WEBVTT 00:00:00.386 --> 00:00:07.907 - Welcome to another program with the Monroe County History Club. It's a nice day outside, and glad you're 00:00:07.907 --> 00:00:15.499 - in here watching us. My name is Michael Carter. Welcome also to my wife, Paulette, and my brother, Steve, 00:00:15.499 --> 00:00:22.661 - and my cousins over there. And thanks to all my old Class of 64 Bloomington High School classmates. 00:00:22.661 --> 00:00:27.102 - The guys are there, and the girls are there. So thanks a lot. 00:00:29.314 --> 00:00:35.278 - I left some sheets of paper on all the tables. My printer's not working too well, so it wasn't pretty, 00:00:35.278 --> 00:00:41.068 - but I think it's legible anyway. They list all the upcoming programs for the history club going all 00:00:41.068 --> 00:00:47.031 - the way into next year, barring cancellations, of course. There's some pretty good programs coming up. 00:00:47.031 --> 00:00:52.821 - First of all, many thanks to the American Legion for allowing us to have these programs. We've been 00:00:52.821 --> 00:00:58.206 - partners in presenting and preserving local history with them for about 13 and a half years. 00:00:59.298 --> 00:01:06.460 - And thanks so much to their white staff and the kitchen staff who do such a great job. Amanda and Misty 00:01:06.460 --> 00:01:13.416 - are serving the group. And be generous to them. And also would like to thank Cats TV, as always, for 00:01:13.416 --> 00:01:20.303 - recording our programs for about 11 years now. Dave is our camera guy today, as he is most days. He 00:01:20.303 --> 00:01:23.678 - does a great job. It's a very important service. 00:01:23.810 --> 00:01:30.275 - for us as it allows us to upload each program to YouTube for people who can't make it to the live ones. 00:01:30.275 --> 00:01:36.616 - In addition, it allows us to preserve our local history for future generations to enjoy. Also, thanks 00:01:36.616 --> 00:01:43.206 - for our local history enthusiasts who attend these programs in person. That's great. We really appreciate 00:01:43.206 --> 00:01:49.609 - your support. Now, history is important to all of us, of course, but the biggest reason I think we all 00:01:49.609 --> 00:01:52.158 - attend these things is because it's fun. 00:01:53.506 --> 00:01:59.310 - It's fun for me, it's fun for the attendees, and it's fun for the presenters, even though I don't pay 00:01:59.310 --> 00:02:05.114 - them anything. I think this is the main reason things have kept going for so long, and I hope to keep 00:02:05.114 --> 00:02:11.316 - it that way going forward. Also, thanks to those who watch our programs on YouTube. That's much appreciated. 00:02:11.316 --> 00:02:17.348 - It's great that transparent Bloomingtonians all over the country can see these. These programs we present 00:02:17.348 --> 00:02:23.038 - here are so diverse, with many different subjects covered. In my opinion, we're all helping promote 00:02:23.138 --> 00:02:31.856 - and preserve local history together. It's fun, but at the same time, very rewarding. How many new attendees 00:02:31.856 --> 00:02:40.252 - today? If you want to share your email address with us, my partner Steve Brewer over there can add that 00:02:40.252 --> 00:02:48.808 - to his list, and you can get emails a week before every program. Steve's help is really much appreciated, 00:02:48.808 --> 00:02:51.230 - believe it or not, very much. 00:02:52.802 --> 00:02:59.731 - Daniel Slagle from the History Center would like to say a few words. Thank you, Michael. And I will 00:02:59.731 --> 00:03:07.352 - vouch for Steve that I get all of two emails in a month from him. One to say, coming up is this presentation. 00:03:07.352 --> 00:03:13.934 - And the second one that says, in case you missed it, it's uploaded on YouTube. And that is it. 00:03:13.934 --> 00:03:21.140 - And I love it, because that's all I get. And I don't have to clear out my inbox of 500 emails from him. 00:03:21.140 --> 00:03:22.526 - So I appreciate it. 00:03:23.106 --> 00:03:29.490 - I'm Daniel from the History Center. We have a number of books over here. We're very lucky that Craig, 00:03:29.490 --> 00:03:36.250 - in addition to bringing his books to sell about his presentation, he brought several books from previously. 00:03:36.250 --> 00:03:42.697 - So there's two books that he's written before that are also for sale. Several people have told me that 00:03:42.697 --> 00:03:47.454 - they've already bought and read the current book, The Vast Empire. However, 00:03:48.162 --> 00:03:55.468 - If you liked his writing, you liked his style, there are two more books that he brought that I can sell 00:03:55.468 --> 00:04:02.704 - you as well. So please feel free to come over. The other big news for anyone that has not heard, we're 00:04:02.704 --> 00:04:09.799 - trying to push it everywhere we can. The garage sale is at its new location in Ellitsville, and next 00:04:09.799 --> 00:04:16.894 - Wednesday, November 4th? Sounds about right. Fourth-ish is when they will be taking donations again. 00:04:17.378 --> 00:04:22.408 - So we've had a lot of calls, a lot of inquiries, so I wanted to make sure I announced it to this group. 00:04:22.408 --> 00:04:27.245 - You all have been very supportive of the History Center. We very much appreciate it. If you do some 00:04:27.245 --> 00:04:32.226 - early spring cleaning or just have some stuff you want to get rid of when no one else is looking, come 00:04:32.226 --> 00:04:37.257 - out next Wednesday between 10 and 2, and our garage sale ladies and men will be more than happy to help 00:04:37.257 --> 00:04:37.982 - you with that. 00:04:38.338 --> 00:04:44.851 - Otherwise, we have some new exhibits. We have an exhibit about scouting, boys and girls scouts. There's 00:04:44.851 --> 00:04:50.174 - a display, a bunch of their artifacts that we have in our collection are on display. 00:04:50.274 --> 00:04:56.128 - And for anyone that doesn't know, upstairs on the second floor where we have that two-story log cabin, 00:04:56.128 --> 00:05:01.868 - we now have an outdoor barnyard play area that incorporates what the early settlers would have grown 00:05:01.868 --> 00:05:07.836 - and raised for food as a part of that. So it's been a hit with the kids, and then mom and dad or grandma 00:05:07.836 --> 00:05:13.406 - and grandpa get to read a little bit more while the kids play, so everyone wins in that scenario. 00:05:13.506 --> 00:05:19.788 - Or the big kids like to play with it too. So you can come out and play with some of the stuff too. So 00:05:19.788 --> 00:05:26.071 - just come by and see us. Thank you very much. Thank you to Michael. I know he puts a lot of work into 00:05:26.071 --> 00:05:32.415 - this and he really is an unsung hero with this. So I just wanted to thank Michael again for all of his 00:05:32.415 --> 00:05:37.342 - great and hard work. So thank you, Michael. I'll pay you later, Daniel. Thanks. 00:05:38.946 --> 00:05:47.070 - So I bring this to our speaker today is Craig Fairman. Now, Craig feels better today than last time. 00:05:47.070 --> 00:05:55.435 - Last March he was supposed to speak, but got the flu from one of his children. But he's recovered. It's 00:05:55.435 --> 00:06:04.766 - been several months ago. But he's a fantastic writer. He's got a title. It's on the New York Times bestseller list. 00:06:05.218 --> 00:06:10.992 - It's called The Vast Enterprise, A New Story, A New History of Lewis and Clark. And we've got some for 00:06:10.992 --> 00:06:16.598 - sale over there, as he mentioned. But he's not going to do a book report on that. Today, he's going 00:06:16.598 --> 00:06:22.485 - to do a talk called Lewis and Clark in Indiana. And so we're all going to learn something new from Craig 00:06:22.485 --> 00:06:23.550 - on that. So Craig? 00:06:34.146 --> 00:06:40.280 - Thank you all for coming out today. I'm gonna make sure I can get everything set up here, and we'll 00:06:40.280 --> 00:06:46.659 - be good to go. I was so sick when I was supposed to be here in March. It was, my daughter was much more 00:06:46.659 --> 00:06:53.038 - sick, but she could not keep food down for like 48 hours, and I just, it was, you know, Lewis and Clark 00:06:53.038 --> 00:06:58.558 - had to deal with more, I'll tell you that, but still having a sick kid at home is no fun. 00:06:59.074 --> 00:07:03.526 - I have a lot of images to show you guys today. If anybody has a hard time seeing from the angle, and 00:07:03.526 --> 00:07:08.110 - I see we have some kids here today, which is amazing, feel free to like move closer to the center. Kids 00:07:08.110 --> 00:07:12.606 - could come sit up in front. Whatever works well for you guys, because I think the images are a lot of 00:07:12.606 --> 00:07:17.191 - what's fun. And also, I'm not a hard person to find. I mean, literally I'm not. I only live a mile from 00:07:17.191 --> 00:07:21.687 - here. But also on the internet, I'm not. My email is on my website. So if you see an image you really 00:07:21.687 --> 00:07:26.183 - like, or you want to see, you want a copy of this PowerPoint I made for today, just send me an email, 00:07:26.183 --> 00:07:27.902 - and I'd be happy to share it with you. 00:07:28.546 --> 00:07:33.940 - Michael's right, I'm not gonna give you a book report, because I put this talk together just for today, 00:07:33.940 --> 00:07:39.333 - just for you all. But I will quickly just say what the book is about, and then if people have questions 00:07:39.333 --> 00:07:44.623 - and the question answers, if people wanna talk about Sacagawea, for instance, she doesn't really show 00:07:44.623 --> 00:07:49.913 - up in the Indiana part of Lewis and Clark, but I still love her and loved writing about her and would 00:07:49.913 --> 00:07:55.099 - be happy to answer questions. The only thing I'll say about my book is what makes it new, because I 00:07:55.099 --> 00:07:56.862 - think a lot of people's reactions 00:07:56.962 --> 00:08:02.369 - Honestly, my editor's reaction was, well, do we even need a new book about Lewis and Clark? There have 00:08:02.369 --> 00:08:07.672 - been a lot of books written about Lewis and Clark. And so what makes it new is that, first of all, I 00:08:07.672 --> 00:08:12.974 - found a lot of new things. This, just very quickly, is William Clark's college notebook. If you read 00:08:12.974 --> 00:08:18.014 - any other book on the Lewis and Clark expedition, they don't even know that he went to college. 00:08:18.658 --> 00:08:24.162 - But I didn't just find evidence that he did. I found his notebook and was able to present a more complicated 00:08:24.162 --> 00:08:29.312 - version of William Clark, because I think a lot of people think of him as the guy who was kind of the 00:08:29.312 --> 00:08:34.513 - Kentuckian. He was good with the soldiers, while Lewis was the brainy one. But that's not really true. 00:08:34.513 --> 00:08:39.562 - They were both good with the soldiers. They were both very intelligent. And so, using new documents 00:08:39.562 --> 00:08:44.510 - like this, I was able to tell a more complicated and well-rounded and human version of the story. 00:08:44.610 --> 00:08:49.431 - The other thing I'll say about the book, and this is the last thing I promise, I'm going to show you 00:08:49.431 --> 00:08:54.205 - the most boring page of any book, which is the table of contents. But I think in my book, it's kind 00:08:54.205 --> 00:08:59.074 - of sneaky and interesting, because you'll see chapter one says Meriwether Lewis. I realize the font's 00:08:59.074 --> 00:09:02.654 - small, so you don't have to be able to read it. But chapter two says York. 00:09:03.042 --> 00:09:07.933 - So York was the black man who was enslaved by Clark, and he was on the whole expedition too. And what 00:09:07.933 --> 00:09:12.872 - I do in every chapter is I sort of move the camera around. So the first chapter, which is most of what 00:09:12.872 --> 00:09:17.715 - we'll be talking about today, is from Lewis's point of view. But then the second chapter says, well, 00:09:17.715 --> 00:09:22.270 - what was York's point of view? And the third chapter says, what was Jefferson's point of view? 00:09:22.658 --> 00:09:27.798 - The fourth chapter, this guy is probably my favorite, John Ordway. He was a working class soldier. He 00:09:27.798 --> 00:09:32.888 - grew up in New Hampshire, but he reminds me a lot of people I know in Indiana. And his experience of 00:09:32.888 --> 00:09:37.978 - the expedition was much, much different than Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark were elites. They were 00:09:37.978 --> 00:09:42.110 - officers. John Ordway was a regular soldier who had to actually do the hard work. 00:09:42.242 --> 00:09:47.968 - So in this book, I try to kind of move the camera around and show the expedition from 10 different people's 00:09:47.968 --> 00:09:53.375 - points of view, and hopefully that makes it a more interesting, makes it a more accurate history, but 00:09:53.375 --> 00:09:58.730 - I also just think it makes it a better story, too. Okay, so no more about my book, I promise. Unless 00:09:58.730 --> 00:10:04.190 - people ask questions, I can't control that. You can't blame me if somebody asks a question, but that's 00:10:04.190 --> 00:10:09.545 - not my fault. I do not have any plants in the audience. When people think of Lewis and Clark, I feel 00:10:09.545 --> 00:10:11.294 - like this is what they think of. 00:10:11.874 --> 00:10:17.979 - This is in what is Idaho today. This looks very similar to what it looked like when Lewis and Clark 00:10:17.979 --> 00:10:24.268 - went through here. You can see the mountains. You can see the water. It's beautiful. It's rugged. It's 00:10:24.268 --> 00:10:30.556 - in the middle of the continent. So that, I think, is sort of the default image when people think about 00:10:30.556 --> 00:10:36.784 - Lewis and Clark. And this is the Lewis and Clark Trail. You can see here it starts down in St. Louis, 00:10:36.784 --> 00:10:41.790 - which St. Louis was a town when they were there. And then they go north and west. 00:10:41.922 --> 00:10:48.091 - up to Montana, Idaho, then come across to the Pacific Ocean, then they turn around and come all the 00:10:48.091 --> 00:10:54.261 - way back. So that takes them almost three years. There and back, it's more than 8,000 miles. Again, 00:10:54.261 --> 00:11:00.677 - this is when people say, what's the Lewis and Clark expedition? This is what they think about. And this 00:11:00.677 --> 00:11:06.846 - story is covered in my book, too. But what I want to talk to you about is what happens before this. 00:11:07.074 --> 00:11:12.037 - Because I think it's part of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And I will admit that I'm a little biased 00:11:12.037 --> 00:11:16.999 - because I grew up in Indiana. I live a mile from here. And so, of course, I'm going to always give the 00:11:16.999 --> 00:11:21.913 - Midwest a little bit of extra credit. But the Midwest deserves some credit here. I mean, in this time 00:11:21.913 --> 00:11:26.972 - period, the Midwest was the West. When they would talk about an area like Ohio or the Indiana Territory, 00:11:26.972 --> 00:11:31.742 - they would say, well, what's happening in the West? Because that was the West in this time period. 00:11:31.842 --> 00:11:37.412 - But this area helped shape Lewis and Clark in some really important ways. And I want to talk to you 00:11:37.412 --> 00:11:42.982 - about that in addition to talking about the area's scenery. The nice thing is that I feel like it's 00:11:42.982 --> 00:11:48.551 - not just my Midwestern bias doing this. I think other people are catching up. In 2019, the National 00:11:48.551 --> 00:11:54.121 - Park Service expanded the official Lewis and Clark Trail. So this is what it looks like now. Now it 00:11:54.121 --> 00:11:57.630 - starts in Pittsburgh, then goes all the way down to St. Louis. 00:11:57.858 --> 00:12:03.959 - then finishes the rest of the expedition. So more and more people are recognizing how important this 00:12:03.959 --> 00:12:10.001 - early part of the expedition was to what came after. And I'll say one other thing. Sometimes people 00:12:10.001 --> 00:12:11.390 - worry about historians 00:12:11.650 --> 00:12:17.154 - finding a modern idea, taking a modern idea, and applying it to the past. And I understand why. I've 00:12:17.154 --> 00:12:22.767 - read historians who do that. I try really hard in my work not to do that. I always say, I didn't write 00:12:22.767 --> 00:12:28.380 - a book about 2026. I wrote a book about 1804. That's what I care about. I want to capture what did the 00:12:28.380 --> 00:12:32.958 - world feel like to those people back then. But one thing that you do notice is that 00:12:33.058 --> 00:12:38.803 - Sometimes the things that feel modern were always there in the sources. It's just we kind of overlooked 00:12:38.803 --> 00:12:44.107 - them for a long time. And that's true of the kind of the stuff we're going to talk about today, 00:12:44.107 --> 00:12:49.631 - the Midwest. Because Lewis, if you go back and look at his papers, he called Pittsburgh the, quote, 00:12:49.631 --> 00:12:55.487 - point of embarkation. So Lewis and Clark always saw the Ohio River Valley and moving through the Midwest, 00:12:55.487 --> 00:13:01.232 - or the West as they called it, as part of the expedition. It's just taken the rest of us a little while 00:13:01.232 --> 00:13:02.558 - to catch up. All right. 00:13:03.010 --> 00:13:07.721 - So one thing that's nice about my book is it's got a lot of maps. And here's an example of one of the 00:13:07.721 --> 00:13:12.340 - books. Each chapter has its own map. And so this is exactly what we're the part we're going to talk 00:13:12.340 --> 00:13:12.894 - about where 00:13:12.994 --> 00:13:17.990 - You know, Lewis does some preparation beforehand. Lewis starts out living in Washington, DC, because 00:13:17.990 --> 00:13:23.183 - he is Thomas Jefferson's secretary, which that doesn't sound very powerful. But back then, that position 00:13:23.183 --> 00:13:28.278 - was like being the chief of staff. So Lewis was kind of Jefferson's right-hand man. He would go to the 00:13:28.278 --> 00:13:33.274 - Capitol building. He would talk to legislators. He was a very important political figure. But he was 00:13:33.274 --> 00:13:38.319 - also a soldier. And he was also very strong and outdoorsy. And so that made him the perfect person to 00:13:38.319 --> 00:13:39.358 - lead the expedition. 00:13:39.810 --> 00:13:44.828 - So after preparing and Harper's Ferry and Washington DC and all that, Lewis goes to Pittsburgh where 00:13:44.828 --> 00:13:49.796 - a boat is being built for him, a big barge. You guys have seen the picture of that barge in the, in 00:13:49.796 --> 00:13:54.814 - the stuff that Michael sent around. And then from there down the Ohio river to Louisville where he's 00:13:54.814 --> 00:13:59.782 - going to meet William Clark. And then from there onto St. Louis, I'm going to use a lot of pictures 00:13:59.782 --> 00:14:04.899 - today. Like I said, because I love pictures. I put a lot of pictures in the book too. And I think they 00:14:04.899 --> 00:14:05.694 - help us sort of 00:14:05.954 --> 00:14:11.524 - feel like we're there. They're sometimes the best way to kind of be the time machine for us. This is 00:14:11.524 --> 00:14:17.094 - a picture of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. in 1804. And so I want to note a couple things 00:14:17.094 --> 00:14:22.775 - about it, although I'm sure some of you are already noting them, too. There is no dome. At this point, 00:14:22.775 --> 00:14:28.345 - there's just one wing. They still have to build the other wing, and then they have to build the dome 00:14:28.345 --> 00:14:33.970 - that connects it with the big main area in the middle. So one thing that I think is interesting about 00:14:33.970 --> 00:14:35.294 - Lewis and Clark is that 00:14:35.554 --> 00:14:40.793 - They're kind of the first American act of foreign policy. The country was still in, you know, even though 00:14:40.793 --> 00:14:45.835 - it had been 30 years after the expedition, the country was still in the midst of constructing itself, 00:14:45.835 --> 00:14:50.827 - you know? And so, Lewis and Clark was sort of the first chance for America to sort of say, there's a 00:14:50.827 --> 00:14:55.918 - bigger world out there, and America should have a say in it and have some influence over it. The other 00:14:55.918 --> 00:15:00.860 - thing I will note about this picture, and this is probably the most striking thing of all, look how 00:15:00.860 --> 00:15:03.134 - empty it is. You got a few houses back there. 00:15:03.874 --> 00:15:09.617 - But most of what you have around the Capitol building is trees and grass and fields. You know, the road 00:15:09.617 --> 00:15:15.195 - between the Capitol building and the White House was lined with trees, and sometimes people who were 00:15:15.195 --> 00:15:21.269 - in Congress would go hunting partridges. This is Pennsylvania Avenue. If any of you have been on Pennsylvania 00:15:21.269 --> 00:15:27.067 - Avenue today, there's nothing there to hunt. It's much different, but this is a reminder of what America 00:15:27.067 --> 00:15:32.700 - looked like and felt like in this time period. Here's another picture, again, to kind of help us with 00:15:32.700 --> 00:15:33.694 - the time machine. 00:15:33.794 --> 00:15:40.518 - This is Pittsburgh in 1802, and I always try with my pictures to get the, like, what it was, like, pictures 00:15:40.518 --> 00:15:46.932 - as close to possible as the time period. But look how small Pittsburgh is. I mean, by population, it's 00:15:46.932 --> 00:15:53.407 - about the size of Spencer. So Pittsburgh was a large town in this time period, but this is what a large 00:15:53.407 --> 00:15:59.758 - town looked like. So this is where Lewis gets his start. You can see the Ohio River there in front of 00:15:59.758 --> 00:16:02.622 - him, and this is where the expedition begins. 00:16:05.154 --> 00:16:10.378 - Here's another picture of the Ohio River from this time period. You can see how beautiful it is. That 00:16:10.378 --> 00:16:15.551 - picture of the barge that Michael shared, that was the main boat at this point. And so to give you a 00:16:15.551 --> 00:16:20.980 - frame of reference, the barge that Lewis and Clark were using was the size of a semi-truck trailer today. 00:16:20.980 --> 00:16:25.691 - So it was a big boat, could hold 12 tons of cargo or more, and they had to push it down the 00:16:25.691 --> 00:16:30.864 - river. Thankfully, the current on the Ohio River was with them, so they had water moving them, which 00:16:30.864 --> 00:16:34.142 - made it a little bit easier, but they're coming down the river, 00:16:34.306 --> 00:16:39.589 - and you can see what it looked like. There's a wonderful quote, not from Lewis and Clark, but from somebody 00:16:39.589 --> 00:16:44.480 - else who traveled the river at this time period. The trees, this person wrote, are as much alike as 00:16:44.480 --> 00:16:49.518 - though they had been topped with shears. And I think you can see this in the picture, right? There are 00:16:49.518 --> 00:16:54.458 - so many trees along the Ohio River, and they are so big and so old that it just looked like somebody 00:16:54.458 --> 00:16:59.399 - had given them a haircut. They're just flat, right across the top. That's what Lewis and Clark would 00:16:59.399 --> 00:17:01.502 - see as they were traveling down the water. 00:17:02.114 --> 00:17:08.100 - Although just Lewis in this case because Clark is in Louisville, Lewis is in Pittsburgh bringing that 00:17:08.100 --> 00:17:14.086 - big barge down the river to meet his friend. So we've already talked about this a little bit, but who 00:17:14.086 --> 00:17:20.248 - are Lewis and Clark? These are some images of them which show what they look like before the expedition. 00:17:20.248 --> 00:17:22.302 - And basically Jefferson's plan was 00:17:22.786 --> 00:17:27.881 - It's hard to summarize Jefferson's plan. One thing that's so interesting about him is that he was always 00:17:27.881 --> 00:17:32.928 - wanting to do everything at once. He had so many ideas, and his mind was so creative. And so the simple 00:17:32.928 --> 00:17:37.926 - explanation for the expedition was he was trying to find a river route from St. Louis and the Missouri 00:17:37.926 --> 00:17:42.875 - River to the Pacific Ocean. Now, in this time period, rivers were super highways. This was how people 00:17:42.875 --> 00:17:47.825 - traded. This was how people moved goods. If you were a farmer in the Indiana Territory, you would use 00:17:47.825 --> 00:17:51.998 - the Ohio River and then the Mississippi River to send your crops down to New Orleans. 00:17:52.162 --> 00:17:57.225 - and sell them, and it was essential for you to be able to make money and be able to live your life and 00:17:57.225 --> 00:18:02.190 - support your family. Well, Jefferson wanted more rivers. And Jefferson and Lewis and a lot of people 00:18:02.190 --> 00:18:07.253 - in this time period thought that the Missouri River and then the Columbia River, which flowed into the 00:18:07.253 --> 00:18:12.218 - Pacific Ocean, they thought they almost touched in the middle of the continent. So just a little hop 00:18:12.218 --> 00:18:17.183 - skip from one to the other, they thought there was this big superhighway that would cross the entire 00:18:17.183 --> 00:18:19.198 - continent just waiting to be discovered. 00:18:19.362 --> 00:18:24.131 - So the simplest version of Lewis and Clark is their job was to try to find that connection, 00:18:24.131 --> 00:18:29.575 - that superhighway. But because Jefferson was Jefferson, there were a million other things that he wanted 00:18:29.575 --> 00:18:34.759 - to do too and that he wanted to accomplish. So Lewis would have to do lots of scientific work, like 00:18:34.759 --> 00:18:40.151 - he would capture animals and kill animals, measure them, describe them, preserve them. Clark was making 00:18:40.151 --> 00:18:44.350 - very detailed maps. They had so many things that they were trying to accomplish. 00:18:46.530 --> 00:18:52.055 - They knew that this was a huge mission. Clark wrote a letter to Jefferson, actually, before they left. 00:18:52.055 --> 00:18:57.473 - And what Clark said is that he would cheerfully and with great pleasure join my friend Captain Lewis 00:18:57.473 --> 00:19:02.837 - in this vast enterprise. That's where I took the title from my book, because that's how the captain 00:19:02.837 --> 00:19:08.255 - saw it. They always saw it as a big thing, not just in terms of how far they had to go, but how many 00:19:08.255 --> 00:19:09.918 - people it would take to do it. 00:19:11.074 --> 00:19:17.030 - So here's the barge I've been mentioning. This is the big boat that is built in Pittsburgh. It takes 00:19:17.030 --> 00:19:23.045 - a long time to build it because the boat builder is drunk. And so Lewis keeps going and he finds that 00:19:23.045 --> 00:19:29.237 - the boat builder is drunk and he's fighting with his men and his men are quitting and there's not enough 00:19:29.237 --> 00:19:31.006 - lumber. And so this is one of 00:19:31.202 --> 00:19:37.270 - things that makes Lewis very far behind schedule in the first year and very stressed out, although Lewis 00:19:37.270 --> 00:19:43.107 - was always stressed out. I mean, he cared so much. He was such a patriotic person. He wanted this to 00:19:43.107 --> 00:19:49.060 - work so badly. He knew that this was the opportunity of a lifetime. And so he carried that stress with 00:19:49.060 --> 00:19:51.198 - him in ways that I think you'll see. 00:19:52.002 --> 00:19:57.270 - Lewis in Pittsburgh with the barge. He has about 10 soldiers with him because they have the current 00:19:57.270 --> 00:20:02.644 - with them. And so they're trying to come down the river to Louisville and Clark, where they will pick 00:20:02.644 --> 00:20:08.123 - up more soldiers and then head on to St. Louis. Again, this is not the part of Lewis and Clark you hear 00:20:08.123 --> 00:20:13.444 - about a lot, but it's an important part of it for sure. I want to give you a picture of what America 00:20:13.444 --> 00:20:18.713 - looked like in this time period. So again, this is a map from 1803, 1804. And let's zoom in here on 00:20:18.713 --> 00:20:20.030 - what is now the Midwest. 00:20:20.514 --> 00:20:26.611 - You can see Ohio that had just become a state in 1803. Kentucky had been a state for a little bit longer 00:20:26.611 --> 00:20:32.476 - than that. And over here, you have what's called the Indiana Territory, which today we would call it 00:20:32.476 --> 00:20:38.399 - Indiana and Illinois. But in this time period, it was just called Indiana. It was not a state yet. It 00:20:38.399 --> 00:20:44.206 - was a territory. But there were starting to be more and more Americans who lived there. So what was 00:20:44.206 --> 00:20:46.238 - it like going down the Ohio River? 00:20:46.946 --> 00:20:52.373 - It was difficult. It was brutal. You would think that this would be the easy part of the expedition, 00:20:52.373 --> 00:20:57.962 - right? Because they're in American territory. There are lots of Americans who can help them. It's early 00:20:57.962 --> 00:21:03.335 - on. But they had a very, very difficult time. On this map you can see over here, this is Pittsburgh 00:21:03.335 --> 00:21:08.709 - right here. And I've circled it and drawn a red arrow there because right after this island, only a 00:21:08.709 --> 00:21:12.094 - couple miles into their journey, Lewis hits the first sandbar. 00:21:14.306 --> 00:21:19.131 - Now, I could probably find an old picture of a sandbar to show you, but I'll be honest with you. When 00:21:19.131 --> 00:21:23.909 - I first started reading their journals and thinking about it, this was the image that popped into my 00:21:23.909 --> 00:21:28.545 - mind. I hate to pick on Evansville, but my wife is from Evansville, so I feel like I can kind of, 00:21:28.545 --> 00:21:33.323 - you know, by marriage, pick on them a little bit. I went to college there, too, at the University of 00:21:33.323 --> 00:21:38.196 - Southern Indiana. But there was a story a couple years ago where Evansville, which is of course on the 00:21:38.196 --> 00:21:40.798 - Ohio River, somebody had their camper out on a sandbar 00:21:40.962 --> 00:21:46.998 - And it just stayed there. The water levels changed, and this became big news, like the nightly news 00:21:46.998 --> 00:21:53.215 - and everyone was covering it. What's the latest update on the camper on the sandbar? So funny to think 00:21:53.215 --> 00:21:59.312 - about now, but not so funny because the Ohio River in this time period was much, much different than 00:21:59.312 --> 00:22:05.952 - the Ohio River we've all seen today. Today, there are modern dams. There's the US Army's Corps of Engineering 00:22:05.952 --> 00:22:09.694 - that's done a lot of work to make the river consistently deep 00:22:10.594 --> 00:22:15.976 - and more straight. But it was not like that for Lewis and Clark. There were places where the river was 00:22:15.976 --> 00:22:21.306 - so shallow that you could walk from Kentucky to Indiana. You didn't need a boat. You didn't even need 00:22:21.306 --> 00:22:26.584 - to get your knees wet. Just up to your shins, a little bit of water, you could just cross. So that's 00:22:26.584 --> 00:22:31.914 - very helpful if you need to cross the river. Not so helpful if you have a semi-truck-sized barge that 00:22:31.914 --> 00:22:37.191 - you're trying to move down the river. So what Lewis realized again and again was that his barge kept 00:22:37.191 --> 00:22:40.222 - getting stuck. They would slam into one of these sandbars 00:22:40.418 --> 00:22:46.694 - They couldn't move forward. So what they would have to do is unload the boat. It took a long time because 00:22:46.694 --> 00:22:52.733 - they had a lot of merchandise on the boat. Then they would have to sort of lift and push and grunt to 00:22:52.733 --> 00:22:58.773 - get the boat through the sandbar. Then they would have to reload the boat. Then they would keep going 00:22:58.773 --> 00:23:04.693 - and hit another sandbar. Very frustrating work. I think probably embarrassing work. Think about it. 00:23:04.693 --> 00:23:09.726 - This is the president's right-hand man on America's first big international mission. 00:23:10.146 --> 00:23:15.632 - And what are people seeing? People are seeing him run into sandbars in American territory. I'm gonna 00:23:15.632 --> 00:23:21.281 - read you a little bit here from the book so you can get a sense for the writing. There's not much about 00:23:21.281 --> 00:23:26.984 - this in the book because I try to get to the main part as quickly as possible, but I pulled out a couple 00:23:26.984 --> 00:23:32.579 - excerpts. Lewis and his men splashed into the shallow water, unloading their boat and then lifting and 00:23:32.579 --> 00:23:35.838 - dragging it for a good 30 yards until it could float again. 00:23:36.130 --> 00:23:42.593 - It was exhausting, embarrassing work, and they had to do it two more times that day, with the last sandbar 00:23:42.593 --> 00:23:48.753 - the largest yet. Remember, this is their first day. At that point, Lewis decided to make camp, having 00:23:48.753 --> 00:23:54.974 - traveled a total of maybe six miles. It was only the first night, but he authorized the use of another 00:23:54.974 --> 00:23:59.806 - supply he'd acquired. Before bed, each man received an extra ration of whiskey. 00:24:02.978 --> 00:24:07.925 - So here's another painting of the Ohio River from this time period, and you can see this was, you know, 00:24:07.925 --> 00:24:12.825 - when things were going well, when the water would be a little bit deeper, this is what they could see. 00:24:12.825 --> 00:24:17.677 - When things were not going well, it was more like the camper in Evansville on the sandbar, and they'd 00:24:17.677 --> 00:24:22.433 - have to find a way to get it through. There's a tiny little cabin there, though, and I want to show 00:24:22.433 --> 00:24:27.190 - you this image. We don't know this for sure, but many historians who study Indiana think this is an 00:24:27.190 --> 00:24:31.614 - engraving of the first cabin ever built in the Indiana Territory. Now, we can't go for sure, 00:24:32.226 --> 00:24:37.419 - is what the first cabin would have looked like, and there were soon many cabins like this. But if you 00:24:37.419 --> 00:24:42.713 - want to understand about the sort of houses that Lewis and Clark saw, or Lewis in this part saw as they 00:24:42.713 --> 00:24:48.007 - were coming down the river, this is what it would have looked like. Let's talk about some of the people 00:24:48.007 --> 00:24:53.149 - who were on the expedition, too. But actually, let's start with not a person, but an animal, because 00:24:53.149 --> 00:24:58.240 - he's one of the best parts of the expedition. And this is Seaman. This was Lewis's dog. Now, Seaman 00:24:58.240 --> 00:25:00.734 - was in Newfoundland, and if you look at a lot of 00:25:00.834 --> 00:25:06.268 - the pictures that people have made later on of Lewis and Clark, the Newfoundland looks like a Newfie 00:25:06.268 --> 00:25:11.971 - today, you know, black, very shaggy, kind of like the Beatles haircut on a dog. You know what I'm talking 00:25:11.971 --> 00:25:17.889 - about. But that's not what Newfoundlands looked like in 1804. This is a painting from 1804 of a Newfoundland, 00:25:17.889 --> 00:25:23.538 - and most paintings are like this, where the hair was shorter, more brown and white than black, but still 00:25:23.538 --> 00:25:28.542 - very good swimmers, very loyal, the perfect kind of dog to bring on an expedition like this. 00:25:28.802 --> 00:25:33.899 - So this is a picture of Semen. And Semen got a good workout in the Midwest. I'm going to read you an 00:25:33.899 --> 00:25:39.197 - excerpt from the journals. Some of you probably already know this. Some of you have probably read these. 00:25:39.197 --> 00:25:44.495 - But Lewis and Clark and their men kept very detailed journals. This was one of the things that Jefferson 00:25:44.495 --> 00:25:49.541 - wanted them to do. They ended up writing more than a million words during the expedition. So that's 00:25:49.541 --> 00:25:54.890 - longer than the Bible. That's Moby Dick times four. That's how many words they recorded. And that allowed 00:25:54.890 --> 00:25:56.606 - them to record details like this. 00:25:57.346 --> 00:26:03.357 - This is Lewis in September 15th when they're still coming down the Ohio River. Past the mouth of the 00:26:03.357 --> 00:26:09.308 - Hawking River and the settlement of Belprie, Ohio, a Yankee settlement. He never says why he called 00:26:09.308 --> 00:26:15.319 - it a Yankee settlement. I assume the farmers there were just from New England and Lewis being a good 00:26:15.319 --> 00:26:21.449 - Virginia boy wasn't real fond of that. Past several bad sandbars over which we are obliged to lift the 00:26:21.449 --> 00:26:26.686 - boat. Saw and caught by means of my dog several squirrels attempting to swim the river. 00:26:27.970 --> 00:26:32.722 - So this is one of Seaman's big tasks. He ended up doing a lot of important things on the expedition. 00:26:32.722 --> 00:26:37.756 - But in this early part, what he would do is that he would be on the barge, and he would see some squirrels 00:26:37.756 --> 00:26:42.696 - trying to swim across the Ohio River. He would jump into the water, kill them, bring them back to Lewis. 00:26:42.696 --> 00:26:47.400 - Lewis would fry them for supper. I like to think he shared some of it with Seaman. I guess we don't 00:26:47.400 --> 00:26:50.270 - know for sure, but we do know Lewis loved his dog very much. 00:26:50.530 --> 00:26:56.305 - So probably they collaborated when it came time to eat the squirrels. But that was one of the things 00:26:56.305 --> 00:27:02.137 - Seaman did. And again, these kinds of little details I just think are so human. I guess in this case, 00:27:02.137 --> 00:27:07.970 - it's so canine, since we're talking about a dog. But in my books, I always try to capture the sort of 00:27:07.970 --> 00:27:13.859 - everyday human moments, because that's what I love about history. I mentioned the journals. And if you 00:27:13.859 --> 00:27:19.806 - decide to catch the Lewis and Clark bug, which many Americans do, I recommend that you start by reading 00:27:20.034 --> 00:27:25.926 - because it's a very complicated topic. I'm not gonna tell you which book I recommend, but I recommend 00:27:25.926 --> 00:27:32.165 - a book that will give you like a big overview of it. But then after you do that, the journals are available 00:27:32.165 --> 00:27:38.172 - free on the internet. A professor at the University of Nebraska spent two decades editing the journals, 00:27:38.172 --> 00:27:44.006 - annotating them, making sure that their text was reliable and useful as, you know, the best editions 00:27:44.006 --> 00:27:45.566 - of Shakespeare or Chaucer. 00:27:45.826 --> 00:27:51.677 - And I think that makes me feel patriotic, because to me, Lewis and Clark are our American epic. They're 00:27:51.677 --> 00:27:57.471 - our version of the audit, a great journey. And we have these wonderful words that they wrote about it. 00:27:57.471 --> 00:28:03.153 - So once you have sort of the framework for the expedition, you can go online and read these journals 00:28:03.153 --> 00:28:08.779 - for free. This is our taxpayer dollars hard at work. You can pull up on your phone. You can look at 00:28:08.779 --> 00:28:14.686 - it on a computer. You can get them from IU's library if you want to look at them in the printed version. 00:28:14.786 --> 00:28:20.411 - You can search by modern towns. You could just search for, let's say you have a favorite animal. Let's 00:28:20.411 --> 00:28:25.872 - say you love prairie dogs. You can find every time Lewis and Clark mentioned a prairie dog in their 00:28:25.872 --> 00:28:31.332 - journals. It's such a cool resource, and it's just an amazing thing for any history lover like this 00:28:31.332 --> 00:28:36.957 - audience. All right, speaking of animals, we're now gonna go from talking about semen to talking about 00:28:36.957 --> 00:28:42.472 - oxen. So Lewis is still coming down the Ohio River, still running into sandbars, still having a hard 00:28:42.472 --> 00:28:44.766 - time, and here the oxen become essential. 00:28:45.762 --> 00:28:52.313 - Let me just switch to reading from the book. Lewis stopped to repair leaks and air out the gifts, which 00:28:52.313 --> 00:28:58.738 - are the kind of gifts for native people that they're bringing for the main part of the expedition. He 00:28:58.738 --> 00:29:05.037 - bought a third boat, a standard canoe. He adapted. He improvised. He persevered. When the sand bars 00:29:05.037 --> 00:29:11.525 - kept coming, five in a two-mile stretch, he tried a new tactic, hiring farmers who lived near the Ohio 00:29:11.525 --> 00:29:13.982 - to tow the barge with their livestock. 00:29:14.914 --> 00:29:20.752 - So picture this for a second. The barge is still getting stuck. So Lewis, the water is so shallow that 00:29:20.752 --> 00:29:26.420 - Lewis pays a farmer to bar the livestock who are probably helping the farmer plow or whatever. They 00:29:26.420 --> 00:29:32.428 - tie it to the barge. And instead of the men having to push the barge, the oxen just tow the barge through 00:29:32.428 --> 00:29:38.095 - these shallow spots. In an update to Jefferson, Lewis smiled at the river level and his reliance on 00:29:38.095 --> 00:29:43.820 - local oxen. I find them the most efficient sailors, he wrote, in the present state of the navigation 00:29:43.820 --> 00:29:44.670 - of this river. 00:29:45.634 --> 00:29:50.498 - This is one of the things I love about Lewis. He's funny. People often think about Lewis as somebody 00:29:50.498 --> 00:29:55.458 - who struggled with depression and who was under a lot of stress. And those things are definitely true. 00:29:55.458 --> 00:30:00.273 - But he also had a great sense of humor. He knew that they were trying to do something great, but he 00:30:00.273 --> 00:30:05.185 - was always willing to laugh at himself. If you look at the letter that Lewis sent Clark asking Clark, 00:30:05.185 --> 00:30:10.145 - hey, do you want to go on this big mission with me? When Lewis is done summarizing all this incredible 00:30:10.145 --> 00:30:14.046 - information and talking about how much Jefferson cares about this, Lewis writes, 00:30:14.210 --> 00:30:20.360 - so much for the outlines of my great scheme. And that's just funny. Even when he's doing something great, 00:30:20.360 --> 00:30:26.277 - he's willing to stop and laugh at himself a little bit. I admire that about him. And that's one thing 00:30:26.277 --> 00:30:32.194 - I tried to capture in the book, is his sense of humor. Because he can sort of say, honestly, the best 00:30:32.194 --> 00:30:38.054 - sailors this huge expedition has right now are oxen. But sometimes that's what life is like. So they 00:30:38.054 --> 00:30:38.750 - keep going. 00:30:39.010 --> 00:30:44.926 - And they get to Cincinnati. I'm going to give you some more images of these towns in this time period. 00:30:44.926 --> 00:30:50.669 - This is what Cincinnati looked like in 1802, so the year before Lewis and Clark went by. This might 00:30:50.669 --> 00:30:56.700 - be a good place to kind of do an aside. What counts as a big town? Because so far we've seen Pittsburgh. 00:30:56.700 --> 00:31:00.318 - We've seen Cincinnati. They're very small by modern standards. 00:31:00.514 --> 00:31:05.691 - I want to show you a different town, though. This is where Lewis and Clark will ultimately meet Sacajawea. 00:31:05.691 --> 00:31:10.578 - It's in what is North Dakota today, and it's a town of the Mandan and the Hidatsa people. So this is 00:31:10.578 --> 00:31:15.513 - kind of a far-out picture, but I'm gonna zoom in here. This is a painting made a couple decades after 00:31:15.513 --> 00:31:20.448 - Lewis and Clark. So here you can see a better version of it. There is a fort there, but that fort was 00:31:20.448 --> 00:31:25.480 - added later. That fort was added because of Lewis and Clark. It was sort of part of the legacy of Lewis 00:31:25.480 --> 00:31:28.190 - and Clark. But here's another painting from the inside. 00:31:29.058 --> 00:31:35.096 - See how densely these houses are packed in here? One person who visited these towns said that he would 00:31:35.096 --> 00:31:40.959 - get so turned around that he would get lost because the houses were so tightly packed. So one thing 00:31:40.959 --> 00:31:46.997 - that's very interesting is that when we think of big towns today, we think of Cincinnati or Louisville 00:31:46.997 --> 00:31:52.919 - or Pittsburgh, huge cities by our modern standards, during this time period, there were native towns 00:31:52.919 --> 00:31:57.726 - that were literally bigger. St. Louis was about 1,000 people in this time period, 00:31:58.114 --> 00:32:03.276 - The Mandan and Hadatsa towns, there were five of them. They were more like 4,000 people. So during this 00:32:03.276 --> 00:32:08.290 - time period, when Lewis and Clark were exploring the middle of the American continent, Native people 00:32:08.290 --> 00:32:13.452 - were the ones who had the biggest towns. Native people were the ones who had the most people. And Lewis 00:32:13.452 --> 00:32:18.863 - and Clark knew this. Again, this is not a modern idea of us saying, you know, like, let's pay more attention 00:32:18.863 --> 00:32:24.026 - to Native people, although I think that's a good idea to have. Lewis and Jefferson had to be very aware 00:32:24.026 --> 00:32:27.550 - of how powerful Native people were because their lives depended on it. 00:32:27.778 --> 00:32:33.741 - If Lewis didn't understand how many native people there were and how powerful they were and how important 00:32:33.741 --> 00:32:39.366 - it was to have good diplomacy with them, well then he was going to be in a huge risk because he was 00:32:39.366 --> 00:32:45.272 - outnumbered. All right, so back to the Ohio River here. They're getting closer and closer to Louisville. 00:32:45.272 --> 00:32:51.010 - Here's another painting from a couple decades after of what the Ohio River Valley looked like in this 00:32:51.010 --> 00:32:55.454 - time period. And here we're going to get to Louisville. So this is this is not 00:32:55.874 --> 00:33:01.646 - painting. This is just an engraving, but if you're standing in Clarksville and looking over there, you 00:33:01.646 --> 00:33:07.362 - can see what Louisville looked like. Here's a map from this time period that's from above. And so you 00:33:07.362 --> 00:33:13.134 - see that first blue arrow, that's Clarksville, named after George Rogers Clark, who is William Clark's 00:33:13.134 --> 00:33:18.795 - older brother. I know you guys had a really good presentation on George Rogers earlier this year, so 00:33:18.795 --> 00:33:23.614 - some of you probably know more about that than I do. And then here is Jeffersonville. 00:33:24.674 --> 00:33:30.033 - And then right across the river is where Louisville is. But I want to draw your attention to something 00:33:30.033 --> 00:33:35.548 - else, which is another huge obstacle Lewis had to deal with. He finally met Clark. Clark's in Louisville. 00:33:35.548 --> 00:33:40.855 - They get to meet up with each other. But then they have to get through what's called the Falls of the 00:33:40.855 --> 00:33:46.526 - Ohio. There's a Falls of the Ohio State Park in Clarksville today that you can go visit to. It's a wonderful 00:33:46.526 --> 00:33:51.833 - park. There's the statue of the moment where Lewis and Clark met for the first time in years and were 00:33:51.833 --> 00:33:54.174 - able to, after writing letters and planning, 00:33:54.338 --> 00:34:00.041 - They had met before, actually. They met in what is now Ohio. Even that, it has a Midwestern aspect to 00:34:00.041 --> 00:34:05.745 - it. But they were able to meet and shake hands. And so you can see the statue in Clarksville today as 00:34:05.745 --> 00:34:11.504 - part of that state park, which I think is well worth visiting. They probably didn't shake hands there. 00:34:11.504 --> 00:34:17.319 - They probably shook hands closer to Louisville and then stayed in Clarksville because of what I'm about 00:34:17.319 --> 00:34:22.967 - to tell you about, which is the Falls of the Ohio. So let's go back to this map here. Do you see all 00:34:22.967 --> 00:34:23.582 - the lines? 00:34:24.514 --> 00:34:31.307 - Those are rocks. Those are rapids. This is a place that drops several hundred feet in the course of 00:34:31.307 --> 00:34:38.373 - just a couple miles. And you can start to see from this how treacherous this water is, but we also have 00:34:38.373 --> 00:34:45.166 - another picture which will help. So see here. You can see all these waterfalls, but because this is 00:34:45.166 --> 00:34:52.028 - the Ohio River before all the modern changes to it, you can't see the falls of Ohio like this today. 00:34:52.028 --> 00:34:53.726 - But at that time period, 00:34:53.858 --> 00:34:59.396 - They were something that anybody using the Ohio River had to find a way to get through. So this was 00:34:59.396 --> 00:35:04.933 - one of Lewis and Clark's first challenges together. Most of what we've been talking about today, it 00:35:04.933 --> 00:35:10.471 - was Lewis and about 10 men and a very good dog. But at this point, he meets Clark, and they have to 00:35:10.471 --> 00:35:16.230 - go through the falls of the Ohio together. I'll read you something from the book where I describe this. 00:35:16.230 --> 00:35:21.214 - The captain's first shared obstacle was visible from the shore. Actually, it was audible. 00:35:21.730 --> 00:35:28.098 - The Falls of the Ohio, an infamous choke point of rapids and small waterfalls, where the current surged 00:35:28.098 --> 00:35:34.527 - to four times its normal rate, roaring and spraying so violently that people could hear it while walking 00:35:34.527 --> 00:35:40.772 - down Louisville streets. It was an intimidating spot, especially if, like most Americans in this time 00:35:40.772 --> 00:35:43.038 - period, you didn't know how to swim. 00:35:44.002 --> 00:35:49.904 - York and the captains did know how to swim, and the next day, they got their boats to the falls, one 00:35:49.904 --> 00:35:56.041 - at a time, dodging the islands and rocky ledges as they dropped 20-plus feet in two miles. Rodney, who's 00:35:56.041 --> 00:36:01.885 - somebody else who comes up in the book, the land commissioner, survived the falls a few days later. 00:36:01.885 --> 00:36:07.846 - For the first time, he wrote, I had dread of wrecking our boat." So, I've already mentioned that they 00:36:07.846 --> 00:36:13.982 - got a late start. But even though they had a late start, and even though the river's levels were getting 00:36:14.146 --> 00:36:19.003 - lower and lower. And even though the whole country at this point knew about the expedition, was reading 00:36:19.003 --> 00:36:23.767 - about the expedition in newspapers, you know, earlier this year we all cared about Artemis II, right? 00:36:23.767 --> 00:36:28.531 - That was going to the moon and every American it seemed like was excited and following the news about 00:36:28.531 --> 00:36:33.294 - this. Well, in this time period it was the same way. I went back and looked at all the old newspapers 00:36:33.294 --> 00:36:38.058 - and there were clippings about Lewis and Clark and newspapers all over the country. They were kind of 00:36:38.058 --> 00:36:39.646 - viral news for their time period. 00:36:39.874 --> 00:36:44.916 - Despite all that pressure, though, Lewis and Clark stopped for almost two weeks in Clarksville. We don't 00:36:44.916 --> 00:36:49.766 - know why they stopped. This is one time where I think sometimes historians should be more honest and 00:36:49.766 --> 00:36:54.904 - say, we don't know the answer to this. If I had to guess, I would say maybe one of their boats got damaged 00:36:54.904 --> 00:36:59.803 - coming through those falls. You saw how treacherous they were. Maybe they could stop and repair them. 00:36:59.803 --> 00:37:04.701 - We also know that they recruited some people, so maybe that was part of why they took the time there. 00:37:04.701 --> 00:37:07.774 - But whatever the reason, they stopped for a little bit of time. 00:37:09.314 --> 00:37:15.100 - During this time, Lewis also approved a group of men who would later be called nine young men who joined 00:37:15.100 --> 00:37:20.886 - at Clarksville. This idea of like the nine Kentucky men important to the expedition. So they were people 00:37:20.886 --> 00:37:26.451 - like Charles Floyd who kind of earned his reputation in the Louisville area because he delivered the 00:37:26.451 --> 00:37:32.016 - mail from Vincennes to Louisville. So that meant he would have to get on a horse by himself and ride 00:37:32.016 --> 00:37:35.102 - through the Indiana territory where it was very remote. 00:37:35.202 --> 00:37:40.458 - and still somewhat dangerous because of native people. And so that was how Charles Floyd could say, 00:37:40.458 --> 00:37:45.818 - I'm cut out for this expedition. I'm brave. You can see because I've delivered the mail to Vincennes. 00:37:45.818 --> 00:37:51.179 - But another person we should mention here is York, because he spent a lot of time in Clarksville too. 00:37:51.179 --> 00:37:56.645 - And remember, York was Clark's slave. He was somebody who followed Clark around and took care of Clark. 00:37:56.645 --> 00:38:01.901 - Clark's father had owned York's father, now Clark owned York. And he was there too. So although the 00:38:01.901 --> 00:38:05.054 - popular phrase is that nine young men from Kentucky joined, 00:38:05.314 --> 00:38:12.379 - I always think of it as 10, because York was very, very important to the expedition. So after this point, 00:38:12.379 --> 00:38:19.644 - they're at Louisville. They have more people now. York and Clark have joined. The two captains are together, 00:38:19.644 --> 00:38:26.375 - and they keep heading towards St. Louis. I'll speed up a little bit here, but here's another view of 00:38:26.375 --> 00:38:31.774 - St. Louis. So again, this is what the big towns in this time period looked like. 00:38:34.818 --> 00:38:39.757 - There's one more person I want to talk about, though, and that's one of the men from Kentucky, a guy 00:38:39.757 --> 00:38:44.648 - named William Bratton. And I want to stop here on this image. A lot of people, when they talk about 00:38:44.648 --> 00:38:49.587 - Lewis and Clark, and this is very true if you see paintings of Lewis and Clark that were made after, 00:38:49.587 --> 00:38:54.673 - they make Lewis and Clark look from the Revolutionary War. They have three-cornered hats and everything 00:38:54.673 --> 00:38:59.662 - like that. But the Revolutionary War was 30 years before this. That's not what Lewis and Clark looked 00:38:59.662 --> 00:39:03.134 - like at all. This is what they looked like. This is a very rare image. 00:39:03.362 --> 00:39:08.749 - The only reason I was able to put it in my book was actually because of the Lilly Library in IU. There 00:39:08.749 --> 00:39:14.083 - was a book that came out in 1802 that had these illustrations. And the Lilly Library owned one of the 00:39:14.083 --> 00:39:19.522 - very few copies still left in America. So the Lilly Library made this scan for me. And you can see they 00:39:19.522 --> 00:39:25.013 - have kind of these rounded top hats, the blue jackets, the light yellow pants. This is what the military 00:39:25.013 --> 00:39:30.243 - uniforms looked like in 1802, 1803. So when you picture Lewis and Clark and their soldiers, this is 00:39:30.243 --> 00:39:31.550 - what you should picture. 00:39:32.514 --> 00:39:37.732 - I want to talk to you for a second about William Bratton. This is the last thing I'll talk about before 00:39:37.732 --> 00:39:42.749 - we open it up for questions. He was somebody who was born in Virginia, and then his family moved to 00:39:42.749 --> 00:39:47.967 - Kentucky. A lot of Americans were doing this in this time period. They were moving to the West, whether 00:39:47.967 --> 00:39:52.734 - that was Kentucky or Ohio or the Indiana Territory. But where did William Bratton settle down? 00:39:55.138 --> 00:40:00.790 - This is 1806. This is Lewis discharging William Bratton, giving him an honorable discharge, giving him 00:40:00.790 --> 00:40:06.552 - the money that he's owed, giving him a gift of land, because all the men who served with Lewis and Clark 00:40:06.552 --> 00:40:12.040 - ended up getting as much land as the Revolutionary War soldiers did, as a way for the nation to say 00:40:12.040 --> 00:40:17.528 - thank you to these men for everything they sacrificed. So you can see right here, William, and then 00:40:17.528 --> 00:40:21.534 - on the next line, Bratton. You can see that this is his discharge paper. 00:40:21.762 --> 00:40:27.988 - After that, William Bratton ended up running a shipping business on the Missouri River for a while and 00:40:27.988 --> 00:40:34.275 - on the Mississippi River. But then he ended up settling in a place called Wayntown, Indiana. So Bratton 00:40:34.275 --> 00:40:40.502 - ran his keelboat business on the Missouri and the Mississippi. But then the new Madrid earthquakes and 00:40:40.502 --> 00:40:46.547 - the War of 1812 destroyed his business. So he moved to Wayntown, Indiana, which is right there. You 00:40:46.547 --> 00:40:50.174 - can see Bloomington at the bottom of the map, Indianapolis. 00:40:50.306 --> 00:40:55.641 - The red pen is Wayntown. And that's where he settled. I want to tell you a little bit about William 00:40:55.641 --> 00:41:00.975 - Bratton, since for the last decades of his life, he was a Hoosier. He's our state's best connection 00:41:00.975 --> 00:41:06.416 - to Lewis and Clark today. Bratton ended up marrying a woman named Mary, although he called her Polly. 00:41:06.416 --> 00:41:11.857 - And they had 10 children together. They ended up farming more than 300 acres in Indiana in Montgomery 00:41:11.857 --> 00:41:17.192 - County. And Bratton became a very important citizen. He was the first justice of the peace for this 00:41:17.192 --> 00:41:20.126 - town. And he was a beloved and important person there. 00:41:21.634 --> 00:41:27.131 - His family liked to tell a story about him, and I'm just going to quote it to you. They said that he 00:41:27.131 --> 00:41:32.627 - was, quote, very saving and could not see anything wasted. One time at a corn husking, so this would 00:41:32.627 --> 00:41:38.396 - have been in Indiana, he was picking up scattered grains of corn, and someone made fun of him. He replied 00:41:38.396 --> 00:41:43.294 - that he had seen the time when he would have been very thankful for a few grains of corn. 00:41:44.354 --> 00:41:49.047 - So if any of you know the bigger Lewis and Clark story, you know that they had some very tough times 00:41:49.047 --> 00:41:53.741 - indeed, especially in the Rocky Mountains, where they were so low on food that they ended up killing 00:41:53.741 --> 00:41:58.806 - some of their horses and eating horse meat, because that was the only food that they had. You can understand 00:41:58.806 --> 00:42:03.685 - why a memory like that would stick with somebody. So William Bratton was a young man when that happened. 00:42:03.685 --> 00:42:08.332 - Later, as an old man in Indiana, he was still careful about food. He still saved food, because like 00:42:08.332 --> 00:42:11.678 - he said, I remember at a time when food was scarce and hard to come by. 00:42:13.378 --> 00:42:18.652 - Bratton ended up dying in 1841 in Indiana at the age of 63. And here's the thing. You can visit his 00:42:18.652 --> 00:42:23.926 - grave still today. If you go to Wayntown, which is a pretty small place, they do have a pizza king. 00:42:23.926 --> 00:42:29.358 - But where this red tag is here, you can see it. And I've got some pictures for you here. These are not 00:42:29.358 --> 00:42:34.737 - my pictures. They are from somebody who put them on the internet named Al Wolf. So I want to give him 00:42:34.737 --> 00:42:40.064 - credit. But this is the little cemetery. Like anybody who's ever gone on a country drive in Indiana, 00:42:40.064 --> 00:42:43.070 - you've seen cemeteries like this. Maybe you've wondered. 00:42:43.202 --> 00:42:48.629 - I wonder who's buried there. Well, there's always gonna be somebody interesting buried there, but in 00:42:48.629 --> 00:42:54.324 - this particular case, there's somebody from the Lewis and Clark expedition. So the state has put a plaque 00:42:54.324 --> 00:42:59.804 - up in this small country cemetery. William Bratton, Lewis and Clark expedition member. He's buried in 00:42:59.804 --> 00:43:05.392 - the cemetery with the US Army rank of private. He joined Lewis and Clark's expedition near Clarksville, 00:43:05.392 --> 00:43:11.088 - Indiana, 1803. The Corps explored the lands of the Louisiana Purchase in the Pacific Northwest. Bratton's 00:43:11.088 --> 00:43:13.022 - duties included hunter, blacksmith, 00:43:13.154 --> 00:43:20.392 - salt maker he completed the entire journey was discharged on october 10th 1806 that's the letter i showed 00:43:20.392 --> 00:43:27.220 - you all settled on a farm in wayne township 1822 held various county and township offices including 00:43:27.220 --> 00:43:34.117 - justice of the peace and there's where he's buried right there and it's hard to see from the picture 00:43:34.117 --> 00:43:41.150 - but i have a a better way to see it you can see that this is what his tombstone says william e bratton 00:43:41.538 --> 00:43:48.141 - went in 1804 with Lewis and Clark to the Rocky Mountains, died November 11th, 1841, aged 63 years. So 00:43:48.141 --> 00:43:54.808 - William today is our state's most direct link to the Lewis and Clark expedition, but hopefully in this 00:43:54.808 --> 00:44:01.735 - talk, whether it's thinking about them coming down the Ohio River, renting some oxen probably from farmers 00:44:01.735 --> 00:44:08.208 - in the Indiana territory, staying in Clarksville for almost two weeks, Charles Floyd delivering the 00:44:08.208 --> 00:44:09.438 - mail to Vincennes, 00:44:09.954 --> 00:44:16.389 - Behind the scenes, William Henry Harrison, who is very important, helping Jefferson with the kind of 00:44:16.389 --> 00:44:23.015 - imperial parts of the expedition. You can see that our state has a lot of connections and a lot of ties 00:44:23.015 --> 00:44:29.705 - to this all-American adventure. And it's one of many reasons I was so happy to write about it. So that's 00:44:29.705 --> 00:44:36.203 - everything that I've prepared for you all. Thank you for listening. And if anybody has any questions, 00:44:36.203 --> 00:44:39.134 - I'd love to hear them. Yes, sir, in the back. 00:44:45.858 --> 00:44:51.263 - So this is a great question, and I think a misconception many people have. The gentleman asked, were 00:44:51.263 --> 00:44:56.561 - Lewis and Clark of military rank? And the answer is absolutely yes. And here's what's interesting, 00:44:56.561 --> 00:45:02.394 - and Fitz, I could have talked about this during the talk, so I'm glad you asked. They met at Fort Greenville 00:45:02.394 --> 00:45:07.799 - in what is now Ohio, northern Ohio. So the American Army fought three very important battles against 00:45:07.799 --> 00:45:09.726 - Native people to kind of ultimately 00:45:09.826 --> 00:45:15.414 - take over Ohio, and Lewis showed up too late to fight in the battles, but Clark fought in the third 00:45:15.414 --> 00:45:21.282 - battle. So he saw active combat. Lewis showed up a little bit later. So Lewis and Clark almost certainly 00:45:21.282 --> 00:45:26.983 - met while they were very young officers in the army. Lewis even served under Clark in a kind of elite 00:45:26.983 --> 00:45:32.683 - group of riflemen. So this was in 1794. So a few years after that, Clark leaves the army. Lewis keeps 00:45:32.683 --> 00:45:38.942 - working his way up the army, and then Jefferson recruits him to become a political operative in Washington, DC. 00:45:39.458 --> 00:45:47.311 - But I always think of Lewis and Clark as a military operation. I think it's very important to do that. 00:45:47.311 --> 00:45:54.935 - And when I would go ahead. Sure. Well, you're asking a very perceptive question, which is because I 00:45:54.935 --> 00:46:02.712 - can't give you a simple answer, which is one of the most interesting things about it. Because as your 00:46:02.712 --> 00:46:04.542 - question is getting at, 00:46:05.026 --> 00:46:09.858 - Most military units, you have to have one person in charge. You don't want to compromise chain of commands, 00:46:09.858 --> 00:46:14.376 - because if everybody starts pulling out their weapons and it seems like a battle is going to happen, 00:46:14.376 --> 00:46:18.894 - and that happens at least two times during the expedition, you want to be able to look at one person 00:46:18.894 --> 00:46:23.637 - who is in charge. You want to say, all right, what do we do? I'm going to look at our commanding officer, 00:46:23.637 --> 00:46:28.423 - not the lieutenant, not the sergeant, the person in charge. But Lewis and Clark did something very unique. 00:46:28.423 --> 00:46:30.526 - They chose to compromise the chain of command. 00:46:31.394 --> 00:46:37.162 - they chose to be co-captains, which is not the way most military units operate. But they did that because 00:46:37.162 --> 00:46:42.603 - that reflected their philosophy. And one thing I tried to do very carefully in this book was read a 00:46:42.603 --> 00:46:48.207 - lot about the military in this time period because it was a military unit. And so the Army in 1804 was 00:46:48.207 --> 00:46:53.812 - not like the Army we think of today. Today we think of, you know, if we say things like, thank you for 00:46:53.812 --> 00:46:55.934 - your service, we support our veterans, 00:46:56.130 --> 00:47:01.456 - We don't do enough, but many Americans want to do as much as we can. But that's not the way the Army 00:47:01.456 --> 00:47:06.888 - was viewed back then. Back then, the Army did not pay well, and it was not respected. So most soldiers 00:47:06.888 --> 00:47:12.583 - were kind of troublemakers. And most officers were very cruel to their soldiers. So if a soldier misbehaved 00:47:12.583 --> 00:47:17.856 - or caused trouble, an officer wouldn't have a court martial or ask questions. An officer would just 00:47:17.856 --> 00:47:23.129 - start beating the soldier. So it was very violent. Officers beating soldiers, soldiers beating each 00:47:23.129 --> 00:47:24.606 - other. It was an extremely, 00:47:24.770 --> 00:47:30.234 - violent outfit compared to how the world works today. But Lewis and Clark made a very deliberate choice 00:47:30.234 --> 00:47:35.593 - not to run their unit that way. In the book, I write about this as an experiment. They decided, we're 00:47:35.593 --> 00:47:40.847 - gonna let the men have more of a say. So at many stressful points in the expedition where Lewis and 00:47:40.847 --> 00:47:46.416 - Clark didn't know what to do, they let the men vote, which is very unusual in a military unit, especially 00:47:46.416 --> 00:47:51.827 - at this time period. So who was in charge to get back to your question? They were both in charge. They 00:47:51.827 --> 00:47:52.510 - were a team. 00:47:52.706 --> 00:47:57.702 - That's how they saw it. And there's a really interesting story actually that Clark wasn't technically 00:47:57.702 --> 00:48:02.845 - a captain. It's all in the book, but they sort of covered it up. Lewis and Clark agreed that even though 00:48:02.845 --> 00:48:07.743 - there wasn't a spot for Clark to be a captain, we'll just kind of say he's a captain because that's 00:48:07.743 --> 00:48:12.935 - how we want our outfit to operate. So it was a military unit with two people in charge. It was a military 00:48:12.935 --> 00:48:17.834 - unit where lots of other soldiers got to vote. Both of these things were very unusual for this time 00:48:17.834 --> 00:48:22.046 - period, but I think it speaks to Lewis and Clark as leaders, that they sort of wanted 00:48:22.146 --> 00:48:27.528 - They wanted a community. They wanted to trust each other. They wanted to work together. And it made 00:48:27.528 --> 00:48:32.964 - sense, because they were going to be so far away from the rest of America that they needed their men 00:48:32.964 --> 00:48:38.561 - to be invested. At a certain point, there's 30 soldiers. There's only two of them. So they have to keep 00:48:38.561 --> 00:48:43.996 - the men on their side. But I also think there are personal reasons for why Lewis and Clark did this. 00:48:43.996 --> 00:48:49.647 - And they ran their military unit in a very unique way. And it worked. It was a huge success. And I think 00:48:49.647 --> 00:48:51.262 - it speaks to them as leaders. 00:48:52.066 --> 00:48:58.699 - All the way all the way back at one point some native people stole the dog and Lewis said go get the 00:48:58.699 --> 00:49:05.397 - dog and kill them if you have to Maybe not the best maybe not the best tactics from Lewis But it does 00:49:05.397 --> 00:49:12.227 - speak to how much he loved that dog and they were able to get the dog back And so the dog made the made 00:49:12.227 --> 00:49:13.278 - the entire trip 00:49:37.090 --> 00:49:45.255 - And I think he felt very uncomfortable then becoming the security officer. And then when they returned, 00:49:45.255 --> 00:49:53.105 - Congress did some direct strikes over two home factories. And then they do something about the pay, 00:49:53.105 --> 00:50:01.113 - that's a P.A. or something like that. And then my last question, why do you refer to your vote as law 00:50:01.113 --> 00:50:02.526 - if it's not true? 00:50:02.722 --> 00:50:07.807 - A lot of good questions here from somebody I can tell knows a lot about the expedition. So thank you 00:50:07.807 --> 00:50:13.093 - for coming today. That's wonderful. Yes, I agree with what you said, that the fact that Lewis had served 00:50:13.093 --> 00:50:18.279 - under Clark was probably part of the reason that he wasn't comfortable. Clark was older. And this just 00:50:18.279 --> 00:50:23.615 - gets to how interesting they were as people, because Clark was the baby brother. Clark had five brothers, 00:50:23.615 --> 00:50:26.334 - and all five of them served in the Revolutionary War. 00:50:26.466 --> 00:50:31.787 - Clark was never able to because he was too young. So you can imagine for William Clark, growing up in 00:50:31.787 --> 00:50:37.055 - this very famous family where five brothers have served so heroically, and he never gets to do that. 00:50:37.055 --> 00:50:42.324 - He's the little brother. But now on this expedition, he's the big brother. He was in charge of Lewis 00:50:42.324 --> 00:50:47.593 - before in the Army. He was older. So you can sort of understand how much this meant to Clark and how 00:50:47.593 --> 00:50:52.913 - he would get things out of it as well. But yes, there was a lot of drama about this because Jefferson 00:50:52.913 --> 00:50:55.678 - made a mistake here, honestly. Jefferson told Lewis, 00:50:56.226 --> 00:51:02.367 - Let's back up a second. We know that when Jefferson was coming up with the expedition, he only thought 00:51:02.367 --> 00:51:08.449 - of it as the Lewis expedition. So when he writes his instructions, there's no mention of a co-captain 00:51:08.449 --> 00:51:14.113 - or even a second in command. It's just named at Luke. But at some point, right before he left, 00:51:14.113 --> 00:51:20.314 - Lewis said, I want to have somebody lead this with me. And so Jefferson amended the instructions, which 00:51:20.314 --> 00:51:21.566 - is how we know this. 00:51:21.826 --> 00:51:27.300 - We know that Lewis had a different person in mind named Moses Hook if Clark said no, but Lewis hoped 00:51:27.300 --> 00:51:32.395 - very much that Clark said yes. If Clark had not said yes, we'd be talking about the Lewis and 00:51:32.395 --> 00:51:37.977 - Hook expedition. Personally, I think Lewis and Clark has a much better sound to it. So Clark says yes, 00:51:37.977 --> 00:51:43.614 - and Lewis says to him, you know, the president has promised you to be the captain, which is higher than 00:51:43.614 --> 00:51:46.974 - what you left. When Clark left the Army, he was a lieutenant. 00:51:48.130 --> 00:51:54.278 - Then Jefferson, as part of his legislative agenda, had reorganized the army, which is a very complicated 00:51:54.278 --> 00:52:00.192 - topic. But one thing it had done is streamline the number of officers. He had made the army smaller. 00:52:00.192 --> 00:52:06.223 - And part of the reason Jefferson had done this is that most of the officers were federalists. I always 00:52:06.223 --> 00:52:12.078 - say to people, here's what politics was like in Lewis and Clark's time. I know it's going to take a 00:52:12.078 --> 00:52:15.006 - big leap, but America was divided into two sides. 00:52:15.394 --> 00:52:21.532 - They hated each other. And whenever one side said we wanted to do something, the other side said, well, 00:52:21.532 --> 00:52:28.025 - we don't want to. Why? Because the other side's for it. So if you can, through some magic use of imagination, 00:52:28.025 --> 00:52:33.278 - imagine an America that was like that. That's what America was like in this time period. 00:52:33.890 --> 00:52:38.578 - Jefferson reorganized the army in part because he wanted to remove some of the people who belonged to 00:52:38.578 --> 00:52:43.266 - the other political party who were officers. But that meant there were not enough spots for officers. 00:52:43.266 --> 00:52:47.954 - So once it came time to do the paperwork, even though Lewis had already told Clark in that very first 00:52:47.954 --> 00:52:52.551 - letter, you're going to be a captain. Everything is going to be equal. You're going to have all the 00:52:52.551 --> 00:52:57.239 - same perks that I have. He gets a letter right before they leave St. Louis that says, actually, Clark 00:52:57.239 --> 00:53:01.835 - has to enter as a second lieutenant, as a lower rank than he left the army, which for somebody like 00:53:01.835 --> 00:53:02.846 - Clark is humiliating. 00:53:04.002 --> 00:53:08.901 - And so what Lewis and Clark decide to do, this is Lewis's idea, is we're just gonna, you know, you've 00:53:08.901 --> 00:53:13.799 - been calling yourself Captain Clark all winter, just keep calling yourself Captain Clark. And you can 00:53:13.799 --> 00:53:18.698 - see the pressure on this even in the documents. They will sign treaties with native people. And Lewis 00:53:18.698 --> 00:53:23.693 - will just write, Captain, Army, First Regiment, because that's what he was. And Clark will kind of come 00:53:23.693 --> 00:53:26.238 - up with these, not lies, but he'll be like, Captain, 00:53:27.298 --> 00:53:32.517 - exploration of the Northwest under the president, like he doesn't have a regiment he can even write, 00:53:32.517 --> 00:53:37.839 - because he's not a captain in a regiment, so Clark has to sort of find a cover story in real time. But 00:53:37.839 --> 00:53:43.109 - once they get back, Lewis is furious, and he says, I want Clark to have the same thing that I do. The 00:53:43.109 --> 00:53:48.483 - Army did ultimately not pay Clark at the same level, but in terms of the huge grants of land, they gave 00:53:48.483 --> 00:53:53.702 - them both thousands of acres, and Lewis did everything he could and made sure that Clark got just as 00:53:53.702 --> 00:53:54.942 - much land as Lewis did. 00:53:55.330 --> 00:54:00.460 - And the last thing you mentioned, and I'm glad you did, is that Sacajawea and York both got to vote. 00:54:00.460 --> 00:54:05.591 - And this was once they made it to the Pacific Ocean. Like I said, in my book, I try to emphasize how 00:54:05.591 --> 00:54:10.772 - many votes there were along the way, because Lewis and Clark were a military unit, but they organized 00:54:10.772 --> 00:54:15.851 - it in a much more democratic and modern-seeming way, which I really admire about them. But they did 00:54:15.851 --> 00:54:21.083 - not let York or Sacajawea vote. They were just letting the soldiers vote. But once they made it to the 00:54:21.083 --> 00:54:23.166 - Pacific Ocean, they do ask York to vote. 00:54:23.362 --> 00:54:28.364 - find this really patriotic and wonderful, too, because York had gone 4,000 miles at that point. York 00:54:28.364 --> 00:54:33.514 - had carried a rifle. York had killed Buffalo. York had pushed the barge through sandbars. York had done 00:54:33.514 --> 00:54:35.742 - the same things that everyone else had done. 00:54:36.354 --> 00:54:41.367 - So I think it's really inspiring that Lewis and Clark were willing to give him a say at that point. 00:54:41.367 --> 00:54:46.531 - But there is one funny thing about Sacajawea. She also gets a vote. But if you go back and look at the 00:54:46.531 --> 00:54:51.694 - journal, and in my book I actually reproduced this page in the journal so you can see it, you can kind 00:54:51.694 --> 00:54:56.758 - of hold it in your hands because I have the color image of exactly these pages from Clark. He writes 00:54:56.758 --> 00:55:01.971 - the long list, then he adds up the votes, and then only underneath that does he write Sacajawea's vote. 00:55:01.971 --> 00:55:02.974 - He calls her Janie. 00:55:03.330 --> 00:55:08.447 - The only thing I can think of is that he didn't ask her, and then she spoke up for herself. But I love 00:55:08.447 --> 00:55:13.414 - that about her, right? Like everybody else's vote, and then at some point, she's just like, well, I 00:55:13.414 --> 00:55:15.550 - have a vote, too. I have something to say. 00:55:15.906 --> 00:55:20.503 - Lewis and Clark took good care of her and were very kind for her, but she was also just such a strong 00:55:20.503 --> 00:55:25.146 - and brave person. And sometimes she would just speak up for herself. In terms of the barge, the reason 00:55:25.146 --> 00:55:29.878 - I call it the barge and not the kill boat is just because of the latest scholarship that Lewis and Clark 00:55:29.878 --> 00:55:34.385 - called it a barge in their journals. And so previous books have called it a kill boat, but the more 00:55:34.385 --> 00:55:38.937 - recent academics who have studied it and written about it say that barge is a better word for it. So 00:55:38.937 --> 00:55:43.670 - that's what I chose for my book, but neither one is really right or wrong. It's just an author's choice. 00:55:43.670 --> 00:55:45.022 - Thank you for your questions. 00:55:45.602 --> 00:55:52.111 - Yes? I did a little bit of research on Lewis and Clark for the 200th celebration. I remember reading 00:55:52.111 --> 00:55:58.748 - that while they were preparing, they come up with something that we would refer to like bullion cubes. 00:55:58.748 --> 00:56:05.321 - Did you find that? Yes. A way to preserve food? So this is called, they called it portable soup. Some 00:56:05.321 --> 00:56:12.088 - of the descriptions in the time period, which I think give you a better understanding of it, they called 00:56:12.088 --> 00:56:12.990 - it veal glue. 00:56:14.434 --> 00:56:20.075 - So this was like a very, bullion is a very good comparison. It was a concentrate, very salty, very nutrient 00:56:20.075 --> 00:56:25.507 - rich because they would use veal and just boil it and boil it and boil it until you were left with like 00:56:25.507 --> 00:56:30.887 - a gummy paste that you could reconstitute. So when you think of MREs, military rations today, this was 00:56:30.887 --> 00:56:36.267 - like what the version of that in 1804. One thing that's really interesting though is that the soldiers 00:56:36.267 --> 00:56:41.438 - hated it. And so I was talking about in the Rocky Mountain mountains where they had to eat horses. 00:56:42.146 --> 00:56:46.650 - The soldiers, that's one of the reasons the soldiers decided to eat horses, because Lewis is like, it's 00:56:46.650 --> 00:56:51.067 - all right, guys. I've prepared for this. I've got portable soup. And so they reconstitute it, and the 00:56:51.067 --> 00:56:55.485 - men are like, we're hungry, but this is disgusting. And so they decide to kill horses instead. They'd 00:56:55.485 --> 00:56:59.816 - rather eat horse feet than this. But there's one thing that I point out in this chapter. Them going 00:56:59.816 --> 00:57:04.190 - through the Rocky Mountains is a chapter I write from Sacajawea's point of view. And so a lot of the 00:57:04.190 --> 00:57:08.650 - research I drew on for her was in the journals, because she shows up in the journals all the time. But 00:57:08.650 --> 00:57:11.422 - I also interviewed Shoshone people who are descendants of hers. 00:57:12.098 --> 00:57:17.322 - And they talked about how, in their culture, and I was able to confirm this in other historical sources, 00:57:17.322 --> 00:57:22.397 - the Shoshone have a huge taboo against eating horse flesh. So nobody in the journal... I sound greedy 00:57:22.397 --> 00:57:27.372 - here, because I have a million words to work with, but I always want more. It's always like the one 00:57:27.372 --> 00:57:32.447 - thing you wish they'd written down they didn't write down. And so, one of the things they don't write 00:57:32.447 --> 00:57:37.472 - down is, did Sacagawea eat the horse or not? They just don't even mention that. But based on the way 00:57:37.472 --> 00:57:40.606 - other Shoshone people lived their lives, she probably did not. 00:57:40.706 --> 00:57:45.622 - And what's so interesting is, as they're going through the Rocky Mountains, you have to remember, she's 00:57:45.622 --> 00:57:50.444 - breastfeeding a baby. And so, nobody is hungrier than her, because she's not just having to climb the 00:57:50.444 --> 00:57:55.219 - mountains, she's having to keep another human being alive with her body. And so, this portable soup, 00:57:55.219 --> 00:58:00.324 - in the book, I kind of make the case, well, maybe the person who needed it the most was actually Sacajawea, 00:58:00.324 --> 00:58:05.051 - because she probably couldn't eat horse meat, she was desperate for any kind of nutrition, so maybe 00:58:05.051 --> 00:58:09.022 - the portable soup that Louis had planned, the soldiers were like, yeah, we're good, 00:58:09.154 --> 00:58:15.827 - But maybe Sacajawea was the one who needed it the most. How long did the barge last or did they leave 00:58:15.827 --> 00:58:22.369 - it somewhere and come back and take it back? Is that what happened? Well, the barge made it all the 00:58:22.369 --> 00:58:29.239 - way up to where they built a place called Fort Mandan in what is now North Dakota. So their first winter 00:58:29.239 --> 00:58:35.977 - after going down the Ohio, stuff we talked about here, they stayed in St. Louis. Then their first year 00:58:35.977 --> 00:58:38.398 - proper, they make it all the way up. 00:58:38.594 --> 00:58:43.872 - more than 1600 miles to Fort Mandan in what's now North Dakota. At that point they realized the barge, 00:58:43.872 --> 00:58:49.252 - Luke designed the barge. He was a very careful planner. So whether it was the portable soup or designing 00:58:49.252 --> 00:58:54.428 - the barge, he tried to use the best science he could to pair them in. But he had to admit this barge 00:58:54.428 --> 00:58:59.552 - just isn't a good fit. Like I just did not understand what these rivers would be like. So they kept 00:58:59.552 --> 00:59:04.574 - the barge and then that's next spring when they kept going, they sent the barge back to St. Louis 00:59:04.674 --> 00:59:10.076 - full of scientific specimens and their journals so far and all the things they wanted to get to Jefferson. 00:59:10.076 --> 00:59:15.428 - They even sent a prairie dog that made it all the way to the White House. So Jefferson had a live prairie 00:59:15.428 --> 00:59:20.679 - dog at the White House that Lewis and Clark had captured for him. So they only used it that first year. 00:59:20.679 --> 00:59:23.102 - And after that, they switched to dugout canoes. 00:59:23.394 --> 00:59:28.338 - And so when they left at that point, they had two peros, which are kind of like bigger canoes, more 00:59:28.338 --> 00:59:33.283 - stable canoes, and then dug out canoes with it. And as they kept going, they ended up setting aside 00:59:33.283 --> 00:59:38.276 - the peros. They were always adapting. They would always change. You know, we think of Sacajawea. She 00:59:38.276 --> 00:59:43.221 - didn't even show up until the second year. So they were always adapting and changing because it was 00:59:43.221 --> 00:59:48.560 - such a challenging expedition. And one of the changes they made was, well, we don't need the barge anymore. 00:59:48.560 --> 00:59:52.862 - You had a second question you said? The expedition members, they received land bounty. 00:59:53.090 --> 00:59:58.845 - How many ended up in southern Indiana? The only person who's buried in Indiana is Bratton. A lot of 00:59:58.845 --> 01:00:04.772 - the men sold the bounties. And I think it's because they had had a taste of adventure and decided they 01:00:04.772 --> 01:00:10.814 - just wanted more of it. It's kind of interesting. Different people are always going to respond to things 01:00:10.814 --> 01:00:16.799 - in different ways. So somebody like Bratton, the guy I was talking about, or somebody like John Ordway, 01:00:16.799 --> 01:00:18.238 - who I write a lot about, 01:00:18.370 --> 01:00:23.282 - They loved being on this adventure, but once it was done, they were like, let's get a farm. We've had 01:00:23.282 --> 01:00:28.338 - our crazy life experience. Let's settle down and have a normal life. But more than half of the men said, 01:00:28.338 --> 01:00:33.250 - we just want to keep having a crazy experiences. We're just going to be traders or trappers. And they 01:00:33.250 --> 01:00:38.066 - were very valuable in that industry because they had firsthand experience of going further than any 01:00:38.066 --> 01:00:41.726 - other Americans had to that point. So sometimes they would sell their land. 01:00:42.274 --> 01:00:47.587 - take pocket the money and then just go out and keep being a traitor or a trapper. So in terms of Indiana, 01:00:47.587 --> 01:00:52.799 - not that many, but that's not anything really about Indiana. It just tells you how many of the soldiers 01:00:52.799 --> 01:00:57.811 - wanted to keep spending time out in the West. And a lot of them ended up dying a few years later. A 01:00:57.811 --> 01:01:02.823 - number of them were killed by the Blackfoot Nation because the Blackfoot Nation, in part because of 01:01:02.823 --> 01:01:07.936 - a battle that happened between Lewis and some Blackfoot people, was very hostile towards America. And 01:01:07.936 --> 01:01:09.790 - so as America kept trying to expand, 01:01:09.922 --> 01:01:16.636 - Blackfoot would kill American traders and trappers. The American traders and trappers would kill Blackfoot 01:01:16.636 --> 01:01:22.973 - people. It was a real ugly time period. And multiple members of the Lewis and Clark expedition ended 01:01:22.973 --> 01:01:29.311 - up dying just a couple years after in those battles. Charles Floyd, I think he has to claim the fame 01:01:29.311 --> 01:01:35.836 - that all the way out and all the way back, he was the only person of the Corps that died. That's right. 01:01:35.836 --> 01:01:37.342 - That's kind of amazing. 01:01:37.634 --> 01:01:42.901 - That's right. And it's not just us saying this from a modern perspective. I found a Jefferson speech 01:01:42.901 --> 01:01:48.324 - where when he was writing about the expedition afterwards, he was like, one of the amazing things about 01:01:48.324 --> 01:01:53.643 - this is that only one man died. So that's good leadership from Lewis and Clark. That's good genetics, 01:01:53.643 --> 01:01:58.910 - because these are all guys in their 20s who are healthy and young. And it's also just a lot of luck. 01:01:59.106 --> 01:02:04.412 - Because they're dealing with grizzly bears. The Missouri River is full of bacteria. They're getting 01:02:04.412 --> 01:02:09.719 - in there to tow their barge and their canoes. Their feet are all cut up, so they get horrible boils 01:02:09.719 --> 01:02:15.185 - and abscesses all over their body. They had to sacrifice so much, but they only lost one person, which 01:02:15.185 --> 01:02:18.846 - is amazing. But if you read their journals, when Charles Floyd dies, 01:02:19.202 --> 01:02:23.998 - None of them think he's the only one who's going to die. They talk about, like, this is the first person 01:02:23.998 --> 01:02:28.611 - we've lost. So you can tell, even early in the expedition, they're so brave, but also uncertain. And 01:02:28.611 --> 01:02:33.223 - that's one thing I really tried to capture in my book. A lot of times, I feel like books are written 01:02:33.223 --> 01:02:37.471 - where everybody knows the ending. And I know you all know what happens with Lewis and Clark. 01:02:37.471 --> 01:02:42.038 - I know that. But when you write a book, you can sort of try to put that idea aside and capture what 01:02:42.038 --> 01:02:46.742 - it felt like for them. And life for them feels just like life for us. They woke up every day, and they 01:02:46.742 --> 01:02:48.478 - didn't know what was going to happen. 01:02:49.058 --> 01:02:53.464 - You know, one of the first questions Lewis and Clark asked when they are coming back to America is, 01:02:53.464 --> 01:02:58.045 - who's the president? Because there had been a presidential election, and they did not know if Jefferson 01:02:58.045 --> 01:03:02.671 - would win. They did not know what was going to happen next, because nobody who's living through history, 01:03:02.671 --> 01:03:07.077 - including us who are living through history right now, know what's going to happen. So when I wrote 01:03:07.077 --> 01:03:11.615 - my book, I tried really hard to capture that uncertainty, because it made me admire them more, because 01:03:11.615 --> 01:03:16.020 - I think you can better appreciate how hard it was, but also because I think it's more accurate, and 01:03:16.020 --> 01:03:17.342 - it shows what life felt like. 01:03:22.626 --> 01:03:35.658 - Right. Yeah, no, the river was just always changing in real time. And, you know, especially once the 01:03:35.658 --> 01:03:46.110 - modern dams happened, that was less visible. But you're right, it was, you know, 01:03:47.266 --> 01:03:51.388 - Even one of the things about history is trying to remember and realize what life was like back then. 01:03:51.388 --> 01:03:55.551 - You think, well, at least the river is the same, but it's not. The river has changed so much, even in 01:03:55.551 --> 01:03:59.102 - your lifetime, much less versus them. So thank you for that comment. That's wonderful. 01:04:14.466 --> 01:04:20.436 - Yeah, I think that they did. And it's really hard to talk about, like, they're at whole, because even 01:04:20.436 --> 01:04:26.523 - Lewis and Clark, both officers, both from Virginia, they were very different. And so this is, you know, 01:04:26.523 --> 01:04:32.376 - in my book, I try really hard to just say, what did people think in this time period? And so, like, 01:04:32.376 --> 01:04:36.414 - if you wanted to make it as simple as possible, Lewis was much more, 01:04:36.706 --> 01:04:41.631 - to African-American people, to black people than Clark was. Clark owned slaves. There are lots of clues 01:04:41.631 --> 01:04:46.509 - I found that Lewis was not an abolitionist, but he didn't really want anything to do with slavery. But 01:04:46.509 --> 01:04:51.292 - in terms of Native people, on the way back, Lewis actually gets more and more frustrated with Native 01:04:51.292 --> 01:04:56.170 - people and then becomes quite cruel towards them, whereas Clark is much more generous to Native people 01:04:56.170 --> 01:05:00.906 - and Native people admired Clark for the rest of his life. He spent the decades after the expedition 01:05:00.906 --> 01:05:04.126 - living in St. Louis and making lots of treaties with Native people. 01:05:04.290 --> 01:05:09.281 - So even when we think about Lewis and Clark, who are so similar, we sometimes sort of combine them into 01:05:09.281 --> 01:05:14.177 - one person on various issues, they had much different views. They were very different. So in my book, 01:05:14.177 --> 01:05:19.120 - I try really hard to say, well, how did each person see something and how did they see it at that time 01:05:19.120 --> 01:05:23.967 - period? But yes, Lewis and Clark definitely understood how much they needed help with Native people. 01:05:23.967 --> 01:05:28.815 - And even if you look at the planning documents, Jefferson understood this. So one of the things they 01:05:28.815 --> 01:05:33.182 - packed that barge full of was trading goods, things that they could trade for information, 01:05:33.378 --> 01:05:38.693 - or trade to sort of help with their diplomacy, or just trade for things they needed. On the way back, 01:05:38.693 --> 01:05:42.654 - they were kind of out of trade goods. And so Clark became sort of a doctor. 01:05:42.946 --> 01:05:47.410 - And so native people would come up to him and they would complain about various ailments and Lewis and 01:05:47.410 --> 01:05:52.091 - Clark still had medicine left because Lewis had brought a lot of that. And so Clark would use that medicine 01:05:52.091 --> 01:05:56.425 - to help the native people, but then the native people would say, okay, you can borrow our horses to 01:05:56.425 --> 01:06:00.932 - cross the river or here's some corn that you need or something like that. And so there was a real human 01:06:00.932 --> 01:06:05.266 - back and forth in that there was one time that almost turned violent and then there was that moment 01:06:05.266 --> 01:06:07.390 - with the Blackfoot people that did turn violent. 01:06:07.554 --> 01:06:12.468 - But other than that, I mean, there was skepticism. There were nerves on both sides, but mostly you had 01:06:12.468 --> 01:06:17.478 - two sets of human beings trying to work together. And one thing I tried to show in the book that I think 01:06:17.478 --> 01:06:22.440 - makes it a little different than other books about Lewis and Clark is it's very easy for us to imagine, 01:06:22.440 --> 01:06:27.403 - well, Lewis and Clark wanted something from Native people. Like, Lewis and Clark had this mission. They 01:06:27.403 --> 01:06:32.174 - got to make it to the ocean. So they're going to, like, they will give Native people something, but 01:06:32.174 --> 01:06:36.945 - they want something in return. But it's just as true that Native people wanted something from Lewis 01:06:36.945 --> 01:06:37.470 - and Clark. 01:06:37.922 --> 01:06:43.372 - And so in the book, I write sometimes from the point of view of Native people. And so the Lakota is 01:06:43.372 --> 01:06:48.877 - a really good example. There's a Lakota leader named Black Buffalo, and chapter six is told from his 01:06:48.877 --> 01:06:54.600 - point of view. And that interaction of the Lakota versus the Americans is interesting. But Black Buffalo 01:06:54.600 --> 01:07:00.214 - wanted something from Lewis and Clark. He wasn't just a supporting character. He was like, well, these 01:07:00.214 --> 01:07:05.883 - new guys are showing up. They're kind of angry a lot. But is there a way I can use them to help achieve 01:07:05.883 --> 01:07:07.518 - the things I want to achieve? 01:07:08.098 --> 01:07:14.762 - And so that's one thing I really tried to do in the book, is pay attention not just how Americans influenced 01:07:14.762 --> 01:07:21.181 - Native people, but how Native people influenced Americans. And there's really no better story to explore 01:07:21.181 --> 01:07:27.417 - that dynamic than Lewis and Clark, for the reasons you said. One of the things that Lewis tried to do 01:07:27.417 --> 01:07:33.836 - as they went west was talk some of the Native groups that they arrived at, they tried to talk the chiefs 01:07:33.836 --> 01:07:34.814 - into going back 01:07:37.826 --> 01:07:44.043 - Is there any record of any of them? Some of them did make that trip. Are there good records? Well, I 01:07:44.043 --> 01:07:50.199 - have the book for you. Because I mentioned that in the book, I have 10 different people's points of 01:07:50.199 --> 01:07:56.539 - view. And so in chapter 14, I write from the point of view of exactly a person who did what you talked 01:07:56.539 --> 01:07:59.678 - about. One of Jefferson's goals was, I want you to 01:07:59.810 --> 01:08:05.040 - all the important Native leaders you find, send them to Washington, D.C. to meet with me. This will 01:08:05.040 --> 01:08:10.322 - be taxpayer-funded. If they can see our nation and meet with us, they'll be impressed and they'll be 01:08:10.322 --> 01:08:15.814 - less violent. And this is a better use of our money than trying to build a huge army and trying to fight 01:08:15.814 --> 01:08:21.305 - wars. And so just as an aside on the cost, I took a little time to sort of add up exactly how much Lewis 01:08:21.305 --> 01:08:22.142 - and Clark cost. 01:08:22.274 --> 01:08:27.702 - like it cost about $35,000, which is a lot of money today, but not when you think about the size of 01:08:27.702 --> 01:08:33.401 - what they were doing. But actually, I found, because of these trips you're talking about, that the total 01:08:33.401 --> 01:08:38.883 - cost, if you factor in how much they spent to send all these Native leaders to Washington, D.C., the 01:08:38.883 --> 01:08:44.690 - total cost was more than $100,000. So if you look at the government's budget in 1804, because of inflation 01:08:44.690 --> 01:08:50.227 - and everything else, Jefferson spent as much of the budget per year on Lewis and Clark as we spend on 01:08:50.227 --> 01:08:50.878 - NASA today. 01:08:51.714 --> 01:08:56.793 - So this shows you, like, the scope we're talking about. Lewis and Clark were a huge military mission. 01:08:56.793 --> 01:09:01.972 - And so in that chapter, because for me, I always try to tell stories through the point of view of human 01:09:01.972 --> 01:09:06.952 - beings. So there's this guy named Biahito, who was an Arikara leader. He lived in what is now South 01:09:06.952 --> 01:09:12.180 - Dakota. And so from South Dakota, he meets with Lewis and Clark. They hit it off. And so we talked about 01:09:12.180 --> 01:09:17.259 - the barge coming back in that second year. One of the things that was on the barge was Biahito. So he 01:09:17.259 --> 01:09:19.998 - got in that barge, went all the way down to St. Louis, 01:09:20.226 --> 01:09:25.565 - Then he switched a horse back and rode on a horse from St. Louis, passing through Indiana and Vincennes 01:09:25.565 --> 01:09:30.853 - and through Louisville and other places all the way to Washington, D.C. So at the same time, Lewis and 01:09:30.853 --> 01:09:32.958 - Clark are going thousands of miles west. 01:09:33.538 --> 01:09:38.759 - Biahito and other leaders are going thousands of miles east. He's doing his own expedition, right? But 01:09:38.759 --> 01:09:43.828 - instead of going to the west, he's going to the east. So there are really good documents. There are 01:09:43.828 --> 01:09:48.998 - letters from Jefferson that talk about meeting with him. There are journals I found at the Library of 01:09:48.998 --> 01:09:54.117 - Congress from other diplomats who describe what he was wearing, what it was like to talk to him. And 01:09:54.117 --> 01:09:59.642 - so in the book, I try to describe exactly what his journey was like, because this is part of the expedition. 01:09:59.642 --> 01:10:03.038 - It's only one chapter. But while Lewis and Clark are heading west, 01:10:03.394 --> 01:10:09.053 - he's heading east, and I think to understand the whole story, you really need to have both parts of 01:10:09.053 --> 01:10:14.939 - it. Great question. Do you think Lewis's death was a murder or a suicide? This is a good question about 01:10:14.939 --> 01:10:20.655 - Lewis's death, and people, right from the start, people were like, well, did he kill himself, or was 01:10:20.655 --> 01:10:26.371 - it a suicide? I will tell you what I think, although it's a question that people will always debate. 01:10:26.371 --> 01:10:32.030 - It's not like I'm gonna be able to solve the debate. I'll just tell you what I think. First of all, 01:10:32.322 --> 01:10:37.019 - Jefferson and Clark both thought it was a suicide. They were there, and I wasn't. So if Clark thought 01:10:37.019 --> 01:10:41.901 - his best friend killed himself, if Jefferson thought his protege killed himself, I give their perspective 01:10:41.901 --> 01:10:46.737 - a lot of weight. But this is also a place where I found a new document that I think is really important. 01:10:46.737 --> 01:10:51.664 - I'll be honest with you all. When I started writing this book, I thought, you know, I've got the different 01:10:51.664 --> 01:10:56.408 - points of view. I have a new way to tell this story. But I'm not sure I'll find that much new, because 01:10:56.408 --> 01:11:01.059 - how much is there really new left to find on Lewis and Clark? But there's a lot new to find on Lewis 01:11:01.059 --> 01:11:01.566 - and Clark. 01:11:01.762 --> 01:11:06.930 - very delighted and astonished at this. And so one of the things I found was a letter by John Quincy 01:11:06.930 --> 01:11:12.149 - Adams, which no other book on Lewis and Clark has ever mentioned this letter. So when Lewis makes it 01:11:12.149 --> 01:11:17.523 - back in 1806, he's been gone for two and a half years, John Quincy Adams knew him before, they're gonna 01:11:17.523 --> 01:11:22.794 - have dinner at the White House. Lewis is a national hero, he's a celebrity. And Adams writes a letter 01:11:22.794 --> 01:11:28.324 - the next day to his wife. And Adams says, even though I knew I was supposed to have dinner with Meriwether 01:11:28.324 --> 01:11:30.494 - Lewis, I couldn't even recognize the guy. 01:11:31.362 --> 01:11:35.951 - That's how much he had changed. He doesn't look two years older. He looks 15 years older. And so, 01:11:35.951 --> 01:11:40.728 - you know, previous historians have speculated, you know, we know Lewis went through all these things. 01:11:40.728 --> 01:11:45.505 - We know that he became more angry towards Native people on the way back. Like, you can sort of guess. 01:11:45.505 --> 01:11:50.188 - Well, it seemed like he was under a lot of wear and tear. But the big thing about this discovery is 01:11:50.188 --> 01:11:54.871 - we don't have to guess anymore, because we have John Quincy Adams, who was there, who in very clear 01:11:54.871 --> 01:11:58.430 - terms was saying exactly, this is what Lewis sacrificed for the expedition. 01:11:58.882 --> 01:12:04.226 - This is how much it changed him. This is how much it wore him out. And so because of what Clark and 01:12:04.226 --> 01:12:09.571 - Jefferson saw, and especially because of that letter from John Quincy Adams that I think shows, and 01:12:09.571 --> 01:12:15.022 - Adams in the letter doesn't just say Lewis looked tired physically, he said he looked tired mentally, 01:12:15.022 --> 01:12:20.367 - that Lewis was worn down both in body and mind. And so, you know, something as terrible as suicide, 01:12:20.367 --> 01:12:22.558 - there's never gonna be one cause for it. 01:12:22.754 --> 01:12:28.060 - It's never gonna be simple. So I can't tell you the one thing, but when I look at all the factors and 01:12:28.060 --> 01:12:33.418 - all the pressures that Lewis was under, as well as his own depression, which that's the word Jefferson 01:12:33.418 --> 01:12:38.621 - used. Jefferson said, Lewis had sensible depressions of mind. I believe that he killed himself. And 01:12:38.621 --> 01:12:43.823 - so there's some end notes about that. If you're somebody who's interested in that, there's a couple 01:12:43.823 --> 01:12:49.337 - of pages in the back where I talk more about that. But in my opinion, especially based on that new letter 01:12:49.337 --> 01:12:51.678 - I found, I do think he killed himself. Yeah. 01:12:51.874 --> 01:12:57.758 - Although he didn't die in the expedition, didn't he get shot in his hind end? 01:12:57.826 --> 01:13:02.701 - I mean, there's a lot of different things. He may have had malaria as well, but he definitely did get 01:13:02.701 --> 01:13:07.480 - shot. It's just terrible luck. He was such a hard worker that on the way back, he's still trying to 01:13:07.480 --> 01:13:12.307 - gather information for Jefferson, especially on the way back, because they weren't able to find that 01:13:12.307 --> 01:13:17.134 - big river route that they wanted. So everybody was a little disappointed. So they stopped to gather. 01:13:17.134 --> 01:13:22.200 - And this shows how history is just like one small difference, five minutes one way or another way, things 01:13:22.200 --> 01:13:26.980 - could unfold in a completely different way. So Lewis stops to do some astronomy readings, which are 01:13:26.980 --> 01:13:27.792 - very hard to do. 01:13:27.792 --> 01:13:33.085 - who's very good at that. This is another new thing in my book, is that previous books have said Lewis 01:13:33.085 --> 01:13:38.794 - wasn't very good at these, but a professor at Illinois a few years ago built a computer program, recalculated 01:13:38.794 --> 01:13:44.035 - all of Lewis's observations, and said, actually, he's only 20 miles off in almost every case, which, 01:13:44.035 --> 01:13:49.225 - if you're using the stars and math, that's a pretty amazing result. So Lewis was very good at this, 01:13:49.225 --> 01:13:52.702 - in addition to being very good at many other things. And so Lewis, 01:13:53.538 --> 01:13:58.373 - stops to get more of that data for Jefferson. But he gets there like 10 minutes late. So if you're going 01:13:58.373 --> 01:14:03.115 - to do the astronomy, you've got to have the sun at a certain position in the sky. So they're too late. 01:14:03.115 --> 01:14:07.719 - So Lewis says, I really want to get this data for Jefferson. Let's just bide our time, and I'll get 01:14:07.719 --> 01:14:12.830 - the reading later on when we can do it. Well, they've got some hours to kill. So Lewis says, let's go hunting. 01:14:13.282 --> 01:14:18.167 - This is at the end of the expedition, though. Their uniforms, remember I showed you that pretty picture 01:14:18.167 --> 01:14:22.864 - from the lily, those uniforms are gone. They're shredded. They've all been worn out. So they're all 01:14:22.864 --> 01:14:27.937 - dressed in elk skin or buck skin. So Louis goes out hunting with another soldier who's a very good soldier, 01:14:27.937 --> 01:14:32.728 - but he only had one eye. He couldn't see very well. And Louis is dressed in elk skin. So you can kind 01:14:32.728 --> 01:14:37.614 - of figure what happens, that the soldier accidentally shoots Louis in the behind. And very embarrassing 01:14:37.614 --> 01:14:41.982 - for him. He was somebody who was very prideful. He really, you know, he wanted to be a hero. 01:14:42.210 --> 01:14:47.320 - There's nothing very heroic about that story. And so he had to spend the last couple months on the way 01:14:47.320 --> 01:14:52.331 - back laying on his stomach in the bottom of the boat. When it would rain, they couldn't move him. So 01:14:52.331 --> 01:14:57.292 - he's just laying on his stomach, the boat's filling up with rainwater, and he just has to lay there 01:14:57.292 --> 01:15:02.303 - in that. Very hard. I'm sure that contributed to what John Quincy Adams saw. And so, yeah, Lewis had 01:15:02.303 --> 01:15:07.363 - a tough go of it on the way back. He sacrificed so much for his country on this mission. And it's one 01:15:07.363 --> 01:15:12.126 - thing that's really admirable about him, no matter what happened to him at the end of his life. 01:15:29.730 --> 01:15:35.193 - It may be. There's one time a letter that I quote where a woman turned him down and he said, he wrote 01:15:35.193 --> 01:15:39.102 - to a friend and he's like, I never felt less like a hero in this moment. 01:15:39.554 --> 01:15:44.431 - So this is after the expedition. And you can see that those personal setbacks may have been part of 01:15:44.431 --> 01:15:49.308 - it. There's so many things. Jefferson made him the governor of the Louisiana Territory, which was a 01:15:49.308 --> 01:15:54.283 - huge honor. But Lewis was not a great administrator. He was a great explorer. He was a great soldier. 01:15:54.283 --> 01:15:59.160 - But in terms of that kind of administrative work, I think he was not well suited for that. And that 01:15:59.160 --> 01:16:04.134 - wore him down. He wasn't able to write the book that literally the entire world was waiting for. When 01:16:04.134 --> 01:16:08.670 - the book was finally finished after his death, this book was reviewed in Germany, in France, 01:16:08.866 --> 01:16:16.859 - in England. He was an international figure, but that comes with a lot of pressure. And so the personal 01:16:16.859 --> 01:16:24.852 - side of it, including his romantic failures, had to play a role as well. Any other questions? No, they 01:16:24.852 --> 01:16:33.310 - didn't split up because they were at odds. They split up because they were trying to get so much stuff done. 01:16:33.410 --> 01:16:38.735 - So most of the way back, they were going as fast as they could. They didn't need to make as many maps 01:16:38.735 --> 01:16:44.165 - or gather as many specimens because they'd already done all that. But there were a few places that they 01:16:44.165 --> 01:16:45.470 - still wanted to explore. 01:16:45.538 --> 01:16:49.987 - This is always just going to be a guess. We're not going to know for sure. But I think that Lewis was 01:16:49.987 --> 01:16:54.393 - worried that he was going to have to tell Jefferson that water route you wanted that you thought was 01:16:54.393 --> 01:16:58.798 - going to be there wasn't there. And so one of the ways they split off, Lewis took a very small group 01:16:58.798 --> 01:17:03.204 - of soldiers to the north, trying to find out if a certain river was heading further north. And if it 01:17:03.204 --> 01:17:07.653 - headed far enough north, then the Louisiana Purchase, which we haven't talked about, but that's a big 01:17:07.653 --> 01:17:12.058 - part of the story too, then the Louisiana Purchase would actually have been hundreds of thousands of 01:17:12.058 --> 01:17:15.504 - square miles bigger. So this is a very important side mission, but that's also 01:17:15.504 --> 01:17:20.903 - where he runs into the Blackfoot people, and they end up killing a Blackfoot man. So again, you can 01:17:20.903 --> 01:17:26.355 - see these tiny little choices. Lewis trying to make Jefferson happy and give Jefferson what he wants 01:17:26.355 --> 01:17:31.862 - ends up leading to a battle that causes decades of animosity between the Blackfoot and the Americans. 01:17:31.862 --> 01:17:37.422 - History's complicated. That's why I love it. I'm sure that's why you all love it too, but it's always, 01:17:37.422 --> 01:17:42.929 - there's a ripple effect. Another interesting thing is that President Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, 01:17:42.929 --> 01:17:44.926 - they've been friends, but then they, 01:17:45.090 --> 01:17:51.909 - disagreed, like one of the politics that you talked about. I wonder if Meriwether Lewis, when he came 01:17:51.909 --> 01:17:59.262 - back, where that relationship was between Jefferson and Quincy Adams. Did they separate and were they kind of 01:17:59.490 --> 01:18:04.841 - We're angry with each other. John Quincy Adams is a very complicated figure because he ends up switching 01:18:04.841 --> 01:18:09.937 - to the Jefferson side of view. Even though his father was the other side, like the Jefferson's view 01:18:09.937 --> 01:18:15.389 - becomes so dominant that John Quincy Adams sort of becomes a part underneath that view. So that transition 01:18:15.389 --> 01:18:20.638 - is happening right here at this time. But you're absolutely right that politics run through all of it. 01:18:20.834 --> 01:18:25.702 - when John Quincy Adams would come and have dinner with Lewis and Jefferson before the expedition, John 01:18:25.702 --> 01:18:30.664 - Quincy Adams would be like, it was a terrible dinner. Everybody was rude to each other. And you're like, 01:18:30.664 --> 01:18:35.532 - well, was the dinner actually that way, or was it that kind of personal political stuff? Even somebody 01:18:35.532 --> 01:18:40.305 - had mentioned all the Native people coming back to visit Washington, DC. And I put this in the book, 01:18:40.305 --> 01:18:45.125 - but you can see even when people talk about the Native people coming, they use that to make political 01:18:45.125 --> 01:18:49.662 - jokes about the other party. I mean, here's another example I found at the Library of Congress. 01:18:50.018 --> 01:18:55.430 - somebody on Jeff who is not on Jefferson's party heard that a Supreme Court justice who was sick and 01:18:55.430 --> 01:19:00.788 - was on was more of a federalist was sick. And so that this senator who's a federalist writes I hope 01:19:00.788 --> 01:19:06.253 - he lives as long as Jefferson because that what he's saying is you know if he dies while Jefferson is 01:19:06.253 --> 01:19:11.611 - president then Jefferson's going to appoint a Supreme Court justice who doesn't agree with our side 01:19:11.611 --> 01:19:12.254 - which again 01:19:12.354 --> 01:19:17.441 - very similar to the kinds of news stories we see today about fighting over who gets to appoint the next 01:19:17.441 --> 01:19:22.333 - Supreme Court justice. So you just cannot overstate how angry politics were in this time period. We 01:19:22.333 --> 01:19:27.420 - think of Lewis and Clark today as this all-American story, and they are that today. But Jefferson could 01:19:27.420 --> 01:19:32.361 - barely get them passed. The whole Jefferson chapter, I found so many new documents about how hard it 01:19:32.361 --> 01:19:37.448 - was for Jefferson to just get the funding for the expedition because the people in the other party were 01:19:37.448 --> 01:19:42.046 - like, why would we send an expedition anywhere? That's the dumbest thing we've ever heard of. 01:19:42.466 --> 01:19:50.156 - They really were saying that just because Jefferson was the one who had the idea. But that speaks to 01:19:50.156 --> 01:19:58.302 - how partisan things were at that time period. Thank you all so much for listening. I really appreciate it.