Welcome to another program with the Monroe County History Club. It's a nice day outside, and glad you're
in here watching us. My name is Michael Carter. Welcome also to my wife, Paulette, and my brother, Steve,
and my cousins over there. And thanks to all my old Class of 64 Bloomington High School classmates.
The guys are there, and the girls are there. So thanks a lot.
I left some sheets of paper on all the tables. My printer's not working too well, so it wasn't pretty,
but I think it's legible anyway. They list all the upcoming programs for the history club going all
the way into next year, barring cancellations, of course. There's some pretty good programs coming up.
First of all, many thanks to the American Legion for allowing us to have these programs. We've been
partners in presenting and preserving local history with them for about 13 and a half years.
And thanks so much to their white staff and the kitchen staff who do such a great job. Amanda and Misty
are serving the group. And be generous to them. And also would like to thank Cats TV, as always, for
recording our programs for about 11 years now. Dave is our camera guy today, as he is most days. He
does a great job. It's a very important service.
for us as it allows us to upload each program to YouTube for people who can't make it to the live ones.
In addition, it allows us to preserve our local history for future generations to enjoy. Also, thanks
for our local history enthusiasts who attend these programs in person. That's great. We really appreciate
your support. Now, history is important to all of us, of course, but the biggest reason I think we all
attend these things is because it's fun.
It's fun for me, it's fun for the attendees, and it's fun for the presenters, even though I don't pay
them anything. I think this is the main reason things have kept going for so long, and I hope to keep
it that way going forward. Also, thanks to those who watch our programs on YouTube. That's much appreciated.
It's great that transparent Bloomingtonians all over the country can see these. These programs we present
here are so diverse, with many different subjects covered. In my opinion, we're all helping promote
and preserve local history together. It's fun, but at the same time, very rewarding. How many new attendees
today? If you want to share your email address with us, my partner Steve Brewer over there can add that
to his list, and you can get emails a week before every program. Steve's help is really much appreciated,
believe it or not, very much.
Daniel Slagle from the History Center would like to say a few words. Thank you, Michael. And I will
vouch for Steve that I get all of two emails in a month from him. One to say, coming up is this presentation.
And the second one that says, in case you missed it, it's uploaded on YouTube. And that is it.
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.
So I appreciate it.
I'm Daniel from the History Center. We have a number of books over here. We're very lucky that Craig,
in addition to bringing his books to sell about his presentation, he brought several books from previously.
So there's two books that he's written before that are also for sale. Several people have told me that
they've already bought and read the current book, The Vast Empire. However,
If you liked his writing, you liked his style, there are two more books that he brought that I can sell
you as well. So please feel free to come over. The other big news for anyone that has not heard, we're
trying to push it everywhere we can. The garage sale is at its new location in Ellitsville, and next
Wednesday, November 4th? Sounds about right. Fourth-ish is when they will be taking donations again.
So we've had a lot of calls, a lot of inquiries, so I wanted to make sure I announced it to this group.
You all have been very supportive of the History Center. We very much appreciate it. If you do some
early spring cleaning or just have some stuff you want to get rid of when no one else is looking, come
out next Wednesday between 10 and 2, and our garage sale ladies and men will be more than happy to help
you with that.
Otherwise, we have some new exhibits. We have an exhibit about scouting, boys and girls scouts. There's
a display, a bunch of their artifacts that we have in our collection are on display.
And for anyone that doesn't know, upstairs on the second floor where we have that two-story log cabin,
we now have an outdoor barnyard play area that incorporates what the early settlers would have grown
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
and grandpa get to read a little bit more while the kids play, so everyone wins in that scenario.
Or the big kids like to play with it too. So you can come out and play with some of the stuff too. So
just come by and see us. Thank you very much. Thank you to Michael. I know he puts a lot of work into
this and he really is an unsung hero with this. So I just wanted to thank Michael again for all of his
great and hard work. So thank you, Michael. I'll pay you later, Daniel. Thanks.
So I bring this to our speaker today is Craig Fairman. Now, Craig feels better today than last time.
Last March he was supposed to speak, but got the flu from one of his children. But he's recovered. It's
been several months ago. But he's a fantastic writer. He's got a title. It's on the New York Times bestseller list.
It's called The Vast Enterprise, A New Story, A New History of Lewis and Clark. And we've got some for
sale over there, as he mentioned. But he's not going to do a book report on that. Today, he's going
to do a talk called Lewis and Clark in Indiana. And so we're all going to learn something new from Craig
on that. So Craig?
Thank you all for coming out today. I'm gonna make sure I can get everything set up here, and we'll
be good to go. I was so sick when I was supposed to be here in March. It was, my daughter was much more
sick, but she could not keep food down for like 48 hours, and I just, it was, you know, Lewis and Clark
had to deal with more, I'll tell you that, but still having a sick kid at home is no fun.
I have a lot of images to show you guys today. If anybody has a hard time seeing from the angle, and
I see we have some kids here today, which is amazing, feel free to like move closer to the center. Kids
could come sit up in front. Whatever works well for you guys, because I think the images are a lot of
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
here. But also on the internet, I'm not. My email is on my website. So if you see an image you really
like, or you want to see, you want a copy of this PowerPoint I made for today, just send me an email,
and I'd be happy to share it with you.
Michael's right, I'm not gonna give you a book report, because I put this talk together just for today,
just for you all. But I will quickly just say what the book is about, and then if people have questions
and the question answers, if people wanna talk about Sacagawea, for instance, she doesn't really show
up in the Indiana part of Lewis and Clark, but I still love her and loved writing about her and would
be happy to answer questions. The only thing I'll say about my book is what makes it new, because I
think a lot of people's reactions
Honestly, my editor's reaction was, well, do we even need a new book about Lewis and Clark? There have
been a lot of books written about Lewis and Clark. And so what makes it new is that, first of all, I
found a lot of new things. This, just very quickly, is William Clark's college notebook. If you read
any other book on the Lewis and Clark expedition, they don't even know that he went to college.
But I didn't just find evidence that he did. I found his notebook and was able to present a more complicated
version of William Clark, because I think a lot of people think of him as the guy who was kind of the
Kentuckian. He was good with the soldiers, while Lewis was the brainy one. But that's not really true.
They were both good with the soldiers. They were both very intelligent. And so, using new documents
like this, I was able to tell a more complicated and well-rounded and human version of the story.
The other thing I'll say about the book, and this is the last thing I promise, I'm going to show you
the most boring page of any book, which is the table of contents. But I think in my book, it's kind
of sneaky and interesting, because you'll see chapter one says Meriwether Lewis. I realize the font's
small, so you don't have to be able to read it. But chapter two says York.
So York was the black man who was enslaved by Clark, and he was on the whole expedition too. And what
I do in every chapter is I sort of move the camera around. So the first chapter, which is most of what
we'll be talking about today, is from Lewis's point of view. But then the second chapter says, well,
what was York's point of view? And the third chapter says, what was Jefferson's point of view?
The fourth chapter, this guy is probably my favorite, John Ordway. He was a working class soldier. He
grew up in New Hampshire, but he reminds me a lot of people I know in Indiana. And his experience of
the expedition was much, much different than Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark were elites. They were
officers. John Ordway was a regular soldier who had to actually do the hard work.
So in this book, I try to kind of move the camera around and show the expedition from 10 different people's
points of view, and hopefully that makes it a more interesting, makes it a more accurate history, but
I also just think it makes it a better story, too. Okay, so no more about my book, I promise. Unless
people ask questions, I can't control that. You can't blame me if somebody asks a question, but that's
not my fault. I do not have any plants in the audience. When people think of Lewis and Clark, I feel
like this is what they think of.
This is in what is Idaho today. This looks very similar to what it looked like when Lewis and Clark
went through here. You can see the mountains. You can see the water. It's beautiful. It's rugged. It's
in the middle of the continent. So that, I think, is sort of the default image when people think about
Lewis and Clark. And this is the Lewis and Clark Trail. You can see here it starts down in St. Louis,
which St. Louis was a town when they were there. And then they go north and west.
up to Montana, Idaho, then come across to the Pacific Ocean, then they turn around and come all the
way back. So that takes them almost three years. There and back, it's more than 8,000 miles. Again,
this is when people say, what's the Lewis and Clark expedition? This is what they think about. And this
story is covered in my book, too. But what I want to talk to you about is what happens before this.
Because I think it's part of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And I will admit that I'm a little biased
because I grew up in Indiana. I live a mile from here. And so, of course, I'm going to always give the
Midwest a little bit of extra credit. But the Midwest deserves some credit here. I mean, in this time
period, the Midwest was the West. When they would talk about an area like Ohio or the Indiana Territory,
they would say, well, what's happening in the West? Because that was the West in this time period.
But this area helped shape Lewis and Clark in some really important ways. And I want to talk to you
about that in addition to talking about the area's scenery. The nice thing is that I feel like it's
not just my Midwestern bias doing this. I think other people are catching up. In 2019, the National
Park Service expanded the official Lewis and Clark Trail. So this is what it looks like now. Now it
starts in Pittsburgh, then goes all the way down to St. Louis.
then finishes the rest of the expedition. So more and more people are recognizing how important this
early part of the expedition was to what came after. And I'll say one other thing. Sometimes people
worry about historians
finding a modern idea, taking a modern idea, and applying it to the past. And I understand why. I've
read historians who do that. I try really hard in my work not to do that. I always say, I didn't write
a book about 2026. I wrote a book about 1804. That's what I care about. I want to capture what did the
world feel like to those people back then. But one thing that you do notice is that
Sometimes the things that feel modern were always there in the sources. It's just we kind of overlooked
them for a long time. And that's true of the kind of the stuff we're going to talk about today,
the Midwest. Because Lewis, if you go back and look at his papers, he called Pittsburgh the, quote,
point of embarkation. So Lewis and Clark always saw the Ohio River Valley and moving through the Midwest,
or the West as they called it, as part of the expedition. It's just taken the rest of us a little while
to catch up. All right.
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
books. Each chapter has its own map. And so this is exactly what we're the part we're going to talk
about where
You know, Lewis does some preparation beforehand. Lewis starts out living in Washington, DC, because
he is Thomas Jefferson's secretary, which that doesn't sound very powerful. But back then, that position
was like being the chief of staff. So Lewis was kind of Jefferson's right-hand man. He would go to the
Capitol building. He would talk to legislators. He was a very important political figure. But he was
also a soldier. And he was also very strong and outdoorsy. And so that made him the perfect person to
lead the expedition.
So after preparing and Harper's Ferry and Washington DC and all that, Lewis goes to Pittsburgh where
a boat is being built for him, a big barge. You guys have seen the picture of that barge in the, in
the stuff that Michael sent around. And then from there down the Ohio river to Louisville where he's
going to meet William Clark. And then from there onto St. Louis, I'm going to use a lot of pictures
today. Like I said, because I love pictures. I put a lot of pictures in the book too. And I think they
help us sort of
feel like we're there. They're sometimes the best way to kind of be the time machine for us. This is
a picture of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. in 1804. And so I want to note a couple things
about it, although I'm sure some of you are already noting them, too. There is no dome. At this point,
there's just one wing. They still have to build the other wing, and then they have to build the dome
that connects it with the big main area in the middle. So one thing that I think is interesting about
Lewis and Clark is that
They're kind of the first American act of foreign policy. The country was still in, you know, even though
it had been 30 years after the expedition, the country was still in the midst of constructing itself,
you know? And so, Lewis and Clark was sort of the first chance for America to sort of say, there's a
bigger world out there, and America should have a say in it and have some influence over it. The other
thing I will note about this picture, and this is probably the most striking thing of all, look how
empty it is. You got a few houses back there.
But most of what you have around the Capitol building is trees and grass and fields. You know, the road
between the Capitol building and the White House was lined with trees, and sometimes people who were
in Congress would go hunting partridges. This is Pennsylvania Avenue. If any of you have been on Pennsylvania
Avenue today, there's nothing there to hunt. It's much different, but this is a reminder of what America
looked like and felt like in this time period. Here's another picture, again, to kind of help us with
the time machine.
This is Pittsburgh in 1802, and I always try with my pictures to get the, like, what it was, like, pictures
as close to possible as the time period. But look how small Pittsburgh is. I mean, by population, it's
about the size of Spencer. So Pittsburgh was a large town in this time period, but this is what a large
town looked like. So this is where Lewis gets his start. You can see the Ohio River there in front of
him, and this is where the expedition begins.
Here's another picture of the Ohio River from this time period. You can see how beautiful it is. That
picture of the barge that Michael shared, that was the main boat at this point. And so to give you a
frame of reference, the barge that Lewis and Clark were using was the size of a semi-truck trailer today.
So it was a big boat, could hold 12 tons of cargo or more, and they had to push it down the
river. Thankfully, the current on the Ohio River was with them, so they had water moving them, which
made it a little bit easier, but they're coming down the river,
and you can see what it looked like. There's a wonderful quote, not from Lewis and Clark, but from somebody
else who traveled the river at this time period. The trees, this person wrote, are as much alike as
though they had been topped with shears. And I think you can see this in the picture, right? There are
so many trees along the Ohio River, and they are so big and so old that it just looked like somebody
had given them a haircut. They're just flat, right across the top. That's what Lewis and Clark would
see as they were traveling down the water.
Although just Lewis in this case because Clark is in Louisville, Lewis is in Pittsburgh bringing that
big barge down the river to meet his friend. So we've already talked about this a little bit, but who
are Lewis and Clark? These are some images of them which show what they look like before the expedition.
And basically Jefferson's plan was
It's hard to summarize Jefferson's plan. One thing that's so interesting about him is that he was always
wanting to do everything at once. He had so many ideas, and his mind was so creative. And so the simple
explanation for the expedition was he was trying to find a river route from St. Louis and the Missouri
River to the Pacific Ocean. Now, in this time period, rivers were super highways. This was how people
traded. This was how people moved goods. If you were a farmer in the Indiana Territory, you would use
the Ohio River and then the Mississippi River to send your crops down to New Orleans.
and sell them, and it was essential for you to be able to make money and be able to live your life and
support your family. Well, Jefferson wanted more rivers. And Jefferson and Lewis and a lot of people
in this time period thought that the Missouri River and then the Columbia River, which flowed into the
Pacific Ocean, they thought they almost touched in the middle of the continent. So just a little hop
skip from one to the other, they thought there was this big superhighway that would cross the entire
continent just waiting to be discovered.
So the simplest version of Lewis and Clark is their job was to try to find that connection,
that superhighway. But because Jefferson was Jefferson, there were a million other things that he wanted
to do too and that he wanted to accomplish. So Lewis would have to do lots of scientific work, like
he would capture animals and kill animals, measure them, describe them, preserve them. Clark was making
very detailed maps. They had so many things that they were trying to accomplish.
They knew that this was a huge mission. Clark wrote a letter to Jefferson, actually, before they left.
And what Clark said is that he would cheerfully and with great pleasure join my friend Captain Lewis
in this vast enterprise. That's where I took the title from my book, because that's how the captain
saw it. They always saw it as a big thing, not just in terms of how far they had to go, but how many
people it would take to do it.
So here's the barge I've been mentioning. This is the big boat that is built in Pittsburgh. It takes
a long time to build it because the boat builder is drunk. And so Lewis keeps going and he finds that
the boat builder is drunk and he's fighting with his men and his men are quitting and there's not enough
lumber. And so this is one of
things that makes Lewis very far behind schedule in the first year and very stressed out, although Lewis
was always stressed out. I mean, he cared so much. He was such a patriotic person. He wanted this to
work so badly. He knew that this was the opportunity of a lifetime. And so he carried that stress with
him in ways that I think you'll see.
Lewis in Pittsburgh with the barge. He has about 10 soldiers with him because they have the current
with them. And so they're trying to come down the river to Louisville and Clark, where they will pick
up more soldiers and then head on to St. Louis. Again, this is not the part of Lewis and Clark you hear
about a lot, but it's an important part of it for sure. I want to give you a picture of what America
looked like in this time period. So again, this is a map from 1803, 1804. And let's zoom in here on
what is now the Midwest.
You can see Ohio that had just become a state in 1803. Kentucky had been a state for a little bit longer
than that. And over here, you have what's called the Indiana Territory, which today we would call it
Indiana and Illinois. But in this time period, it was just called Indiana. It was not a state yet. It
was a territory. But there were starting to be more and more Americans who lived there. So what was
it like going down the Ohio River?
It was difficult. It was brutal. You would think that this would be the easy part of the expedition,
right? Because they're in American territory. There are lots of Americans who can help them. It's early
on. But they had a very, very difficult time. On this map you can see over here, this is Pittsburgh
right here. And I've circled it and drawn a red arrow there because right after this island, only a
couple miles into their journey, Lewis hits the first sandbar.
Now, I could probably find an old picture of a sandbar to show you, but I'll be honest with you. When
I first started reading their journals and thinking about it, this was the image that popped into my
mind. I hate to pick on Evansville, but my wife is from Evansville, so I feel like I can kind of,
you know, by marriage, pick on them a little bit. I went to college there, too, at the University of
Southern Indiana. But there was a story a couple years ago where Evansville, which is of course on the
Ohio River, somebody had their camper out on a sandbar
And it just stayed there. The water levels changed, and this became big news, like the nightly news
and everyone was covering it. What's the latest update on the camper on the sandbar? So funny to think
about now, but not so funny because the Ohio River in this time period was much, much different than
the Ohio River we've all seen today. Today, there are modern dams. There's the US Army's Corps of Engineering
that's done a lot of work to make the river consistently deep
and more straight. But it was not like that for Lewis and Clark. There were places where the river was
so shallow that you could walk from Kentucky to Indiana. You didn't need a boat. You didn't even need
to get your knees wet. Just up to your shins, a little bit of water, you could just cross. So that's
very helpful if you need to cross the river. Not so helpful if you have a semi-truck-sized barge that
you're trying to move down the river. So what Lewis realized again and again was that his barge kept
getting stuck. They would slam into one of these sandbars
They couldn't move forward. So what they would have to do is unload the boat. It took a long time because
they had a lot of merchandise on the boat. Then they would have to sort of lift and push and grunt to
get the boat through the sandbar. Then they would have to reload the boat. Then they would keep going
and hit another sandbar. Very frustrating work. I think probably embarrassing work. Think about it.
This is the president's right-hand man on America's first big international mission.
And what are people seeing? People are seeing him run into sandbars in American territory. I'm gonna
read you a little bit here from the book so you can get a sense for the writing. There's not much about
this in the book because I try to get to the main part as quickly as possible, but I pulled out a couple
excerpts. Lewis and his men splashed into the shallow water, unloading their boat and then lifting and
dragging it for a good 30 yards until it could float again.
It was exhausting, embarrassing work, and they had to do it two more times that day, with the last sandbar
the largest yet. Remember, this is their first day. At that point, Lewis decided to make camp, having
traveled a total of maybe six miles. It was only the first night, but he authorized the use of another
supply he'd acquired. Before bed, each man received an extra ration of whiskey.
So here's another painting of the Ohio River from this time period, and you can see this was, you know,
when things were going well, when the water would be a little bit deeper, this is what they could see.
When things were not going well, it was more like the camper in Evansville on the sandbar, and they'd
have to find a way to get it through. There's a tiny little cabin there, though, and I want to show
you this image. We don't know this for sure, but many historians who study Indiana think this is an
engraving of the first cabin ever built in the Indiana Territory. Now, we can't go for sure,
is what the first cabin would have looked like, and there were soon many cabins like this. But if you
want to understand about the sort of houses that Lewis and Clark saw, or Lewis in this part saw as they
were coming down the river, this is what it would have looked like. Let's talk about some of the people
who were on the expedition, too. But actually, let's start with not a person, but an animal, because
he's one of the best parts of the expedition. And this is Seaman. This was Lewis's dog. Now, Seaman
was in Newfoundland, and if you look at a lot of
the pictures that people have made later on of Lewis and Clark, the Newfoundland looks like a Newfie
today, you know, black, very shaggy, kind of like the Beatles haircut on a dog. You know what I'm talking
about. But that's not what Newfoundlands looked like in 1804. This is a painting from 1804 of a Newfoundland,
and most paintings are like this, where the hair was shorter, more brown and white than black, but still
very good swimmers, very loyal, the perfect kind of dog to bring on an expedition like this.
So this is a picture of Semen. And Semen got a good workout in the Midwest. I'm going to read you an
excerpt from the journals. Some of you probably already know this. Some of you have probably read these.
But Lewis and Clark and their men kept very detailed journals. This was one of the things that Jefferson
wanted them to do. They ended up writing more than a million words during the expedition. So that's
longer than the Bible. That's Moby Dick times four. That's how many words they recorded. And that allowed
them to record details like this.
This is Lewis in September 15th when they're still coming down the Ohio River. Past the mouth of the
Hawking River and the settlement of Belprie, Ohio, a Yankee settlement. He never says why he called
it a Yankee settlement. I assume the farmers there were just from New England and Lewis being a good
Virginia boy wasn't real fond of that. Past several bad sandbars over which we are obliged to lift the
boat. Saw and caught by means of my dog several squirrels attempting to swim the river.
So this is one of Seaman's big tasks. He ended up doing a lot of important things on the expedition.
But in this early part, what he would do is that he would be on the barge, and he would see some squirrels
trying to swim across the Ohio River. He would jump into the water, kill them, bring them back to Lewis.
Lewis would fry them for supper. I like to think he shared some of it with Seaman. I guess we don't
know for sure, but we do know Lewis loved his dog very much.
So probably they collaborated when it came time to eat the squirrels. But that was one of the things
Seaman did. And again, these kinds of little details I just think are so human. I guess in this case,
it's so canine, since we're talking about a dog. But in my books, I always try to capture the sort of
everyday human moments, because that's what I love about history. I mentioned the journals. And if you
decide to catch the Lewis and Clark bug, which many Americans do, I recommend that you start by reading
because it's a very complicated topic. I'm not gonna tell you which book I recommend, but I recommend
a book that will give you like a big overview of it. But then after you do that, the journals are available
free on the internet. A professor at the University of Nebraska spent two decades editing the journals,
annotating them, making sure that their text was reliable and useful as, you know, the best editions
of Shakespeare or Chaucer.
And I think that makes me feel patriotic, because to me, Lewis and Clark are our American epic. They're
our version of the audit, a great journey. And we have these wonderful words that they wrote about it.
So once you have sort of the framework for the expedition, you can go online and read these journals
for free. This is our taxpayer dollars hard at work. You can pull up on your phone. You can look at
it on a computer. You can get them from IU's library if you want to look at them in the printed version.
You can search by modern towns. You could just search for, let's say you have a favorite animal. Let's
say you love prairie dogs. You can find every time Lewis and Clark mentioned a prairie dog in their
journals. It's such a cool resource, and it's just an amazing thing for any history lover like this
audience. All right, speaking of animals, we're now gonna go from talking about semen to talking about
oxen. So Lewis is still coming down the Ohio River, still running into sandbars, still having a hard
time, and here the oxen become essential.
Let me just switch to reading from the book. Lewis stopped to repair leaks and air out the gifts, which
are the kind of gifts for native people that they're bringing for the main part of the expedition. He
bought a third boat, a standard canoe. He adapted. He improvised. He persevered. When the sand bars
kept coming, five in a two-mile stretch, he tried a new tactic, hiring farmers who lived near the Ohio
to tow the barge with their livestock.
So picture this for a second. The barge is still getting stuck. So Lewis, the water is so shallow that
Lewis pays a farmer to bar the livestock who are probably helping the farmer plow or whatever. They
tie it to the barge. And instead of the men having to push the barge, the oxen just tow the barge through
these shallow spots. In an update to Jefferson, Lewis smiled at the river level and his reliance on
local oxen. I find them the most efficient sailors, he wrote, in the present state of the navigation
of this river.
This is one of the things I love about Lewis. He's funny. People often think about Lewis as somebody
who struggled with depression and who was under a lot of stress. And those things are definitely true.
But he also had a great sense of humor. He knew that they were trying to do something great, but he
was always willing to laugh at himself. If you look at the letter that Lewis sent Clark asking Clark,
hey, do you want to go on this big mission with me? When Lewis is done summarizing all this incredible
information and talking about how much Jefferson cares about this, Lewis writes,
so much for the outlines of my great scheme. And that's just funny. Even when he's doing something great,
he's willing to stop and laugh at himself a little bit. I admire that about him. And that's one thing
I tried to capture in the book, is his sense of humor. Because he can sort of say, honestly, the best
sailors this huge expedition has right now are oxen. But sometimes that's what life is like. So they
keep going.
And they get to Cincinnati. I'm going to give you some more images of these towns in this time period.
This is what Cincinnati looked like in 1802, so the year before Lewis and Clark went by. This might
be a good place to kind of do an aside. What counts as a big town? Because so far we've seen Pittsburgh.
We've seen Cincinnati. They're very small by modern standards.
I want to show you a different town, though. This is where Lewis and Clark will ultimately meet Sacajawea.
It's in what is North Dakota today, and it's a town of the Mandan and the Hidatsa people. So this is
kind of a far-out picture, but I'm gonna zoom in here. This is a painting made a couple decades after
Lewis and Clark. So here you can see a better version of it. There is a fort there, but that fort was
added later. That fort was added because of Lewis and Clark. It was sort of part of the legacy of Lewis
and Clark. But here's another painting from the inside.
See how densely these houses are packed in here? One person who visited these towns said that he would
get so turned around that he would get lost because the houses were so tightly packed. So one thing
that's very interesting is that when we think of big towns today, we think of Cincinnati or Louisville
or Pittsburgh, huge cities by our modern standards, during this time period, there were native towns
that were literally bigger. St. Louis was about 1,000 people in this time period,
The Mandan and Hadatsa towns, there were five of them. They were more like 4,000 people. So during this
time period, when Lewis and Clark were exploring the middle of the American continent, Native people
were the ones who had the biggest towns. Native people were the ones who had the most people. And Lewis
and Clark knew this. Again, this is not a modern idea of us saying, you know, like, let's pay more attention
to Native people, although I think that's a good idea to have. Lewis and Jefferson had to be very aware
of how powerful Native people were because their lives depended on it.
If Lewis didn't understand how many native people there were and how powerful they were and how important
it was to have good diplomacy with them, well then he was going to be in a huge risk because he was
outnumbered. All right, so back to the Ohio River here. They're getting closer and closer to Louisville.
Here's another painting from a couple decades after of what the Ohio River Valley looked like in this
time period. And here we're going to get to Louisville. So this is this is not
painting. This is just an engraving, but if you're standing in Clarksville and looking over there, you
can see what Louisville looked like. Here's a map from this time period that's from above. And so you
see that first blue arrow, that's Clarksville, named after George Rogers Clark, who is William Clark's
older brother. I know you guys had a really good presentation on George Rogers earlier this year, so
some of you probably know more about that than I do. And then here is Jeffersonville.
And then right across the river is where Louisville is. But I want to draw your attention to something
else, which is another huge obstacle Lewis had to deal with. He finally met Clark. Clark's in Louisville.
They get to meet up with each other. But then they have to get through what's called the Falls of the
Ohio. There's a Falls of the Ohio State Park in Clarksville today that you can go visit to. It's a wonderful
park. There's the statue of the moment where Lewis and Clark met for the first time in years and were
able to, after writing letters and planning,
They had met before, actually. They met in what is now Ohio. Even that, it has a Midwestern aspect to
it. But they were able to meet and shake hands. And so you can see the statue in Clarksville today as
part of that state park, which I think is well worth visiting. They probably didn't shake hands there.
They probably shook hands closer to Louisville and then stayed in Clarksville because of what I'm about
to tell you about, which is the Falls of the Ohio. So let's go back to this map here. Do you see all
the lines?
Those are rocks. Those are rapids. This is a place that drops several hundred feet in the course of
just a couple miles. And you can start to see from this how treacherous this water is, but we also have
another picture which will help. So see here. You can see all these waterfalls, but because this is
the Ohio River before all the modern changes to it, you can't see the falls of Ohio like this today.
But at that time period,
They were something that anybody using the Ohio River had to find a way to get through. So this was
one of Lewis and Clark's first challenges together. Most of what we've been talking about today, it
was Lewis and about 10 men and a very good dog. But at this point, he meets Clark, and they have to
go through the falls of the Ohio together. I'll read you something from the book where I describe this.
The captain's first shared obstacle was visible from the shore. Actually, it was audible.
The Falls of the Ohio, an infamous choke point of rapids and small waterfalls, where the current surged
to four times its normal rate, roaring and spraying so violently that people could hear it while walking
down Louisville streets. It was an intimidating spot, especially if, like most Americans in this time
period, you didn't know how to swim.
York and the captains did know how to swim, and the next day, they got their boats to the falls, one
at a time, dodging the islands and rocky ledges as they dropped 20-plus feet in two miles. Rodney, who's
somebody else who comes up in the book, the land commissioner, survived the falls a few days later.
For the first time, he wrote, I had dread of wrecking our boat." So, I've already mentioned that they
got a late start. But even though they had a late start, and even though the river's levels were getting
lower and lower. And even though the whole country at this point knew about the expedition, was reading
about the expedition in newspapers, you know, earlier this year we all cared about Artemis II, right?
That was going to the moon and every American it seemed like was excited and following the news about
this. Well, in this time period it was the same way. I went back and looked at all the old newspapers
and there were clippings about Lewis and Clark and newspapers all over the country. They were kind of
viral news for their time period.
Despite all that pressure, though, Lewis and Clark stopped for almost two weeks in Clarksville. We don't
know why they stopped. This is one time where I think sometimes historians should be more honest and
say, we don't know the answer to this. If I had to guess, I would say maybe one of their boats got damaged
coming through those falls. You saw how treacherous they were. Maybe they could stop and repair them.
We also know that they recruited some people, so maybe that was part of why they took the time there.
But whatever the reason, they stopped for a little bit of time.
During this time, Lewis also approved a group of men who would later be called nine young men who joined
at Clarksville. This idea of like the nine Kentucky men important to the expedition. So they were people
like Charles Floyd who kind of earned his reputation in the Louisville area because he delivered the
mail from Vincennes to Louisville. So that meant he would have to get on a horse by himself and ride
through the Indiana territory where it was very remote.
and still somewhat dangerous because of native people. And so that was how Charles Floyd could say,
I'm cut out for this expedition. I'm brave. You can see because I've delivered the mail to Vincennes.
But another person we should mention here is York, because he spent a lot of time in Clarksville too.
And remember, York was Clark's slave. He was somebody who followed Clark around and took care of Clark.
Clark's father had owned York's father, now Clark owned York. And he was there too. So although the
popular phrase is that nine young men from Kentucky joined,
I always think of it as 10, because York was very, very important to the expedition. So after this point,
they're at Louisville. They have more people now. York and Clark have joined. The two captains are together,
and they keep heading towards St. Louis. I'll speed up a little bit here, but here's another view of
St. Louis. So again, this is what the big towns in this time period looked like.
There's one more person I want to talk about, though, and that's one of the men from Kentucky, a guy
named William Bratton. And I want to stop here on this image. A lot of people, when they talk about
Lewis and Clark, and this is very true if you see paintings of Lewis and Clark that were made after,
they make Lewis and Clark look from the Revolutionary War. They have three-cornered hats and everything
like that. But the Revolutionary War was 30 years before this. That's not what Lewis and Clark looked
like at all. This is what they looked like. This is a very rare image.
The only reason I was able to put it in my book was actually because of the Lilly Library in IU. There
was a book that came out in 1802 that had these illustrations. And the Lilly Library owned one of the
very few copies still left in America. So the Lilly Library made this scan for me. And you can see they
have kind of these rounded top hats, the blue jackets, the light yellow pants. This is what the military
uniforms looked like in 1802, 1803. So when you picture Lewis and Clark and their soldiers, this is
what you should picture.
I want to talk to you for a second about William Bratton. This is the last thing I'll talk about before
we open it up for questions. He was somebody who was born in Virginia, and then his family moved to
Kentucky. A lot of Americans were doing this in this time period. They were moving to the West, whether
that was Kentucky or Ohio or the Indiana Territory. But where did William Bratton settle down?
This is 1806. This is Lewis discharging William Bratton, giving him an honorable discharge, giving him
the money that he's owed, giving him a gift of land, because all the men who served with Lewis and Clark
ended up getting as much land as the Revolutionary War soldiers did, as a way for the nation to say
thank you to these men for everything they sacrificed. So you can see right here, William, and then
on the next line, Bratton. You can see that this is his discharge paper.
After that, William Bratton ended up running a shipping business on the Missouri River for a while and
on the Mississippi River. But then he ended up settling in a place called Wayntown, Indiana. So Bratton
ran his keelboat business on the Missouri and the Mississippi. But then the new Madrid earthquakes and
the War of 1812 destroyed his business. So he moved to Wayntown, Indiana, which is right there. You
can see Bloomington at the bottom of the map, Indianapolis.
The red pen is Wayntown. And that's where he settled. I want to tell you a little bit about William
Bratton, since for the last decades of his life, he was a Hoosier. He's our state's best connection
to Lewis and Clark today. Bratton ended up marrying a woman named Mary, although he called her Polly.
And they had 10 children together. They ended up farming more than 300 acres in Indiana in Montgomery
County. And Bratton became a very important citizen. He was the first justice of the peace for this
town. And he was a beloved and important person there.
His family liked to tell a story about him, and I'm just going to quote it to you. They said that he
was, quote, very saving and could not see anything wasted. One time at a corn husking, so this would
have been in Indiana, he was picking up scattered grains of corn, and someone made fun of him. He replied
that he had seen the time when he would have been very thankful for a few grains of corn.
So if any of you know the bigger Lewis and Clark story, you know that they had some very tough times
indeed, especially in the Rocky Mountains, where they were so low on food that they ended up killing
some of their horses and eating horse meat, because that was the only food that they had. You can understand
why a memory like that would stick with somebody. So William Bratton was a young man when that happened.
Later, as an old man in Indiana, he was still careful about food. He still saved food, because like
he said, I remember at a time when food was scarce and hard to come by.
Bratton ended up dying in 1841 in Indiana at the age of 63. And here's the thing. You can visit his
grave still today. If you go to Wayntown, which is a pretty small place, they do have a pizza king.
But where this red tag is here, you can see it. And I've got some pictures for you here. These are not
my pictures. They are from somebody who put them on the internet named Al Wolf. So I want to give him
credit. But this is the little cemetery. Like anybody who's ever gone on a country drive in Indiana,
you've seen cemeteries like this. Maybe you've wondered.
I wonder who's buried there. Well, there's always gonna be somebody interesting buried there, but in
this particular case, there's somebody from the Lewis and Clark expedition. So the state has put a plaque
up in this small country cemetery. William Bratton, Lewis and Clark expedition member. He's buried in
the cemetery with the US Army rank of private. He joined Lewis and Clark's expedition near Clarksville,
Indiana, 1803. The Corps explored the lands of the Louisiana Purchase in the Pacific Northwest. Bratton's
duties included hunter, blacksmith,
salt maker he completed the entire journey was discharged on october 10th 1806 that's the letter i showed
you all settled on a farm in wayne township 1822 held various county and township offices including
justice of the peace and there's where he's buried right there and it's hard to see from the picture
but i have a a better way to see it you can see that this is what his tombstone says william e bratton
went in 1804 with Lewis and Clark to the Rocky Mountains, died November 11th, 1841, aged 63 years. So
William today is our state's most direct link to the Lewis and Clark expedition, but hopefully in this
talk, whether it's thinking about them coming down the Ohio River, renting some oxen probably from farmers
in the Indiana territory, staying in Clarksville for almost two weeks, Charles Floyd delivering the
mail to Vincennes,
Behind the scenes, William Henry Harrison, who is very important, helping Jefferson with the kind of
imperial parts of the expedition. You can see that our state has a lot of connections and a lot of ties
to this all-American adventure. And it's one of many reasons I was so happy to write about it. So that's
everything that I've prepared for you all. Thank you for listening. And if anybody has any questions,
I'd love to hear them. Yes, sir, in the back.
So this is a great question, and I think a misconception many people have. The gentleman asked, were
Lewis and Clark of military rank? And the answer is absolutely yes. And here's what's interesting,
and Fitz, I could have talked about this during the talk, so I'm glad you asked. They met at Fort Greenville
in what is now Ohio, northern Ohio. So the American Army fought three very important battles against
Native people to kind of ultimately
take over Ohio, and Lewis showed up too late to fight in the battles, but Clark fought in the third
battle. So he saw active combat. Lewis showed up a little bit later. So Lewis and Clark almost certainly
met while they were very young officers in the army. Lewis even served under Clark in a kind of elite
group of riflemen. So this was in 1794. So a few years after that, Clark leaves the army. Lewis keeps
working his way up the army, and then Jefferson recruits him to become a political operative in Washington, DC.
But I always think of Lewis and Clark as a military operation. I think it's very important to do that.
And when I would go ahead. Sure. Well, you're asking a very perceptive question, which is because I
can't give you a simple answer, which is one of the most interesting things about it. Because as your
question is getting at,
Most military units, you have to have one person in charge. You don't want to compromise chain of commands,
because if everybody starts pulling out their weapons and it seems like a battle is going to happen,
and that happens at least two times during the expedition, you want to be able to look at one person
who is in charge. You want to say, all right, what do we do? I'm going to look at our commanding officer,
not the lieutenant, not the sergeant, the person in charge. But Lewis and Clark did something very unique.
They chose to compromise the chain of command.
they chose to be co-captains, which is not the way most military units operate. But they did that because
that reflected their philosophy. And one thing I tried to do very carefully in this book was read a
lot about the military in this time period because it was a military unit. And so the Army in 1804 was
not like the Army we think of today. Today we think of, you know, if we say things like, thank you for
your service, we support our veterans,
We don't do enough, but many Americans want to do as much as we can. But that's not the way the Army
was viewed back then. Back then, the Army did not pay well, and it was not respected. So most soldiers
were kind of troublemakers. And most officers were very cruel to their soldiers. So if a soldier misbehaved
or caused trouble, an officer wouldn't have a court martial or ask questions. An officer would just
start beating the soldier. So it was very violent. Officers beating soldiers, soldiers beating each
other. It was an extremely,
violent outfit compared to how the world works today. But Lewis and Clark made a very deliberate choice
not to run their unit that way. In the book, I write about this as an experiment. They decided, we're
gonna let the men have more of a say. So at many stressful points in the expedition where Lewis and
Clark didn't know what to do, they let the men vote, which is very unusual in a military unit, especially
at this time period. So who was in charge to get back to your question? They were both in charge. They
were a team.
That's how they saw it. And there's a really interesting story actually that Clark wasn't technically
a captain. It's all in the book, but they sort of covered it up. Lewis and Clark agreed that even though
there wasn't a spot for Clark to be a captain, we'll just kind of say he's a captain because that's
how we want our outfit to operate. So it was a military unit with two people in charge. It was a military
unit where lots of other soldiers got to vote. Both of these things were very unusual for this time
period, but I think it speaks to Lewis and Clark as leaders, that they sort of wanted
They wanted a community. They wanted to trust each other. They wanted to work together. And it made
sense, because they were going to be so far away from the rest of America that they needed their men
to be invested. At a certain point, there's 30 soldiers. There's only two of them. So they have to keep
the men on their side. But I also think there are personal reasons for why Lewis and Clark did this.
And they ran their military unit in a very unique way. And it worked. It was a huge success. And I think
it speaks to them as leaders.
All the way all the way back at one point some native people stole the dog and Lewis said go get the
dog and kill them if you have to Maybe not the best maybe not the best tactics from Lewis But it does
speak to how much he loved that dog and they were able to get the dog back And so the dog made the made
the entire trip
And I think he felt very uncomfortable then becoming the security officer. And then when they returned,
Congress did some direct strikes over two home factories. And then they do something about the pay,
that's a P.A. or something like that. And then my last question, why do you refer to your vote as law
if it's not true?
A lot of good questions here from somebody I can tell knows a lot about the expedition. So thank you
for coming today. That's wonderful. Yes, I agree with what you said, that the fact that Lewis had served
under Clark was probably part of the reason that he wasn't comfortable. Clark was older. And this just
gets to how interesting they were as people, because Clark was the baby brother. Clark had five brothers,
and all five of them served in the Revolutionary War.
Clark was never able to because he was too young. So you can imagine for William Clark, growing up in
this very famous family where five brothers have served so heroically, and he never gets to do that.
He's the little brother. But now on this expedition, he's the big brother. He was in charge of Lewis
before in the Army. He was older. So you can sort of understand how much this meant to Clark and how
he would get things out of it as well. But yes, there was a lot of drama about this because Jefferson
made a mistake here, honestly. Jefferson told Lewis,
Let's back up a second. We know that when Jefferson was coming up with the expedition, he only thought
of it as the Lewis expedition. So when he writes his instructions, there's no mention of a co-captain
or even a second in command. It's just named at Luke. But at some point, right before he left,
Lewis said, I want to have somebody lead this with me. And so Jefferson amended the instructions, which
is how we know this.
We know that Lewis had a different person in mind named Moses Hook if Clark said no, but Lewis hoped
very much that Clark said yes. If Clark had not said yes, we'd be talking about the Lewis and
Hook expedition. Personally, I think Lewis and Clark has a much better sound to it. So Clark says yes,
and Lewis says to him, you know, the president has promised you to be the captain, which is higher than
what you left. When Clark left the Army, he was a lieutenant.
Then Jefferson, as part of his legislative agenda, had reorganized the army, which is a very complicated
topic. But one thing it had done is streamline the number of officers. He had made the army smaller.
And part of the reason Jefferson had done this is that most of the officers were federalists. I always
say to people, here's what politics was like in Lewis and Clark's time. I know it's going to take a
big leap, but America was divided into two sides.
They hated each other. And whenever one side said we wanted to do something, the other side said, well,
we don't want to. Why? Because the other side's for it. So if you can, through some magic use of imagination,
imagine an America that was like that. That's what America was like in this time period.
Jefferson reorganized the army in part because he wanted to remove some of the people who belonged to
the other political party who were officers. But that meant there were not enough spots for officers.
So once it came time to do the paperwork, even though Lewis had already told Clark in that very first
letter, you're going to be a captain. Everything is going to be equal. You're going to have all the
same perks that I have. He gets a letter right before they leave St. Louis that says, actually, Clark
has to enter as a second lieutenant, as a lower rank than he left the army, which for somebody like
Clark is humiliating.
And so what Lewis and Clark decide to do, this is Lewis's idea, is we're just gonna, you know, you've
been calling yourself Captain Clark all winter, just keep calling yourself Captain Clark. And you can
see the pressure on this even in the documents. They will sign treaties with native people. And Lewis
will just write, Captain, Army, First Regiment, because that's what he was. And Clark will kind of come
up with these, not lies, but he'll be like, Captain,
exploration of the Northwest under the president, like he doesn't have a regiment he can even write,
because he's not a captain in a regiment, so Clark has to sort of find a cover story in real time. But
once they get back, Lewis is furious, and he says, I want Clark to have the same thing that I do. The
Army did ultimately not pay Clark at the same level, but in terms of the huge grants of land, they gave
them both thousands of acres, and Lewis did everything he could and made sure that Clark got just as
much land as Lewis did.
And the last thing you mentioned, and I'm glad you did, is that Sacajawea and York both got to vote.
And this was once they made it to the Pacific Ocean. Like I said, in my book, I try to emphasize how
many votes there were along the way, because Lewis and Clark were a military unit, but they organized
it in a much more democratic and modern-seeming way, which I really admire about them. But they did
not let York or Sacajawea vote. They were just letting the soldiers vote. But once they made it to the
Pacific Ocean, they do ask York to vote.
find this really patriotic and wonderful, too, because York had gone 4,000 miles at that point. York
had carried a rifle. York had killed Buffalo. York had pushed the barge through sandbars. York had done
the same things that everyone else had done.
So I think it's really inspiring that Lewis and Clark were willing to give him a say at that point.
But there is one funny thing about Sacajawea. She also gets a vote. But if you go back and look at the
journal, and in my book I actually reproduced this page in the journal so you can see it, you can kind
of hold it in your hands because I have the color image of exactly these pages from Clark. He writes
the long list, then he adds up the votes, and then only underneath that does he write Sacajawea's vote.
He calls her Janie.
The only thing I can think of is that he didn't ask her, and then she spoke up for herself. But I love
that about her, right? Like everybody else's vote, and then at some point, she's just like, well, I
have a vote, too. I have something to say.
Lewis and Clark took good care of her and were very kind for her, but she was also just such a strong
and brave person. And sometimes she would just speak up for herself. In terms of the barge, the reason
I call it the barge and not the kill boat is just because of the latest scholarship that Lewis and Clark
called it a barge in their journals. And so previous books have called it a kill boat, but the more
recent academics who have studied it and written about it say that barge is a better word for it. So
that's what I chose for my book, but neither one is really right or wrong. It's just an author's choice.
Thank you for your questions.
Yes? I did a little bit of research on Lewis and Clark for the 200th celebration. I remember reading
that while they were preparing, they come up with something that we would refer to like bullion cubes.
Did you find that? Yes. A way to preserve food? So this is called, they called it portable soup. Some
of the descriptions in the time period, which I think give you a better understanding of it, they called
it veal glue.
So this was like a very, bullion is a very good comparison. It was a concentrate, very salty, very nutrient
rich because they would use veal and just boil it and boil it and boil it until you were left with like
a gummy paste that you could reconstitute. So when you think of MREs, military rations today, this was
like what the version of that in 1804. One thing that's really interesting though is that the soldiers
hated it. And so I was talking about in the Rocky Mountain mountains where they had to eat horses.
The soldiers, that's one of the reasons the soldiers decided to eat horses, because Lewis is like, it's
all right, guys. I've prepared for this. I've got portable soup. And so they reconstitute it, and the
men are like, we're hungry, but this is disgusting. And so they decide to kill horses instead. They'd
rather eat horse feet than this. But there's one thing that I point out in this chapter. Them going
through the Rocky Mountains is a chapter I write from Sacajawea's point of view. And so a lot of the
research I drew on for her was in the journals, because she shows up in the journals all the time. But
I also interviewed Shoshone people who are descendants of hers.
And they talked about how, in their culture, and I was able to confirm this in other historical sources,
the Shoshone have a huge taboo against eating horse flesh. So nobody in the journal... I sound greedy
here, because I have a million words to work with, but I always want more. It's always like the one
thing you wish they'd written down they didn't write down. And so, one of the things they don't write
down is, did Sacagawea eat the horse or not? They just don't even mention that. But based on the way
other Shoshone people lived their lives, she probably did not.
And what's so interesting is, as they're going through the Rocky Mountains, you have to remember, she's
breastfeeding a baby. And so, nobody is hungrier than her, because she's not just having to climb the
mountains, she's having to keep another human being alive with her body. And so, this portable soup,
in the book, I kind of make the case, well, maybe the person who needed it the most was actually Sacajawea,
because she probably couldn't eat horse meat, she was desperate for any kind of nutrition, so maybe
the portable soup that Louis had planned, the soldiers were like, yeah, we're good,
But maybe Sacajawea was the one who needed it the most. How long did the barge last or did they leave
it somewhere and come back and take it back? Is that what happened? Well, the barge made it all the
way up to where they built a place called Fort Mandan in what is now North Dakota. So their first winter
after going down the Ohio, stuff we talked about here, they stayed in St. Louis. Then their first year
proper, they make it all the way up.
more than 1600 miles to Fort Mandan in what's now North Dakota. At that point they realized the barge,
Luke designed the barge. He was a very careful planner. So whether it was the portable soup or designing
the barge, he tried to use the best science he could to pair them in. But he had to admit this barge
just isn't a good fit. Like I just did not understand what these rivers would be like. So they kept
the barge and then that's next spring when they kept going, they sent the barge back to St. Louis
full of scientific specimens and their journals so far and all the things they wanted to get to Jefferson.
They even sent a prairie dog that made it all the way to the White House. So Jefferson had a live prairie
dog at the White House that Lewis and Clark had captured for him. So they only used it that first year.
And after that, they switched to dugout canoes.
And so when they left at that point, they had two peros, which are kind of like bigger canoes, more
stable canoes, and then dug out canoes with it. And as they kept going, they ended up setting aside
the peros. They were always adapting. They would always change. You know, we think of Sacajawea. She
didn't even show up until the second year. So they were always adapting and changing because it was
such a challenging expedition. And one of the changes they made was, well, we don't need the barge anymore.
You had a second question you said? The expedition members, they received land bounty.
How many ended up in southern Indiana? The only person who's buried in Indiana is Bratton. A lot of
the men sold the bounties. And I think it's because they had had a taste of adventure and decided they
just wanted more of it. It's kind of interesting. Different people are always going to respond to things
in different ways. So somebody like Bratton, the guy I was talking about, or somebody like John Ordway,
who I write a lot about,
They loved being on this adventure, but once it was done, they were like, let's get a farm. We've had
our crazy life experience. Let's settle down and have a normal life. But more than half of the men said,
we just want to keep having a crazy experiences. We're just going to be traders or trappers. And they
were very valuable in that industry because they had firsthand experience of going further than any
other Americans had to that point. So sometimes they would sell their land.
take pocket the money and then just go out and keep being a traitor or a trapper. So in terms of Indiana,
not that many, but that's not anything really about Indiana. It just tells you how many of the soldiers
wanted to keep spending time out in the West. And a lot of them ended up dying a few years later. A
number of them were killed by the Blackfoot Nation because the Blackfoot Nation, in part because of
a battle that happened between Lewis and some Blackfoot people, was very hostile towards America. And
so as America kept trying to expand,
Blackfoot would kill American traders and trappers. The American traders and trappers would kill Blackfoot
people. It was a real ugly time period. And multiple members of the Lewis and Clark expedition ended
up dying just a couple years after in those battles. Charles Floyd, I think he has to claim the fame
that all the way out and all the way back, he was the only person of the Corps that died. That's right.
That's kind of amazing.
That's right. And it's not just us saying this from a modern perspective. I found a Jefferson speech
where when he was writing about the expedition afterwards, he was like, one of the amazing things about
this is that only one man died. So that's good leadership from Lewis and Clark. That's good genetics,
because these are all guys in their 20s who are healthy and young. And it's also just a lot of luck.
Because they're dealing with grizzly bears. The Missouri River is full of bacteria. They're getting
in there to tow their barge and their canoes. Their feet are all cut up, so they get horrible boils
and abscesses all over their body. They had to sacrifice so much, but they only lost one person, which
is amazing. But if you read their journals, when Charles Floyd dies,
None of them think he's the only one who's going to die. They talk about, like, this is the first person
we've lost. So you can tell, even early in the expedition, they're so brave, but also uncertain. And
that's one thing I really tried to capture in my book. A lot of times, I feel like books are written
where everybody knows the ending. And I know you all know what happens with Lewis and Clark.
I know that. But when you write a book, you can sort of try to put that idea aside and capture what
it felt like for them. And life for them feels just like life for us. They woke up every day, and they
didn't know what was going to happen.
You know, one of the first questions Lewis and Clark asked when they are coming back to America is,
who's the president? Because there had been a presidential election, and they did not know if Jefferson
would win. They did not know what was going to happen next, because nobody who's living through history,
including us who are living through history right now, know what's going to happen. So when I wrote
my book, I tried really hard to capture that uncertainty, because it made me admire them more, because
I think you can better appreciate how hard it was, but also because I think it's more accurate, and
it shows what life felt like.
Right. Yeah, no, the river was just always changing in real time. And, you know, especially once the
modern dams happened, that was less visible. But you're right, it was, you know,
Even one of the things about history is trying to remember and realize what life was like back then.
You think, well, at least the river is the same, but it's not. The river has changed so much, even in
your lifetime, much less versus them. So thank you for that comment. That's wonderful.
Yeah, I think that they did. And it's really hard to talk about, like, they're at whole, because even
Lewis and Clark, both officers, both from Virginia, they were very different. And so this is, you know,
in my book, I try really hard to just say, what did people think in this time period? And so, like,
if you wanted to make it as simple as possible, Lewis was much more,
to African-American people, to black people than Clark was. Clark owned slaves. There are lots of clues
I found that Lewis was not an abolitionist, but he didn't really want anything to do with slavery. But
in terms of Native people, on the way back, Lewis actually gets more and more frustrated with Native
people and then becomes quite cruel towards them, whereas Clark is much more generous to Native people
and Native people admired Clark for the rest of his life. He spent the decades after the expedition
living in St. Louis and making lots of treaties with Native people.
So even when we think about Lewis and Clark, who are so similar, we sometimes sort of combine them into
one person on various issues, they had much different views. They were very different. So in my book,
I try really hard to say, well, how did each person see something and how did they see it at that time
period? But yes, Lewis and Clark definitely understood how much they needed help with Native people.
And even if you look at the planning documents, Jefferson understood this. So one of the things they
packed that barge full of was trading goods, things that they could trade for information,
or trade to sort of help with their diplomacy, or just trade for things they needed. On the way back,
they were kind of out of trade goods. And so Clark became sort of a doctor.
And so native people would come up to him and they would complain about various ailments and Lewis and
Clark still had medicine left because Lewis had brought a lot of that. And so Clark would use that medicine
to help the native people, but then the native people would say, okay, you can borrow our horses to
cross the river or here's some corn that you need or something like that. And so there was a real human
back and forth in that there was one time that almost turned violent and then there was that moment
with the Blackfoot people that did turn violent.
But other than that, I mean, there was skepticism. There were nerves on both sides, but mostly you had
two sets of human beings trying to work together. And one thing I tried to show in the book that I think
makes it a little different than other books about Lewis and Clark is it's very easy for us to imagine,
well, Lewis and Clark wanted something from Native people. Like, Lewis and Clark had this mission. They
got to make it to the ocean. So they're going to, like, they will give Native people something, but
they want something in return. But it's just as true that Native people wanted something from Lewis
and Clark.
And so in the book, I write sometimes from the point of view of Native people. And so the Lakota is
a really good example. There's a Lakota leader named Black Buffalo, and chapter six is told from his
point of view. And that interaction of the Lakota versus the Americans is interesting. But Black Buffalo
wanted something from Lewis and Clark. He wasn't just a supporting character. He was like, well, these
new guys are showing up. They're kind of angry a lot. But is there a way I can use them to help achieve
the things I want to achieve?
And so that's one thing I really tried to do in the book, is pay attention not just how Americans influenced
Native people, but how Native people influenced Americans. And there's really no better story to explore
that dynamic than Lewis and Clark, for the reasons you said. One of the things that Lewis tried to do
as they went west was talk some of the Native groups that they arrived at, they tried to talk the chiefs
into going back
Is there any record of any of them? Some of them did make that trip. Are there good records? Well, I
have the book for you. Because I mentioned that in the book, I have 10 different people's points of
view. And so in chapter 14, I write from the point of view of exactly a person who did what you talked
about. One of Jefferson's goals was, I want you to
all the important Native leaders you find, send them to Washington, D.C. to meet with me. This will
be taxpayer-funded. If they can see our nation and meet with us, they'll be impressed and they'll be
less violent. And this is a better use of our money than trying to build a huge army and trying to fight
wars. And so just as an aside on the cost, I took a little time to sort of add up exactly how much Lewis
and Clark cost.
like it cost about $35,000, which is a lot of money today, but not when you think about the size of
what they were doing. But actually, I found, because of these trips you're talking about, that the total
cost, if you factor in how much they spent to send all these Native leaders to Washington, D.C., the
total cost was more than $100,000. So if you look at the government's budget in 1804, because of inflation
and everything else, Jefferson spent as much of the budget per year on Lewis and Clark as we spend on
NASA today.
So this shows you, like, the scope we're talking about. Lewis and Clark were a huge military mission.
And so in that chapter, because for me, I always try to tell stories through the point of view of human
beings. So there's this guy named Biahito, who was an Arikara leader. He lived in what is now South
Dakota. And so from South Dakota, he meets with Lewis and Clark. They hit it off. And so we talked about
the barge coming back in that second year. One of the things that was on the barge was Biahito. So he
got in that barge, went all the way down to St. Louis,
Then he switched a horse back and rode on a horse from St. Louis, passing through Indiana and Vincennes
and through Louisville and other places all the way to Washington, D.C. So at the same time, Lewis and
Clark are going thousands of miles west.
Biahito and other leaders are going thousands of miles east. He's doing his own expedition, right? But
instead of going to the west, he's going to the east. So there are really good documents. There are
letters from Jefferson that talk about meeting with him. There are journals I found at the Library of
Congress from other diplomats who describe what he was wearing, what it was like to talk to him. And
so in the book, I try to describe exactly what his journey was like, because this is part of the expedition.
It's only one chapter. But while Lewis and Clark are heading west,
he's heading east, and I think to understand the whole story, you really need to have both parts of
it. Great question. Do you think Lewis's death was a murder or a suicide? This is a good question about
Lewis's death, and people, right from the start, people were like, well, did he kill himself, or was
it a suicide? I will tell you what I think, although it's a question that people will always debate.
It's not like I'm gonna be able to solve the debate. I'll just tell you what I think. First of all,
Jefferson and Clark both thought it was a suicide. They were there, and I wasn't. So if Clark thought
his best friend killed himself, if Jefferson thought his protege killed himself, I give their perspective
a lot of weight. But this is also a place where I found a new document that I think is really important.
I'll be honest with you all. When I started writing this book, I thought, you know, I've got the different
points of view. I have a new way to tell this story. But I'm not sure I'll find that much new, because
how much is there really new left to find on Lewis and Clark? But there's a lot new to find on Lewis
and Clark.
very delighted and astonished at this. And so one of the things I found was a letter by John Quincy
Adams, which no other book on Lewis and Clark has ever mentioned this letter. So when Lewis makes it
back in 1806, he's been gone for two and a half years, John Quincy Adams knew him before, they're gonna
have dinner at the White House. Lewis is a national hero, he's a celebrity. And Adams writes a letter
the next day to his wife. And Adams says, even though I knew I was supposed to have dinner with Meriwether
Lewis, I couldn't even recognize the guy.
That's how much he had changed. He doesn't look two years older. He looks 15 years older. And so,
you know, previous historians have speculated, you know, we know Lewis went through all these things.
We know that he became more angry towards Native people on the way back. Like, you can sort of guess.
Well, it seemed like he was under a lot of wear and tear. But the big thing about this discovery is
we don't have to guess anymore, because we have John Quincy Adams, who was there, who in very clear
terms was saying exactly, this is what Lewis sacrificed for the expedition.
This is how much it changed him. This is how much it wore him out. And so because of what Clark and
Jefferson saw, and especially because of that letter from John Quincy Adams that I think shows, and
Adams in the letter doesn't just say Lewis looked tired physically, he said he looked tired mentally,
that Lewis was worn down both in body and mind. And so, you know, something as terrible as suicide,
there's never gonna be one cause for it.
It's never gonna be simple. So I can't tell you the one thing, but when I look at all the factors and
all the pressures that Lewis was under, as well as his own depression, which that's the word Jefferson
used. Jefferson said, Lewis had sensible depressions of mind. I believe that he killed himself. And
so there's some end notes about that. If you're somebody who's interested in that, there's a couple
of pages in the back where I talk more about that. But in my opinion, especially based on that new letter
I found, I do think he killed himself. Yeah.
Although he didn't die in the expedition, didn't he get shot in his hind end?
I mean, there's a lot of different things. He may have had malaria as well, but he definitely did get
shot. It's just terrible luck. He was such a hard worker that on the way back, he's still trying to
gather information for Jefferson, especially on the way back, because they weren't able to find that
big river route that they wanted. So everybody was a little disappointed. So they stopped to gather.
And this shows how history is just like one small difference, five minutes one way or another way, things
could unfold in a completely different way. So Lewis stops to do some astronomy readings, which are
very hard to do.
who's very good at that. This is another new thing in my book, is that previous books have said Lewis
wasn't very good at these, but a professor at Illinois a few years ago built a computer program, recalculated
all of Lewis's observations, and said, actually, he's only 20 miles off in almost every case, which,
if you're using the stars and math, that's a pretty amazing result. So Lewis was very good at this,
in addition to being very good at many other things. And so Lewis,
stops to get more of that data for Jefferson. But he gets there like 10 minutes late. So if you're going
to do the astronomy, you've got to have the sun at a certain position in the sky. So they're too late.
So Lewis says, I really want to get this data for Jefferson. Let's just bide our time, and I'll get
the reading later on when we can do it. Well, they've got some hours to kill. So Lewis says, let's go hunting.
This is at the end of the expedition, though. Their uniforms, remember I showed you that pretty picture
from the lily, those uniforms are gone. They're shredded. They've all been worn out. So they're all
dressed in elk skin or buck skin. So Louis goes out hunting with another soldier who's a very good soldier,
but he only had one eye. He couldn't see very well. And Louis is dressed in elk skin. So you can kind
of figure what happens, that the soldier accidentally shoots Louis in the behind. And very embarrassing
for him. He was somebody who was very prideful. He really, you know, he wanted to be a hero.
There's nothing very heroic about that story. And so he had to spend the last couple months on the way
back laying on his stomach in the bottom of the boat. When it would rain, they couldn't move him. So
he's just laying on his stomach, the boat's filling up with rainwater, and he just has to lay there
in that. Very hard. I'm sure that contributed to what John Quincy Adams saw. And so, yeah, Lewis had
a tough go of it on the way back. He sacrificed so much for his country on this mission. And it's one
thing that's really admirable about him, no matter what happened to him at the end of his life.
It may be. There's one time a letter that I quote where a woman turned him down and he said, he wrote
to a friend and he's like, I never felt less like a hero in this moment.
So this is after the expedition. And you can see that those personal setbacks may have been part of
it. There's so many things. Jefferson made him the governor of the Louisiana Territory, which was a
huge honor. But Lewis was not a great administrator. He was a great explorer. He was a great soldier.
But in terms of that kind of administrative work, I think he was not well suited for that. And that
wore him down. He wasn't able to write the book that literally the entire world was waiting for. When
the book was finally finished after his death, this book was reviewed in Germany, in France,
in England. He was an international figure, but that comes with a lot of pressure. And so the personal
side of it, including his romantic failures, had to play a role as well. Any other questions? No, they
didn't split up because they were at odds. They split up because they were trying to get so much stuff done.
So most of the way back, they were going as fast as they could. They didn't need to make as many maps
or gather as many specimens because they'd already done all that. But there were a few places that they
still wanted to explore.
This is always just going to be a guess. We're not going to know for sure. But I think that Lewis was
worried that he was going to have to tell Jefferson that water route you wanted that you thought was
going to be there wasn't there. And so one of the ways they split off, Lewis took a very small group
of soldiers to the north, trying to find out if a certain river was heading further north. And if it
headed far enough north, then the Louisiana Purchase, which we haven't talked about, but that's a big
part of the story too, then the Louisiana Purchase would actually have been hundreds of thousands of
square miles bigger. So this is a very important side mission, but that's also
where he runs into the Blackfoot people, and they end up killing a Blackfoot man. So again, you can
see these tiny little choices. Lewis trying to make Jefferson happy and give Jefferson what he wants
ends up leading to a battle that causes decades of animosity between the Blackfoot and the Americans.
History's complicated. That's why I love it. I'm sure that's why you all love it too, but it's always,
there's a ripple effect. Another interesting thing is that President Jefferson and John Quincy Adams,
they've been friends, but then they,
disagreed, like one of the politics that you talked about. I wonder if Meriwether Lewis, when he came
back, where that relationship was between Jefferson and Quincy Adams. Did they separate and were they kind of
We're angry with each other. John Quincy Adams is a very complicated figure because he ends up switching
to the Jefferson side of view. Even though his father was the other side, like the Jefferson's view
becomes so dominant that John Quincy Adams sort of becomes a part underneath that view. So that transition
is happening right here at this time. But you're absolutely right that politics run through all of it.
when John Quincy Adams would come and have dinner with Lewis and Jefferson before the expedition, John
Quincy Adams would be like, it was a terrible dinner. Everybody was rude to each other. And you're like,
well, was the dinner actually that way, or was it that kind of personal political stuff? Even somebody
had mentioned all the Native people coming back to visit Washington, DC. And I put this in the book,
but you can see even when people talk about the Native people coming, they use that to make political
jokes about the other party. I mean, here's another example I found at the Library of Congress.
somebody on Jeff who is not on Jefferson's party heard that a Supreme Court justice who was sick and
was on was more of a federalist was sick. And so that this senator who's a federalist writes I hope
he lives as long as Jefferson because that what he's saying is you know if he dies while Jefferson is
president then Jefferson's going to appoint a Supreme Court justice who doesn't agree with our side
which again
very similar to the kinds of news stories we see today about fighting over who gets to appoint the next
Supreme Court justice. So you just cannot overstate how angry politics were in this time period. We
think of Lewis and Clark today as this all-American story, and they are that today. But Jefferson could
barely get them passed. The whole Jefferson chapter, I found so many new documents about how hard it
was for Jefferson to just get the funding for the expedition because the people in the other party were
like, why would we send an expedition anywhere? That's the dumbest thing we've ever heard of.
They really were saying that just because Jefferson was the one who had the idea. But that speaks to
how partisan things were at that time period. Thank you all so much for listening. I really appreciate it.