How Lewis and Clark Worked

if you heard of William Clark, the explorer, Lewis and Clark. Yeah, well I'm Josh Clark because Clark's the unusual name. You might be no, but I mean like his family, Uh was from the Ohio River Valley. I grew up in Toledo. Hey, there you go. I wonder you have an explorer spirit. You're a laid back guy. He was laid back yep, not like Lewis. He was semi literate. Yeah, I'm fairly literate. Yeah,

that's the big distinction. It is funny, like have you read some of his verbatim journal unentry Clark's or Lewis's, well, both of them, but Clark's way worse. Uh. Yeah, Lewis is pretty good writer, I thought, yeah, but he had some weird spellings. To Clark was just like frontier Kentucky boy writing in a Yeah. They were a good pair though. Yeah.

And this isn't one of those podcasts where or stories where you look back and you're like, oh, you know, histories really pumped this up and they were really kind of like this and like jerks and no, No, this was really a great story and they were actually true American heroes, you know, one semi tragic. I would say, well, the ending is pretty tragic. No, but Lewis lewis manic depressive. Yeah,

by all accounts. Yeah, back then they called it prone to you know, prone to fits, but modern people say, no, he was probably manic depressive. Uh. And I prepped by watching the four hour Ken Burns documentary last night. Four hours. Yeah, I thought it was two hours, and I was like, oh, I got this, And then I got to, uh, the two hour point, and I was like, wait a minute, they just hit the Continental divide. I don't think I'm

at the end. That's so funny because in the email you you emailed me to suggest that I watch it. You called it a six part not four hour. Well they had it on YouTube in six parts, but in actuality it's twelve parts. All right, So let's do this. This is one of my favorite stories in history, is it really? Yeah? Man? And again I've said this before. Why isn't this a movie, like a really good movie? Not?

Have you seen almost heroes? Yeah? Right, there you go. No, alright, So Chuck um Lewis and Clark Merriwether Lewis William Clark, pair of UM army folk turned explorers thanks to a little bit of um I guess serendipity. It would have been somebody else had it not been these guys. Because really, the whole idea of this expedition, which was called the Core of Discovery, it sounds like a soccer team. Um

it was. It was the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, in the brainchild of t J. Because he's like, hey, I just bought I just doubled the size of our country by buying a bunch of land from Napoleon. Do you know the background on that, the Louisiana purchase. I know, it's the greatest land deal in the history of the world. Probably, But what what do you mean, Well, it was the Frenches land and they were about to get it from

they were about to get it given to the Spanish. Well, the Spanish were west of them, so probably, and the French like had barely any presence in this area, but it was their land. But the Spanish, had they taken over, they would have been a real problem because the Americans had access to the Port of New Orleans because the French were basically absentee landlords there, and so the idea that the Spaniards were about to get it, that was

a big problem. So Jefferson sent some people over to France to try to negotiate something, and it turned out Napoleon was having all sorts of problems and it had been recommended to him by his people, like just sell it to the Americans. They're coming over, they want to talk.

So I think James Monroe was sent by Thomas Jefferson with the a limit of ten million dollars to do something to buy Florida and New Orleans or New Orleans for ut the ten million dollars, Monroe found out he could get all of the Louisiana territory, which went up to Canada. Yeah, Louisiana is really undersells it. It was. They went from the Rockies all the way over to the colonies and then up to Canada and down to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a double the size

of our country. Yeah, overnight. So Monroe was like, I'll give you fifteen million dollars for it, and the French are like sold. So he bought eight hundred and twenty seven thousand square miles of North America about three cents an acre, and uh, that was a chunk of change, though, I think that was double what our are gross economy was at the time. But it's a pretty good investment. That's a great investment. Could you imagine, though, how weird that would be off if it had gone a different way.

The United States could have ended it about the Mississippi River, which it did at the time, and just beyond that on the other side could have been Spain or not Spain, but you know what I mean, a Spanish colony. Well, it could have been a lot like um Africa, you know, like all these former colonies that are just like adjacent to one another. But this is a French colony. This was a Belgian colony. This was a British colony, and I think the Brits controlled Canada and like the Oregon

territory at the time. Yes, um, yeah, we were all sandwich kind of in there together. So we buy from the French, we go fight Spanish for the rest of it. And uh, in between all of this, we send Lewis and Clark to go check out what had just been bought. And this expedition was gonna happen anyway, but we thought that we were going to have to ask for permission to go through this area. But now all of a

sudden it was America. And that added a facet to this expedition that hadn't been there before, which was basically informing the Indians that they were now living in America and they had um a new great father, which is how Meriwether Lewis put it. How he described t J. Yeah, you have a new great father who lives in a lodge in Washington, d C. And you can come visit him and see like how great it will be to live under his patronage. But not really right sign this treaty.

Uh so uh he named he was his private secretary. Lewis was his kind of personal aid, and he knew what kind of dude he was. Maybe drink a little too much, was prone to depression, but he he sort of gave him this job to help him out. He thought he'd be good for it. Don't get me wrong, right, he groomed him for the position. But yeah, he he thought it would be. He had he had invested interest in the man, and he's like, this is gonna be really good for Lewis, is what he needs. He's twenty

nine years old, which is remarkable to me. Uh good, sharpshooter. He said, you pick your partner. He picked William Clark, who was his former captain I believe in the army, a couple of years older. And he looked up to Clark quite a bit. It was like, I need you, brother, because you compliment You complete me, right, which, by the way, we should probably say there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Lewis and Clark were ever gay. Clark definitely wasn't. Yeah,

there's a lot of conjecture about Merriwether Lewis was. He courted several women and was rejected by all of them. He was a total eligible bachelor, never married, never was engaged or betrothed or anything. So of course, as time wore on, people were, well, he must have been gay. Yeah, there's been a lot of a lot of conjecture, and they come up with the idea that he probably wasn't gay, but that he was um bye. You know that he had um something of an aversion to women that was

not necessarily based on any kind of sexual orientation. He just didn't know what he was doing and he didn't feel comfortable around women. Well, like we said, he was by all accounts manic depressive, So he was kind of a messed up guy in a lot of ways, a little bit semi tragic figure. You said, yeah, and we'll get to that. Um, the main goal, well, there are a couple of main goals. The main goal for Jefferson was, Hey, I want to find this all water route to the

sea that's really important for trade. And also, hey, let's check out this thing we just bought and go out and record as much of it as you can. Animals, plants, people, Uh, what the heck is out there? Basically come back and tell us. Right, and Lewis wasn't exactly a slide, which when it came to this kind of stuff. His mother was a celebrated herb doctor um in Virginia. Yes, you knew what she was doing. And um, she kind of raised him in the woods, so he was he was

pretty good at botany. But to just kind of further his education and not just that, but all sorts of other things that would come in handy on the expedition, Jefferson sent him to the American Philosophical Association, which was the first learned society in North America, and basically he underwent this like grueling crash course of everything from astronomy to cartography to geology, medical training, everything everything you could

you would need. They basically just filled Lewis's head with and he in turn filled Clark in on a lot of it too. Yeah, also a lot of what they might encounter in ways of uh, we'll call them Indians for the purposes of the show, because that's what they called them, right, And Jefferson was like, and don't forget to call me great father. It's awesome. So, um, Lewis is in Pittsburgh or in Philadelphia getting this training. He writes to Clark, says, please join me on this and

you were my captain. I'm a captain. Now we're gonna be co captains on this, just so there's not any kind of weirdness or anything like that. Like I'm I was chosen to leave the expedition, but I'm choosing you for help. But let's do this evenly, which is unheard of, and it actually even more unheard of. It worked out really well. Yeah, it did. Like there wasn't any kind of like backbiting or problems, and they actually ran it

a bit like a democracy too. Yeah. In the end um the they were kind of described as a family, like really really tighten it. I kept waiting for the story to go off the rails, but it didn't. They really hung together and stuck together. After some initial discipline problems once they kind of weeded out, I think from summer to fall they kind of weeded out some of the bad apples. Well, what's funny. One guy got um discharged for mutinous acts and another guy got discharged for desertion.

But they they this happened in the middle of the the first leg of the trip, so they had to stay on and so they could get them to a place where they could go back. So they just had them doing hard labor the whole time. Wow. Uh so, Um, they brought along a couple of people of note. One, Clark took his slave, York, that he had had since he was a kid. He was only only black guy and only slave on the on the party, right on

the adventure party, we'll call it. He was he was technically a man servant I guess, like a valet or something like that to Clark outside of the expedition, but on the expedition, York was basically just a member of the party. Yeah, he was a member of the party. Um. He played a really great role in diplomacy because, uh, the American Indian was had never seen black people before and they didn't have hang ups obviously like white people did.

So they're like, this guy is awesome. He's huge, and he's strong, and look at that, like amazing black skin that's even darker than ours. Like they really thought he was great. And I'm you know, I'm sure all the white people and they were like, well, yeah, look at me, Look what about me, my pale white skin. I'm friends with the great father. But he played a great role in diplomacy. Um, and like you said, was generally treated pretty well. Um. Although he did get sort of sort

of some of the crap duties. Well, plus he also got royally screwed over at the end of the expedition. Oh yeah, we'll get to that though. Okay. Uh. And so we have York with Clark, and then um Louis purchased a dog for twenty dollars name c Man. And they used to think it was scanning because these guys um handwriting was so bad that for yeah, basically a century, like,

everybody thought it was scanning for two centuries. And then somebody figured out, well, wait a minute, why is one of these rivers called Siemens Creek right, And then they realized, wait, that's the dog. That's the dog. Everybody, by the way, had something named after them, and they had trouble coming up with names for everything, like York, the York Islands of Montana, like everybody on that tour had something named

after them, which is kind of neat. So he was a Newfoundland dog and he made it the whole way. We're happy to go ahead and spoil that one. Yeah, which is great because they ate dogs, by the way. At some point on this trip, they had a lot of horse. Yeah, they did, so like you said they started in Pittsburgh, but the officials start was really in St. Louis in December of UM three, and they're like, all right, let's hit the river, the Missouri River. Well, that's where

they assembled camp and wintered. They started all their people and ran them through like army training, and took the best of the best. They officially started in May, the falling spring. Of course, you wouldn't start in the winter. Uh So they had a big keel boat and a couple of smaller canoes and said let's hit the river.

And they did. So they stillst to it because again, ultimately Jefferson was looking for a northwest passage across the continent to the Pacific, and he wanted to see if you could basically ride a river all the way across the country. Yeah, by the time, I think they're about forty five people at first, but when they eventually whittled

it down, the official Corps discovery was thirty three people. Right. So, they they head out and they start going upstream up the Missouri River, and it was rough going at first, and they literally pulling their boat out from outside the water waist deep by tow rope against the current again. Yeah, they're going upstream the whole way to the source of the Missouri River. Yeah. So the first Indians they encountered, well not the first, the first situation they encountered where

the Titan Sioux or the Lakota. And they're actually warned by previous American Indians like, watch out for these guys. They're basically the mafia of the Missouri River. Like they'll demand payment, they won't. Uh, they'll take your goods, they'll control the trade. Yeah. They wanted them to trade exclusively with them. Yeah. And they had done this to the French in the Spanish for years. Uh and they I

think Lewis called them the pirates of the Missouri. But um, when they did reach them, it came to a standoff over a canoe that they they gave them their gifts.

The first thing they would do whenever they encountered a new tribe was to like give them these trinkets, tell them about the Great Father, give them like handkerchiefs and things like we come in peace and um with with the Titon Sue though, there was a standoff over a canoe that they wanted and they're like, we're not giving this canoe and it literally came to a point where guns were raised and like hundreds of Indians had their arrows pointed at them, and it was about to go down,

and uh, chief Black Buffalo intervened. It was like, you know what, let our women and children toward your really cool boat that we've never seen and meet all you guys and then y'all can have safe passage. So they managed to get through their unscathed. But that was their first like run in where they were like, man, this could go down pretty badly. And luckily that was one of just a few I think as far as cross country unchartered expeditions, uncharted expeditions go, this went about as

good as you could possibly hope for. Yeah, I mean it was super peaceful. Um, they were the well, they only shot one bullet in anger the entire trip. It's pretty remarkable. Man, that is neat. So they hit the great planes and that might as well have been Mars to them. Um, if you think about it, if you've never been west of I think there's a saying that a squirrel can jump from tree to tree until it's

the Mississippi. And so when they hit the great planes, they had never seen anything like it like there were no trees, just just planes. It's just planes, and it was just you know, they were absolutely blown away by this. And uh, there they encountered the Mandan and Minotauri or Hidatsa Indians, right, and they just I did, all right, this is pretty good place to build a camp, stay here for a few months. And they built Fort Manden, which they named after the local one of the local

tribes and Um and they were buddies. They had like lived together in harmony, right, they got they they forged friendships, they were visited by locals, and uh, something big happened here, which we'll get into in a second, but first let's do a message. Okay, Chuck. So we're at Fort Manden,

which is we're in South Dakota. I think they were having a good time hanging out having Yeah, there was a big problem with venereal disease on the expedition because like they were having a lot of sex with Indians and the Indians um had syphilis, which was something that was unknown to Europeans, and Europeans contracted it very easily. So that was a big thing. Well that was another thing about Louis too. Apparently like everybody else in the exped had sex with Indian women, and he was like

he stayed away from his journal. Entries about like Indian sexual practices were very like and just snide. I think is away one person put it um. Yeah, there's just he's an odd duck. I get what if he tried to put on that. He was just you know, cleaning up. And they're like, Louis, it doesn't hurt when he peas like something's going on, it doesn't burn. I don't think he's having sex. He says he had sex with all those women burns. When is a burn? When you be

doesn't burn? Win Louis Peace. Yeah. So apparently burning when you pee like was a big thing on this core of discoveries. Discovered syphilis too, all right. So the other important thing that happened here, which is I think what you were getting to was they hired a French Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau. But they really what they were doing was hiring his wife. Yeah, Soicago way or Soicago wea.

I didn't mispronounce that. You didn't mispronounce it. There's a lot of pronunciations, yeah, but there's only one that's right, and they're the right. One is based on the journal entries of Louis Clark everybody else in the expedition. Because this was an expedition, everyone was expected to like make notes and and yeah, they were all ord of stuff down right. And Sacaea is mentioned dozens of times in these journals because she did do some outstanding stuff. Um,

and she's mentioned phonetically, so it's Socca Gowa. Also at some point it's also mentioned that her name is Shoshone for bird woman and the shy Sacaga is bird and Weya is a woman, so it's Chicago Wea, not Sacca Joeya. That's right. Well, I mean that's a big point. It's true, although the ken Burns thing, these historians all pronounced it differently, which is sort of frustrating. Well, yeah, there's such a

kaka and then Saca joweyah. Yeah. One of the ladies called her straight up Sacada and I was like, straight up. So she was very important because A she was a translator. B she was essentially a white flag everywhere they went. Um. And I don't think we said this, but by the time they broke camp to leave, she had a baby. Yeah, she actually gave birth to her first child. Um and Fort Manden Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, Yeah, who was pretty cool,

grew up to be pretty cool. Yeah. Sure, But Scagia if we say Soca Dwia too, I think that's fair. Okay she Um, she was sixteen at the time, and she was married to Charbonneaux. She's one of two of his wives. Um, and I didn't hear anything about the other showy woman. Did she not go along? I don't think so? Okay, all right, so, um she John Baptiste and Toussaint were a family, even though Sacagawea was Toussant's slave wife, like he purchased her. But she was Shoshone.

And the reason why she was so valuable is because the expedition leaders had found out that the Shoshone were known for their horsing abilities, and the expedition had two horses that they set out with, and we're like, we're gonna need a lot more. So we need to trade with the Shoshone when we make it to the Rockies, and we will need this woman. And she comes in

handy to a spectacular degree in this sense. Yeah. And not only was she a white flag She was just great for the spirit of the camp to have a woman there. Uh. And baby was a charmer too. Oh, of course. You know, you can't pull up with a woman and a baby and say like we're warring people exactly, you know, apparently across all tribes along the plains, if you have a woman and a baby in your party, you're automatically not a war party, and therefore you come

in peace. Yeah, and she was also pretty awesome. Charbonneau himself was described as quite average, but Chicago Way was the real deal, like one of the bravest members of the expedition. And at one point one of the boats overturned and they lost we're losing a lot of their important records and things. And she was the main one that was like boom in the water retrieving the stuff while Charbonneau was I don't know what he was doing. Who knows what Sharbonneau was doing. But Psychic Awaya was

swimming retrieving the stuff. This is after she'd given birth, This is while she's breastfeeding, walking scores of miles and in a given week, she was pretty tough. Yeah, and you know, we'll go ahead and spoil this that baby, like we said lived. It made it all the way there and back, this brand new baby, uh to the age of about I guess two and a half, and he just stole William Clark's heart. Yeah, he loved him. He ended up adopting him, he did. Yeah, he adopted

him and educated him in St. Louis. After she died, he adopted both her kids much later. So um, but yeah, his name was Jean Baptiste, the the baby, and he was nicknamed Pompey because of his pompous little dancing. Antics like Clark found him to be quite a little danswer. Um. So the The other way that Saka Gaweya was helpful to this expedition was that she was a translator. She could speak um Shoshone obviously um. She could also speak

Hadata and so her husband could speak Hadata. So if she was speaking to a Shashoni, Let's say they encountered a Shoshoni person, the Shoshone would speak to Sacagawea. She would say what they said in Hadata to her husband. Her husband would say in French what had just been said in Hadata to another man, who would in turn tell William and Merryweather what had been said in English. That was the translation line, and Sacagaweya was the pivotal point of this as far as speaking to um plains

abs point. Yeah, and you would think that's setting it up to say in like big problems arose because of it. But it really worked pretty well. No, because they were also trained in plain sign language to Apparently there was a lot of UM gesturing that was fairly universal that a lot of the people who were recruited in St. Louis originally were familiar with two. Yeah, they got along

pretty well, they did, all right. So after the Mandon villages, they broke camp and went on um to the confluence of Yellowstone with the Missouri and entered the land where they started seeing, like when they hit the planes, they started seeing these crazy animals they've never seen before. Uh. It's important to say they didn't discover anything. Yeah, it's very important to say that they were just the first white guys to record it for science. Um, but prairie

dogs and elk and buffalo by the tens of thousands. Uh, antelope, all kinds of things to them that were just these weird animals. Um. They actually sent a live prairie dog back to Jefferson, which is pretty it's hious and it made it all the way U Grizzly Bears. They encountered those for the first time on this expedition. Yeah, they were warned at the grizzly by the Indians and they were like we we've hunted brown Bear and black Bear.

And then they were kind of like holy crap. Like in their journals they were like, I've never seen anything like this. It took ten shots and we almost died, and the Grizzly Bears to be reckoned with. Lewis said something like, um, I'd rather fight two Indians than one Grizzly Bear. Yeah. So here we are in early June. Uh, they reached the point where the Missouri divided that they didn't they weren't told about this, uh fork, So like huh right, what should we do here? In equal parts

north and south? Yeah, I mean it was like a hardcore left and right that was uh, basically everyone in the party agreed on one direction except Lewis and Clark. They were like, we were old school, we like in sync. Yeah.

So they despite the fact that everyone disagreed, they followed them, and that just shows like how united they were They were like, you know what, we don't think you guys are right, but we're going to follow you because you were our captains, right, and we want to see your faces when you realize you're wrong, which actually would happen, but it wouldn't lead to like eating each other like the dinner party, no, huh um. So they keep mosying

along and they're doing pretty well. They apparently they got to a point where, um Clark looked down one day, I think it was Clark, it was possibly Lewis too. It was Lewis and he realized that a little stream at his feet was running west and he realized that they just crossed the Continental Divide. Yeah, that was the mouth of the Missouri that they were literally straddling with their feet. Yeah, and they that meant that now they had just left the Missouri, and we're going to hook up.

First they went on to the Snake River, but that would take them to the Columbia River, which, by their reckoning, would take them to the Pacific Ocean. So they'd made it like a substantial amount of distance. Yeah. That was a depressing moment though for Louis, because he he thought when he reached that ridge that he would look and see just downhill to the ocean, and what he saw was rocky mountains Nevada. Yeah, and he was like, oh man, this is not going to be very easy. No, we

didn't know about the rocky mountains. No. And even uh even still, when they finally do think that they see the ocean, they still were twenty five miles away from it when they finally get to that point, yeah, which we'll get to. Oh, that's right. Uh So, what they ended up doing they made a mistake because there was a shortcut they could have taken. They would have taken four days, and instead they had to go work their way around the Great Falls of Montana, which took uh

fifty three days of portage. Uneasy portage, yeah, because this portage was like carrying these boats. But also these guys were wearing like moccasins and stuff, and they had a huge problem with prickly pear, yeah, which would just go right through your bokusen. It's basically like stepping on nails the whole time while you're carrying a very heavy boat. Yeah, and all your supplies whiskey and you know, food, salt. Uh So in July they arrived at another fork. Three forks.

They named them the Gallatin for the Secretary of Treasury, the Madison for the Secretary of State, and the Jefferson, and decided to follow the Jefferson because there was more to it. I think, yeah, And I think they were like, this is the one that is going to head west, so they follow that. I think at this pointer, either right before or right after, they they meet up with

the Shoshone. Have they met the Shoshoni yet? Uh? Well, at this point Lewis went off by himself, um, and a couple of more people to find the Shoshoni, including psychic away right or No, she wasn't there yet. I don't think she was there yet. But he did find them, and um he basically said, hey, we come in peace. We have a camp back here. We want you to come hang out at. Well. They were in bad shape apparently this is show anywhere. Yeah, they were pretty worse

for the wear and very docile as a result. Um. So he met these women and children and told them all that stuff and they came back and hung out with them, and at Camp Soka Goea recognized one of the women that Clark was a Clark or Lewis I think at this point it was both who who they came back with and said, hey, we found some shoon and she said, hey, that's actually my bff from first grade.

Because remember Soa had been um kidnapped and sold, so there were still members of her tribe living around the Rockies and um, she actually met up with them and with her brother who was now chief. Yes, she was like your chief and you know it, little sister, and he went, you're married to a French trapper. She's like that guy. Not really he bought me, uh, which is

not funny at all, you know. Um. So then they proceeded across the continental divide to the main village with the Shoshonees and uh hard on a tour guide, old Toby, which is a great name for an Indian tour guide, and said Toby said, you know, I'll lead you through these mountains, but we're gonna need some horses to eat because it's gonna be rough and to travel with. Right, But this is where they were really eating a lot of horse meat. Yeah, the Bitter Root Mountains. It was

pretty rough through Montana and Idaho. Uh and that was when you know, their spirits were never broken. But that's when they were dampened for sure. So um, when they make it through the bitter Roots, I don't remember why they did or where, but there was a point where they said, we can't use these horses anymore. I guess it's when they got onto the Columbia River, right. Well, maybe is this where they were eating salmon and the

salmon was making them sick? Yes, So they come to a pierced village with old Toby I believe it, at the lead and um, they're celebrated, welcome, they throw a feast for him, and it makes every buddy violently ill in the expedition, like the salmon is awful, yeah, or these roots or whatever. I'll bet it was the roots that got them. Yeah, I think it was. Um. So every apparently everyone recovered. Um, but they say, okay, well here's the Columbia River. We can't really use these horses anymore.

I think one of the things that's very much overlooked in the history of this expedition is just how much the core discovery relied on friendly tribes. So like when they hit the Columbia River, they said, hey, Shoshone or no Nez Pierce friends, will you watch our horses for us. And then as Pierce said, yes, you guys go to the Pacific Ocean. When you come back, we'll have your horses. Go ahead and brand them so you know which ones are yours, And they did. They left their horses with

the Nez Pierce. Yeah, I mean it was it was kind of the best case scenario story for most of the trip. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Uh. And that is actually too where they were where they traded for dog to eat, which was one of the only disappointing parts of the story for me. Um, that and what happened New York. All right, So at this point, it's uh, mid October, it floated down to the Great Falls of

the Columbia, which is now Solilo Falls. I think about how much easier it was at this point, like they're not going upstream any longer they get with the current. True, but it was the Oregon territory, so they were getting rained on constantly. I mean it was pretty brutal conditions. Um, but you're right. It wasn't like slugging through in the summertime, pulling that boat up stream, stepping on prickly pear exactly. Uh. So this is where on November seven, they thought that

they saw the ocean. It's actually a bay about inland. And one of them said ocean in view O c I N I love the ocean O T e A N. In this the same paragraph they misspelled ocean two different ways. Give him a break, come on. Uh. Finally, finally, finally, by mid November, they strode upon the sands of the Pacific. And this is the really sad part is that Merryweather called it tempestuous and horrible. Like he wasn't like, oh,

we made it. He was he was depressed, and he was like, this isn't like the Atlantic coach, and this is rocky and beating us with waves like the Organ coast is rough. Uh. And he didn't cotton to it. But what he did cotton to was being an accurate dude. By dead reckoning over the course of over he was only off by forty miles in charting this, this ride that is pretty amazing, is pretty remarkable. So sagawea Um.

One of the reasons she signed on, aside from being a slave to her husband who signed her on um, was that she wanted to see the Pacific. She'd heard about the Great Waters and yeah, and so when they were getting closer, Um, she petitioned Lewis and Clark saying like, there's no way you can't let me not come with you to see the Pacific Ocean itself. And they let

her come along. They had word from some local tribe, I'm not sure which one it was that there was a monstrous fish on the beach, and Lewis and clarker like they're talking about a whale. We should go get some blubber, and so aways like I'm there, I'm coming with you. So they took her along and they all got to go see the Pacific Ocean and it was personal that first time. Yeah, they got a bunch of blubber and oil and stuff from it. Um, and it died first, So you can keep liking Lewis and Clark Um.

So uh, they camp there on the Pacific for a full four months. Yeah. Basically they were trying to two things. They were trying to decide what to do, and they were technically they were waiting for a boat to come by, say, a letter of credit from Jefferson that said, hey, if you're a boat, give these people a ride back and we'll pay you like good money, right, I read that they never seriously thought that they were going to take a boat back. Well, that was the deal is. Technically

they were supposed to be waiting for a vote. What they were really doing was just sort of weighing their options as to how best to go back and win. And this is the really cool part. They put it to a vote. They did put it to a vote, um, and it was a vote that included an African American and a woman and a Native American, and it was a who Saya and York both both their votes were given equal weight to everybody else's. Where to camp? Set

up camp for the winner. Yeah, so they elected to cross the river to the south Um where they were informed that there was elk and deer. You can hold up here, you can hunt all winter, and they did, and prepare yourself for the return journey home, which we'll get to after this message. All right, So here we are at Fort Clatsop o Yea named after the Clatsop tribe. They were hunting, They were storing up, they were getting their provisions in order, getting ready to go back, and

they hauled butt on the way back. They did. Yeah, you know how it is sure it plus it doesn't take as long because now you know how long it's gonna take. Yeah, And they weren't stopping to record everything they did actually been there, um, but the group wasn't as happy. Uh. They were irritable, especially Lewis. He kind of fell into a depression on the way home. He didn't did he come out of it at all while they were at the Pacific or did it just stick the whole time? Well, I mean I think it was

up and down. Basically, they believe when he was not recording in his journal he was depressed. Um, but he is remarkable and that he soldiered on like this is a manic depressive who was still like getting up every day and doing this and like the worst thing he did was not journal you know. Um. Actually the worst thing he did was on the way back he stole a canow at one point, which is really out of character. And he was described as kind of like cracking at

the seams at this point, which is really sad. So March six, they started back up the Columbia with these new canoes, bartered for some horses and camped with the Nez Pierce for a month, and then they got their horses back from the Nez Pierce. Those horses that those were, there's the ones before they got back there to the next piers. They bartered for some horses and then eventually hooked back with the next pierce and camp for like a month and got their horses back and got their

horses back. I think that's your favorite part of this night. They're like, hey, guys, were you hanging onto this for? They also sunk their canoes at a certain point and then went back and got those. He keep keep the canoes from being sent down river. They just sunk them and then they came back and got them. It's pretty cool. So they basically retraced their trail through the Bitter Roots UM only one retrograde march and the entire journey, which means you have to double back Gale, which is in

itself pretty remarkable. Uh. And then on July six, they separated UM back where they were at that original shortcut that they should have taken, and said, hey, let's send off some different factions here and do a little bit more exploring and a little bit more recording of things.

They're like, we've slacked off. Well, yeah, because they were kind of like I said, they were home, but on the way home, Um, this is where Louis where they ran into their first kind of violent episode with the black Feet Indians, and um, a dude shot at Louis. He shot back, hit the guy in the belly. Another guy stabbed the Blackfeet Indian. Where is it a Blackfoot Indian?

And um, they rode away like the black Feet did, but two of them died and it was you know, it was sad they had gone all that way without violence and they finally kind of had to their hand was forced, essentially. Chuck. Also, Um, there was another shooting that took place during this period, but this moment accidental. Um Lewis was actually shot when he was mistaken for an elk while he was out hunting with a member of the expedition, Pierre Cruzette, and cruzatt Um didn't fess

up to it immediately. He was like, oh, I guess from Indians. It must have been those black Feet and uh. Finally, when they searched the area and found no sign of black feet, Crusat was like, I'm sorry, I thought you're an elk. I'm blind in one I don't forget, but I'm the fiddle player and everybody loves me, and Louis was like, we'll just let it go and apparently was really in a lot of pain. It hit him in the try and like he had a very long and difficult recovery for the rest of the time. But it

was about this time when everybody came back together. Yeah, and this, you know, we're sort of simplifying this part of the story. But they eventually did all meet back up UM pretty remarkably. Like I think the story is one of them around it a bin and right as they did that, the others were rounding the band and they're like, oh hey, it's you, Like it's you out here in the middle of nowhere. Uh. So they've eventually

went back to demand in villages. That is where the Charbonneau family UM left the expedition UM, and that is where a private John Coulter, who was one of the men, said, you know what St. Louis like, I didn't like it there. I really like it out here. Can I can I go back? And they're like, sure, man, go go west, young man exactly, and he did. So he did. He he was going to UM work with some French trappers

and they had a following up pretty quickly after. And then this guy Coulter, Yeah, he went off on his own and they think he was the first white person to enter what's now Yellowstone Park, and he was. He was the first to recount the geysers, and even um still there's part of it called Coulter's Hell. Oh cool, the guys are area of Yellowstone very cool. Uh So reportedly the only thing they did not run out of on the way home was powder, lead, paper, an inc or.

At least that's what Kinburn says, you know how they put a little cherry on top of everything. Uh. Finally, in September of eighteen o six, on the twenty three, they arrived victorious in St. Louis and the river was lined with people cheering for them, shooting their guns in the air, and like we should point out, everyone thought they were dead. Yeah, I mean for a long time, like they were sending messages back in Prairie Dogs. But then at a certain point that just wasn't possible. So

even Jefferson had given up hope. They've been like they've been gone for two and a half years, like we're not going to hear from Lewis and Clark again. And then they did, and then they did, and um covered about eight thousand miles over two years, four months and nine days, discovered, I'm sorry, not discovered, recorded hundred and twenty two animals that they had never seen, hundred and seventy eight plants that they had never seen, and did

a pretty darn good job of cartographing. Cartographing is that even a word? Yeah? I think it is drawn maps. Um describing the Rocky mountains and Jeffrey was like, rocky mountains, but I have mountains, now, what are those? And they were like they're snow capped even in the summer, and they were, you know, they've never seen any of this. They were blown away. So um. After this, uh, Clark sets up shop in St. Louis. Yeah, they doubled everyone's pay,

which was nice, and gave everyone a bunch of land. Right, you got I think three d and twenty acres and some Clark got six hundred each, but the rest of the guy's got like almost the rest two people did not get any land or any money, and that was SKAGWAYA and York, um, which sucks. Yeah, and apparently York had a difficult reentry into slavery. I can imagine, So could you think about like living like that and then going back to being a slave. Yeah, And so he

asked um Clark for his freedom. He's like, I know, I don't get landed all and stuff, but how about my freedom? And Clark was like no, And not only that, he wrote his brother a letter and said, you know, York is being kind of uppity since he got back. He's not he's not being a good slave and he's having trouble and uh so I had to beat him. No. Yeah, that was that was the one time I was like, oh, man, yeah, that's pretty awful. It was like really headed in the

good direction. And all that had to happen was he could have just said, yes, you are free, and then it would have been the best story ever. Man. That's that's really awful. I had no idea about that. Yeah. And then there were there various accounts that he might have been freed a few years later, or perhaps escaped.

No one is quite for sure, even though I've noticed kin Burns does a lot of factual stating of things that are disputed, Like he just said straight up that he was freed five years later, and I read up on it, and people like maybe not huh. Ken Burns just does whatever his haircut tells him. I'm a sucker for those things, though. I mean, and I know a lot of documentary filmmakers kind of poopoo him. Yeah. Well, I mean that takes a certain interpretation, and that's that

exactly he said. Wait, hold on, I'm really disappointed in Clarks. What do you want me to do? I don't know. I guess to talk about Lewis. Yeah, I mean, Clark went on, we should say to have like a very successful rest of his career. Well, hold on, you want to bright side? Bill Clinton in two thousand one gave a posthumous um rank a sergeant in the army to York. Oh great, so that's kind of nice and um, way to go Clinton. Today, there are some statues commemorating York.

One in Louisville, Kentucky. I think there's one at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. In Kansas City, there's one. So he's He's definitely been smiled upon historically as like a great man and adventurer by everyone but William Clark. Yeah, and his family, who was like no, So Louis had some difficulties upon returning home, he's made governor appointed governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory. I think started out well,

but then he kind of got into financial trouble. I think his territory got into financial trouble, right and Washington he wasn't able to complete. The big thing was that he wasn't able to complete what he was supposed to do, which has come back and write about the whole thing. Yeah, those weren't published until eighteen fourteen, which is eight years after they returned. And even then they were published after his death. Yeah, so he was. He was, by all accounts,

pretty depressed. He was on his way to Washington supposedly to plead for more money for the territory. Yeah, to kind of he had been called out on some finances and he wanted to go clear that up. And supposedly he had some some of his journals that he wanted to turn in. It's like here, I've got this right. And he fell out of favor a little bit with Jefferson because of all that, which is you know, kind of sneaks. It is because he was groomed by Jefferson.

There was a family friend, like they were friends. So um, Lewis. I guess he's on his way to Washington. He's following the Natchez Trails trace and he stops in Tennessee at a place called the Grinders in near Nashville, and that's where he died. He was he was found well, apparently crawling toward the innkeeper's wife, shot bleeding, asking for water, and she just like screamed and ran away. Yeah. And this is another disputed thing. Was he killed or did

he commit suicide? Uh? If you google death of Meriwether Lewis, that comes up suicide. But it is definitely in dispute. Yeah. And ken Burne straight up said he killed himself and it was very sad. Well. The reason why it's in disputes because he was shot in the abdomen and in the head. Ye. It's also an expert marksman. Yeah. And the suicide people I think reckon that back then with guns, Like if you really wanted to do it, you would point one at your chest and wan at your head

and squeeze at the same time. Yeah, Like I um, but the people said he was murdered for money, and what were you gonna say? Nothing? Okay? Uh? Sadly, even though this story had a happy ending. It was sort of the beginning of the end of the American Indian Um. It's a pretty big thing to point out. Yeah, there was a great quote from one of the people in

the documentary. It said, they left his students, came back his teachers, and sadly America failed to learn the lessons that they had brought back with them, because if everything had gone the way of Lewis and Clark, it would have been awesome. They were basically like, hey, got the Great Father, Like we said, we're gonna live in harmony, and they believed him, and they believed themselves, you know.

They weren't like pulling one over on him. Uh. And it's just sad that it went down a different way from that point forward. Basically, you know what I'm saying. There was one brief moment when it could have gone in a different way. Yeah, and that was it. Yeah. But Clark and Lewis also, I guess, kind of paved the way for the idea of manifest destiny, although that

wasn't coined until about forty years after the expedition. They are always held up as this idea, and this is an idea that people subscribe to for a very long time that America was destined to take up the area between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It was our destiny, and therefore anything that stood in our way should just fall before us as we swept outward towards the Pacific Ocean to and justifies the means. And Lewis and Clark was like, look, they're they're an example of that. Clark

eventually died of natural causes. In most of the rest of the party sort of just faded into history. Um, Jean Baptiste, while yeah, he didn't. He became like, okay, the court is not a courtis on the lady a quartier? Right? Yeah, he was prince with a German prince, with German prince Prince Wilhelm. Okay, Um and uh, I think the oldest survivor to be nine, lived all the way to the Civil War and at the age of ninety volunteered to

fight for the Union. And I don't know if they took him up on under They're just like, we get it, your legend, but we got this, so who knows. So that's the Lewis and Clark expedition. The core of discoveries. The dog lived the baby lived. Yeah, the dog made it all the way. They only lost one person on the entire trip, Charles Floyd, and he died early on of what they believe was probably a pendicitist first dependix. And Uh, it's pretty amazing. They didn't have to eat

each other. They didn't even eat the guy who died of the first dependix. No, just dog and horse. Uh. If you you got anything else, No. If you want to learn more about Chuck's favorite story from American history, you can type in Lewis and Clark in the search bar. How stuff works. And since I said search bar, it means it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this diplomatic community. Hey guys. Last week, the Dutch police arrested the Russian diplomat Dmitri borrowed then in his home.

They were called in by concerned neighbors because the diplomat was drunk, hitting his kids, dragging them by their hair through the house. The police arrived as and was witnessed to the brutality against the children and also established that Mr Borodin was extremely drunk. They had no choice but to arrest him to protect the children from further abuse. Immediately, the Russian government came into action and putin the devil incarnate. If you ask me, this is from Jasper demanded his

release and apologies from the Netherlands. Uh. That same afternoon, I started listening to the latest stuff you should know, Lo and behold it was about diplomatic community as a podcaster to a close. I received a news update on my phone that the Dutch government had apologized to the Russians for the arrest because it violated the Treaty of Vienna. Immunity one out again. UH. Since then, UNA SEF has issued a statement that the well being of the children

should be more important than diplomatic community. Maybe something will finally change, probably not person and I hope we declare a board in persona non grata, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, I want to share this actuality of your podcast with you. It's pretty weird that it happened when it did, and luckily it wasn't about floods or earthquakes. And that is from Jasper in Amsterdam, one of my favorite cities. Nice. Thanks a lot, Jasper. It's pretty interesting. I love it

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