Lewis And Clark Reconsidered

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Two men got the highway signs—but the real Lewis and Clark Expedition story was a crowded canoe. We sit down with Craig Fehrman to discuss This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark and why the expedition only comes into focus when we follow the people history usually pushes to the margins—and when we take Native nations seriously as powers, not scenery.

If you care about American history, primary sources, archival research, and how interpretation changes when new evidence appears, this episode is for you. We explore Thomas Jefferson as the “mainspring” behind the mission, the mistaken dream of an easy water route to the Pacific, and the hard reality of distance, terrain, and the Rocky Mountains.

We also dive into diplomacy and danger along the Missouri River, where the Lakota Nation and other Native powers were making strategic decisions of their own. Fehrman’s rotating point-of-view method makes familiar moments feel new by asking what the same event looked like from the other side.

We discuss leadership and military culture in 1804—why Lewis and Clark’s style of discipline, trust, and shared responsibility differed sharply from Army norms—and how figures like John Ordway helped make the expedition function day to day. We also confront the hardest truths, including York under enslavement and Sacagawea as a teenage survivor whose role became indispensable.

Subscribe, share with a history-loving friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show. What famous American story should be retold from another point of view next?

Reach Craig Fehrman atcraigfehrman.com

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Transcript

Welcome To Crossword

Michele McAloon 0:00

Hi, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michelle McLoon. You can find out more about me and the show at bookclues.com. And we have a fabulous book that we're going to talk about this week. Who doesn't need more Lewis and Clark? What a great adventure. What a great story. And Craig Fehrman, the author of the book, The Vast Experience, has captured this story. It would make a great Father's Day gift, a great Mother's Day gift. It's beautifully set, has beautiful pictures in it. Really encourage everyone to take a look at this book. Hope you enjoy the interview. And if you would, be so kind to like and subscribe. That always helps numbers. Thank you. God bless. All right, folks, we have a headbanger of a book today. And it is called This Fast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark. Who doesn't need a little Lewis and Clark in their life? Oh my gosh. This is this is such an American story. And it really encapsulates a lot of kind of the best of America, sort of the worst of America. I mean, it really is truly an American story. And we have with us today Craig Furman. He is the author of this opus of a work. Welcome to the show, Craig.

Craig Fehrman 1:28

Hey, thanks for having me. And thanks for saying that. I I totally agree with your uh with your take on Lewis and Clark.

Michele McAloon 1:33

Oh, it's it's such a story. Oh my goodness. Craig Furman, we comes to us from, I believe he is in Indiana at the end. That's right. That's right. Where he has come to us through the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. Folks, read both of the reviews for this book that have come out over the past couple days. They are phenomenal. Some of the best I've seen in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He has been interviewed on PBS News Hour, MPR. His first book was Author in Chief, and you can find him at his website at Craig Furman, right?com.

Craig Fehrman 2:07

That's it.

Michele McAloon 2:07

Okay. He grew up near Dillsboro, Indiana, University of Southern Indiana, where he graduated from. He's studied at Yale, and he is just all things loose and Clark. Craig, so glad you're here.

Craig Fehrman 2:21

Oh, I I can't wait to wait to dive into this book with you. I'm excited.

Michele McAloon 2:25

Let's start from the very beginning. We've got our two casted characters, Mary Weather Lewis and William and Clark, but behind them are a trail of really just some magnificent, complicated, wonderful, complex people. Lewis and Clark. Let's start with how did they become Lewis and Clark? Because I know it started off with Lewis, but then King Clark. How was this embedded with the envision of uh Thomas Jefferson? Sure.

Craig Fehrman 2:57

Well, yeah, the the first person we have to start with is Jefferson. Clark in a letter called Jefferson the mainspring of the expedition. And when he used that metaphor mainspring, he wasn't talking about a watch. He was talking about a gun. So if you think of the Lewis and Clark expedition as a shot fired, which I don't think is an inaccurate way to think about it, Jefferson was the person who, you know, who was responsible for it. And Jefferson had had this idea for so long, even back into the 1780s, he had had the idea for so long that he initially asked Clark's older brother, George Rogers Clark, if he would be interested in an expedition to kind of make it out to the Pacific Ocean and try to figure out what was between St. Louis and the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Pacific Ocean. So Jefferson had had this idea for a long time. He had a lot of different ideas with it. I sometimes think that this is one of those things that that would never have survived in writing. But Lewis and Clark must have gotten a little exasperated because Jefferson would send these letters and he'd be like, you only have one goal. That goal is just to find this river route. But then, you know, there's a difference between saying something and then what you do. And Jefferson put so many duties on the captains that it was clear that there was never just one goal. It was a huge mission with a huge swath of territory to cover, but then also just so many responsibilities. They had to be diplomats, they had to be scientists, they had to be ethnographers, they had to be military captains. It was, it was an unbelievable mission.

Michele McAloon 4:14

This is a question I asked myself while I was reading, and this may seem ignorant on my part, but how did Jefferson even imagine this trip? Of course, he knew about the Pacific because there had been some writing about it, but how did he imagine that there would be a water route? Where did he get that kind of from?

Craig Fehrman 4:32

Sure. Yeah, I didn't put a lot about this in the book, so you're not wrong to ask it, but he sort of had the wrong idea, and that's one of the things that created real problems for the expedition. And we can't blame Jefferson. He was working with the best knowledge of his time period. His library at Monticello was the best library for what was understood about Western America at that time. But the kind of the dominant idea at that time was that the continents were mirror images of each other. So when Jefferson thought of these shining mountains or these rocky mountains, as they were called, he saw them as an echo of the Appalachian Mountains or the Alleghenies. So he thought there would be mountains, there would be maybe one chain of mountains. And he thought that the rivers would be very similar to the Ohio River and the Mississippi River on the eastern half of the uh continent. So Jefferson's idea was that the eastern half of the continent and the western half of the continent would echo each other. And so it would be a pretty simple thing to find this passage. That was the idea he had. There are letters from Lewis where he talks about this. I mean, Lewis even has a letter where he says the Columbia River and the Missouri River probably just basically touch. That's how close they thought everything would come. Then of course, once they actually went to explore it, they found that the reality was much different.

The Myth Of A Water Route

Michele McAloon 5:38

Right. It was like a 340-mile difference, wasn't it?

Craig Fehrman 5:41

And the sum of the toughest terrain on the entire continent, yes.

Michele McAloon 5:45

Wow. Wow. I kind of wonder in 200 years, are people going to look back at our space program kind of in the same light as they were looking at the core of discovery at the time? I just kind of wondered that. If we, you know, what do we not know now? And I'm sure there's plenty, right?

Craig Fehrman 6:02

Well, I mean, even think about what we've learned in space in terms of the possibility of life and microbial life and things like that on Mars. And, you know, we still don't know for sure, but but it's certainly starting to point in promising directions. That wasn't really the idea, as far as I know, in the Apollo program and things like that. So already we're learning that our assumptions sometimes I feel like what exploration is is unlearning your assumptions as much as it is finding new things. And that was true for Lewis and Clark and true for the space program, too.

Michele McAloon 6:27

Did Jefferson understand the complication of the Native American nations that were out there and the Native American tribes? Aaron Powell He did.

Craig Fehrman 6:35

And I think this is something that's really important. A lot of times when I talk about this book, I try to say, you know, Lewis and Clark were not going into some wilderness or some undiscovered territory. They knew this country was full of people and powerful nations. When Jefferson talked about the Lakota, which were one of the most famous and powerful nations in that time period on the Missouri River, Jefferson said that America was, quote, miserably weak. So that's one of the reasons the expedition was so big and so heavily armed. And Jefferson told Lewis, you know, I don't know if you're going to have a friendly reception or an unfriendly reception, so be prepared for both. The goal from the American perspective was to be friendly. We should be clear that Lewis and Jefferson were always thinking about expansion, always thinking about American empire. But in the short term, they knew that they were going to be at a disadvantage and that they would need help. So they didn't know how many Native nations were there. I mean, Lewis and Clark met with at least 50. And honestly, I think the number is much higher than that. It's just hard to be precise with the journals. So they knew that there were going to be a lot of people, maybe even more than they expected. But this was always seen as learning about human beings as much as learning about territory.

Michele McAloon 7:35

Your book does a really good job of, I mean, does a lot of good jobs, but it shows the complexity of the Native Americans and their politics that they had. They were infinitely human. There was not any, they were not above or below. They had their complexities and their politics and their fighting for resources. And you really show how Lewis and Clark had to navigate that.

Craig Fehrman 7:58

Yeah. I mean, it's easy for us to think of Lewis and Clark trying to use Native people, trying to think like, well, how can we get the Lakota to do what we want to help America? But the opposite was absolutely true that the Lakota were trying to use Lewis and Clark. There was a leader named Black Buffalo who was sort of, you know, he was much more worried about his internal power struggles with the Lakota, because there was another leader named the Partisan who had sort of a different vision for where this nation should go. And so Black Buffalo was a very strategic operator, and he realized I can use these outsiders showing up as a way to persuade my people that my vision for the future is the right one. When I wrote this book, I did it with these kind of rotating points of view. So chapter one is still Lewis's point of view. We still, there's still a lot of Lewis and Clark and Jefferson, I found new stuff about them too. But to me, biography is kind of a superpower. Like if you if you read a biography, you just by definition sort of enter that person's point of view and sort of understand what they care about. And I think it's really important to remember that we have a choice on who we write biography about. And so I wanted different chapters to be from different points of views. So the famous encounter between Lewis and Clark and the Lakota, that's in all the previous books about Lewis and Clark. But when I get to that moment, I tell it entirely from Black Buffalo's point of view. And so I think that helps you understand how he saw the Americans better, but it also makes you understand exactly what you said that he was rational, that he was human, that he was worried about his children and their future, just like Lewis and Clark were worried about their children. Well, Lewis didn't have children, but just like they were worried about America and its future. So you had really patriotic and courageous people on both sides. And I think when you understand both sides, it's more accurate history, but it's also just a better story.

Michele McAloon 9:32

Oh, it is. Everybody has a story. We all, as human beings, we have a story. Skin color just doesn't matter. We have a story, and you do such a great job of bringing out the story of Sakajuya, of York, of these people that they had complex lives, complex emotions. They were caught in something bigger than themselves. It seemed like from the very beginning they understood that they were un undertaking a monumental event. Would you say that was true?

Craig Fehrman 10:02

I think that's absolutely true. One of my favorite people who gets his own point of view chapters in the book is a guy named John Ordway. And he was just kind of a working class soldier. And it was really important for me to put that in there because Lewis and Clark are amazing, but they also had a much different experience. Most of the time, when somebody's in the cold river towing the boats, that's not Lewis and Clark. That's the soldiers who are kind of the working class, literal manpower for the expedition. But even in Ordway's letters, there are only a couple of his letters that survive. But he talks about, you know, we're going to make great discoveries and we're going to get great rewards. And so he writes back to his parents who are home in New Hampshire, and you can just, you can feel the pride radiating off the page. He is so proud to do this. It's really cool to remember that Lewis and Clark were viral news in their time period. The newspapers, and I spent a lot of time going through old newspapers as I was working on this. Anytime there was a scrap of information about Lewis and Clark, whether it was true or not, it was in every newspaper in the country. So that you had headlines flying around. Lewis and Clark have been kidnapped and shipped to China. They were gone for more than two years. And so nobody really knew what was happening. Even Jefferson, the president, didn't know, but every American cared. Again, just like the space program, just the same way we have all been obsessed with Artemis II and inspired by that and curious about that. That's how most Americans felt about Lewis and Clark, too.

Michele McAloon 11:14

You did a great job with John Ordway, because I am a retired Army officer. I've met loads of John Ordway. I have met loads of first sergeants. And how you describe his responsibilities, his sense of responsibility for his people, for his leaders is, I mean, that just encapsulates what the experience that I've had with really good first sergeants, command sergeant majors in the army. And you do a great job. Lewis and Clark kind of do something different on this. They don't approach traditional discipline. Explain that a little bit. And how do you think that eventually affected the overall success of the mission?

unknown 11:53

Sure.

Native Nations And Power Politics

Craig Fehrman 11:53

Well, this is, I think, this is also a good example of why this book took me five years, but why I think those five years were years well spent. Because I didn't start with Lewis and Clark. I started with what was the military culture in this time period. And I really appreciate you saying that about John Ordway, by the way, because I worked really hard. I interviewed military personnel and read a lot of scholarship about it too, trying because this was always a military operation. And so the army in this time period was not the army that we know and love today. It was a pretty terrible place. Most of the people who went there were do going there because they had no other options. And the officers were incredibly cruel. Now, I mean, you can kind of understand from the perspective of 1804 why it was this way. You know, class was much more prominent back then, and the officers were dealing with men who could be quite tough. I found so many stories in the archives of a soldier going up to a captain and saying, I have a problem here. And the captain doesn't even talk to him. He just grabs a rifle or a whip and just starts beating his own man until he bleeds. And so that was just kind of the way the army worked back then, that it was discipline first. And again, by discipline, we don't mean something small like you lose your sword. We mean like brutal physical discipline. That happens first and then questions happen later. And so once you understand that context, what Lewis and Clark did sort of pops out in technicolor. It's incredible because not only did they scale back the physical discipline, although there were times when they felt it was necessary to do it, they involved the men at almost every step. There's another pretty famous moment from the expedition where there's a vote on the Pacific Ocean where people get a chance to say, you know, where should we put our winter quarters? But that was the last in a long string of moments. I was able to show by really reading the journals carefully and finding some new documents that Lewis and Clark again and again allowed their men to have a vote. And I believe Lewis and Clark were very strategic about this. They decided we're not going to beat our men, we're going to trust our men, and we're going to empower our men. And I think they did that for a couple of reasons. First, they wanted the men to be able to react quickly because they were going somewhere where they didn't really know what was going to happen. And so if there was an emergency, the men needed to be able to make good choices and make fast choices on their own. But also, I think it contributed to that line from Ordway's letter, that idea of great discoveries and great rewards. The more they made the men feel like they were part of a team and part of a team that was doing something great, the more they would kind of build that cohesion. It was a brilliant decision and especially brilliant when you realize how much this was antithetical to this time period. Most officers from Lewis and Clark's background wouldn't even talk to their soldiers. And Lewis and Clark did things completely differently because they were doing a strange mission, but also I think because they had a different idea about how a military unit should function.

Michele McAloon 14:26

And it was a foreshadowing of the modern army. I think that is what the strength of our modern army is now, is that everyone contributes. They contribute in a hierarchy in a chain of command, but everybody is valued in the U.S. Army. And I do think it is our strength.

Craig Fehrman 14:41

I totally agree with you. And I don't think Lewis and Clark have gotten enough credit for this, honestly. I th I hope that one thing that people take away from the book is not just appreciating John Ordway and how, you know, there's always a great first sergeant making any big unit run, but also that Lewis and Clark were very progressive, not in a political sense, but in a kind of historical sense. They saw the future. They had personal reasons for this and sort of command operation reasons for this, but they were able to see a different way to construct a military unit and it worked.

Michele McAloon 15:06

You show another very interesting person, York, who was the enslaved person of Clark, but you showed such a great way of how that relationship, it begins off one way, it changes into something else, and he becomes really truly a part of the core of discovery. Tell us a little bit about York, because this is really a fascinating point in your book.

Craig Fehrman 15:28

Appreciate you saying that. People knew that York was a part of the expedition. It's not like I have discovered this, but the traditional account has always just been York and Clark were around the same age. They grew up as buddies. Then once, as often happens, once the enslaved person is 10 or 12, they realize that, well, actually, we're not buddies. This is different. And Clark was kind of in charge of York. York went along, and there were some interesting moments where Native people were amazed by York because they'd never met somebody with such dark colored skin and they kind of celebrated him. And maybe York said, Oh, wow, I guess I am special. That is very much the received narrative about York, or sometimes he doesn't even show up that much at all. But I just don't think any of that made sense because of what I read in the journals and because of the best scholarship I read about these kinds of relationships, and because of slave narratives, I read a lot of slave narratives written by people sometimes 10 or 20 years after York, but people who would describe their own experiences of living in Kentucky. As far as we know, York could not read or write, but there is still a lot of York's perspective and voice preserved just because Clark would write about him a lot. So to me, I think the truer story is that York hated being enslaved. I mean, the vast majority of records we have from enslaved people in this period, that's true. And it's again just common humanity and common sense that you wouldn't want this. But also, York realized I'm trapped in this brutal and unfair system, but I can make choices. So the fact that York rose to be Clark's body servant or sort of his personal servant, that's not just luck. That's not Clark's choice. That's York's choice. Because York could have said, you know, I don't want this extra work. I don't want this extra pressure. I'll just take a couple beatings and then get left behind on the plantation in Kentucky. But York was excellent. He excelled in so many areas, and that it continued on the expedition. Again and again, there are clues that York was somebody who was finding ways to show his talents and finding ways to stand on his own. He was the fifth named person to shoot a buffalo and kill a buffalo in the journals. We know that he was an excellent swimmer, so he must have been essential when they were running some of the worst rapids. And in these different moments, you can sort of see Clark, Clark wants to stay in control. If you read the journals closely, it's it's it's pretty uncomfortable because slavery as a psychological system was very uncomfortable for the enslaved people, most of all. But for us as modern people, looking back on it too, Clark wanted to control York. Clark wanted to be in charge. Clark elevated York, but then hated it when York got credit. But you can see York through the course of this expedition changing and realizing I can assert myself more. I, Clark might tell me to do something, but we're not in St. Louis anymore. So I don't have to do that. And so within the limits of the system, I think York was able to assert himself more. And he really did become an essential part of the unit, even if all that unfortunately unraveled once they uh once they returned.

Michele McAloon 18:03

You show something very, very interesting. You show Clark as kind of being the person, and it it here's the irony of it. Clark may have had this enslaved man, but he was kind of the personality between Lewis and Clark. Lewis was more intellectual, he was more introverted, he was less social. It's kind of strange because Lewis is a darker personality, and you've got Clark, who is definitely a lighter personality, but he's got this enslaved person. So it's, you know, it's it's ironic, really.

Craig Fehrman 18:33

Well, that's that's why I think that method of kind of having the rotating points of view is important. Sometimes people say, well, we need to judge people by the standards of their time period. And I agree with that in general, but I also don't think it goes far enough because even Lewis and Clark, two people about the same age, served in the same military, came from the same state, they're just radically different human beings. So we can't really say, let's judge Lewis by the standards of 1804. It's let's figure out what Lewis's standards were. And on this issue of slavery, I found new stuff that showed that Lewis, he wasn't an abolitionist, he wasn't a reformer, but he was very uncomfortable around the institution of slavery. And even when they get back, Clark would get so angry at York that he would want to beat him. And Lewis would intervene and say, no, I think you're going too far. And so you can see that even Lewis and Clark on the issue of slavery had very different views. And so in this book, what I tried to do was not say this is what 2026 says about 1804. It's just there are these 10 people in 1804. Let's try to understand how each of them saw the world, and then readers can kind of make up their own mind.

Michele McAloon 19:32

Contextualizing people, and not I don't want to say contextualizing people in their times, just contextualizing people. We're complicated, we're sinful, we're we're glorious, we're creative, we're we're just so many different things. And every single human life is like that despite the time that you live in. It just, that's just the way we are.

Leadership That Defied Army Norms

Craig Fehrman 19:52

I totally agree. And and one thing that's amazing about the expedition is not just that they go through 8,000 miles and deal with mountains and grizzlies and all that. That's that's all incredible too. But if you really take the time to look, it's such a great document of the humanity that you're talking about. Because they're keeping these journals at this all along the way, more than a million words they wrote down, plus a lot of other sources. And so we really, we don't just have this incredible crucible. We have great documentation of what human beings are doing in the middle of this crucible. I think that's why it's such a great story. And that's why for me it was such a privilege to write about it. I I wanted you to feel like you were in the canoe, but I also wanted you to feel like you knew the person who was sitting in the canoe next to you, right? Like these are just such remarkable human beings.

Michele McAloon 20:33

This is the success of your book. You feel like you're rowing down the Ohio, you feel like you're rolling down the Missouri. You really do. You can feel the gnats, you can feel the hunger. That really is the success of this book. You really feel immersed in this experience in a way that a lot of Lewis and Clark literature I've never read before, like this. And I'm I'm a Lewis and Clark fangirl. So it is, it's just amazing. Let's talk about the star, or at least so many years later, we think of her as the star of the trip. And that is old Sakajui. Tell us a little bit about her.

Craig Fehrman 21:08

Well, first of all, she's an amazing person. Like she's kind of turned into this myth. Uh that according to the National Park Service, there are more statues of her than any other woman in North America. But she's one of the rare myths where like the reality lives up to the hype, in my opinion. But one thing I was able to learn about her and understand better is just how brutal her, the few years she had before the expedition were. Because too often, I think, maybe because of this desire to make her a myth, we sort of sanitize what the years of her life were like before the expedition. We say, oh, she's the wife of this fur trader. But that's not the right word. She was a slave. And this is not me projecting 2026 views back. Clark used that word in an interview after the expedition. He was like, Sackage was a slave. And so there's been really great work by professors at universities to understand just how common it was for Native women in this time period to be enslaved. And once they were enslaved, they were abused, they were impregnated. It was a very Violent and and abusive form of life. It was tough. And let's also remember Sacchageweeus 13, 14, 15 while all this is happening.

Michele McAloon 22:09

Yeah, stunning. That's that is actually a stunning figure. Yeah.

Craig Fehrman 22:12

Yeah. It breaks your heart. But what's amazing is what comes after, right? Like all the myth stuff is true. It does happen. And I think if you understand the brutality that she had to go through in the few years before it, it makes everything she does after it only more inspiring. And it also makes you, again, helps you understand how strategic she was. Was Sacagawea this friendly and resourceful tour guide? Yes, she was. But if you see her as somebody who is enslaved and beaten and abused, then you can understand she was being a friendly tour guide because she realized, you know, if I make myself indispensable to Lewis and Clark, they will protect me. And there are many examples in the journals of Lewis and Clark protecting the Shoshone and protecting Sacagawea. But that's not just because they were nice guys, although I believe they often were. It was because Sacagawea realized, you know, I can make choices here. I have a very tough set of circumstances, just like York, but there are also things I can do to protect myself and to protect my newborn son. She was able to be strategic. She was able to accomplish those things, and she made it hundreds of miles back to her people and then hundreds of miles more. She got to see the ocean too. And I just think that's so inspiring.

Michele McAloon 23:16

I think there's a really endearing moment where she says, No, I'm I want to see the ocean too. Yeah. I feel like that. No, no, guys, I've done all of this. I'm going to go see the ocean much more.

Craig Fehrman 23:25

And that's yeah, it's it's a wonderful moment. And there are little hints like that throughout. She was a very assertive person. And in that, again, the fact that she's a teenager makes this more impressive too. I don't know that we can access what this must have felt like for her because she's the only woman with 32, 31, because we we won't count her own son in this, with 31 pretty tough men in very tough circumstances. It would the easiest thing to do probably would just be to be quiet. But she was not a quiet person. She was helpful, she was opinionated, she was smart, and she was tough.

Michele McAloon 23:54

Let me ask you, what happened to her son? Your book didn't really cover this, but I'm just more of curiosity. Pompey, was he adopted by Clark?

Craig Fehrman 24:04

He ended up at a certain point, Sacagawea and Sharbano, who was the man who owned her, they ended up heading back up to Missouri. It's not entirely clear whose choice that was, but there is a journal from a trader who said that that Sacajewea, or the woman we think is Sacagawea, wanted to go back home. So they lived in St. Louis for a little while and she may have just gotten homesick. Very understandable. And so what happened is they left Pompey, whose full name was Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau. He stayed with Clark. And so Clark paid for his schooling. There's good documentation on this. And eventually, Pompey, he he led a pretty remarkable life too. He spent some time in Europe, in Germany, actually. He, by according to the best records we have, he fathered a child while he was out there. He ended up back in the American West, and he kind of shows up in various places up through the 1860s. So he, like his mother, was very gifted with language, was very curious, was a traveler, and got to see and do things we can't even imagine today.

York And The Realities Of Enslavement

Michele McAloon 24:58

Interesting. Very interesting. Okay, so you've got some good Indian personalities too, or Native American, excuse me. Sure. Either one's Black Buffalo and Wolfcalf. Tell us a little bit about these because they were definitely leaders and I mean, just formidable people in their own right. Yeah.

Craig Fehrman 25:15

Black Buffalo was the leader of the Lakota. And so we talked about him a little bit about how his he sort of used Lewis and Clark to solve this problem he had about an internal schism within the Lakota people themselves, and sort of trying to, Black Buffalo said, I want to have negotiations and relations with America. And he was able to pull that off, and they sort of formed an alliance that lasted through the War of 1812. And you can see this alliance in new documents I was able to see on the American side of things, but you can also see it in the Lakota's own documents. One question people often have in this book is like, how do you even know what Native people thought? But Native people have their own oral traditions. Scholars have shown these are very reliable and contain a lot of information, not just dates and facts, but also sort of cultural understandings about their priorities and values. But also they would record things like Lakota had these beautiful and rich winter counts, which would kind of preserve some of the information that you would need. Another great example, though, is Wolfcap. One thing that I think is really important in this book is that it's very easy to think Lewis and Clark versus Native people. But just like Lewis and Clark were very different than each other, just like you and me today are very different from each other, different native people were very different too. And so Wolfcap, one reason I was so happy to feature him in the book is that he was a teenager in this time period. Black Buffalo was an older person. He had kids, he was incredibly powerful and wealthy. He saw the world one way. Wolcf was somebody on the way up. He was, you know, closer to a John Ordway where it's like, well, I haven't really found my place in the world yet, but I'm ambitious. I want things. And so it was really neat to capture Wolfkaf's point of view. And then of course the Blackfoot as a people are just much different than the Lakota too. And this is probably the coolest thing I found in this book. I honestly did not think I was going to find that much new stuff because it's Lewis and Clark. And yet once I got in the archives, I did find a lot of new stuff. But probably the single coolest thing was I found an interview that Wolfkaft gave late in his life. And this was, you know, a white historian writing down. If you look at the notebook page, and I reprinted the notebook page in my book, you can see the handwriting is just cramped because it's trying to capture down every word. And so Wolkaft told his story of this encounter where the Blackfoot and just Lewis and kind of a side group of the expedition meet up and it turns into a battle. That was the word Wolfkaff used. And up to this point, we've mostly just sort of focused on Lewis's point of view. But having Wolfkaft's interview and having a way to kind of bounce those two perspectives off each other, I thought helped me able to kind of like retell that encounter and offer a very new interpretation of it. I realized that readers might be a little skeptical because this is new. So in an appendix in the book, I actually printed both accounts. I printed Lewis's journal right next to Wolfkaft's interview, full text of both. And I think it's important to remember that like that's what history is. History is interpretation. It would be dishonest to say it's not. So, you know, once you read my book, if you're like, well, how do we know that that this battle went down the way Craig said it does? Go to that appendix, read both accounts, come up with your own interpretation. This is a conversation that that's going to keep going because Lewis and Clark is such a great story.

Michele McAloon 28:06

You know, that's a great way of putting that. And we're reading that appendix, it's really good. You know what? Everybody has their own perspective. And you see that, that's where it's hard to find the truth sometimes because it's crystalline. It has 360 degrees. So one person sees it one way and one person sees it the other way. And we think we are so new and innovative, our media and all that. No, it's no, folks. It's just it's we just hear more of it. And it stayed the same. Let's talk about how you did your research and how you did find new material. So you talk about the journals. These were actually journals. It was Clark that did most of it was it Clark that did most of the writing?

Craig Fehrman 28:43

Well, there's at least five journals that have survived, but there we know we can see little traces that them at least two other men probably kept journals. So there may have been seven, eight, nine journals for sure, but at least five or six survived for different points, which is one of the reasons this is great because you get different perspectives. So on that Lakota encounter we've talked about, you know, Clark said the partisan sort of gets in in Clark's face and pushes him around and insults him, and Clark gets very upset and his his sense of honor is threatened. So Clark pulls out his sword. Things really escalate on both sides, although both sides are able to not fire any shots. But all Clark said in his journal was, you know, I spoke very in warm terms to him. But one of the other men said, What Clark said was, he said, I have enough medicine on my boat to destroy 20 nations of your size. And that's that's that's a lot different, right? You can see why Clark, Clark might not want to take a gap there.

Speaker 2 29:32

Yeah. Yeah.

Sacagawea Beyond The Statue

Craig Fehrman 29:34

So you could see why Clark might not want that line in the record, even though you can also understand, you know, standing on that shore, his sword's out, there's native people all around, the guns are pulled. Like you can understand why Clark would have said that. It's it's a very human response to that kind of tense moment. The only reason we know that comment happened is because somebody else was keeping a journal too. So these journals are more than a million words. And a scholar, a guy named Gary Moulton, spent more than 20 years editing kind of the definitive text where we have every word, every variation. It's as high quality of a text as what you could get for the best Shakespeare editions today. So my research generally started with that. The journals are more than a million words. I read them at least three times, but from many places, I read them many more times than that, because I would just read them over and over, try and find every detail, every perspective I could. So I started there, and that's where I kind of figured out not just the arc of the story, but also how am I going to do these different perspectives? Because the journals tell us a lot about Clark, but they tell us a lot about York too. They tell us a lot about Sacagawea, that line you mentioned where she's like, I want to go see the ocean, I want to go see the whale. That's in the journals. You just have to, you know, read the journals, not just from Clark's point of view, but also from Sacagawea's point of view, too. And so I would do that. And then from there, I read a lot of scholarship. It was really important to me, especially for the different native nations. You know, there have been professors who have written whole books about the Lakota or about the Blackfoot or about the Clatsup, a guy named Kobe, who's a really important person in the book. That was his nation. And so I would try to read the scholarship from those nations. I would interview native people from those nations today. And they, especially the people I spoke to from the Clatsup, they really they changed the way I thought about this book because I first started talking to them. I could tell they were interviewing me as much as I was interviewing them. And they were very honest. They just said, we have our stories, we have our history, but every time we give it, it gets exploited like everything else. As a human being, I have never had to experience that, but I could see that I could hear the pain in their voice and I could hear the seriousness in their voice. And I tried to honor that. And it it felt like a big responsibility, honestly, that I wanted to capture what Lewis went through, but I wanted to capture what Kobeway went through too. And so those interviews were really important. And then just going to archives and finding kind of things that had been overlooked or things people hadn't understood. That Wolfkaf interview, there is a letter from the guy who wrote it down where he was writing to another historian. And this is like in the 1890s. They're all friends with Teddy Roosevelt, that kind of period where every historian is also a scientist. It's a really fun period of American intellectual life. And so the guy who took down the interview said, you know, I interviewed this guy and I think I wrote it down on my notebook. I'll I'll check and get back to you. But he never checked. He just got busy. So I was like, Well, I know this guy's notebooks are sitting somewhere. Let me find his notebooks and see. And right there on page one of those notebooks was Wolfcast's story in Wolfkaf's own words. So just taking the time to follow up on every lead and to really think about the perspective. How can I get as close as I can as somebody alive in 2026 to seeing the world the way that it looked to Wolfcalf in 1806? I didn't fully succeed, but I sure gave it everything I had.

Michele McAloon 32:31

Wow. I mean, just the detail in it. And I tell you, there's some things that you learn in this book too. I didn't realize the Rockies are four ranges. I didn't realize that.

Craig Fehrman 32:42

I mean, there are probably more. They thought, you know, when we were talking about Jefferson's early ideas, he thought maybe one range. Then the native people were like, it's at least four ranges. I don't even know how we would count the ranges today. To me, the Rockies are not a range of mountains. It's like a region. Like that's the only way. And that's the biggest thing that Lewis and Clark discovered in terms of geography and what they brought back to Westerners is they were like, you know, this is not a chain of mountains the way you think of a chain of mountains. This is multiple ranges. This is a region. This is an obstacle on a scale that we just haven't seen before.

Michele McAloon 33:10

In reading this book, you know what I decided to do was teach myself how to uh find latitude. Oh, nice. Longitude's a little harder, but latitude to figure out how to do latitude, because what would it be like on a canoe trying to figure out a latitude without a Google map? And that was actually kind of a little side hobby I have now, trying to figure out the latitude wherever I am. That I love that. I mean, there's so many things, just plant life and the what a pawpaw is, and what just things that just these little tidbits that you don't need to know to live, but it makes your life that much more colorful. Right.

Craig Fehrman 33:44

And it makes their life colorful too, I think. I to me, some writers are like, I'm a researcher, and some writers are like I'm a storyteller. My answer is always I'm both. And to me, doing the five years of research, like that's why I was able to tell a story that that makes you feel like you're in the canoe. I had to get every detail I could, and then I had to be selective and say, well, if I have 10 good details, the reader's gonna fall asleep after three. So I should probably only use two. But if I hadn't done the research, I wouldn't have the best details to choose from. So it's for me, those kinds of small details, that's what gets me excited in my work. And so I hope that it's what makes readers feel excited as they read.

Michele McAloon 34:19

It is, and it's a good historical narrative because you do, you say, this is maybe what he thought. Maybe he was thinking this. You're not being definitive. You're just giving room to this would be a natural logical thing for a human being in this situation, but you set it up so it's reasonable that you understand that a human being would probably think about that in this situation.

Craig Fehrman 34:42

I I don't want to say this aggravates me, but this is something that I think people misunderstand about historical writing. I th I think what you said is exactly right. Some people are like, well, this book has must-have and probably in it. That means the guy is making it up. No, it's actually the opposite. It means that I'm careful. The statements that have probably or must-have attached to them, I'm 99% sure, but I'm not 100% sure. If I was 100% sure, then I wouldn't put probably and must-have. You know, I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I did a lot of work. And so I have not just inferences, but very reasonable and well-articulated and argued inferences. It's important to put that material in the book, especially because without some of those hedges, we're not going to be able to make Sacagwea and York appear as complicated as Lewis and Clark because they did not leave behind a written record. If I wrote a book where Lewis and Clark seem really nuanced and complicated and Sacagwea and York do not, that's not more accurate. That's less accurate because we know they were human beings and we see moments in the journals where their humanity pops out. And so when I use those kinds of hedges, like probably or must have, that's not me taking shortcuts or making guesses. That's me just being precise in my language because I care so much about the truth.

Michele McAloon 35:51

What was the most surprising thing you learned? I know you probably had five years of standout moments, but what do you take away from this whole beautiful experience of the Peter?

Black Buffalo Wolfcalf And A Battle

Craig Fehrman 36:01

I think the biggest takeaway for me is probably the simplest one. And that's that's how life is sometimes, right? Like, like when I first started looking on working on this book, I thought of Lewis and Clark as Lewis and Clark. I think that's how most people do. If you've ever taken a family road trip in the American West, you see these brown and white signs on the side of the highway. They're like the Lewis and Clark Trail. And it's just two guys. And they're wearing the wrong hats, by the way. No, no offense to the National Park Service, but they're wearing the kinds of hats you wore in the Revolutionary War, and this is 30 years later. But it's it's okay. Nobody's perfect. I'm sure my book has mistakes in it too. But it's just two guys. That's the key thing. And that's how most people think of it. They think of Lewis and Clark as two people. Maybe Sacagewee is there too, but it's two people. And the biggest takeaway to me was that it really was a vast enterprise. That's Clark's phrase, by the way. He knew that too. Lewis knew that too. But it's easy for us to forget that 200 years on. We have to remind ourselves of what that world was like, how huge and ambitious this mission was, and how of course it took a lot of people. Like the Artemis mission was not just the four people who got to fly around the moon. It was thousands of other people. The Lewis and Clark expedition was the same way. And so being able to understand that, and I hope convey that through those rotating points of view, that to me was the thing I care about most of the book. And I hope readers appreciate just seeing how many amazing human beings got swept up in this story.

Michele McAloon 37:16

I think you have a broad lesson here, too, is that when we look at historical figures, they're not cartoon figures. They lived in a real time, a real place, they had real ambitions, they had real failures, they had real faults about them. Woe to us to say this was a horrible person or this was we only know from the evidence given, but to take away their humanity in that moment, and there have been some horrible people in history, and we can call them horrible people in history, but to take away their humanity makes them cartoon characters and it makes them something less than real.

Craig Fehrman 37:48

I totally agree.

Michele McAloon 37:50

Yeah, and your book, I mean, you know, you want to be friends with all these people. You feel sad when when Meriwether Lewis kills himself, which was tragic at the end. It's just, it's actually an amazing, amazing book. And folks, if you are looking for a great Father's Day gift, and I'm gonna say a Mother's Day gift, too.

Speaker 2 38:08

Absolutely.

Michele McAloon 38:10

This is the book. It is, I mean, and I have my run to the Amazon store. This is it. This it's the vast enterprise, a new history of Lewis and Clark and Craig Furman. I have heard that the Artemis is looking for a biographer. So what do you think?

Craig Fehrman 38:27

That's a fun idea. That would be a that would be a true honor. I'm sure there will be a lot of great books produced by that, and that there should be. They've made my day a little brighter. Sometimes it's nice to think about the moon when the world can feel a little crazy. Sometimes it's nice to think about history when the world can feel a little crazy. So it's Absolutely.

Michele McAloon 38:42

Absolutely. And I just love the fact that this book has come out with Artemis. I mean, I just uh I mean, talk about happy coincidences, right?

Craig Fehrman 38:50

That's just good luck. Yeah. Five years working on it, and then the whole time I was like, I really should finish this sooner, but maybe I finished it just at the right time.

Michele McAloon 38:56

I think you did. Craig, I wish you the best of luck with this book. And folks, I mean, I cannot, this is one of probably the best books that I have interviewed and read this year. So it is a must, must read. And thank you for saying that. I hope it sells really well because it's a great American story, and it's a story that I think America needs right now, to tell you the truth.

Craig Fehrman 39:17

I agree with everything you said, and I appreciate your questions. This is a really fun conversation.

Michele McAloon 39:21

All right. Thank you, Craig, and God bless. I really appreciate it.