Lewis and Clark became American legends. But they didn’t explore the West alone. A new book profiles the forgotten members of the Corps of Discovery and their remarkable stories.

Guest

Craig Fehrman, Author of “This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark.”

Book Excerpt

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

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Transcript

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: In the fall of 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were floating down the Missouri River back towards civilization. They had just endured 8,000 miles of rapids, mountains and forests. Many of the farmers they passed along the way assumed they were dead.

A couple of years earlier, they had been sent westward by President Thomas Jefferson to explore and chart their passage through a nation newly doubled in size. Their task was to reach the Pacific Ocean, which they did. Upon their return to St. Louis, Lewis and Clark received a hero’s welcome, and they began shaping a narrative that would become intertwined with the story of how the United States became both a nation and a continent spanning sea to shining sea.

But that narrative often leaves out other members of the Corps of Discovery that joined Lewis and Clark, and their stories are just as interesting, if not more, than the two men whose names are now synonymous with exploration and adventure.

Well, the new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark, tells the stories of these lesser-known men. It’s by Craig Fehrman, and he joins us today from Bloomington, Indiana.

Craig, welcome to On Point.

CRAIG FEHRMAN: Hey, thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, Craig, so before we, we dive in to the stories of these other individuals in the Corps of Discovery, I think we should just do a little bit of like History 101 here.

FEHRMAN: Sure, sure.

CHAKRABARTI: And remind ourselves sort of what led up to the first steps that Lewis and Clark, and the Corps as a whole, took on their westward journey. Why is it that President Jefferson at the time said, “We gotta send a group of explorers out?”

FEHRMAN: Well, I think the biggest answer is just Jefferson himself. This was an idea that he had been obsessed with for decades. The first time that we have in writing where he was thinking about sending explorers west, he didn’t ask William Clark, he asked his older brother, George Rogers Clark, in the 1780s. So this was an idea Jefferson had held for a long time, and then once he became president, it wasn’t just an idea, it was something he could actually execute. He finally had the political power to pull it off.

So America at this point, you know, is states mostly close to the Atlantic Ocean, slowly, slowly spreading into the middle of the continent, but Jefferson was always looking further than that. He was always thinking about the Pacific. He was thinking about this huge unmapped part of the continent.

A lot of other people were thinking about it too, including the people who were still living there, but Jefferson wanted to get more information. He wanted to start expanding America’s imperial claims.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so then how did he go about doing that?

FEHRMAN: Well, he started out with a small plan, and then that plan just got bigger and bigger because the stakes got bigger and because the dangers got bigger.

So Lewis was somebody who lived with him in the White House when Jefferson was president. Lewis was kind of Jefferson’s chief of staff, and they sort of talked about this idea together. It was supposed to be 10 or 12 people. Jefferson had to get it approved through Congress first, and that was actually pretty hard to do. You know, today we think of Lewis and Clark as this iconic American story. Who wouldn’t wanna vote yes for Lewis and Clark? But a lot of people didn’t wanna vote yes for Lewis and Clark.

And so they, they, they got the, the expedition approved, and Jefferson, you know, said, “Let’s start taking these steps. Let’s put together a team. Let’s go to St. Louis. Let’s get more supplies. Let’s make the team bigger, and then let’s start heading up the Missouri and see what we find next.”

CHAKRABARTI: I suppose I should mention the Louisiana Purchase just so that we do have all of our history here together. That was completed what, in 1803?

FEHRMAN: 1803. Yep, yep. Right.

CHAKRABARTI: 1803. Okay. So that was obviously a major piece of this puzzle because now the United States owned a lot of this territory that Jefferson —

FEHRMAN: Well, yeah, it’s really tricky. People always think Louisiana Purchase, then Lewis and Clark. But you know, I’m not somebody who’s a big myth buster. I don’t love history that like scolds people and says everything you know is wrong. But in this one case, I’m afraid I do have to put on the myth-busting hat and, and say that it’s important to say the expedition first, then the Louisiana Purchase.

Because Jefferson had been working on it for decades, like we said, and he and Lewis started doing the real work to plan it in 1802. So the expedition was always happening. The Louisiana Purchase was an incredible bit of good luck that made the expedition even more important, but Jefferson was heading west whether he owned the land or not. That’s how much he cared about this, and how much he thought it was the future of America.

CHAKRABARTI: One of the reasons why I love this job is, I’m telling you, Craig, I learn something new every day. (LAUGHS)

FEHRMAN: Well, that’s okay. I had to learn this while I was working on it.

CHAKRABARTI: And your myth-busting here is much appreciated because I genuinely think for the past several decades I thought the Louisiana Purchase came first.

Okay, so one more quick thing about Lewis and Clark and then we will get to the other members of the Corps of Discovery. So you said Meriwether Lewis, did I hear that right, had already been working for Jefferson or was that Clark?

FEHRMAN: No, that’s Lewis. He was in the White House. Jefferson said they were like two mice in church living in the White House and working together.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And a little bit about Clark’s background?

FEHRMAN: Well, similar to Lewis’ in that they both grew up in Virginia and were both soldiers for a long time, but where Lewis ended up in the White House, Clark and his family headed to the quote-unquote west. They headed to Kentucky.

And so Clark lived outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and his family owned a plantation there. They were slaveholders, and they were growing crops and that was the future Clark thought he might have for himself. Then one day he gets a letter from his old friend Lewis saying, “Do you wanna go on this amazing adventure?” And he quickly said yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Hmm. Okay. And so, you know, again, in my sheepish admission to what I did not know which is why books like yours are so valuable, is, you know, whenever I am definitely one of those Americans that whenever I think of Lewis and Clark, I think of, yes, those two men plus the other folks, right? Because they didn’t go alone.

But I’d never given a second thought, honestly, to all the other people who were part of this expedition. So we’ll talk about specific members of the Corps of Discovery in a second, but how were, you know, the other members chosen? How big was the corps?

FEHRMAN: Well, at its biggest it would be 30 or 40 people. So, you know, I think sometimes we picture Lewis and Clark in a canoe, and maybe Sacagawea’s there too, and that’s kinda all we see. I love Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea, they’re really important, but this was always a bigger military operation.

One thing I did in my book is recalculate the budgets, which sounds kinda boring, but it actually produced a really interesting point, which is that Jefferson spent as much in terms of the federal budget on the expedition as we spend on NASA today. So this was a huge, huge undertaking with big political goals, with big nation-building goals, and that’s why you needed 30 or 40 people. I mean, honestly, there were times when they probably wished they had more people than that. It was a big, big operation.

CHAKRABARTI: I love that metaphor, though. I mean, it makes so much sense, right? It’s this huge exploration that the nation’s undertaking in order to better understand  its universe at the time. But if it was that expensive, um, I mean, did Jefferson have to convince Congress?

FEHRMAN: That’s exactly right. And then he had a couple tricks because he was a brilliant president and a brilliant political operator. So, you know, the final cost was more than $100,000, but Jefferson’s budget request was for $2,500.

I like to say that Lewis and Clark was a military operation, but the most military thing about them was that they started out wanting $2,500 and ended up spending more than $100,000. Because that’s how military projects often go. But then, of course, they also produced really important research, too, and Lewis and Clark did.

So if you wanna think about the political time in Jefferson’s period, you know, in 1802, 1803, really just think about today. Because there were two sides in Washington, and the second one side had an idea, the other side would say, “We don’t really need to hear what it’s about. We’re just against it because you’re for it.”

And the Lewis and Clark Expedition was like this, too. Jefferson had to really work hard, and this is one of the stories I tell for the first time in my book, to get the expedition funded, to keep people in his party from defecting because there was so much international intrigue in this time period. You know, Napoleon was circling Britain, Russia, all the native nations that were in the middle of the continent that Lewis and Clark knew to prepare for.

There are so many different kind of factions and power bases going on in this moment, and one of them is just the people in Washington who disapprove of everything Jefferson does.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, because he’s Jefferson? Or because they thought that the money would be better spent to deal with, as you said, these other international dynamics that were going on?

FEHRMAN: Well, it’s sorta hard to say, just like today, right? Like, does one party oppose things because they oppose it on the principles or because they hate the people on the other side? Sometimes it’s hard to be able to assign those motives, and I think that’s true in 1803, too.

CHAKRABARTI: Could be both, honestly.

FEHRMAN: Right, exactly. A little bit of both. That’s always the answer when it comes to human beings.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So that’s fascinating. And by the way, I should say that so much of this new scholarship that you have comes from actually, and we’ll talk about this more, but having read what journals that were kept during the time. Does that include journals that the president himself had?

FEHRMAN: Well, Clark, or sorry, Jefferson didn’t have journals at the time, but what I would — the best source for understanding Jefferson was actually what other people wrote. Because Jefferson could be very taciturn, and sometimes it’s very hard to understand what he did.

So what I did is I just went and read every letter or journal I could find from people on the other side of the political aisle. And it was actually in reading those journals when I started seeing people say, you know, “We’re scared about this. We’re stressed about this. We’re worried about Napoleon.”

And that’s what made this time period come alive to me because so many histories just sort of, you know, smash the Louisiana Purchase of Lewis and Clark into one big Western expansion idea, which, I get it, I understand, but my job was to really understand what was life like back then. What was Jefferson seeing? What was Lewis seeing?

And so sometimes reading these journal entries from other senators who disliked Jefferson but would have dinner with him in the White House, that’s where I would find the details that started to unlock what was really happening.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, because you’re exactly right. We often learn about this period of American history, and specifically the expedition as, like, everyone was behind the idea of exploring a newly expanded nation, and they just got underway. But it was not like that. Alright, so one last thing about Lewis and Clark then specifically. You write that Lewis essentially begins, what, in Pittsburgh?

FEHRMAN: Mm-hmm.

CHAKRABARTI: Builds this huge barge, picks up  Clark in, not in Pittsburgh, but in…?

FEHRMAN: Louisville, yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: In Louisville. Okay. And then recruits other people to join the corps along the way. Tell me more about that.

FEHRMAN: Well, it’s, I think what I would compare this to is actually Artemis II. The way that that was viral news, we were always interested, you know, what’s the latest picture we’re gonna see on Twitter or Instagram? The Corps of Discovery was that in its time period.

So Americans were constantly reading in the newspaper, looking for any updates they could find about this big mission. Yeah, a lot of Americans were opposed to it, but everyone was interested in it. And so when Lewis and Clark needed soldiers, they would stop at these forts as they were slowly heading west, and they would have tryouts.

And, you know, if a fort had 150 people, 130, 140 people might try out. And then Lewis and Clark would pick the best of the best that they could find and add them to their team as they were slowly getting bigger. So this was very competitive. A lot of people were interested in this.

Clark complained to Lewis while, while he was waiting for Lewis to float down to him that he kept getting, quote, “gentlemen’s sons.” So you would have the people around Louisville who kinda came from the finest families saying, “We should go on this expedition. We want this glory and honor.” And Clark would say, “No, I’m gonna get the people who know how to hunt, the people who are tough. That’s the right move for us.”

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, we’re not looking for people who might die along the way.

FEHRMAN: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: Craig, did someone tell you that I’m a space fan? (LAUGHS) Because you keep hitting on these NASA metaphors that thrill me completely. (LAUGHS)

FEHRMAN: Well, I’m a space fan, too. It’s really exciting to get to see all that, and it’s exciting to think what the equivalent of that must have felt like back then.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Craig, so there are a lot of people in the Corps of Discovery that I’d love to have you reveal more about to us. Let’s start with John Ordway, originally from New Hampshire. Who was he?

FEHRMAN: Well, he was a working class soldier. He was somebody who grew up in, in, in poverty. His family had a farm, but they had a lot of kids too, so there wasn’t enough land to feed everybody, much less enough land to give to everybody so those families could create independence on their own.

And, you know, in 1803, 1804, land was everything. Land was your identity, land was how you, you know, ensured that you had a vote if you were a white American male. And so land really mattered to somebody like John Ordway. And so the way he decided to get it was to join the army.

And the army was not the, not the job that we, we think of today. There was not a lot of “thank you for your service” in this time period. Soldiers were not paid well. Soldiers were beaten instead of having kind of like, you know, formal military protocols. It was a very violent time period, and officers would kind of look down on their soldiers. Regular people would look down on their soldiers. But that was the best Ordway could do. That was the life he chose.

And so that got him from New Hampshire all the way out to the West, which in this time period was what’s now Illinois. That was the American West. And so Ordway was living there and kinda counting down the days. We know this because a couple of his letters have survived, and he writes back to his family in New England and says, you know, “I’ll come home as soon as I can,” you know, “This is not going great.”

But then one day, that barge of Lewis and Clark’s shows up on the river and, you know, it was a huge craft. It was the size of a semi-truck trailer today. So he sees this big barge. He sees that they already have some soldiers. He knows what is happening because he’s read about this in newspapers. And so Ordway is one of the people who tries out. They agree to take him on, and it was one of the best decisions they ever made because he became the top sergeant on the expedition.

And, you know, when Lewis and Clark were doing science, doing diplomacy, doing Jefferson’s high-level tasks, John Ordway and the other working class soldiers were the ones splashing into the freezing river and making that barge move.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so tell me more about how he, he ended up being, as you’re saying, a kind of leader that has to pull together the really sort of diverse members of, of this, of this corps. How does he do that?

FEHRMAN: Well, the, you know, those 30 or 40 people, they ended up breaking down into kinda two camps. There were people from the regular army like John Ordway, and so they showed up with sort of agreed-upon values and kind of a shared culture. But then there were a lot of people from Kentucky that Clark had recruited, not those gentlemen’s sons, but you know, the tough frontiersmen and hunters who had the right skills for this expedition.

The problem is, those guys from Kentucky, they were really independent. They didn’t like to listen to orders. And so if Lewis or Clark said it, you know, those guys were celebrities. They might listen to them. But there would be times, especially in that first winter when they were near St. Louis, preparing and getting ready, where Lewis and Clark would slip out to do something diplomatic or just have a nice meal in St. Louis, Ordway was the guy left in charge.

And he had real problems. There were near mutinies where his own soldiers, you know, Ordway would say, “It’s time to stand watch,” and one of his own soldiers would pull out his rifle and say, “You’re not telling me what to do. I don’t wanna stand watch.” And so that’s a very stressful moment for John Ordway. That’s also, you know, not great for a military mission that’s about to head somewhere really dangerous.

That first winter was precarious. It could have all fallen apart. And John Ordway was the person who just through discipline and patience and having the restraint not to pull out his rifle, they were able to slowly patch together this unit that would become so effective later on.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Okay, where were they at the time in this first winter on the Mississippi?

FEHRMAN: Well, they built a winter quarters right outside St. Louis, so where the Mississippi and the Missouri come together, and so that’s — they had wanted to be further than that, but they were always running late.

Lewis was a great planner, which was amazing and helped the expedition, but he was also always running late. He always had more that he wanted to do and he felt the stress of that. Jefferson back in the White House felt the stress of that, too.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

FEHRMAN: So they ended up spending that winter outside St. Louis waiting for the river, the ice to break up and everything, and then they were gonna start heading up the Missouri, and then heading to whatever came after that. They didn’t really know.

CHAKRABARTI: Got it. Okay. This makes more sense, because I was like, ice on the Mississippi? Where would they be? Okay, pretty far north. Now you had said that sometimes they would have to jump into the river and pull the barge?

FEHRMAN: That’s right. The barge was, like I said, the size of a semi-truck trailer.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

FEHRMAN: So it’s a big craft. It’s full of gifts for Native people to do diplomacy. It’s full of blank books that they’re gonna fill with their journals. It’s full of food, because they don’t really know if they’re gonna run into places where they can’t hunt to feed themselves. And so they have more than 30 tons of cargo spread across three boats, primarily this barge.

And the Missouri River in this time period, there weren’t the modern dams that we know of today, so there were everywhere they would go they were going against the current first of all, and then the water would sometimes be shallow, sometimes it would be deep, but there would always be this current.

There would be trees stuck in place in the water just barely poking up that would, would ram the barge, and they would try to row. They would try to sail when the wind worked with them. But sometimes they just had to tow. They had to tie a rope to the mast, climb in the water, pull that rope over their shoulder and just pull it one inch at a time. We said they made it 8,000 miles. Some — a lot of those miles they made it just by pulling their boat against the shoulder and just grunting it out.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So, you mentioned a couple of times the Native peoples who had already been living on this land for thousands of years. I’d actually like to spend the next big chunk of time talking about that.

We’ll get to Sacagawea in a little bit, but you spend a whole chapter on Chief Black Buffalo. And it’s a part of the story, again, that I just am ashamed to say I did not know. So let’s talk about that. Tell me about Chief Black Buffalo and his importance or interaction with the Corps of Discovery.

FEHRMAN: Sure. One thing I should say is that in the book I kind of use these rotating points of view. Like, novels do this a lot. So if people have read Game of Thrones or As I Lay Dying, they’re used to a novel moving one chapter from one person’s point of view, one chapter from another’s. Well, I tried to do that too in the book, even though it’s still very carefully sourced history and nonfiction.

And so when Lewis and Clark meet with the Lakota, that’s one of the two big moments where they meet not just with Native people, but it comes very close to violence. I mean an international war could have broken out, the Lakota versus the Americans. But what I do in that chapter is instead of telling it from Lewis and Clark’s point of view, I move the camera to Black Buffalo’s point of view.

And so I think it’s important, not just in my research, but in my storytelling, to remind people that this was always a story with two sides. There were always powerful Native people and the Americans, and they both wanted something. And this is not just a modern view, you know. Jefferson, in his letters to Lewis, said, “We need to make a good impression on the Lakota.” He said in another letter that the that America was, quote, “miserably weak in the Lakota territory.”

So if you wanna know who had the upper hand in this time period, it was Black Buffalo. What’s interesting is that he used that upper hand not just to deal with the Americans, but to sort of solve internal dynamics within the Lakota people themselves. He had rivalries within his nation, and he had to sort that out while he was worrying about these new outsiders, Lewis and Clark.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So the Corps meet the Lakota, so what? Near the Bad River? Is that right?

FEHRMAN: That’s right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

FEHRMAN: Yeah, so this is what’s now South Dakota, and this is in the fall of 1804. They’ve made it a few hundred miles. They’ve met some other Native nations, but now they’re running against, running into the Lakota, who they know are the most powerful nation they’re gonna encounter.

CHAKRABARTI: And what happens?

FEHRMAN: Nothing good. They had a diplomatic protocol that Jefferson and Lewis had devised together where you give a speech and you sort of try to, you know, give some gifts and say, “Let’s keep the river open. Let’s, let’s have free trade.”

And the Lakota listened, but then the Lakota said, “You know, that, that’s a great theory, but we’re the ones in charge here, and we don’t really wanna play by those rules.” And so the Lakota blocked Lewis and Clark from going. Before long, Lewis and Clark had their cannon loaded.

Clark was on the shore with his sword out yelling at The Partisan, who was another Native leader, and it looked like, you know, there were heavily armed people on both sides. There could’ve been a shootout and enormous bloodshed. And that’s when Black Buffalo jumps in. He was somebody who’s a very important Native leader, and in my book, I try to tell the full story of his life, not just once Lewis and Clark shows up, but what he did as a young man, because he was really at the forefront of the Lakota becoming the Lakota we know today.

We think of them as being very powerful, their horses, but that was a change that happened in Black Buffalo’s life. So he had seen so much in his life, and he drew on those experiences and that wisdom to deescalate this encounter between Lewis and Clark. When Clark had his sword out, Black Buffalo was the one saying, “Let’s calm down. Let’s talk it through. Let’s try to negotiate.”

CHAKRABARTI: Well, so tell me a little bit more then. We have time. Tell me a bit more about Black Buffalo and his younger years and some of the experiences he had that led to this moment.

FEHRMAN: Well, I always think horses are the best way to understand this. Because when Black Buffalo was a young man, the Lakota did not have a lot of horses, and so they were people who moved around a lot. They were wonderful hunters and traders. And so when they would move from one spot to another, it was the women and the children who would often transport the belongings.

But by the time Black Buffalo was a leader in the 1790s, the Lakota were famous for their horses. They had really grown in power and in wealth. And so, you know, he had children when he met with Lewis and Clark, and his children owned fine horses. They weren’t transporting the goods. They could ride anywhere they wanted. So just in that small detail, you can see how much the Lakota power had grown.

But there had also been some difficult moments in that time period, too, and we can really understand this through something called winter counts. The Lakota people would record these images, these kinda pictographic images for each year, the most important thing that would happen. And then the storyteller or the historian from a different tribe or band could expand on that image and explain the history. And so I tried to study these winter counts really carefully, and I also interviewed Lakota sources and read a lot of scholarship.

And, you know, Black Buffalo, he had to deal with a lot. There was smallpox epidemics that swept through his people and hurt other nations even more. But there were also, you know, Black Buffalo’s brother was murdered by the Arikara. Black Buffalo led a mission against the Arikara. But then Black Buffalo also said, once it was fall, “Okay, it’s time to stop the war because the Arikara have corn, and we need to trade our furs for their corn.” That’s Black Buffalo in a nutshell, I think. He was somebody who could use power and could use military might, but he could also know when to pull that back and negotiate, and that balance made him a really fearsome and intelligent leader.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And as you said, later, the key thing in the Lewis and Clark story is that he, Black Buffalo, is the one who diffuses this incredibly tense moment between the Corps.

FEHRMAN: That’s right.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Alright. So there are so many Indigenous people that you do highlight. Let’s get to another one since you mentioned the Arikara. And this is, I hope I say his name correctly, Piahito?

FEHRMAN: Perfect.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Tell us about Piahito.

FEHRMAN: Well, he’s another person who gets a chapter from his point of view, and then Black Buffalo’s on the Missouri dealing with Lewis and Clark. But Piahito does something that I think will really surprise people.

While Lewis and Clark are heading thousands of miles west on the expedition, Piahito heads thousands of miles east to meet with Thomas Jefferson. And this was always a key part of Lewis and Clark. It doesn’t show up in many stories and books about Lewis and Clark, but one thing Jefferson wanted was for them to identify the best leaders, meet with the best leaders, earn their trust, and then send them on a taxpayer-funded trip back to meet with him at the White House.

So that’s exactly the journey that Piahito went on. He started out in what’s now South Dakota, went more than 1,000 miles down the Missouri River to St. Louis, then got on a horse and rode all the way to Washington, D.C.. And it was such a fun journey to trace and to try to understand because, you know, Lewis and Clark were explorers, but Piahito was an explorer, too.

So you can see, you know, he was big news. There were newspaper accounts of him. He met with Jefferson in the White House at least twice. And I think one of the most special things about Piahito is that he made this map, and it’s a map that works a little differently than American maps in this time period did.

But it still tells you a lot about how Piahito sees the world. And I actually put this map in the book. You know, the front-end papers is Clark’s famous map. One of the most important contributions from the expedition was this map he made of the Rockies and the Missouri. But the back-end papers of my book is Piahito’s map, where you can see what he drew, what he showed to Jefferson in the White House, and I kinda think that’s what this book does. What makes it special is that we’ve got Clark’s map, we’ve got Piahito’s map. To really understand the whole story, to get all that history, you need both maps together.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Now, he had a specific role. I think you might have mentioned this, but if I missed it, forgive me, that he was trying to be a diplomat, right? Between the corps and some Indigenous groups?

FEHRMAN: That’s right. Yeah. When Lewis and Clark first met him, this was on the Missouri, he helped them out by traveling with them when they went up and met with the Mandan and the Hidatsa. That’s where they ended up building their second winter quarters in what’s now North Dakota. So in the winter of 1804 and 1805, they spent some time there. That’s where they meet Sacagawea.

But after Piahito helped sort of facilitate that, then that’s when he decided to head all the way to Washington, D.C.. But he was still a diplomat there. On his map, you can see he’s explaining to Jefferson, “These are all the nations that live in the middle of the country. These are how they interact with each other, and most importantly, these are what my people, the Arikara, want. These are the goods that we care about and trade. These are the kinds of deals we’re willing to make.”

Piahito devoted his entire life to negotiation and to helping his people, and Jefferson was very impressed by him. You know, in his letter Jefferson talks about how Piahito is such an interesting and curious and intelligent person. I wish we could’ve been there to hear that conversation in the White House between them, to see them poring over his map. What an amazing and human moment that would’ve been.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Although there’s a sad ending to this, because he never left Washington, right?

FEHRMAN: That’s right. Unfortunately, he was an older man. A lot of the leaders, Native leaders who headed east were older, because they had the important parts in their society, the important roles, and so Piahito ended up dying in Washington. And Jefferson and his secretary of war did everything they could to help Piahito, but he passed away.

So this created some real consternation in Washington. Because they understood the Arikara, once they heard this news, what reason do they have to believe the American side of things? So Jefferson wrote a very careful message. They sent a lot of trade goods. They hoped to persuade the Arikara that, you know, he died of old age and “we’re sorry for your loss,” basically. The Arikara didn’t buy it, and you can understand why they’d be skeptical.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

FEHRMAN: And this is one of many instances where Lewis and Clark are, you know, you can think of the expedition as America’s first big act of foreign policy, but sometimes when America goes to a place, a new place, and tries to change things or fix things, they leave it a little worse than they found it. That’s definitely what happened with this relationship with the Arikara, and Piahito’s death rippled out in all kinds of ways in the coming years.

CHAKRABARTI: Hmm. Okay, so you did mention Sacagawea, who of any of the members of the Corps of Discovery, I think that she’s probably the best known, right? Because we do learn a little bit about her. What did you discover about her that you hadn’t known before?

FEHRMAN: Well, I think in school, you know, we hear about her as the cheerful tour guide, right? Like, she’s got her son, the baby strapped on her back, and she’s sort of helping Lewis and Clark out, and she’s just friendly and hardworking. And that’s all true. There’s nothing wrong about that. But I do think if we learn different contexts, that cheerful tour guide stuff starts to read differently.

And the most important context, I think, that I found in my work is that Sacagawea was a slave. And this is a word that Clark used in an interview, so this is how people saw her in this time period.

But she had lived with the Shoshone people in the Rocky Mountains. She was kidnapped by another Native nation named the Hidatsa, and she was brought hundreds of miles away from her home. And just to remind people, she was 12, 13 when this happened. So she’s barely a teenager.  She’s taken hundreds of miles away from everybody she knows, and she ends up being owned by a fur trader named Charbonneau.

And this happened to a lot of Native women in this time period. I think one thing that’s so important about Sacagawea’s story is that we know her name, we know some things that happened to her, but her story really stands in for things that were happening to thousands of Native women in this time period.

And it was a dark story. Really hard things happened to her. She was abused. She was impregnated. When you see what she had to go through, though, and what she was up against, I think that makes the tour guide stuff even more inspirational and more interesting. Because when Sacagawea was doing that, she wasn’t just being friendly and nice. She was being strategic. She realized, you know, “If I can make myself valuable to Lewis and Clark, maybe they’ll protect me. Maybe they’ll help me achieve my goals.” And that’s exactly what happened.

When the expedition was starting in its second year, Charbonneau, her owner, tried to beat Sacagawea, and Clark stepped in and said, “You can’t do that here.” And that’s a story that says something good about William Clark, but I think it also says something good about Sacagawea, because she had built those relationships to help in a world that was very much stacked against her, to help preserve her own ability to make choices and to make it hundreds of miles back to her people.

CHAKRABARTI: And Charbonneau was — who was he?

FEHRMAN: Well, he was a fur trader, kind of a freelancer, living in what’s now North Dakota. And so he would, he was a troublemaker, honestly. And he would kind of try to go wherever the money led him. So he might deal with the British, or he might deal with the French. Once the Americans showed up, he’s interested in working with them. He could, he could see this big NASA-sized budget, and he thought, “Well, how can I get a piece of that for myself?”

And Sacagawea was kind of his leverage, because Lewis and Clark knew they were gonna have to cross the Rockies. They didn’t know exactly what the Rockies were. They thought maybe this is a range of mountains. But he said, you know, “Why don’t we use Sacagawea? She can help us find horses,” and that’s exactly what happened.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: So Craig, you had told us that Sacagawea was enslaved when she joined the expedition. I mean, she didn’t just join it, right? She joined it because Charbonneau, her enslaver, had also joined it, correct?

FEHRMAN: Mm-hmm. That’s right.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, so that brings us to another enslaved person who was on this expedition that we really should talk about, and this is York, the only Black man on the expedition, who was at the time owned by William Clark?

FEHRMAN: That’s exactly right. We talked about Lewis and Clark meeting in Louisville, York was there, too. And York was with them every step of the way. Those 8,000 miles, York was there. And he was not just somebody who was owned by Clark, he was somebody who eventually became an essential part of the expedition.

We talked about those tryouts and how many people wanted to join this. Even with the number of people who wanted to join, one thing that really surprises people, certainly surprised me when I was doing the research, is that a lot of the soldiers on the expedition could not swim. It was just a different time back then. So even though they’re doing a river expedition, they could not find enough good swimmers. I would think that would be kind of qualification number one, but that’s just, they were, that’s the way it was in 1804.

We know York was a fantastic swimmer, though. And so Clark also writes in letters — I was able to find a new letter that got at this, too — that York was really good at handling boats. So York’s ability to be a good swimmer and York’s ability to be good with boats, that was one of many ways that he sort of proved his value. And on this expedition, the further they got from America, the more York was able to kind of assert himself, to sort of create some distance between him and Clark.

Of course, the sad thing is that once they got back to America, that distance collapsed, and York was right back in the role he always was. But on that expedition, he was essential, and he was able to, you know, do amazing things and see amazing things, too.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, let’s go into more detail about this, because I think it’s very important. First of all, York was born into slavery in the Clark family, right?

FEEHRMAN: That’s right. His father was one of the kind of like the body servant or the close assistant to Clark’s father, and so York and Clark had that exact same relationship where York took care of Clark, cleaned his clothes, followed him around, and made his life as comfortable as possible. And from a young age as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm. I mean, William Clark being young at the time when, when I think York was, quote-unquote, “first assigned to him.” So they have a long relationship here. Of the many things York did that are actually really unacknowledged until more recent times on the trip is I understand that he was also like something of a remarkable naturalist. Like he doesn’t get his name on many of the species or new descriptions that William — Lewis and Clark get, but I was looking that there are some things that he’s the one who pointed Lewis and Clark’s attention to these things.

FEHRMAN: That’s right. He was a great hunter, first of all. He was the fifth named person in the journals to bring down a buffalo, which was very exciting to everyone to see these buffalo and then also to be able to eat them. They ate a lot of buffalo. But there are also examples of York finding insects and bringing them to Lewis, for instance.

And there are these amazing journals from the expedition. There’s more than a million words, so I don’t wanna sound greedy, but sometimes the journals, even with all this documentation, they don’t tell us everything. So sometimes you’re just looking for little flickers like Lewis will mention, you know, “Oh, York brought me this.” There are other times where Lewis wasn’t keeping a journal where York might have done more, but even from the documentation that we have, we know that York was, just like Sacagawea, finding plants and animals, bringing them to Lewis. They were all working together, you know? The whole point of my book is that this was an ensemble. Even the scientific work, even the diplomatic work, that was an ensemble, too.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. I take your point, but it also got me thinking about how truly American this expedition was because we’re talking about two of the key figures that helped make this expedition a success who are enslaved. Even here we cannot disentangle the history of slavery with the history of the United States.

FEHRMAN: That’s absolutely right. And I think one thing those journals do is they offer us an unusually human perspective on the relationship between an owner and an enslaved person. You know, Clark writes a lot about York. And if you look at how Clark writes about him, you have to read those sources with a critical eye because sometimes what Clark is recording is not just what York did but what Clark feels about it.

And so you can see the resentment sometimes. You can see the kinda curdled obsession. And you can see what York had to deal with, not just in terms of being enslaved but dealing with Clark’s own toxic psychological attitudes that being an owner produces in somebody like Clark. So there’s just so much documentation, and it’s really a chance in this book to sort of say, “Let’s not write about slavery. Let’s write about York.”

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

FEHRMAN: I tried to do that again and again in this book to get us down to the human level and I think it’s important because slavery is so much a part of our history.

CHAKRABARTI: Right, and I really appreciate that because, of course, York didn’t get a chance to write down what, how he viewed Clark, right? Or how he viewed his participation in this expedition. Well, as far as I can tell. Am I wrong about that?

FEHRMAN: Well, it’s a yes and no kind of thing.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

FEHRMAN: York was not able to read and write as far as we know, but let me give you a quick example.

When Clark made it back to St. Louis, he wrote a letter to his brother, and in this letter Clark says, “I don’t agree with York that his quote “immense services” have earned him his freedom. So in that line, you know, we can say, well, that tells us something about Clark and how he’s sort of sarcastic and degrading towards York. But that line, “immense services,” in some way that’s York’s words, right? We know from that line that York said, “I did a lot. I was there along the way. I did as much as you did. I think I’ve earned my freedom.” And so in that sentence we can both understand Clark’s point of view, but we can hear York’s voice as well if we take the time to listen.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, this is so interesting. I’m looking at a part of, I think it’s the same letter that you’re talking about, written in 1808. Is that right?

FEHRMAN: That’s right. That’s right.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, because York was also married. He had a wife before the expedition even left, and he was forced to, obviously forced to be separated from her by going on this expedition.

FEHRMAN: That’s right. And, you know, maybe York wanted to do that. Maybe York thought, “A couple of years away from my wife will be hard, but it’s worth it to see the ocean and be a part of this.” And we know that he kept in touch with her. York sent a couple buffalo robes back to Kentucky during the expedition, and one of them was for his wife.

But one thing we also know for sure is that once they got back, Clark got a big government job in St. Louis, so he left Louisville and headed to St. Louis to work for the president on helping America sort of continue its expansion. And he took York with him. And we do know that York did not want to do that. York wanted to stay in Kentucky with his wife.

Almost three years away from his wife, from York’s perspective — I’m sure from her perspective, too — that was enough. But they didn’t get a say. Clark said, “You have to leave,” and this really created a lot of friction. That’s where York was saying, you know, “I want my freedom. I wanna go back to my wife,” and Clark, as was his right in that time period, said no.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, but it was his right in this time period, but this letter also reveals a kind of cruelty in William Clark that I did not know about because he writes that, you know, York wanted, of course, to stay with his wife in Louisville.

FEHRMAN: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: He wasn’t allowed to. And then William Clark writes this. He says, quote, “He,” being York, “is serviceable to me at this place.” St. Louis, right? “And I am determined not to sell him, to not to gratify him. If any attempt is made by York to run off or refuse to perform his duty as a slave, I wish him sent to New Orleans and sold or hired out to some severe master until he thinks better of such conduct.”

FEHRMAN: That’s right. And that cruelty, your word, is exactly the right word for it. And I think it just gets at the messiness of history. We were talking about how William Clark stepped in and stopped Charbonneau from beating Sacagawea. The same person who could do that, though, could also separate York from his wife. Clark contained those contradictions. America has always contained those contradictions. And I just really appreciated being able to write about it from the human level, because I think when you see what York had to go through, that just helps you appreciate things like slavery in a way that statistics or dates never will quite capture.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. York, again, by virtue of going on this expedition, whether he actually wanted to or not, he became the first Black man to reach the Pacific Ocean. Is that true or not?

FEHRMAN: Well, the first Black American, I think you could say.

CHAKRABARTI: First Black American. Okay. Fair enough.

FEHRMAN: Right, because there was a lot of trade happening on the Pacific Coast, and so there were, you know, different Black people on ships from other countries. But in terms of Americans, yeah, I think we can safely say that York was the first one to see that part of the Pacific Ocean.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And, just to be clear, upon the completion of the expedition, obviously William Clark never freed York. Did he die in slavery?

FEHRMAN: Well, he freed him, but much later.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

FEHRMAN: And we have to take Clark’s word for it. It’s not like we have a document that shows this. But Washington Irving, the famous writer and beloved American author, he ended up meeting with Clark many years after the expedition, and they talked about York. And in Irving’s notes, you can still hear Clark’s sarcasm in the way that he will just kind of talk down to York and see York as something less than human. Clark does say in that interview though that he freed York.

So if we take Clark at his word, then York was able to get freedom, but only much later and after his own wife had left Louisville, too. So in terms of a big reunion or a happy end to the life that York felt that he earned, and that I think most people today would agree with him, that never happened.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Okay. So we’re just getting a little bit of a taste, right, of the sort of rich history that you provide in the book about all these other key members of the Corps of Discovery, and I really, really appreciate that.

But in the last couple minutes that we have, Craig, I’m hoping, if you don’t mind, if we actually return to Lewis and Clark themselves. Because you have some new stuff in there about what happened to those two gentlemen. I mean, I think particularly Lewis, right?

FEHRMAN: That’s right. And then, you know, when I started writing this book, I knew that just sort of paying attention to details that other people had overlooked, that was gonna give me a lot to work with, and telling the story in a new way, that all this was gonna produce more history for the history lover. But what I didn’t know was that I was gonna find so much new stuff in the archives.

I thought Lewis and Clark, there’s not really gonna be anything new to find, and that’s just not true. I found big, new things about both captains, and I think Lewis is the best example. I found a diary entry and a letter by Massachusetts’ own John Quincy Adams. And so when Lewis made it back on the expedition, when he made it back to Washington, John Quincy Adams had dinner with him at the White House, and they had met before.

And there’s this letter where John Quincy Adams writes to his wife and says, “I knew I was gonna have dinner with Lewis, but I didn’t even recognize this guy. He looked,” and this is a quote, “15 years older.” And so that expedition was two and a half, three years. It aged Lewis five times that. And we can understand why because of how grueling and physical it was, but I also think that that, that says something about Lewis’ psychology and what he had to sacrifice for his country.

Because, you know, Black Buffalo was a patriot. He cared about the Lakota. He wanted to do what was right for his people. But Meriwether Lewis was a patriot, too. He was doing what he thought the president wanted and what he thought was right for America. Lewis gave up a lot, and in that expedition, in part because of Lewis’ own psychology, really cost him something and started him down a path that ended up in his suicide a couple years later.

So if we talk about history as something that’s very personal and human, the end of Meriwether Lewis’ history is a sad one. And I was able, thanks to these documents, to sort of explore it in a totally new way.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more about that. Because I have to say, I don’t recall in school at all learning that Lewis took his own life just a couple of years after they got back.

FEHRMAN: Yeah, it’s a really sad decline.

But I think what’s interesting, too, is that once you see something like John Quincy Adams, who was in the room reporting what Lewis was like after the expedition, you can go back to Lewis’ journals and notice some of these same themes.

Lewis was a wonderful scientist. He was so good at, you know, finding a prairie dog or finding a new plant or that worm that York brought in and describing it. But one thing that’s amazing, especially in this time period, remember, we’re talking about 1805, 1806, Lewis was able to describe his emotions and his own way of thinking in a way that feels very modern to me.

And so Lewis would, just like he would analyze a plant, he would analyze his mind. He would say, “You know, I’m focusing too much on a mistake I made in the past. I need to set that aside,” or, “I can’t stop thinking about the uncertainty of what’s gonna come next. I need to focus on the here and now.”

I’m not saying Lewis always succeeded at this. I mean, he clearly didn’t because of the trajectory his life ended up going on, but he did always try. And I just find that frankly heroic, that he in his journal was able to record, you know, “I’m struggling with these things, but I have a plan. I’m gonna try. I’m gonna be there for the other members of the expedition.” And it’s so intimate. It’s so modern. It’s so human. It’s straight from the pen of Meriwether Lewis.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So we have, I have just two minutes. I have two more questions. Talking about the pen of Meriwether Lewis, the description written down by John Quincy Adams, the letters we were talking about written by William Clark, there’s a lot of written history here that you were able to uncover.

But when you were writing from the perspective of, say, the Indigenous peoples that you highlight in the book, was there written material, or did you rely more on oral histories? And how did you work with that?

FEHRMAN: Well, I relied on both, and I don’t think it makes sense to say we’ve got oral history versus written history. I think the historian’s job is to put all these sources in conversation.

So Piahito, for instance, he has a fantastic joke where Lewis and Clark are like, “You know, this is what all the native people are telling us.” And Piahito says, “Well, maybe they’re telling you the truth the way you tell a truth to a child.” You’re sort of like, you know, you tell them what they want to hear. So it’s a wonderful joke and it shows Piahito’s personality, and it’s right there in Lewis and Clark’s journals. We just have to pay attention to it.

But then I also interviewed Arikara people and looked at Arikara oral history and sort of brought those together. And sometimes the oral history would help me see something different in the written documents or vice versa. My job was to spend five years gathering up everything and then making the best and most accurate interpretation I could.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, we’ve got a minute left, Craig, and, you know, here we are, what, 220-plus years. Did I do that math right? I think I did.

FEHRMAN: You are on, yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: 220-plus years following this expedition. I’m wondering what your scholarship on the rest of the Corps of Discovery, if that sort of changed your view of America today, or has it helped you understand the nation as it is today in a different way? I mean, how do you connect then and now?

FEHRMAN: Well, what I think is that America has always been an ensemble. And sometimes the worst parts of our history are reflected in that ensemble, whether it’s slavery or the way that we treated Native people and their land. But sometimes the best parts of America are reflected in that ensemble, too.

And so just for you, I’m gonna bring it back to NASA one last time. Artemis II, those four astronauts are amazing, but they would tell you they weren’t the whole mission. There were janitors, there were politicians, there were scientists, there were engineers. It was a team effort. The same thing is true of Lewis and Clark. The same thing is true of most great moments in American history.

And so my job as a historian, and really my passion as a storyteller, is to remind us that these things have always been the work of a lot of Americans coming together and doing their best.

CHAKRABARTI: America is an ensemble. I love that. Well, the book is This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark. Craig Fehrman, thank you so much for joining us today.

FEHRMAN: Hey, it’s been my pleasure.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.