Mm-hmm.

So if you wanna talk about density, if you wanna talk about, like, where the power, and the people, and the commerce is on the Missouri in this time period, it's not St. Louis.

It's up here where the Mandan and the Hidatsa live.

And so Charbonneau lives in that cluster of towns.

He's somebody who's originally from Canada, and one of the recent things, you know, even with a story like Lewis and Clark, we're still always learning new things.

And so one historian named Brett Rushforth found Charbonneau's baptismal certificate from Montreal.

So we actually know that he was born in 1767, which makes him about 37 or 38 when he meets Lewis and Clark, and that's, you know, I, I think we can already start to see some of his, uh, qualities or lack thereof.

I, like, I think this is, like, a weird Canadian [laughs] thing.

Well,

I feel like with Lewis and Clark, it's very easy for us with our modern lives and our air conditioning to remember the highlights and think, you know, wow, what would it have been like to be the first Americans to cross through that part of the Rocky Mountains or something like that? And I have those moments in the book.

But the reality of their life was that it was very, very hard, that anything they wanted to do, they had to do it by hand and they had to do it at great risk while they were worried about grizzlies and disease and everything else.

So the reason I started the book and started that Lewis chapter with this little mishap is I just wanted readers to know right from the first page a reminder that the past was a different and dangerous place.

But there's also kind of a nobody's asked me about this, so I can share it with you and your listeners.

There's also sort of a secret reason I wanted to do it, which is that most books about the expedition will talk about Lewis's air rifle.

And that's where the kind of mishap happens.

Who are they all? Sure.

I wanted to ask you about how you approach those gaps in the historical record as a historian but then also as a storyteller.

Well, I feel like they're kind of the same job.

I think the research, the endnotes, but also the page-turning front of the book, you know, the main story, to me those are never in opposition.

They work best together, and the more details you find, the better story you can tell.

But in terms of that kind of that, those inferences and those attempts to sort of, like, understand it as best we can, I think a story is the best way to illustrate this.

When the expedition made it to Three Forks in, in what is now Montana, Sacagawea, that was where she had been kidnapped and enslaved years before.

And so Lewis and Clark knew this, and Lewis sort of paid attention to her, and in his journal he wrote, "You know, she's not really showing any emotion, even though she's back to this place where something really terrible happened to her.

I really wanted to ask you about how you approached York as a character in this book and how you understand him as a man in this historical record.

Yeah

... worm their way in there.

But anyway, um, so like the Shoshone would have to go out and get buffalo/bison, try to keep both of you happy, um, each, each time in the fall.

And so in 1800, when Sacagawea was like 13 or 14, her people go out there.

And so they set up camp at Three Forks, and the men are off hunting buffalo, and the women and the kids are sort of, you know, back at the camp.

And so then one day some armed raiders with rifles, which the Shoshone do not have at this point, from the Hidatsa Nation show up and, you know, they're, they're coming on horseback.

So the Shoshone scatter.

[laughs]

How did you decide to weave that into the thread of the book?

There were a, a few things, but one of them was honestly kind of personal.

I wrote about this in an essay for Defector, which some of your listeners may enjoy.

It's, it's a wonderful website.

Subscribe if you're not checking it out.

They, they do great stuff on sports and culture.

But they let me write about this experience that happened to me about a year and a half into the book.

I mean, how did they change? And to your way of thinking, were these beneficial changes? I mean, obviously it shortened some of their lives, but, like, in, in what ways did this change them?

Sure,

sure.

There were some close calls.

The most famous one, I think, is with the Lakota.

This is where my book sort of switches perspectives.

And so I talk about this pretty famous moment between the Americans and the Lakota.

from the perspective of Black Buffalo, not from the perspective of Lewis and Clark.

What were they and how did we, you know, what did the Native Americans at that time or the Indians think we wanted with the land?

You say, "I urge anyone," I think this is one of your footnotes, "anyone writing on York to reread Clark's journal carefully to hear the, um, uh, resentment, the curdled obsession," and I, I'm, I'm not reading very well, "and I urge scholars of slavery to examine York's life more closely."

Yeah.

I think, again, the gift here is the journals.

We've got a million words to work with, and those million words are about all kinds of different things.

But one of the things they're about is the relationship between an owner and his slave.

And if you read Clark's comments carefully, you can see that it is important for him psychologically, also economically, but psychologically especially, to control York, to tell York, "You need to go shoot this buffalo.

You need to go carry that deer." But the further the expedition got away from American society, the more York realized, "I can do at least some things that I want to do.

... what, what, what were they, a- and how did we, you know, what was, what did the, the Native Americans at that time, or the Indians, think we wanted with the land?

But, like, what are the challenges of that kind of approach as you're trying to tell a comprehensive story of the Corps of Discovery, but at the same time you've gotta keep in mind, like, it's assembled of these smaller pieces?

Right.

Yeah, and that's...

I'm, I'm glad you say that 'cause this still has the 1804 to 1806 St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean.

Like, all the big beats are still there.

We're still getting them from the start line to the finish line.

But at the same time, the rotating points of view I think kinda deepen that story.

It's, it is messed up.

This is amazing"?

Yeah, that would, that would be such an amazing opportunity.

I think with Jefferson, I would probably try to pin him a little down, down a little bit more about what exactly he wanted the expedition to do and in what timeframe.

Because Jefferson is such a great writer that he almost seems to shift letter to letter.

His, his writing is so evocative, but it's not always precise, and you can see this in his relationship to race and all kinds of other things, too.

But I, I would sort of s- try to understand more, you know, what precisely he wanted the expedition to do because my reading based on reconstructing it from these letters is that he kind of wanted the expedition to do everything.

You know, we think about how hard it was for Lewis and Clark to go 8,000 miles and deal with rapids and mountains and all that, but Jefferson's sort of research checklist for them was just overwhelming, and it's just, uh, it, it's a, it's amazing how many things he wanted them to do.

Why was that so important to you, and how does it changeIn your mind, uh, what we consider to be the historical truth here about the exploration?