Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Lewis and Clark Worked

Episode Date: February 23, 2019

They may be the most famous explorers in U.S. history, but there are plenty of interesting details to the Lewis and Clark expedition that history has allowed to fade. Learn about the origin and the aftermath of America's first early push Westward in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, SYSK friends, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen how Lewis and Clark worked, a great episode from 2013. It reveals that the famed expedition

could have changed the history of relations between Native Americans and European Americans, but sadly, the European Americans in charge ended up going a different way. I hope you enjoy this eye-opening episode about what could have been starting now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

["HowStuffWorks.com"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Lewis? Bryant. Yep, I thought you were gonna call me Lewis. Yeah, I thought so. You know, like, I thought about it.

You like, not a chuckle through that dumb joke. I wondered if I was related to Mr. Clark. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I'm just gonna say I am from now on. Feel like, have you heard of William Clark, the explorer? Lewis and Clark? Yeah. Well, I'm Josh Clark.

Yeah, because Clark's an unusual name you might be. It's not, it's not. No, but I mean, like, his family was from the Ohio River Valley. I grew up in Toledo. Hey, there you go. I wonder. You have an explorer spirit. You're a laid-back guy.

Yeah. He was laid-back. Yeah. Not like Lewis. He was semi-literate. Yeah. I'm fairly literate. Yeah.

That's the big distinction. It is funny. Like, have you read some of his verbatim journal entries? Who, Clarks or Lewises? Well, both of them, but Clark's way worse. Yeah, Lewis is a pretty good writer, I thought. Yeah, but he had some weird spellings, too. Clark was just like frontier Kentucky boy writing in a journal.

Yeah, they were a good pair, though. Yeah. And this isn't one of those podcasts or stories where you look back and you're like, oh, you know, history's really pumped this up and they were really kind of like this and like jerks and... No, no. This was really a great story

and they were actually true American heroes. You know? Yeah. One semi-tragic, I would say. Well, the ending is pretty tragic. No, but Lewis, Lewis is manic depressive. Yeah. By all accounts.

Yeah. Back then they called it prone to, you know, prone to fits. But modern people say, no, he was probably manic depressive. Right. And I prepped by watching the four hour Ken Burns documentary last night. Four hours? Yeah, I thought it was two hours.

And I was like, oh, I got this. And then I got to the two hour point and I was like, wait a minute, they just hit the continental divide. I don't think I'm at the end. That's so funny because in the email, you emailed me and suggest that I watch it. You called it a six part, not four hour.

Well, they had it on YouTube in six parts, but in actuality, it's 12 parts. That's hilarious. All right, so let's do this. This is one of my favorite stories in history. Is it really? Yeah, man. And again, I've said this before, why isn't this a movie?

Like a really good movie. Have you seen almost heroes? Yeah, right. There you go. No. All right, so Chuck, Lewis and Clark, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark. Yeah.

A pair of army folk turned explorers thanks to a little bit of, I guess, serendipity. It would have been somebody else had it not been these guys because really the whole idea of this expedition, which was called the core of discovery. Yes. It sounds like a soccer team. It was the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson.

Yeah, and the brainchild of TJ because he's like, hey, I just bought, I just doubled the size of our country by buying a bunch of land from Napoleon. Do you know the background on that? The Louisiana Purchase? I know it's the greatest land deal in the history of the world probably. Yeah.

But what do you mean? Well, it was the French's land and they were about to get it from, they were about to give it to the Spanish. Well, the Spanish were west of them, so probably. And the French Lake had barely any presence in this area, but it was their land. But the Spanish, had they taken over,

they would have been a real problem because the Americans had access to the port of New Orleans because the French were basically absentee landlords there. And so the idea that the Spaniards were about to get it, that was a big problem. But Jefferson sent some people over to France to try to negotiate something. Right.

And it turned out Napoleon was having all sorts of problems and it had been recommended to him by his people, like just sell it to the Americans. They're coming over, they wanna talk. So I think James Monroe was sent by Thomas Jefferson with a limit of $10 million to do something, to buy Florida and New Orleans or New Orleans for up to $10 million.

Yeah. Monroe found out he could get all of the Louisiana territory, which went up to Canada. Yeah, Louisiana is really under sells it. It was. It went from the Rockies all the way over to the colonies. Yeah. And then up to Canada and down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Yeah, it was double the size of our country. Yeah, overnight. So Monroe was like, I'll give you $15 million for it in the French are like sold. So he bought 827,000 square miles of North America. Yeah, about three cents an acre. And that was a chunk of change though. I think that was double what our gross economy was

at the time. But it's a pretty good investment. It was a great investment. Could you imagine though, how weird that would be if, if it had gone a different way, the United States could have ended it about the Mississippi River, which it did at the time. Yeah.

And just beyond that, on the other side, it would have been Spain. Right. Or not Spain, but you know what I mean. A Spanish colony. Well, it could have been a lot like Africa, you know, like all of these former colonies that are just like adjacent to one another.

But this was a French colony. This was a Belgian colony. This was a British colony. And I think the Brits controlled Canada and like the Oregon territory at the time. Yes. Yeah, we were all sandwiched kind of in there together. Yep.

So we buy from the French, we go fight the Spanish for the rest of it. And in between all of this, we send Lewis and Clark to go check out what had just been bought. And this expedition was going to happen anyway, but we thought that we were going to have to ask for permission to go through this area. Right.

But now all of a sudden it was America. And that added a facet to this expedition that hadn't been there before, which was basically informing the Indians that they were now living in America. And they had a new great father, which is how Maryweather Lewis put it. How he described TJ.

Yeah, you have a new great father who lives in a lodge in Washington DC and you can come visit him and see like how great it'll be to live under his patronage. But not really. Right, sign this treaty. So he was his private secretary, Lewis was, his kind of personal aide.

And he knew what kind of dude he was, maybe drank a little too much, was prone to depression. But he sort of gave him this job to help him out. He thought he'd be good for it, don't get me wrong. Right, he groomed him for the position. But yeah, he thought it would be, he had a vested interest in the man. And he's like, this is gonna be really good for Lewis.

This is what he needs. Right. He was 29 years old, which is remarkable to me. Good sharpshooter. He said, you pick your partner. He picked William Clark, who was his former captain, I believe in the army, a couple of years older. And he looked up to Clark quite a bit.

Right. It was like, I need you, brother, because you, you complete me. Right. Which by the way, we should probably say there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Lewis and Clark were ever gay. Clark definitely wasn't.

Is that a rumor? Yeah, there's a lot of conjecture about it. Maryweather Lewis was, he courted several women and was rejected by all of them. He was a total eligible bachelor, never married, never was engaged or betrothed or anything. So of course, as time wore on, people were like, well, he must have been gay.

I'd never heard that. Yeah, there's been a lot of conjecture and they've come up with the idea that he probably wasn't gay, but that he was. By? No, that he had something of an aversion to women that was not necessarily based on any kind of sexual orientation.

He just didn't know what he was doing and he didn't feel comfortable around women. Yeah, and we'll get to that. The main goal, well, there are a couple of main goals. The main goal for Jefferson was, hey, I wanna find this all water route to the sea. That's really important for trade. And also, hey, let's check out this thing we just bought

and go out and record as much of it as you can. Animals, plants, people, what the heck is out there, basically, come back and tell us. Right, and Lewis wasn't exactly a slouch when it came to this kind of stuff. His mother was a celebrated herb doctor in Virginia. Yes, she knew what she was doing and she kind of raised him in the woods.

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

Medical training. Everything you would need. They basically just filled Lewis's head with. And he, in turn, filled Clarkin on a lot of it too. Yeah, also a lot of what they might encounter in ways of, we'll call them Indians for the purposes of the show, because that's what they call them.

Right, and Jefferson was like, and don't forget to call me the great father, it's awesome. So Lewis is in Pittsburgh or in Philadelphia getting this training. He writes to Clark says, please join me on this. And you were my captain, I'm a captain now. We're gonna be co-captains on this. Just so there's not any kind of weirdness

or anything like that. Like I was chosen to lead the expedition, but I'm choosing you for help, but let's do this evenly, which is unheard of. And it actually, even more unheard of, it worked out really well. Yeah, it did. Like there wasn't any kind of like backbiting or problems.

And they actually ran it a bit like a democracy too. Yeah, in the end, they were kind of described as a family, like really, really tighten it. I kept waiting for the story to go off the rails, but it didn't. They really hung together and stuck together after some initial discipline problems. Once they kind of weeded out,

I think from summer to fall, they kind of weeded out some of the bad apples. Well, what's funny, one guy got discharged for mutinous acts, and another guy got discharged for desertion, but this happened in the middle of the first leg of the trip. So they had to stay on until they could get them to a place where they could go back.

So they just had them doing hard labor the whole time. Wow. So they brought along a couple of people of note. One, Clark took his slave, York, that he had had since he was a kid. He was the only black guy and the only slave on the party, on the adventure party, we'll call it. He was technically a man servant,

I guess like a valet or something like that, to Clark outside of the expedition, but on the expedition, York was basically just a member of the party. Yeah, he was a member of the party. He played a really great role in diplomacy because the American Indian had never seen black people before, and they didn't have hangups.

Obviously like white people did. So they were like, this guy is awesome. He's huge and he's strong. And look at that like amazing black skin that's even darker than ours. Like they really thought he was great. And I'm sure all the white people on the thing were like, well, yeah.

Look at me. What about me? Yeah. White skin. I'm friends with the great father. But he played a great role in diplomacy. And like you said, was generally treated pretty well, although he did get sort of some of the crap duties.

Well, plus he also got royally screwed over at the end of the expedition. Oh yeah, we'll get to that though. Okay. And so we have York with Clark and then Lewis purchased a dog for $20 named Seaman. And they used to think it was Scanan because these guys handwriting was so bad

that for basically a century, like everybody thought it was Scanan for two centuries. And then somebody figured out, well, wait a minute. Why is one of these rivers called Seaman's Creek? Right. Then they realized, wait. That's the dog. That's the dog.

Everybody, by the way, had something named after them. And they had trouble coming up with names for everything. Like York, the York islands of Montana, like everybody on that tour had something named after them. It's kind of neat. So he was a newfoundland dog and he made it the whole way. We're happy to go ahead and spoil that one.

Yeah. Which is great, because they ate dogs, by the way, at some point on this trip. They ate a lot of horse. Yeah, they did. So like you said, they started in Pittsburgh, but the official start was really in St. Louis in December of 1803.

And they were like, all right, let's hit the river, the Missouri River. Well, that's where they assembled camp and wintered outside St. Louis and assembled all their people and ran them through like army training and then took the best of the best. They officially started in May, the following spring. Of course, you wouldn't start in the winter.

Right. So they had a big keel boat and a couple of smaller canoes and said, let's hit the river. And they did so. They said, let's do it. Because again, ultimately, Jefferson was looking for a Northwest Passage across the continent to the Pacific and he wanted to see if you could basically ride a river

all the way across the country. Yeah. By the time, I think there were about 45 people at first, but when they eventually whittled it down, the official Corps of Discovery was 33 people. Right. So they head out and they start going upstream up the Missouri River.

And it was rough going at first. Yeah. Literally pulling their boat out from outside the water, waist deep by tow rope against the current. Again, yeah, they're going upstream the whole way to the source of the Missouri River. Yeah. So the first Indians they encountered,

well, not the first, the first situation they encountered where the Titansu or the Lakota, and they're actually warned by previous American Indians like, watch out for these guys. They're basically the mafia of the Missouri River. Oh, yeah. Like they'll demand payment. They won't, they'll take your goods.

They'll control the trade. Yeah, they wanted them to trade exclusively with them. Yeah. And they came to the French and the Spanish for years. And they, I think Lewis called them the pirates of the Missouri. But when they did reach them, it came to a standoff over a canoe that they're, they gave them their gifts.

The first thing they would do whenever they encountered a new tribe was to like give them these trinkets, tell them about the great father, give them like handkerchiefs and things like we come in peace. And with the Titansu though, there was a standoff over a canoe that they wanted. And they're like, we're not giving you this canoe.

And it literally came to a point where guns were raised and like hundreds of Indians had their arrows pointed at them. And it was about to go down. And Chief Black Buffalo intervened. It was like, you know what, let our women and children tour your really cool boat that we've never seen and meet all you guys. And then y'all can have safe passage.

So they managed to get through there unscathed. But that was their first like run in where they were like, man, this could go down pretty badly. Yeah. And luckily that was one of just a few. I think as far as cross-country uncharted expeditions, uncharted expeditions go, this went about as good as you could possibly hope for.

Yeah, I mean, it was super peaceful. They were the core of discoveries rather than the core of bloodshed or something. Well, they only shot one bullet in anger the entire trip. Is that right? It was pretty remarkable. Man, that is neat. So they hit the Great Plains

and that might as well have been Mars to them. If you think about it, if you'd never been west of, I think there's a saying that a squirrel can jump from tree to tree till it hits the Mississippi. Oh yeah. And so when they hit the Great Plains, they had never seen anything like it. Like there were no trees.

This is plains. It's just plains. And it was just, you know, they were absolutely blown away by this. And there they encountered the Mandan and Minotari or Hidatsa Indians. Right. And they decided, all right,

this is a pretty good place to build a camp. So they're here for a few months and they built Fort Mandan, which they named after the local, one of the local tribes and... And they were buddies. They had like lived together in harmony. Right.

They got, they forged friendships. They were visited by locals and something big happened here. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Letting things with Chuck and Chuck, shining on the face of you should know. OK, Chuck. So we're at Fort Mandon. Yeah. Which is, we're in South Dakota, I think.

Yeah, it's in the Dakotas. They were having a good time, hanging out, having lots of sex with the local ladies. Yeah, there was a big problem with venereal disease on the expedition because they were having a lot of sex with Indians and the Indians had syphilis, which was something that was unknown to Europeans. And Europeans contracted it very easily.

So that was a big thing. Well, that was another thing about Lewis, too. Apparently, everybody else on the expedition had sex with Indian women. And he was like, he stayed away from it. His journal entries about Indian sexual practices were very snide, I think, is a way one person put it. Yeah, it was just, he was an odd duck, I get.

What if he tried to put on low that he was just cleaning up? And they were like, Lewis, it doesn't hurt when he pees. Like, something's going on. It doesn't burn. I don't think he's having sex. He's an outlaw. He says he had sex with all those women. Burns when I pee, does it burn when you pee?

Doesn't burn when Lewis pees. So apparently burning when you pee was a big thing on the core of discoveries, discovered syphilis, too. All right, so the other important thing that happened here, which is I think what you were getting to was, they hired a French-Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau. But they really, what they were doing was hiring his wife. Yeah, Sacagawea.

Sacagawea or Sacagawea. I didn't mispronounce it. You didn't mispronounce it. There's a lot of pronunciations. Yeah, but there's only one that's right. And the right one is based on the journal entries of Lewis, Clark, everybody else on the expedition. Because this was an expedition.

Everyone was expected to make notes and write this stuff down. Right. And Sacagawea is mentioned dozens of times in these journals because she did do some outstanding stuff. And she's mentioned phonetically. So it's Sacagawea. Also, at some point, it's also mentioned that her name is Shoshone for bird woman.

And in Shoshone, Sacaga is bird and Wea is woman. So it's Sacagawea, not Sacagawea. That's right. Well, I mean, that's a big point. It's true. Although in the Ken Burns thing, these historians all pronounced it differently, which was sort of frustrating. Well, yeah, there's Sacagawea.

And then Sacagawea. Well, yeah, one of the ladies called her straight up Sacagawea. Straight up Sacagawea? Straight up. So she was very important because, A, she was a translator. B, she was essentially a white flag everywhere they went. And I don't think we said this, but by the time they broke camp to leave, she had a baby.

Yeah, she actually gave birth to her first child in Fort Mandon. Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau. Yeah, who's pretty cool, grew up to be pretty cool, for sure. But Sacagawea, if we say Sacagawea, too, I think that's fair. OK. She was 16 at the time, and she was married to Charbonneau. She was one of two of his wives. And I didn't hear anything about the other Shoshone woman.

Did she not go along? I don't think so. OK, all right. So Jean-Baptiste and Toussaint were a family, even though Sacagawea was Toussaint's slave wife. Like, he purchased her. Yeah, yeah. But she was Shoshone.

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

And she comes in handy to a spectacular degree in this sense. Yeah, and not only was she a white flag, she was just great for the spirit of the camp to have a woman there. Yeah, and the baby was a charmer, too. Oh, of course, you can't pull up with a woman and a baby and say, we're warring people. Exactly.

Apparently, across all tribes along the plains, if you have a woman and a baby in your party, you are automatically not a war party, and therefore, you come in peace. Yeah, and she was also pretty awesome. Charbonneau himself was described as quite average, but Sacagaway was the real deal. Like, one of the bravest members of the expedition,

and at one point, one of the boats overturned, and they were losing a lot of their important records and things, and she was the main one that was like, boom, in the water, retrieving the stuff, while Charbonneau was, I don't know what he was doing. Who knows what Charbonneau was doing. But Sacagaway was swimming, retrieving the stuff. This is after she'd given birth.

This is while she was breastfeeding, walking scores of miles in any given week. She was pretty tough. Yeah, and you know, we'll go ahead and spoil this. That baby, like we said, lived. It made it all the way there and back. This brand new baby, till the age of about, I guess, two and a half.

And he just stole William Clark's heart. Yeah, he loved him. He ended up adopting him. He did, yeah. He adopted him and educated him in St. Louis. Yeah, after she died, he adopted both her kids. Yeah, much later. So, but yeah, his name was Jean Baptiste, the baby,

and he was nicknamed Pompey, because of his pompous little dancing antics. Right. Clark found him to be quite the little dancer. So, the other way that Sacagaway was helpful to this expedition was that she was a translator. She could speak Shoshone, obviously. Yeah.

She could also speak Hidata. And so, her husband could speak Hidata. So, if she was speaking to a Shoshone, let's say they encountered a Shoshone person, the Shoshone would speak to Sacagaway. She would say what they said in Hidata to her husband. Her husband would say in French, what had just been said in Hidata to another man

who would in turn tell William and Maryweather what had been said in English. Yeah. That was the translation line. Yeah. And Sacagaway was the pivotal point of this as far as speaking to Plains tribes went. Yeah, and you would think that setting it up to say

and like big problems arose because of it, but it really worked pretty well. No, because they were also trained in plain sign language too, apparently there was a lot of gesturing that was fairly universal, that a lot of the people who were recruited in St. Louis originally were familiar with too. Yeah.

So they got along pretty well. They did, okay. All right, so after the Mandan villages, they broke camp and went on to the confluence of the Yellowstone with the Missouri and entered a land where they started seeing like, when they hit the plains, they started seeing these crazy animals

they'd never seen before. It's important to say they didn't discover anything. Yeah, it's very important to say that. They were just the first white guys to record it for science. Yeah. But prairie dogs and elk and buffalo by the tens of thousands, antelope,

all kinds of things to them that were just these weird animals. They actually sent a live prairie dog back to Jefferson, which is pretty neat. It's hilarious. And it made it all the way. Grizzly bears, they encountered those for the first time on this expedition.

Yeah, they were warned of the grizzly by the Indians and they were like, we've hunted brown bear and black bear. We know we're talking about bear. And then they were kind of like, holy crap. Like in their journals, they were like, I've never seen anything like this. It took 10 shots and we almost died.

And the grizzly bear is to be reckoned with. Lewis said something like, I'd rather fight two Indians than one grizzly bear. Yeah. So here we are in early June. They reached the point where the Missouri divided that they weren't told about this fork. So we're like, huh.

Right. What should we do here? It went in equal parts, north and south. Yeah, I mean, it was like a hardcore left and right. Yeah. Hardcore. It was basically everyone in the party agreed on one direction except Lewis and Clark.

They were like, we were old school, we like in sync. Yeah. So they, despite the fact that everyone disagreed, they followed them and that just shows like how united they were. They were like, you know what? We don't think you guys are right, but we're going to follow you because you are our captains.

Right. And we want to see your faces when you realize you're wrong. Which actually would happen. But it wouldn't lead to like eating each other like the Donner party. No, huh. So they keep moseying along and they're doing pretty well. They apparently they got to a point

where Clark looked down one day. I think it was Clark, it was possibly Lewis too. It was Lewis. And he realized that a little stream at his feet was running west. And he realized that they just crossed the continental divide. Yeah. That was the mouth of the Missouri

that they were literally straddling with their feet. Yeah. And they, that meant that now they had just left the Missouri and were going to hook up. First they went onto the Snake River, but that would take them to the Columbia River, which by their reckoning would take them to the Pacific Ocean.

So they'd made it like a substantial amount of distance. Yeah. That was a depressing moment though for Lewis because he thought when he reached that ridge that he would look and see just downhill to the ocean. Yeah. And what he saw was Rocky Mountains. Nevada.

Yeah. And he was like, oh man, this is not going to be very easy. No. We didn't know about the Rocky Mountains. No. And even still when they finally do think that they see the ocean, they still were 25 miles away from it when they finally get to that point.

Yeah, which we'll get to. Oh, sorry. That's right. So what they ended up doing, they made a mistake because there was a shortcut they could have taken. Oh, really? That would have taken four days. And instead they had to go work their way

around the great falls of Montana, which took 53 days of portage, uneasy portage. Yeah, because this portage was like carrying these boats. Yeah. But also these guys were wearing like moccasins and stuff. And they had a huge problem with prickly pear. Yeah. Which would just go right through your moccasins.

It's basically like stepping on nails the whole time while you're carrying a very heavy boat. Yeah, and all your supplies. Right. Whiskey and food, salt. So on July 25th, they arrived at another three forks. They named them the Gallatin for the Secretary of Treasury, the Madison for the Secretary of State,

and the Jefferson and decided to follow the Jefferson because... There was more to it, I think. Yeah, and I think they were like, this is the one that is going to head west. Right. So they follow that, I think at this point or either right before or right after,

they meet up with the Shoshone. Have they met the Shoshone yet? Well, at this point, Lewis went off by himself and a couple of more people to find the Shoshone. Including Saka Gawai, right? Or no, she wasn't there yet. I don't think she was there yet. Okay.

But he did find them. And... He basically said, hey, we come in peace. We have a camp back here. Yeah. We want you to come hang out at. Well, they were in bad shape, apparently, the Shoshone were.

Oh, they were? Yeah, they were pretty worse for the wear and very docile as a result. So he met these women and children and told them all that stuff. And they came back and hung out with them. And at camp, Saka Gawai recognized one of the women. Yeah.

That Clark, was it Clark or Lewis? I think at this point it was both. Who they came back with and said, hey, we found some Shoshone. And she said, hey, that's actually my BFF from first grade. Yeah. Because remember, Saka Gawai had been kidnapped and sold.

Yeah. So there were still members of her tribe living around the Rockies. And she actually met up with them. And with her brother, who was now chief. Yes. She was like, you're chief? And he went, you know it, little sister?

Yeah. And he went, you're married to a French trapper? She's like, that guy? Not really. He bought me. Yeah. Which is not funny at all. You know?

So then they proceeded across the Continental Divide to the main village with the Shoshonis and hired on a tour guide, Old Toby, which is a great name for an Indian tour guide. Sure. And said, Toby said, you know, I'll lead you through these mountains. But we're going to need some horses to eat

because it's going to be rough. And to travel with. Right, but this is where they were really eating a lot of horse meat. Yeah, the Bitterroot Mountains. It was pretty rough through Montana and Idaho. And that was when, you know, their spirits were never broken,

but that's when they were dampened for sure. So when they make it through the Bitterroot, I don't remember why they did or where, but there was a point where they said, we can't use these horses anymore. I guess it's when they got onto the Columbia River, right? Well, maybe. Is this where they were eating salmon

and the salmon was making them sick? Yeah. So they come to a Nez Pierce village with old Toby, I believe it, at the lead. Yeah. And they're celebrated, welcomed, they throw a feast for them, and it makes everybody violently ill in the expedition.

Yeah, they're like, this salmon is awful. Yeah. Or these roots or whatever. I'll bet it was the roots that got them. Yeah, I think it was. So apparently everyone recovered, but they say, okay, well, here's the Columbia River. We can't really use these horses anymore.

I think one of the things that's very much overlooked in the history of this expedition is just how much the Corps of Discovery relied on friendly tribes. So like when they hit the Columbia River, they said, hey, Shoshone, or no, Nez Pierce friends, will you watch our horses for us? And the Nez Pierce said, yes.

Yeah. You guys go to the Pacific Ocean, when you come back, we'll have your horses. Go ahead and brand them so you know which ones are yours. And they did. They left their horses with the Nez Pierce. Yeah, I mean, it was kind of the best case scenario of story for most of the trip.

Yeah, it was pretty cool. And that is actually too, where they traded for dog to eat, which was one of the only disappointing parts of the story for me. Yeah. That and what happened to York. All right, so at this point, it's mid-October.

It floated down to the great falls of the Columbia, which is now Solilo Falls. And think about how much easier it was at this point. Like they're not going upstream any longer. They get to go with the current. True, but it was the Oregon Territory, so they were getting rained on constantly. Oh yeah.

I mean, it was pretty brutal conditions. But you're right, it wasn't like slugging through in the summertime, pulling that boat upstream. Stepping on prickly pear. Exactly. So this is where on November 7th, they thought that they saw the ocean. It's actually a bay about 25 miles inland.

And one of them said, ocean in view, O-C-I-N. I love the ocean, O-T-E-A-N. In this, the same paragraph, they misspelled ocean two different ways. Give them a break. Come on. Finally, finally, finally, by mid-November, they strode upon the sands of the Pacific.

And this is the really sad part, is that Mary Weather called it tempestuous and horrible. Like he wasn't like, oh, we made it. He was depressed. And he was like, this isn't like the Atlantic Ocean. This is rocky and beating us with waves, like the Oregon coast is rough. And he didn't cotton to it.

But what he did cotton to was being an accurate dude by dead reckoning over the course of over 4,100 miles, he was only off by 40 miles. Wow. In charting this ride. That is pretty amazing. It's pretty remarkable. So, Sacagawea, one of the reasons she signed on,

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

Right. And they let her come along. They had word from some local tribe. I'm not sure which one it was, that there was a monstrous fish on the beach and Lewis and Clark were like, oh, they're talking about a whale. We should go get some blubber.

And Sacagawea is like, I'm there. I'm coming with you. So they took her along and they all got to go see the Pacific Ocean. And it was a whale. A person that first time. Yeah. They got a bunch of blubber and oil and stuff from it.

And it died first. So you can keep liking Lewis and Clark. So they camped there on the Pacific for a full four months. Yeah, basically they were trying to, two things. They were trying to decide what to do. And they were, technically they were waiting for a boat to come by. Say a letter of credit from Jefferson that said,

hey, if you're a boat, give these people a ride back and we'll pay you like good money. Right. I read that they never seriously thought that they were going to take a boat back. Well, that was the deal is, technically they were supposed to be waiting for a boat. What they were really doing was just sort of

weighing their options as to how best to go back and win. And this is the really cool part. They put it to a vote. They did put it to a vote. And it was a vote that included an African-American and a woman and a native American. Yeah. And it was a, who Saka Gawaiya and York both had,

both their votes were given equal weight to everybody else's. Yeah, it was very cool. Where to camp, set up camp for the winter. Yeah, so they elected to cross the river to the south, where they were informed that there was elk and deer. You can hole up here, you can hunt all winter.

And they did. And prepare yourself for the return journey home. And they did. And prepare yourself for the return journey home. And they did. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

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And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so here we are at Fort Clatsop, Oregon. That's in Oregon, yeah. Named after the Clatsop tribe. They were hunting, they were storing up,

they were getting their provisions in order, getting ready to go back. And they hauled butt on the way back. Oh, they did. Yeah, you know how it is. Sure, plus it doesn't take as long because now you know how long it's gonna take. Yeah, and they weren't stopping to record everything.

They did actually split up. They're like bird dogs, we've already seen it. Been there, but the group wasn't as happy. They were irritable, especially Lewis. He kind of fell into a depression on the way home. He didn't, did he come out of it at all while they were at the Pacific or did it just stick the whole time?

Well, I mean, I think it was up and down. Basically, they believe when he was not recording in his journal, he was depressed. Oh, okay. But he is remarkable in that he soldiered on, like this is a manic depressive who was still like getting up every day and doing this. And like the worst thing he did was not journal, you know?

Actually, the worst thing he did was on the way back, he stole a canoe at one point, which is really out of character. And he was described as kind of like cracking at the seams at this point, which is really sad. So on March 23rd, 1806, they started back up the Columbia with these new canoes, bartered for some horses and camped with the Nez Piers for a month and then.

No, they got their horses back from the Nez Piers. Those horses, those were theirs, the ones they braided and left. Well, now this is before they got back there to the Nez Piers. They bartered for some horses and then eventually hooked back with the Nez Piers and camped for like a month.

And got their horses back. And got their horses back. I think that's your favorite part of the story. I think it's cool. They're like, hey guys, will you hang on to this horse? They also sunk their canoes at a certain point and then went back and got those. Yeah, to keep the canoes from being sent down river,

they just sunk them and then they came back and got them. That's pretty cool. So they basically retraced their trail through the Bitter Roots, only one retrograde march in the entire journey, which means you have to double back basically, which is in itself pretty remarkable. And then on July 3rd, 1806,

they separated back where they were at that original shortcut that they should have taken and said, hey, let's send off some different factions here and do a little bit more exploring and a little bit more recording of things. They're like, we've slacked off. Well, yeah, because they were kind of, like I said, they were hauling butt on the way home.

This is where Lewis, where they ran into their first kind of violent episode with the Blackfeet Indians. And a dude shot at Lewis. He shot back, hit the guy in the belly. Another guy stabbed the Blackfeet Indian. Or is it a Blackfoot Indian? I think Blackfoot.

Okay. And they rode away like the Blackfeet did, but two of them died. And it was, you know, it was sad. They had gone all that way without violence and they finally kind of had to. Their hand was forced essentially. Chuck, also there was another shooting

that took place during this period, but this one was accidental. Oh yeah. Lewis was actually shot when he was mistaken for an elk. While he was out hunting with a member of the expedition, Pierre Cousette. And Cousette didn't fess up to it immediately.

He was like, oh, I guess some Indians, it must have been those Blackfeet. And finally, when they searched the area and found no sign of Blackfeet, Cousette was like, I'm sorry, I thought you're an elk, I'm blind and one eye, I don't forget. But I'm the fiddle player.

And everybody loves me. Yeah, exactly. And Lewis was like, we'll just let it go. And apparently was really in a lot of pain. It hit him in the thigh. And like he had a very long and difficult recovery for the rest of the time. But it was about this time

when everybody came back together. Yeah, and this, you know, we're sort of simplifying this part of the story, but they eventually did all meet back up pretty remarkably. Like, I think the story is one of them rounded a bend and right as they did that, the others were rounding the bend. And they're like, oh, hey, it's you.

They're like, it's you. Out here in the middle of nowhere. So they eventually went back to the Mandan villages. That is where the Charbonneau family left the expedition. And that is where private John Coulter, who was one of the men, said, you know what? St. Louis, like, I didn't like it there. I really like it out here.

Can I kind of go back? And they're like, sure, man, go west, young man. Exactly. And he did so. He did. He was going to work with some French trappers and they had a following up pretty quickly after. And then this guy, Coulter, he went off on his own

and they think he was the first white person to enter what's now Yellowstone Park. And he was the first to recount the geysers and even still there's part of it called Coulter's Hell. Oh, cool. The geyser area of Yellowstone. Very cool. So reportedly the only thing they did not run out of

on the way home was powder, lead, paper, and ink. Wow. Or at least that's what Ken Burns says. You know how they put a little cherry on top of everything? Right. Finally, in September of 1806, on the 23rd, they arrived victorious in St. Louis

and the river was lined with people cheering for them, shooting their guns in the air. And like, we should point out, everyone thought they were dead. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I mean, for a long time, like they were sending messages back and prairie dogs. But then at a certain point, that just wasn't possible.

So even Jefferson had given up hope. They've been like, they've been going for two and a half years. Like we're not gonna hear from Lewis and Clark again. And then they did. And then they did. And covered about 8,000 miles, over two years, four months and nine days. Discovered, I'm sorry, not discovered.

Saw. Recorded 122 animals that they had never seen. 178 plants that they had never seen. And did a pretty darn good job of cartography. Right. Cartographing? Is that even a word? Yeah, I think it is.

Drawing maps. That was great. Describing the Rocky Mountains. And Jefferson was like, Rocky Mountains. Well, I have mountains now. What are those? And they were like, they're snow capped even in the summer. And they were, you know, they'd never seen any of this.

They were blown away. So after this, Clark sets up shop in St. Louis. Yeah, they doubled everyone's pay, which was nice. And gave everyone a bunch of land. Right. You got, I think 320 acres. Yeah, Lewis and Clark got 1,600 each. But the rest of the guys got like 320.

Almost the rest. Two people did not get any land or any money. And that was Sakagawa and York, which sucked. Yeah, and apparently York had a difficult reentry into slavery. I can imagine so. Cause think about like living like that and then going back to being a slave.

Yeah. And so he asked Clark for his freedom. He was like, I know I don't get land and all that stuff, but how about my freedom? And Clark was like, no. And not only that, he wrote his brother a letter and said, you know, York is being kind of uppity since he got back. He's not, he's not being a good slave.

And he's having trouble. And so I had to beat him. No. Yeah, that was the one time I was like, oh man. Yeah, that's pretty awful. This was like really headed in the good direction. And all that had to happen was he could have just said, yes, you are free.

And then it would have been the best story ever. Man, that's really awful. I had no idea about that. Yeah. And then there were various accounts that he might have been freed a few years later or perhaps escaped. No one is quite for sure,

even though I've noticed Ken Burns does a lot of factual stating of things that are disputed. Yeah. Like he just said straight up that he was freed five years later, and I read up on it and people are like, oh, maybe not. Ken Burns just does whatever his haircut tells him to. I'm a sucker for those things, though. I mean, I know a lot of documentary filmmakers

kind of poo poo him. Yeah. Well, I mean, it takes a certain interpretation. That's that, like you said. So, Louis. Wait, hold on. I'm really disappointed in Clark. I know.

That stinks. What do you want me to do? I don't know. It is very sad. I guess talk about Louis, yeah. I mean, Clark went on, we should say, to have a very successful rest of his career. Well, hold on.

You want a bright side? Okay. Bill Clinton in 2001 gave a posthumous rank as Sergeant in the Army to York. Oh, great. So that's kind of nice. Way to go, Clinton. Today, there are some statues commemorating York,

one in Louisville, Kentucky. I think there's one at Lewis and Clark College in Portland in Kansas City. There's one. So he's definitely been smiled upon historically as like a great man and adventurer. Great, by everyone but William Clark. Yeah, and his family.

Who was like, no. So Lewis had some difficulties upon returning home. He's made governor, appointed governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory. I think started out well, but then he kind of got into financial trouble. I think his territory got into financial trouble, right? Yeah, and he was going to Washington.

He wasn't able to complete. The big thing was that he wasn't able to complete what he was supposed to do, which is come back and write about the whole thing. Yeah, those weren't published until 1814, which is eight years after they returned. And even then, they were published after his death. Yeah, so he was, by all accounts, pretty depressed.

He was on his way to Washington supposedly to plead for more money for the territory. Yeah, he had been called out on some finances and he wanted to go clear that up. And supposedly, he had some of his journals that he wanted to turn in. Oh, gotcha. It's like, here, I've got this.

Right. And he fell out of favor a little bit with Jefferson because of all that, which is kind of stinks. It is because he was groomed by Jefferson. He was a family friend. Like they were friends. So Lewis, I guess, is on his way to Washington. And he's following the Natchez Trail, Natchez Trace.

And he stops in Tennessee at a place called the Grinders Inn. Yeah, near Nashville. And that's where he died. He was found, well, apparently crawling toward the innkeeper's wife, shot, bleeding, asking for water. And she just screamed and ran away. Yeah, and this is another disputed thing.

Was he killed or did he commit suicide? If you Google death of Maryweather Lewis, it comes up suicide. But it is definitely in dispute. Yeah, and Ken Burns straight up said he killed himself. And it was very sad. Well, the reason why it's in dispute is because he was shot in the abdomen and in the head.

He was also an expert marksman. Yeah, and the suicide people, I think, reckon that back then with guns, like if you really wanted to do it, you would point one at your chest and one at your head and squeeze at the same time. Oh, really? Yeah, like I hadn't heard that. Yeah.

But other people said he was murdered for money. And what were you going to say? Nothing. OK. Sadly, even though this story had a happy ending, it was sort of the beginning of the end of the American Indian. Yeah, that's a pretty big thing to point out.

Yeah, there was a great quote from one of the people in the documentary. It said, they left as students, came back as teachers, and sadly, America failed to learn the lessons that they had brought back with them. Because if everything had gone the way of Lewis and Clark, it would have been awesome. They were basically like, hey, you got the great father.

Like we said, we're going to live in harmony. And they believed him. And they believed themselves. They weren't pulling one over on him. And it's just sad that it went down a different way from that point forward, basically. You know what I'm saying? There was one brief moment when it could

have gone a different way. Yeah, and that was it. But Clark and Lewis also, I guess, kind of paved the way for the idea of manifest destiny. True. Although that wasn't coined until about 40 years after the expedition, they are always held up as this idea. And this is an idea that people have subscribed to

for a very long time. That America was destined to take up the area between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It was our destiny. And therefore, anything that stood in our way should just fall before us as we swept outward toward the Pacific Ocean. And justifies it means.

And Lewis and Clark was like, look, they're an example of that. Yeah. Clark eventually died of natural causes in 1838. Most of the rest of the party sort of just faded into history. Jean Baptiste. Well, yeah, he didn't. He became like a courtesan, not a courtesan,

that'd be a lady, a courtier, right? Well, one of the two, yeah. I think he went to Europe and hung up the king. He was friends with the German prince. Oh, a German prince? Prince Wilhelm. Yeah, OK. And I think the oldest survivor lived to be 99,

lived all the way to the Civil War. Oh, yeah. And at the age of 90, volunteered to fight for the union. And I don't know if they took him up on it, or if they were just like, we get it, you're a legend. But we got this. Yeah. So who knows?

So that's the Lewis and Clark expedition, the core of discoveries. The dog lived, the baby lived. Yeah, the dog made it all the way. They only lost one person on the entire trip, Charles Floyd. And he died early on of what they believe was probably appendicitis. Yeah, burst appendix.

And it's pretty amazing. Yeah. They didn't have to eat each other. No. They didn't even eat the guy who died of the burst appendix. No, just dog and horse. Yeah. If you, you got anything else?

Nope. If you want to learn more about Chuck's favorite story from American history, you can type in Lewis and Clark in the search bar at How Stuff Works. And since I said search bar, it means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this diplomatic immunity. Hey, guys, last week, the Dutch police

arrested the Russian diplomat, Dmitry Borodin, in his home. They were called in by concerned neighbors because the diplomat was drunk, hitting his kids, dragging them by their hair through the house. The police arrived as and was witness to the brutality against the children, and also established that Mr. Borodin was extremely drunk. They had no choice but to arrest him

to protect the children from further abuse. Immediately, the Russian government came into action and Putin, the devil incarnate, if you ask me, this is from Jasper, demanded his release and apologies from the Netherlands. That same afternoon, I started listening to the latest stuff you should know. Lo and behold, it was about diplomatic immunity.

As a podcast drew to a close, I received a news update on my phone that the Dutch government had apologized to the Russians for the arrest because it violated the Treaty of Vienna. Immunity won out again. Since then, UNICEF has issued a statement that the well-being of the children should be more important than diplomatic immunity,

maybe something will finally change? Probably not. Personally, I hope we declare Borodin persona non grata, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, wanted to share this actuality of your podcast with you. It's pretty weird that it happened when it did, and luckily it wasn't about floods or earthquakes.

And that is from Jasper in Amsterdam, one of my favorite cities. Nice, thanks a lot, Jasper. That's pretty interesting. I love it when things happen, like, some pateco like that. Yeah, confluence. Yeah, well, if you have a confluence email you want to send us, you can send us an email

to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. You can also hit us up on Facebook. We have a page at facebook.com. You should know. We have a Twitter handle. We're verified now. It's pretty awesome. That's S-Y-S-K podcast.

And you can join us at our good old home on the web. It's called stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.