The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0422; Jenkinson as Merryweather Lewis

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Today's program is a bit unusual. Clay Jenkinson, the scholar behind Thomas Jefferson, is also the nation's leading first-person interpreter of Captain Maryweather Lewis. Captain Maryweather Lewis joined hands with William Clark in the early 1800s to lead a military expedition across the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean. We know this journey today as the Lewis and Clark expedition and also as the Corps of Discovery. Today's program was recorded in late winter 2004 in Hayes, Kansas. And the program is a concert tape of scholar Clay Jenkinson portraying Captain Maryweather Lewis. This is part one of a two-part series. Please join us as Captain Maryweather Lewis takes us on his journey into the western part of our country. Thomas Jefferson was a visionary. He saw the future of America and the Republic of the Americas in the West. In 1803, as you know, he doubled the size of the United States with a single stroke of the presidential pen when he

signed the Louisiana Purchase and that was the biggest land sale in American history and actually in human history. Jefferson was also a collector of protégés. As president, he hired his neighbor Maryweather Lewis to serve as his private correspondent secretary in the White House. They lived together for 18 months and during that time Thomas Jefferson gave him a short course on the entire enlightenment. Maryweather Lewis was actually young enough to have been Thomas Jefferson's son who was born with insight of Monticello in the year 1774. He served in the United States Army in the Ohio River Country and then in 1804 with his friend William Clark. He led the most successful exploration in American history. Avoid your discovery that made Lewis and Clark and Sakagawa principal figures in American history and American mythology. Maryweather Lewis's life ended prematurely and tragically. He died in Tennessee in the early morning hours of October 11th, 1809, almost certainly by his own hand. Tonight you'll have the opportunity to meet this remarkable and complicated man.

The program will actually consist of three parts. First Mr. Lewis will tell his story of the expedition. Then he will take your questions and answers and then finally Clay Jenkins and the scholar behind Mr. Lewis will emerge to take your questions as a scholar from an historical perspective. So ladies and gentlemen it's my great pleasure to introduce Thomas Jefferson's friend and agent of discovery, Maryweather Lewis. First of all let me bear you greetings from the president of the United States. The difficulty of my expedition was very simple to describe. We left St. Louis or its environs on May 14th, 184 and we had about 20 tons of luggage and we had to take everything that we might possibly need for a voyage that might

extend to three years and there was absolutely no hope of resupply. So we had to take enough tools and clothing, pieces of metal, medicines, gifts to give to the native peoples that we would meet, scientific instruments, whatever an expedition of about 50 individuals would require for an immense journey into the heart of the American wilderness had to be fitted into our boats. But if we had included enough for a three-year voyage we could never have moved a single mile above St. Louis and so the great problem was finding enough to get to the Pacific coast and back again but not so overburdening ourselves that we could never move up the Missouri. Our vessels consisted of three boats, a 55-foot

keelboat which was really a sort of a barge. It drew three feet of water, 22 ores and two rowboat-like crafts called pyrrugs, a red pyrrug and a white pyrrug, one had seven ores and the other six. I'm going to Mr. Jefferson envision this expedition. He actually thought that I might go with ten or twelve young men to the Pacific coast and back and that's in fact what Congress authorized in the spring of 183. The letter of instruction that I received from the Secretary of War Henry Dearborn said that I could take up to twelve men with me. By the time I reached St. Louis the expedition really began at Pittsburgh that's where the keelboat was manufactured and I came down the Ohio River and began to gather men all along the route. When I got to St. Louis in the late autumn of 183 I was informed by local experts that twelve

men was too few. Not only would that be too few to get our immense amount of luggage up towards the source of the Missouri but there were concerns that the Sue Indians or others might attempt to intercept us and that a party that small would not be able to defend itself adequately. And so I made a kind of a unilateral decision in St. Louis not only to double the number of men authorized by Congress but to increase at fourfold. When we left May 14th 18th four we had just under fifty. Now some of those men were Frenchmen, French watermen we called Angagees or Voyageurs and they were hired merely to get us somewhere up the river. In other words when we'd taken care of the first great leg of the voyage up to your North Dakota they would be sent back and we would lighten the number of boats and move into the true wilderness of the

American West with a much smaller company. That's precisely what happened. When we left Fort Mandan in your North Dakota on April 7th 185 we had thirty three individuals in the permanent party and the others had been sent back with artifacts and maps and preliminary reports and even some live specimens for the President of the United States. You are listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Today humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson is portraying Captain Maryweather Lewis of the famous 1803 Lewis and Clark expedition. Captain Lewis's retelling of his captivating tale was recorded in late winter 2004 in Hayes, Kansas. Please join us as Captain Maryweather Lewis continues his description of the provisioning of this military expedition tasked with finding the Northwest Passage. So the first difficulty was provisioning. Mr. Jefferson had encouraged the Congress of the United States to

appropriate $2,500 for my voyage and I must tell you that I had spent all of those funds before I left Pittsburgh. Now it was never intended that that would cover all the costs. We had received permission to requisition clothing, uniforms, rifles, ammunition, ball, other items from army posts along the way. And I was authorized to recruit at public expense army soldiers from Cascascia and Southwest Point and other army posts in the Ohio country. Thomas Jefferson was a visionary. He believed that the future of our republic would play itself out in the Trans-Appalagian region. He wanted to make sure that our Western development was orderly, rational, sensitive in some way or other towards the native peoples who lived there and characterized by science rather

than just a pale male development into the West. And so essentially what he had in mind when he was the president was to send out a series of exploration parties to map the West, to survey it, to catalog its plants and animals and minerals and soil types and meteorology and so on. And to begin to create a systematic inventory of the entire continent. You all know of my expedition. I suppose it's the most famous in American history but it was by far not the only one. Zebulin Pike in 185 while I was searching for the source of the Missouri was attempting to find the source of the great Mississippi River. He determined to his satisfaction that it was leech lake. In 186 Zebulin Pike tried to find the source of the Arcanzus River. So there was one set of explorations that were funded under the Jefferson administration. William Dunbar and his friend Hunter were examining the Washington River at the same time

and down in what you call Texas Thomas Freeman with a naturalist by the name of Custis was attempting to ascend the Red River. So in other words the point that I wish to make from the beginning is that I was only one small part of Mr. Jefferson's grand scheme for the systematic unfolding of American development into the American West. My expedition I'm proud to say was the only one that he personally managed and I spent 18 months living with Thomas Jefferson in the White House. That was an extremely satisfying time for me because here was this extraordinary man a Renaissance man a scientist an architect a paleontologist a student of library classification the author of the Declaration of Independence the author of a famous scientific book notes on the state of Virginia and he lived with me virtually alone in the White House and we had long conversations about his intentions for the West. So I

learned what I could from this great man and I suppose I would say the most important decision that I ever made in the whole course of my life was that I couldn't command this expedition alone. I said to Mr. Jefferson that it was too much for any single individual and so he authorized me to find what I called a partner in discovery and the man that I chose was William Clark. William Clark as you know was the younger brother of the famous George Rogers Clark. I had served under William Clark briefly in the army. Clark was four years older than I was and that decision was so important that I just want to dwell upon it for a moment. I will tell you in candor that I am a moody man and that I'm happiest when I'm alone on the shore of the great Missouri River with my rifle and my notebook and my Newfoundland dog C-Man and that I was subject to fits of depression. So William Clark my partner was a steadier sort

of man. He had both feet firmly on the ground and his temperament was sunny and he frankly managed the men better than I did and he was a better boatman than I was and he had more tolerance for the Indian peoples than I tended to have and so that we split the command. This was informally done but but essentially Clark was the day-to-day manager of my expedition. It was his duty to keep those boats moving towards the source of the Missouri to make sure that the men were fed that there was adequate military discipline and my job was in a sense to be Mr. Jefferson's private agent on the tour to spend as much time on shore as possible conducting scientific work for Mr. Jefferson and that division of labor served us very well indeed. When we got back in 186 I held up the males in St. Louis on September 23 and I wrote the first report to the

president. I told him that there was no Northwest passage that we had only lost one of our men and that had been through natural causes Charles Floyd had died early on probably of a rupture dependence possibly of an intestinal failure of some sort but it bewildered us and we knew that he could not be saved but he was the only casualty amongst us. We did kill two Indians unfortunately on the return journey. I made a side trip up the Mariahs River to see if its head waters were in Canada because you see we were entitled by the Louisiana Treaty to the entire watershed of the Missouri. So every acre of land whose water drains into the Missouri system belonged to us now and Mr. Jefferson wanted to hasten the moment when the British left this continent once and for all. He openly resented that there were British in Canada and the idea was that if I could find a northern tributary of the Missouri that would send the

border farther north towards the North Pole. This was one of the primary objectives of our time in North Dakota and Montana and we nominated about four different rivers that we thought might have a Canadian source. None of them in fact did but I was examining one of them the Mariahs and I only had three men with me. I was I was dangerously under man and we encountered eight young black feet men and we knew if there were eight there there were eighty or eight hundred nearby and we felt that we had no choice but to spend the evening with them. We camped with them. We had a feast and I gave my peace speech and even gave a peace medal to the to the leader of the eight but at dawn the next morning when we were all at our most vulnerable they attempted to steal our guns and horses and I had taken the first watch and then I had awakened one of my men and gone to sleep and the next thing I remember was hearing this terrible chaos and I woke up and I saw one of my men Rubenfield wrestling for his

rifle and he in order to defend himself took out his knife and stabbed a black feet man in the guts and then the black feet realized that they couldn't couldn't steal the weapons but they tried to abscond with our horses and in protecting ourselves I pursued one of them and he was taking our little string of horses up a little coolly and I knew that if he got over the top of that ridge we would never see him again and so on a kind of universal sign language I said stop or I will shoot and he didn't and I I shot him in the guts as he fell he had a rifle he had an indifferent Canadian musket and as he fell onto one knee he shot at me and I distinctly remember feeling the breeze through my hair it was that close so we killed these two black feet and I must say on behalf of president Jefferson I regret it because he had urged us to bend over

backwards to conciliate the native peoples wherever possible but you must defend yourself and we did and we were lucky not to suffer any losses in that accident you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour today we are fortunate to capture Captain Maryweather Lewis of the famous 1803 Lewis and Clark expedition retelling his tale to an audience in Hayes Kansas please listen quietly as Captain Lewis continues to tell us about his first letter to President Jefferson a letter he sent upon his return to St. Louis so I held up the males in St. Louis to tell Mr. Jefferson all of this and I also told him that there were infinite numbers of beaver on the upper Missouri I mean infinite and that if the American people were just turned loose by their government and given a little economic encouragement this beaver trade could be one of the primary economic engines of the century that was opening and that we could we

could defeat the British in the fur trade and the French and the Spanish so all of that in my letter to Mr. Jefferson but finally I said if a grateful country gives rewards to us for our work I insist that William Clark be rewarded equally with myself and he was and I was very grateful for that so that's Clark you get a sense of him I'll give you another story about Clark to show that he did have a temper we met more than 50 different Indian tribes in the course of our tour now think of this we didn't speak their languages they didn't speak English and so every Indian encounter was fraught with difficulty because we had to to explain to them Mr. Jefferson's purposes across almost impossible linguistic barriers now we did have a sign language interpreter by the name of George Duallyar he was our ableist man after Clark and he knew the the lingua franca of the plane's tribes this gesture language and it was actually

quite an effective language for simple communications but that doesn't get Mr. Jefferson's abstractions to the years of these native peoples and so let me give you the worst case scenario I would give my peace speech in English this was amongst the Nez Perse I would speak in English and say we come in peace this then would be translated from English into French by François LaBiche and then Tucson-Charbonneau a trader that we met in Dakota would translate from his native French into his adoptive Hedazza and then his wife Succa Garouille translated from her adoptive Hedazza into her native Shoshone and then a 16 year old boy who was a prisoner translated from his adoptive Shoshone into his native Nez Perse I would say we come in peace and we go from English to French and French to Hedazza and Hedazza to Shoshone and Shoshone to Nez Perse how much of Mr. Jefferson's benevolence found its way across these barriers I cannot say

it was quite complex and I would give the speech that I could I could recite to you in 10 or 15 minutes and it once took five hours to communicate and pain taking you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour please visit our website www.thhythinjefferson.org www.thhythinjefferson.org Clay Jenkins in portraying Thomas Jefferson and Bill Crystal portraying John Adams will be appearing in Squaw Valley California on July 17th 2004 please check our website or call 530-581-4011 extension one Jane Carlson for ticketing information the number again is 530-581-4011 extension one Jane Carlson thank you for listening we will be back in just a minute please stay tuned

welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour if you're just tuning in you will realize that today's program is a bit unusual humanity scholar Clay

Jenkinson is portraying Captain Maryweather Lewis the famous co-captain of the 1803 Lewis and Clark expedition this expedition was conceived by our third president Thomas Jefferson president Jefferson hired his young neighbor in protégé Maryweather Lewis to lead this military expedition tasked with finding the northwest passage when we went to break captain Lewis had just finished describing the complicated task of interpreting president Jefferson's speech into the native language of the various tribes they encountered let us join captain Lewis as he speaks before an audience in Hayes, Kansas and we would take down vocabularies because mr. Jefferson had wisely printed up a grid of 250 common words husband wife birth death son moon stars words like that a basic vocabulary and he had had these printed in blanks and he wanted me whenever we had leisure to sit down and take down a basic vocabulary of the tribe that we were with and we did these we brought back almost 30 of them this was

extremely difficult business and so for example I would say what is their word for moon this would go from English to French and French to Hedazza and Hedazza to Shoshone and Shoshone to Nezperson then there would be a long discussion amongst the Nezperson and it would work its way back and then they would say well full moon or half moon I mean literally this is impossibly difficult and so this this was all part of the enlightenment project of the expedition you know we weren't adventurers we were there as collection agents for for science so most of the tribes that we met we we got along with well we made we made a list after the expedition of the tribes we most liked and the tribes we least liked we most admired the Mandan of your North Dakota the Walla Walla and the Nez purse of Idaho and Oregon we least liked the Sue of South Dakota and the black feet of Montana but most tribes were somewhere in the

middle but out of the whole very friendly and conciliatory towards us and and really they they showed a great deal of respect for us but we were amongst the Teton Sue in South Dakota for four days September 24th through 28th 18th four this was the first real crisis of the expedition now we left St. Charles Missouri where the river is a mile wide on May 14th and we traveled slowly across Missouri and just touched your Kansas in fact we named Independence Creek because we were there on the 4th of July we we stopped at the the Great Kansas River which is one of the primary sources of the of the lower Missouri and then we worked our way up along your Idaho Nebraska border and had our first significant Indian encounter with otos and Missouri's on August 3rd 18th four that went quite well then we met the Yankton Sue at near Yankton South Dakota but everyone warned us that the Teton Sue would be troubled that the Teton Sue considered them to be the masters of the Missouri and we found

this to be true and twice during our four days amongst them they're most aggressive chief a man named the partisan said this said you can stay with us forever if you want you can turn back and go and go down the Missouri but if you wish to go on you must leave a third of your goods with us as tax to their minds that was their river and they could close it or open it at will well we obviously couldn't allow this to happen so twice during that four-day period we came within a hair's breath of a of a blood bath and at one point when the when the tension was at its height I looked up on the bluffs I was on the keelboat out in the water and Clark was on shore doing the actual negotiating and they're on the bluff for more than 200 Teton warriors all with their bows and arrows ready and if if somebody had fired an arrow or someone had fired a gun there would have been a great loss of life on both sides and

probably the expedition would have collapsed at that point if we survived so Clark normally was very level headed but on this occasion he grew angry and what happened was that there there is an elite core of soldiers amongst the Teton suit called dog soldiers and they are trained from earliest childhood to be absolutists and so for example if they are walking into battle they will continue to walk straight into a cannon's fire and never turn away that they're required to to maintain this rigidity of discipline and the partisan this rascally chief had several of these dog soldiers grab hold of the cable of the boat and they would not let go nothing we would have had to kill them to get that cable out of their hands this is of course what something we did not want to do so Clark grows angry I'm watching this as if it's a kind of a pantomime from the keelboat he pulls out his sword and raises it like this and this is a signal to me to prepare for action so I'm getting the men ready and Clark then

says he reported later he says to the partisan we are not squaws but men and we have enough medicine in that boat there to kill ten such tribes as yours well now a more moderate chief by the name of black buffalo medicine came forward an older man and he said look we're going to let you go on but you need to show some respect for our sovereignty and so I insist that you give us something even a single plug of tobacco to show that you know that that we can control this river and William Clark said no way well enough I happen to have some tobacco and I took a plug of it and I hurled it with all my might into the chest of black buffalo medicine so now if you are a great leader open this river but now he had a problem because these dog soldiers are still holding

the cable and he can't he can't order them off so here's what he did he went to the cable and put his hands on it and snapped it out of there's this allowed them to save face and he handed that cable to William Clark and off we went so there's a sign of Clark's anger when he he was seldom angry but when he became angry I was more level headed than he you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour today scholar Clay Jenkinson has dawned bookskins in front of an audience in Hays Kansas and he is portraying Captain Mary Weather Lewis Captain Lewis just finished telling us a story about his co-captain William Clark's becoming angry with the Teton Sue who wanted a payment for traveling on their river as we join Captain Lewis again he will tell us more about the expeditions encounters with the tribes along their route well then we got to the Erykara a few weeks later the Erykara and Northern South Dakota and there and Earthquatch people

they're not nomads like the Sue there there are semi-settentary farmer Indians when we got to them their chief Arquita and Asher came out to Great Britain said the river is open and no one dares to close it so we had made our point and we were never seriously molested there after and held this little this little skirmish that occurred on the return journey now Clark brought with him his Negro slave York the only black man in the expedition was not at all uncommon for a military officer to travel with his black servant and Clark had slaves the Clark family had many slaves and Clark brought this this boyhood companion of his York and the thing about York was that no Indian had ever seen a Negro before so imagine if you had never seen a black man before and suddenly as an adult you had your first experience of this the Indians have a kind of a superstitious way of seeing the world and they say that anything that

is not within their system anything that's unfamiliar has medicine so I had an air gun that fired without gunpowder and they would back away in awe at this because they saw it as a medicine item when the when the horse first came into the Indian world the horse as you know was not indigenous to North America the horse was brought by the Spanish and when the horse first came the Indians called it a medicine creature or a medicine dog because they of course they had no word in their in their language for horse but they see everything that is beyond their world as medicine or spiritual and when they met this York they assumed that he must be a spirit being and some of them thought he must be our chief because he was so different from the rest of us you see the irony of that I mean here's York who's who's chattel in Kentucky suddenly impressing the Indians and they're looking upon him as perhaps the leader I mean none of us was unaware of the ironies of the situation in the

Erickaer called him the big medicine I see that there are some young people here you know amongst the Erickaer York York had a rich sense of humor and amongst the Erickaer he pretended that he was a semi-tamed bear and the carc was his owner and he would roar at these children and the children would shriek and walk behind their mother's dear skin dresses and hide and I finally put a stop to that not wanting any cultural misunderstandings amongst the amongst the Erickaer but the most famous event involving this York occurred in in North Dakota amongst the Mandan and the Hadatsa the Mandan and the Hadatsa are also Earth Lodge peoples and they had a population of about 4,000 so this made this the largest urban center west of New Orleans in the New World and we spent the winter with them and there was a chief by the name of LeBorn who was a Hadatsa and he was very skeptical of us and in fact he stayed away the entire winter and we wondered how we were ever going to make

contact with him and finally on March 9th 185 when we'd been there for three or four months he came in and we said we gave him a piece metal and we gave him a American flag and we gave him an officer's coat and a hat and and other gifts of respect and then through the interpreter Sharfa now I said what brought you in finally he said I my foolish country men tell me that you have a black man amongst you I do not believe it and I have come to see this prodigy so we brought York out and this man was shocked but he was so skeptical that he puts fiddle on his finger and tried to wipe off what he assumed was war paint and when he couldn't he clearly was perplexed so Clark told York to take off his handkerchief and there was his kinky hair and the the Hadatsa said is it a is it a buffalo man but after that they called York the black white man because of course they had no term for negro in their limited vocabulary and

York played this role for us that we would meet these Indian tribes and they would be they would be so odd by him that this would buy us time to explain ourselves so he played an inadvertent role but an important one in the success of the expedition drewyer I've already told you about the sign language interpreter he was our master hunter I said once in one of my journals that is as long as drewers healthy and we have lead and ball we will eat plentifully in North America I would say he was the third most important individual of the expedition there was John Colter who was an extraordinary young man I'll speak of him a little bit at the end of of my talk Francis White House was a was a skin dresser made clothes like this once our cloth disintegrated Patrick Gas was our carpenter he helped to build camp wood at the mouth of the Missouri and Fort Mandan in North Dakota and Fort Clats about on the Pacific coast we had Silas Goodrich who was a fisherman we had Francois

Rivet one of the Frenchmen who could dance on his hand and this actually produced a good deal of merriment amongst the Indians that we met we had Joseph Shields John Shields who was a self-taught blacksmith he is not formally trained in in the arts of blacksmithery but he proved to be extremely important and I said one time in Montana this self-taught man has shown skills that we probably could not have survived without his ingenuity with metal is just the staggering and also with with other craft so we tried the higher strong young men with a high threshold of pain and a good work ethic who would also bring certain types of skills to us that we needed to survive for a three-year voyage one of them one of the men later said that there were 100 applicants for every position that we filled that's something of an exaggeration but we did have a very rigorous system and I said I wrote a

kind of job description in a letter to William Clark and I said no gentleman sons working boys preferably unmarried because we don't want people looking over their shoulders through the course of a perilous journey of this sort you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour humanity scholar Clayging Conson is portraying Captain Mary Weather Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition from 1803 Captain Lewis is speaking in Hayes, Kansas where he is about to tell us more about the expedition's personnel and about the various medical situations they encountered when we started out we assume there would be doubts and the fact that there was only one we regard as as extraordinary luck many of the men were ill William Bratton had a slip disc on the Pacific coast I assumed that he would die Nathaniel prior one of the three sergeants and one of the ableist of all the men got a shoulder dislocated

in North Dakota and if you can imagine it we put three of our strongest men onto this and they held him down and put their feet on his chest and pulled that shoulder back into place took four tries he in his once this happens it can happen quite easily again he had two more dislocations in the course of the expedition and he was later given a pension by the United States Army for the disability that he had suffered several men had had knife and an axe accidents that went right down to the bone nobody broke a bone fortunately that would have been extremely difficult and of course Charles Floyd died I'll give you one more personnel note George Shannon was the youngest member of the expedition he was 18 years old at the time we left St. Louis who's an extraordinary young man and we all liked him a great deal and he had that kind of optimism of youth but he had a terrible failing he got lost from time to time and you know you wouldn't think that this would be possible but it was

and the worst case was at the bottom of yourself Dakota we had sent him out to hunt and somehow he got it into his adolescent brain that he had fallen behind us when in fact he was ahead of us and so naturally he tried to catch up and in doing so got farther and farther and farther ahead of us until he began to worry and then he ran out of lead he had plenty of powder but very little lead and so after he had used his last lead ball he fashioned to find a little bullet out of a piece of wood a stick with that he shot a rabbit and then he he fell into despair and when we found him 16 days later he was amaciated he had been living on grass and he in fact we saw him when we saw him he was sitting on the banks of the river hoping against hope that some trading vessel would come up and William Carcou was almost never sarcastic on that occasion wrote in his diary this young man had liked to have starved to

death in the greatest game preserve on earth for the want of a bullet in some good sense so that made us watch him more closely there after but he was lost twice more so this is you get a sense of I hope you get a sense of the kind of people that I was involved with these are not people that you take to high table at the White House with Mr. Jefferson these are young men who got us across this continent and if you think about it this is an age before internal combustion we were about 10 years ahead of steam steam was being experimented with but it did not yet really been applied to water crafts and so we went 7,689 miles and when the conditions were precisely what we needed we could we could sail that almost never happened maybe one day out of a hundred and so we made we took 20 tons across this continent basically with the backs and thighs of these young men and you I don't think any one of you I know some of you are farmers but I don't think that any one of you can imagine how

strenuous this was when I would call a halt at the great falls in Montana the men would lie down wherever they happened to be and sleep until we kick them back awake they suffered so grievously they had turned their bodies into protein consumption machine and some of them were eating seven and eight pounds of roast per day just to feed this machine because they were working so hard and yet at the end of a day that began at 4 a.m. and last until at least 5 p.m. a day of unbearable labor we would call a halt and create camp we'd serve up a meal post a guard at the perimeter and then instead of going to sleep as you might have expected them to do someone would call out well cruise at your fiddle and PR cruise at our master waterman who had a fiddle with him would pull it out and make music and they would dance sometimes two and three and four hours

under the moon you're listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour we will return in just a moment welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour today humanity scholar Clay

Jenkins and his portraying Captain Mary Weather Lewis in this two-part concert series in Hayes Kansas before the break mr. Lewis showed us how difficult it was to be a member of the expedition strenuous backbreaking work long hours no normal comforts of home and yet in the evening the men would call for PR cruise at to bring out his fiddle and the men would dance let us join captain Lewis as he describes a typical evening for us just shocked me to see that they had any interest in recreation after such a day but they did and there was a kind of an a spree to core that all that made us a family in a certain kind of way so that's that's the expedition the first year of travel took us from the mouth of the Missouri all the way up to the great bend of the Missouri in your North Dakota and we wintered amongst these mandan and hidatsa peoples I'll only tell you two stories about that you I'm sure you

can sense how cold it can be in North Dakota yeah unbearable cold none of us had ever seen anything like it in our lives it was 45 degrees below zero on the worst day and the wind was about 80 miles per hour it was so cold that our whiskey froze it was so cold that our thermometer burst and I was sitting at my desk making a report for the president one day and the sergeant at about 9 a.m. on an extremely cold day and the sergeant at guard came in and said captain Lewis you must come outside because there's something I have never seen in my whole life there are three sons today so I went out and looked down to the southeast and there was the pitiful little son and on either side of itself were crystalline reflections have you seen this the sun dogs the the parhelian I described it in in my journals for science but the mandan leader had a much better explanation he said father it is so cold in Dakota that the sun lights little fires for itself to stay warm such as the savage

sensibility we saw the northern lights there for the first time and I described them in our journals but the second story I'll tell you about this is that with the day that we arrived these are friendly people the mandan and the hidats and they were they're semi sedentary so they're somewhat civilized and that means they have the rudiments of institutions and the leader of the lower mandan village a man named shehaka the big white came to visit us and he brought across the river for us a hospitality gift of 140 pounds of buffalo flesh he brought it on the back of his wife and he carried his pipe such agenda relations amongst the peoples of Dakota and he gave us this lovely speech that the roast was was placed on a mat and he said to be father you are welcome here but I must warn you winters are harsh and I will make this pledge to you if we mandans eat abundantly this winter you will join us in

abundance but if we suffer you must agree to starve alongside of and they were equal to that generosity of spirit and extraordinary people the black cat Posa Capsa hey I said was a man who would be honored in any society honor well finally it was time to leave and as I told you we sent reports and discharged men and temporary French voyages and live specimens and a range of other things down the river in the keelboat which could go no farther and so now our group number 33 and as I suppose you know we had hired the Charbonneau family who saw Charbonneau the trader and his wife Sakagar we are and their infant son came with them John Batesh Charbonneau he had been born just 55 days before our departure so here's this incongruity of a family with an infant child traveling with us and here's why this Charbonneau was a sort of a a huckster but a valuable huckster and he came to us when we were setting up our

fort there and he said you're going to need horses to cross the Rocky Mountain said you'll never get all this stuff across the Rocky Mountains without horses he said there are two types of people out at the source waters that have horses there are the flat heads and there are the Shashone and he said you want the Shashone because they're closest to the actual source of the Missouri River and if you take me with you I have this Shashone wife and when the moment comes she will help you get the horses that you need to cross the continental divide and so it was on that basis that we hired this family you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour today Captain Maryweather Lewis portrayed by Clay Jenkinson as telling us about his experience as the co-captain of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition he just explained how the expedition acquired Sakagawa and her husband now Mr. Lewis will tell the tale of the expedition leaving their winter home and searching for the northwest passage and so we

left 33 strong on April 7th 185 we had made six crude little dug out canoes out of cottonwoods and now our fleet consisted of the two original pieroges and these six new canoes and this is what I wrote I think I think you can get a sense of the pride that I felt on this occasion because in a sense we were now leaving the last little outpost of Western civilization no a number of white people had been that far up the Missouri River before and now we were entering true wilderness what I like to call Tara incognito and everything that we now saw was going to be new I mean literally in some sense everything we saw thereafter had never been witnessed by a man with an alphabet before so we were the first civilized people ever to see Montana and we would be naming it and describing its creatures and mapping it for the first time and so on so this was this in a sense we were leaving this little outpost and entering the

true discovery phase of the expedition and I was really full of this idea this is what I wrote in my diary April 7th 185 our vessels consist of six small canoes and two large pieroges this little fleet although perhaps not quite so respectable as those of Columbus or Captain Cook were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever be held theirs and I dare say with as much anxiety for their safety and preservation we are now about to penetrate a country at least 2,000 miles in width upon which the foot of civilized man has never tried but good or evil it has in store for us is for experiment to determine and this little fleet contains every article by which we are to expect to subsist or defend ourselves entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which has formed a darling

project of mine for the last 10 years I could not but look upon this moment as amongst the most happy of my life the men are an excellent health and spirits zealously attached to the enterprise and eager to proceed not a murmur or whisper of discontentment is to be heard among them but all act in unison and with the most perfect harmony I took an early supper this evening and went to bed we were now about to penetrate a country at least 2,000 miles in width upon which the foot of civilized man had never tried just imagine this we were in a sense walking off the map and we literally had no idea what was to come and I felt the pride of the discoverer well we named this country you know when the Missouri forks into three co-equal branches no one of which can any

longer justly be called the Missouri I had to name them and I named the first branch the Gallatin after the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin I named the second branch the Madison after the Secretary of State James Madison the and the principal branch the branch which we would take to the source I named the Jefferson and when the Jefferson forked into three branches I named one philanthropy another philosophy in the third wisdom after Mr. Jefferson's cardinal virtue we named the Dearborn River and the Smith River one day we named a river something or other and Clark came to me after supper and he said my friend I wonder if you would allow me a small private indulgence I should like to rename this the Judith River after a young woman that I fancy back in Virginia so I said of course and as you know that river is still called the Judith River in your time well now I felt a certain pressure upon myself so a few days later when we came to another bold stream I determined to call it the

Mariahs after one Mariah would a woman of Virginia and I wrote in my diary this shallow-feated and accurate stream although it perhaps does not have the pure celestial virtues of that fair one is nevertheless destined to become a bone of contention between great Britain and the United States with respect to the fur trade and perhaps Miss Wood will not mind terribly much if I name the stream modestly in her honor so we named the West and we mapped the West and we discovered things that you probably will not credit we would come up over a ridge and we would see 60,000 buffalo they were so thick that when we walked on shore we literally sometimes had to use the butt of our rifles to part them because they they feared us not and they just stood there and we would walk

within inches of them there were millions of antelope and mule deer and big horned sheep and jack rabbits and the elk were so plentiful that they almost were a nuisance to us I reckoned that every morning if Clark and I walked alone on the shore in 15 minutes we could kill enough to feed a regiment of 800 for a week I had to warn the men not to kill too much because the temptation was just so great the wolves and coyotes of this district didn't even bother to hunt they just walked behind the herds and waited for something to die I mean literally I worked it out one day it took for our 33 member party it took a buffalo a day to feed them or four deer or an elk in the deer but this was no problem in this part of the voyage on the return journey in 186 Clark came down the Yellowstone I never saw the upper Yellowstone but he came down it and he he said in his diary about on the eighth day of

describing the innumerable numbers of buffalo he said you know I'm never gonna say this again because no one would ever believe how many there are they were as thick as locusts but two thousand pounds a piece it was the Garden of Eden and all of us had a sense of awe at this place it's as if I'm not really a Christian in that sense of the term I'm more like Mr. Jefferson adias but it's almost as if the great creator had been holding this back from time immemorial for this moment in Europe everything had been tamed everything had been domesticated the fences had been put up the fields had been plowed it was there was no nature in Europe but here was nature in the wrong we were the first ever to see it it was extremely intoxicating and I frankly wanted to be the first civilized man to see the great falls of the Missouri we had heard of them and I wanted to be the first civilized man to see the source of the Missouri

because frankly who remembers Columbus's lieutenant you if you're if you're going to be the discoverer you want to be more or less alone on that occasion so I would make up excuses to go ahead because I wanted to be there first now I know that sounds vain but if you were in my position you would do it too and I was the first civilized man to see the great falls and I described them in my diary and after I described them I realized that my description was pitiful here was my moment you know I was Mr. Jefferson's hand picked emissary I was the eyes and ears of the enlightenment this was the moment that I had been preparing all my life for and when the moment came I could not find words equal to the magnificence of the great falls and I wish that I had the painting capacity of Salvador Rosa or Titian or that I had the poetic capacities of the Scottish Nature Poet James Thompson or Mr. Jefferson's famous facility with prose but I had none of those and I dispaired but we made it around the 18 and a quarter miles that the portage of the falls required we got underway again and then I had this is perhaps the proudest moment of my entire life on

August 12 18 5 I actually drank from the source of the Missouri River think of it when we started it was more than a mile wide and literally nobody knew where its source was and now after all of this hardship I am at the precise fountain of one of the world's great rivers this is what I wrote my diary I said at the distance of four miles far that the road took us to the most distant fountain of the Missouri River in search of which we have spent so many toils some days and restless nights thus far I had accomplished one of those grand objects upon which my mind has been unalterably fixed for many years judge then of the pleasure I felt in kneeling and slaking my thirst with this pure and ice cold water which issued from the base of a low mountain or high hill I was traveling with a man named human feel an Irishman I said this two miles below McNeill stood with one foot on either side of this little rivulet and thanked his God that he had lived to mistride the mighty and here to for

deemed endless Missouri River now that was a day think of it I bestowed the Missouri and drank from it and then I climbed up a little ridge and on the other side there were waters of the Columbia it was the continental divide and I drank from those I had as it were knitted together this continent in my digestive tract you have been listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour please visit our website for information pertaining to humanity scholar Clay Jenkinson's performances on July 17th 2004 Clay Jenkinson is Thomas Jefferson will discuss with his lifelong friend John Adams the ideas and thoughts completing the concepts of war and peace this discussion will take place in Squaw Valley California just a quick drive from Reno Nevada please visit our website www.th hyphen Jefferson dot org for more information or call the

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again next week for another entertaining historically accurate and thought provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson