Lewis and Clark, the Corps of Discovery, and Writing Collective History: Interview with Author Craig Fehrman

Introduction

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0:12Hi, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, it's hard to avoid hearing about Lewis and Clark and the core of discovery. As a lad with more interest in history than was perhaps healthy, I wanted to know everything I could about them. Every time we were at the Oregon coast, I demanded to visit Fort Clatsop, where they spent the winter of 1805 to 1806. When we drove along the Columbia Gorge, I wanted to stop at the landmarks Lewis and Clark mentioned in their journals.

0:44It was as close to real history as I ever felt.

Guest Introduction

0:48That is one of the two major reasons I am so excited to talk to today's guest. Craig Fairman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently of the new book, This Vast Enterprise, A New History of Lewis and Clark. The other reason is that the book is so, so good. It is one of my favorites of the last decade, and I am so excited to talk with him about it today for our very last ever interview on Tides. Craig, thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, man, I'm so excited. Thanks for having me.

Writing Inspiration

1:18So what brought you to the subject of Lewis and Clark? I mean, why write a new book on this topic? It's a very fair question, and it kind of started because I wanted to tell an adventure story. So I wanted to write a book that was a page-turner, that was epic, and started thinking through American examples. And honestly, the first one that came to mind was Lewis and Clark. But there has been a lot written about them, so I sort of started by going through the journals and seeing, you know, was there something new here? Was there something that had been missed? And honestly, from the very start, I was like, I only know half of the story. I know a little bit about Lewis.

1:48I know a little bit about Clark, although I think I found new things about them in my book, too. But there was so much that I didn't know, and then I started supplementing with a little archival work, found some new documents that hadn't really been seen.

Research Process

1:59And so what I realized was that readers had never really experienced the full story, and I had a chance to tell that to them in this book. Grubhub Plus membership auto-renews.

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Historical Context

3:17I mean, a great many people, and I'm guessing a lot of people who are listening to this episode, will have read Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage. I mean, I think I read that right after it came out when I was maybe 12 years old. Sure. But that was 30 years ago, and that's still kind of the standard thing that people go to if they're like, read a book on Lewis and Clark. That's the one. What has changed with our understanding of the core of discovery in those 30 years?

3:50Sure. Well, let's nerd out a little bit here. One thing that's great about Lewis and Clark is because it's such an all-American story, it's a great case study to see how different historians kind of bring their eras to bear. So my favorite writer on Lewis and Clark is actually Bernard DeVoto, who wrote back in the 50s. And that was the Cold War, and he sees imperialism around every corner. And you can understand why, right? Like he's thinking about America and the Soviet Union, and so he's finding echoes in the journals. I think the same thing is true of Ambrose, too. To me, it feels very much like a Clinton-era book, right? Like it's all about competence and commerce, and it's very neoliberal.

4:22I'm sure we can say the same thing of my book, too, in that I'm shaped by some of the concerns around us. So I think there's value in going in each of those directions. But I do think what I was able to do that was new was really rely on scholarship that sort of emphasized some of these new perspectives. So much academic work, and I know you rely on this in your podcasting as well, focuses on the regular people, whether they're Native, whether they're American soldiers, but not just the captain point of view, not just the president's point of view. So that's what I tried to do, too. I tried to bring in these different strands and sort of make this more of an ensemble, which I think is really the only accurate way to tell the story.

4:55Yeah, that came through so, so clearly was that you were not just concerned with Lewis and Clark. You were not just concerned with Jefferson, the kind of top-down idea of what is the expedition for and what is it like for the people who were leading it. But the whole crew, I mean, just to give the listeners a little bit of a preview here, I mean, every single chapter of the book, you are switching perspectives. You're moving from one individual to the next, and it's not just Lewis and Clark. You're talking about York, Clark's slave. You're talking about Sacagawea. You're talking about the various indigenous leaders that they're meeting along the way.

5:28I think my favorite chapters might be the ones from the perspective of John Ordway, who was kind of the first sergeant of the expedition. These are just not ways that I have ever been taught to think about Lewis and Clark, not in school and not in the reading I've done on the topic. Yeah, but I think it's important to do because Lewis and Clark were very heroic and courageous individuals who sacrificed a lot. But when it was time to tow a canoe against the Missouri current, to stand in that cold water waist deep and just get to work, the rocks lacerating your feet, they weren't doing that. Lewis was off working on science.

6:00Clark was off working on maps. John Ordway was the one who had that rope over his shoulder, leaning against it, trying to grab a bush for leverage, and then he pulls out a rattlesnake.

Expedition Experience

6:08That experience was just fundamentally different than what the captains did. And so to tell the expedition truthfully, you need all those experiences. You need York, you need Sacagawea, you need the native people they met, but you definitely need John Ordway and even something like land. To me, land is at the core of this story, and so they're going up the Missouri. A lot of it is some of the best farmland any of them ever seen. The reason John Ordway was on the expedition, the reason he was a soldier, was because his family didn't have enough land. They were poor. The family farm couldn't be split enough ways for all the brothers.

6:39And so John Ordway was out on the American frontier doing God knows what, standing in a cold river now. But he was also seeing this land, and it meant something to him. Of course, it meant something to the native people, too, who were living there. And that's one of the ways that this expedition is such a powerful story, because you have so many people wanting the same thing and trying to figure out how to navigate not just routes, but to navigate each other and each other's desires. I'm so glad you mentioned land and Ordway, because I could not get out of my head the picture of your description of Ordway's family farm in New Hampshire.

7:12And, I mean, for anybody who's ever been to New Hampshire, imagine farming, like, a random plot of land in New Hampshire. Compare that to the bottom land around the Missouri River. Are you kidding? It must have looked like paradise to him. Absolutely. And I can kind of go behind the scenes here, I think, in a fun way. So I knew the towns that John Ordway grew up in. And one thing that's great about New England is it's got this long culture of history lovers and history buffs and amateur historians. So I talked to people at the town level in the history societies, and they had written books. And so there was a book that had a for sale ad for a farm that was on the same road as the Ordway's farms in the same decade that John Ordway lived there.

7:50So that description, you know, I qualify it. I try to be really rigorous. So I was like, it may have looked like this. But also we know this is as close as we're going to get, because I had a for sale ad that listed the orchards, the kinds of crops that they grew, the number of outbuildings. And that kind of granular detail, like in this book, I wanted to put you in the canoe, but I also wanted to put you on the farm. I wanted you to see the world the way John Ordway did. And now all of a sudden land means something different to him than it does to, say, Jefferson, where it's more of a, you know, a nation building exercise. For John Ordway, that's that's your independence.

8:20That's your future. I'm so, so glad that you did that, because one of the things that I think is hard for people to make sense of is how you translate how you get from these big abstract processes like westward expansion or, you know, the demographic expansion of the American populace that Americans are having more babies than just about anybody else on the face of the planet. In this time, populations are expanding so rapidly. You talk about what a large family Ordway comes from, how, frankly, poor the farmland is. It can't support the ones that are there, much less each of them individually with families of their own, that that creates a powerful pressure that works within a person that like you can see those big processes turn into an engine of individual movement.

9:04I thought that was such a fascinating thing in the way that you did that here. Yeah, and this is just where the research helped me be as detailed as I could. I went through old newspapers, which, as we know, are digitized and a little easier now. I knew the first captain that Ordway had served under from the National Archives. So I found the recruitment ad that, you know, I don't know for sure that Ordway saw this ad. But at the same time that he signed up, this ad was running in newspapers all around New England. And in that ad, the captain says, come serve and quote the Garden of America. So you can see this poll was happening in a really specific way.

9:34And given what Ordway's farm looked like, you read a line like that in a newspaper and you start to think, maybe I do want to serve in the army, even if it means five bucks a month and getting beat by a kind of nasty captain. I mean, that's it's such an elegant encapsulation of the idea of push pull factors and migration that, you know, you have the push of this land sucks. I can't farm it. I can't farm it. There are too many people here. I have too many siblings. And the pull factor of but the land there is really good. And if you are born and raised as a farmer, which, you know, 80, 85, 90 percent of the American populace is at this point in time, that is how you see the world.

10:10You see it as a succession of different farmable plots. And so, of course, that would have been on his mind. I thought that was just a really, really illuminating way of helping us understand who these people were and why they were doing it. Thanks. And it's such a contrast to Lewis and Clark, too. Like Clark's family moved from Virginia to Kentucky, but it was much more an executive level decision. They're like, well, our tobacco is sort of draining and leaching our soil, so let's make a move that makes financial sense for us. But it wasn't desperation. It wasn't personal. It was calculating. And so Clark's life was a lot different than Ordway's.

10:40York, who was dragged from the people he knew in Virginia as a young kid all the way to Kentucky, obviously he had a very different experience, too. But that's where the rotating points of view, I hope, help that you can see everybody is circling these same push pull factors, but everybody is experiencing them in a very different way. Yeah, I mean, I think you handle that so, so well. And it's like any expedition where you have 30-something people going along it, no one individual is going to be able to communicate the entirety of that experience. It has to be kind of a kaleidoscope or a mosaic of different points of view for you to get anything approaching a comprehensive picture of it.

11:15Yeah, yeah. This Fast Enterprise, the title of the book, that's a line from Clark in a letter that he wrote to Jefferson. So I think it's important to say the captain saw this, too. This is not just us back projecting how we think the world should have looked or might have looked. This is how the captain saw the world, too. This is how Ordway and York saw the world. And so I'm just trying to render that as accurately as I can here in 2026. Yeah. So at kind of a mechanical level, because you're switching from perspective to perspective, like I know for my own work, that is a really, really difficult thing to do, to move from one individual to the next while keeping a narrative through line that runs through the whole book.

11:49Like, I know how hard that is. So you have my congratulations and my thank you for as well as you do it here. But, like, what are the challenges of that kind of approach as you're trying to tell a comprehensive story of the core of discovery? But at the same time, you've got to keep in mind, like, it's assembled of these smaller pieces. Right. Right. Yeah. And I'm glad you say that, because this still has the 1804 to 1806 St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean. Like, all the big beats are still there. We're still getting them from the start line to the finish line. But at the same time, the rotating points of view, I think, kind of deepen that story.

12:22And so what saved me here were the journals. You know, Elliott West, eminent historian, has said that there's just nothing like these journals for any comparable event in American history. And I think he's right. And so we've got a million words to work with. And I told you when I was thinking about writing this book, I read it one time and I was like, OK, there's a lot of stuff that's been missed here. But then I read it a second time just looking for structure. And so I sort of just blocked the book out where I was kind of like, well, I want to start with the Lewis chapter. He's the one who's doing all the preparations. The second chapter I wanted to do for York because I felt like Clark's childhood, that's been covered plenty of times.

12:55But York's childhood was overlapping, if also very distinct from Clark's childhood. Then it's time for Jefferson. Let's bring in the political stuff. I found a lot of surprising new stuff there, too. But just trying to think about how to rotate it and rotate the points of view. So as I was reading through, I was sort of thinking, you know, the portage, that's one of the hardest things they had to do. That has to be an Ordway chapter because Lewis and Clark weren't that involved with that. Like John Ordway was the one pulling a canoe across the prairie. He was the one he called it sailing on dry land. Right. And so I would sort of try to make those choices.

13:26And my final outline ended up matching the finished book really closely. But one more thing I want to say, it was hard to do this, but I also think it really helped me. It was one of those things where a shortcoming became a payoff because I just noticed new stuff. Let's take that portage example. The men were so tired. You know, they were spending 16, 18 hours a day pushing these canoes on rickety, poorly made wagons because there was no really good lumber where they were. They were out on the plains. And so they were just like trying to move tons of cargo and their canoes because there's no lumber to build more canoes around 20 miles around these huge waterfalls on the Missouri River.

14:05And so they're so tired. They don't really have time to do a great job with their journals. So Ordway is just copying what Clark writes, just trying to keep it simple. And Clark, at one point, just as an aside, says that the men are, quote, dull and lolling about. Just basically, he's like, they're slacking off and I'm annoyed by it. And Ordway is copying everything down very faithfully. Ordway, among other things, is a very faithful guy. He sees everything you would want an NCO to be. But he stops there and he does not copy that line. He picks up right after it. But to me, that's one of the most telling moments in the entire book, that John Ordway has a chance to repeat what Clark says.

14:40He also, frankly, has a chance to confront Clark and say, like, screw you, man. We're dull and lolling about because we almost died in a hailstorm yesterday. He doesn't do either thing. What he does is he is a buffer. He absorbs his frustration, surely his men's frustration, but he makes sure it doesn't get to the captain level. And then they just keep working together. So I would not have noticed that detail if I hadn't been reading John Ordway's journals for the portage again and again. Because I knew, you know, this is an Ordway chapter. I've got to get every detail I possibly can to capture this. So in a sense, these rotating points of view, I think, made the book stronger because they kind of gave me a lens that helped me notice things I would have missed otherwise.

15:17I'm so glad you brought up that specific example because it's the one I kept coming back to over and over and over again. That if you were going to write that chapter from Clark's perspective, you would be quite literally looking down, right? You would be looking down back at the prairie from the heights that they were trying to portage or that they had to portage around. Right. And you might cover the portage itself. You might say, oh, yes, it was very hard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But but at the end, you know, then they lost a couple of days because you're repeating Clark's perspective that they're lolling, that they're dazed and lolling.

15:48But doing that from Ordways, you see all of it. You're looking up. You're seeing that you are quite literally looking up at the difficulty of the task ahead of them. It's such a more visceral experience. It means so much more to read that from his point of view. Yeah, they had to take ropes. And let's remember, they had to make their own ropes. The rope they brought from St. Louis had all frayed or rotted at this point. So they're taking ropes they made out of elk hide skin and they made harnesses. They put these harnesses on their body and then tied these to the canoes and just tried to climb up these hills. It's like the worst sled pole you can imagine.

16:20The next time you're at the gym, realize that whatever your PR is, you are not touching John Ordway. And so they just you're right. It was visceral. It was brutal. It was incredibly hard. And, you know, Lewis and Clark did some of that stuff. And moments when morale was fraying, they would often jump in and sort of offer to do some of the physical stuff next to the men, which which is to their credit. They understood that that would be inspiring to the men and remind the men that they were all in it together. But during most of these moments, it was the enlisted guys doing it and they they gave it everything they had. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones,

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18:56So, I want to come back to a little bit about how we know all this, because you talk about the journals. You see, we have a million words to work with. This is an extraordinarily well-documented event. So, who was keeping journals? We know Lewis and Clark kept journals, but who else was keeping journals on this? How do we know? There were at least four other enlisted men that did this, and all credit to Jefferson here. Jefferson was a bit of a control freak. And so, in his instructions to Lewis, he didn't just say, I want you to keep journals.

19:27He said, let's make copies of the journals. Jefferson even said, maybe let's consider using birch bark paper, because it's more waterproof than regular papers. You can imagine Jefferson back in Washington just wanting to control and preserve every detail of this expedition he'd dreamed about for decades. So, there was at least four enlisted men who did it, but there were honestly more, because there are just different whispers in the archives of people who had journals and they were lost. Maybe they'll turn up someday, but maybe they won't. So, there were multiple enlisted men doing this, and it's really important because it gives you different perspectives on events. So, you know, the portage looks one way from Clark's perspective, one way from Ordway's.

19:59And that's not me just wish-casting, you know, how would it have felt to have been an enlisted guy? The enlisted guy wrote down his experience, too. And so, it's really important to be able to compare and contrast. Even Lewis and Clark, sometimes they would copy each other, too. But, you know, Lewis would write pretty disparaging things about Native people, and Clark would either soften it. Clark preferred the word Indian to the word savage, whereas Lewis used the word savage more often. Or sometimes Clark would just omit it. So, you can see even in there, you get multiple perspectives. That's in my book, but that's also in the journals, too. And that is, I cannot overstate what a rare thing that is.

20:33I mean, most of the time, if you've got a few documentary scraps at different points, you're doing great. If you've got one journal, oh, my God, you are, you are, you know, a pig in slop. Like, you are, you're feeling great about it. To be able to go day by day, point by point, to figure out how far they traveled every day, to have multiple different perspectives on things from a small group of 30-something people, that is, I mean, as a historian of the ancient medieval world, that's, I'm like, are you kidding me? This is like, you're drowning in riches here.

21:04It's incredible. No, I felt very fortunate to be able to write about it. And then there are more riches beyond this, too. I relied on maps a lot. This seems crazy about an expedition, but I really feel like the maps have been an underused resource. And there's a wonderful modern folio book edition from Gary Moulton, the guy who edited the definitive text of the journals, where he preserves all the maps and annotates them. So you can really see in real time, you know, Clark is writing on these maps, you know, we stayed here, or there were rapids around this bend. And there's also a lot of good images, you know, just a couple decades after, you have Bodmer and Catlin, some of the most famous artists of Western America ever.

21:39And so one thing I did was I just compared these, you know, I would find this Catlin painting, which people know about, it's at the Smithsonian. But he says, this is next to Fort Pierre. So I find Clark's map, and I figure out where Fort Pierre is. And I'm like, oh, my God, Catlin's painting is literally of the same plane where Lewis and Clark met the Lakota. So if you want to see what Lewis and Clark saw, or if you want to see what the Lakota saw, frankly, this is the closest you're ever going to get. This is a painting a couple decades after that captures the landscape, that captures the density of the Native population. So I relied on those images.

22:11And then Native sources, I interviewed more than 100 people on this book. A lot of them were Native, and so they would share oral traditions. A lot of Native nations have begun producing their own books, which gather oral traditions. And I really, I just felt like this, I had this incredibly rich chorus. And to me, it never felt like they were in opposition. It felt like they were in conversation. And so, you know, I would take a Native perspective, take Lewis and Clark's perspective, take Ordway's perspective, take some scholarship, and sort of weigh them and interpret them. And then I feel like that helped me get as close to the truth as you possibly can from 200 years removed.

22:43So I want to talk more about the Native peoples that Lewis and Clark encountered on this journey.

Native Perspectives

22:48Because, I mean, this is one of the first things you say in the book is they were not entering an empty land, as is so often, I think, assumed or presented in kind of popular portrayals of this expedition, is that it's a big empty land and they're just kind of going off into it. No, like there are hundreds of thousands of people who live here. And that is one of the major ways in which scholarship has changed over the past few decades, is that we are so much more aware of Native perspectives on these events, of Native power and Native agency in this part of the world.

23:19So when you are coming back to write this book and you were thinking and you were bearing in mind all that scholarship, how does that change your perspective? How does that change your presentation of what Lewis and Clark were doing? Yeah. And again, we can nerd out on this podcast. It's kind of crazy it took this long to see this, right? Like I don't want to, like I said, you know, different historians are writing in their different eras. But yes, modern scholars emphasize this, but Thomas Jefferson emphasized this too. In a letter, he talked about America's presence in Lakota Territory. And Jefferson's line was the Americans were, quote, miserably weak.

23:51So the Americans understood this. The Native towns that were near Fort Mandon, where Lewis and Clark wintered, their total population was four times St. Louis. Their total population was literally bigger than Washington, D.C. So in terms of density, in terms of, I guess, the word Lewis and Clark and Jefferson used civilization, like the Native people had more of it in many cases than the Americans did. And so Lewis and Clark understood that and that changed their approach. But for me, it wasn't just enough to offer that reminder to people. I wanted to take it a step further.

24:22So we talk about different perspectives. There are 10 people whose point of view, they get at least one chapter from their point of view. Five of them are Native people. And it was really important for me in the book to kind of rotate to their point of view, partly because this helped me say something new, like the Lakota encounter between Lewis and Clark and Lakota. That's one of the most well-known episodes from this period in American history. Now, I happen to think that it's one of the most poorly understood. Most people say that this is their worst foreign policy of expedition. But I found a transcript that has been very rarely seen from 1807, a diplomatic council.

24:53It actually suggests that the Lakota encounter was the best foreign policy that Lewis and Clark produced. But I didn't just want to offer reversals like that. I wanted to put you at the Lakota council where Lewis and Clark are not present, where the Lakota themselves are trying to figure this out. For the Lakota people, and Black Buffalo is the person whose point of view I try to capture, he's not as well-known as Crazy Horse or some other Lakota leaders, but frankly, he should be. He was a very influential leader in this time period, and he wasn't worried about Lewis and Clark. He was worried about somebody named the Partisan. Black Buffalo led the largest band of the Sikangu, was the tribe that we're talking about here, the division of the Lakota.

25:29The Partisan led the second biggest, and they had had a rivalry for years that we know because other traders in this region had documented it in their journals. And so Lewis and Clark didn't just walk into a place that was densely populated. They walked into a place that had rivalries that predated them. And we can credit the captains for a lot of things, but they did not always see this clearly. And so the Lakota-American encounter ended up working up well for everybody. But the biggest reason for that was Black Buffalo. He was using the Americans every bit as much as they were using him. And he sort of realized, I've got these new and well-armed outsiders.

26:01If I play my cards right, I can sort of nudge my people to my ideas about the future instead of the partisans. And that's what he was able to do. I loved the way that you did that chapter because you capture both Lewis and Clark's expectations of what they were going to do and what they were going to find, which are kind of almost laughable when you understand the actual context that they're entering. But then it would be really easy to homogenize Black Buffalo and the partisan and to say, well, obviously, this is power politics or this is purely the rivalry.

26:31But you embed that in a really thorough and illuminating discussion of how Lakota society and politics worked. And so not only are we seeing kind of the grand scheme of clashes between different ways of understanding the land, ways of using the land, things you want from the land, but also at the granular level, like the very specific conflict between Black Buffalo and partisan. I was fascinated by how you managed to weave all those threads together into something pretty fantastic. That was probably my favorite chapter of the book.

27:02That's awesome to hear you say, because that was the first chapter that I told from the native point of view. So that was one where I really there was a lot of mechanics I needed to set up. I needed to start introducing these ideas of change and how things weren't static for them. Life was changing. When Black Buffalo was a young guy, the Lakota were not that dominant on the Missouri. And then that changed for a lot of reasons. So there were a lot of moving pieces to get there. But again, I had great sources. I had the journals. Black Buffalo shows up in the journals constantly. You just have to take the time to notice and then take the time to think, well, what does this look like from his perspective?

27:33But then also there are winter counts from the Lakota that really preserve lots of different things about Black Buffalo and about his people. And there's just fantastic scholarship from anthropologists, archaeologists, and interviews with Lakota people as well. So I sort of, again, tried to take all this in and then do the best job I could to capture how Black Buffalo saw the world, what he cared about. And what he cared about was his people and their loyalty and their land. And so Lewis and Clark are an interesting tool for him, but they're just a tool. They're not what he's worried about. He's worried about his people.

28:04If you had to sum up the difference in scholarship on Native agency and power in the last 30 years, I mean, I think that's it, right? I just wrote an episode for my show, Past Lives, on the Indian slave trade in the Carolinas. And one of the clear points there is that these powerful Native groups could have wiped out the colonists at absolutely any time they wanted to. Absolutely any time. They chose not to do it because the colonists were a source of trade goods that they valued, because they were a source of occasional military aid for a variety of reasons.

28:37But they were their reasons. It had nothing to do with incapacity or anything like that. It was that they wanted them there because they were useful. And when that clicks into place in your head, the whole world looks different. Yeah. And what's bizarre to me is that there's been so much great scholarship like you talk about, but those lenses have been almost never applied to the core itself. I think too many historians kind of wrinkle their noses at the core a little bit. And they're sort of like, you know, well, that's for elementary school. That's for family road trips. And first of all, you should wrinkle your nose at those things. Those things are awesome.

29:08And that's how you became a history lover. That's how I became a history lover. But second, all of those dynamics you're talking about, because of the journals, because of all the other documentation, we have fantastic records with the court. You're talking about native enslavement. Sacagawea was a slave. It makes no sense to see her as some kind of plucky tour guide. She was that, but she was using that to gain some agency and choice in her life as somebody who was enslaved by the Hidatsa and then by the fur trader, Sherbano. So any academic topic you can think about, relationships between an owner and an enslaved person, York and Clark, that's one of the best documented ones we're going to find from this time period.

29:42So if you bring the best scholarly ideas and sort of put them in conversation with these documents, I found that you could find all kinds of new material, but also a better story. That's the other thing. Even hearing you talk about these ideas of power and agency, this just makes it more fun to read. This is not a corrective. This is not scolding. This is not tisking previous historians or anything like that. This just makes it a better story. It's like the old version is like Breaking Bad, but Gus isn't in it. Well, let's have Walter White and Gus. It's a better story when you have two powerful and intelligent people who are circling each other.

30:14That's exactly what was happening on the Missouri River in 1804. And I am so glad as you were preparing that chapter and writing that chapter that what came through so clearly is that this is a world in flux. This is not a static world where the Lakota have been here, powerful for century after century after century after century. They are comparatively recent arrivals. Their rise to power has happened within living memory. These are not the age-old guardians of the Missouri Corridor. They have taken it by force, and it's an active and ongoing process that will continue in the decades to come.

30:46Yeah, and I think that's what helps make Black Buffalo's chapter feel as personal and as human as York's chapter or Ordway's chapter or anyone else. Because if you look at his timelines, and we have a pretty good sense of when he was born, both from journal descriptions and then from native sources as well, he lived through this hinge moment. It was a much different experience than some of the Lakota leaders that came later. So when Black Buffalo was a kid, dogs were dragging their possessions from one campsite to another. They had guns, but they didn't have many horses. But when Black Buffalo was a teenager, that's when they start to get horses.

31:17That's when they start to cultivate this reputation as these fearsome fighters and master equestrians. There are other push-pull factors here as well, including smallpox, which really hit people in the dense towns we were talking about much harder than they hit the Lakota. But Black Buffalo lived through this moment of incredible change, and I think that really shaped him personally because, you know, he could see his teenage son, who was at the encounter with Lewis and Clark, riding a beautiful horse. He could remember what his life was like as a teenager. But also, Black Buffalo, I think, was probably shaped by this change. You know, his life had been so extreme.

31:47He had seen moments of Lakota triumph, and he had seen moments of Lakota suffering. And I think that really shaped him because he was a very patient and strategic thinker, certainly in contrast to the partisan, who was more reactive. And I think, you know, what Black Buffalo saw, those moments of change you're talking about, I think they shaped him as a human being and as a leader.

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34:04Be fascinating.

34:10One of the things I found so fascinating about this book was that we can know those things. That we have enough evidence to be able to build out these full granular portraits of these people, who they were, what mattered to them. And I found that that illuminated even people that I thought I knew pretty well, like Lewis and Clark themselves. Like there were aspects of Lewis and Clark's personalities that came through in your writing that I had underrated or discounted or hadn't thought that hard about before. I mean, like Clark's kind of inferiority complex about York was one of the most fascinating things that you could see whenever York starts to kind of spread his wings, that you can see Clark start to grumble about it as if that's an affront to his own manhood.

34:52I had never picked up on that before, and it makes it so much more interesting. Yeah, and that's stuff that, you know, if you read Slave Counterpoint or some of the other classics of academic literature on this topic, you'll see that description again and again between these relationships between owners and what was sometimes called favorite slaves. One thing that really helped me here was a slave narrative written by somebody who lived in Kentucky, and I tried to really limit myself. I read a lot of slave narratives, but I tried to focus on people who lived in Virginia or especially Kentucky because slavery looked so different depending on the state you were in. But there was this one that was really helpful from a man who grew up in Kentucky.

35:24And when I use these kinds of sources, I always try to put people's names in the main narrative because I'm just like, you know, I want to acknowledge them in whatever small way I can. But I couldn't do it with this guy because his name was literally Lewis Clark. I was like, if I put his name in the main narrative, like any attempt I have to keep people immersed in this book is out the window. So Lewis Clark, I'm sorry you're getting your shout out now on a podcast, but that's not as good as being in a book. But he talked about that dynamic you're talking about, about favorite slaves. And the phrase that Lewis Clark used was he said, a favorite slave has to cringe a little lower.

35:55But that's a choice. York was a really smart guy. He was a really talented guy. And so the reason he became what we call Clark's body servant, you know, kind of the enslaved person who followed him around and took care of him and took care of his person. That was a series of choices York made. If York decided, I don't want to put up with this, he just does a bad job at it, gets beat a couple times and then goes back to life as it was. But he wanted to do that. He ended up going to the Jefferson White House before the expedition even happened. York created a really exemplary life for himself, but it was also a very pressure packed life because of that dynamic you're talking about from Clark.

36:27Clark felt pride in York's success, but Clark also felt possession over it and he felt jealousy over it. It's a really curdled psychological dynamic that's, it's just gross. It's tough to read about. It's tough to think about, but it's there in the documents. And if you're going to talk about something like slavery, I think you need to capture the psychological dynamics as best you can. I could not possibly agree more. And I mean, this is, slavery is something I just spent a lot of time working on for my show Past Lives. And I remember reading in a book by the great historian Walter Johnson, it's called Soul by Soul.

36:57It's about the antebellum slave market in New Orleans. And he uses the line, and this is reflecting what people at the time thought, that a slave owner was made of his slaves, that a slave owner's reputation was defined by his ability to choose and control his enslaved property. And that came through so clearly in the way that you wrote about Clark, that everything York did for good or ill was in some way a reflection on Clark himself. And that the way that Clark understood those things as being either positive or negative is not necessarily what we would think of, that there was a much different.

37:31And I'm going to remember the word, the phrase curdled psychological dynamic there, because that's exactly it. You can see the contradictions buzzing around his head, driving his behavior. And it's like, man, that's messed up. It's just like there's no other way to put it. It is messed up. But what's also so cool about the expedition is that you can see those dynamics shift in small ways. So once I track this stuff really closely, and, you know, people have talked about York before. He shows up in Undaunted Courage a few times. But I really disagree with the portrait that people have made of him, where they, you know, York got out around some of these Native nations, like the Arikara and the Mandan, and they were amazed by him because they had never seen somebody with black skin before.

38:10And so the previous account of this has been like, York loved the attention, and he realized that he was equal and that he might deserve freedom or at least equal treatment. That's not true. We have some access to black people's interior in this period. We have Jupiter Hammond's poems. We have Phyllis Wheatley's poems. York understood that he was equal. York hated being enslaved. His family was ripped apart by the Clark family. One of his brothers killed himself, most likely, because of Clark's treatment. Another of his brothers ran away. Clark put a runaway slave ad in newspapers for months trying to track this guy down.

38:43York understood that he was equal. He understood that he was living in a man-made, unfair system. But once the expedition happens, once you start to move away from American society, York starts to realize, I don't have to cringe out here. When the Native people pay attention to him because of the curdled stuff we've been talking about, Clark says, let's slow it down. Let's back it off. I don't like that. But then York keeps doing it. And this is where the other perspectives really help. But Ordway's journal talks about the kids are loving this. York's pretending to be a bear. And one thing I think is so interesting is that York didn't pretend to be a bear.

39:15He pretended to be a bear that had been captured by Clark. So even in the games York is playing, he's putting the idea of slavery in there. And he's sort of grappling with that, even in these silly games. But they're also just silly games. They're moments of human connection. And so these kids love it. And at a certain point, Clark can't do anything about it. And so York continues to push because the rules are different out here. This is not American society. This is a new society. This is the expedition. And it's so fascinating to watch York in small ways because, let's be real, he's still enslaved. A lot of the white soldiers still hate him.

39:46It's still a fraught situation. But in small and real ways, he's able to push those boundaries. And he also proves himself to be invaluable. One of the new documents I found was a letter where Clark talks about York's skill with boats. And we also know from the journals, York was a great swimmer. This is kind of mind-blowing, but most people in this time period were not able to swim. So just the fact that York was good with boats and was able to swim, that meant he was essential when the Corps ran some of the craziest rapids of the expedition, which were on the Columbia watershed, close to where you grew up. And so York was essential in those steps.

40:17He was the fifth person in the journals to bring down a buffalo. York did so much. And there's this moment that people love to talk about with Lewis and Clark, the vote, right, where York gets a vote in where they put their winter's corners. It's a wonderful moment, especially from York's point of view. But he earned that. Like, let's not see that as the captain's deigning to grant him a vote. Let's see that as York pushing, changing the definitions as much as he can, and asserting himself as somebody that I sacrificed, I bled, I pushed. I'm part of the reason we're here on the Pacific Ocean, I get a say. I had not thought about York as one of the best documented enslaved people of this period until I started reading this.

40:56And by the time I got to the end, I'm like, there's a whole history of slavery in York's relationship with Clark. And the way that you bring it out is so incredibly intimate. And, like, I love the way that you engage with the scholarship on slavery. And you have really illustrated American slavery at the beginning of the 19th century and the complexities of that relationship, the psychological dynamics on both sides of it in ways that are really, really hard to get to. So, I mean, I got to thank you for that because this is it's really, really good. I don't mean to gush too much, but, like, it's, as somebody who just spent months and months and months reading about this,

41:31it is hard to do that. Like, I know how hard it is to do that, and you did it. Well, I, this is probably corny, but I felt like I owed it to York. I mean, like, I had the documents, I had great scholarship at my back, and I just wanted to try to tell his story as best I could because the expedition belongs to him. It doesn't just belong to Lewis and Clark. It does. But it also belongs to him. He was an essential member of the expedition, and I really wanted to show that while also showing all the other nonsense he had to deal with. Yeah. I mean, by the time we get to the end of it, he is one of the best-traveled and most-accomplished people in all of North America at that point.

42:08Like, the number of different skills that he has, the number of different things that he has seen, like, the ability to survive that kind of position as the only enslaved person on a journey that lasts for several years, like, that really speaks to his qualities. Mm-hmm. And that, like, of course he knew he was equal. And that's something that comes through so clearly whenever you can actually read the words of enslaved people in this period. They were never unclear on any of that stuff. Right. They never had to think, like, I'm just as good.

42:39They never had to come to the realization that they were just as good as the people who were enslaving them. What they had to live with was the crushing knowledge that they were and they weren't treated that way, which is so much worse. It is so much worse. Exactly. And it gets even worse when they get back. We're focusing on the relatively happy moments, which is York getting a vote, York running Rapids, York doing all these amazing things. But when we get back, York wants his freedom. And we know this because Clark sort of by accident preserved York's voice. Clark in a letter to his brother said that, you know, I don't agree with York about his immense services and that he has earned his freedom.

43:14That tells you a lot about Clark, that kind of sarcasm, that kind of reflexive dismissal. But it also tells you something about York. Like, Clark is probably sort of sarcastically quoting York and saying immense services. But York said immense services, you know? Like, that's how York saw himself, and he had every reason to see himself that way. Yeah. It made me think much worse of Clark than I used to, to be completely honest. Like, you know, all this stuff about you're not supposed to judge the people of the past or whatever. Like, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the people of the past, and I think slavery is a circumstance in which it is perfectly fine to judge them because you contrast Clark with Lewis.

43:52Right. And where Lewis grew up around slaves, Lewis's family owned slaves, Lewis's family did not treat slaves the way the Clark's family did. Absolutely. And Lewis sort of detached from the institution of slavery. This was a sentence that felt almost too obvious to write, but to me it also seemed kind of profound. Lewis didn't have a York. And it's not just on the expedition. When Lewis joined Jefferson as his secretary in the White House, which is kind of like chief of staff today, Jefferson said, do you want to have a black enslaved person, a body servant? And Lewis said, no, I'll take a part-time free person instead. And that was a pattern that showed up again and again in Lewis's life.

44:25And so Lewis was not an abolitionist. Like, one of the things the expedition was up to was sort of figuring out if native removal could work. And so Lewis would relay to Jefferson, I don't think native removal is going to work because the white residents of St. Louis are too attached to slavery. And they're worried that if they move somewhere else in America, they won't be able to keep their enslaved people. And Lewis just relayed that without judgment. Obviously, he knew and revered Jefferson without judgment, who was a slave owner as well. But on a personal level, Lewis found a different way to relate to this kind of stuff. And there's even another moment in a Clark letter where Clark says, I'm so sick of York complaining.

44:59This is after the expedition, after they've been through 8,000 miles of hell together. Clark says, I was ready to give York a beating. But Captain Governor Lewis at that point, Governor Lewis stopped me. So, again, you can see, like, this man of their era, I agree with it in theory, but I also think it just, it erases too much. People in 1804 had many different views, just like people do today. So let's not worry about men of their era. Let's worry about what Clark thought. Let's worry about what Lewis thought. Let's worry about what York thought. It takes a long time to be able to understand that. That's why this book took me five years.

45:30But that's what I tried to do. Put you in the shoes of each one of these people. And the contrast between Lewis and Clark on that count is telling. Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking is, you know, there's, when you say that someone is a man of their era, you imply that there is only one way to be in that era. And there are so many different ways of being. And so even among two people who grew up in not dissimilar circumstances between Lewis and Clark and not all that far away from each other in the grand scheme of things. And they were best friends. They loved each other. They had a wonderful relationship, and that was essential to everything they achieved together.

46:01And it makes you wonder, did they talk about that or did they not? Because you can easily see that among two, let's say, touchy about their pride gentlemen, that just being a thing that you studiously avoid talking about. Sure. Well, I even wonder, I didn't put this in the book because it was just too speculative, but, you know, Lewis and Clark wrote a lot of letters back and forth in the preparation phase. And so they never mentioned York. And so Lewis shows up, and there's Clark, and there's York. And Clark's like, he's coming with me. What was that conversation like?

46:31I mean, in the book, I focused because that's a York point of view chapter. So I focused more on York was being forced to leave his wife, was being forced to leave his family. You know, that's more important to emphasize. But at the same time, I did always wonder, like, between the captains, what did Lewis make of that? I mean, I think by the end, he was happy. He was very generous to York throughout the expedition. So Lewis was a smart guy who wanted to succeed. So he realized York was valuable in those regards. But still, at that first moment, I'm sure the captains had moments of sort of what best friend pairing doesn't have a moment of where you're just like, what is up with that guy?

47:03If you don't have that moment with your best friend, they're not your best friend. You don't know them well enough for them to be your best friend. Totally, totally agree. Yeah. That is one of the many, many insights that you have to offer here. I mean, I could continue asking you questions about this for the next 45 minutes or hour or 45 hours, quite frankly. But if listeners could walk away with one thing from this, what do you want them to think about Lewis and Clark or know about Lewis and Clark that they didn't know before? Sure.

47:33So if you've spent any time in the American West, you have seen on the side of highways and roads these brown and white signs for the Lewis and Clark Trail, right? It's like two guys, white silhouette, brown sign. I love that the trail exists. I love that people travel it. But that sign is wrong because this was not a story of two people. This was an ensemble. That's always the way it was. This isn't some writer trying to find a new angle. This isn't somebody trying to reconceptualize them for the world of Game of Thrones. No, that's what it always was. This fast enterprise. Those were Clark's words.

48:05And so if you want to know the true story and if you want to read a better story, you have to see it as an ensemble. So if people read this book, I hope they come away from it admiring things about Lewis and Clark, questioning things about Lewis and Clark, but also thinking about people far beyond Lewis and Clark. Ordway, York, Sacagawea, Black Buffalo, all the people in this book. I loved all 10 of them, and I hope readers will feel the same way. I mean, if they're anything like me, then they absolutely will. The book is This Vast Enterprise, A New History of Lewis and Clark.

48:38Craig Fairman, thank you so much for joining me. This was just absolutely fantastic. This is one of my favorite things ever. I'm so happy. Thank you for having me, man. Thank you. Hey, thank you.

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49:03You've been listening to Tides of History, an Audible original. The show is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. Sound engineered by Sergio Enriquez. Produced by Morgan Jaffe. The executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lower Beckman. The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Naven. The head of Audible Originals North America is Marshall Louis. The chief content officer is Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.

49:35Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Audible Originals, this has been Tides of History.