The Aftermath and Legacy of the Expedition

Want to explore even more history ? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world . From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland , there is plenty to discover. With your subscription you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War two . Just visit historyhit. com slash subscribe to bring the past alive . Along the coast of Oregon, a frigid Pacific Ocean wind punches across breaking waves. Ahead on the beach, a group of travelers stare in silence at a massive skeletal shape sprawled before them on the gray sand. It is the giant carcass of a deceased whale, stripped of much of its fles h. The travelers had been alerted that they could find the whale at this location, understanding it to be a must see. This is january eighteen oh six with Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery crew a year and a half into their two and a half year journey. Among the crew is Sekajua, a native born woman who has been with the party since North Dakota, and who, along the way, has given birth to the baby she now carries on her back, all the while guiding this expedition of thirty people . Shoney by birth, Sakajiwaya has lived a landlocked existence her entire life . So faced with this creature, this vision, this Leviathan of the deep on one side of her , and the Pacific Ocean on the other , she is suddenly faced with the unimaginable . So much of this journey has been otherworldly, towering mountains, endless rivers , strange peoples, in unfamiliar lands. For the white men, it was a journey into a haunting, awesome world they would report upon with maps and documents. But for Sakajua here at the edge of the continent , she might have had another impression that here was a continent destined for cataclysmic change , and it was coming Welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Webman. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Margaret Hiddle. She is the Assistant Professor of History and the Director of Indigenous Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Osgosh .llo, Margaret, thanks for joining us on American History Hit to talk about most famous camping trip in American history, greetings. Hello, I'm excited to be here. Before we get into the events of the expedition, Lewis and Clark and Sac u Joae. Well, let's provide listeners with context. Lewis and Clark's expedition had been dispatched for what purpose exactly. Why was this so necessary at this time? The short answer is American expansion . The longer answer, the more specific context is that Thomas Jefferson had recently purchased the Louisiana territory from France, eighteen oh three, and this is territory from Louisiana all the way up to the like Montana, Great Plains, Pacific Northwest area . But the problem is that they bought that territory from France . They didn't know anything about it, and they didn't actually negotiate for that territory with the people who lived there, the native people lived there and were the legal owners of the land . And so what the Lewis and Clark Expedition was supposed to do was get information , figure out what resources were in this territory , figure out what the native relationships were in this territory, and then also open trade routes with native people to help the United States get a foothold in these indigenous territories. Sure. This is the great sight unseen real estate purchase of all time. I mean, they just did this. And now these several guys who about we' tore discuss in more detail take off in what's called the Core Discovery Expedition. It was commissioned by Thomas Jefferson, as you say, kind of an inventory of the United States newly acquired resources, which is the unkind way of saying there's a lot of people out there as well. And what are we going to be encountering now that we're well another third of the country is suddenly being added to this in the big picture? Maryweather Lewis and William Clark were the leaders of this expedition. There were thirty others in this corps. Who else are on this crew? Can you take me through a few individuals ? Yeah , so when they leave from St. Louis, there's Louis and Clark and then a series of a group of sergeants . So it's a military led expedition . And there's a group of sergeants . Their names are Charles Floyd, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Nathaniel Prior , a group of twenty three U. S. Army soldiers , and then York, who is enslaved by Clark . He was born into slavery on Clark's family's plantation and had been with Clark for many years. And then a group of French Canadian boatmen, about a dozen French Canadian boatmen because they were better at sailing canoes than many of the Americans, a hunter named George Dreward and that's most of the group that sets out from St. Louis. The expedition took roughly two years . Begins in may eighteen oh four, goes until september eighteen oh six. The goal was to find a way to the Pacific Ocean by water and map this journey along the way, developing relationships with indigenous peoples along this route. It starts in Missouri. If you ever want to there's a place that you can stand under a bridge in St. Louis and there's a statue in the middle of the river. I mean, it can be in the middle of the river when it's flooded. That is too funny. I went there on a trip, business trip one time and it was a big flood at the time. And there was one hand above the water and that was Lewis's or Clark's hand . It was really quite comical . The expedition starts in Missouri, continues along the Missouri River north towards the Pacific Northwest , eventually through the Columbia River, constructing Fort Clatsop in what is today Oregon. But the individual we're most interested in today is Sakajewaya. Who was she and how has she been hired? Or is hired the right word? So Sakajua was a sixteen or seventeen year old young woman girl . It's always hard to know what terms to use when we're talking about people in the past, but she was a sixteen year old girl. I have a sixteen year old niece. I always think about her now when I think about Sakajuya. She was Shashoni, although there are some Hidasa people and some Crow people who say that she was in fact Hidatsa and Crow , but the dominant narrative, the narrative that has come down through written history is that she was a Shashoni girl who was kidnapped by the Hidatsa when she was about twelve and then trafficked and trafficked at a fort where she was either sold to won in a gambling game by Toussaint Charbon , who then marries her, takes her as one of his wives. He had at least one other wife. And you know, it's unclear how much consent was involved in that relationship, but I don't think there was very much consent involved in that relationship . But apart from being a young girl who experienced traumatic separation from her family in at least some form , she was she was known as being a really good swimmer of the breaststroke. She was a great swimmer . She protected her younger siblings . She was good with kids , and she really liked coffee. And these are just some of the things that we know about her as a human being, which don't show up in things like Lewis and Clark's journals, but she was, you know , an adventurous, a brave kind person . Yeah, let's just say from the outset, this woman is pregnant when she starts this expedition . She's pregnant and she is getting on a boat with a bunch of strangers , white guys march off and paddle off into the great unknown, which would have been unknown to her at the time. Of course, you know, she's she's, I guess, born in what would be today Idaho, right? That that territory is definitely where she's from. And then the traffic king and the passage she goes on lands her more in the state of North Dakota, I suppose is that's where that area would be. You know, she's gone through a lot already. And now here she is married to this guy and she's pregnant with their child, I suppose, right? Right. And he is a guy with a bad reputation . He is known to be a violent husband who abuses his wives . This is observed by both Lewis and Clark noted in their journals. It's documented that it happened. He also was described as pretty worthless, very bad boatman by Lewis and Clark, but a decent cook. So well, there you go. Qualities. How was she perceived by the people on this expedition? They must've written all kinds of things about her, right? I mean, it was really something for this bunch of guys to go, oh my goodness, here we go into nothingness that we don't know. And this young woman they would describe her as that. We would say a girl is going to guide us, right? They often don't describe her. They call her that Indian woman, Charonbot's wife, the inter preter's wife . And she appears very rarely , but the ways that she appears are really profound and you get kind of a sense of what her role was on the journey , she's described as often like picking service berries. One of the things that she knew, even if she didn't know the specific path is, she knew the land , she knew what food was available in the land and she helped her provide food for the expedition . There's this one incident that the journals describe where she's in a canoe with Charbonau , and the canoe gets blown over and the canoe capsizes and Charbono freezes . He is panicking , but she gets into the water and she saves some really expensive scientific equipment where her husband was just a flailing, panicking mess . And so it's clear it's clear from these little notes that she was respected in many ways and also sidelined in many ways. Tension, right? Yeah. Forthright woman, forthright personality, a leadership quality to her. And nevermind, you know, as she's saving that scientific equipment, she's putting her baby aside. You know, she's right. He's jumping in the water, having put her infant over there. Let me save the right, save the day for these guys. And just to underscore this, she was already pregnant. She joins the expedition. She gives birth along the way to her son, Jean Baptiste Chabon ot during the journey, then carried him along the way and on a cradle board on her back. That's the classic symbol, which is on the dollar dollar coin, I suppose. The cradle on the back, the rest of the journey. Much of this is very similar, if I must say when we were having conversations about the Separatists, the pilgrims in Massachusetts, the relationship that we have cast, that white America has cast upon Squanto, you know, that whole kind of thing. Right. You know, where we're raised with this sort of mythology about these indigenous people welcoming and being so gracious about this. And my goodness, of course, I'll take off into the middle of nowhere and help you folks not die. Her story is more about a rougher persuasion, right? Right, right. The hard thing about Sakajewia is that we never get her perspective . We only see her filtered through the eyes of her husband, the eyes of Lewis, the eyes of Clark, the eyes of these other white men. But yes, she 's on this journey because she doesn't have a choice. Her husband brings her along. Let's talk a little bit more about the two men who are most famous here, obviously, Maryweather Lewis, whose lifetime is se seventeenventy four to eighteen oh nine, which is a pretty short time . A Virginian, family plantation owners, they are enslaves, goes on to have a military career and then becomes personal secretary to Joe Jeff erson. And upon a president's request, Lewis travels to Philadelphia to study and he really has a big relationship in other words with Thomas Jefferson personally because of his family. Whereas we have William McClark, who is born around the same time, seventeen seventy, lives a bit longer to eighteen thirty eight, also a Virginian, also belongs to a plantation owning family, joined the militia, and was often involved in conflicts between native groups and settlers along the way. William Clark, I understand, was a friend of Lewis and was invited to be part of this expedition serving as the cartographer, the main journal keeper. But there is this third member of the troop of the leadership crowd that you talked about. His name is York, and he is the enslaved member of William Clark's household. He lives from about the early seventeen seventies. We don't know much about origins. He lives to eighteen thirty two, was probably born into enslavement under that Clark family. That's questionable. He's the only African American on this expedition. And at the time of the expedition, he was married to a woman who was enslaved back in Kentucky . So on this expedition, he carries out many of the physical tasks, of course, of hunting and gathering, keeping these people alive, building forts, and caregiving to Charles Floyd and Sakajewaya. It's a whole mixed crowd. Boy, it's almost like this was invented for a novel. You know, you have this microcosm of this new land , you know, with these white people dominating , but along the way are these other people who are representing other populations that they are going to encounter. Right. Well, and even the boatsmen, a lot of the boatsmen were Meti , so mixed often Cree or Ojibwe and French . Yes. So just another example of already interchange of people and relationships and cultures that was happening in North America. Let's take a short break and digest that for now. When we come back, Margaret and I will be talking more about the expedition and how it unfolds . Welcome back. We're talking with Margaret Hiddle of the University of Wisconsin at Osgosh. Margaret, what would life have been like on the trail itself? And especially for a young woman, a young mother carrying her baby on her back? It would have been uncomfortable a lot of the times. That's one of the things that everybody wrote about in the journals was their discomfort. The one advantage that Sakajua would have had is that she comes from a nation that is used to moving . Both the Shashoni and the Hadatsa were farming people intended to live in big farming villages , but both groups of people moved for different seasonal purposes. So the Shoshone, for instance, would move for the buffalo hunts and then they would move to other places to fish for the winter. And so she had the advantage of being used to having to pick up and move relatively often . But you know, food was often scarce , nights were often cold, the rivers were often difficult to travel . So not exactly a fun camping trip, not a weekend vacation. And we're talking about small boats, a series of these boats which are moving along waters that are probably moving against them at times. You know, this is a hard crossings and hard a passage . So as they move along these rivers mostly , they are encountering different peoples along the way. You know, separate from each other. They're kind of getting this cross section of this area vis a v the Indigenous tribes. Right. And the way that many people think about Native Americans is all the same . We have this idea right and it comes from Hollywood movies. We lump a lot of Native people together, but they're travel ing through an incredibly diverse region . So going for a long time without seeing people and then encountering people . And it's always a little uncertain how those different nations are going to react to Lewis and Clark. They had had some pretty tense interactions with the Lakota people before they headed further west early in the journey . So because they don't have a fully filled in map . They don't know when they're going to encounter the next group of people. They just have a rough estimate. And as a result of Sakaju is, of course, central in this situation, here is this one person that they can recognize , you know, as their own in quotation marks, I know, but also a pregnant also a mother at some point, you know, with her baby. I mean, it's quite a different quite an amazing sight, I would imagine. Right. And that actually is really important and part of the reason why I think Lewis and Clark agreed to bring her along because they knew that from indigenous perspectives and this is something that's true across many different nations . Having a woman and having children in your group is a sign of peace. It's a sign that you're not there for conflict. And so she helped to just her presence helped to open diplomatic doors for Lewis and Clark. I'm confused when she joins this journey. I imagine they'd set out alone and then I mean without her and then suddenly she comes along. Is that what happened? Or did she start from the beginning? So no she joins in February of eighteen oh five. . They are at a fort outside of where the Mandana Hidatsa live. They are at this fort. Charbonau approaches them and says, Hey, do you need an interpreter ? I speak Hadatsa, although he actually speaks terrible Hidatsa and even worse English . But he says, I speak Hadatsa. I have this wife. She speaks sh . We could be useful to you. And so that's how they joined the expedition in North Dakota. I think I'd cast Randy Quaid in the role of Charneux, wouldn't I? I think that would be a great choice, yes. Their routes are not entirely unknown. And this is me piecing this together. They're traveling on routes. I mean, some of these guys are fur trappers or know these traditional routes to go into these lands, but that's obviously not going to do the job as far as understanding the indigenous peoples out there, which is such a big part of this. And so Secretary is absolutely necessary in this situation. They make that call. In august eighteen oh five, they end up encountering the Shoshone tribe, which is actually not her home tribe, right? That's not her native place, but she knows these people a lot. And tell me about that encounter. Well, it's possible that it is her home Okay. Okay. So she either was born in the Shawnee nation and was kidnapped by the Hidatsa or she was born to a Hidatsa father and crow mother. And if that's the case, she would have known the Shoshone due to like a diplomatic or trade encounter earlier where her father adopted a shashony person who she then sees at this encounter. There you go. Thank you for indulging all of this because what we're really talking about in a bigger sense is the absolute navite of white Europeans encountering this entire world that has been there for hundreds of thousands of years , which is a whole diverse. Their words escape me because it's like it's a huge vast area . And so this is as a result completely confusing to them. And as they come along, here they go. And as we're talking about it, in twenty twenty six , there are people like me who are completely still naive about how diverse this nation really was at the beginning and without even the language to talk about it. And we often talk about this on the podcast in a sense of the sheepish shame of, Oh my gosh, what a world . Now, Lewis and Clark are out there to experience this . And that's if there's beauty to this, it's really that experience aside from the natural environments that they're going through. But that's such an important part of this that we actually have this commonality today with Lewis and Clark because so much of American history has steered clear of this fact. It's amazing. I want to understand this encounter with the Shashoni. As I said, august eighteen oh five, they are negotiating to trade for horses with a group of Shashoni. Sakajua realizes at that moment that Shoni chief leader was her brother. Tell me his name. His name is Kame i. And he was her brother, right? He was either her brother or her cousin. This again is part of the problem of translation because the word for brother and male brother and male cousin in Shashoni is the same. So maybe her brother, maybe her cousin, either way, he was her close k.ing. Wow You have to wonder what this was looking like to these guys as they're realizing they're walking into family relationships and, you know, whole giant , you know , tapestries of people that are know each other and stories from each other all over the place. And they tell these stories in these journals. Lewis, august seventeenth, eighteen oh five, he writes shortly after Captain Clark arrived with the interpreter Chabonot and the Indian woman who proved to be a sister of the chief Kamewue . The meeting of those people was really affecting, particularly between Sakajua and an Indian woman who had been taken prisoner at the same time with her. Another key encounter comes in the fall of september eighteen oh five. And we're in really this is the first six months or so of this journey . Things are going badly at this point. Tell me what happens when they encounter the Niz Purse, that nation of indigenous people. And that's their not their name, of course. What are they? What's the real name? Their name for themselves is the Nimipu, which means the people. Okay . The expedition had encountered them at a time when these Americans are starving . They've lost their horses. They're leaving them behind. They're transitioning into canoe travel at this point. And Clark reports that many of these men were very sick. So when they meet the Nimipu , they have really good timing because they happen to meet them at their Camus gathering site. So Camus is Hardy Bulb . It's a kind of like lily that the NEZPER,S the Nim ipu people eat, right? So they encounter them in a valley where they are harvesting canis , which means that the NESPERS have a lot of food to give them. But at first the encounter is a little dicey. The Nimipu are suspicious of these new people , but what happens is according to Nimipu oral tradition , there is a woman who had been taken captive by the Blackfeet earlier, traded through the Northwest similar to Sakajua. This whole problem of trafficking native women has a long history and today has culminated in the missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis . But this woman had been trafficked and she had eventually ended up with a white family that treated her well. And so she eventually found her way back home and she comes and tells the Nimipoo leaders Be nice to these strangers . Their relatives treated me well. And so that helps smooth over the encounter . They feed core of Discovery and they feed Lewis and Clark's group and they give them chamos and chemist bread and they give them salmon. But the problem is that the men on this trip did not have a lot of fiber in their diet. Kamis is incredibly fiberful and so it makes them very sick for like two weeks until they adjust to this food. One of those journal entries I'm going to read, september twentieth, eighteen oh five. This is written by Clark. Wednesday, september twentieth, eighteen oh five, set out and proceeded through a country as rugged as usual, passed over a low mountain into the forks of a larger creek , which we kept down two miles and ascended a steep mountain, leaving the creek to our left hand passed ahead of several streams on a dividing ridge and at twelve miles descended the mountain to a level point. We're talking about an entire huge hike here and it's all one little paragraph . We proceeded through the beautiful country for three miles to a small plane and found many Indian lodges. Met three boys, they saw me and ran and hid themselves , but I gave them small pieces of ribbon RIBIN and sent them forward to the village. You know, these are fascinating journals to read because they're the details of a world that , you know, has been what it has been for so long, it will all go away, you know, in the coming hundred years or so and beyond. But you see this kind of Eden that they're walking through filled with people who are either happy to see them or interested in seeing them or really not happy at all. How does that split? You know, what is the different perceptions of these indigenous tribes as these guys come along? Some of the native nations who encounter Lewis and Clark general information, like they are aware because again the West was a place full of movement and encounters between people . The Nimipoo are the center of a trade empire . And so from their perspective , when they meet Lewis and Clark, they see an opportunity for trade . They see them through an economic lens. They also are very interested in access to their guns , especially since some of the other native nations who they had encountered had access to firearms and that was changing the nexus of power on the planes . Other nations were not interested in having those relationships, had heard bad things white men coming from the east . And they also had encounters because we think of American history east to west . But as you get out to the west, you have Spanish, Russian , and other Europeans who were also telling them that sometimes this new group of people wasn't interested in balanced relationships but was interested in exploiting their lands and people. Yes, exactly. There's an enormous story to be told about the day to day life of this journey, which as I mentioned before, takes from may eighteen oh four to september eighteen oh six, both the way up to the northwest of North America and then the way back. I mean, that's how long this journey is. So to cover that in such a small conversation is not possible. But I just wanted people to understand that without this woman along the way guiding this group, they wouldn't have made it. Is that fair to say? I think that's fair to say, yes . And I mean, from her ability to provide food and some helpful medicine to when they encounter the Shoshone, Lewis had been talking to the Shashoni for several d before the rest of the party caught up to them. The Shoshone weren't willing to trade horses after Seku reunites with her kin , they're willing to trade horses. So very basically right, she made it possible for the journey to continue multiple times. Right. So had perceptions changed, I imagine I mean this is a gigantic experience they're all going through. This is a bonding experience for any human being of any age and time in history . They must have softened about her and valued and understood where they would be without her, right? No. Oh gosh, that's the answer . I didn't want to hear or anyone listening. Really? Like, I mean, she's given birth . She got on pregnant, she gave birth. She every time they walk up on a new tribe, a new group, a new village, she's the one who has to talk for them. They haven't learned this by now. Nope. She remains relegated to the background and very rarely even mention by name . Wow . And Clark really fell in love with Jean Baptiste, her son , and he was a cute baby, who doesn't love a cute baby. And he offers take him and adopt him right to adopt him and Secuya does say no, she won't give up her breastfeeding baby we can get into what happens with that more. Yes, please she won't give up her baby . I think there probably was some real affection of Clark towards Sakajewia. I think he probably did respect her as a human being, but it's not something that he takes the time to write down. Yeah, it was Lewis who really referred to her as, you know, racial slur and all the rest of that and in the writings. And of course Charon Charon, as we've described , it's so painful to imagine that experience for this person thrown to the wolves of sort. After the break, Lewis and Carc will reach the left coast of the continent and we talk about how we end up on this trip, which is just, you know, halfway home at this point We're back with Margaret Heddle. Margaret, this journey that started in may eighteen oh four finally reaches the Pacific coast in late eighteen oh five . There is a very famous story about this . There's a number of them, but I'm going to ask you first of all, what sticks out for you when they finally reach the Pacific? Do you know how Sakajoya reacted to seeing the ocean? I'm just curious if there is any way of understanding this. This is one of my favorite stories about Sakajuya because I think you really understand who she is . So Lewis writes in his journal that was insistent on being allowed to go and see the ocean . They also had just heard there was a whale, that a dead whale washed up on the beach . And so this is a quote from Lewis in his journal. He says she, observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters and now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either. So she puts her foot down and says I, am going to see the ocean. I've gone all this way. I'm going to see this whale, bigger fish than I've ever seen in my life before . And she goes and she looks at the ocean and of course because, we don't have anything from her perspective, we can only imagine how she felt when she looked out at the ocean. But here she is, again, seventeen years old probably at this time , a one year less, than one year baby on her back looking out at water like she's never seen before and water that she made a choice there, right? That's what I love about this story, right? Is she she wants to see the water and she goes to see the water and I can just imagine how awe inspiring and empowering it would have felt to look out at the Pacific Ocean for the first time that was a sensation , a state of mind that all of us can relate to course every time we see it now. Can you imagine here's a woman that was a landlocked individual all her life? Probably heard mytholog ical stories about the oce an. There were the Great Lakes not that far away. So there were big bodies of water for sure, but nothing like the ocean. And suddenly here it is, as we all know, is impossible to describe until you're looking at it. And there's this whale, you know, it's just evidence of these strange creatures, these monstrous creatures inside this water . And that's when Mary Lewis would lean over and say he says, It's a mammal, not a fish. No, he didn't . Right? Yes, the scientific scientific classification there. Absolutely. Also, Sakajuya so often is reduced to a symbol . And for me, this story really is a reminder that she was human , that she was curious , that she was part of a world that was full of travel and movement and people not just waiting to be discovered, that core of discovery name, right? These weren't people wait ing to be discovered. They were people who lived in a vibrant world and who wanted to learn not just about their own communities. They weren't isolated. They were learning about each other, they were learning about the newcomers , and they were able to take in new information like what it means to see the ocean and bring that back to their community. Yeah . This all happened on Cannon Beach, Oregon, which you can visit yourselves at any time. It's very famous. That reaches the pe ak basically of or the apex of the trip, I suppose. They've reached their point, their objective, which is the Pacific Ocean. Now not so directly, but eventually they have to turn around and come back. Once they do, I want to just talk about the aftermath. What happens to everybody afterwards, especially Zach ua, but let's start with Maryweather Lewis. What is his fate in life? Well, as you mentioned, he does not live a very long time . He dies by gunshot in eighteen oh n ine. And this is another one of those historical uncertainties. Most likely he died by suicide . But there's also a possibility that he was killed by someone who he was involved in a financial dispute with, but nobody knows. Yeah. One of these guys, I guess it was Mary Orthod Lewis was a very depressed guy, wasn't he? He went through a lot of depression. Yes. And struggles with alcohol. Yeah that's why we suggest that he was it was a suicide. William Clark on the other hand rewards Clark with double pay and sixteen hundred acres, same as Lewis by the way. Thomas Jefferson appoints Clark as Brigadier General of Militia for the Louisiana Territory and Federal Indian agent for Western tribes. Now that he's been educated and no, he's not. He's not versed in anything. In eighteen twenty two, President Monroe appoints Clark , superintendent of Indian Fairs and in this role he exercises jurisdiction and control over Western tribes as well as eastern tribes. It's so interesting. You know, we're going to go into a terrible period of what unfolds during this time as far as the wars and so forth. And there's this man who has had this very intimate contact with these peoples through the help of Sak uya. Did that temper his view of those peoples or what was his position as a result? I think I'm going to disappoint you with my answer once again. Yeah, and say it didn't really temper his view He very firmly believed that the United States had a right to expand and like a basically manifest destiny before those words manifest destiny were used to expand democracy civilization throughout the North American continent . He's involved in a whole bunch of really questionable treaties with native nations in the St. Louis are a and further west . And he's not well thought of among most native communities. Also, you would have hoped that all of his interactions with diverse people, you know, having someone like York keep him alive maybe make him rethink owning another human being. But no matter how many times York asked for freedom, Clark consistently refused to give him that freedom . So Clark continued to operate from the view that white American civilization was inevitably going to expand throughout the North American continent. It's the continuing dilemma. How much do we project our own values into this history? You know, how could someone, you know, if you put yourself in that position, how could you after all those years all his months of traveling in such intimacy and understanding of the diversity , then come back and say, Okay, yeah, we need to take this place over. You know, it's it's really impossible for a modern mind to really grasp. Right. And it's hard because he does, so eventually Charbonaux and Sakajewia do move to St. Louis , Clark helps them get some land and he does put Jean Baptiste through school and he eventually becomes Jean Baptiste Guardian because Charon sells their land and moves back up to North Dakota. It's not clear again how Sakajewia felt about leaving her son in St. Louis. It was common at the time for especially mixed descent kids to live in settler centers and get an education in settler schools. But like he loved this kid, right? This kid who is native on an individual level, he had these feelings of affection, but that didn't translate into policy that respected the humanity and sovereignty of native nations. Yeah. Let's talk about York in more detail. On their return to the East, York reportedly asked for his freedom, as you said, in order to live with his wife in Kentucky. Clark refuses to free him due to financial constraints , hard to believe, considering Clark had this reward for the expedition, he had the money because he was paid so much more than he expected. As a result, York spends the rest of his life in slavery under the Clark family. He received no money or compensation for his part in the expedition. Let's talk about Sakajua. Where did she land in the conclusion of this journey? Before we talk about Sakajua, sure, can I mention so one of the things that I think is really interesting about how the Lewis and Clark story is remembered is like the statues that are made, right? And I did forget to mention a very important member of the team, which was the dog , semen there are more statues of semen than of York and Sak ua. There's twelve statues with semen in it and there are only two statues of York. All right. And where could you find those statues? Where are they all along the path? Yeah, there's statues along the path. There's there's one I when I used to work in Nebraska, there's one in Lincoln that has L ewis and Clark and Siemen. And like a young native boy and then a man the young native boy is holding an American flag and the man is like pointing here, here is all our land , but there's there's so many Lewis and Clark statues around the country , especially along the trail. Sure, yeah. Well, it becomes its own tourism and all the rest of that. Never mind the memorials do this journey. Sagajewaya l'ifsetime goes from seventeen eighty eight to eighteen twelve, which is only a few years after she returns. So what happens to her at the end of her life? So the documented narrative, the narrative that historians and others have been writing for a long time is that she died of a fever in eighteen twelve. And that's just the end, right? She disappears from the record, she died. There's a very brief mention of it , but there are other stories that her life lasted much longer. Both the Shishoni and the Hedatsa have oral traditions that she li ved to be in her eighties . On the Shashoni reservation there is a grave that is supposed to be Sakajewya's grave where they say she lived out the rest of her years with the Sh ishoni people and has had other children and has descendants. The Hadasa say the same thing that she lived to be in her eighties , had at least three more daughters and has living descendants to this day. And to be clear, these stories , you find documented examples of these oral traditions that say she that her life was much longer than that two year Lewis and Clark trip. There are examples of these oral traditions being told to anthropologists and others in the late nineteenth century. They're told more than a hundred years , but they just never make it into the written . Yeah , yeah, for so many obvious reasons. The complications are, you know, make the story a little too much too complicated to tell as we're even encountering now. Right. As far as what we want to believe, of course . Her son, after Charnot dies, her husband then, their son and daughter, are given to William Clark, as you mentioned. But there's a lot of debate about all of this stuff. And as you mentioned, she may have lived as long as eighteen sixty nine or one of the many of the several stories having you said, three daughters . One story tells mentions that she was eventually shot in a raid by another indigenous tribe, right? Right, yes , yep, and died in her grandson's arms. There you go. I want to read a little bit of the biography of Secretary J oe's son, Jean Baptiste Charbonot. He lives from eighteen oh five to eighteen sixty six. William Clark became his legal guardian in St. Louis . In eighteen twenty three, Jean was invited to go to Germany with Duke Paul Wilhelm of Werternberg after he and the Duke made acquaintance in St. Louis . He traveled with the Duke through Europe as a companion, lived with him in the palace , Jean then returned to America in eighteen twenty nine , where he utilized his skills as a multilingual guide, scout , fur trapper. He eventually dies in Oregon of illness after taking part in the gold rush. Oh my Lord, what a life this man led . Yeah, pretty much every epoch, every important era in American history there. Very exactly. Which is very it's interesting. So much about this story is so micro cosmic of America at that time. It really is an interesting way of looking at it. I hadn't thought of before this. Well, and my favorite detail about Jean Baptiste too is that he apparently loved quoting Shakespeare . And I just love to think about this , you know, this like rugged mountain man of a guy out there quoting shape, like it should be in a Hollywood movie sometime definitely . In summation, Margaret , and addressing the American mythology of this, how do you think the core of Discovery Expedition should be remembered in retrospect ? And how is the storytelling of this changing even as we live? From my perspective as someone who works in Indigenous studies , I think that the core of discovery should be remembered as an invasion . Its intended goal was to get the information that the United States needed to take over these lands and these people . The goal was never to live and coexist with native nations, but rather to dominate native nations. That's how American policy worked despite Jefferson's curiosity about native people, right? That's, you know, his idea is, right ? The American civilization , heavy quotes on that, right , has to succeed in the end . So from my perspective, the core of discovery is an invasion . And it's also complicated, right? Because if you put yourself in the position of those twenty three soldiers, those American soldiers, for instance, traveling across lands they, you know, never had encountered, like you also can see bravery , the persistence, etc of the individual men who went on that journey. And I don't want to take that away from their story . And it's just those tensions that exist, right? It can be a story of bravery at the same time that it's also a story of colonial dispossession. Which is such a huge story today. I mean, of course the Trump administration released a restoring truth and sanity to American history executive order and the removal of slides and all the rest of it. I think this is an excellent story a lens through which to look at that effort and the general effort to cleanse history by way of, you know, oversimplifying it and fictionalizing it, really, why is always my question? So what? You know , deal with the honesty of what happened instead of this fiction and it,'s actually filled with wonderful stories about real strength and human behavior . And of course there are strange things that happen and uncomfortable truths about what happens as a result, but it's a much more dynamic story to tell the truth of it than to whitewash it with this lean of history that we want to see. And Sakageua, the story of that, just like Squanto and all the rest is a perfect example of this where you see this incredibly brave woman . You know, did I know her? No, I didn't, but I'm assuming that a person of her age and her circumstance is incredibly courageous and bold and adventurous and works it out over a more than year long journey. It's extraordinary . But I'm not left with uncomfortable feelings of American. I'm left with pride for Sakajua. It's a shame that we need an American dollar coin to communicate that to most people. But that's how I feel. There you go, there's my blur . Look, I can get on a soapbox with the best of 'em, so I mean, that's how I feel, Margaret. How does but I'm more interested in you. You are a director of the Indigenous Studies at University of Wisconsin Oscosh, listening to you tell this story , the Lewis and Clark expedition becomes the story of Sakajewia . I mean, that's a remarkable turnaround, isn't it? It is . And it represents for me how I think we could flip some of these narratives where native people become passive victims in their own story, where native people are acted on where Native people are pushed to the sideline, where native people are simply discovered rather than the ones who are doing the discovering who are the intellectual equals of non native people . When you look at Lewis and Clark narrative through Sakajewia's lens, it is a story of contradictions. It's a story of hope and survival. It's a story of curiosity. It's also a story of the beginning of loss and the beginning of taking of indigenous sovereignty . But that's never, it's never an end . The Shashoni people continue . The Hidatsa people continue, the Nimipu people continue . They continue to tell these stories in their communities. What's new to someone like me who's not shash ony, what's new to someone like you who's not native . These aren't new stories in native communities and we're just starting to hear them and to share them on a more national scale. Yes. I think we've begun a real long period of reevaluation. That's going to have a lot of bumps along the road, a lot of trips up the roller coaster and down, but essentially that's the process that we really are underway here. Our guest today has been Margaret Hiddle. She's the director of Indigenous Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Osgosh. She is an assistant professor of history there. Thank you so much, Margaret. I feel much closer to Tsaka Juaya, and I haven't even begun. Thank you so much. You're welcome. We should go drink some coffee in her honor. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know