Observations of the United States' 250th anniversary are ramping up. What is now the state of Arkansas first entered into U.S. possession in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Less than a year after Napoleon sold the preemptive rights of all of that land to the U.S., President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Corps of Discovery Expedition to go through much, and then beyond, of the territory included in that purchase. The expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, is a major part of the American mythos.
Craig Fehrman's new book, "This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark," digs deeply into the expedition. Each chapter in the book, on shelves April 21, is anchored by a different person's point of view, from the captains leading the mission to York, an enslaved man who becomes invaluable to the excursion, to Sacagawea. Fehrman says he decided which historic figure would be the focus of which chapter the same way he did everything else related to the new book: Slowly and patiently.
Craig Fehrman: The book took me five years, and a chunk of that was figuring out exactly what you said. The Lewis and Clark expedition is amazing for so many reasons. One of them is the journals that they kept in real time, and there's more than a million words in there. So once I knew I wanted to write about this, I read all million words — not for the last time, but this time when I was reading it through, I was thinking about structure. I was really thinking York was such an important part of the expedition. Sacagawea was so important. Even regular soldiers like John Ordway, so important. So I tried to look for moments where they were either the stars, or moments where they were there but we had always kind of focused on the captains. One famous example is this guy named Charles Floyd — he dies, the only soldier that dies during the expedition. And Clark, in his journals, talked about his death and recorded the sergeant's last words. But York was there, too. York was the one who was cleaning up his vomit and trying to help the man. So I tried to tell that moment through York's point of view, and that helped me know, well, that's the place for a York chapter.
Kyle Kellams: I'm glad you brought up that episode of this expedition, because it's one that shows how a historian can try to guess what happened. You guessed that he perhaps died from an inflamed and burst appendix. But there are things, despite the million words, you'll never know for sure.
Fehrman: That's true. It almost feels greedy to complain about this when we have a million words. But there's always more we wish we knew. I remember when I was looking through a ledger that Thomas Jefferson kept — we have so many letters between Lewis and Jefferson as they were planning this. Even once the expedition started, Lewis would send a couple letters back. But there's at least nine letters on that ledger that are missing, and it kind of keeps me up at night. What were in those letters? Could there be one more thing we could learn, one more thing we could understand? We have to work with what we had, just like the captains did.
Kellams: You mentioned that we learn about that one man's death. We see it through York's point of view in that chapter. York is a historical figure that for most Americans they might have heard of briefly in the sort of mythology of Lewis and Clark. York was an enslaved man. What else can you tell us about York?
Fehrman: There's so much to say about York if you take the time to look. Here's a great example. When I was starting out, planning out the book and reading those journals — they hadn't even left St. Louis yet, this is when they're building their first winter quarters — and there's just one time that York is mentioned. And Clark says York commenced sawing with a whip saw. So what's a whip saw do? It turns logs into planks, and you really need planks. You need them on the roofs of your huts so you don't get rained or snowed on. You need them to build beds so you don't sleep on the ground. But a whip saw is very hard to use. It's a technical tool. And this was at a point when there were dozens of white soldiers, but they chose York to use it. Why? Because York was an exceptionally talented builder. He had learned that trade while he was enslaved in Kentucky, helping the Clarks build their plantation. And so from just one detail like that, you can understand his skill. You can understand how York was starting to separate himself from Clark. You can understand how York fit in this really complicated unit and the dynamics there. So York was an enslaved man, but to me, he was so much more than that. He was a builder. He was a hunter. He was the fifth named person in the journals to bring down a buffalo. He was a diplomat. He was funny — he just had a great sense of humor. He was a human being most of all. And I really tried to capture that in my book.
Kellams: You also capture the relationship between Clark and York. There is this, I think, junior high history class romanticism that wants to tell us that York somehow achieved equality in Clark's eyes. But we see through Clark's journal that that wasn't the case. Clark could be petty when York had success.
Fehrman: I really relied on slave narratives. I tried to focus on people who had written in slave narratives who had lived in Kentucky, because slavery could be so different in different parts of America during this time period. One of them — the enslaved person's name was actually Lewis Clark — I couldn't mention his name in the book because I was like, nobody will believe this, it will just take us out of the moment. But this gentleman named Lewis Clark talked about being what he called a "favorite slave" and how that relationship was so much harder and so much more complicated. York gained things because he was skilled, but he also lost things, too, because slavery was always going to be a brutal and invasive relationship from the Black person's point of view. It was even worse because in Clark's mind, he had made York, and so when York succeeded, Clark felt good about that, but he also felt jealous about it. It was a really twisted psychological dynamic, and the journals are a wonderful record of that, if we just take the time to look for that curdled psychological residue.
Kellams: This expedition, of course, is embedded into the American fabric — into both myth, truth and distortion. I was wondering how quickly I would find something in this book that I didn't know. You make me gasp in the prologue when, before they've even taken off, there's an accidental shooting that I'd never read about. It's a fascinating incident.
Fehrman: This is before Lewis and Clark have even met up. Lewis is just trying to get down the Ohio River to meet Clark and to meet York in Louisville. Lewis is such an interesting guy, and one of the things that's interesting about him is he just loves technology. So he had this air rifle. This is something that our understanding has even changed in the last few years, because we've learned that the air rifle was a repeater — he could fire 20 shots in less than a minute, which in an age of muzzle loaders is a mind-blowing technology. There have been plenty of accounts of Native people being impressed by this air rifle, but white people, Americans, were impressed by it, too. And so just outside of Pittsburgh, Lewis showed it off for them. They were impressed. But then somebody who was sort of fiddling with the rifle accidentally fired another shot. It grazed a woman's head. She passed out. Blood was everywhere. Lewis thought that, you know, here the president's golden boy on this huge expedition had just murdered an American citizen. She turned out to be okay. But that kind of uncertainty, that kind of anxiety that was always present in the expedition — I really wanted readers to feel that.
Kellams: And we do. As the journey continues, sometimes I marvel at not overconfidence, but maybe confidence from the captains that we're going to do this, we're going to make it okay. And I sometimes got the feeling that the men who were with them also questioned that confidence.
Fehrman: I think you're exactly right. I admire a lot of things about Lewis and Clark, and one is their confidence. Right now we're sending a rocket to the moon. Americans are a confident nation, and I think that's one reason we've accomplished a lot of amazing things, including the expedition. But there can be downsides to confidence, especially if you're on the rocket ship or you're in the canoe. Those soldiers — if you read the journals closely, you can see at several points the expedition came very close to falling apart. You can note that sometimes it's not even said in words, but in actions. Clark has a horrible sore on his ankle, he's riding in a canoe, it's infected, it's oozing, but he still gets in the water to help tow the canoes after not having done that for months. When you compare that to other clues, you can see he's doing that because morale is close to eroding and he's got to do something to keep this unit together.
Kellams: We were talking about the confidence that the captains had. I think that also comes out in their early assessment of grizzly bears — that they're bigger than black bears, but you got a gun, not a problem
Fehrman: Right? Native people tried to warn them. Sometimes Native people would go out to hunt and they would take eight or 10 people. Their guns weren't rifled, so they weren't as powerful. And to Lewis, he thought, I've got the better technology, I've got my American grit, this will be fine.
One of the funniest moments to me when I was working on this is there's a line that nobody had noticed before, where Lewis is talking about grizzly bears after he's finally figured out what a threat they are and how he needs to be more cautious. And he says that they were very "tenacious of their right of soil," which is funny — they're not going to give up the land. But there's an irony to that humor because the joke Lewis is making is about American expansion. "Right of soil" is a Jefferson term, a political term. And so you can see that Lewis is always thinking about land, always thinking about where Americans are going to go next. He thinks dispossessing these grizzly bears is going to be tricky. But of course the Native people were an even larger obstacle, from Lewis's point of view.
Kellams: This is the most I think I've ever read about Sacagawea's life before she joins the expedition. How did you find out more about her?
Fehrman: I found out in several different ways. The first was just reading the journals, because the captains had recorded that really carefully. And if you read it more closely, you can see that this story came straight from Sacagawea — she used sign language. A lot of times we sort of just treat the journals as this finished text and don't realize that they can record their own making process. Sign language was essential for people to communicate in this time period. But I also found out from talking to Shoshone people. I started with the journals. I'm a historian, so the written documents are where I start, but that's not where I stopped with this book. I interviewed more than 100 people. A lot of them were Native, and they taught me so much. The Shoshone people specifically really helped me understand Sacagawea as a mother and just the routines. I wanted the air rifle, I wanted the canoes, I wanted the action. But I also found myself thinking, what did breastfeeding her son feel like? What did changing the diapers — which they weren't diapers, it was a different setup, but it was the same basic thing — what did that feel like? How did she give her son a bath? I wanted those human details to be there, because Sacagawea is amazing. She's one of those mythological figures who lives up to the hype. I just wanted to remind everybody that she's a human being, too.
Kellams: And she meets the expedition when she's a teenager.
Fehrman: That's right. 15 or 16 years old, which is just an incredible thing to think about, especially because of what had happened to her in the last four years or so. She was captured from her people. She was taken hundreds of miles away from her people. And this is really important to say: she was enslaved. Sometimes people talk about Sacagawea as the wife of Charbonneau. I don't think that's the right word. He was her owner. And this is not just me projecting some modern understanding — Clark used that word "slave" when he talked about her after the expedition. So she was somebody who was beaten, who was impregnated, who was abused. She had a very difficult life. But to me, that just makes her more inspiring, because she was able to accomplish all those things we learned about in school. She just had to start from a much darker place than we realize.
Kellams: The Spanish were not happy with this expedition.
Fehrman: The Spanish marshaled more than a thousand soldiers. They sent at least four different attempts to try to hunt down Lewis and Clark, and they came much closer than we realized. When you think about the scale we're talking about — this huge continent that hasn't even been mapped by imperial powers — they came within about 100 miles of running into Lewis and Clark. If they had just left a day or two earlier, or if Lewis and Clark had been a day or two later, we might have had an international war break out on the Missouri. Who knows what the continent would look like today if that had happened.
Kellams: There's a person in here who you mention early in the book that I had completely been unaware of, speaking to the Spanish, and that is someone who was mysteriously known as Agent 13, a counterintelligence officer helping the Spanish who was deep in the American government.
Fehrman: He was America's top-ranking general at that time. His name was James Wilkinson, and he was somebody that Lewis knew, that Clark knew. He even sent some smaller missions that were similar, led by an American officer named Zebulon Pike. So Wilkinson was somebody who was a very important American official, but he also worked with the Spanish at the same time, made tens of thousands of dollars from his dealings with the Spanish. And he told the Spanish, Lewis and Clark are going because the Americans want to settle the Pacific Coast — you've got to get your best cavalry and hunt them down. The Spanish tried, and they came very close to succeeding.
Kellams: There's so much wrapped in this that we think of when we think of American history — this idea of expansion, this idea of innovation, of dispossession of others' lands, of enslavement. I think it's an important expedition to think of related to all of those matters and more.
Fehrman: I think so. When I tried to write this book, what I tried to do was keep people in 1804, because I just didn't feel like it was my job to sort people into good guys or bad guys or right or wrong. I think that's the reader's job. There's this land along the Missouri that's an incredibly valuable resource. Lewis and Jefferson want it. So do the people who live on it. The land looks one way to a working-class soldier and another way to a captain. That's where the rotating points of view, I think, really helped. I could show the different perspectives on all these important topics, what they meant at that time. And then I hope readers can sit with it and think about it. I know I spent a lot of time thinking about it, too. I think it's a really rich story to think about our past.
Kellams: I know you said it was a five-year effort to write this book. There is maybe — and maybe this is too easy — there is a metaphor here, an analogy, that did you ever think in the middle of this five-year journey of yours that you didn't know if this was going to get done?
Fehrman: I guess what I felt is an obligation. Not just because of everything they put into the expedition, but because of how much this expedition means to Americans. So many people I've talked to have a family story from a vacation to see a Lewis and Clark site, or they read a book in college or something like that. And so I knew how many people loved this story. I love this story, too. And so the pressure I felt was that I needed to try to do the story justice and tell it in a new way. I'm proud of this book. I found so many new documents. I found the perspectives. I think people who know this story will still learn so much. But definitely while writing it, it was the most pressure I've felt in my career, and the pressure was living up to this all-American adventure.
Kellams: Reading those million words written more than 200 years ago — easy enough to understand English?
Fehrman: Their spelling was difficult, and people like to make fun of them for that. I think that's kind of unfair. We're sitting in air conditioning here saying, why didn't you spell check? Let's cut them some slack. But they were easy to understand, and they were really good writers. I sometimes found myself, especially near the end of the book, where an adjective would pop into mind and I would realize, oh, that's one of Lewis's or Clark's favorite adjectives. The journals are a wonderful source of just American description — concrete, tactile, action-packed.
Kellams: Was it difficult to finish and send it off?
Fehrman: Yes, it was. I had a deadline, which helped. Lewis and Clark had a deadline, too — they had to get back before winter, or they would have had to spend another year out there. So deadlines are always useful with this kind of project. But at a certain point, you put all the work that you can into it, and then you just hope that the world finds as much value in it as you found while you were writing it.
Kellams: Is it easy to underestimate how much the United States in 2026 might have been formed by what was learned on this journey?
Fehrman: I absolutely think so. One thing I really tried to do in my book was — academics have this word "contingency," which means that the past could have unfolded in many different ways. Even though it's an academic concept, I think it's really easy and useful because it just means how we understand our lives. We don't know what's going to happen at work tomorrow. We don't know who's going to win the next presidential election. Well, neither did Lewis and Clark. So if you capture that mindset, I think it's really important to help understand the story, but it also makes it a better story. I did not try to write this with any kind of sense of preordained — they were going to do this or America was going to look like this. I wanted you in the canoe, feeling the fear, feeling the pressure, seeing the courage. And once that's your engine for telling a story, I think you can appreciate that their sacrifices really shape what the country looks like today.
Kellams: Craig, congratulations on the book. Thank you so much for your time.
Fehrman: It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Craig Fehrman's book, "This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark," will be released April 21. Our conversation took place on Zoom yesterday.
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