Closed Captions Audio Described

Dr. Gary Moulton, editor of the Lewis and Clark Journals, discusses the three foundational pillars of the expedition: journals, botanical specimens, and maps. He explores how modern scholars use these materials to understand buffalo ecology, plant climate history, and cartographic methods. Moulton examines game sink and game park theory, Lewis's plant collection, and Clark's meticulous river mapping across 1,500 miles.

Transcript

0:02 Oh, there is uh Doctor Moulton earned his Phd And his MA at Oklahoma State University and then became Assistant Professor of History at Southwestern Oklahoma State University where he worked on the John Ross project um advertisement for editor of the Lewis and Clark Journals for the University of Nebraska caught his eye and I was just talking to
0:27 Gary's lovely wife Fay and asking, you know, uh was it kind of interesting how he uh found out about the job? You know, you never know how things are gonna turn out? And I guess uh some of uh Gary's grandchildren are, are very interested in that as well. Maybe he'll share a little bit of that. But here's a quote from him. When I first started this project,
0:51 I had no idea the breadth and depth of materials said, reflecting on his hiring as editor for the Journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, I never envisioned 13 volumes or taking 20 years. He remembers that he soon discovered the materials were so vast that his task seemed incomprehensible. He admits feeling slightly panicked
1:16 and my doctor calls me to take Paxil.
1:22 for me the most exciting moment in this research project came when I said, whoa when I realized I could do it, I was finished with the first volume and well into the second, when I realized I can do this and, and the person that wrote this said, you know, that must have been very similar to what Lewis and Clark felt when they first imagined their journey.
1:47 And then after they got their first couple of stops under their belt, maybe the first five
1:56 in 2001, Doctor Moulton was uh awarded the Outstanding Research and Crea Creativity Award from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He's a member of the Nebraska Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission, which still is in existence through 2007. And we're very pleased that he's working on that. And he's a scholar in residence at the uh
2:20 Missouri River Basin, Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. And I'm sure there's many other things, but one thing we know he is a friend of the Mouth of the Platte. He's been here before and I was very pleased that when um I asked him to speak with us at night that he is approachable as he has always seemed to be.
2:43 Uh and that's one thing that everybody says, uh especially by the way, um my girlfriend Del, it was great, Doctor Moulton when he talked to her
2:54 anyway. And of course, she was in tears when she first met you in Philadelphia when she got to hold the journals. That was a very special moment. Anyway, without further ado I will present to you Dr. Gary Moulton
3:17 Thank you very much. Uh I'm testing the equipment here. Uh Can you hear me all right back there in the very back? Yes, thank you. Well, I was sort of envious of the person who got the award for coming the farthest I told my table that Faye and I had, uh amassed more miles than that today. Shopping in Omaha.
3:43 I'm sure that we shouldn't have gotten that.
3:47 We came over early and spent the whole day. So Omaha is a big city, not like that little town Lincoln over there. And uh it's sort of, we've been looking up at the tall buildings all day and
4:05 so it's really great to be back here in Omaha. I remember standing right over there a few years ago and giving my talk. I see some of you nodding uh in remembrance of that evening, which means uh I'm gonna have to think of a different talk
4:24 because you might remember that one. I came up with something fresh, please. I hope it's fresh for you. It's a talk I've given a few times lately and it's a way to sort of look back on the bicentennial from an academic point of view, you know, that's where I come from. And so,
4:44 uh that's what moves me and uh get my thought processes going and I'm here to tell you tonight about the three pillars that hold the Lewis and Clark expedition together the documentary evidence that we have that makes the Lewis and Clark expedition. So special
5:08 part of the reason we celebrated it in the bicentennial is because we have this abundance of documentary materials that shed light on what happened during the expedition. So we have journals kept by the two captains and four enlisted men. We have maps of the expedition gathered by Lewis
5:33 before the trip and then made in the field by Clark as they travel across the continent back. And the maps that were made after the expedition is sort of the grand result of the area that they had seen. And we have botanical specimens, plants that were gathered by Lewis during the trip,
5:57 pressed between sheets of paper and hauled back and forth across the continent. So these three pillars of the Lewis and Clark expedition come down as our heritage from that trip. I wanna tell you tonight that these are living legacies of Lewis and
6:20 the journals aren't notebooks that are set on some shelf, gathering dust and some uh archive that nobody knows about. The botanical specimens aren't plants in the basement of some building being eaten away by bugs and the maps aren't simply wavy lines on
6:44 sheets of paper that represent places that nobody knows about. These materials are being actively used today by scholars by enthusiasts such for yourself, by people of all different sorts of interests. And so I wanna talk tonight
7:06 about how these materials are being used by scholars to enhance our notion and interest in the Lewis and Clark expedition. And these are recent studies that have come about largely as a result of the interest that's been generated by bicentennial by
7:31 Stephen Ambrose's book and Ken Burns' film, my own endeavors in editing the journals of Lewis and Clark,
7:41 April the 12th, 1805, Lewis and Clark were just a few days out of Fort Mandan were they wintered during the winter of 1804 05. They north of Bismarck in North Dakota and now they had moved up the Missouri River a few miles
8:05 and they stopped that day. April the 12th 1805 at the mouth of the little Missouri river, Lewis and Clark wanted to take some astronomical observations, you know, to fix their spot on the earth and that help of Clark's mapping and just their knowledge of the terrain in general more.
8:26 But I'm sure they stopped because the men were probably tired, you know, they had softened up over a winter of little physical activity and now they were spending five or six days holding and pulling and pushing those boats against the relentless current of the Missouri River.
8:48 So give them a chance to rest up, maybe dry out some of their equipment and to reprovision the party. And in that regard, Lewis and Clark sent out 10 hunters were spread out over the terrain looking for food for the party.
9:11 We've heard a bit about that already. This evening,
9:15 10 men went out and they came back. There's only a single deer. Now, single deer is not nearly enough to feed a party of 33 working hands. They needed much more than that. Listen to what Lewis said on one occasion,
9:39 we eat an immensity of meat. It requires four deer and elk and a deer or one buffalo to supply us plenty for 24 hours. A buffalo might yield 500 to 1000 pounds of meat.
10:01 A deer. Only one order of that a man.
10:07 Now, part of Bob's conversation here were about the nutritional needs, the caloric needs of the party as they did the work across the continent, there have been studies of that and I, I knew of this when you hear that they run a little article in WPO about this matter. And it's very interesting
10:31 been different studies and, uh, French voyageurs who did much the same work as Lewis and Clark men have been found to need 7000 calories a day about what we had this evening for dinner. I
10:52 even without a desert,
10:55 7000 calories a day. So I, uh, a few years ago had one of the cornhusker football players in my class. Carlos Polk. You may remember that name. One of those behemoths on the cornhusker football team. And I asked Carlos, do you mind if I call the,
11:17 uh, athletic office to see how many calories you're eating? He said no no go ahead. So I called the dietician for the Husker football team and I said, how many calories does, uh, Carlos Polk both eat during the height of football season? I said most of our players like Carlos eat about 6000 calories a day,
11:41 almost the same as Lewis and Clark did. But they were probably twice the size. Carlos Polk three times the size of many of the members of the party.
11:55 10 hunters went out, they came back with a single meal. Where were the buffalo that day? Where was the meat that that party needed to keep them going and not have this caloric, uh deficit, that Bob talked about.
12:11 well the buffalo stand supreme in the vision of the world as the emblem of the American West
12:26 for all the world. The buffalo stands as the symbol of the American West and Lewis and Clark loved the buffalo meat. Ab a above any other meat that ate elk deer, whatever they could get was always the buffalo they desired particularly, uh, several sacred parts where the
12:50 tongue, the hump, the liver, the intestines. These were the things they liked and the reason they liked them was because they were the fattiest parts and they provided the most calories and that's what the men were after
13:08 Lewis and Clark began to see great herds of buffalo very early in the trip on June 30th 1805 near Great Falls. Clark wrote that he saw 10,000 buffalo in a single sighting. Joseph Whitehouse at another time, said I can without exaggeration, say
13:31 that I saw more buffalo feeding at one time than all the animals I've ever seen before in my lifetime put together.
13:42 Finally, Clark said I'm not going to enumerate buffalo anymore. There are just too many of them, see.
13:51 But then on the way back after he got in buffalo country again, he said one more time, I wanna mention the number of buffalo, 20,000 buffalo in a single sighting. Incredible man. The numbers of the buffalo on the Great Plains have been estimated at been anywhere from 30 to 70 million
14:17 Buffalo by Lewis and Clark times had already retreated from occupying the eastern parts of the United States and were now pushed on to the great plains. The great grasslands of North America where they thrived and increased in number 70 million is probably much too high an estimate.
14:41 And because of modern studies, we've pushed that number back to a more realistic 30 million. Still an incredible number of beasts
14:56 So where were the buffalo on April the 12th? 1805,
15:03 some historical and model. Excuse me, some historical ecologists have done some studies using Lewis and Clark's journals, Paul Martin and Christine Szuter of the University of Arizona. Have moved through Louis and Clark journals looking at bison references.
15:26 And they said the reason they didn't see any animals that day was because Lewis and Clark were in a game sink that is a drop off of bison numbers, a games. And they said within a few weeks, they would enter a game park that is high numbers of buffalo.
15:52 Why is it a game sink? Well, Lewis and Clark understood part of the game sink. They answered the scholars questions themselves because they said we have noticed within the hunting range of Indians, the numbers of game animals fall off
16:16 and they were within the range of the hunting of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, their host over the winter and they would see camps that they had established for hunting purposes along the Missouri. And so they knew that they were still within that range. Within two weeks,
16:40 Lewis would write the country abounds in animals. and when they reached the mouth of the Yellowstone River at the border between North Dakota and Montana. Lewis said there are so many animals we have to push them aside to get through. They were now in a game park.
17:04 Well, if one side of the equation, the game sink is answered by the hunting territory of native Americans nearby. How do we answer the other side? The game park where there are lots of numbers.
17:23 Paul Martin and Christine Szuter have an answer. They say it's not only game park, it's a war zone, a buffer zone. It's a contested area where native Americans struggle for occupation but do not have the singular strength to control the territory themselves.
17:47 In other words that contested hunting grounds and the area that Lewis and Clark were entered were contested by a number of very aggressive tribes. The Mandan the Hidatsa the Assiniboine, the Crow, the Atsina, the Blackfeet, the Shoshone all encircling this vast preserve
18:12 of buffalo and the buffalo thrived there because the tribes to move in as hunting parties hunt briefly and aggressively and then rush out before they were set upon by their competitors. So Lewis and Clark were seeing, they were in a game park and they too noted this phenomenon
18:36 in the same way. They noted the phenomena of the game sink. They said we have noticed in the areas where nations are warring that the game numbers go up. So Lewis and Clark, the astute observers that they were,
18:55 were noticing these things that has taken us a couple of 100 years to figure out and they were doing it on the ground moving very quickly and they crossed through this region. They finally reached the area of the three forks of the Missouri and Sacagawea uh the native woman who was with them,
19:19 the Shoshone Indian woman whose territory they have now entered. Said when I was a child, there used to be lots of buffalo here. Uh, but in recent years before I left this area, the numbers had gone down and she said we can't find animals anymore.
19:43 Why is that? Well, competition again between the Shoshones and the Blackfeet for that. Hunting area, on the way back they crossed through here again. Clark and his party going over to the Yellowstone they past through the game sink there the base of the Rockies and went back into the game park again
20:03 moved up the Yellowstone through that region and then out again into a game sink near the Mandan and the Hidatsa indians. So Paul Martin and Christine Szuter were able to make some very important observations
20:26 about a phenomena of the Buffalo range and behavior and extent and numbers based on the journals of Lewis and Clark
20:41 Meriwether Lewis was a natural, he had a naturalist inclination from earliest life in a little biographical sketch that Jefferson wrote uh of Lewis. He talked about how as a boy, he loved to go out into the forest and the wild and, and go on excursion for himself. And, and there he would study nature
21:06 he like Jefferson had an inclination towards the plant life of the world. You know, Jefferson just uh always was gathering plants and studying them and trying to learn about their medicinal purposes and the ceremonial and ritualistic purposes among Native Americans and, and Lewis either had this himself or captured it.
21:31 Uh from uh Jefferson and carried it with him on the trip. Lewis was the primary naturalist on the trip of the 239 plants that we have from the expedition. Everyone but a single plant seems to have been gathered by Lewis. He was the one who
21:56 observed the plants who recorded, he wrote about them, who preserved them and then carried them back to Philadelphia where 99% of the plants remain today
22:12 on way up Fort Mandan Lewis was gathering plants along the Missouri River.
22:20 And then as they left Fort Mandan in April of 1805, he sent a shipment of goods back and you probably know about these crates that he boxed up and everyone knows the wonderful story of the little magpie and prairie dog that made it all the way back to Washington DC and uh to Jefferson's Monticello.
22:42 But there were other items in these shipments, Indian artifacts, the geologic specimen and the plant specimens, 60 plants that he had gathered on the way up the Missouri River to Fort Mandan. There,
23:01 30 of those plants are lost. We have no idea of what happened to them. We know they existed at one time because Lewis besides sending in the plant, sent a list of the plants and then the receiving agent in Philadelphia checked off each plant certifying that he had the whole lot that Lewis had sent.
23:27 We don't know what happened, but I'm gonna speculate a moment that these 30 plants that were lost were probably plants that were familiar to scientists in the East. You see, it's not a random 30 that are missing. It's the 1st 30 plants.
23:48 The first plant that we have in the Lewis and Clark Herbarium is number 31 gathered in Burt County, Nebraska
23:59 on the edge of a new zone of ecology, a new environmental zone that is the, the uh high plains of North America where these drought tolerant species first began to appear. So the bontanist, the scientists in the East were probably going through the plants and say,
24:23 oh yeah, I know that one. I collected it in Mississippi. I know that one. I collected it in North Carolina. You know, so they knew about some of these plants that Lewis was collecting up the Missouri River. As a matter of fact, the terrain up to Sioux City was very similar to the terrain
24:46 they were seen all along the way and it finally reached the point where the high plains entered and the drought tolerant species took over. And these species who demanded more water just couldn't function any longer and died out. So the 1st 30 plants
25:08 may have just been discarded as being familiar to scientists in the East. So we only have that 2nd 30. But that's more important because these are from a new environmental zone and scientists would be interested in those
25:27 and they left Fort Mandan then in April 1805, Lewis began his collecting and preserving again. And as he went across the continent, he's gathering plants and preserving them between sheets of paper that are carefully pressed together. And then he decided rather than to chance them over the rocky mountains,
25:50 he buried them in a cache at Great Falls, Montana and left them there to pick up on his way back when he came back and opened that cache water had seeped in and destroyed all those plants
26:07 The plants that we have then are primarily those from the rocky mountains and Pacific Northwest that he had collected from that point on and the 30 plants from Nebraska to North Dakota. So the Great Plains is very much underrepresented in the collection of Lewis and Clark.
26:32 What is the bulk of this plant collection are the plants from the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. But those are the most important because those are the ones that are unknown to scientists in the East. And me, those are the plants that they will want to see those plants today. Some 240 are mostly at
26:55 the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia.
27:01 Mark Keith A chemist in Syracuse New York has been studying this plant collection. What Mark Keith is interested in
27:14 are the plants providing a snapshot of environmental conditions at the time of their gathering they're collecting. He studied the plants in a way that they hold a memory of what were the environmental and climactic conditions at the time of the gathering,
27:40 what when I was studying the plants myself, getting them ready for the herbarium volume that's out here, I went to Philadelphia and made notes on them and we took photographs of them and identified them by their scientific and popular names. And I did all this work and finished up the volume and went away and,
28:05 uh, I worked on the book and then I came back a few years later to do some set up on it. And when I pulled out the sheets that had the specimen, I noticed little holes, little missing parts of the plant, you know, about the size of a Florida chad.
28:27 And so I went to the uh Botanist, the curator in charge and I said, what's happened to the plants here? He said, well, Mark Keith is working on it. He cuts out these little chad size pieces and takes them back to his lab to study.
28:48 They're not damaging of the plants greatly because mostly it's leaves that are underside, not visible out of the way. And it's very small of gatherings from these plants.
29:05 So I talked to Mark Keith to try to discover what sort of research that he was bringing to the plant collection here. And I'm going to try to describe it to you in layman's terms. Uh I don't understand it fully. Uh So you may not understand it as fully as I do even,
29:28 but that's all right. We can understand it from a sort of a neutral position here. Now, we all know about carbon 14, you know that way of dating um, items because they have a half life that carbon deteriorates at a known rate over time.
29:50 And so you can take a piece of wood or any sort of organic matter and take and trace its age with some degree of accuracy. But now Mark Keith is looking at organic substances or inorganic substances rather on these
30:11 leaves that do not deteriorate over time, that are steady, that are stable isotopes. And he scrapes the waxy surface of these leaves and looks at the results under a microscope. And when these plants are gathered, you have a time
30:34 zero snapshot of what they were like. What was the oxygen in the air? What were the other sort of environmental and climactic conditions at the time it was gathered. And so now Mark Keith can gather other plants. Modern plants do the same study and get a sense of how
30:59 environmental conditions have affected plant life over time. Now, we all know that fertilizers, atmospheric conditions, uh industrial waste and all of these things have had impacts on plant life and that's what he's trying to determine.
31:20 Uh some plants have thrived and grown and spread because of this. Others have deteriorated and retreated from their former zones of activity. So Mark Keith is studying all this and using the Lewis and Clark plants that were preserved during the expedition
31:43 to discover answers to these questions about the environmental changes. At this point, he's not done the further study, he simply determined this sort of study is possible with these plants. And that speaks to the, the care that Lewis gave in collecting these plants
32:05 and also the care that they've been given over the years that they are so carefully and well preserved today. That
32:16 well, if Lewis was the naturalist Clark was the mapmaker, he was the cartographer on the trip of the 129 historic maps that are associated with the exhibition. Almost everyone has some direct or indirect connection with William Clark
32:42 uh had a, a group of maps with him to begin with maps that were not of his own making, but maps that were gathered by Lewis before the expedition, the maps as a whole fall into three sort of categories. And the first category is the pre expeditionary maps,
33:06 the maps that were gathered by Lewis before the trip. He was going all over Washington to the Spanish and the French and the Russian embassy and saying uh could I use maps that you have of the West when he got to Saint Louis? He met people there, uh fur traders and government officials from Spain
33:27 who would also give him some maps that they have of the Western territory. These were sort of the maps in the glove compartment, you know, and he can pull out to look at what was expected to be before. And Clark as they set out the winter across the river from Saint Louis waiting
33:51 uh to start up river Clark would recopy many of these maps and try to bring the cumulative knowledge on to single sheet or two to know what was going to be before them. As a matter of fact, these pre expedition maps that they were gathering also included some maps of uh a Welsh
34:16 a Welshman who had gone up to Missouri as far as the Mandan Indian and his maps of the Missouri were excellent maps. As a matter of fact, Lewis and Clark were not really see new territory up to the Mandans because John Thomas Evans and the others had been up this route many times
34:39 and some of the boatman that they hired in St Louis said, ah I wintered here last winter near the Nishnabotna River and I hunted a few weeks here uh next to the Platte. So they knew this river up to the Mandan. So Lewis and Clark were not really treading new territory.
35:00 They mapped the internals of previous explorers and traders.
35:07 And then we have that second group of maps, maps made by Clark on the trip route maps day to day maps that Clark worked out along the river. And the third set of maps were post expeditionary maps where Clark brought together the pre expeditionary maps.
35:31 His route map, plus the information he had gathered from natives and from traders who told him about the territory to the north or south of their route farther east or uh off their line of march. And so incorporated this a vast store of knowledge and data that he had accumulated
35:55 into a great map of the West. The map that would eventually be published in the 1814 edition of their book by Nicolas Biddle. And so that became the great map of the West. As a matter of fact, that map published in 1814 was not supplemented until
36:17 the 1850s was not really uh taken over. So it was a grand map.
36:26 But what I really want to talk about are Clark's route maps. The daily maps he made along the way. Now, if we respect Lewis for his naturalist and scientific ability and gathering of plants of descriptions of animals and astronomical observations, then we have to put the same sort of respect for Clark
36:51 for his untiring efforts to map every mile of the trip. The amount of work involved is incredible what he seemed to be doing. And there's no statement about his methodology. What he seemed to be doing is what's called the back azimuth method that is Clark would be standing at a point
37:16 looking up river and he would see a bend in the river or a prominent feature, a rock, a tree, something that stood out and he would mark his spot. Where am I standing here? What is the feature here? And then he would move to the point ahead, turn around and take a compass reading.
37:39 And then in his mind, he would have to turn that 180 degrees and write that course on a line on his sheet about the direction he had traveled. If he had traveled northeast, he would write it in this way, a surveyor's way of writing north 45 degrees east.
38:04 And he would write that to a point, a bend in the river and then he would say, traveled three miles because he used dead reckoning to determine the distance what is dead reckoning. Guessing that's what he was doing. He was guessing how far he had traveled. Um But he was
38:29 a dead reckoner par excellence. He can uh know distances. If today, you would take some of his maps in Montana. The rivers of weavings have not changed. You can lay those down over modern maps and they fit perfectly. He was a genius at doing it.
38:53 We don't know where he gained this knowledge and this ability, but he was certainly a master of it. So across the continent, then he would develop these maps. He usually had a sheet of paper on which he had laid out a grid line square
39:13 and these were usually uh one inch squares he had laid out on his sheet. And then he, he uh he had a gauge of scale of what the distance would be and it was usually about six miles to an end. So if he said we traveled three miles north, 45 degrees east,
39:34 then he would draw a line halfway across the grid and start all over again within the next three months, the next mile in the north, the next three quarters of a mile, 8000 miles across the continent and back day by day,
39:56 the tables that he established these course and distance tables go on page after page after page, an incredible amount of work with his compass and with his dead reckoning and with his perseverance and patience to get that done.
40:19 I admire Clark greatly. He was not only leading the party, doing the maps, keeping a journal, and in the most difficult circumstances. It's only been lately that we've had biographies of Clark. We had all the adulation to Lewis with the uh biography by
40:41 uh Stephen Ambrose and then the film by Ken Burns. Put uh Lewis at the forefront that Clark's a man to be rightly admired for his work on the expedition
40:56 or when he returned to Saint Louis and Philadelphia. Uh He gave these maps to the president. Um Some of the maps went back with that uh supply of goods from Fort Mandan. I can just see Jefferson and uh laying the map of the Missouri out on the floor of the Great Hall of Monticello and crawling across
41:20 the floor and working his way up to Missouri. Uh He was enthralled with Clark's mapping
41:29 these maps then that we have of the Missouri River. And that's what I want to focus on here. Uh, from Saint Louis to Fort Mandan are about 1500 river miles.
41:46 Now, we know there were about 29 maps for that period because Jeffer Jefferson himself said, um I uh have 29 half sheets of maps of the party and this was what he had received from Fort Mandan. Most of those were lost to us
42:11 that just like the 30 plants are lost to us like some of the journals from the expedition are lost to us. As a matter of fact, from St Louis to about Omaha Nebraska, we have no original maps from the expedition. What we have from Omaha to Fort Mandan. Then
42:35 are copies of Clark's original maps. We don't even have uh the original maps by Clark for that period. Either all of those maps, maps of the Missouri River up to Fort Mandan are lost to us and probably will be forever lost to us. Searches through the national archives through appropriate
42:59 depositors have not yielded up those maps. So what do we have from Omaha to Fort Mandan? Then we have a copy a set of copies of maps made for Prince Maximilian. And where would they be Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha Nebraska right.
43:22 That is our single and most important uh part in connection with the Lewis and Clark expedition. Prince Maximilian arrived in uh the United States to do his grand tour and study of the ethnology and, and botany and zoology of the American West and write his grand book.
43:46 And when he reached Saint Louis, he visited William Clark. And Clark said, let me give you a set of maps uh going up the Missouri River, but that set begins at Omaha. I think it's such a coincidence that his maps began at Omaha.
44:08 And that's the very place where all his archives now reside. Uh What a coincidence. The first map is number 13. In other words, supposing that 12 went before. Well, why didn't he have the 1st 12 copy? Probably because
44:33 at the time of Maximilian, the highway, the river highway coming up to Omaha was a thoroughfare was a turnpike. You didn't need maps to get on the river and go and everything will be apparent beyond Omaha. In 1832 became the wilderness, the unknown country.
44:56 It was where the American Fur company now had fewer posts and less involvement. So he was giving him maps of the true wilderness that he would enter.
45:10 And those maps then reached the number 29. So there are copies of maps that Jefferson has seen at one time that Clark had until the 1830s that are lost to us today. So it's a real sad story that we don't have Clark's original, but we're happy that because of Maximilian
45:35 and because of the efforts of Joslyn Art Museum uh to get these materials. And I'm sure all of you from Omaha and Council Bluff know that incredible story of the artwork of uh Karl Bodmer and the archives of Prince Maximilian were making up a tour of the United States in 1962. And the uh InterNorth Art Foundation
46:00 decided to buy those materials and deposited on loan to Joslyn. And, and when Northern Natural Gas Company became Internorth and left Omaha, uh they bequeathed after some negotiations, those materials to the Joslyn Art Museum or in. And that's where they reside today.
46:22 And then you probably know the unhappy story and maybe you have stock in that company
46:29 and you know that it became Enron. Yes, that's sad. But luckily they left this incredible art collection, there at Joslyn of the Bodmers and the even more incredible uh Maximilian papers. And just as an aside tomorrow uh at noon, Joslyn Art Museum will be sending the first
46:52 volume of the newly edited Maximilian Journals to University of Oklahoma Press to start qualification process. So we will be getting the Maxmilian diaries here within the next few years beginning with volume one that takes him uh out to New Harmony, Indiana
47:15 and we'll be seeing the eastern part of Maximilian. So in years to come, you can look forward to Maximilian's journal I call him son of Lewis and Clark.
47:27 And uh again, Omaha can be proud of the connection with this world.
47:35 Two years ago, a man I met in Vancouver Washington. Martin Plamondon told me about his efforts to reconstruct the maps of Lewis and Clark. And he's shown me some examples of his work. And I was amazed at the beauty and the detail and the craftsmanship that Martin had brought to that work
48:00 After he completed it, it all. He had three volumes, numbering hundreds of maps showing the route of Lewis and Clark across the continent. I wanna talk about his first volume. The volume that covers from Camp Wood, Illinois across from Saint Louis up to the Mandan
48:23 that 1500 river miles that Clark mapped in 29 sheets. Martin Plamondon mapped in 153 sheets, five times the detail of Clark. Now in Martin's maps
48:47 volume 1, 2 and three across the continent and back. And I, I have to tell you that Martin died just a few years ago, but he had completed the third volume and the press had sent the results of the third volume just before he died. So he, he came out with this work. He completed this work a magnificent work. It is before he died.
49:13 Martin Plamondon started to work on this lower part in Missouri and he faced the problem that I've already told you about. There are no maps by Clark from Camp Wood to Omaha and from Omaha to the Mandan, And we have secondary maps by Maximilian. Could he trust those?
49:37 Well, he had to because that's all he had available. But how did he reconstruct the river of Lewis and Clark where he had no maps on the lower Missouri below Omaha he had Clark's horse and distance riding north 45 degrees east, three miles to a bend in the river.
50:01 And he simply used those figures and those descriptions to reconstruct the river of Lewis and Clark.
50:13 He said, I think I've done about as well as humanly possible. Well, we probably has and it's probably not truly the river of Lewis and Clark. We'll never know the, the river of Lewis and Clark because of errors that creep into it
50:32 because of difficulties and field conditions, doing the work that Clark was doing poor instruments of a difficult uh field circumstances. All these things drove it to increasing problems. Clark sometimes would go ahead, do his back azimuth reading
50:54 and forget to change it 180 degrees in his mind and had himself going back.
51:02 Um You get up to Sioux City and all of a sudden he takes off from Minnesota. We don't know why, but uh what Martin had to do was resolve the difficulties of these errors and he simply did the best he could. Uh And it's a beautiful piece of work if you don't have any of those volumes or haven't seen them.
51:25 I encourage you to get a look at them or purchase them. Uh the river uh of Lewis and Clark and Lewis and Clark terminology on the maps is in bold black print. So it's easy to view. And in the background in fainter lettering are modern circumstances. The modern course of the Missouri
51:48 uh Omaha, the city, the county lines, the uh the airports, all these things are drawn in. So you get a sense of where you are as you move up the Missouri and across the continent. Well, Martin has been criticized for some of his work. Uh Again, of all the difficulties that Clark had
52:10 were brought over into the work that Martin Plamondon had to do. But still I believe it's a magnificent work and it gives us something to begin with. So there we have journals, botanical specimens, maps of the Lewis and Clark expedition actively being used today
52:31 by scientists, scholars, enthusiasts of the expedition. So the living legacies of Lewis and Clark live on. And I think that we are just beginning that there are things that will continue to interest people from all sorts of discipline to return to Lewis and Clark.
52:54 Each generation takes up Lewis and Clark and brings their own insights and circumstances of their time. We've been fortunate to live in the bicentennial era and have a flood of new studies come to us. Uh But we don't know where the next generation will find interest and um answers to questions about the expedition.
53:18 So I'm gonna be laying low for the uh tricentennial I add to that. But uh maybe some of you will be here, but there will certainly be some people out there and they'll be working on the Lewis and Clark expedition also and they'll bring other studies, magnificent uh group of materials we have. Thank you again for inviting
53:42 and pleasure to be here.
53:52 [applause] OK. We have a little time for questions. Um We have these, these three legs of, of scholarship here and I'm curious that of your opinion about in the future, particularly somebody told me that the only thing we have can learn now about Lewis and Clark is gonna come from Indian oral histories and the Indian perspective of, of this. What, what's your view of that? And, and, and what do you
54:17 in the future? That mean it oral history is historian. These oral histories count uh what, what's the value in the future? Well, I've had that question come up uh several times before as a historian, it's difficult for me to comment on the oral tradition of something I have worked with uh historians like documents, they like the written word
54:40 and that's we, we know how to abide the way and discriminate with the written word. We have contesting words, and contesting testimony. And so we're used to dealing with this and evaluating it and investigating it and we see the difficulties there with the oral testimony. We're just not as comfortable with it.
55:05 Uh I'm not comfortable with it partly because I, I can say this document is in error. This document has flaws or prejudices, but I can't say to someone, your grandmother lied to you of that. So we have to be sensitive to oral traditions. I am not
55:30 discounting this in entirely. I'm just saying there are difficulties with critiquing it with putting it under the same sort of very close examination that we would documentary evidence. We have even, I think one thing good about the bicentennial is those stories have come forward.
55:51 I think the bicentennial has been very rich in its uh desire to try to tap into uh Native American stores. And we've seen that happen in a number of places and they've been reported and I think that's good. I don't know how they will be used, but maybe different sorts of scholars know how
56:15 to handle those materials better than I do. And I hope that we can gain more information from that.
56:26 We sort of think we own you your su so I hope you'll me, brother. I think we're very as to what your life is like these days. What are you doing? First land for those in heart life? Well, uh first, I'm working with the Maximilian project. I'm advisor on that project, Son of Lewis and Clark You know they uh they,
56:49 maybe there's a few miles left in the old guy. Yeah. So I'm doing that and very interesting. It's, it's a fascinating project and I'm sure that you will be interested in it too as it comes out. And then, uh, Fay and I are doing some traveling. Um, we've had, uh, some lucky chances to do lots of traveling during the Bicentennial
57:12 I've got these wonderful in patients like this, not only to come here but go to great places uh all along the Lewis and Clark trail. So we have found that in the future we will travel where no member of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
57:30 We've been in those places. I thought we're doing some traveling and uh uh just enjoy your time. Thank you. Are you thinking of doing a, I do have, I do have one other uh Lewis and Clark book that I'm doing and uh I will be working on that next year. I hope to finish that up. And what it is is a,
57:53 it's a narrative of each day of the expedition. Um You know, I, I did the full journals and then I did the, the abridged journals. And so now what I wanna do is the Lewis and Clark day by day. So each day of the trip, I will write an entry telling what was happening with the expedition that day.
58:13 So you can need to read the original journal or you can open that up and see in my words, what was going on? That's what we working on that.
58:23 Do you have any suggestions for Mouth of the Platte as a purposeful motivation for us to undertake?
58:31 Well,
58:35 I'll tell you, you, people have done so many different things that I've admired, you know, your ongoing studies, these weekly things that Kiara and other people like Bob have been engaged in and uh certainly, uh we've benefited from your help just uh giving us physical labor uh to the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission.
58:59 I uh I pull up to some Lewis and Clark events. I see all these people in Blue t-shirts and I think it's gonna be OK, you know, uh because we've got the help from Mouth of the Platte. So, uh the bicentennial has certainly appreciated the volunteer efforts. Uh Your enthusiasm for the commission events uh in Omaha,
59:24 Fort Atkinson, in Nebraska City. Uh We certainly appreciate that. So, uh I would just, I, I keep on keeping on and uh I throw something, we, we just had a commission meeting last week and I got put on a committee to talk about doing an inventory of assets on the trail in Nebraska.
59:48 All a lot of the states are doing this now, inventory of all the wayside exhibits, the historical signs, the museum exhibits all this and there's a lot of good information and things like Kira's book and a lot of other book. But uh there needs to be some, some uh inventory done and I'm on a committee. Um, I'm on top of the Park Service and Suzanne and Dan and some other people here in the next couple of weeks.
1:00:12 And I think out of that it's gonna come some, some labor that is gonna be needed in terms of inventorying uh, sites along the, the trail here. So, uh, you might keep that in mind. It was a project that, uh, might require some, we'd asked for some assistance uh from the Mouth of the Platte. So, Dick, do you think that would be a good, uh January,
1:00:37 we're gonna, we're gonna need to plan this out. Ok. All right. Well, we'll talk about that.
1:00:43 Uh You mentioned the contributions both with Lewis and Clark. Uh Have you in all your time with this? Uh come up with who you think is, say one of the other members the most important to the uh to the expedition. I know everybody's got a different. Well, it is, it is hard. Um You know, if you would ask Lewis and Clark,
1:01:07 I think they would have to name two or three people and, and pretty much in their summary of the members of the party afterwards. Uh If you read what they said about the different members of you get a very quick sense of who was most important to them. George Drouillard and um uh the two Field brothers of course, were very important. Uh Reubin and Joseph Field. Um
1:01:31 those, those, those three people have to stand at the top. And I know we, we give lots of attention and lots of space to Sacagawea and York. And I think they would represent um a portion of our own thinking in our own time. And they've come forward because
1:01:51 we are interested in a woman's role, an Indian woman's role on the expedition. And we're interested in a black man's role on the, this particular because Clark had such problems after the expedition with York So those two persons have come to the forefront, but immediately after the expedition, if you would ask Lewis or Clark,
1:02:14 they have probably said, Shields and Drouillard and the Field brothers. So I think those, those three people would, would be very important and, and that's not overlooking some of the sergeants uh like Gass who uh printed his own journal, like John Ordway, the top sergeant on the expedition.
1:02:37 But in terms of getting everyday things done that is getting the party where they needed to go and getting enough provision and to feed them, feed them each day. You know, those, those three individuals, right time,
1:02:51 I have one more question then OK. Can, can you tell us exactly how many copies of these journals there are? There's been a report that there's some down in the Missouri historical society and then some back uh the philosophical, just how many copies are there? Well, anybody said that

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Gary Moulton on Lewis and Clark Documentary Evidence

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