We answer listener questions in response to episode #1277 Gerrymandering, and then turn to a discussion about an important discovery of an 1805 Lewis & Clark related map. It was found after being stored for 200 years in a French archive. The map and its background story appear in this month’s issue of We Proceeded On, published by the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.
The letters discussed are from Stephen Mishkin, Joe Lovell, Kellen DeAlba, James Kenyon, and Sidney Sjoquist.
Further Reading
Jefferson’s Exploration Legacy is Not Over Yet
The Jefferson Watch
The map was made by Too Né, who traveled with the expedition for a few weeks in the autumn of 1804 in what’s now North Dakota. He went upriver with Lewis and Clark to try to make peace with the Mandan Indians, with whom the Arikara had been at war. He tried to inform Clark of some of the important landmarks, including sacred places, on that stretch of the Missouri River, between today’s North and South Dakota border and the earthlodge villages at the mouth of the Knife River in central North Dakota. In his journal Clark said he was indifferent to the geographic, historical, and sacred information Too Né was explaining to him through an interpreter. But the discovery of the map shows that Clark was listening more closely than he let on, and Too Né’s information did actually find its way into Clark’s journal.
Read this week's Jefferson Watch essay, "Jefferson’s Exploration Legacy is Not Over Yet."
What Would Jefferson Do?
“Exploration was a very important factor in my life.”
Tune in to your local public radio or join the 1776 Club to hear this episode of What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?
Clay Jenkinson welcomes back David Nicandri for a discussion about Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, the explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. They also talk about Thomas Jefferson's influence on exploration. Nicandri is the author of River of Promise: Lewis and Clark on the Columbia and Captain Cook Rediscovered: Voyaging to the Icy Latitudes.
Clay Jenkinson recently lead a conference for the Smithsonian that introduced attendees to the Lewis and Clark expedition. The lecture was brimming with questions, so many that there was not enough time to answer all of them. This week, we try to finish that task and answer those extra questions about Lewis and Clark.
We present a fascinating conversation with HannaLore Hein, who in 2019 became Idaho’s first woman state historian. Clay Jenkinson and Hein discuss her duties as a state historian and talk about an author from Idaho, Vardis Fisher. His first novel, Mountain Men, was used as the basis for the 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson. His book, Suicide or Murder: The Strange Death of Meriwether Lewis, published in 1962, is regarded as starting the longstanding controversy over the death of Meriwether Lewis.
This week on the Jefferson hour, a conversation with David Nicandri about his new book “Lewis and Clark Reframed: Examining Ties to Cook, Vancouver and McKenzie”, and the importance of reading not only the journals left, but also their “day books”. In writing the book, Nicandri speaks about his goal to not just get get into explorers shoes, but to get “into their heads’.