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Two men got the highway signs—but the real Lewis and Clark Expedition story was a crowded canoe. We sit down with Craig Fehrman to discuss This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark and why the expedition only comes into focus when we follow the people history usually pushes to the margins—and when we take Native nations seriously as powers, not scenery.
If you care about American history, primary sources, archival research, and how interpretation changes when new evidence appears, this episode is for you. We explore Thomas Jefferson as the “mainspring” behind the mission, the mistaken dream of an easy water route to the Pacific, and the hard reality of distance, terrain, and the Rocky Mountains.
We also dive into diplomacy and danger along the Missouri River, where the Lakota Nation and other Native powers were making strategic decisions of their own. Fehrman’s rotating point-of-view method makes familiar moments feel new by asking what the same event looked like from the other side.
We discuss leadership and military culture in 1804—why Lewis and Clark’s style of discipline, trust, and shared responsibility differed sharply from Army norms—and how figures like John Ordway helped make the expedition function day to day. We also confront the hardest truths, including York under enslavement and Sacagawea as a teenage survivor whose role became indispensable.
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