Is it possible to write a new history of Lewis and Clark (and get anyone to read it)? If you’re Craig Fehrman, the answer is a definite yes! In today’s episode, Craig joins Kate Carpenter to talk about his new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark.
Craig is a journalist and historian who lives in Indiana, where he focuses on writing and occasional adjunct teaching at Indiana University. His first book was Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote. He has published articles and reviews in venues like Deadspin, the New York Times Book Review, and Boston Globe.
In his new book, This Vast Enterprise, Craig retells the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition through the rotating perspectives of several members of the expedition, as well as some of the people they encountered along the way. The result is a nuanced, fresh version of this history that decenters the expedition leaders and introduces some new sources and interpretations! In the interview, We get into how Craig came upon those sources and how what he found allowed him to reinterpret other sources, like Lewis and Clark’s expedition diaries. We also talked about his interviews with contemporary Native sources, how a creative constraint actually led to new insights, his approach to writing history as a page-turner, and much more.
Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Craig’s website
- Craig Fehrman, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark
- Craig Fehrman, Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote
- Craig Fehrman, editor, The Best Presidential Writing: From 1789 to the Present
- Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
- Ken Burns documentary Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery
- Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History and Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
- Elizabeth Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People and Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
- We Proceeded On journal from the Lewis & Clark Trail Alliance
- Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
- Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Listen to Megan in DTP episode 1 and episode 94)
- Claire Keegan
- Carys Davies
- Rachel Aviv
- Lillian Ross
- Jill Lepore
- Louis Menand
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. When I tell you that today’s guest has written a new history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, it’s possible that you will have the same thought I did when I first heard about this book: did we really need another Lewis and Clark book? I’m so glad I gave the book a shot anyway, because it turns out—maybe we really did need this one! I’m joined today by Craig Fehrman to talk about his new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark.
Craig Fehrman 0:32
I've been looking forward to this. Thanks for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:34
Craig is a journalist and historian, and he did coursework for a PhD in English at Yale University. Now he lives in Indiana, where he focuses on writing and occasional adjunct teaching at Indiana University. His first book was Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote. He has published articles and reviews in venues like Deadspin, the New York Times Book Review, and Boston Globe. In his new book, This Vast Enterprise, Craig retells the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition through the rotating perspectives of several members of the expedition, as well as some of the people they encountered along the way. The result is a nuanced, fresh version of this history that decenters the expedition leaders and introduces some new sources and interpretations—something I didn’t really know was possible with Lewis and Clark! We’ll get into how Craig came upon those sources, the rest of his research, and how what he found allowed him to reinterpret other sources, like Lewis and Clark’s expedition diaries. It’s also a beautifully written book. We did this interview before the book was released, and at one point you’ll hear Craig remark that not a lot of people have read the book yet. That’s no longer true! This Vast Enterprise hit the New York Times bestseller list, no small feat for a historian, let alone a relatively unknown one. We talked about his interviews with contemporary Native sources, how a creative constraint actually led to new insights, and much more. Here’s my conversation with Craig Fehrman.
Craig Fehrman 2:05
So I went to grad school to become an English professor. And while I was in grad school, I started thinking more about writing journalism and writing essays and that sort of thing. And so in grad school, I was sort of not sure which direction I wanted to go. I picked a dissertation that was about books presidents had written, because that seemed like an idea that might have appeal both inside and outside academia. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to focus on journalism. So I sold that book, got a book deal with Simon and Schuster and transitioned into writing full time, although I still teach as an adjunct sometimes too, and still have tons of respect and admiration for professors and academics.
Kate Carpenter 2:44
What kinds of writing have you focused on since then?
Craig Fehrman 2:47
Mostly I've been focusing on this Lewis and Clark book because it just kind of broke my brain and overwhelmed me, and it just, it took a lot out of me, but, but I like to write all kinds of different things. The classes I often teach at universities are actually in sports writing, because I love sports, and it's a, it's a really fun class to teach, because I sort of teach it as a stealth English major class. I make them read a lot of good sports writing from across history. And sometimes that's one of the few classes where people in the in that media school get to do that. So I wrote all kinds of different things, sports writing, some historical essays, a lot of book reviews, anything I could get a chance to write.
Kate Carpenter 3:21
Let's talk about how you like to work. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Craig Fehrman 3:25
Well, I have two little kids, so wherever I can achieve it. Near the end of this book, they both, they were both in school finally, and that made a big difference, where I could have a little bit more of a routine, but I pretty much just, you know, get their school lunches packed, get them on the bus, and then grab a laptop and anywhere that's not overcome with K Pop Demon Hunters toys, that's, that's where I write.
Kate Carpenter 3:47
Excellent. How do you like to organize yourself?
Craig Fehrman 3:50
This is, this is probably something that I took from academia, went, and from working on a dissertation, because that, of course, was the first long term project that I did, because I really try to think in terms of chapters. And so when I'm sifting through research, I don't use Evernote or programs like that. I probably should, but I just have Word documents for each chapter when I first start breaking a project down, and sometimes those will get hundreds of pages long. But I find the sifting and the reviewing to be one of the most productive parts of the writing process, because when you're going through your stuff and figuring out, well, I need this or I don't need that, oftentimes that's when good ideas or even good phrases will pop into your mind. So I organize things just with giant Word documents. I don't really read much in print unless it's a book that's not available electronically, but what I'm always doing is putting everything in those Word documents, carefully attributing them to protect myself and make it easier to do citations later, and then just sifting through those files. And then once I'm working on a chapter, then I might break it down and say, you know, these are the different sections or the different themes, but it's always just really ugly Word documents that you have to sift through. But, again, the sifting, I think, is very helpful.
Kate Carpenter 5:02
Is there a point where you sort of transition from research and note taking to actual writing?
Craig Fehrman 5:07
As late as humanly possible. I always like the research better. I don't know how you feel, but it's, there's just something more, you feel more free when you're doing research and when you're learning other people's ideas. And I find that more exciting. And you know, I feel like I could do that 18 hours a day if I had to. The writing is a lot harder, but there does come a time when you have to switch to the writing. Obviously, that is the point. I generally have a pretty good idea of what I want to say, although I will learn some things or change my mind as I go through writing. But oftentimes writing in those giant Word files, I will have, you know, some paragraphs, some transitions, some key arguments, and sometimes it'll be, well, I could make three or four different points in this chapter, but I really only have space for one. So it's an act of act of selection and refinement as much as anything else.
Kate Carpenter 5:54
How do you approach revision in your work?
Craig Fehrman 5:56
Carefully. Revising is more fun than writing, I guess, if we had to do a hierarchy; reading other people's work, the most fun; revising, a little fun; writing the first draft, no fun at all. But I try to revise really carefully. I try to get some some friends and colleagues to give me an early set of eyes. Both of my books, I've had to completely rework the first couple chapters late in the game. And I don't know if that's because I sort of figured out the tone or the style or the pacing as I was going. I would love to write a book where I don't have to do that. But both times, big deadline looming, I had to go back and rework the first thing I'd written in a really major way. But I do think that helped in both cases. So revising is is obviously really important.
Kate Carpenter 6:39
You just said something I found interesting about how you might have multiple points you'd like to make in a chapter, but you really only have room for one. How do you think about structuring a chapter? How do you see the shape of a chapter?
Craig Fehrman 6:52
Well, I think there's, there's different ways to do this, and so I I'll probably talk about my two different books, if that's okay, because the first one, I think, is more clearly at least a half of an academic book in that I tried to make sure that each, you know, I would think in terms of chapters in that book. That book was about presidents and the books they wrote. So each chapter was mostly focused on one president or two presidents. And then I would try to think with each section, how can I make an argument? This section is going to be about book history. So I want to make a claim about how the Book of the Month Club transformed middle brow tastes in non fiction reading, and that happened in a chapter on Harry Truman, for instance. So those are kind of academic ideas that could have worked in academic articles. And I think my first book was a better example of trying to balance, how do you take academic ideas and more accessible or story driven prose, and fuse them together. But with this book, I really just wanted to write a page turner. I wanted to try to I wanted to see, can you write a David McCullough style book without David McCullough's ideas? And that's no offense to David McCullough, who's a very important figure to a lot of readers and a wonderful writer, but I just have different ideas than he does. So I tried to do it that way. And I really was focused more on moving the story along than introducing new ideas. And so if my first book had, you know, five or six ideas in each chapter, this one would be different. This one would be, I'm working on chapter nine about Lewis, and I know this is where I want to get into Lewis as a scientific observer, and sort of what his Enlightenment ideas and goals were. But that's, you know, other than that, what do I want to get in here? I want to get a lot of grizzly bears, and I want to get Lewis's ideas about grizzly bears and how he did not take the advice from Native people that he maybe should have, and that kind of thing. It just sort of depends on the project, I think, and how you do it. I do think ideas and storytelling don't have to be in opposition. I think good books can do both, even if the weighting might be different depending on the specific project.
Kate Carpenter 8:53
Let's talk more about this project, This Vast Enterprise. I wanted to talk about how you wrote it, but first I want to talk about why. Because Lewis and Clark, this is not like an untold history, as people like to say, you know? What brought you to this project?
Craig Fehrman 9:08
Yeah, I believe some Americans, at least a few, are aware of Lewis and Clark. That seems safe to say. Well, I honestly just sort of what I said about the David McCullough thing. I wanted to try to write a big adventure book, and so I was talking with my editors, and we talked through a few different ideas, but I think the first idea came from an editor, and I think the first idea may have been Lewis and Clark. This was also during the pandemic, and the University of Nebraska has put together a wonderful digital edition of their journals, which I encourage anyone to look at and use. I honestly think historians should probably spend more time with the Lewis and Clark journals. I think they sort of got typecast, as you know, for high school history and family road trips. And I understand why that happened, but there's a lot of really interesting academic ideas within the journals, but I wanted to write a big, epic story, and I had these journals that I could work with really carefully, even during the middle of a pandemic. And so I thought, well, let me just poke around and see if there's anything new to say here. Because, you know-- my publishers were probably less interested in that. They were like, it's been 30 years since the Ambrose book and the Ken Burns documentary. So it's been, we can say it's been a generation, that feels like it's time to try again. But I really wanted to see if there was something new to say, and so I read the journals. But even more than that, I read, you know, I've never seen a catchy term for this, but the new Western history. I always just call it Native history. But, you know, work from the last 20 years or so, Ned Blackhawk, Elizabeth Fenn, figures like this, who have done incredible work on Native nations, and on Native people and on Native power. And so I read some of that. There's not as much of that on Lewis and Clark as you would think, but there's a lot of it on other important topics. And those books blew my mind. I mean, this is no surprise to most historians who work in this period, but it's the most exciting work in American history, I think, that's happened in the last couple decades. And so when I read that and saw that there was a toolkit, a way to apply these kinds of new ways of reading, and I had the journals themselves, I thought, well, if I can mash these two things together, I might actually be able to say something new about this story that's been told so many times before.
Kate Carpenter 11:15
I like that. I want to talk about your end notes, which seems like a strange way to start talking about a book, but I don't often ask authors a lot about their end notes, but yours are very interesting. So first of all, you have two appendices, and in them, you take two key aspects of the book, and you really do a deep dive into your sources and the reasoning behind why you did some things and not others. These are super fascinating. So first I wondered if you could talk a little bit about them, but also, why put them in the end notes and not just within the text?
Craig Fehrman 11:44
I will give you the honest answer, which is that, you know, when I when I was in grad school and thinking, do I want to be a journalist? Do I want to be an academic? How do I want to do things? And I was starting out to write, I wrote a lot of book reviews, which I would recommend to anybody. I mean, academic book reviews too. But if you're interested in writing for trade audiences, write book reviews because you have a great expertise that you can rely on, but it's also a chance to really break down trade books and see what works and doesn't work. So I often, when thinking about a project, sort of remember who was I as a book reviewer 5, 10 years ago, what what would stick out to them. So I just it sort of gets back to your question about what makes this new. I really wanted to show people who, you know, a book reviewer gets five or six galleys. They're thumbing through them. They're like, a book on Lewis and Clark. I've already read Undaunted Courage, do I even need that? So I wanted something on the table of contents to kind of be a big flashing sign that said, this is different, this is serious. This is worth at least reading five pages of. So that's why I did the two appendices, and I tried, even in the titles, to sort of grab people's attention. The first one was "Oral History Versus Written History, or a Newly Discovered Interview With Wolf Calf." Wolf Calf is a Blackfoot man, a member of the Piikani, and I found a new interview of his that was really important to the book. And then the other appendix was just called "Sex and the Expedition." My wife pushed really hard for it to be called the sexpedition, and maybe I should have listened to her, but obviously that's something that I think will grab readers' attention. So we were talking about organization and having these different files. I just had two big Word files for my two different appendices, and I was throwing all kinds of notes and ideas in there, but I didn't really get to look at them for about five years because I was writing the main book, and at one point I'd even thought about a third appendix on preemption, which is this legal concept about how land is claimed and sovereignty is adjudicated. But I decided two appendices is plenty, and a preemption, an appendix is just probably not as eye grabbing as sex and the expedition. So I had, I had these files, but I didn't really look at them until the end. But I think it kind of worked out to my advantage. I don't know if it will catch readers' and reviewers' attention or not. I hope that that you know, my strategy was, well, this will at least signal that this is a new book. Maybe that'll work. Maybe it won't, but what I did find really helpful for myself is that in those five years, the public's attitudes towards history have shifted a lot. History has become as much political as it's become professional. And so that's that's always been true, but it's especially been true in the last year or two. And so I thought, well, here's a chance to just show my work, to show readers who, you know, no matter what political background they come from, to say that this is what good historians do. They evaluate sources, not just written sources, but oral sources. They weigh claims. They try to interpret. I was very honest in the appendices. You know, these are places where we don't know for sure what's happening, but this is what I believe happened. These are the reasons why I believe happened, but especially in that first appendix, which is about the new interview with Wolf Calf. I just printed Wolf Calf's interview right next to Lewis's journal entry from that day, and I told readers, you know, you could decide. And I also hope that's useful to historians, because I think that interview with Wolf Calf is a pretty important document. I think it's the biggest thing I've ever found in my career. So I wanted the full thing out there so other people could use it in their own work. But also I just thought these appendices will maybe grab the attention of book reviewers or the editors who assign book reviews, but then by the time it came to write them, I was like, this is a chance, methodologically, to kind of remind readers that, yes, historians have bias, but there are also professional counters to that bias, and all human beings have bias, so let's just be honest about the process, and maybe that can, in some small way make people trust my book, or make people trust history books more broadly.
Kate Carpenter 15:24
I was also interested because, you know, I assume most people are huge nerds like me, and look at the notes in all the non fiction books they read. But in case they don't, usually in notes, there's notes for each chapter that say, you know, where you where you found information. In your case, you also start each chapter's notes with the sort of short bibliographic essay talking about the scholarship on the subject of that chapter. I thought this was really interesting. There's been some chatter among historians about trying to reimagine the bibliography to be more useful to readers. How did you think about writing those?
Craig Fehrman 15:55
It was a couple things. Like I said, I'm always a bit of a hybrid. I came from an academic background. Most of the things I read are academic history. I don't read a lot of David McCullough's books. I either read novels or academic work, and so that those are the things that have shaped me the most, and the things that I revere as a reader. But I'm trying to write a David McCullough kind of book, and so somebody like Elizabeth Finn, a historian, I just could not admire more in her book, she's able to write books that are incredibly accessible but also incredibly erudite. And she will pause in the middle and sort of say, you know, this is how I know this, or this is what I don't know. But I decided I really want to write a page turner here. I don't want 2026 scholarly debates intervening in this book. When you're reading the main chapters, I want you to feel like you're in a canoe and it's 1804. But I still had some points I might wanted to make in terms of Lewis and Clark and the historical debates, and also I felt like I needed to justify some of my interpretations. A good example here is probably the Lakota chapter in chapter six that covers the encounter between Lewis and Clark and the Lakota. Most historians see this as their biggest as the as the Corps of Discovery's biggest screw up, that they made a huge mistake here. They lost control of their emotions. It could have turned very ugly. Honestly, the Lakota are the reason it didn't turn ugly more than the Americans. That's kind of the cutting edge historians understanding of that encounter. And there's a lot of truth to that, but there's a really important document, a transcript of a council between the Lakota and William Clark that happened after the expedition in 1807, and this transcript is not widely known. I It baffles me as to why. The only thing I can think is that it came out near the end of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial. And you know how history sort of works in cycles. And so people kind of decided, Oh, well, everything there is to know about Lewis and Clark is known. We can kind of move on. But this transcript is incredibly important, and I didn't dig it up in an archive. It's published in, I think, South Dakota History or North Dakota History, one of those great state journals. But if you read the most recent scholarship on the Lakota and Lewis and Clark, it's not in there, but it's so important, and it really, I think, in that end note essay, I say that trying to understand this relationship without the transcript is like trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces. You really have to have this transcript. And so I just took that essay as a chance to sort of explain this is why this transcript mattered. This is how I read this transcript. This is how I read the journals. Because often good history writing, especially good narrative history writing, is driven by inferences. Black Buffalo, who's the Lakota leader, shaped the encounter with Lewis and Clark, not really because he was that worried about Lewis and Clark, but because he was trying to win an ongoing political dispute within the Lakota. There was a really strong rivalry between him and another leader named The Partisan. And so Black Buffalo was a very strategic person, and saw, I can use these outsiders as a way to sort of fortify my case and persuade my people, but to be able to show that, it requires a couple of inferences. It's not like Lewis and Clark understood this. It's more like, if you read between the lines, you can understand that. So those essays, parts of them, are always lit reviews. I sort of, you know, with the Lakota one, I talk about a lot of the Lakota scholarship that shaped my chapter, and what I relied on and what I find most useful. I think in that Lakota chapter, I sort of flag a couple things that show how long Lakota history goes, how long their ties to the Black Hills are, which is something that modern historians even don't always give them enough credit for and understand, both the oral traditions, but also the written documents that show that that relationship to the Black Hills is longer than than is commonly seen. So I, you know, points like that, I just think are important to emphasize. But also I just wanted to sort of explain my inferences and really draw as much attention to as I could to those sources. A different kind of book would have done all that in the main text, but I wanted the main text to be a page turner. I still wanted to make those points. And the last thing I'll say is that there's a great journal by the Lewis and Clark Trail Association. So that's a fascinating organization that's partly made up by people who love Lewis and Clark. There are some people in there who just are great canoers or people who love old weapons. There are plenty of really great academics who are involved with it, and they put out a quarterly journal called We Proceeded On. It's an amazing journal, and it felt like so many times when I was like, well, I need to do a couple sentences on rope making and how Lewis and Clark made ropes. There'd be a 2000 word essay in We Proceeded On that was brilliant and authoritative and told me exactly what I needed to know. So I guess those essays sort of inspired me. And I was thinking about that Lewis and Clark Trail Association audience, I want them to like this book. And so I thought, like, I can kind of give them a smattering of these essays tucked in the back. I hope some people read the appendices, because I think those are kind of for anybody. The essays in the back, though, they can get pretty arcane, but the people who care, like you, like me, like the Lewis and Clark aficionados, they will get these kinds of new arguments and places where I can push back on the received understanding of the expedition.
Kate Carpenter 20:53
And one more practical question about your endnotes, which is, did you get any pushback from the press? Were they ever like, let's just have the page turning part and leave all this extra stuff out?
Craig Fehrman 21:01
A little early on, but I was ready to, I was ready to stomp my foot a little bit. But I didn't have to. I have an amazing press. I don't think you've seen the finished book yet, but there are 32 color plates. I found a lot of rare images in the five years that I wanted to put in there. The first time that, there's a portrait of Wolf Calf, the Blackfoot man that I mentioned. There's a great portrait of him, painted by Bodmer, that I don't think has been reproduced before. They spared no expense in the images, in making it just a beautiful object as a book. But early on, when we were talking about it, they were like, well, I don't, you know, how long do we really want to make this be, we want this book to be accessible. But I said, you know, if I can keep it under 40,000 words, is that, for the end notes, is that okay? And they said, yeah, we can probably make that work. And so they ended up printing the book on thinner paper so it actually doesn't feel like it's very heavy. So I sometimes I'm like, who are we trying to fool here? Because it seems like a pretty small book on a table, and then you pick it up, you're like, wow, I gotta use two hands to even lift this, but it's really nice paper, and it's a really beautiful book, and so I would have liked to cite a lot more work. When I was putting together these end notes, I could not cite everything that I had read or everything that I had learned from. I really tried to focus on these kinds of arguments, citing the most important work and then citing something that had shaped a specific idea or a specific interpretation. But it's not like I could cite everything I'd read about the Lakota and Lewis and Clark so I did face some limits, but still, overall, the press was understanding. And I mean, I think they understand that, you know, if reviewers look at this and see all those notes, they're going to realize this is not just somebody who read the journals and read Undaunted Courage and called it a day. This is a, this is somebody who took the time.
Kate Carpenter 22:43
I have many more questions to ask you, including about that Wolf Calf interview, but I want to start by having you read this excerpt from chapter 13, and then we can dig into the details.
Craig Fehrman 22:53
Two things I want to say about this excerpt before I read it. First, we're coming off chapter 12, which has ended with a pretty famous moment from Lewis and Clark, which is a vote where they tried to decide where are we going to put our winter quarters? Are we going to be on the Pacific Ocean? Are we going to go back inland? And they vote on it, and York actually gets a chance to vote. Sacajawea doesn't really get a chance to vote, but she speaks up anyway, which isn't surprising, because she's a very assertive person, and so they don't technically ask her. You can tell by the way Clark wrote in the journals that they didn't include her in the list, but she just spoke up for herself, which, again, isn't surprising, if you know anything about her. She's a very brave and outspoken person, but York did get to vote, so that. And then the other thing is, there's a line in here where I say, quote, "grand chief package." End quote. I would not use the word chief in writing. I'm just using it because it's a historical quote, and that's kind of a concept that goes through the book, because that's what Lewis and Clark called them. But I just want to flag that that's not my writing. I would not use that term.
Craig Fehrman 23:50
“On December 12, 1805, Coboway decided it was finally time to meet his new neighbors. He was the most powerful leader of the Clatsop, and he maintained an extensive network of allies, informants, and commercial partners. Coboway had been monitoring the Corps for a month or more. He’d heard prophecies about outsiders his entire life. He’d had time to think—about what he wanted from the Americans, and about what they might want from him. Coboway headed out with nine people and two canoes. It was not a long trip. His town, Niakilaki, was about seven miles from the fort the Americans were building. The Clatsop canoes knifed through the Columbia, then the tributary. When they reached the fort, which say back from the water, they landed, and Coboway approached. The forest was dense with spruce and shore pine—so dense that a beam of sunlight could not graze the ground. The Americans were cutting logs and raising huts, but Lewis and Clark stopped everything to meet Coboway. They knew who he was. At this point, their ‘grand chief’ package was just a medal, but they presented it to him. He appreciated the gesture, but Coboway was there to trade. The Clatsop had brought a small assortment of items to the first meeting, a feeling out. Coboway showed Lewis and Clark an otter skin, which always excited the ship captains he dealt with, along with sweet roots and wapato. The captains bought all of it, much to Sacajawea’s delight, paying with fishhooks and tobacco. They communicated with Coboway through sign language and trade jargon; he knew plenty of English phrases like ‘the sturgeon is very good’ and ‘son of a bitch.’ The captains said they thought the prices were sleep. Coboway explained his reasons. He bought that wapato, for instance, from Natives to the east. They charged a high price, and he charged a bit more. Trade was an intricate topic in this region, and the captains had much to learn. It was the source of Clatsop wealth and the stimulus for Coboway’s network. Already Clark could sense the discipline and intelligence behind it. ‘I can readily discover that they are close dealers,’ he wrote. Clark had no idea. Coboway’s network had told him early on that the Americans desperately needed food and clothing, and he had acted. In the days before the captains’ vote, Clatsop groups visited their camp three different times. They talked relentlessly about the elk to the south. (The Clatsop, wrote Lewis, ‘have tantalized us.’) If there was an election, there was foreign interference. The vote remained meaningful, especially to York. But Coboway had shaped it. He had steered the Corps to his side of the Columbia because he believed it would be good for his people. It was also good for the Corps. The Clatsop had told the truth—there were plenty of elk to the south. Still, Coboway had gotten what he wanted. Most of the time, he did. The winter was just beginning.”
Kate Carpenter 26:33
What went into writing this passage?
Craig Fehrman 26:35
A lot of things. The journals, first of all, Lewis and Clark's journals, I mentioned that online edition that's more than a million words. So some of the details, like the date, or like the fact that there were nine people and two canoes in Coboway's party, that came from the journals. Other things came from other traders' journals. That detail about a sunbeam not being able to hit the floor, another trader visited the fort a few years after Lewis and Clark left, a guy named Alexander Henry. There's actually two Alexander Henrys to keep it maximally confusing for us, but, but the one who visited that he he wrote in his journal about the sunbeam. So that's how I knew that. A lot of great scholarship on the Pacific Northwest. There were two dissertations from the '80s in particular, one on epidemics in this region, and one on kind of political structures in this region that were really helpful. I interviewed an academic named Douglas Deur, who does fantastic work on these, on these Native nations, but probably the single biggest influence, all that stuff mattered, all that stuff contributed, but the single biggest influence on this chapter, and this is true for all of my chapters on Native people, but especially this one was a long phone call, I guess, a zoom I did with it the Chinook Indian nation. And there were two people named Tony and Rachel who were important in that nation. And then there was another person who helped facilitate it. Her name was Hailey. I want to give her credit too, because she did a lot of help facilitating it. But Tony and Rachel were the two people I talked to the most, and they saved me from so many mistakes, and they taught me so many things. And I would love to talk with you about talking with them, but I want to read one thing first. I went back to my notes, because I knew this is a chapter we were going to talk about, and Tony said something to me early on, and so we're on Zoom. I'm typing as fast as I can, and this is what I wrote down that he said: "we have had everything taken from us, and every time we give something, it gets exploited. The one thing we consider our wealth is our cultural knowledge and our historical knowledge." And so he said that early on in the interview, and they explicitly said in this interview, you know, we're interviewing you. You're not just interviewing us. We don't know that we want to work together. And so I said, I understand that. I just want to tell you the kind of book I'm writing, and we can sort of talk to each other and see if we want to work together. And thank goodness for my book. They agree that they wanted to do that. But also, that's a powerful quote, I think, and I've read things like that in other people's work, but to have a human being say that to you, I thought about that quote every day I worked on this book, because he's right. They have been exploited. They and other native nations have given their their culture and their history, and that trust has not been rewarded by even academic historians. And so that every time I worked on this book, I thought about that, I thought about what Tony said, and I thought, I'm I'm not going to be perfect, but I'm going to try to do better.
Kate Carpenter 29:20
Yeah, that really drives home a sense of responsibility, I imagine.
Craig Fehrman 29:23
Yeah, absolutely.
Kate Carpenter 29:24
How did those interviews shape your research?
Craig Fehrman 29:27
They were really important. And I do want to say that it worked different for every nation. You know, sometimes people wouldn't really want to talk that much. I understand and respect that. Sometimes, like the Chinook, people wanted to talk a lot. And I'm saying Chinook, Coboway was Clatsop, but today, the Chinook Indian Nation represents not just Chinook people, but Clatsop people, and several other tribes as well. Rachel, one of the people I talked with, is a direct descendant of Coboway. And so, those interviews did a lot. They gave me that sense of responsibility. They were a reminder that, yes, this is a book of history, but it is very much about the world we live in today, and that history has not always been told fairly or ethically or honestly. So there was that kind of weight, I guess. But also they saved me from really dumb mistakes. When I was reading that intro or that excerpt, I talked about shore pine. I had used the wrong tree there, Tony ended up reading a draft of the chapter, which was really generous, and he was like, I think you mean shore pie. And I was like, oh, so I those kinds of little mistakes drive me crazy. I am in absolute terror every day of making small mistakes like that, and especially if you're writing about people and they notice these mistakes, that is, to me, that is the worst thing that can happen to you as a writer, if you write about someone else and they're like, No, you did not get my life right. What's the point of even writing? So they helped save me from some of those mistakes, and then they also just conveyed important ideas to me. There's a line in that excerpt where I said he'd heard prophecies about outsiders his entire life. I didn't put quotation marks around it, but I'm pretty sure that is 99% what Tony and Rachel said to me in the interview. And there are lines throughout the chapter where one was they talked about canoes and how important canoes are to this culture. And Rachel said, you know, for us, a canoe has a heart. There's a line in my chapter where I just say the canoe had a heart. Later in the winter, the Americans over hunt and kill and waste a lot more elk than the Clatsop had anticipated. And this becomes a real point of friction, and the Clatsop end up stealing some of the elk to feed their families and to, you know, maintain their sovereignty. And I asked them about that moment, and I can't remember if it was Tony or Rachel, but one of them said, you know, it's not stealing if it's yours in the first place. There's a line in the chapter that just says it's not stealing if it's theirs in the first place. These these lines are from the Clatsop point of view. Obviously Lewis and Clark had a different point of view on these moments, and I try to explore both points of views. But when I talk to them, they, to Tony and Rachel, they really helped me understand the point of view. They helped clarify specific issues for me. One thing is head flattening, which is what historians call it. But for cultures in that area, it's a very gentle and humane process, and it's a process with a lot of dignity. If you want to be a Clatsop elite in this time period, you would have your head shaped as a baby, no pain, no negative side effects or anything like that. It's just an esthetic choice that they thought was beautiful, and so that's obviously a sensitive thing to write about it. Let's just say Lewis and Clark did not pass that sensitivity test when they described this, this process. And so I talked to them, you know, how should I describe this? I can't not put it in here. It needs to be in here. It's part of the history. But what's the right way to frame it and to understand it? And they just pointed me to other sources too. One thing they really raised for me was, there are these stories about Blue Jay and his sister, I'oi, who were, Frank Boaz actually wrote these down when he was collecting various texts and oral traditions from the from the Chinook. And they talked about, you know, these are the stories that Coboway would use, not just for entertainment but for education to sort of shape his moral worldview, and so look to those to kind of understand his perspective on culture and his values. So yeah, they just, this is only a fraction of what they gave me. They gave me so much, and it was, it's what helped me feel comfortable, to be able to try to write a chapter like this one that sort of takes on Coboway's perspective, and you know, Lewis and Clark on the Pacific Northwest, that's one of the more well known episodes from the expedition. There's a great park today where you can see a replica of Fort Clatsop, that that stuff has been done a lot, but I don't even write about it in a Lewis and Clark chapter. It's very much from Coboway's perspective. I could not have done that without their patience and their help.
Kate Carpenter 33:39
I want to talk more about that Wolf Calf interview, too, because there must be people listening to this who are thinking, new interview? How is that possible that, you know, this is something that hasn't been heard? So tell me how you came to that.
Craig Fehrman 33:51
Yeah. I mean, I thought the same thing I when I started working on this book, I thought I would not have that much new archival material to share. I thought that what would make it interesting would be the combination of the journals being fully edited and easy to read and reference, and then the new Western history and the perspective that shared. I found a ton of archival stuff. I found new stuff about Clark and Lewis and all kinds. I found so much new archival stuff, which is really exciting for me and I hope for readers. But the Wolf Calf interview is the most exciting thing of all. People have known the name Wolf Calf. There was a guy named George Bird Grinnell, who was a kind of a polymath in the in the late 19th, early 20th century. He was friends with Teddy Roosevelt. And if you think about Teddy Roosevelt's attitude towards the west and and his active dabbling in all kinds of different fields, Grinnell was very similar to that. And so there was another writer named Olin Wheeler, who was working on a book about Lewis and Clark, kind of right around the big centennial celebration that brought a lot of attention back to the expedition, kind of attention that's not really left since. And so Wheeler reached out to Grinnell, because Grinnell had spent a lot of time on the Blackfeet reservation, and said, do you know anything about this? Do you have any stories? And they exchanged a few letters back and forth, and Wheeler printed parts, but not all of those letters in his book. And so historians have known this for a while. And those, those letters are really important because they have Wolf Calf's name. They have the name of another person named Side Hill Calf. And this, this is a very important moment in the expedition, because at least one native person died during this encounter. Lewis was on a solo mission for very complicated reasons that I get into in another one of those endnote essays you mentioned. But he meets with some Blackfoot people, and they sort of have a first peaceful day talking to each other, but then early the next morning, the Blackfoot people try to take some horses, possibly, or some guns, possibly, that most people, most academics even, who wrote about this focused on the guns. And so, you know, the Americans woke up, saw their weapons were being seized, killed one of the Native people, it became a battle. That was the word that Wolf Calf used so that's the word I used too. And the Blackfoot ended up leaving, and Lewis and his men rushed back to the main part of the expedition. So there are these letters that sort of, where Grinnell says, yeah, I actually met one of the people who was in that battle. Grinnell was writing in the late was it 1902 I think, think it's 1902 Grinnell was writing in 1902 and he says, You know, I actually met one of the people who was at that and here's what he told me. And there's a line in that letter that says, you know, I think I have the full thing in my notebook. Let me check. But Grinnell never went back to check, and so I did go back and check Grinnell's papers are at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, but they are also on microform at Yale Sterling Memorial Library. So I went through there, and on the first page of one of his notebooks, he's got the transcript from Wolf Calf, and it's already exciting, because you get Wolf Calf's authentic voice. You can tell from the way that Grinnell wrote, that he was writing in a hurry, that he was really trying to capture everything. You know, this is the closest thing to a modern journalistic transcript we have, instead of his letter, which was a paraphrase of what he remembered 10 years later about Wolf Calf saying. So already, as a historian, I know this is a better source, because it's closer to contemporaneous, even though they talked in, I think, 1891 so still, well after the expedition itself. But what's really interesting is that the letter and the interview contradict, and so I think here you can clearly see that Grinnell's own memory and also his own prejudices are influencing what he remembered. So he talked about, you know, the Blackfoot people were trying to take the guns and the horses. But if you read Wolf Calf's transcript, where exactly his story is being taken down in real time, he never mentions guns. And so that was the first aha moment for me when I when I read this and thought, well, that's not the story I've always heard. And so this is what that appendix really does, is walk through the kind of progression here. But it because I think it's very important to say that it's not just that Wolf Calf's interview is an important historical source on its own, although it is, it also causes you to read the journals differently. Oral history and written history work best in conversation. I think it doesn't have to be an either or. The historian's job is to gather everything they can, including interviews with Native people who can help you better understand their cultures and perspectives, and then synthesize and evaluate and understand. And so in that interview, Wolf Calf made a few things clear, which is that they were only going for horses and that they tried to make peace. Now that's not what Lewis says in his journal entry, but if you read the journal entry closely, you'll see that Lewis was asleep for the inciting event. And so the only testimony that the that the Blackfoot people went for guns came from two American soldiers were probably asleep during watch, which is a capital crime, and who also happened to be brothers. So to me, there's a it's very easy to imagine those brothers making a mistake and realizing, well, we've made a huge mistake as soldiers. Let's cover for each other. Let's make the Blackfoot seem as intimidating as possible. So then the focus gets away from our military protocol mistake and and for that reasons, and a few others, including a really careful reading of John Ewers' ethno-historical classic on the Blackfoot people, in which his his account of how Blackfoot horse raids worked, fits much more closely with Wolf Calf's version of events than it fits with Lewis's version of events. All those things together caused me to believe that Wolf Calf's story was right. So it wasn't just that it was an interview where I could find things like the word battle and describe it in Wolf Calf's words. It was also that I could completely reinterpret this event, and I frankly, you know, great historians, people like James Rhonda, have written about this account and done really good work, but I don't think they got it right, because they didn't have Wolf Calf's side. And we'll never know for sure. But I believe Wolf Calf. I think when you look at Ewers's work and read Lewis's journal carefully and try to inhabit the Blackfoot point of view, as much as that's possible as an outsider, I think Wolf Calf's account is the true one. We'll never know for sure, but that's what I believe.
Kate Carpenter 39:44
I want to talk a little bit about structure, because it also gets to this idea of inhabiting different points of view. So in case it's not clear in our conversation for listeners, you write this book with rotating points of view to tell the story, which I really liked as an approach to this, what is usually seen, you know very much from the lens of Lewis and Clark. What led you to the structure? Why did you settle on it? I really liked that you mentioned that it sort of allowed you to bring multiple voices more into prominence. So how did that change the story?
Craig Fehrman 40:14
I think we should talk about the writing, but I also think it really changed the research. Lots of novels have done this. I think Game of Thrones does this, although I'm more of a TV Game of Thrones person than a written word Game of Thrones person. Other historians have done this. I think the first time I remember seeing a historian do this was Isabella Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns. I know Megan Kate Nelson, who you've had on your podcast. She does this in her books too, sometimes. So this idea of rotating point of views, there were plenty of models out there that I could look to for this. But where it helped me the most was in the research. Because the first few months when I, before I even had a book deal, before I'd even written a proposal, when I was just thinking, can I make this work? I thought, well, maybe let's try this rotating points of view thing and see how it could go. And so I read the journals, kind of only with my eye to structure. And so I was reading the journals, and all I was thinking was, what would be a Lewis chapter, what would be a Clark chapter? What would be a York chapter? York gets three chapters. York is an enslaved man that Clark brings on the expedition. I think those are the best chapters in the book. What would be a Sacajawea chapter? What would be some of the other native people they meet, like Coboway? Coboway only gets one chapter, because for him, the expedition was not an important part of his life. It was an important part, an important part of that winter, but that was not his main focus of his life. So I think one thing the point of view thing does is remind people that Lewis and Clark was was big news to the Americans, but to the Clatsop it was a weird winter and a frustrating winter, but it was not their entire world by any stretch. They had other things that they were worried about. I sort of early on mapped out and read the journals, which takes a while, because it's like a million words. And I was just thinking, where can I, could this even work? Can I, can I have enough York chapters? Can I have enough Lewis chapters? Can I, can I get some kind of balance here? And I was like, yeah, I think it'll work. And so I when I was making those giant Word documents for breaking down different chapters, that's how I sort of organized it, and I had an outline. The outline I started with five years ago is the outline that's in the book. The only thing that changed is I eliminated one chapter for John Ordway. He's a soldier from New Hampshire, and I really wanted to include him, just because Lewis and Clark were so wealthy and so elite that I don't think their their experience was really that similar to the 30 plus men who were working for them on the expedition. So I really wanted a regular working class soldier's point of view. So I went with only two Ordway chapters, not three. But other than that, the outline matches the book. So once I thought it could work, it just really pushed me to think hard, especially for York and Sacajawea, who show up in the journals a lot. And I one thing I did is I went and read documents from other expeditions in this time period, and there were enslaved people on other expeditions, there were native helpers on other expeditions. They do not show up nearly as much in those journals as York and Sacagawea do in the Lewis and Clark ones. Maybe that tells you something about Lewis and Clark, but it definitely tells you something about York and Sacagawea and how assertive they were, and how extraordinary they were. And so when I was working on their chapters, though, even though there are a lot of mentions, there are not as many as I would like. As a historian, the second chapter, and the first chapter is a Lewis chapter, and then the second chapter moves to York, and in the time period that that York chapter covers, I think he shows up in the journals three times, and it's a 20 page chapter. So I have three specific mentions to work with, and so that requires me to be to read really closely. It requires me to be really creative, and it requires me to be really careful. But that's, the different points of view really caused me to read the journals in a different way. I think the best example of this, and this gets to your point of, why even tell this story again? It's been told so many times. One of the most beloved details from the expedition is this idea of portable soup. So when the expedition is crossing the Rocky Mountains, they're very hungry. They don't have enough food, they don't know if they're going to make it out. And so Lewis, who is a compulsive planner, had brought portable soup, which is this kind of nasty, gelatinous, it's sometimes called veal glue in contemporary documents, that can be rehydrated and used to make a kind of soup. And so he had some of this that he had purchased in Philadelphia and brought with them, and so they used it in the Rockies. And so that's that's kind of all the story is. The men try it and are like, this is disgusting. I think we're going to kill our horses and eat those instead. And Lewis and Clark are like, whatever. Let's just get out of the Rockies. So that's it. But it just so happened that for me, the Rockies chapter was a Sacajawea chapter. And so I started thinking, and I did interviews with a lot of Shoshone people, just like the ones with the Chinook Indian nation. And I talked to them about various Shoshone taboos, that Shoshone people would not eat horses and dogs for various cultural reasons. And, you know, Sacajawea's identity is important, or is complicated. I believe that she was born Shoshone. There's been some debate about that recently, and we can talk about that if you want. So I believe that those Shoshone taboos were important to her, but she was also somebody who had been a part of the Hidatsa culture for a few years, and she was somebody who is now on this kind of crazy American expedition too. So we can never know for sure what worldview was weighing on her most heavily. But if she was following the Shoshone taboos, and I think she was, she was the hungriest person in the Rockies. The other men could eat the horses, but she couldn't, and she had foraged and gathered things for herself. But also, because this was a Sacajawea chapter, I remember thinking, she's breastfeeding during all this. Because I would try to calculate, you know, how many calories were the men consuming, how hungry were they? What kind of, what was the difference between when they were in buffalo country and had all the meat they could eat, versus now in the Rockies? And I remember thinking, you know, breastfeeding, that's like 500 calories a day. So, you know, if we think of the Rockies as this time when Lewis and Clark were hungry and they had to try portable soup, well, Sacajawea was the hungriest person of all, because she had to keep another human being alive, and she also could not eat the horse meat. So the portable soup probably mattered to her the most. So it's a small moment, but I tried to take this portable soup thing, which is kind of a beloved talking point among Lewis and Clark people, and reframe it as not a Lewis and Clark moment, but a Sacajawea moment. And so that's where the rotating points of view, I don't think I would have figured that out if I wasn't stressed out and saying, Oh, this is a Sacajawea chapter. I need to have, I need to think really hard about her perspective, and I need to find all the Sacagawea details I possibly can. So, you know, some of those, that's conjecture. So there are, you know, in when I talk about the portable soup, I try to hedge carefully. She probably, she may have, that kind of language, which was also important to making the rotating points of view work, but it was an interesting writing challenge. But I really think it helped me notice things that I would not have noticed otherwise.
Kate Carpenter 46:35
Yeah, it strikes, it strikes me that the creativity that emerges out of sort of the stress of constraint is really powerful.
Craig Fehrman 46:43
It's the best and the worst at the same time.
Kate Carpenter 46:46
Well, I think it worked out very well for you. I don't want to get out of this interview without talking about your your writing from a language perspective, because your writing is beautiful in this. I kept, I kept highlighting sentences while I was reading it, things that were either gorgeous or just smart and funny that I wanted to come back to in the future. So I want to talk about how you think about that part of your craft. How do you think about writing on that sort of sentence level?
Craig Fehrman 47:10
Well, first of all, thank you for saying that. Not a lot of people have read the book yet. So I, that's, I did work hard on those sentences. So I, it means a lot that you said that. I don't know, though, how much I think about that. I actually would go back to the research that when I have those giant Word documents that are hundreds of pages long and I'm sifting through them, sometimes a description will pop into mind, or sometimes a line will pop into mind, or sometimes a joke will pop in mind. Because I tried to, I tried to make the book funny. This is another thing that people do not understand about the expedition is that Lewis was somebody who had a lot to deal with. Jefferson said he had sensible depressions of mind, is the phrase I use in the book. And so Lewis had a had a lot of darkness in him. But Lewis was also really funny, and nobody liked making fun of the expedition more than Lewis liked making fun of the expedition. So I wanted, I mean, Sacajawea was a deeply hilarious person. York was hilarious, so I really wanted the book to be funny too. And so jokes or descriptions, those would come just from doing the research and reviewing the research. And I would, you know, if I'm sitting down to write a chapter, where I feel comfortable is, you know, I've got, as a writer, you don't want to have too many writerly lines, right? Like that starts to make the book feel contrived, and they become distracting, not additive. So I might have 30 or 40 of them, and my job, as I put the chapter together is put the 12 best ones in, and the rest just nobody ever gets to see those. And that's probably for the best in terms of writing sentence by sentence, the research would help me generate sentences. And I would just, you know, other than that, just do the tricks that everybody does. Read aloud, vary sentence structure. I think we've probably got to give credit to the novelists I read more than anything else, because I just try to read books that are written really beautifully, and then in some osmosis type way, I guess, it hopefully shows up in my writing too.
Kate Carpenter 47:56
Well, I want to ask more about what you read. So you mentioned that you read a lot of novels. Are there their specific writers you turn to for inspiration?
Speaker 2 48:42
The two novelists that I read the most on this book were Claire Keegan and Carys Davies. And I read them because they write really short novels, and I did not want, I think the main narrative of my book is just under 400 pages, which is not a short book. I would not claim that it is, but it could have been an 800 page book, and I just had no interest in writing that. I wanted this book to move and so I tried to read people who were good at economy. And I think, I think the biggest influences on me as a writer have actually been magazine writers, people writing today, like Rachel Aviv, or people going back like Lillian Ross at The New Yorker, but I just think, I don't know if you feel this way, but often, when I read a non fiction book, you can tell that the writer is like, okay, I need to do my paragraph of scene setting. I often think they're not very good. They just feel like they're there only because the writer was thinking, well, I need to have a scene here. And so you, they almost feel reverse engineered, where it's less that there's something useful to say about the scene that might reveal something about an idea or a person, and more that the scene just needs to be there, because trade non fiction has scenes in it, and I think that's the wrong way to go about it. So I think magazine writers are much better at this because they are they have a lot less space. So reading Jill, Lepore, Louis Menand, people like that. I think they have less space, and so they pick better details, and they really keep things moving. So I read those people a lot in grad school, and I even think about the chapters in this book. I think the longest chapter is maybe eight or 9000 words. That's a long magazine story, but it still could be a magazine story. So I even think about the 17 chapters in this book, as you know, 17 kind of profiles because of the rotating points of view. Like, it's like Lewis gets three profiles, Sacagawea gets two profiles. And so I think magazine writing is incredibly helpful. I mean, it certainly helped me as I was trying to switch from thinking like an academic writer to thinking like a trade writer. And so reading a lot of magazine prose helped me a lot. And then in terms of novelists, it would just be Davies and Keegan, because their novels are, like, 150, 160 pages. And I was like, well, if I read really short books, I'm not going to be able to write a short book, but maybe I can at least write a shorter book.
Kate Carpenter 51:13
I like that philosophy. What is the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Craig Fehrman 51:18
I don't have a great quip here, but I have a teacher who meant a lot to me. Her name was Sherry Darrell, and I was at the University of Southern Indiana, and sort of first figuring out that I liked books and liked writing and might be good at them, and she was, she was so mean, and she was so hard. You would get your essays back from her, and you know, I was like, well, I'm good at this. Maybe I'll be a writer someday. And then I get my first thing back from her, and it's a C, and there is more of her ink on the page than mine, because it's just a bloodbath. And she was so strict and rigid too. She just, if Strunk and White said it, it was right, and if they didn't say it, it was wrong. Like, she was so rigid, and it drove me nuts. But the further I get from that experience, the more I realized that that did more to help me as a writer than anything else, because it stripped my prose down, which gave me a good place from which to build, and it also just made me really intentional. Because, you know, once you write in that kind of pared down Strunk and White style, eventually you'll realize there are other ways to write, and maybe even better ways to write, but anytime you deviate from that very simple baseline, you're going to do it for a reason. You're going to do it with intentionality. So her really tough editing and her very rigid idea of what made good writing, even though I don't necessarily agree with her ideas all the time anymore, they forced me to grapple with those ideas and strip things down and give me sort of a clean foundation from which I could then slowly build the style that I really wanted.
Kate Carpenter 52:47
So as I'm speaking to you, the book is not even quite out yet. I know you will be busy with it for some time to come, but I am. I am curious to know if you're working on something new. Do you have another project you're tackling?
Craig Fehrman 53:00
No, no, I've been thinking a lot just--
Kate Carpenter 53:01
How do you think about a next project? I guess is perhaps a better question.
Craig Fehrman 53:05
Yeah, I have thought about that. And I think what I want to do is I just want to write about one person. I loved going in the different the different directions and the different points of view and all that. That was such a fun challenge. And it was fun, like we talked a lot about the research, but it was really interesting stylistically to do it too. I never, you were asking about sentence levels. I never quite got to the point where I was like, well, I need to try a different style for each person. That's what a novelist would have done. And it probably could have been really cool. But I had so many things I had to keep straight in my head that I was like, I'm just going to write this in the same style. And then, you know, it's the perspective that will will shift things, not the not the style, that was really fun, and maybe I'll do that again sometime. But I found myself by the end just thinking, I really want to write a short book about one person and from one point of view. And one thing I feel like I kind of left on the table, we talked a lot about different perspectives and points of view and writing about different cultures and all that. I feel like I have more to learn about how people's minds worked in different time periods. I think it's too easy as a writer to say, you know, well, Jefferson's talking about sensible depressions of mind. So Lewis must have felt depression the same way I in 2026 might feel depression or something like that. And there is some truth to that, but there is also some danger to that. And so I guess the next book I write, if I can find the right topic that makes my editors happy, I would like to write a book that's focused on one person, maybe a shorter, and really tries to sort of capture that kind of pre Darwin, pre Freud mindset, whatever. I don't know if it'll be the 19th century or the 18th century or what, but just tries to really think about, how does one consciousness work? Because I tried to bring a lot of people together in this book, and now I find myself wanting to just hang out with one person as long as I can find the right person.
Kate Carpenter 54:42
Excellent. I am so happy to have gotten to talk to you and learn more about your writing process. Craig Fehrman, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Craig Fehrman 54:49
This was super fun. Thank you.
Kate Carpenter 54:51
Thanks again to Craig Fehrman for joining me in this episode, and thanks to you for listening. Craig's new book is This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark, and you can find links to it and the other books mentioned in this episode in the show notes at draftingthepast.com. If you'd like to help keep the show going, consider becoming a paid supporter at patreon.com/draftingthepast. Paid supporters get access to ad free episodes, as well as other perks, like the chance to win books from the show. And their support is crucial to allowing me to produce Drafting the Past. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
