How ‘This Vast Enterprise’ adds new Lewis and Clark Expedition perspectives

The first challenge writer Craig Fehrman faced as he considered writing a book on the Lewis and Clark Expedition was whether there was enough fresh material to warrant the project.

After poring over the journals of Merriweather Lewis and William Clark, a million words in all, Fehrman decided there was.

“After I read the journals the first time, I ended up reading them at least three times after that,” he says on a recent phone call. “I had seen all these details and seen there was enough material that hadn’t been told before that I was like, ‘This deserves a new book.’

“I don’t want to rehash somebody else’s work,” he says. “If I’m to spend five years on this, I need to have new things to say. So once I cleared that bar in my mind, then I started thinking about structure.”

That decision further guaranteed that “This Vast Enterprise,” Fehrman’s deeply researched and highly readable biographical history, would be unlike any of the Lewis and Clark books that preceded it.

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“I love reading and writing biography,” Fehrman says. “I think biography is a superpower. If you’re reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson, by definition, you’re going to see the world the way he did. You’re going to care about the things he cared about. You’re going to experience the ideas he experienced.

“But we have a choice about who gets biographical treatment,” he says. “I realized we only knew half of the Lewis and Clark story. I wanted to spend more time talking about Native people and their goals and their ideas, because that hadn’t been fully represented in most books about the expedition.

“But it wasn’t just enough to say, ‘Let’s have Native people show up in Lewis and Clark‘s story.’ I wanted it to be [Lakota leader] Black Buffalo’s story, too. I wanted it to be [Lewis and Clark’s guide] Sacajawea’s story, too.”

He wanted the book to be an immersive experience, the kind of tale that transports readers to the barge Lewis and Clark and their team used in order to struggle through the shallows and rapids of rivers on their journey from St. Louis to the Columbia River’s mouth on the Pacific Ocean. He wanted readers to feel like they were there at the tribal councils Lewis and Clark held with Native leaders on a trip that lasted from 1804 to 1806.

“The way to do that is biography,” says Fehrman, whose previous book, “Author in Chief,” looked at the literary works of past presidents. “So the rotating points of view, I just thought, ‘You know, if I’m if I’m going to write a book, everybody needs to have their perspective in the book.’ Because I think readers just respond to that in different way.

“And so the way to make this a more complicated story, to make this an ensemble story, isn’t just to have every character fleshed out,” he says. “It’s to have every person’s, every people’s point of view.”

“This Vast Enterprise” was written in 17 chapters that alternate the point of view between 10 different participants in all or part of the expedition. Lewis and Clark get multiple chapters as they experience the journey of some 8,000 miles.

But York, Clark’s enslaved servant, John Ordway, the expedition’s de facto sergeant, and Sacajawea also get chapters where the story is told through their eyes, as do Black Buffalo and three other Native people.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Fehrman talked about the clues he discovered in Lewis and Clark’s journals, how he filled out the stories of people who left no written records, Lewis’s mental health struggles, and the rarest discoveries he made during years of research.

Q: Tell me how you decided upon Lewis and Clark, which is not a new story, for your new book.

A: “Author in Chief,” I was really proud of, and it was a lot of fun. But it’s very much a book about ideas. It’s a book where you kind of feel like you’re in a library. So I wanted to do something different with my next book, and what seemed like an obvious move was to tell an adventure story. To get outside, get on the move.

And when I thought about America’s best adventure stories, Lewis and Clark was the first one that came to mind. But the reservation I had was exactly what you just said, that there have been a lot of really good books and great documentaries. It’s not a secret to Americans. A lot of Americans love this.

I started reading the journals, and they’re more than a million words long, but they preserve so many details and so many perspectives. And I realized reading those journals, I’m a historian and I don’t know half this story. There are so many details that have been left out of previous tellings. I was like, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’

Q: What’s an example of something in the journals that hadn’t been written about before that triggered your imagination?

A: I can give you one example that speaks to both of those things. Early in the journals, when Clark is keeping a journal, they’re in St. Louis. They’re spending their first winter there before the expedition proper starts. And York, the Black man and slave of Clark, only comes up one time.

There’s just one sentence: “York commenced sawing with a whip saw,” and I don’t know exactly what that means. What’s a whip saw? But a whip saw was a very important tool in this time period because it turned logs into planks. They’re building their winter fort; they need planks because that’s how you put the roof on the fort, that’s how you build the beds, so you’re not sleeping on the ground.

A whip saw is a very difficult tool to use. You need two people; they need to be in perfect rhythm. So why York? There are dozens of White soldiers there at that point. The reason is because York was the best person for the job. They had extreme time pressure, but York was strong and skilled. He had helped the Clark family build their plantation in Kentucky.

So from that one sentence, you can start to see how they build the winter fort. You can feel the sleet and the snow. But you can also see York working and separating himself from Clark. You can see York trying to find his place in this very complicated military unit where he doesn’t quite belong. I did that as a York point-of-view chapter. The sentence is all I had, but I was able to write a 15-20 page chapter.

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Q: How did using point-of-view chapters change the usual research and writing?

A: It definitely was a limitation, but I found that it helped me. Because if I know I’m writing a Sacajawea chapter, I have to find every single detail I can, because they didn’t leave journals. It’s a writerly kind of question, but I had decided that Sacajawea was going to be the Rocky Mountains. So as I was reading the journals, I was trying to find every Sacajawea detail I could.

And famously, in the Rockies, they have run out of food, so they have to kill some of their horses. They have to use this stuff called portable soup that Lewis and Clark buffs love to talk about. It’s kind of like nasty glue you can turn back into soup. But because I was looking at it from Sacajawea’s point of view, I talked to Shoshone people who were like, “Well, she couldn’t eat the horses. We have a huge cultural taboo against eating horse flesh.”

So Sacajawea was in the Rockies. We know she was breastfeeding, which is burning 500 calories a day. She can’t eat horse meat like everyone else. Maybe she was the one who needed that portable soup the most. The only reason I connected those dots was because I was trying really hard to see this portion of the expedition through her.

I found that happening again and again. Definitely with Lewis and Clark, but especially with the chapters about people who didn’t leave behind as much of a written record. When I tried really hard to see it through their point of view, new details started popping up that I probably would have skipped if I hadn’t had this structure.

Q: Tell me more about writing York, who didn’t leave a written record as far as we know.

A: There were Black people in his time period who were starting to write about their race and identity. People like Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. So I read their poetry and I read the best scholarship on that. I was very careful in my writing to say “York probably thought this.” But we do have Black people from this period talking about what it meant to be Black, this is what slavery felt like and meant.

I read a bunch of slave narratives, and was very careful to read slave narratives from Kentucky, because slavery in this time period, an enslaved person in Georgia versus an enslaved person in Kentucky, they had a very different experience. I tried to capture that.

Q: Did the journals or other documents help here?

A: Clark wrote a letter after the expedition to his brother, so he’s going to be very honest. And just says a throwaway line about what York’s done the whole expedition, and that York is like, “I want my freedom. I feel I’ve earned it.” So Clark says, “I don’t agree with York about his immense services,” and so you can kind of imagine that phrase “immense services” in scare quotes.

That tells you he doesn’t respect York and that he still feels superior to York. But almost by accident, that’s also York’s point of view and York’s words, too, right? Because Clark has preserved not just his own reaction, he’s preserved York saying, “I did a lot. I was there. I gave everything I had to it.” Oftentimes in the written records, you can find voices and moments from the people who couldn’t write themselves.”

Q: Continuing that point, what’s a good example of a Native voice that emerges from the research?

A: Probably the biggest thing I found in this book was an interview with Wolf Calf, who was a Blackfoot man, and this interview, nobody had seen in more than 100 years. It’s Wolf Calf telling his side of this famous encounter between the Blackfoot and Lewis.

When I read that, it was obviously just a huge thrill to see that and realize what I was reading, something new from a Native person. But then I went back and read Lewis’s journal, and I started to notice things that I wouldn’t have noticed without seeing Wolf Calf’s side of things. They sort of worked together and I tried to read them carefully, synthesize them, and create the closest thing we can get to the truth.

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Q: I was fascinated with the material on Lewis’s mental health – what did Thomas Jefferson call it?

A: “Sensible depressions of mind.”

Q: Right. It’s easy to view him as an explorer, a scientist, an artist. How do you add the context of his mental struggles?

A: I think it can really speak to the method I use for everybody. People have written a lot about Lewis and his mental health, but I think what you’ll find in most accounts is that people try to understand him through modern diagnosis. Did Lewis have complex PTSD? Did Lewis have bipolar disorder?

That kind of thing I don’t like to do as a historian, when you talk about a modern category and sort of project it backwards. I sometimes think that ends up telling us as much about ourselves as it does about the thing we’re trying to understand in the past.

So when I was writing about Lewis – Lewis lived with Jefferson in Washington for several years, and they were extremely close – Jefferson himself said that Lewis had sensible depressions of mind. So he was using depression in the same way that we would use it today. Jefferson also said in other letters that Lewis struggled with addiction, with alcoholism. That to me was enough.

Did Lewis have manic symptoms as well to qualify for bipolar disorder? Maybe. But there’s no way I’m going to know that for sure. So I tried to understand Lewis as he understood himself. And there are a couple of new things that led me to it. The first is that I really think this book is the first time where somebody paid attention to how Lewis analyzed his own mind, because you’re right, he was a scientist.

He would write about his tendency to expect the worst in the future or his tendency to obsess and fixate on something bad that had happened in the past. Then, in the journals, he would not just write about those emotions, he would write about what he would do to try to counter that. He didn’t always succeed, but her always tried, and I think that’s really heroic to see him analyzing his own mind as carefully as he analyzed everything else.

The other thing was a letter from John Quincy Adams after Lewis makes it back to Washington. They have dinner at the White House, and Adams has met Lewis before. And Adams, in this letter, says, ” You know, I didn’t even recognize Lewis. Like, I’ve had dinner with this guy, and I didn’t recognize him. He looked 15 years older.

That’s a new letter I found. I think that and the Wolf Calf letter are the two biggest archival things that I found.

Q: How did that approach work as you wrote about Clark’s attitudes? You write that York earned the trust and respect of Lewis and others on the expedition, but Clark, a slave owner, couldn’t adjust his prejudices.

A: There’s a letter from near the end of Lewis’s life where Clark is very angry at York after the expedition. Clark says, “I was going to give York a beating until Lewis stopped me and said, don’t do that. So it’s absolutely true that Clark was a man of his era. This again is where that biographical approach really is important. I tried very hard to suspend modern judgment and just say very clearly, this is what Clark believed, this is what Lewis believed, this is what York believed.

Of course, modern readers are going to have to think of these parts of Clark that are great and these parts of Clark that are horrifying. We don’t have to decide one way to feel about William Clark. He was somebody who did some remarkable things and somebody who did some terrible things. And I think readers are strong enough to kind of balance those aspects.

Q: I was struck by passages in the book where Clark seems envious of the Native people’s fascination with York. How they gathered around him when they saw him.

A: Clark liked York, and Clark elevated York to this special standing, but that also just made him sort of resent York. It’s a really weird and curdled and complicated psychological dynamic. How fascinating is that York, when he’s telling stories to the Native people, he doesn’t just pretend to be a bear. He’s like, “I’m the bear who was captured by Clark.”

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Q: You’ve talked about using words like “probably” and “surely” when there’s uncertainty in the historical record. How does that fit into the need to interpret and piece together things?

A: I’m really glad you asked that. The first answer is that every historian does this differently, which probably drives readers a little crazy. I wish we had some kind of clear conceptual system like “off the record” for journalists. It really comes down to the judgment and the technique of the individual historian.

What I will say for me is that when I use words like “probably” or “surely,” I’m not using that because I don’t know. I’m using that because I feel 96-, 97% confident, but I don’t want to pretend I’m 100% confident. To me, those words are not a sign of uncertainty, they’re a sign of care, because there are times when I’m just not going to know for sure.