Tent of Many Voices: 11210601F

30s um Dr Molton 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 Gary's lovely wife Bay 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 going to turn out and I guess uh some of uh Gary's grandchildren 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 I had no idea the breadth and depth of the material said reflecting on his hiring as editor for the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition I never en Vision 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 and my doctor caused me to take taxel for me the most exciting Moment In This research project came when I said Woo 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 and then after they got their first couple of stops under their belt maybe their first tribal in 2001 Dr M was uh awarded the outstanding research and create 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 and Residence at the uh Missouri River Basin Leon 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 pl he's been here before and I was very pleased that when um I asked him to speak with us tonight that he is approachable as he has always seemed to be that's one thing that everybody says uh especially by the way U my girlfriend Dell that was great Dr Molton when you talked to her anyway and of course she was in tears when she first met you in Philadelphia when when she got to hold the journals that was a very special moment anyway without further Ado I will present to you Dr Gary M thank you very much uh I'm testing the equipment here uh can you hear me all right back there in very back thank you well I was sort of envious of the person who got the award for coming the farthest I told my table that Fay and I had amassed more miles than that today shopping in Omaha I'm not sure that we shouldn't have gotten that we came over early and spent the whole day so Omaha is a big city that little candle Lincoln over there and it's sort of we been looking up at the tall buildings all day and so it's really great to be back here in Omaha 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 going to have to think of a different talk because you may remember that one I came up with something fresh at least St it's FR 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 by Centennial from an academic point of view you know that's where I come from and so that's what moves me and uh gets my thought processes going and I'm here to tell you tonight about the three pillars that hold the Louis and Clark expedition together the documentary evidence that we have that makes the Lewis and Clark expedition so special part of the reason we've celebrated it in the B Centennial 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 foreign listed men we have m Ms of the Expedition gathered by Lewis before the trip and then made in the field by Clark as they traveled across the continent back and then 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 pressed between sheets of paper and hauled back and forth across the continent so these three pillars of the Louis and Clark expedition come down as our heritage from that trip I want to tell you tonight that these are living legacies of leis and the journals aren't notebooks that are set on some shell Gathering dust and some uh archive that nobody knows 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 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 interest and so I want to talk tonight about how these materials are being used by Scholars to enhance our notion and interest in the Louis and CLK Expedition and these are recent studies that have come about largely as a result of the interest that's been generated by the by Centennial by Steven Ambrose's book and Ken bur film my own Endeavors in editing the journals of Lewis and CLK April the 12th 1805 leis and Clark were just a few days out of Fort M where they winter during the uh winter of 180405 there north of bis Mark in North Dakota and now they had moved up the Missouri River a few miles and they stopped that day April the 12th 1805 at the mouth of the little Missouri River Louis and Clark wanted to take some astronomical observations you know the fix their spot on the earth and that would help of Clark's mapping and just their knowledge of the terrain in general more 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 pulling and pulling and pushing those boats against the Relentless current of the Missouri River 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 10 Hunters were spread out over the terrain looking for food for the party we've heard a bit about that already this evening 10 men went out and they came back with only a single deal now a single deer is not nearly enough to feed a party of 33 working hand they needed much more than that listen to what leis said on one occasion we eat an immensity of meat it requires four deer an elk and a deer or one Buffalo to supply us plentifully for 24 hours a buffalo might yield 500 to 1,000 lb pounds of meat a deer only one quarter of that amount now part of Bob's conversation here were about the nutritional needs the caloric needs of the party as they did their work across the continent there have been studies of that and I I knew of this when here that they run a little article in wpo about this uh matter and it's very interesting been different studies and and French voyagers who did much the same work as Lewis and clarkman have been found to need 7,000 calories a day about what we had this evening for dinner I even without a dessert 7,000 calories a day I uh a few years ago had one of the Corn Husker football players in my class Carlos Pop you may remember that name on those behemoths on the cornar football team and I asked Carlos do you mind if I call the uh athletic office to see how many calories you're eating today no no go ahead so I called the diet for the huser football team and I said how many calories does uh Carlos Pop eat during the high of football season they said most of our players like Carlos eat about 6,000 calories a day almost the same as leis and Clark then but they were probably twice the size Carlos vat three times the size of many of the members of the Party 10 Hunters went out they came back with a single de 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 well the Buffalo stand Supreme in the vision of the world as the emblem of the American West for all the world the Buffalo stands as the symbol of the American West and Louis and Clark loved buffalo meat above any other meat that they ate elk deer whatever they could get was always the Buffalo they desired particularly uh several savored parts where the the tongue the hump the liver the intest 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 Lewis and Clark began to see great herds of buffalo very early in the trip on June 30th 1805 near Great FS Clark wrote that he saw 10,000 buffalo in a single sence Joseph White House at another time said I can without exagger ation say that I saw more Buffalo feeding at one time than all the animals I'd ever seen before in my lifetime put together finally Clark said I'm not going to enumerate Buffalo anymore there're just too many and I'm seeing them too all but then on the way back after we got in Buffalo country again he said one more time I want to mention the number of Buffalo 20,000 buffalo in a single s incredible number the numbers of the buffalo on the Great Planes have been estimated have been anywhere from 30 to million Buffalo by Louis and Clark's time had already retreated from occupying the Eastern parts of the United States and we're now pushed onto the great plane the Great grasslands of North America where they thrived and increased in number 70 million is probably much too high in estimate and because of modern studies we pushed that number back to a more realistic 30 million still an incredible number of be so where were the buffalo on April the 12th 1805 some historical anal excuse me some historical ecologists have done some studies using Lewis and Clark's Journal Paul Martin and Christin zuder of the University of Arizona have moved through Lewis and Clark journals looking at bison references and they said the reason they didn't see any animals that day was because Lewis and Clark were in a game scene that is a drop off of Bison numbers a game s and they said within a few weeks they would enter a game park that is high numbers of Buffalo why is it a game s well Lewis and Clark understood why it was a game s they answered these Scholars questions themselves because they said we have noticed within the hunting range of Indians the numbers of game animals fall off and they were within the range of the hunting of the Manan and hota 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 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 LS said there are so many animals we have to push them aside together through they were now in a game Park well if one side of the equation the game SN 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 Paul Martin and Christine Zer have an answer they say it's not only a 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 in other words this contested hunting grounds in the area that LS and Clark were entered were contested by a number of very aggressive tribes the Mand the Hadas the asins the crow the AA the black feet the shony all encircling this vast Preserve of Buffalo and the Buffalo Thrive there because the tribes could move in as hunting parties hunt briefly and aggressively and then rush out before they were set upon by their competitors so Louis and Clark were seen they were in a game Park and they too noted this phenomena in the same way they noted the phenomena of the game s they said we have noticed in the areas where nations are Waring that the game numbers go up so LS can Clark the astute observers that they were for noticing these things that is taken us a couple of hundred years to figure out and they were doing it on the ground moving very quickly as they crossed through this region they finally uh reached the area of the Three Forks of the Missouri in Chicago WEA the native woman who was with them the Shoni Indian woman whose territory they had 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 why is that well competition again between the Shon and the black feet for that hunting area on the way back they cross through here again Clark and his party going over to the yellow Zone they passed through the game sink there at the base of the Rockies and then went back into the game park again moved up the Yellowstone through that region and then out again into a game sink near the Mandan and theat Indians so Paul Martin and Christine zuder were able to make some very important observations about a phenomena of the Buffalo range and behavior and extent and numbers based on the journals of Lewis and cl very wether Lewis was a natural he had a naturalist inclination from earliest life in the little biographical sketch that Jefferson wrote uh of Lewis he talked about how as a boy he loved to go out into the for forest in the wilds and and go on Excursion for himself and and there he would study nature he like Jefferson had an inclination towards the plant life of the world you know Jefferson just always was gathering plants and studying them and trying to learn about their medicinal purposes and their ceremonial and ritualistic purposes among Native Americans and and LS either had this himself or captured it 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 observed the plants who recorded who wrote about them who preserved them and then carried them back to Philadelphia where 99% of the plants remain today on the way up to Fort Mandan Lewis was gathering plants along the Missouri River and then as they left Fort Manden in April of 1805 he sent a shipment of goods back and you probably know know about these crates that he boxed up and everyone knows the wonderful story of the little mag pie and prairie dog that made it all the way back to Washington DC to Jefferson's Montello but there were other items in these shipment Indian artifacts the geologic specimen and the plant specimens 60 plants that he had gathered on the way up the Missouri River to Fort man there 30 of those plants are lost we have no idea what happened to them we know they existed at one time because Lewis besides sending the plants sent a list of the plants and then a receiving agent in Philadelphia checked off each plant certifying that he had the whole lot that Lewis had sent we don't know what happened but I'm going to 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 first 30 plants the first plant that we have in the ls and Clark herbarium is number 31 gathered in Burke County Nebraska 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 the scientists in the East were probably going through the plant and say oh yeah I know that one I collected it in Mississippi I know that one I collected 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 Sous city was very similar to the terrain they were seeing all along the way and it finally reached a 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 first 30 plants may have just been discarded as being familiar to scientists in the East so we only have that second 30 but that's more important because these are from a new environmental Zone and scientists would be interested in those and they left Fort Manan and they 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 he buried them in a cash at Great Falls Montana and left them there to pick up on his way back when he came back and opened that cash water had seeped in and destroyed all those plants 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 the brasket to North Dakota so the Great Plains is very much under represented in the collections of Ls and Clark what is the bulk of his plant collection are the plants from the Rocky Mountains in the Pacific Northwest but those are the most important because those are the ones that are unknown to scientists in the East and no those are the plants that they will want to see those plants today some 240 are mostly at the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia Mark te a chemist in Syracuse New York has been studying this plant collection what Marti is interested in are the plants providing a snapshot of environmental conditions at the time of their Gathering their Collective he studies the plants in a way that they hold a memory of what were the environmental and climactic conditions at the time of the Gathering when I was studying the plants myself getting them ready for the herbarium the volume that's out here I went to Philadelphia made notes on them and we took photographs of them and identified them by their scien popular names and I did all this work and finished up the volume and went away and uh worked on the book and then I came back a few years later to do some check 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 and so I went went to the uh Bist the curator in charge and I said what's happened to the plants here he said well Mark te is working on them he cuts out these little Chad siiz pieces and takes them back to his lab to study they're not damaging of the plants greatly because mostly it's leaves that are under side not visible out of the way and it's very very small of gatherings from these plants so I talked to Mar to try to discover what sort of researches he was bringing to the plant uh 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 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 and so you can take a piece of wood or any sort of organic matter and T and Trace its age with some degree of accuracy but now Mark te is looking at organic substances or inorganic substances rather on these 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 mic scope and when these plants are gathered you have a Time 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 get and so now Marti can gather other plants modern plants do the same study and get a sense of how 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 uh some plants have thrived and grown and spread because of this others have deteriorated and retreated from their former zones of activity so Mar is studying all this and using the Lewis and Clark plans that were preserved during the expedition to discover answers to these questions about the environmental changes at this point he's not done the further study he simply determined that this sort of study is possible with these plants and that speaks to the the care that Lewis gave in collecting these plants and also the care that they've been given over the years that they are so carefully and well preserved today well if Lewis was the naturalist Clark was the MC maker he was the Cartographer on the trip of the 129 historic maps that are associated with the Expedition almost everyone has some direct or indirect connection with William Clark Clark 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 for fall into three sort of categories and the first category is these pre-expedition Maps 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 embassies and saying uh could I use maps that you have of the West when he got to St Louis he met people there uh bird Traders and government officials from Spain who would also give him some maps that they had of the western territory these were sort of the maps in the glove compartment you know that 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 St Louis waiting uh to start up River Clark would recopy many of these maps and try to bring the ACC cumulative knowledge onto 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 a Welsh a Welshman who had gone up to Missouri as far as the Manan Indians and his maps of the Missouri were excellent Maps as a matter of fact Lewis and Clark were not really seen new territory up to the mands because John Thomas Evans and the others had been up this grout many times and some of the boatmen that they had hired in St Louis said ah I wintered here last winter near the nishnabotna river and I hunted a few weeks here next to the pla so they knew this River up to the manand so Louis and Clark were not really treading new territory they had Maps they had journals of previous explorers and Traders and then we have that second group of maps maps made by Clark on the Tria root maps daytoday maps that Clark worked out along the river and the third set of maps were post expeditionary Maps where Clark br brought together the pre-expedition maps his root Maps plus the information he had gathered from Natives and from traders who told him about the territory to the north or south of their Ro farther east or uh off their line of March and so he Incorporated this a vast store of knowledge and data that he had accumulated into a great map of the West the map that would eventually be published in the 1814 edition of their book by Nicholas Bid And so that became the great map of the West and as a matter of fact that map published in 1814 was not supplemented until the 1850s was not really uh taken over so it was a grand map of the west but what I really want to talk about are Clark's grot maps The Daily Maps he made along the way now if we respect lewiis for his naturalist and scientific abilities his Gathering of plants his descriptions of animals his astronomical observations then we have to put this same sort of respect for PL for his untiring efforts to match 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 but what he seemed to be doing is What's called the back asthma method that is Clark would be standing at a point looking up River and he would see a bend in the river or 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 breing and then in his mind he would have to turn that 180° and write that course on a line on his sheet about the direction he had traveled if he had traveled Northeast he would ride it in this way the surveyor's way of running North 45° East 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 geing that's what he was doing he was guessing how far he had traveled but he was a dead reckoner per Excellence he could uh note distances if today you would take some of his maps in Montana where the rivers of weavings have not changed you can lay those down over modern maps and they fit perfectly he was a genus of doing it 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 map he usually had a sheet of paper on which he had laid out a gridline square and these were usually uh 1 in squares he had laid out on his sheet and then he he uh he had a gaug of the scale of what the distance would be and it was usually about 6 mil to an end so if he said we traveled 3 mil North 45° East then he would draw a line halfway across the grid and start all over again for the next three milth the next mile and a half the next 3/4 of a mile 8,000 miles across the continent and back day by day the table that he established these course and distance tables go on page after page after pain an incredible amount of work with his compass and with his dead reckoning and with his perseverance and patience to get that done I admired Clark greatly he was not only leading the party doing the maps trecking the Journal under the most difficult circumstances it's only been lately that we've had biographies of Clark we had all the agulation to Lewis with the biography by uh Steven Ambrose and then the film by Kim burns put Lewis at the Forefront but Clark's a man to be greatly admired for his work on the Expedition well when he returned to St Louis in 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 laying the map of the Missouri out on the floor of the Great Hall of monello and crawling across the floor and working his way up to Missouri uh he was enthralled with Clark's mapping these Maps then that we have of the Missouri River and that's what I want to focus on here from St Louis to Fort Mandan are about 1,500 River miles 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 mam most of those are lost to us today just like the 30 plants are lost to us just like some of the journals from the Expedition are lost to us as a matter of fact from St Lewis to about Omaha Nebraska we have no original Maps from the Expedition what we have from Omaha to Fort Manan 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 of the Missouri River up to Fort mandam are lost to it and probably will be forever lost to us searches through the national archives or appropriate depositors have not yielded of those Maps so what do we have from Omaha to Fort Mandan we have a a set of copies of maps made for Prince Max milon and where would they be Jos Ln art mus no Nebraska that is our single and most important uh part in connection with the Louis and Clark expedition Prince Max Mayan arrived in uh the United States to do his Grand Tour and study of the ethnology and and boty and zoology of the American West and wri his Grand book and when he reached St 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 and that's the very place where all his archives now reside what a coincidence the first map is numbered 13 in other words supposing that 12 went before well why didn't he have the first 12 copies probably because by the time of Max Milan 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 it was where the American Aman Fur Company now had fewer posts and less involvement so he was giving him maps of the true Wilderness that he would enter and those Maps then reach the number 29 so they're copies of maps that Jefferson had 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 Max M and because of the efforts of Johnson Art Museum uh to get these materials and I'm sure all of you from Omaha and Council Bluff know that incredible Story how the artwork of U Carl bobber and The Archives of Prince maxan were making a a tour of the United States in 1962 and the uh inter North Art Foundation decided to buy those materials and deposit it on loan to Jon and when Northern Natural Gas Company became inter North and left Omaha uh they Beque after some negotiations those materials to the Jon Art Museum and there's where they reside today and then you probably know the unhappy story maybe you had stock in that of and you know that it became inran yes that's sad but luckily they left this incredible art collection there Jon of the bodmer and the even more incredible uh Max me papers and just as an aside tomorrow uh at noon J Art Museum will be sending the first volume of the newly edited Max Million journals to University of Oklahoma press to start the publication process so we will be getting the Max Million Diaries here within the next few years beginning with volume one uh that takes him uh out to New Harmony Indiana and we'll be seeing the eastern part of maxman so in years to come you can look forward to Max Millions Journal I call him son of Lewis and Clark being published and again Omaha I can be proud of their connection with this world few years ago a man I met in Vancouver Washington Martin Ponda told me about his efforts to reconstruct the maps of Lewis and Clark and he showed 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 after he completed it in all he had three volumes numbering hundreds of maps showing the rout of Louis and Clark across the continent I want to talk about his first volume the volume that covers from campwood Illinois cross from St Louis up to the manance that 1,500 River miles that Clark mapped in sheets Martin plont mapped in sheets five times the detail of Clark now in Martin's Maps volume one two and three across the continent and back and up 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 him 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 when Martin pondan started to work on this lower part of the Missouri he faced a problem the problem that I've already told you about there are no maps by Clark from Camp Wood to Omaha and from Omaha to theand Dan we have secondary maps by Max mil could he trust those well he had to because that's all he had available but how did he reconstruct the river of Le and flar where he had no maps on the lower Missouri below Omar he had Clark's course and distance riding north 45° East three miles to send in the river and he simply used those figures and those descriptions to reconstruct the river of Lewis and Clark he said I think I've done about as well as humanly possible well he 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 erors that creep into it because of difficulties and field conditions doing the work that Clark was doing poor instruments uh difficult uh field circumstances all these things drove it to increasing problems Clark sometimes would go ahead do his back asthma treating and forget to change it 180 degrees in his mind and have himself going back for you get up to Sous City and all of a sudden he takes off for 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 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 the Missouri uh Omaha the cities the county lines the uh the airports all these things are drawn in so you get a sent of where you are as you move up to Missouri and across the continent well Martin has been criticized for some of his work uh again all the difficulties that Clark had were brought over into the work that Martin plon had to do but still I believe it's a magnificent work and it gives us something to begin with so there we have journalists Botanical speci Maps of the Lewis and Clark expedition actively being used today by scientists Scholars Enthusiast of the Expedition so the living legacies of Lewis and Clark live on and I think that we're just beginning that there are things that will continue to interest people from all sorts of discipline to return to Lewis and Clark each generation takes up 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 but we don't know where the next generation will find interest and um answers to questions about the Expedition so I'm going to be laying low for the uh triennial I don't 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 to magnificent uh group of materials we have thank you again for inviting me okay we have some a little time for questions there um we have these these three legs of of scholarship here and I'm curious of your opinion about in the future particularly somebody told me that the only thing we have can learn now about leou and Clark is going to come from Indian oral histories and Indian perspective of of this what what's your view of that and and what do you see in the future is that I mean as oral history is historian these oral histories count uh what's the value in the future well I've had that question up uh several times before as a historian it's difficult for me to comment on because the oral tradition is something I have't worked with uh historians like documents they like the written word and that's we we know how to evaluate and discriminate with the written word we have contesting words contrast 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 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 so we have to be sensitive to oral Traditions I am not discounting it 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 I think one thing good about the B Centennial is those stories have come forward I think the B Centennial has been very rich in its uh design to try to tap into Native American stories 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 to handle those materials better than I do and I hope that we can gain more information from that aome please start I think we own you to some exent so I hope you'll ex me I think we're curious as to what your life is like these days what are you doing personally with those par well uh personally I'm working with the maxan project I'm advisor on that project son of Ls Park you know they uh they thought maybe there's a few miles left in the old guy yet so I'm doing that and very interesed it's it's a a fascinating project and I'm sure that you will be interested in it too as it comes out and then F and I are doing some traveling um we've had uh some Lucky Chances to do lots of traveling during the B Contin I've got these wonderful invitations like this not only to come here but go to great places all along the Lewis and CLK Trail so we have vowed that in the future we will travel where no member of the Lou Park Expedition we've been to those places so we're doing some traveling and uh just enjoying retirement thank you for asking are you thinking of of doing any I do have person writing I do have one other uh Louis 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 it's a it's a narrative of each day of the Expedition um you know I I did the full journals and then I did the a bridg journals so now what I want to do is a Louis 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 so you can either read the original journals or you can open that up and see in my words what was going on that's where I'm working on there do you have any suggestions for out of the plat as a purposeful motivation for us to undertake well 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 Kira and other people like Bob have been engaged in and um certainly uh We've benefited from your help just uh giving us physical labor to the Lewis and Clark B Centennial commission I uh I pull up to some Lewis and Clark event I see all these people in blue t-shirts and I think it's going to be okay you because we've got the help from MTH and the plat so uh the B Sentinal commission has certainly appreciated the volunteer efforts uh your enthusiasm for the commission events uh in Omaha Fort Atkinson PK and Braska City uh we certainly appreciate that so uh I would just say keep on keeping on and uh can I throw something in there commission 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 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 in things like Kira's book and a lot of other books but uh there needs to be some some uh inventorying done and I'm on a committee um I'm going to talk with the park service and Suzanne and Dan and some other people here in the next couple weeks and I think out of that is going to come some some labor that is going to be needed in terms of inventorying uh sites along the the trail here so you might keep that in mind it was a project that uh might require some we'd asked for some assistance from the mouth of the class so dick do you think that' be a good uh about January we're going to to plan this out okay all right we'll talk about that yes sir uh you mentioned the contributions both of Lewis and Clark U have you in all your time with this come up with who you think is say one of the other members the most important to the uh for the Expedition I know everybody's got a different well it it it is hard um you know if you would ask Lewis and Clark 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 uh you get a very quick sense of who was most important to them George Jer you know uh the two field Brothers of of course were very important Ruben and Jose field um 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 sagia and to York and I think they would represent um a portion of our own thinking in our own time and they' come forward because 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 Expedition because Clark had such problems after the Expedition with your so those two uh persons have come to the Forefront but immediately after the Expedition if you would ask leis or Clark they' have probably said shield centuri and the field Brothers um so I think those those three people would would be very important and and that's not overlooking some of the sergeants like gas who um printed his own journal like John orway the top Sergeant on the Expedition but in terms of getting everyday things done that is getting the party where they needed to go and getting enough Provisions in to feed them feed them each day you know those those three individuals R time one more question and then we okay 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