The Lewis and Clark expedition is a topic that I find fascinating but because Lewis and Clark and everyone involved seem a bit enigmatic as people they don't seem to get the historical movies, mini series and etc you might expect.
The fact that they spent nearly 3 years traveling in the wilderness so far from the civilization they knew / into a fair amount of unknown is fascinating to me. Something you can't really do anymore.
Their reliance on laxatives is fairly amusing / interesting. Granted, would maybe not include that in a movie...
It was already settled, just not by white folk. In fact that would be another whole aspect of the adventure. Over each rise a whole new culture, which may or may not welcome or tolerate you.
Notably, before smallpox wiped out most of the North American population, the continent was largely deforested. Deliberately. Bison ranged to Louisiana.
The "little ice age" after ~1500 is suspected to have been caused by the pulse of reforestation, and thus dip in carbon dioxide, occasioned by the disappearance of the long-time stewards of open range land.
In the 14th century, a very large expedition west from Africa is documented, with likelihood part of it reached South America. (One ship was separated and returned, reporting fresh water out of sight of land, suggestive of Amazon outflow.) There is ecological evidence of pre-Columbian disruption in Amazonia thereafter.
The use of mercury laxatives may make for a rather funny scene though. Much like the scene in Blazing Saddles where they are sitting around a campfire eating beans. Not that Lews&Clark expedition would make a great comedy.
In the strictest sense, OP is of course correct. In the age of global satellite coverage, nothing is unknown in quite the same way as the west was to Lewis and Clark.
> People seem to do this sort of thing pretty often in the Arctic.
The arctic is a different beast. It is impossible to survive for long in the arctic without either a supply chain or substantial reserves, and expeditions can last for at most a season.
However, the United States has a lot more empty public land than people seem to realize. Even in the densely populated Northeast, you can walk into the White Mountains or Adirondacks without a map, leave the trail, and probably spend years exploring in a mostly self-sufficient manner. Especially if you commit to turning back whenever you encounter people or trails. And that's to say nothing of the west or the great deserts.
Just because a map exists and trails are cut doesn't mean you have to acknowledge their existence. Remember: Lewis and Clark, for the most part, were traversing already inhabited land.
Growing up in Missouri there was no shortage of Lewis and Clark namesakes, memorials, material taught in school, etc. Granted, I would expect a disproportionate amount of that stuff in Missouri because the expedition began there and traveled along the river the state is named after, and Missouri has a big cultural focus on westward expansion (see the Gateway Arch). Still, my impression was always that their expedition is a staple of American cultural history.
There are regions of the country where Lewis and Clark are taught in some detail (e.g., Missouri). However, even in those regions, surprisingly little is taught about the actual details of their expedition. The story is mostly told as one of naturalists and cartographers, with some passing mention of native peoples. A "grand adventure in the wilderness" sort of narrative is what I recall from school.
If you read the actual journals, two things stick out. First, the expedition was mostly boring. Second, the fact that the west was populated is difficult to miss. The expedition was almost more about establishing trade and diplomatic relations with existing civilizations than about discovering and charting virgin lands.
I wonder if one reason that L&C aren't studied more widely is that the happy version of the story is mostly boring ("we made a map and documented fauna") and the more complex/detailed/interesting version of the story makes abundantly clear the extraordinary scope of the Manifest Destiny genocide.
The correct word here is culture. Civilizations are cultures which have cities, as the etymology indicates. The Americas had several indigenous civilizations, including one in Missouri, but that was gone several centuries before Lewis and Clark (most likely culprit being the first wave of smallpox), and the expedition didn't encounter any.
It's also true that civilized is used as a term of praise, and uncivilized is really only used as a term of disparagement, but these are connotations, and not ones I intend here.
The large nations had systems of what the US Army referred to as "settlements" whose size and complexity were perceived as serious threats. Some of the nations comprised of those settlements were even referred to explicitly as civilizations when they assimilated.
Maybe "settlements" don't count as cities; the whole thing is a bit pedantic to me. But, in any case, "culture" is too weak a term for the complex social systems, political systems, and living patterns that existed during the time of L&C.
In a virtual kind of way, you can do this in Minecraft.
I play on a private server with a group of seasoned high tech types, and we have a tendency to explore very far from civilization (as it were). It’s a dangerous process fraught with peril, but if you can get back to civilization with the maps you make along the way, there is great benefit to the other players.
You can do this in real life. Obviously you aren't going to be as far from civilization but there are plenty of real places to explore quite alone for days or weeks.
TL;DR: Mercury Chloride was sold as a powerful laxative referred to as "thunder clappers" which enabled the Lewis and Clark expedition could manage on a meat-heavy diet and the occasional syphilis. Last paragraph sums it up nicely:
So as Lewis and Clark’s men made their way across the continent and across Oregon, they were unknowingly depositing a trail of heavy metals along the way – a trail that historians and scientists have been able to detect and use to document almost their every movement, so to speak.
There's a great book by the historian Stephen Ambrose on the Lewis & Clark expedition. He mentions the use of mercury. He says they tended to use mercury to treat a whole variety of ailments. Mostly because they had nothing else to use. They also had many skin problems during the journey from not eating enough vegetables.
> More than a few of the men did end up needing treatment for syphilis, either for pre-existing problems or for ones picked up along the way from friendly Native American women.
This struck me as odd. "What? How did syphilis get to this part of the Americas already?"
Apparently syphilis was already in the Americas prior to European contact. Two schools of thought are that either Europeans already had syphilis but mistook the diverse symptoms for other diseases, or that Columbus and crew brought it back.
The part that stuck out to me was “friendly”. A subtle insertion of language that at best alludes to some early 19th century frolicking, and at worst rewrites a history of sexual violence.
In a fairly objective accounting of historical science (is that a term?), I’d like to see more evidence when suggesting cultural behavior, or just leave the descriptive language out and let the reader interpret.
I don't know if "Offbeat Oregon" is actually an appropriate venue for "objective accounting of historical science" (never been written before per google, but I'm cool with it).
Not sure how accurate it was, but back in history class in school, syphillis was always used as an example of a disease that was brought to Europe from the Americas (as a converse to smallpox being brought over from Europe). We were told these were part of the so-called "Columbian exchange": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
I've read that the expedition members left campsite selection to their Native guide. She wanted to camp where her herbs were plentiful. She (and her son) certainly ate more than meat. If the rest had seen fit to follow her example they could have avoided many health issues including vitamin deficiency.
I still don't quite understand how their diet could have been this troublesome... frankly, when I backpack I have almost the opposite problem, as walking gets me going. I'm just an amateur woodsman, but when I'm in the woods I eat a variety of berries, greens, mushrooms, etc - one would think their native contacts and guides would have been a source for information if they didn't have this knowledge for themselves, IE: why was their diet quite so high in meat?
Separately - my understanding is that there were many native groups worldwide that ate a meat-heavy diet, so when we hear about native Alaskans (for example) eating an almost exclusive meat diet, why weren't they having those same issues? Maybe fish / whale / seal vs. bison and deer is the problem?
> one would think their native contacts and guides would have been a source for information if they didn't have this knowledge for themselves, IE: why was their diet quite so high in meat?
They did eat plenty of local plants and likely would have starved without crops shared by local populations [1]. However, they were a large group with prodigious caloric requirements. The corps needed an epic amount of food -- roughly one buffalo worth of meat every 24 hours, likely in addition to foraging. (Buffalo, if you haven't seen any, are huge. Apparently the equivalent of 4 deer, or 9 lbs of meat per person.)
> Separately - my understanding is that there were many native groups worldwide that ate a meat-heavy diet, so when we hear about native Alaskans (for example) eating an almost exclusive meat diet, why weren't they having those same issues? Maybe fish / whale / seal vs. bison and deer is the problem?
Chronic dehydration likely caused by a combination of insufficient water intake, excessive exertion, and prolonged periods of high sodium diets (their emergency rations were, essentially, boullion and jerky).
In a healthy person, constipation is almost always ultimately an issue of under hydration. Fiber can help, because it pulls water in the digestive tract, but the best solution is staying well-hydrated. Hard to do when you're 30 men eating jerky and working so hard that the camp eats an entire buffalo each day.
I have eaten a zero-fiber diet for over a year (I ate 0 calories from any plant-based food source for all of 2021 -- beef, eggs, fish, and dairy was all I ate).
The one indisputable effect of a zero fiber diet is less frequent, smaller, and much "easier" bowel movements.
The idea that not having fiber in your diet leads to constipation can be completely disproven by anyone who is willing to try eating a zero-fiber diet for a few weeks.
The more I think about it, the more annoyed I get at this completely unsupported assumption, taken as OBVIOUS, that eating only meat leads to constipation. Not only does eating only meat lead to the smoothest bowel movements you've ever experienced, but it also dramatically improves musculature, skin & hair, mood, sleep, and overall physical fitness. Incidentally, it is impossible to get diabetes on a meat-only diet. In fact, we evolved on a meat-only diet for hundreds of thousands of years (with a berry here and there).
Calling it a berry here or there seems to be downplaying ancient hominid diets. We lost the ability to produce our own vitamin C quite early on due to our subsistance on fruits, nuts, and vegetables foraged from the surrounding land. Hunting is a high-stakes calorie game, which foraging supports.
Anyone eating a diet mainly of meat they have hunted will have more than enough vitamins from the meat. Particularly the organs, particularly the liver.
The entire old-world primate order lost vitamin C synthesis, and that common ancestor was arboreal and a foot tall. Our genus has primarily subsisted on hunted meat for the entire period between adopting bipedalism and getting forced into growing crops (if you like this stuff, Against The Grain is a great read).
You also, presumably, have ready access to limitless quantities of water, a mild exercise routine, and don't go prolonged periods on an extremely high sodium diet.
The root cause of constipation during an epic is almost always a prolonged period of mild to moderate dehydration. This can be caused by a lack of sufficient water, excessive exertion, excessive heat, excessive sodium intake, or most often all three in combination.
People often become very dehydrated on long epics even in places with limitless water, eg rivers or snow-covered mountains. This is especially true in colder weather. I have rendered aid to dehydrated parties on snow-covered backpacking routes much more often than eg on the side of walls or in deserts. In the latter situations you know that water is precious and your body wants to hydrate. In the cold the mind doesn't want to hydrate and water doesn't seem so precious.
Fiber always helps with constipation when your body is trying to preserve water because fiber pulls water into your digestive tract -- water which would otherwise be distributed in other ways by your body. If you are sufficiently hydrated then fiber often isn't necessary for healthy digestion.
Do you ever go weeks at a time on 4000 calories of beef bouillon and horse jerky, a gallon or less of water, and 8 hours of mild to heavy exertion? When you do eat fresh meat, do you eat 9 pounds of steak each day? If not, then your definition of "meat-heavy diet" isn't the same as the L&C definition of "meat-heavy diet".
If you ever find yourself in adverse conditions for prolonged periods -- in the alpine, high desert, or a big wall -- I highly recommend incorporating fiber into your rations. Particularly in the desert or on a wall, where staying hydrated is difficult because water is heavy.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadhttps://www.memoriesoftheprairie.com/blog/2018/11/30/how-lax...
Funny, I've just played through Oregon trail game on a Nintendo DS, recognized many place names.
The fact that they spent nearly 3 years traveling in the wilderness so far from the civilization they knew / into a fair amount of unknown is fascinating to me. Something you can't really do anymore.
Their reliance on laxatives is fairly amusing / interesting. Granted, would maybe not include that in a movie...
The "little ice age" after ~1500 is suspected to have been caused by the pulse of reforestation, and thus dip in carbon dioxide, occasioned by the disappearance of the long-time stewards of open range land.
In the 14th century, a very large expedition west from Africa is documented, with likelihood part of it reached South America. (One ship was separated and returned, reporting fresh water out of sight of land, suggestive of Amazon outflow.) There is ecological evidence of pre-Columbian disruption in Amazonia thereafter.
Speak for yourself, this was Chris Farley's last movie:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_Heroes
People seem to do this sort of thing pretty often in the Arctic. There's a lot more empty space than some people think.
> People seem to do this sort of thing pretty often in the Arctic.
The arctic is a different beast. It is impossible to survive for long in the arctic without either a supply chain or substantial reserves, and expeditions can last for at most a season.
However, the United States has a lot more empty public land than people seem to realize. Even in the densely populated Northeast, you can walk into the White Mountains or Adirondacks without a map, leave the trail, and probably spend years exploring in a mostly self-sufficient manner. Especially if you commit to turning back whenever you encounter people or trails. And that's to say nothing of the west or the great deserts.
Just because a map exists and trails are cut doesn't mean you have to acknowledge their existence. Remember: Lewis and Clark, for the most part, were traversing already inhabited land.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5360318/
We have Lewiston, ID and Clarkston, WA is just across the river. Tons of references to them around here too.
Also, The Mullan trail came through here...so we have a lot of stuff named after that expedition
As well as the French trappers and Jesuit priests...
I was just thinking that this area also seems to have a bunch of references to Lewis and Clark.
If you read the actual journals, two things stick out. First, the expedition was mostly boring. Second, the fact that the west was populated is difficult to miss. The expedition was almost more about establishing trade and diplomatic relations with existing civilizations than about discovering and charting virgin lands.
I wonder if one reason that L&C aren't studied more widely is that the happy version of the story is mostly boring ("we made a map and documented fauna") and the more complex/detailed/interesting version of the story makes abundantly clear the extraordinary scope of the Manifest Destiny genocide.
It's also true that civilized is used as a term of praise, and uncivilized is really only used as a term of disparagement, but these are connotations, and not ones I intend here.
Maybe "settlements" don't count as cities; the whole thing is a bit pedantic to me. But, in any case, "culture" is too weak a term for the complex social systems, political systems, and living patterns that existed during the time of L&C.
In a virtual kind of way, you can do this in Minecraft.
I play on a private server with a group of seasoned high tech types, and we have a tendency to explore very far from civilization (as it were). It’s a dangerous process fraught with peril, but if you can get back to civilization with the maps you make along the way, there is great benefit to the other players.
It is worth doing, but start small.
https://www.amazon.com/Undaunted-Courage-Meriwether-Jefferso...
This struck me as odd. "What? How did syphilis get to this part of the Americas already?"
Apparently syphilis was already in the Americas prior to European contact. Two schools of thought are that either Europeans already had syphilis but mistook the diverse symptoms for other diseases, or that Columbus and crew brought it back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis
In a fairly objective accounting of historical science (is that a term?), I’d like to see more evidence when suggesting cultural behavior, or just leave the descriptive language out and let the reader interpret.
Maybe not: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/lewis-c...
And entries from the journal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_(explorer)#York_and_Nativ...
https://www.themeateater.com/conservation/anthropology/bar-r...
Though I do wonder how many "offered wives" were slaves of the tribe. We know that Sacagewea was a slave who was sold as a wife to a French trapper.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/lewis-c....
Separately - my understanding is that there were many native groups worldwide that ate a meat-heavy diet, so when we hear about native Alaskans (for example) eating an almost exclusive meat diet, why weren't they having those same issues? Maybe fish / whale / seal vs. bison and deer is the problem?
They did eat plenty of local plants and likely would have starved without crops shared by local populations [1]. However, they were a large group with prodigious caloric requirements. The corps needed an epic amount of food -- roughly one buffalo worth of meat every 24 hours, likely in addition to foraging. (Buffalo, if you haven't seen any, are huge. Apparently the equivalent of 4 deer, or 9 lbs of meat per person.)
> Separately - my understanding is that there were many native groups worldwide that ate a meat-heavy diet, so when we hear about native Alaskans (for example) eating an almost exclusive meat diet, why weren't they having those same issues? Maybe fish / whale / seal vs. bison and deer is the problem?
Chronic dehydration likely caused by a combination of insufficient water intake, excessive exertion, and prolonged periods of high sodium diets (their emergency rations were, essentially, boullion and jerky).
In a healthy person, constipation is almost always ultimately an issue of under hydration. Fiber can help, because it pulls water in the digestive tract, but the best solution is staying well-hydrated. Hard to do when you're 30 men eating jerky and working so hard that the camp eats an entire buffalo each day.
--
[1] https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/what-lewis-and-...
The one indisputable effect of a zero fiber diet is less frequent, smaller, and much "easier" bowel movements.
The idea that not having fiber in your diet leads to constipation can be completely disproven by anyone who is willing to try eating a zero-fiber diet for a few weeks.
The entire old-world primate order lost vitamin C synthesis, and that common ancestor was arboreal and a foot tall. Our genus has primarily subsisted on hunted meat for the entire period between adopting bipedalism and getting forced into growing crops (if you like this stuff, Against The Grain is a great read).
The root cause of constipation during an epic is almost always a prolonged period of mild to moderate dehydration. This can be caused by a lack of sufficient water, excessive exertion, excessive heat, excessive sodium intake, or most often all three in combination.
People often become very dehydrated on long epics even in places with limitless water, eg rivers or snow-covered mountains. This is especially true in colder weather. I have rendered aid to dehydrated parties on snow-covered backpacking routes much more often than eg on the side of walls or in deserts. In the latter situations you know that water is precious and your body wants to hydrate. In the cold the mind doesn't want to hydrate and water doesn't seem so precious.
Fiber always helps with constipation when your body is trying to preserve water because fiber pulls water into your digestive tract -- water which would otherwise be distributed in other ways by your body. If you are sufficiently hydrated then fiber often isn't necessary for healthy digestion.
Do you ever go weeks at a time on 4000 calories of beef bouillon and horse jerky, a gallon or less of water, and 8 hours of mild to heavy exertion? When you do eat fresh meat, do you eat 9 pounds of steak each day? If not, then your definition of "meat-heavy diet" isn't the same as the L&C definition of "meat-heavy diet".
If you ever find yourself in adverse conditions for prolonged periods -- in the alpine, high desert, or a big wall -- I highly recommend incorporating fiber into your rations. Particularly in the desert or on a wall, where staying hydrated is difficult because water is heavy.