Forgotten Explorers of America / Pt 2
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Concept
snow was waist deep on a man standing, chest deep on a mule carrying a pack
That’s extremely deep snow—so deep that even standing is hard, and carrying weight makes it worse. Cars in this kind of snow can lose traction and get bogged down fast.
Concept
Temperature dropped to 20, 30, 40 below zero
They’re describing temperatures far below freezing. In a car, that kind of cold can make the battery weaker, the engine harder to start, and everything sluggish.
Concept
mules could not move through the drifts
The wind piled snow into drifts that were too deep to push through. A vehicle would face the same problem: once the tires are buried or traction is gone, it can’t move.
Concept
mutiny
Mutiny means people in the military refuse to obey their commander. In this story, it’s the accusation that led to the court martial.
Term
Gazette
A “gazette” is a kind of publication—like a local newspaper or official notices. The conversation is correcting the word because they actually mean something related to maps/places.
Concept
offline maps
Offline maps are maps you save to your phone before you go. That way, you can still navigate even if you don’t have cell signal.
Concept
verified and rated
“Verified and rated” means someone checked the trail and judged how hard it is. It helps you pick trails that fit your comfort level and vehicle.
Concept
public and private land boundaries
Some trails cross public land, and some cross private land. If you don’t know which is which, you might accidentally go somewhere you’re not allowed to.
Term
Pullman porter
A Pullman porter was a worker employed on Pullman sleeping cars, responsible for passenger service such as luggage handling and tending to guests. The term is important historically because the job was closely tied to post–Civil War labor arrangements and racial discrimination.
Concept
Pullman sleeping cars
A Pullman sleeping car is a train car made for long trips where people can sleep. It was considered nicer than regular train seating, and it needed staff to run it.
Concept
George Pullman
George Pullman was the entrepreneur behind the Pullman Company and the development of Pullman sleeping cars for passenger rail. In the segment, he’s described as creating the porter job and hiring practices that were explicitly racist.
Concept
provenance
Provenance just means the car’s “paper trail.” It’s the story you can prove with receipts, photos, and records, not just what someone says.
Company
The Common Gear
The Common Gear is a website/app that helps you keep all your car paperwork in one place online. Instead of losing receipts in boxes, you can upload everything and search it later.
Concept
digitize everything
Digitize everything means taking your paper receipts and photos and turning them into digital files. Then you can find them quickly instead of digging through binders.
Concept
car's entire digital legacy
This refers to keeping a complete, searchable record of a car’s history—maintenance, photos, receipts, and other documents—in a digital format. For enthusiasts, it reduces the hassle of tracking paperwork and can support resale value.
Concept
adds value when you go to sell your car
They’re saying that when you sell a car, having good records can help you get more money. Buyers trust the car more when they can see what’s been done.
Company
Nokian Tires
Nokian Tires is a tire brand from Finland. They’re known for making tires that work well in cold weather, and they also build newer tech tires for different road conditions.
Term
winter tire
Winter tires are made to grip the road better when it’s cold. They use special rubber and tread so you get more control in snow or icy weather.
Term
double action stud technology
This is a tire feature that helps the metal studs “come alive” when it gets cold. The idea is better grip in winter without having studs active all the time.
Term
all season tire
An all-season tire is built to handle a mix of weather through the year. It’s a compromise—good for many conditions, but not as specialized as winter tires for heavy snow or ice.
Term
55,000 mile warranty
This means the tire comes with a promise from the manufacturer for up to 55,000 miles. If the tire wears out or fails in a covered way, you may be eligible for replacement based on the warranty rules.
Term
pothole protection
Pothole protection is coverage that helps if you hit a pothole and damage your tire. The idea is that the company will replace the tire if the damage is too severe to fix.
Concept
barometric pressure
Barometric pressure is basically how heavy the air is pressing down. Weather systems can make that “air pressure” go up or down, which helps predict what the weather will do next.
Term
Patagonia parkas
Patagonia makes winter jackets. A parka is a warm coat meant for very cold, windy weather, which helps keep you from getting too cold.
Term
Gore-Tex
Gore-Tex is a type of jacket material that keeps water out but still lets your body moisture escape. That matters in freezing weather because wet clothing can make you lose heat fast.
Concept
supply ship
A supply ship is a vessel tasked with delivering food, fuel, and other necessities to a remote expedition or settlement. The segment emphasizes that the expedition’s survival depended on the supply ship arriving on time.
Concept
contingency plan
A contingency plan is a backup plan for when the main plan fails. Here, they had a “Plan B” location for where supplies should go if they couldn’t reach the original destination.
Concept
ship crushed by ice
When sea ice gets packed and moves, it can squeeze a ship’s hull like a vice. That kind of damage can be so severe that the ship can’t just keep going normally.
Concept
rations
Rations are set amounts of food meant to last for a certain number of days. In survival situations, planning rations is crucial so everyone can make it until help arrives.
Concept
court martial
A court martial is like a formal court for military personnel. It’s used to decide whether someone is responsible for something that went wrong while on duty.
Concept
emergency cache
An emergency cache is a small stash of supplies left somewhere in advance. The idea is that if something goes wrong, people can grab it and survive.
Concept
frostbite
Frostbite is when skin and deeper tissue freeze because it’s too cold. If it isn’t treated quickly, the damaged parts can die and sometimes have to be removed.
LIVE
He sat there holding his companion as the cold came in through his own clothes, while
Rice slowly lost consciousness.
Oh, that's tough.
George Rice died in Frederick's arms that evening.
Quote, I stooped and kissed the cheek of my dead companion, and left him there for the
wild winds of the arctic to sweep over.
Then Frederick got up.
He wanted to die.
He said so later, but he didn't.
He saved Rice's food ration because the men at camp needed it more than the dead man did.
He walked to their old camp at Eskima Point for shelter for the night, and then he turned
around, walked back to where Rice lay, and buried him in the ice and snow.
Twelve miles out of his way, a five-foot-two man who weighed almost nothing, walking twelve
miles through the arctic to bury a friend because leaving him unburied was not something
he could do.
Then he walked back to Camp Clay.
Hey guys, welcome to Overcrest.
I'm Chris and I'm Jake.
We've got part two of our American Explorer series, The Forgotten Ones.
I've got some really great feedback on the previous one.
I've been reaching out to some experts in the field to talk to them about the psychology
and everything of this.
So I've been kind of working that in as a part three, as a part three for that.
I'm excited.
Okay.
I also just noticed how long your notes document is.
Like I did a little research about these people.
This is...
This is serious.
Sit down.
And we're saving the best for last, truly the best story for last.
And what I've discovered is, yeah, well of the six, in my opinion, this one is the most
harrowing, is the one that's at the end of this episode.
So stick around.
I'm excited.
I think one thing I've noticed is how many tangents you can go on when you start digging
into these people.
You know, I'm like digging in and all of a sudden you see this name, you're like, oh,
I recognize that name.
And then you go off down this thing.
And now I own a book about like the worst possible, like all these different books that
I've bought.
I've bought like 12 books in the last three weeks, kind of doing these episodes and skimming
through and reading.
And oh, what about that guy?
Oh, I've seen that name before.
What's that?
Oh, my gosh, that guy led hundreds of Navajo to their death, but he's celebrated as a
hero.
Why?
And you start kind of like going into these rabbit holes.
So I, there's, there's, I tried to keep the rabbit hole into a minimum and stick to
the core story.
Oh boy.
Okay.
But please feel free to chat with me.
But it sounds like you're well informed.
So more informed than I was before, more, more informed than I was before.
And yes, exactly.
Exactly.
Which is, what are the reasons why I do this?
You know, it's, it's kind of interesting because this is a little off topic, you know,
as a, as a car podcast, right?
But the way I feel about it is if our car, if our audience, our core audience, if I'm
interested in it, you guys will be interested in it.
So that's why I'm going kind of off the rails here.
That's why we did the train one and the, and the Lockheed Martin one and stuff like that
is, it's a little off the beaten path for us, literally.
And yeah, I hope you guys, hope you guys enjoy it.
We got three, three people this, well, three, a little mix of people and the, all, all three
of these stories are very, very different.
Okay.
So these are very, very different stories and one of them is similar to last week and
two are very different than last week.
All right.
Jacob.
Let's go.
Let's delve right in.
It is the winter of 1848.
So quite a bit in the future compared to some of the ones that we did last time, 35 men
in a hundred and 20 mules are climbing into this.
Jake, are mules and horses related?
I mean, obviously they're related.
How closely related is the product of a horse bred with a donkey?
I do believe.
Okay, so they're like, but they're sterile.
So like, you can't just breed mules, you know what I mean?
Like only be made from a horse and a donkey.
What about miniature ponies?
Where those come from?
Those, I believe, are just like any dog breed that they made into a miniature where they
just keep making the runs of the litters and then just keeping them smaller.
That's my understanding.
Got it.
Okay.
All right.
So we've, we're one sentence in, and we're very off the rails.
All right.
We got 35 men in 120 mules climbing the San Juan Mountains of Southern Colorado.
This is kind of like, I think there is some gold rush stuff here, a lot of silver actually
in this area.
Mules fun fact are used for this type of expedition because they are good, not only like horses
are long distance, right?
And they can carry stuff, but not as much mules are great because you have the best of both
worlds.
Like I said, with a donkey, you can carry stuff the more compact.
It's basically me, Chris.
I'm like, I was going to say, right?
You are, you are my favorite donkey.
You're, you're, you're, your center of gravity is low.
So it's, it's December, the snow is already deep and getting deeper.
Where is this?
This is the San Juan Mountains, Southern Colorado.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Not good.
Yeah.
So they're in Rockies basically.
Every trapper and mountain man at Brent Bents Fort told these men not to go.
The old man, there was a guide called old Bill Williams, uh, particularly enough.
And he said the passes might still be open.
He was wrong.
He was lying or he was lying and the men following him into these mountains were about to find
out which of those were true.
The man who led them all there was John C. Fremont.
Now, the funny thing about Fremont, for anything
about John C. Fremont is his name is actually Fremen or Fremont.
He was born, uh, his, uh, his mom was like Virginia society and her dad was a penniless
French refugee named Fremont.
So the accent and the T are like fake.
So everywhere you look in the country, like Fremont, California is all, it's all not real.
So it's funny you bring up like his upbringing.
He was actually the bastard son of this immigrant school teacher, right?
And the youngest daughter of, like you said, this socially prominent Virginia planter.
However, so she, the other thing in this time period is there are massive age gaps in marriages.
That's like a theme all over the place.
So which way was like both ways.
He, she, the mom, Anne was 17 and was married to a 60 year old dude.
It was also like a hot pollutant, sanitary or something down there and like, like this
is like a marriage of bureaucracy, right?
Yeah, basically.
Yeah.
Right.
Because the hit her father.
It was like a well to do.
And so married her off to like the senator dude.
And then the ironically, the her 60 year old husband then hired this tutor, John, to like
tutor her on the ways of the world.
And then they had John Jr.
So that was our painless refugee there, which is, I think they, yeah, it's just a bizarre
ridiculous story.
So that's John and he then married Jesse, who I think we're going to mention later
in the story as wife.
And they were also not as bad of a age difference, but I think she was then 16 and he was like
35.
And I don't think you get into it in this too.
But so what's interesting there is Jesse, her father was also a prominent, I think senator
or had some type of pole and he was in the military and basically when they were going
to like the father, I'm in love, I'm going to marry this man, right?
And then all of a sudden, Oh, oddly enough, Chris, he gets orders to deploy.
Huh.
Interesting timing.
Huh.
I wonder how that happened.
Good bye.
So anyways, there's there's a lot of interesting history.
On his way out into these mountains, he was just 35 years old.
Six months earlier, he had been court-martialed by the United States Army for mutiny, convicted
of disobedience and misconduct.
President of the United States pardoned him and offered to reinstate his commission.
Vermont refused it.
He resigned instead.
Do we know what happened there?
Yeah, we'll get there.
Okay.
A man like that does not take a pardon.
He takes it personally.
And the expedition in the San Juan's in the dead of winter was his answer.
He would prove a central railroad to the Pacific was possible even in winter, even through
the worst mountains in the West.
He would do it with private money and no government help.
And we came out the other side.
Every man who voted to convict him would have to shut his mouth.
That was the plan.
Mm hmm.
I like it.
By the second week, the mules started dying.
Not one or two dozens.
How many did they have?
What, was it 28 or something?
35?
They had 35 mules?
Quite a few.
Yeah, quite a few.
But you got to have provisions.
The snow was waist deep on a man standing, chest deep on a mule carrying a pack.
Temperature dropped to 20, 30, 40 below zero.
Oh!
The mules could not move through the drifts.
Couldn't find footing on the frozen slopes, and one by one, they just stopped.
You could hear them breathing, this low wet rasp, there's not the nostrils crusted with
ice.
They would stand there trembling until their legs gave out, and then they'd sink into
the snow and die.
The men stripped what they could off the dead animals and kept climbing.
The cold at that altitude is not something you walk through, gets inside your chest and
stays there.
As you know, Jake, being in Minnesota when it's negative 20, every breath burns.
Yeah, literally.
Good old Bill Williams couldn't find the pass.
He led them into a drainage that dead ended against a wall of snow-covered rock.
So they retreated and tried another.
Same thing.
The ridge line that was supposed to open up into a gentle saddle was buried under 10
to 15 feet of snow, and there was no way through it.
Vermont refused to turn back.
For days they pushed further into the range, burning daylight and muscle and food, trying
to force a route that did not exist.
The men started eating the mules that had frozen on the trail behind them, hacking at
the carcasses with hatchets because the meat was already as hard as wood.
Christmas came and went on the side of a frozen mountain.
The men huddled around fires that could barely keep lit, burning green timber that popped
and hissed and put out more smoke than heat.
That smoke hung in still in the air and stung their eyes shut while frostbite took fingers
and toes.
One by one, the men who could still walk started to slow down.
Their eyes went hollow and their speech got strange.
Some of them stopped talking altogether.
They stopped asking about the route and started talking about their families.
Benjamin Kern, the expedition's doctor, wrote in his diary,
We lived in a camp fluctuating between hope and despair.
A raven floating through the cold air gave the music of its horse notes a perfect addition
to camp dismal.
Blankets, coats, and one's hair froze indiscriminately together.
Imagine having all your clothes just freeze to your body.
It's so cold.
That means you're sweating and wet, too, by the way, which is not good.
Yeah, just dampen.
Vermont finally did what he should have done two weeks earlier.
He split the party, sending a group of four men ahead on foot, including old Bill Williams,
down the mountain toward the nearest settlement to bring back help and provisions.
Then he pulled the rest of the party back to his sheltered camp and waited.
The four men staggered out of the mountains, starving,
frostbitten, and barely alive.
One of them was so far gone he could not stand.
They made it to a small settlement along the Rio Grande and found a man with a few
mules willing to go back up and get the others.
Back up on the mountain, the men were still dying.
Ten of Vermont's 35 did not come down.
They froze to death in the San Juan's one at a time over the course of weeks.
Some just stopped walking, sat down in the snow, and didn't get up.
Others crawled into their blankets and never came out.
The stronger groups of men pushed ahead while the weaker ones fell behind.
As his companions dropped, Edward Curran wrote,
I came to look on death with as little sympathy as I would have done had they been dogs.
It will be my turn soon.
Fellow, he has but a few hours' start of me.
He was a good man.
And that was about all the eulogy you got was.
Now he's a good man.
There were whispers afterward, quiet ones, about whether the survivors had eaten the dead.
The diaries are careful in their language.
They don't say it, but they don't deny it either.
One letter written by Edward Curran immediately after a disaster alluded to, quote,
unlawful food.
Oh, yeah, that's definitely cannibalism.
Yeah.
Another account describes men discussing cannibalism even as a companion lay dying beside them.
Oh, yeah.
Justin was voted down and the group planned to wait three days before considering so horrible
an alternative.
Neither of the bodies in question there were ever found.
From it, Vermont got himself out because of course he did.
He made it to Taos, rested, regrouped and continued on to California.
He wrote to Jesse, his wife, and the letter is one of the saddest things in this whole story.
Oh boy.
I say briefly, my dear Jesse, because now I am unwilling to force myself to dwell upon
particulars.
I wish for a time to shut out these things from my mind, to leave this country in all thoughts
and all things connected with recent events, which has been so signally disastrous as absolutely
to astonish me with a persistence of misfortune, which no precaution has been adequate on my part
to avert.
And I find that interesting.
That's what he takes from this.
It happened to him, not grief, not guilt, 10 men dead, and the astonishment, an astonishment
that misfortune could happen to him.
Doesn't mention it.
It is.
It is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These guys are like, how could this happen to me?
He doesn't talk about the people that died or what happened or anything like that.
It reads kind of like a man who still cannot believe the world treated him so unfairly.
E.M.
Kern, writing to his wife, Mary from house, Edward Kern, faced it more directly.
You will think it's strange.
I have no doubt when you learn of our reimagined or a remaining here instead of going on with
Vermont, but our tail is soon told that will give you an idea of why and where for in the
first place.
He has broken faith with all of us.
He left us with no good wishes.
Vermont ended up blaming the guide, Kit Carson, which is like, speak of rabbit holes, Kit
Carson is rabbit hole.
He's a legendary frontiersman.
It's not any relation to Carson City, is it?
I don't, I don't know.
I don't know.
I bet they're, I wouldn't be surprised, I'll say.
Yeah.
He was, he was there when, when everybody came back.
Kit Carson, who had guided Vermont's earlier expeditions and new old Bill Williams personally
offered this dark assessment.
Quote, in starving times, no man ever walked in front of old Bill Williams.
Why?
Jacob.
What?
In starving times, no man ever walked in front of Bill Williams.
You don't turn your back on this guy.
He's going to eat you.
Yeah, he's going to eat you.
Like if you're still walking, like you're probably fine, right?
I, I don't know.
Kit Carson said don't walk in front of this guy if you're starving.
Okay.
I guess I won't.
Don't.
Vermont's own verdict written later placed the blame squarely on Williams and he took
none of the blame himself.
The error of our journey was committed in engaging this man.
He proved never to have in the least known or entirely to have forgotten the whole region
of country through which we were to pass.
Now there's like, there's conjecture that maybe old Bill Williams was sabotaging them
and he was going to steal from them and all this other stuff, but it all seems very, very unlikely.
Because now this was, this was Fremont's expedition.
Yes.
Yes.
The guy just didn't want to take any responsibility at all.
In 1842, his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri,
arranged for Fremont to lead his first Westburn expedition.
Kit Carson was his guys.
We're coming back in time here a little bit to try and get a little bit of foundation.
It was a flashback.
We'll call it.
The expedition there was a success by every measure,
but the thing that made Fremont famous wasn't the maps or the data.
It was his report.
Jesse Benton Fremont was 17 years old when she sat down with her husband's
rough field notes and turned them into a sensation.
Think about what that means.
She's a teenager married to a man.
She barely knows sitting a house in Washington with a stack of scrawled observations.
And she has to turn it into something that makes the United States Senate give a shit about Oregon.
She had the education and he did not.
She had a feel for language and what the American public wanted to hear about the West.
The report she wrote read like an adventure novel that happened to be true.
Mountains and rivers and danger and wide open beauty.
All of it described in prose that made you want to see it for yourself.
So the Senate ordered 10,000 copies to be printed.
It's nice when your dad's in the Senate, right?
Yeah.
A little bit of a little bit of nepotism there.
A little bit, yeah.
Newspapers reprinted sections, families who had never left the eastern seaboard reddit
and started packing wagons.
Is that what this was for?
Like that is why this like the government wanted to distribute this is to basically.
Other than the fact that this was his daughter's book, yes.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm sure that was the they wanted everybody to go west.
Start seizing that land and start developing the land.
Yep.
To pay taxes.
His second expedition crossed the Sierra Nevada in winter and that crossing nearly killed all of them.
Again, the passes were buried and the snow was so deep the mule sank through the crust again
and could not be pulled out again.
They just thrashed in the white until they went still again.
The men ate the men ate horse and mule to stay alive, cutting it frozen and thawing it over fires
that took an hour to build in the wet wood again.
Some of them were snow blind.
It's like he didn't learn his lesson.
Yeah, apparently not at all.
Some of these men and I'm this is I this is another story that I just shortened up.
Some of them were snow blind, stumbling around with rags tied over their eyes.
They came down the western slope into California, half starved and hollow wide.
Jesse wrote it up.
The Senate printed 10,000 more copies.
He had a new nickname now, the Pathfinder.
This was the expedition that made Fremont believe the mountains would always let him through.
You already know what happened when they didn't.
A third expedition took him to California where the Mexican American War was starting.
Fremont inserted himself into the revolt, helped overthrow Mexican authority,
declared himself military governor and refused to step down when an actual general arrived
with orders from Washington.
Ah, this may be where the court martial comes in, Chris.
This was a national spectacle, by the way, national spectacle.
Yeah, newspapers covered it every day, every single day.
The jurisdictional fight turned into that court martial,
the most famous explorer in America charged with mutiny.
The verdict came down against him, but the president parted him.
And Fremont being Fremont refused the pardon.
He resigned his commission and walked out of the army.
Six months later, he was leading our friends, those 35 men,
into the San Juan Mountains in December with something to prove,
and no one left to stop him from proving it the wrong way.
This pattern repeated for the rest of his life.
Gold was found on his California property and he was instantly wealthy.
He ran for president in 1856 as the first Republican nominee
and he lost.
Lincoln gave him a civil war command and he issued an order
freeing the slaves of Missouri rebels without authorization
a full year before the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln asked him to walk it back and he refused.
So he was relieved of his command.
He got a second command, lost battles to Stonewall Jackson,
and asked to be relieved rather than serve under a general he considered beneath him.
Fremont could not tolerate anyone above him
and could not accept that his own judgment might be wrong.
It made him bold enough to cross the Sierra in winter
and stubborn enough to get those 10 men killed in the San Juan's.
The same quality, the same flaw.
After that war, he lost everything.
Bad investments, failed mining, the fortune was gone.
The family was living off of Jesse's writing.
She published books, articles, memoirs, anything they could get paid for.
The woman who had written her husband into fame at 17
spent the last decades of her life writing to keep them fed.
Fremont died in 1890 in a hotel room in New York City.
He was 77.
His grave?
Spark kill New York.
Not Washington or California, not Oregon.
Not in any of the places that bear his name.
And there are dozens of them.
Counties in four states, cities in California,
Nebraska, Michigan, New Hampshire, Fremont Peak, Fremont Past.
The man whose name is on half the map of the West died
in a rented room, nearly broke and almost completely forgotten.
I don't, I don't like him, Chris.
I don't like him.
He was surely deeply flawed, deeply narcissistic, deeply arrogant.
Right.
And also I would say deeply brave.
You know, it's with a little tinge of stupidity.
I was going to say some of that is.
I couldn't find much positive.
I couldn't find much, much positive.
And you know, history writes the, writes the books, right?
I mean, the guy did a lot of great things.
He discovered a lot of great things.
But was constantly dogged by the ghost of his own hubris.
Yes. 100%.
The Pathfinder.
The Pathfinder.
If you need to find a path.
Jake, can you call me the Pathfinder?
I do the overpass routes.
I know, I'm not going to find you.
The rally, the rally that we do, I am the Pathfinder.
I am the Pathfinder.
No, I was going to say, if you need to find a path.
Oh, by the way, before I, yeah, before I write the ad,
did you have you used my birthday gift to you?
Have you been using it on any?
I should, I should, I should go get it.
I should, I should try it out on the, Jake, it's not a Gazette.
Gazette is a small newspaper from a small town.
You were thinking of a Gazetteer.
That's the one.
Also a publication.
Yes.
But rather than that, you could just use Onyx, right?
That's, that's right.
It is actually the best app for navigating your next adventure
on XF road has over 750,000 miles of trails,
comprehensive offline maps you can explore without worrying
about cell service.
We know that these trails are actually verified and rated by
their guides that are trained and are actually certified
in telling you how rough the terrain is.
It has detailed information to discover tool,
help you find trails near you.
You can also, of course, look at public and private land
boundaries as well as who owns the land,
which is super, super interesting and helpful.
I use that when I'm scouting.
I use that all the time.
I'm like, Hey, who owns this cool thing?
Yeah.
There's a lot of times the places I want to go are,
you can't, it's like closed or abandoned.
Right.
So how do you find out who you can't just walk in and be like,
Hey, or that.
Yeah, it's great.
It's a great tool.
Yeah.
There's also tools like the route builder,
waypoint marking, real time updates, route sharing.
There's also the, what is it where you can basically have
pins of each other, people on your group.
So you can keep track of your, your adventure mates.
So, you know, you don't have to worry about being in front of
Bill, who's going to eat.
Yeah.
Because you can just keep track of them on the app.
Right.
And you can try it for free for seven days.
Annex, anti cannibalism since day one.
Sure.
Something like that.
That partner's, that partner's gone.
All right.
This story, Jake, is, and feel free.
I mean, I know we got some more partners so you can interrupt me
anytime and we can talk about the people that support this
podcast and it's important that you do too.
They believe in what we're doing and by proxy, you do what
you do.
Yeah.
All right.
And we, this one's, I think it's worth noting that, that we
only like run ads and partner with the companies that we
personally believe in and use.
Yes.
Yeah.
We've had recently some, some people reach out and we've
decided, maybe not a good fit.
Maybe, maybe not a good fit.
That's kind of what I was thinking too.
So boners are great, but yeah, not a good fit.
All right.
This one's, this one's completely different.
All right.
So just, you're going to tilt your head a little bit, but
just be patient with me.
Okay.
Okay.
In the evening, after a long and gritty day, mapping
rock formations in the Nevada desert, Clarence King would
retreat to his tent, change out of his dusty field clothes, and
emerge in silk stockings, polished shoes, and a
freshly pressed suit.
His valet had laid them out.
The geologists and surveyors in his party, men who had
been crawling through dirt, rocks and brush all day, would
look up from the campfire and see what one friend later
described as a bird of paradise rising from the sage brush.
What?
That.
This is on expedition?
Yep.
Yep.
Okay.
This is, he's a geologist, one of the most renowned.
That was Clarence King, the best geologist in the country, and
everybody knew it.
The most charming man in any room he entered.
A Yale man.
Look at that.
A Yale man, a mountaineer, a best-selling author.
Keep that picture up, Mrs. Producer.
I just wanted an observation we made here.
That's a vibe.
A mountaineer, a best-selling author, a fraud buster, and for 13
years, an African-American Pullman porter named James Todd, who went home
every night to a wife and five children in Brooklyn.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Hold on.
He's, he's, he's not a black dude from that photo.
King got to California in 1863.
Are we going to address this later?
Are we going to?
I'm so confused.
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
Yes, we will.
Yeah.
Okay, absolutely.
I'm so confused.
Okay.
King got to California in 1863 with his college friend, James Gardner, and
almost no field experience.
He talked his way out of the California Geological Survey without pay
and within weeks was climbing the peaks in the Sierra Nevada that nobody
had bothered to name yet.
He was 21 years old and he was volunteering to scramble up mountains for free
because he couldn't stand the idea of being anywhere else.
The climbing nearly killed him more than once.
On Mount Tindall, he found himself wedged between rock and glacier at 14,000 feet.
He wrote in his book,
We are now in a dangerous position
to fall into a crevice upon one side was to be wedged to death between rock and ice.
Corvoss, Chris.
I'm sorry.
Corvoss.
What do you want me to read it like?
I imagine a guy that's the looks like that.
I don't know.
I just you can't ever say crevice.
You have to always have to say Corvoss.
Corvoss.
Well, Corvoss, I guess that it would be a Corvoss.
I thought that was glaciers, but it's
fall into their crevice upon one side was to be wedged to death between rock and ice
to make a slip was to be shot down 500 feet and then hurled over the brink of a precipice
in the friendly seat, which this wedge gave me.
It's like one of the little things you sit in when you're hanging like the little chair.
Got it.
Yep.
I stopped to take wet and dry observations with the thermometer,
this being an absolute preventative of a scare and just to enjoy the view.
That was king.
The danger was the part he liked.
On Mount Shasta, he crossed a glacier field where the boulder shifted and sank under his feet as
he moved.
Whole sections of rock caved in behind him as he jumped from stone to stone.
He described it as the most dangerous kind of climbing he had ever seen.
He was 23.
By 25, he had talked Congress into funding the most ambitious geological survey in American
history, the geological exploration of the 40th parallel, which is the strip of land from
California border to Wyoming, mapped and documented in scientific detail across six years.
He made this pitch in person.
He's 25.
No credentials at all.
Walks into a room and convinced them to give him this project.
Who's he pitching it to some Congress?
Oh, Congress.
Like Congress.
Okay.
Congress.
Yeah, some room.
Okay.
Yeah.
Got it.
Oh, yeah.
Congress.
Yeah.
He pitched it in Congress and nobody else had ever tried to do this.
So I guess nobody else could ask.
So they said, sure.
What?
Let me ask you this.
What is the value of a geological survey?
Like having maps and saying like these are mountains and also like topography is good.
But like.
What are we looking at?
Geologists.
What is this?
A geologist I'm thinking is like, but these are sandstone rocks and there's a sedimentary
layer underneath this.
Like what is the value of that?
I think a geologic.
Well, mining, I think would be number one of potential mining.
I think it's pretty good to know the land of which your country exists in for a myriad of
reasons, both economical and social and defense.
I mean, what if there was a Ninian tribe out there with Kajillion people or something?
I mean, there's a lot of different reasons.
And that's not a geologist is what I'm saying.
No, a geological exploration is mining.
And what stones are there?
What is?
Yeah, that's that's I'm going to get a sense of that one.
I'm fairly certain.
Six years he was in the field.
Think about what that does to a man.
Six years, six years.
The Nevada desert in summer will cook you from above and below at the same time.
The sun hits the sand and the sand throws the heat back up.
And you walk through both of them all day long, taking measurements of rocks that nobody will
read about for years.
That's what I mean.
Yes, I takes a different kind of guy.
The grit gets into everything.
Your teeth, your eyes, creases of your hands and other creases, maybe elsewhere.
Yeah, yeah, probably.
At night, the temperature drops 40 degrees and you sit by a fire listening to coyotes
in the silence that comes after them when they too go to sleep.
The winters in Wyoming bury them.
The rattlesnakes in the Great Basin were constant and King loved it all.
He wrote about the mountains like a painter.
He published a book called Mount Neering in the Sierra Nevada as well.
He was still running the survey and it read like literature, not geology.
He wrote by far the grandest of all these ranges is the Sierra Nevada,
a long and massive uplift lying between the arid deserts of the Great Basin and the
California exuberance of grainfield and orchard.
It's eastern slope, a defiant wall of rock plunging abruptly down to the plain and the
western along grand sweep well watered and overgrown with cool, stately forests.
It's a crest, a line of sharp snowy peaks springing into the sky and catching the
alpine glow long after the sun has set for all the rest of America.
What is Alpine glow?
What is Alpine glow, first of all?
Alpine glow, I believe, is just like the haze that you get in mountains like sun setting.
Have you been like sunrise mountains?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of like that hazy glow, I believe.
I actually looked that up.
I've been sunrise in mountains with you, Chris.
Yeah, that's probably true.
That's true.
Anyways, Alpine glow, got it.
Henry Adams called King the best and brightest man of his generation.
Henry Adams is John Quincy Adams.
Thank you.
That John Adams.
It's an Alpine glow.
Yeah, see, that's right.
It's the sunrise.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Henry Adams was John Quincy Adams.
Yes, that one, the grandson called King the best and brightest man of his generation,
with talents immeasurably beyond any of his contemporaries.
They adored him.
So did everyone who met him.
He had the kind of confidence that put senators and cowboys equally at ease.
In 1872, while King was wrapping up the survey, a rumor swept through San Francisco and New York.
Someone had found diamonds in the American West.
Real diamonds, just lying there in the dirt.
Now, talk about rabbit holes and tangents.
It took every bit of my willpower to not dig deep into this.
You did it.
And we could.
We, a little, I'm going to gloss over this.
Okay.
But maybe we can talk about it for a Drivers Club episode.
I don't know.
Okay.
Two prospectors had shown up with a sack of stones and investors were losing their mind.
Tiffany's themselves had examined a sample and declared them genuine.
Millions of dollars begun to be raised.
King heard the details and something didn't sit right.
The location was supposed those guys, those guys come up to you with a handful of diamonds.
I don't know.
We'll say skeptical.
Yes.
King heard the details and something didn't sit right.
Those guys with diamonds come on.
We're raising millions.
If you're not watching the podcast, you should.
The location was supposedly in Northwest Colorado within the boundaries of his very own survey.
So yeah, this guy's geological surveys.
Jake, this is why you do surveys.
Okay.
He knew the terrain.
He'd mapped it.
Diamonds do not show up in that kind of rock.
He tracked down the supposed site and come across any diamonds, not a one.
He wrote out there with a few as men and started looking.
Sure enough, they found diamonds and rubies.
They found sapphires.
They found them sitting on top of ant hills and tucked into crevices in the rock,
which is not how any of those stones happen in nature.
What?
Someone had salted the site and planted the gems.
The whole thing was a fraud.
I like that.
Salted the site.
Salted them.
The hoax was perpetuated by Philip Arl and John Slack.
They bought uncut gems and diamonds and just scared them across.
Those two guys that we saw.
They kept most of the 600 grand that they collected in investment, ran away to Kentucky,
opened a bank, and then got shot and died from a business dispute.
Yeah, that tracks.
100% not surprised by that.
How did they get the money for all the stones in the first place?
That's a great question.
I resisted digging into this too much.
I don't know.
I'm sure they stole it.
Scheme.
Yeah, they they heisted something.
King went public with this.
The story hit newspapers and the great diamond hoax collapsed overnight.
Clarence King became a national hero at just 30 years old.
In 1879, President Hayes nominated King to be the first director of the United States
Geological Survey.
This guy's awesome.
He structured the agency, staffed it and set it scientific direction and then quit.
He handed the job to John Wesley Powell.
The subject of a future driving team exclusive that I'm going to put together for you guys.
And then he went into private mining.
He was convinced he could make a fortune.
He never did.
He was a great scientist and a terrible businessman.
And for the rest of his life, he borrowed money from his rich friends to stay afloat.
But the real story of Clarence King's life, the one nobody knew until he was dying,
started in 1887 in New York City.
He met a woman there named Ada Copeland.
She was 23.
She worked as a nursemaid for a wealthy family in Manhattan.
She had been born enslaved in Georgia in 1864 and came north to find work.
She was black.
King was white.
The toast of the New York City.
A man who dined with senators and slept in the finest clubs in the city.
He fell in love with her.
And in America-
I forgot the whole start of this story.
Yeah, the, okay, got it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And in the America of 1887, there was no version of that story that worked.
None.
Interracial marriage was legal, but socially would have been the end.
His career, his friendships, his social standing, gone.
All that gone.
His mother would have disowned him and his friends may have even walked away.
Some, but not all.
So Clarence King invented someone new.
Do you know what a, do you know what a Pullman porter is?
I, I know a porter is like they bring your luggage along.
Okay.
Do you know a Pullman, like the Pullman car on a train is like the luxury car on a train.
Got it.
Okay.
They were, so a Pullman porter is a black man who worked on the Pullman sleeping cars.
It's one of the most, if you were a black guy, this was the job.
It was the job.
The thing is, is the job was created by George Pullman after the civil war,
and he hired exclusively black men, former slaves.
And the reason is pretty openly racist.
He just assumed black men would be naturally a subservient
and that wealthy white men would be more comfortable working with them.
The porters were often called George by the passengers after George Pullman,
regardless of their actual names.
It's okay.
Okay.
But, but as a, but as, I mean, you got to keep in mind, this is not,
this is late 1800s, the civil war is still within the generation.
So this is, this is after, yeah.
So these are, this is a very good job.
Right.
Black man.
Okay.
I get it.
He said, so he told Ada his name was James Todd.
Yeah, there's a Pullman car.
Look at that thing.
So the woman he fell in love with, he also didn't tell her who he actually was.
No, he did not.
And he claimed that he was a black porter.
That's correct.
He said he was a black man of West Indian descent.
Was she blind?
It's, you said he works as a porter, I don't know, I explained why he was a way for a lot,
a long, for a long stretch and you're not wrong.
The absurdity of this should stop you cold.
Was blue-eyed, fair-skinned white man from Newport, Rhode Island,
standing in a parlor in New York City, telling a black woman from Georgia that he was a Pullman
porter.
She believed him.
The reason why?
In that time, if you said you were black, nobody's going to question it.
The assumption was always that someone might try to pass as white, never the other direction.
It was inconceivable that a white man would choose the line the wrong way.
Yeah, but like visually, was their black face involved?
I don't think so.
There's no pictures of him in black face or anything like that.
He said he was of West Indian descent, like a very light-skinned.
Yeah, apparently, light-skinned man.
Okay, okay, so when did this start in his career?
Pretty mid-career.
Yeah, this went on for a double life with his lovely wife, did they get married?
They married in September of 1888 in a quiet ceremony at her aunt's house.
King bought a home for them in Brooklyn.
He hired servants.
They had five children over the next nine years, and he wrote to her when he was away.
I can see your face every night when I lay my head on the pillow.
I think of you and dream of you.
And my first waking thought is of your dear face and your loving heart.
I like this guy, Chris.
I'm still perplexed, but I like this guy.
He's doing it for love in a society of would never tolerate.
So for 13 years, Clarence King walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and became a different person.
Think about this.
Think of the physical act of this.
You leave the Century Club in Manhattan after dinner with the Secretary of State.
You step out on the sidewalk.
All the gas lamps are lit.
You walk through the streets and onto the bridge,
and the wooden planking sounds under become different under your shoes than the cobblestone did.
The river is behind you black and white and somewhere in the middle of it in the dark
with the cables humming above you in the wind.
You stop being Clarence King.
By the time you reach the other side, you're James Todd.
You walk into a house where your children are sleeping and your wife is waiting and she has
no idea the man she married does not exist.
You do this every night when you're around for 13 years.
Imagine the weight of that.
The ordinary mundane discipline of lying to someone you love every single day,
knowing that if you stop, everything falls apart for both of you.
Why?
But like...
Love.
She...
Love and he had to keep up appearances.
If it's love, couldn't he at least in on it?
Couldn't she have at least known and been like,
oh, that's great, honey.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think there was a certain level...
Okay, so this comes from white guy from 2026, okay?
I think there was a certain level of segregation even on both sides.
I've watched like the Gilded Age and it's just very segregated.
She wouldn't have wanted that either because her entire culture would have ostracized her.
Just as much as it would.
Obviously, the repression kind of goes one way.
Yes, of course.
So like, I don't know, it just seems very bizarre.
He was probably scared.
He was scared that if...
And once you get down, the house of lies becomes quite large
and pulling something out of the foundation can sometimes...
That seems so exhausting.
The money was all constant problem.
He maintained two lives.
This was very expensive.
His mining investments failed one after another,
so he borrowed constantly from his friends who had no idea what the money was actually for.
He suffered from malaria, from depression.
The weight of the lie was physical.
Think about what it does to a man to perform two complete identities every day for years,
to remember which name to answer to, to monitor every word for a slip that ends everything.
To sit at a dinner with John Hay and Henry Adams,
two of the most perceptive men in America and maybe the world,
and know that one careless sentence about Brooklyn, about children,
about Ada could unravel the entire world.
The strain was not metaphorical.
It broke him.
So I think you also need to realize this wasn't just two identities.
This was two personas, right?
Like you have to talk different.
You have to carry yourself different in order to fit into that identity.
You'd have to fabricate stories.
Ada's going to be like, hey, where did you go on the train?
Yeah.
Where did you go?
What did you do?
Who did you meet?
How are people treating you?
How are your coworkers?
How can we never meet any of your friends?
In the mid 1890s, Clarence King was committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum in Upper Manhattan.
A private institution for wealthy patients, the kind of place where a man from a good family
could disappear for a while and come back with a story about rest and travel.
The man who scrambled up mountains at 21,
who had stood on the summit of peaks nobody had climbed,
who had mapped 1,000 miles of rock and exposed the greatest mining fraud in the country,
was now in a room he couldn't leave being treated for a mine that had come apart under
the weight of life he had built.
He had tried to be two people in the math, just caught up with him.
Then in night, go ahead, Jake.
I'm just curious now, like we assume looking back that he fabricated this for love, right?
Could it have been?
That's the common knowledge.
Okay, I'm just thinking like, okay, the fact that he went to, you know, the Sasane Asylum,
basically, like could it have been a form of schizophrenia?
You know what I mean?
Like was this actually a split personality thing or did it develop into it?
Can you like?
Well, schizophrenia would never be something that would be diagnosed at that time.
Well, that's what that's what I mean.
So like looking back, was it a multiple?
That's not what the common knowledge says, but I understand what you're saying.
It certainly seems like that could be the case.
Okay, continue.
So in 1901, he kissed it a goodbye for the very last time and left for Arizona for one reason.
Tuberculosis.
He knew what that meant.
He'd watch friends die of it.
The dry era was going to buy him some time, but it was not going to buy him a life.
Tuberculosis is pretty nasty, dude.
It's like, it's called consumption.
Because it basically eats you from the inside out and your lungs get covered in scars and
just work less and less and less until you're basically die.
I killed one out of four people in Europe at the time.
One out of four people died of tuberculosis.
It's a bacterial infection that wasn't cured until like the 40s when they came up with antibiotics for it.
He went to a Phoenix and checked into a boarding house and lay in bed,
felt himself drifting away.
Somewhere in those last weeks, lying in a room in the desert,
a thousand miles from the woman he loved, Clarence King made a decision.
He could take the secret to his grave and no one would ever know.
Ada would go on being Mrs. Todd.
The children would go on being the Todd children.
John Hay and Henry Adams would go on thinking they're a brilliant friend and
merely was merely eccentric and bad with money.
The lie was still airtight and was for 13 years and it would hold forever.
Instead, he picked up a pen.
The letter he wrote told Ada everything, his name, his race, his work, his world,
Clarence King, geologist, first director of the United States Geological Survey,
white man, Newport, Rhode Island, the man she had married, the man who had held her,
the man who had written those letters about her dear face on his pillow,
was someone she had never met.
Every night, he had come home to her across that bridge he'd been carrying
alive she couldn't even imagine.
Now dying, he put it on paper and sent it to her because he could not stand to
leave her without the truth, even though the truth was the cruelest thing he could ever give her.
Try to imagine for a moment Ada reading that letter alone.
The handwriting seems familiar, but the words are impossible.
It's, I don't know, man, it's pretty crazy.
All this, his entire world was undone.
Of course, everyone else is going to find about this as well.
He told her that his friend, John Gardner, would take care of her with $80,000 he had left in
a trust just for her.
John Hayes' friend, upon learning the truth after his death, called them, quote,
the brightest man of his generation with everything in his favor,
but blind luck hounded by disaster from his cradle.
Ada received checks that weren't from that trust for 30 years.
She assumed that they came from Gardner.
In 1933, at nearly 70 years old, she went to court to claim control of the money.
Only at trial did she learn the truth.
The checks had never come from Gardner.
They came from John Haye, his friend, then John Hayes' widow, then his son-in-law.
King's famous friends had been quietly supporting his secret family for three decades.
Wow.
Ada Copeland King lived to be 103 years old.
She outlived her husband by 63 years.
She was one of the last people in America who had been born into slavery.
She watched the civil rights movement unfold on television.
She saw Martin Luther King deliver the I Have a Dream speech.
She had spent her entire adult life married to a man who didn't exist,
raising children whose father had two names, receiving checks from people she'd never met.
Now, Clarence King's headstone is in Newport, Rhode Island, and has been knocked over years ago.
It lies in the grass with his name barely legible.
The inscription, I am the resurrection and the life, sayeth the Lord, is gone.
The man who mapped the West and lived two lives,
lies in a grave that looks about the same as our friend from episode one,
John Ledgerd, which is to say, forgotten.
What a life, man.
Wild.
What an absolute life.
Wild.
What a brilliant man that fell into this.
What happened to the trust, then, if the money wasn't coming from that?
I'm sure the trust ran out.
Did the lady live to be 103?
Yeah, good point.
Okay.
Trust runs out and then the checks start coming from everyone else.
Pretty soon, it's somebody's grand kid is still continuing the tradition of paying.
I'm pretty sure they wouldn't give her the money because they don't.
Oh, what, Mrs. Producer?
They wouldn't give her the money because they didn't believe that she was his wife.
Oh, the trust.
They wouldn't give her the money out of the trust.
Oh, I see.
But the friend stepped in is really cool because that was so socially unacceptable,
like you're talking about.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
What a story, you know.
Speaking of stories, Chris.
Stories obviously matter.
The information that we carry.
The story of her car also matters.
The receipts, the late night fixes, the rally miles, all of provenance.
But most of us have all that history and documentation scattered around everywhere,
whether it's in your club box, whether it's on your computer, whether it's God knows where.
That's where the common gear comes in.
It's a platform built by real car guys.
And it makes it possible to digitize everything, every record, every maintenance,
every photo, every receipt.
And it's all organized, all searchable, all in one place online.
It is basically your car's entire digital legacy right there.
If you have decades of paperwork, maybe a binder full of old records,
they have a white glove service as well.
They'll digitize it for you or on site.
You basically can hand them chaos and they hand you a complete car history.
It adds credibility and of course it adds value when you go to sell your car.
So go to thecommongear.com, make your free account and start building your car's digital legacy today.
I always think about one of my friend's dads was the guy that would go,
every time he goes to the gas station, he would even record filling up
and the mileage he got during that tank.
I know those records still exist somewhere in glove boxes.
And so it's like having all that data for a vehicle would be really, really cool.
So that's the common here.
Absolutely.
Why don't you tell us about Nokia and Tire as well?
I'm going to guess this next man would wish he had a vehicle with Nokia and Tire.
Yeah, Nokia and Tire of course is an amazing tire company out of Finland.
They have the actual invention.
They have the claim of inventing the winter tire.
And they also have invented the coolest new tire, the Hakopolita 01,
which is the world's first tire with what they're calling double action stud technology.
It allows the tires studs to automatically engage under colder temperatures.
But we're kind of beyond winter.
Thank God, it feels like spring here.
So you can also take a look at the surpass AS01,
which is a high performance all season tire made specifically for drivers
who want the most out of their tires without sacrificing capability when the roads get slick.
Tire comes with a 55,000 mile warranty, has Nokia and Tire's pothole protection.
So if you damage your tire beyond repair, Nokia will replace it for free.
And of course has all of the great hallmarks of Nokia and Tire's,
which is their durability, their quality and dependability.
So check it out at nokiantires.com.
All right.
Do you like that one, Chris?
I just made that up on the fly.
I do.
I did like that very much.
I'm thinking if my voice will survive, I've been on Zoom calls all day.
Oh boy.
Okay.
So we're going to get, we're going to give a shot.
Do I still sound okay?
I mean, here's the thing though, Chris.
We are at an hour.
We could save this one for another episode if you wanted.
I know you did tease that this was like the best one, right?
This is the best one.
Yeah.
Well, defined best.
I think I want to give it a shot.
I think I want to get a shot.
Okay.
I love our listeners.
I want to give them what we told them we were going to give them.
I like it.
I'm excited.
All right.
In the spring of 1884.
So I just imagine like all these different things that are going on.
Our buddy up here, Clarence King, is alive at the time this is happening.
Right.
I'm just thinking of the period of time.
In the period.
Yep.
There's just something about this time.
There's something about it that these men had the spirit of adventure.
Yeah.
And I don't know if I feel like it is still in us,
but the catalyst maybe isn't there.
Well, it's a, it's, yeah.
It's certainly a product of the environment and the time and the period.
All right.
Jake spring 1884 in a place called camp clay on the coast of Ellesmere island,
about 500 miles south of the North Pole.
A man named Adolphus Greeley is lying in a collapsed tent.
Can't sit up and weighs less than a hundred pounds.
His uniform hangs off of him like a potato sack.
There are six other men in the tent with him.
Some of them are unconscious and all of them are starving.
Outside the tent, buried in shallow graves, scraped into the frozen ground,
are the bodies of 18 of their companions.
They have been there since October.
It is now June.
They haven't eaten anything.
The food is gone.
The seal meat is gone.
The boot leather they boiled into the soup is gone.
The seal skin strips they cut from their clothing and chewed until their jaws ached is gone.
The lichen they scraped off the rocks is gone.
For weeks now, some of the men had been doing almost anything to stay alive.
And nobody talks about it.
Not then, not ever.
When the rescue ship finally reaches them on June 22nd,
the men who climb into the tent and see what is inside will never fully describe it.
Commander Winfield Scott Schley, who led the rescue,
will say later that the site was the most horrifying thing he had ever witnessed.
Seven men alive out of 25.
The rest dead of starvation, hypothermia, drowning, and a single bullet.
This all starts three years earlier.
A single bullet?
Are we going to get back to that?
What does that mean?
Jacob, don't you know the format by now?
I know I do.
You're teasing me.
I know.
Be patient.
I'm also quite terrified of this one.
This is, uh, this one's up there, man.
This is up there.
Adolphus Washington Greeley is 37 years old.
He's an army lieutenant with no arctic experience.
He joined the Union Army at 17.
Adolphus, by the way, was a pretty common name at the time.
Not anymore.
Adolph.
Yep, not anymore.
We don't, that's a pretty precipitous drop off.
Don't like that one.
All right, continue.
He volunteered as a private, fought at Antietam and Fredericksburg.
By the end of the Civil War, he was a Brevet major.
Mrs. Producer, which one is he here in this?
What is that about a Brevet?
Brevet major, I have no idea.
Which one is he, Mrs. Producer?
Greeley?
Oh, right there in the, in the center.
Oh, of course he is.
Look at that guy.
He's the one that catches your eye right away.
That's right.
He's seen the worst of a Civil War battlefield could offer,
and it did not prepare him for what was coming.
The Army Signal Corps wants a meteorological station,
and the high Arctic is part of the first international polar year.
Yeah, no.
Eleven nations, simultaneous data collection,
stations ringing the top of the world.
Like just like basically all around the Arctic.
No one had ever been to the North Pole yet.
Okay, so they put, they were doing all these weather stations
around the whole Arctic Ocean.
They were recording things like barometric pressure,
temperature, wind, moisture, all these different things,
measuring everything, like every hour.
Okay, it's like hourly.
Okay.
Just like, I mean stuff, Common Gear would be a big fan of.
Well, that's gonna say, I have that right in my app, Chris,
the weather app, you know, it gives you all of this.
Yeah, just look it up.
I just don't know why they needed to do this.
Greeley is chosen to lead the American party.
He has never been north of New England.
25 men leave St. John's on July 7th, 1881 aboard the Steam Ship Proteus.
That's Newfoundland.
So like that right outside of Canada there.
Most are soldiers, cavalrymen, infantrymen, infantrymen.
Men who had fought in the Indian wars on the Western Plains.
They are tough in their season and none of them has any idea what the Arctic is like.
In Greenland, they pick up two Inuit dog drivers.
Jens Edward and Frederick Christensen and a surgeon named Octave Pavey,
who has actually been up here before and already thinks he knows more than the lieutenant in charge.
The total crew, 25.
They arrive at Lady Franklin Bay on the eastern coast of Ellesmere Island in August.
The bay was named after Jane Franklin.
Let me pull up, I'm gonna pull up Google Maps so everybody can see where this is.
Yeah, I think it's important that people see how far we're going here, just relative to.
Okay, yeah, it's, it's, you know, it's always a good sign when you
zoom out and it just starts showing the whole earth.
Okay.
Oh, well, let me share.
Why?
Oh, here we go.
It's like I can't see it.
Yeah, I'm getting there.
They don't make this process easy.
All right.
So this is like St. John's is out here.
We're at St. John's.
Here's St. John's right here.
So all the way out on the tip of the whole continent and they basically sailed up, sailed up here.
So this is Ellesmere Island.
Oh my gosh.
Okay, so that just gives you a perspective of where these men are.
Okay.
Yeah, that's.
They are there.
It's nowhere in the worst possible way.
In 1845, Franklin left England, you know, you know, Franklin,
you know, the story of the Franklin disaster,
which was the most terrible, most terrible disaster ever.
The Bay was named after Jane Franklin, right at Ellesmere Island.
The wife of Sir John Franklin.
In 1845, Franklin left England with two ships.
And I would, I would have done this story, but we're talking about American explorers here.
In 1845, Franklin left England with two ships and 129 men to find the North was
passed through the Arctic.
None of them came back.
None.
The ships got trapped in the ice.
The men abandoned them and tried to walk south and starved.
They went mad.
Bodies were found scattered across the ice years later with flesh cut from the bones.
It is the most famous disaster in the history of exploration.
That ended up being the name on the front door of the place.
Greeley's men are about to call home.
350 tons of supplies are unloaded.
Enough food for Greeley and his men for three years.
The plan is straightforward.
I can't.
Who signs up for this?
The plan is straightforward.
Stay for two years, collect data, resupply ship will come after the first year.
And at the end of the second year, a ship will come to take them home.
Who signs up for this?
It must be really, really good pay, Chris.
And like you have nothing else.
From what I could tell, I was like, why?
Why are they doing this?
From what I could tell is a lot of the men were like, well, I'm going to get paid
and I won't have any expenses.
So I'll have a bunch of money when I get back,
which I think is the common sentiment for a lot of military enlistment.
Right.
I was going to say, if you just served in war two, there's something about,
you know, seeing the horrors there and like, I don't know.
At the end of the second year, a ship comes to take them home.
They're also young men, Jake.
They're all young men.
You know, their brains aren't even fully developed yet.
To what, 25 or something like that?
Yeah.
From like a risk aversion.
Mm-hmm.
So after two years, if the ship doesn't come,
Greeley's orders say to retreat south to supply caches at Cape Sabine.
250 miles away.
Simple enough.
On paper.
Yeah.
First, the beginning of the first year starts well.
The men, I don't, I don't like the fact that they had the contingency of,
oh, you know, and by the way, if, if we don't show up after two years,
here's what you can do.
Be like, what do you mean if, if you don't show up?
Like, why is that even in the plan document here?
I don't want that option.
The main reason is because if you looked at that map,
that entire channel right here, I'll, I'll share again so I can explain it to you.
This part right here.
Yeah.
This channel right here, they're up here, up here is where they are,
because they're trying to get as far to the north as they can.
This is filled with, you can't see this, but this is filled with ice flows.
So this freezes and you can't, sometimes you just can't get through.
So there's no ships that it's possible that a ship might not be able to get through.
So it comes up there.
Sorry.
It's, we're just not going to make it a little.
I don't like that.
I don't like that.
The first year starts well.
The men build Fort Conger.
They build it.
There's nothing there, Jake.
There's nothing.
Great.
Yeah.
It's a previously prefabricated single three room hut austere as a prison barrack.
Okay.
So not very like.
Yeah.
So they start to collect weather data, magnetic readings, title observations.
They publish a camp newspaper called the Arctic moon on Thanksgiving.
They hold a snowshoe race and give out prizes of canned peaches and tobacco.
There's a library of nearly a thousand novels, encyclopedias and 75 volumes on Arctic exploration.
This seems actually quite nice.
This is great.
I see no problem.
And then the sun goes down for 137 days.
Oh, right.
I forget about that.
Yeah, there it is.
137 days of darkness changes a man in ways that are hard to explain to someone who has
not been through it.
And I haven't.
So I'm just conjecture, right?
It's not the absence of light.
It's the absence of time.
The days lose their edges.
You wake up.
It's dark.
You eat.
It's dark.
You do your work.
It's dark.
You go to sleep.
It's dark and nothing changes when you wake up.
I, I walls.
I wouldn't like that, Chris.
I don't know if you know me at all, but I don't think I would do well.
Solar power Jake would not.
I don't.
I think I'd start walking south like day three.
I'd be like, you know what?
No, thanks, guys.
Only 250 miles to go.
Yeah.
Yep.
By the way, like the emergency cash, I can't say being it's not like there's another
people there.
There's nothing there.
They're just, they'll just leave it on the side of the road.
The emergency cash.
There's the layout of the place.
Not big.
Yeah.
Not, not a big spot for this 25 men living in here.
A good point.
The walls of this hut are not for long, Chris.
Yeah.
They, they get themselves some more room, you know, after a while.
The walls of the hut are slick with condensation from 25 men breathing any closed space.
I don't like that.
The air smells like wool and sweat and kerosene and the seal blower that they burn in the lamps.
Slowly, but surely the mind starts to slip.
Small irritations become enormous.
The sound of another man chewing becomes unbearable.
The way someone breathes in a sleeping bag next to you or keeps you awake for hours
or a cough that won't stop or a man that simply likes to hum.
25 men in a space, not bigger than a three car garage, shoulder to shoulder for months in the dark.
It took only a few people to do the scientific work.
The rest had nothing to do but sit there and listen to each other exist.
You couldn't even stand me snoring in a cabin for an hour before you
like relinquished me outside on the porch.
Can you imagine this?
I cannot.
I cannot.
So Greeley was quite the guy, which we'll get into in a second.
But if you were idle, he didn't let you lay in your bunk.
You had to be up and about.
You really ran it like pretty hard.
So he's like, like, you can't just lay about and lay down.
I don't care.
I mean, that's probably science data, whatever.
I don't know.
Reynard, one of the men, Sergeant David Reynard, wrote about this in his diary.
The monotonous routine of our life is felt more keenly every day.
Our time after the usual hours work in the morning is spent in reading, writing, or discussion.
Nothing seems to hurry the flight of time.
Everything annoys and aggravates us.
We give way readily in any situation with bursts of unreasonable-ness
rather than bolster up our willpower.
Unreasonableness.
We need to bring that term back.
Yeah.
You're being unreasonable, sir.
Unreasonable, yes.
The price of this is unreasonable.
I'm going to try that sometime.
I'm bringing it back.
I'm bringing it back.
I'm just, people are going to look at me like I'm crazy.
And Greeley made all of this way worse than it need to be.
And he ran the exhibition like a garrison, not an outpost.
He was a Civil War officer, and he commanded like one.
When he ordered his hard-bitten cavalrymen to do his laundry, the men nearly revolted.
Greeley's response was to gather them together, deliver what Breynard described as a long talk
to a crowd of angry and excited men, in which Greeley said he was not a man to be trifled with.
And in case of necessity, he would not stop at the loss of human lives to restore order.
Oh boy.
See, I thought like the order and the structure and the discipline would have been good
for this environment.
But maybe you have a capital punishment that early in the game.
Maybe you're not even through the first year.
And you're going to shoot someone because they don't, or you're dead.
Probably not.
That's probably not ideal.
Yeah.
This is the first winter.
We're arguing about human lives over laundry.
Nobody's starving yet.
Nobody's dying.
They have a thousand books and three years of food, and the commander is threatening
to kill men over who washes his shirts.
The doctor, Pavey, fought Greeley on everything.
He refused to hand over his medical records and his diary when Greeley demanded them.
Greeley placed him under arrest.
Another man, Kingslingbury, the second in command had already been discharged for insubordination
in the first month.
He missed the ship home by hours and spent three years trapped with an expedition that
didn't want him doing odd jobs, sleeping in a space where every man knew he had been fired.
The tension in the hut was something physical and you could feel it in the dark.
Could you imagine seeing the ship sail away right after you got fired and you got fired?
You've been relinquished of your duties and the ship is sailing away,
and you realize you're stuck there for two years, three years.
I don't like this story at all, Chris.
I don't like that.
But before things fell apart completely.
Also, the dude that got a quote arrested, what does that even mean there?
I don't know, man.
He's just trying to maintain it.
He's trying to run a tight ship.
He believes that order and law and by the book is what's going to hold these men together.
Yeah, I thought I was saying like, oh, that's admirable.
But I don't think it's working out.
I think the Navy Seals kind of have more of the structure done right,
where everybody kind of, you've got one guy in charge and then a lot of guys, it's peers.
I don't know.
This seems like if you're something to shoot someone over your laundry, that's you're already
down the road.
Before things fell apart completely, something extraordinary did happen.
In the spring of 1882, the light came back and Greeley sent two teams north to attempt what
the expedition had secretly been sent to do, beat the British record for going the farthest north.
England had held that title for 300 years.
The American government wanted it and getting it was the one thing that might justify the expense
of the whole mission.
We're better than you.
Is a really good reason to spend this kind of money.
I love that there's the secret mission.
Okay, the secret mission is go further north.
Yep.
Two teams went out, one led by George Rice, headed up the Ellesmere coast.
The train was impassable and they had to turn back.
So that's the north side.
The other team was Lockwood, Brainerd and Frederick Christensen, the Greenlandic Inuit dog driver.
They went up the Greenland side.
So I think Brainerd was probably the most trusted man on the expedition.
He's just at 25 years old.
All right.
They were gone for 60 days, nearly 1,000 miles, 1,000 miles, three men and a dog team
hurtling over the ice on sleds through hummocks and pressure ridges and stretches of open water
that could swallow them without warning.
Temperatures routinely dropped below minus 50.
You know, it's a good thing these guys had Patagonia parkas.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think they did.
And Gore-Tex, right?
At those temperatures, exposed skin freezes in minutes.
Metal burns to the touch.
Your breath comes out in a cloud and falls to the ground as ice crystals before it clears your face.
And your pee freezes before it hits the ground.
Oh, no.
The dogs pause cracked and bled on the ice and they left pink tracks behind them in the snow.
Oh, the men's faces were raw.
Their lips split open and would not heal.
Their eyelashes frosted shut every time they stopped moving.
The sled runner squealed on the cold ice.
The thin high sound that carried for miles across the emptiness.
They traveled along the northern coast of Greenland farther from any other human
than almost anyone alive.
If something went wrong out there, there was certainly no rescue.
There was no one to come.
They slept in whatever shelter they could scrape together from snow and canvas.
The wind finding every gap and in the morning they got up and kept going north.
On May 13th, 1882, they stopped 83 degrees, 23 minutes, eight seconds north.
Four miles past the British record, the farthest north any human being had ever stood.
There was nothing around them, ice in every direction, white and flat and endless,
with nothing but wind cutting across it with nothing to stop it for thousands of miles.
No land, no features, just white and cold, and the three of them standing in it.
Brainerd wrote in his diary, May 13th, 1882,
We have reached a higher latitude than ever before reached by mortal man.
We unfurled the glorious stars and stripes to the northern breezes with an exultation impossible
to describe.
Then they turned around and walked back.
The round trip took until July 1st.
When they reached Fort Conger, the expedition had its prize.
It would not be enough to save them.
What are you looking up Jake?
What are you curious about?
I'm curious how far they were from the North Pole.
So 83 degrees, 23 minutes, eight seconds is still 448 miles from the actual North Pole.
Still a ways out.
Because I'm like, they're that close.
Let's go.
Let's just keep going to the North Pole.
You're already that far.
But that, no, by that point, no, probably not.
The search for the poles, especially on the Antarctic side, is a harrowing series of stories.
I'm reading a book right now of this guy who just was taking his ship and just driving around
and going in all the inlets over and over and over again.
They couldn't figure it out.
They couldn't get in.
They couldn't figure it out.
Then they go back to New Zealand.
And then there was this one guy, remind me,
yeah, remind me.
Well, it has to do with Greeley.
So remind me to tell this, tell this story later about the round ship at the end of this.
Summer 1882.
They're waiting for the supply ship now.
It doesn't come.
It does not come.
The Neptune tried to reach them, but the ice was heavier than the year they'd arrived.
Captain Bebe turned back.
But here's what Bebe did that is absolutely unforgivable.
Oh, no.
Unforgivable.
His order said that if he could not reach Fort Conger, he was to leave the supplies at Cape
Sabine, the fallback for Greeley's men 250 miles away.
That was the contingency plan.
The whole thing depended on those supplies being there.
Bebe instead left a small cache and hauled the rest of the provisions back to Newfoundland.
Why?
Just took them home.
Why?
Why?
It's not on record.
That single decision is what arguably killed 18 men.
100%.
Yeah, you literally killed them.
Nobody at Fort Conger knows any of this.
They wait.
They organize their letters and their scientific records and watch the horizon.
That's the summer of 1882.
Summer 1883.
No, hold on.
We just we just passed over a year.
Just passed over a year.
The second ship does not come either.
This time, the ship Proteus was crushed by the ice and sank.
The commander Lieutenant Gardner.
This is supposed to be the ride home, by the way.
Yes.
The second summer.
They're like, great.
Okay, we didn't get our supplies.
That sucks.
We can make it.
All right, now it's time to go home.
Yeah.
This time the Proteus was crushed by ice and sank.
The commander, Lieutenant Garlington, left only a tiny emergency cache at Sabine.
40 days of rations for 25 men.
Then he sailed south and saved himself.
Garlington faced a court martial, by the way, on this one.
Yeah.
Court inquiry.
And he was found not culpable.
And they blame the ice.
Yeah, they blame the ice.
Wow, okay.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
It's like, what do you do?
I mean, your ship just got crushed.
Yeah.
You got to go all the way back.
Do you know, like, by crushed, does that mean like they were able to limp it back?
Or did they have to?
I am not sure.
I did not dig.
I'm trying to stay on task, Jake.
I get it, but like, okay.
I mean, they had to have, right?
They probably repaired the ship and then limped it back.
Otherwise, they'd also be dead.
So that's a pretty good assumption.
So, but at least like maybe leave the supplies.
My thought is, is that he knew his ship was injured.
Didn't know what was going to happen.
Didn't know if he would need them and made the decision to save his own crew.
Yeah.
But I mean, these are trying times, man.
It's really easy for me to sit here in my heat pump,
warmed garage in Minnesota thinking, well, that guy should have left more food.
Which also goes back to the initial question of like knowing all this.
Why would you sign up?
Why would you go?
They didn't know, dude.
That was the point.
These dudes didn't know.
It wasn't like there was books to read.
Yeah.
They didn't know this.
This is all hindsight.
He didn't know.
They didn't know.
I mean, they knew a little bit.
Hey, it's going to be cold.
Let's go.
Oh, we got a thousand books.
This will be great.
Oh, there's a fallback plan.
We'll just back in Washington.
The secretary of war was Robert Todd Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln's son.
Oh, okay.
He was dismissive.
He told people that there was not the slightest reason to suppose
that Lieutenant Greeley's party was suffering.
Senator Ingalls gave a speech on the Senate floor arguing it wasn't
worth the money to go rescue them.
He called Arctic Exploration one uninterrupted succession of failures
and disasters after another suggested the men were already dead anyway.
Oh, that's the OK.
Well, that's yeah, that's an attitude to take.
That's a position.
I don't think.
Well, boy.
Henrietta Greeley went to the National Press.
This is this is an office Greeley's wife.
Gotcha.
She had written to the Signal Corps.
She had written to the Secretary of War.
She had written to the president.
Nobody listened.
Her letter to the War Department included a line Greeley had written
in her tour before he left.
Mr. Greeley expressed to me complete faith in the government's care
of its own expedition.
They replied nothing can be done this season to reach Mr. Greeley.
He will be reached next year if possible.
So she told the newspapers the story of 25 American
soldiers abandoned in the Arctic by their own government ran in papers
across the entire country.
The public outrage that followed is what finally forced Congress to fund
a proper rescue exhibition in 1884.
Commander Schley was given three ships until not to come back without Greeley.
Three ships.
Henrietta had to embarrass the United States of America into saving her husband.
Good.
On August 9th, 1883 after waiting at the Reddy's since July, Greeley
accepts that no one is coming.
His orders say retreat south.
The men do not want to go.
Many of them wrote in their private diaries that leaving Fort Conger was madness.
They had shelter.
They had food.
They could hunt.
Cape Sabine was 250 miles south across some of the most dangerous water on the
entire planet.
Even Brainerd, the most loyal man in the party, wrote that Greeley's plan was insanity.
That if his opinion was ever asked, he would tell what he thought.
His opinion was never asked.
One historian noted that they probably could have lived there for years.
Unhappily, but years.
Yeah, they could hunt.
Yeah, they could have survived for years at that spot.
Wow.
Greeley loaded what he could into three small boats and the 25 men left Fort Conger.
Think now for a moment about what these men are being asked to do.
Most of them are soldiers, cavalrymen.
They know horses and rifles and open ground.
They do not know the sea.
They do not know ice.
Now they are in small open boats on the Arctic Ocean surrounded by pack ice that shifts and
cracks and can crush a wooden hull like a fish closing on a walnut.
The water is just 30 degrees.
If you go in, you've got minutes.
Yeah.
Indubitably, the boats get stuck.
The ice closes around them and they can't move.
They sit there, trapped, drifting, unable to paddle, unable to walk,
listening to the ice groan and pop around them.
This deep sound like something enormous breaking underground.
Then the ice opens and they paddle furiously until it closes again.
It is here that Greeley fell apart.
On the water, away from the structure of Fort Conger,
with no walls and no routine and no way to command the ice,
he crawled into his sleeping bag and stayed there for hours, for days.
The men watch their commanding officer disappear into himself
while Brainerd and Rice ran the show.
Rice, who had some experience with boats from his years in Nova Scotia,
stood in a bow looking for leads in the ice.
He fell overboard four times and they pulled him back in each time.
He joked that he'd had more baths than the rest of them all year.
Brainerd kept the men moving, kept the supplies organized,
and kept the discipline intact.
He wrote in his diary.
The commanding officer has seldom out of his bag.
His appearance indicates the most abject cowardice.
The men don't lose sight of the gross ignorance
and incapacity of the man who brought them to this present strait.
After weeks of this, the boats are trapped for good.
The men haul themselves and their supplies onto a large ice flow and sit on it.
They are now passengers.
The flow drifts with the current and the tide,
sometimes south, towards Sabine, sometimes north, back the way they came.
Sometimes it just spins.
They can do nothing.
They're sitting on a piece of ice in the Arctic Ocean,
hoping it takes them somewhere they can survive.
The men wrote in their private diaries that they feared becoming another Franklin disaster,
a name on their front door.
129 men, all dead, scattered across the ice.
That is what they were thinking about.
So they had to have known then, Chris, going back to like,
why would they sign up for this?
You claim, oh, they didn't know.
They had to have known.
I don't know.
Either way, I don't like it.
I don't like it.
I can say something.
They totally knew.
Greenlee was like, totally knew about Franklin and like romanticized the whole thing.
Hmm.
Okay.
Yeah, but these, maybe the young men didn't know.
Maybe that's part of it too, is the romanticizing of the, of the adventure.
You just drunk with.
You could, you would die and explore.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
I, I know where this is going and I don't like it.
On the ice as Greeley went quiet,
three men came to Brainerd at night with a plan.
Pavey, the doctor would officially declare Greeley insane and unfit for command.
Kislingbury would take over.
They would turn around and go back to Fort Conger.
All they needed was Brainerd.
The men would follow that first sergeant,
the most respected man on that sheet of ice.
He was being asked to lead a mutiny.
He said, no, not because he trusted Greeley,
not because he thought the retreat was a good idea.
He said, no, because that without military discipline,
25 men in the Arctic, no rescue coming would tear them apart.
He'd watched what the darkness did to these men in a warm cabin with food,
without structure and rank, without someone to obey.
They would not last a winter.
The mutiny died right there.
So they kept drifting south.
51 days after leaving Fort Conger,
they landed at Cape Sabine.
All 25 men alive, barely.
They found the supply cache.
It was not what they were promised.
It was a fraction of what they needed.
Greeley did the math.
40 days of full ration.
Winter coming.
The sun about to disappear again.
25 men and not enough food to keep them alive
until a rescue ship could reach them in June or July.
Eight months away.
Maybe they've already been through two summers where the ship didn't show up.
He said, quote, no game, no food, and apparently no hopes from Littleton Island.
We have been lured here to our destruction.
He cuts the rations.
He cuts them again and again.
By January, the men are getting a few ounces of food per day.
They eat everything they can find.
Shrimp, they pull through holes in the ice,
each one about five to 10 millimeters long.
Seaweed, lichen, they scrape off rocks.
They boil their sleeping bags into a gray broth and drink it.
They eat their bootlaces.
One man finds a pair of old seal skin pants
in an abandoned cache and the groups ration them out.
A few strips of that leather per man per day.
They chewed on it until the fiber separated and could be swallowed.
They eat candle wax.
They eat bird shit.
They eat anything that could be put in on their mouth and forced down their throats.
Greeley wrote in his journal during this period,
to die is very easy.
Now it is only hard to strive, to endure and to live.
The dying starts on January 18th.
Sergeant William Cross, morose, and an alcoholic from the beginning.
Scurvy and starvation got him.
He was buried in a shallow grave on a rocky hill.
The men called it Cemetery Ridge.
He was the first, but not the last.
Between April 5th and the rescue on June 22nd, 17 men died.
That is roughly one death every three days for 11 weeks.
One man was described as talking at times like an infant as he succumbed.
Another begged for opium pills to speed his death.
They refused him and he died of starvation anyway.
Rainer recorded what was happening to Corporal Ellison.
Ellison's right foot dropped off this morning without his knowledge.
The fact was carefully...
His right foot dropped off without his knowledge.
Dropped off without his knowledge is frostbite, Jake.
I know, but you don't know that your foot literally falls off.
Dear Lord.
The fact was carefully concealed from Ellison.
One of his fingers fell off a few days ago and several others will follow any short time.
This guy actually survived.
He died on the rescue ship after multiple amputations.
He died on the ship.
When he died, he weighed 78 pounds.
Lockwood, the man who planted the flag at the farthest point on earth,
north on earth, died April 9th.
His last words were a request that someone tell his family
that he'd think thought of them when he died.
The same day Lockwood died, two men were out on the ice trying to save everyone else.
Sergeant George Rice, the expedition photographer and Corporal Julius Frederick
had been sent to recover a 140 pound of English tinned meat
abandoned at a cache 40 miles down the coast.
I don't know that I would have eaten the English tinned meat.
When the Franklin disaster, when they started doing autopsies on these guys,
all the welding that had been done on these particular tins was done with lead.
All the men had lead poisoning.
How did they know this cache was down there?
Probably just on the map.
Hey, a cache, there's maybe a cache here.
Maybe, I don't know, maybe they made the shit up.
I have no idea.
It was a desperate gamble.
Both men were starving and the distance alone could probably kill them.
A few hours out, a gale hit.
The wind came in so hard and so fast that they could not stand in it.
They crawled into their sleeping bag and lay there while the storm battered them for 22 hours.
22 hours on the ice, listening to the wind tear at them, unable to move.
When it finally stopped, they got up and just kept going.
They reached the cache.
The meat was gone and it drifted from the shore on the ice.
Hours of searching among the flows turned up nothing.
They had risked their lives for a food that no longer existed.
On the way back, Frederick noticed rice was failing.
They took shelter behind an iceberg.
Rice said that I'm just tired, man.
He even joked feebly with Frederick, something small and human in the middle of all that white nothing.
Then his mind started to wander.
He began talking about home and about food.
And his voice got soft and then it got strange and then it trailed off.
Frederick took his own parka off and wrapped it around rice's frozen feet.
He sat there holding his companion as the cold came in through his own clothes
while rice slowly lost consciousness.
Oh, that's tough.
George Rice died in Frederick's arms that evening.
Quote, I stooped and kissed the cheek of my dead companion
and left him there for the wild winds of the Arctic to sweep over.
Then Frederick got up.
He wanted to die.
He said so later, but he didn't.
He saved rice's food ration because the men at camp needed it more than the dead man did.
He walked to their old camp at Eskimo Point for shelter for the night.
And then he turned around, walked back to where rice lay and buried him in the ice and snow.
12 miles out of his way, a five foot two man who weighed almost nothing.
Walking 12 miles through the Arctic to bury a friend because leaving him unburied was not something he could do.
Wow.
Then he walked back to Camp Clay.
When Frederick walked back into camp, empty-handed and without rice, the camp went quiet.
Rice had been the one who volunteered for everything.
The one who went out in the worst of it every time because somebody had to do it.
The one the other man looked at when they needed to believe they might survive.
And now he was dead on the ice 40 miles south and the food he went to find was gone.
Brainerd wrote in his diary, rice was as brave and noble as any man the world has ever known.
Before he died, rice had written in his own diary.
Ellis tells me of the thing.
Ellis tells me of being intimidated by the other occupants of his sleeping bag
and talks of cannibalism.
I much fear the horrors of our last days here.
George W. Rice.
Then there was Private Charles Henry.
He was a big man.
He had gained weight at Fort Conger while others lost it.
He figured he would outlast everyone and could come write his own version of events when the rescue came.
He was stealing food.
Not once, repeatedly, shrimp from the communal pot, rations from other men.
In a camp where every ounce was the difference between living and dying,
he was killing people, one stolen mouthful at a time.
On June 6th, 1884, Greeley wrote a note by hand and gave it to three men.
Two had live rounds, one had blanks.
They went outside.
Henry saw them coming and rushed at them.
And they shot him dead.
In the final days, Brainerd's diary contains one of the most carefully worded entries in the
entire record.
An arrangement between the commanding officer and four others and myself,
by which our condition be ameliorated, has been reached.
What?
Our condition be ameliorated.
Fixed.
Okay.
An arrangement between the commanding officer and four others and myself,
which our commission is ameliorated.
This is as close as anyone came to writing it down.
Other diaries mention bodies of men, long dead, being present in the camp for reasons
nobody explained.
Ameliorated means calories.
16 days later, on June 22nd, Commander Schley's rescue squadron reached Camp Clay.
The men who cut open the tent found what was left of the Lady Franklin Bay expedition.
The smell hit them first.
Then the sight, seven men lying in a space that had been built for survival had become
something closer to a grave.
Some of them were unconscious.
Some of them were too weak to speak.
Greeley was on the ground.
He looked up at the men standing over him and whispered just two words.
Seven alive.
One of the seven would not make it home.
Corporal Joseph Ellison had lost both his hands and feet over the preceding months.
The frostbite took them slowly one piece at a time.
This is the guy whose foot just fell off.
The amputations were done with whatever tools were available on the ship with no anesthesia
and no medical supplies.
In a camp where men were eating boot leather and seal skin and candle wax and anything else
they could put in their mouths, Ellison's flesh was removed and it went...
somewhere.
Nobody wrote down where.
Ellison weighed 78 pounds when they carried him out of the rescue ship.
The accusation went national.
The public wanted to know what happened in that tent.
The survivors denied it, Greeley denied it, and denied it for the rest of his life.
If there was cannibalism, the man eating was done in secrecy entirely without my knowledge.
Here is what happened to Adolphus Greeley when he got home.
He got promoted.
In 1887, President Cleveland appointed him to Chief Signal Officer of the United States Army
with the rank of Brigadier General.
He built the Worldwide Communications Network used during the Spanish-American War.
He was promoted to Major General in 1906.
That same year when San Francisco earthquake hit, Greeley was put in command of the relief effort.
In 1935, a few months before he died, he was awarded the Medal of Honor.
He lived to be 91 years old.
Married a woman named Henrietta, as we know, and never left her side for the rest of his life.
She'd been one of the few people who fought publicly for the rescue when the government
was dragging its feet.
He's buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
So, as David Brainerd, his most trusted sergeant, the man who once stood at the
farthest north point on earth, their graves are right next to each other,
as close in death as they were at Camp Clay.
Greeley never spoke publicly about what happened at Cape Sabine.
He published a two-volume account of the expedition that is meticulous
in every detail about the silence and is silent about the suffering.
He wrote about the weather.
He wrote about the magnetic readings.
He wrote about the tidal data.
He did not write about what men ate in the final weeks or what they did to the bodies
or what it was like to order a man's shop for stealing food.
He did not write about the darkness or the mutiny or the sound of another man dying
in the sleeping bag next to you.
He put all of that somewhere and closed the door and never opened it again.
And most of the men remain forgotten.
So, I want to read a newspaper printing on this that I have screen-shotted in,
like, the worst screenshot of all time.
It's very, very, it's one of these very long screenshots.
Yeah.
Rochester, New York, August 14th.
One of the most heart-rending disclosures was made this morning regarding the remains
of Lieutenant King Kislingbury of the Arctic expedition who died among the Arctic snow last
June. It is established beyond all question that cannibalism was resorted to by the starving
men of Greeley's expedition and shows that the lives of those saved were preserved only by eating
the dead bodies of their companions. Lieutenant Kislingbury's relatives here were filled with
horrible doubts as soon as they learned that the disclosures had been made in New York regarding
the cannibalism among the members of the expedition and they determined to learn the truth
by exhuming the remains and having them examined by competent physicians.
Their services of L.A. Jeffrey Undertaker were secured and this morning with the assistance of
five men, he accomplished the work of taking up the casket from its resting place. The casket
was open in the presence of Frank W. Kislingbury and John P. Kislingbury, brothers of the deceased.
Dr. Chaz Buckley, Dr. F. A. Mansville's Superintendent, Stillson, Assistant Superintendent,
Mansville and two reporters of the Post and the Express.
The work of opening the heavy iron receptacle was found comparatively easy.
All three, it's hard to read, it's like scan on the old newspaper.
The noiseless ease with which the ladder was pried from its bed
showed there was no evidence of grease in the casket and it was feared there might be
nobody in the casket at all. Feeling it was way into the mass of snow cotton waste, which
snow cotton, which filled the coffin to the top, Mr. Jeffrey soon exclaimed, he is there.
A strong odor of alcohol but no very pronounced suggestions of decay emanated from the casket.
Dr. Buckley would put on a pair of black leather gloves, uncover the lower portion of the coffin's
tenet, and there it was as if one of the legs, the right one, was missing. But when the waste was
all removed it became apparent that the limb was tied under the left one. The casket was next
placed upon the floor and then enshrouded, the form taken from it and placed upon a table.
The undertaker and physician now began to cut the stitches and unwind the sheeting which formed
the first cover. The sheet was taken away, the tarred rope entwining the blanket cut,
and the work of taking off this last covering began. Slowly the blanket was removed, the blackened,
fleshless face showing marks of arctic soil or no semblance to the dead man. The skin was dried
to his skull. The sightless sockets in half open mouth gave the dead man a look of mute appealing
agony. The remains were completely identified as those of Lieutenant Kislingbury. The physicians
made a thorough examination and the remains were then packed back into the casket and again
lowered into the grave. Returning to the city, the physicians made an affidavit that they found
the skin and muscles removed from the legs, thighs, arms, and other parts of the body.
Their investigation leaves no doubt that the survivors of the party were some of them at
least compelled to resort to cannibalism to save their own lives.
I don't like this story, Chris.
I think there are wonderful parts of this story. Yeah.
When you talk about, you know, Rice and his friend and
that's, yeah, going back and wanting to get them. Wow. And Rice died in Frederick's arms and
Frederick got back to camp and decided he'd need to go back and bury his friend.
Went all the way back there and kissed him on the cheek and said goodbye, friend.
There's a lot of, I think this is an interesting and a good story because it shows the contrasts of
good and evil in human, in humanity. And maybe you and I can talk offline about this a little bit
because I just don't want to get into it too much here. I want this just to be a story of
perseverance and how, how far a man can really be pushed. How far, how far can a man really be
pushed? As I think. I, yeah, I don't know. It's heavy. It's heavy. A better term. Heavy.
So knowing, you ask what they knew and Mrs. Producers said they knew,
there must have been some naivety of age there. But art exploration has been going on
for decades before then. Why did people do this? Why did they go? Right.
That is the question I will be asking our guest. I've got a couple lined up.
One is an author, one is a philosopher, award winning authors both. And we'll see who wants
to come on. I'm lining it up. I'm lining up. I'm very, very excited to talk to somebody that
has visited these places, written books and has like intimate knowledge of all this because I want
to know why, why these men went, why and what is lost in humanity now in a world that has very
little left to explore. Rather than exploring the natural world, I feel like we're exploring
ourselves. It's just like an entire society of navel gazers. You know, like what are we,
what's left? Yeah, I don't know. It's, that's why I'm so fascinated by Artemis.
You know, we think about going to the moon and setting up a colony there and going to Mars and
you know, everybody's like, Oh, well, we could just take that money and give it to,
give it to people and it could, you know, starving children and all this. I think
rallying behind the exploits of adventure, especially from a case of the human condition
and exploring the unknown. Maybe it goes back to the nomadic roots of humans. I don't know,
but I think it's, it's worth rallying around. Dude, my voice is shot. It is gone.
I can tell. Yeah, I've been talking since like 9am. It's 4pm.
Yeah. Well, thank you for all of that. We've got one more
that will three more on Mr. Powell and you may know a lake named after this man.
And we're going to talk a little bit about him. We'll do a driver's club
exclusive one sometime in the next couple of weeks here. Okay. Very cool. All right. All right.
I'm that guys on that note, guys. We will see you next week. Thank you for hanging out with me.
Absolutely. All right. Take care.
About this episode
A grim, history-heavy double feature follows “forgotten explorers” stories that blend endurance, ego, and moral collapse. The episode opens with John C. Frémont’s winter San Juan Mountains expedition—35 men and mules, blocked passes, frozen deaths, and lingering hints of cannibalism—then pivots to Clarence King, the brilliant geologist who exposed a diamond hoax and lived a double life as a “Pullman porter” to marry Ada Copeland, ending in a late confession. The finale turns to Adolphus Greely’s Arctic expedition, where starvation, mutiny attempts, and cannibalism accusations shadow a rescue that arrives too late.
Original notes
Past the edges of the maps were mountains that killed ten men at Christmas. A bridge in New York where a man became someone else every night for thirteen years. And an Arctic camp where twenty five soldiers were abandoned by their own government and left to eat whatever was left. These are the stories nobody tells anymore. Not because they aren't worth telling, but because the men at the center of them have faded into memory, replaced by time.Support this show: https://www.patreon.com/c/overcrest
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