The Forgotten Ones: Lost Explorers of the American West / Pt 1

You and I have driven across the country several times.

What if every time we tried, someone stole our car and we had to walk home?

Like, yeah, you don't even comprehend, like even driving, you're like, wow, this is far.

Like, this sucks.

With nothing, Jake. With nothing. They steal your car.

You walk!

And then you have nothing, and you just start walking with nothing.

We would be dead.

Yeah, I'm sure.

They walked east into nothing on a trail to nowhere.

The remaining horses slowed, stopped, and died.

When the last one went down, they cut the meat off of it and carried what they could.

The weight lightning as they ate stringy horse meat until it was gone.

The days ran together, indistinguishable from one another.

Sand, sun, sagebrush, dry lake beds that shimmered like water from a distance turned out to be nothing but cracked white dust.

Hope was about all that was left.

Hey guys, welcome to Overcrest. I'm Chris.

And I'm Jake.

We have a pretty solid episode coming out of the west for you today, Jake.

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it is that I want to talk about.

And I've, I'll give you a little bit of the backstory of why we're doing this.

So, and then I'll tell you what we're doing.

Which everybody already knows because they heard intro that like teases what we're doing, but anyway.

Which we haven't done yet, so we don't even know what that intro says.

That's right. We haven't even done it.

That's from the future.

It's from the future.

I love bookstore.

I love books.

I think books are a, I usually don't get rid of books, especially fiction books that I have read and sold.

Because I feel like books are a testament to the knowledge that you have gained by reading them.

So I always keep books.

So you, how, where do you keep them?

Usually on a bookshelf.

How big is your bookshelf?

Well, I have a lot of bins because we moved and I got rid of a lot of bookstores.

Right. That's where most of mine are too.

Okay.

Yeah. So I've got a lot of books that I really love on a bookshelf and the books that are on my bookshelf, the ones that I really love.

I went to a place called Rare Books in Minneapolis.

Actually, I don't know if it's actually called Rare Books, but the sign outside says Rare Books.

It's not in a great neighborhood.

Anyway, I got the girls with me.

This is last summer.

I got the girls with me and we go and I like jiggle the door of this place.

It's on the corner in a pretty sketchy neighborhood.

Not like, you know, you wouldn't want to take your mom there for dinner.

I remember this.

I remember this story.

Yes.

So I jiggle the door and, and this old guy comes in, he opens the door for me and lets me, lets me and he's like, oh, what are you looking for?

I'm like, oh, I just want to look around.

And I said, where's like some of your nice books?

You know, I'm looking for fiction, looking for history.

Right.

I want to, I want to learn things about the human condition, things that have happened before.

I don't know.

I'm just always very, very curious about other people's experiences.

Something that is, it gets me going.

I like reading about it.

Yeah.

Like this whole wall is fiction and it's all rare books.

So I kind of look through this wall and there's like behind me on the other side of the wall.

Do you mean nonfiction, by the way?

Yes.

I do mean nonfiction.

Thank you.

Okay, good.

I mean nonfiction.

I just want to clarify that.

I want to know, I want to know how Bilbo Baggins went about his life so I can emulate.

Right.

Which actually is probably.

Do you have any Harry Potter?

First edition only.

No.

So I'm looking through all these nonfiction books.

Sorry.

Thanks for that catch.

And it's like, okay.

Like it's stuff that I'm like, it's like, just these books that are like third edition, fourth

edition, they're like $20, $3.

Okay.

Very stupid question.

I'm pretty sure I understand how editions work.

Yes.

Let's talk about like old rare books.

A first edition is like when they make and print a run of books, is it like, well, we

think we're going to need 5,000.

So they print 5,000 and that's the first edition.

Pretty much.

Is that what that means?

Or is it, or do they change it somehow or it's like a repulsion?

Well, it's the first edition is the first copy of the book.

So if you buy a first edition, that is the first printing that you could go buy at the

store or at a book.

Yeah.

It's the first time they produced it.

Well, sometimes they have like, there's other stuff that's like goes to press like media

editions and there's some like different editions and things that are out there that are kind

of rare.

I'm not like a rare book aficionado or anything like that.

I just sold.

I hope I'm not wrong.

No, I'm just like, I wouldn't know what I'm even asking for.

If I was like, oh, these are only third editions.

Come on guy.

And so that's just like the run that they did.

Yes.

I like seeing things go through anything else.

Right.

So it's like they only produced so many because they were like, oh, well, this is how many

we're going to need or want to sell.

And then later they reproduce them and that's they change.

Sometimes they change the forward or the author changes some things in the book.

I like and I also kind of like just having the first one is like the collectability of

it.

I know I know enough to know that that's the collectible.

I'm looking at the I'm looking at these books.

I'm like, yeah.

And I go to the guy.

I'm like, is this it?

He goes, oh, you're looking for something nicer.

Come with me.

Long story short, so we can get to the point here.

It takes me to this back room.

I'm like, oh, I'm like, I'm looking for expedition, exploration, whatever he's like this section

right here.

And he's got a section dedicated to like exploration.

Oh, cool.

You know, expeditions to like Antarctica and Alaska and the North Pole and Hamilton.

And yes.

And well, that that would be a very expensive book, but he didn't.

Well, maybe he didn't have one of those.

There were some books that were like three, four, $500.

There's books that are like 15, 16, $17,000.

There's just like crazy amount of a book like I want.

I would really love to have a first edition of the grapes of wrath by Steinbeck, which

is a, which is kind of this.

It is a book about kind of like growing up in the dust bowl and like this dust bowl

period, which is where my family came from is like the dust bowl.

So I kind of wanted this book.

There's actually a funny story with, with that book is all of the notes that were

taken to write that I don't know the title of the book.

Don't hate me.

All the notes that were taken that were written, gained to write that book because

he wasn't from there.

He just wrote the book about this place.

So you had to get the notes.

So we got this notes from this woman without her permission for a book that she

was going to write.

And then he published the book.

And we didn't find out about this till like decades later.

Now that her book has been recently published in like 2000 something or whatever.

I really want to read it.

I can't remember what it's called.

Maybe someone, if you're interested, send me a DM.

I've got it in my want to read books list.

Actually, I might have purchased it, but anyway, so I'm looking at all these books.

I've, so I like started pulling all these books off the shelves about expeditions and

this and that and sailing.

Oh my gosh.

These, these guys have sailed this guy went to, I even got a book about like

discovering the Mississippi River and everything that it took to do it.

And the Mississippi River used to have rapids.

Oh my God.

And you're reading all these different things.

And people died a lot.

They really, really, really died a lot.

And we're going to talk about that.

Hold on.

Before, before we get any further.

And I know this is going to take forever now.

What, what is the most expensive book you, you've purchased antique?

The only reason I ask is like, at what point do you, because I don't care about the answer.

You don't have to tell me, but at what point do you have to like start ensuring books and

like, I'd be worried to have it out on a bookshelf versus like, Oh, this is, this goes

in the safe or in like the glass climate controlled vault.

That's what your umbrella policy is for.

Okay.

Yeah.

A lot of times you need to itemize and claim.

Yes.

You need to have receipts.

You need to have, well, yeah, you, I have like an itemized receipt of when I bought

them from the guy that's got the values.

I don't have anything worth more than a few hundred bucks.

Like a, like $200.

Like I don't have anything.

That makes me feel better for you.

But also I know you're insured now.

Thanks to me.

So we're good.

Thanks to you.

And we can talk about that on another episode down the road when things have come to a reasonable

conclusion.

Fully.

Yes.

Yeah.

Which we, yeah.

Anyway.

Okay.

So exploration, people dying.

Okay.

So I love this topic.

You have lots of books.

I have lots of books.

Like I have the bloody Boseman, which is the, the, the discovery of Montana.

I've got the great expedition.

It's like a, a book written about the miss, the Mississippi river.

And like when we first bought Louisiana from the Spanish and just before then, and people

were getting arrested by the Spanish, I've got books about the gold rush and going out

there.

And, and I'm kind of fascinated by this because my family was one of the people that got a

warrant to go get land in Kansas and they went and they got the land.

And so it's like, this whole concept is, I don't know if it's in my blood or what, but

I'm super, super curious about it.

So one of the things that I wanted to do, and everybody knows like Lewis and Clark,

like when in like mapped out and went out West for, you know, Jefferson had them go

out there and do it.

And I'm like, okay, thousands of people went West.

They think that like 15 to 20%.

Did you know Lewis and Clark, by the way, cause I, I looked at a bunch of fun facts

here, which I didn't write down, which sucks, but there's a name of the Lewis and Clark

expedition.

And like Lewis and Clark, these guys get all of the glory along with, of course, Sacagawea

and the slave guy.

I forget his name because he was notorious as well that they had this guy that also helped

them.

There was like 35 people on that expedition.

There was many of them and we will talk about one of them today.

Yeah.

That gets no glory, no credit.

Most of the people we're going to talk about today, and this is a three episode series.

So I'm going to do three or four of these.

This is, this is, this is big.

These are great stories.

I've got some really, we're going to start, um, and we're going to, we're going to, it's

impossible to believe, but we're going to get better as time goes on.

Um, these are in no particular order.

Okay.

It's not chronological or anything like that.

Okay.

Not chronological.

Just great stories.

One thing that you'll notice.

Um, and maybe I'll just skip reading my intro and just talk about it.

No, no, I want you to, I know I'm screwing you up because I know where you're going with

this is what, what the precipice was for a lot of this exploration.

I think it's worth going with that.

And so I want you to reveal it as you want it.

So let's, let's get into it.

We know why you were interested in this was the books and it's some cool, cool freaking

people.

So let's get into it.

So I want, I want you Jake and the audience to try and think about what it was like to

be 23 years old in the late 1700s.

Okay.

It seems like it was that long since I was 23.

Tell me about it.

The revolutionary war is over.

You have survived your 17 or 18.

When you signed up a younger son from a farming family with no land coming to you, English

stock, maybe Scott's Irish, maybe German.

You owned what you wore.

The continental army paid privates $6 a month.

You ate a hunk of meat and a bit of bread a day when it showed up and you slept in the

mud next to other boys from every colony during the war.

You marched in shoes that fell apart and then you marched without them at Valley Forge.

You watch men die of disease in frozen ground while Congress argued about money in a warm

room room a mere hundred miles away.

Now you're home.

Your father's farm is small and the soil is tired.

Virginia's tobacco ground has been planted and replanted and it doesn't give back anymore.

And if you're a younger son, the land just goes to the older brother.

Congress owes you years of back pay and they don't have it.

What they have is paper, land warrants, a certificate that says you can claim acreage

past the Appalachians in a territory the government won but never set foot in.

Most soldiers sold those warrants to speculators for almost nothing.

Which I think is crazy.

Can you imagine having a land warrant to go stake your claim and they just sell them

for pennies on the dollar?

I was thinking about this a lot, this specific concept and there's two things that are like,

it boggles my mind, it's hard to comprehend.

One is that there was just massive swaths of land that were not, they were just there.

That sounds so dumb to say but this was not a colonized or an actual, what is the other part?

Because this is, yes I know you've got papers where they say this is your part of your...

Look at that.

160 acres.

Right, so here's my question.

Does it tell you where specifically these 160 acres are or is it you go get, go for it,

go find 160 acres, mark it out and you get it.

Because I've seen that where they all like race off and they try to like parcel it out.

So this is, we're talking over the course of like 100 years.

So we're kind of going through like after the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and these periods of times.

So there's lots of different ways that it was done.

Yeah, they had the races and stuff like that but it also was like, hey we're going to do Kansas now.

Here's the plots, you can have this one if you get there.

And that's what my family did.

They went from Pennsylvania to Kansas and when my ancestor got there he said the grass was as high as a man on a horse.

And he staked his plot and slept in a cave that he dug out of the side of a, next to a river.

Like dug out a little cave thing for him to sleep in while his family was back in Pennsylvania until he was able to turn over the land.

Which turning over fresh land with grass like that with one horse, pretty crazy stuff.

Take it forever.

And that's why you think about like, oh these people would just sell their paper, their rights for like pennies.

It's because in civilization, at least here you have something established, whether it's a meager, terrible life.

But as far as you know, that's just death out there.

Hey, not everybody's brave.

And this was, it took nuts.

So you've stood in formation while Cannibal skipped through the ranks.

You've watched a great shot.

Take men apart.

The wilderness to you maybe doesn't do that.

The river doesn't aim.

The cold is patient.

But maybe not too hostile to you crossing into the unknown country feels like something you can manage.

And that naive sentiment killed a lot of men.

Nature doesn't need to aim.

It freezes you slowly.

It's starve them quietly.

Put a river between them and safety and then raise the water.

The tribes who'd lived there for centuries knew the land.

And the men walking into it with a rifle and a land warrant.

We're not welcome to say the least.

Definitely not.

Then later on the country broke in half and it all repeated the same calculation.

You've looked at them the face.

There's nothing behind you.

And there's still a lot of empty map.

These men learned the tribes by living with them, fighting with them or both.

Most died young and most of them died alone.

Here are 12 that made their mark on the great American West.

Manifest destiny.

Did we talk about that concept at all?

Oh, tell me about it.

I'm not going to.

I don't know enough about it.

This was like, this was a seventh grade American history class, but it was the, the concept

or the period where it was this great expansion out to the West from.

I mean, think about Oregon Trail.

This gold rush, all this stuff was just like, well, there's nothing here for me.

And I think a lot of it was kind of the mindset of like, this is, this is our right almost

or this is, this is our destiny that we need to manifest.

America is very, very interesting because I feel like America has been the great talent,

courage and drain on Europe.

If you think about over the years, like who came here from Britain?

You didn't just like be kind of a power lead dude and come over here.

No, you had a set of stones.

You got on a ship and you went to the new land.

Not only that though, most of the time it was the destitute.

It was the, you know, you weren't the upper class and just bored and like wanted to come over.

Well, there's probably some of that too.

Yes, but you had like, you're established.

It was well established, right?

You're not just like fairly well off and like, I'm going to just go over and try to spot new land myself.

My thesis is that the, the two great wars in the 17 and 1800s and you have the war of 1818 to all these different things.

All these different wars that happened really bred a certain kind of men and there was a certain kind of society.

I mean, anytime men come back from war, they have a lot of sex and do really well for the country that they're in.

Look at the, look at the baby boomers or the, I'm sorry, the greatest generation, all these different things are a product of that.

And I think this was partially that too.

But just on the, think of like all of the immigration that happened to all of the Ellis Island were all the people that were entrepreneurs desperate people that wanted to fight and claw their way into something.

They all left Western Europe and some of Eastern Europe and came here and that drained out of Europe.

And now look at Europe.

I mean, it's a bunch of bootlickers over there now.

That's, that's pretty much all that remains.

We, we, yeah, we won't get into geopolitical.

Yes, sir.

All right.

How it's currently.

Let's, let's go to our, to our first guy.

Okay.

All right.

In 1809, I tried to not write too many dates in here because it sounds like a history lesson.

Well, and I also, it is confusing to me because I tried to keep track of like, okay, when is this guy from?

Like, what is this time period?

Because there's a little bit of recent than some of the later folks.

Yes.

But this is a lot of these men started doing things before the dates.

Okay.

So a lot of these guys are very, have very complex stories.

And I have kind of cherry-picked ones that I think that are interesting to tell some stories about what kind of men these were.

So this is by no means a, the quintessential version of their life.

All right.

So we're just, we're kind of doing this for fun.

Not the full biography because.

No.

Turns out there's, there's a lot of misinformation.

There's like, they didn't have, there was no documentary being filmed about them at the time, right?

There's no autobiographical.

Just you wait till this, this one guy later.

I think it's our last guy or second, our middle guy today.

All right.

In 1809, the upper Missouri is as far from civilization as a white man can get.

There's no roads, no towns and no forts worth a name.

There is grass and sky and river and silence stretching in every direction until it runs into mountains that are further away than they could ever look.

If a horse breaks a leg, the rider walks.

If the rider breaks a leg, he dies where he falls.

The black feet own this country.

They've owned it longer than the United States has existed and they do not want anyone else there.

John Coulter chose this twice.

Yes, go ahead.

I'm notoriously, should be notorious, bad at geography.

So I had to like remind myself where Missouri was, which is of course just on the other side of Illinois.

There's St. Louis there and just blow Iowa.

So that was in 1809.

That was still like the middle of nowhere.

That was still the middle of nowhere.

Huh.

That seems bizarre to me.

Dude, that's only like 20 years after the Revolutionary War, 25 years.

Yeah, I guess.

The colonies were founded.

We are a young country, aren't we?

Yes.

Because I think of like, oh, it's 2,050 years.

Yeah, like my grandma can tell me about her parents from 1900, right?

And so it wasn't that much further before than that.

And it's like, okay, yeah, it's not actually that.

Well, this country grew very fast.

It was, it's a very opportune time, the Industrial Revolution.

It was the ideal.

Oh gosh, I don't want to get into American history.

Let's just stick with our boys.

Okay.

Got it.

John Coulter signed on with Lewis and Clark in 1803.

A hunter, a scout, the kind of man that you would set ahead alone because he came back with meat, information and no complaints.

He was with them for three years.

He saw the Pacific.

He saw a country that would take another generation to settle.

When the expedition turned home in 1806, almost back to St. Louis, Coulter asked to leave.

He'd met two trappers headed upriver and wanted to go with them.

Lewis and Clark let him go.

He turned around and walk back into the wilderness.

What do you think got here?

The core of discovery expedition, by the way, is the name of the, the actual name of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The core of discovery expedition.

What do you think you got paid a month to go on the core of discovery?

What do you think Coulter made?

Here's the problem too.

These numbers mean nothing to me without knowing what the inflation, you know, the relative value of it was.

I bet you got paid three new Chevy Silverados.

All right.

It was $5.

$5, okay.

$5 a month.

So that's, what is that?

That's what I mean.

Like, okay, is that great?

Like, are you rich?

I don't know.

$150.

So this guy got paid $150 to hang out with Lewis and Clark on the expedition.

That can't be accurate.

Well, you also have to keep in mind that the value of the dollar itself and what it purchased was a lot different back then.

That's what I mean.

The buying power of the dollar has greatly decreased.

All right.

Anyways, so not being paid what it's worth to risk your life in that.

No, no, no, it is, it is not.

But you got to keep in mind going from five to 150 is a lot different from going from like 500 to 1500 because that's only a 300% increase.

This is like a 1200.

What is it?

A 2,791% increase.

You got to look at $5 as a percentage of $144.60.

Not, oh, well, $5 and $144.

And today's your mindset of today would $5 and $4.

Yeah.

This is a dumb conversation.

Let's keep going.

Doesn't matter.

The numbers mean no.

So mean nothing.

Coulter would not see the city again for four years after turning around and walking back into the wilderness.

Manuel Lisa hired him the following year.

He was a fur trader out of St. Louis.

He was the one of the first persons to build permanent trading posts in Missouri.

Clearly.

Manuel Lisa.

Lisa, I don't know what kind of.

No, you think Spanish.

Actually, Manuel could be Spanish.

Could be Spanish.

He's building a trading post at the mouth of the big horn at the time and he did someone to find the crow tribe and convince them to come and trade.

He sent Coulter alone.

Do we know if they were friendly?

Did they know if the crow were friendly?

Let's let's just let's keep going.

Shall we?

Yeah.

He sent Coulter alone on foot in winter, 500 miles through country.

No white man had ever seen, which is the norm out there.

The snow in the northern Rockies buries everything.

The river's ice over and the game moves to lower ground.

Coulter walked through it carrying his rifle, some ammunition and whatever he could trap or kill along the way.

Sleeping in the open or dug into the snow.

There is no account of how he navigated.

No record of how many days it took or how close he came to dying.

Just that he left in November and came back in the spring with the information Lisa wanted.

500 miles alone in the winter.

On that walk, he became the first white man to lay eyes on what is now Yellowstone.

He came through a valley where water shut out of the ground and columns and hot springs steamed in the frozen air.

Can you imagine seeing this stuff for the first time?

I was just going to say.

Unbelievable.

Like what is that?

I've walked into hell.

All of this stuff.

All of this stuff was completely dismissed as fantasy Jake.

No one believed him.

I know.

Well, would you if the guy comes back, it's like, all right, guy.

I realize you've been out in the wilderness by yourself for six months and you're claiming there's a water shooting in the sky.

Sure there is.

Coulter.

A little bit of that with a little piece of paper.

Little piece of paper.

What else did you see?

This Yellowstone wasn't officially documented until the Hayden Survey of 1871.

That was 60 years later after Coulter died.

Yeah.

So they all laughed at him.

They called it Coulter's Hell.

Yes.

The man had walked.

Yeah.

The man had walked 500 miles through the winter and came back with a story nobody believed.

In the fall of 1808, Coulter and a man named John Potts paddled up the Jefferson River to check their traps.

They worked at night setting the traps after dawn, pulling them before dawn and hiding themselves during the day.

After dark, sorry.

Coulter still had a wound in his leg from the last time he'd fought the Blackfeet.

There's a lot of tribes we don't need to try and discern who all the tribes are here.

I know.

One thing I've learned about doing this throughout 12 of these guys is the diversity of the Native American tribes during this time.

I did look into this a little bit for my own just curiosity.

So the Blackfeet was like the major controlling tribe in that area at the time.

They weren't like the small one.

They were like the majority.

Okay.

One morning they heard movement on the bank above them.

Hundreds of hooves Potts said Buffalo.

Coulter said Indians several hundred Blackfeet appeared on the bank in motion for the men to come ashore.

Come on.

Come ashore.

Coulter went.

He did not have a choice and he told Potts to come in too.

But an Indian grabbed Potts' rifle before he could get out of the canoe.

Coulter snatched it back and handed it to Potts who pushed off into the river instead of coming ashore.

An arrow hit him.

Coulter told him to paddle in.

Instead Potts leveled his rifle and shot one of the warriors straight dead.

He knew what they'd do to him if they took him alive.

The Blackfeet filled him with arrows until, in Coulter's own words, he was made a riddle of.

They stripped Coulter naked.

Clothes, moccasins, knife, they all came off or were taken.

They discussed how to kill him and some just wanted target practice.

The chief stopped them and walked Coulter out onto the open plain about 300 yards from the group and asked him if he could run fast.

Coulter spoke enough to understand what was happening.

In his head he knew he was one of the fastest men on the frontier.

He told the chief he was slow.

So they let him go.

How do you know you're one of the fastest men on the frontier?

You just got that kind of vibe.

Jake, you just got that kind of vibe.

Behind him, the war whoop went up.

Several hundred men started running.

Six miles of flat open plain between Coulter and the Madison River, his goal.

No trees, no cover, nothing but sagebrush and prickly pear cactus.

He was barefoot, naked, and every step drove thorns into his feet.

The plain was wide and dry and there was nowhere to hide on it.

The sound behind him was nothing but hundreds of men screaming.

Halfway across, blood started pouring from his nose, running down his chest and covering his skin.

He looked back once.

Most of the warriors had fallen behind, but one man was close, maybe a hundred yards or so.

He was sprinting at full chat, carrying a spear, gaining.

A mile from the river, the man with the spear was about 20 yards back, close enough to throw it.

So Coulter suddenly stopped and spun around and spread his arms wide and let out a blood curdling war scream at the man.

The warrior stumbled, tripped, fell forward, and his spear broke under him as he hit the ground.

Coulter grabbed the broken point and drove it into the man before he could get up.

He quickly took the man's blanket and kept running.

He reached the Madison and went in. The water was cold.

Downstream, a raft of driftwood had jammed up against an island and he dove under it,

wedging himself into the tangle with his face barely above water, breathing through the gaps between the logs.

The Native Americans came to the bank.

He could hear them, could see them through the cracks in the wood above him.

They walked on the raft.

They searched the banks.

For hours he stayed under there, chin deep in the river, his whole body shivering from the cold,

waiting for them to set wood on the fire.

Every sound above him could have been the last thing he ever heard.

They didn't light it.

After dark he slipped out of his makeshift hide and swam downstream where he climbed out on the bank to start the only thing he could do.

Walk.

Fort Raymond was 200 miles to the east and it was the only place he knew to go.

He was naked, could barely walk.

His feet were shredded with cactus thorns, no food, no weapon, no tools.

The only thing he had was a dead man's blanket.

He walked for seven days, eating nothing but roots and bark.

The sun burned him during the day and the cold froze him at night.

When he stumbled through the gate at Fort Raymond, there wasn't a soul in the place that recognized him.

He went back to three forks twice more after that.

The black feet found him both times.

The second time two of his partners were killed.

He finally walked away for good.

Back to St. Louis in 1810, the first time in a city in nearly six years.

He bought a farm, married a woman named Sally and had a son.

He sat with William Clark and gave him a detailed report of everything he'd seen out there, filling in the blank spaces on Clark himself's maps.

When the war of 1812 started, he enlisted and died in service.

Not from a bullet, not from the black feet.

John is, he was 38.

Wow.

Yeah.

So this guy was illiterate.

He couldn't read or write.

So all of this is him dictating.

Sitting with Clark and telling him his story.

This is what happened.

So, you know, this is maybe a little bit of a big fish story, but pretty crazy nonetheless.

I mean, the guy obviously walked back 200 miles.

We'll give him that.

Yeah.

Wow.

And then went back out again.

That's what I don't understand.

Exactly.

Yeah.

What else do you know?

It's not like you're going to be like, ah, well, I guess I'll stay home and watch Netflix and Apple TV.

I'm just really tired doing this.

If it's all you know, it's all you know.

It's like men that.

I don't like trap locally.

Start the farm earlier.

I don't know.

All right.

Next guy.

All right.

So that was.

Yes.

Mr. Colter.

You will.

You might.

Colter.

What?

John Colter.

I was trying to remember his name.

John Colter.

Thank you.

In 1822 an ad ran in a St.

Louis newspaper.

William Ashley and Andrew Henry wanted.

Enterprising young men to ascend the Missouri River as fur trappers.

Jebediah Smith signed up at 23 years old.

He could read and write unlike Colter, which put him ahead of most of the men around him.

He did not drink.

He did not use tobacco.

He did not swear.

The men he'd be working with did all of those things.

He was born in New York.

He'd read the Lewis and Clark journals as a boy.

And that's what started all of this.

He grew up moving west with his family through New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Tall, thin, blue-eyed, quiet.

He carried a Bible wherever he went.

His favorite books were that and the expedition journals.

The two things that defined his entire life he'd found before he was just 15.

He had like 11 brothers and sisters, by the way.

I mean, yeah.

It was a good Presbyterian family, I assume.

Yes.

He was a Puritan.

Puritan, that's what I meant.

Yeah.

Within a year of signing on with Ashley and Henry,

they gave him a command of a party headed deep into the Black Hills.

So we'd already kind of like, ooh, this is the guy.

You know, you're in a year, you're a year in,

and they're already giving you the charge of a...

Yeah, wow.

There, as he led his men through brush,

looking for the crow to trade horses with,

a grizzly came out of the thicket before Smith could get his gun up.

The bear tackled him to the ground, broke several ribs,

clawed his side wide open and closed its jaws around his head.

It tore his scalp clean off from his eyebrow to his ear,

leaving it hanging by nothing but a strip of skin.

The bear was in and out and bolted back into the brush as fast as it had come.

That was it?

That was it.

His men gathered around him and the sight of it made some of them quite sick.

There's blood everywhere.

His scalp hung off his skull.

You could see his ribs.

He stayed calm, calmer than any man that had, looking like that, had the right to be.

He told Jim Clyman to get a needle and a thread and sew him back together.

Clyman stitched the scalp piece by piece in the middle of the wilderness,

laying the torn skin together as best he could with his hands.

When he got to the ear, he said,

sorry, man, there's really, really nothing I could do.

He said, quote, I put my needle sticking it through and through and over and over,

laced the lacerated parts together as nice as I could with my hands.

Anyway, he wore his hair long on one side for the rest of his life to cover the scars.

The only known portrait of the man painted after his death shows it that way.

I think Mrs. Producer is going to pull this.

Yeah, I would wear it that way as well.

Yeah, yeah.

It was a good thing he kept a good head of hair to cover that up.

Over the next three years, Smith rediscovered South Pass in Wyoming

and became a partner in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

So these guys would get like, they would trap a fur, it would cost them like a dollar

or they could even trade for a fur for these and they would make like a hundred time return.

This was a really, really lucrative lucrative lucrative lucrative business.

So, yeah, I read about this.

It would be a hundred X for like street value in Europe.

Is that what you're saying?

Yes, yeah, yes, exactly.

Yeah, it's very, very lucrative trapping for trapping.

There's like a trapping rush, very similar to the gold rush that happened.

Wait, is this guy that walks forever?

We'll get there.

Okay, this is, but yeah, I got your guys mixed up because he finds out,

or yes, firsthand knowledge of just how lucrative this can be.

No, I'm not giving anything away.

I'm trying to keep myself straight here as well.

Keep yourself, keep it under control.

So fun fact, speaking of your scalp showing and being exposed.

No, I'm not going there yet.

Fun fact, you know what would have made all of this much easier, you know, like exploring.

Yes, I do.

You wouldn't need any of these guys.

You wouldn't get lost.

You wouldn't have to walk 500 miles the wrong way if they all had-

Let me rephrase what you're saying.

Hold on, let me rephrase what you're saying.

You got it.

There is one company that can trace its foundation all the way back to many of these men.

Yeah.

Is the way that I would put it.

I like that.

And that would be our friends over at Onyx.

That's right.

Yeah, if you're looking for the best app for navigating your next adventure,

hopefully it's not quite as harrowing as the guys we're talking about here,

but you should use Onyx Off-Road.

They have over 750,000 miles of trails, comprehensive offline maps.

And as we know, they have folks that are actively exploring, mapping, and rating these trails themselves.

So you can know if you can actually, you know, forward the, like, dried up ditch in your 9-11, or maybe not at all.

So it's real-time data.

It's actually people that have explored these things.

They also have trail ratings, detailed information, a discover tool to help you find trails near you.

There's all sorts of awesome features in the app that are honestly being released, like, all the time.

Like, there are new features that we're just learning about as well.

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Alright, so, here's what I was going to say.

Fun fact, sorry.

So, when I learned about this guy and the fact that his scalp got torn off by a bear,

it's also another phenomenon brought to mind during this period, which was scalping.

Oh, scalping. Yes, yes.

Yeah, the military practice, or I should say the wartime practice of scalping,

which was not I learned unique to just Native Americans.

Like, there are a lot of other cultures that would scalp their enemies as a prize.

But there are also horrifyingly accounts of people that got scalped and then just weren't killed,

or they, like, escaped after being scalped and played dead.

And so my question is, like, do you literally just have your skull showing for the rest of your life?

And if they did survive, which there are accounts of, your skin will grow back over your skull.

What?

Yeah, yeah. That's what I read, Chris, and I don't like it.

But that's how this guy also survived.

Maybe there's hope for me then.

No, just cut it all off.

Yeah, no, I don't think you'll grow hair, but, you know.

Oh, so it'll just look the same.

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I don't know that, yeah, that came to mind as well.

Yikes.

Smith rediscovered the South Pass in Wyoming, and the South Pass is this kind of like this

wide crossing of the continental divide, Wyoming.

How do you rediscover it? Was it discovered?

Yeah, it's, I think he discovered it originally.

The continental divide, without it, the Oregon Trail doesn't exist.

So he was the first one that, he was the first one that discovered, hey, you can take wagons, wagons through it.

Sure.

By 1826, he was leading an expedition southwest from the Great Salt Lake into the desert through southwestern Utah, down the river,

across the Mojave Desert, and into the Spanish settlements at San Gabriel, California.

He was the first American to travel overland to California.

Wow.

He did not have a safari 9-11, still able to make it happen.

The Mexican governor arrested him, told him to leave, and then let him go.

Smith left most of his men camped on the Stanislaus River in California.

It took two men, I've been to the Stanislaus Forest too, it's kind of cool knowing I've been in some of these places.

In California, it took two men east to cross the Sierra Nevada and back to the rendezvous.

It was spring, and the deep snow still buried the passes.

They tried in April and got turned back, losing mules in the drifts.

The snow was too deep to move through with loaded animals.

So they retreated down the western slope and waited.

In late May, they tried again.

Eight days through the mountains, the snow so deep that they could only cover two miles a day.

They lost two horses and a mule that sank through the crust and could not be pulled out.

Smith and his two men kept going on foot, carrying what they could,

and they crossed the divide to come down the eastern side of the great basin.

Six hundred miles of desert stretched between them and the rendezvous that they were looking for

at Bear Lake where they met the rest of their men.

Summer was hitting the basin and the sand reflected the heat upward.

There was no water anywhere and no map to help find any.

No on-ex, right?

They walked east into nothing on a trail to nowhere.

The remaining horses slowed, stopped, and died.

When the last one went down, they cut the meat off of it and carried what they could.

The weight lightning as they ate stringy horse meat until it was gone.

The days ran together, indistinguishable from one another.

Sand, sun, sagebrush, dry lake beds that shimmered like water from a distance

turned out to be nothing but cracked white dust.

Hope was about all that was left.

One of the two men collapsed and could not stand.

He told them to go on without him.

Smith must have looked at the man on the ground and known that leaving him meant killing him.

He and Robert Evans pushed on, leaving the man behind.

After two more miles, they found water.

They filled what they had and walked back.

The man was right where they left him, faced out in the sand.

They grabbed him under the arms and dragged him the two full miles to the water.

His legs traced lines in the dirt behind him the whole way.

Couldn't they have given him the water that they filled up?

I don't think they had. They probably drank it and then went back to get him.

It's two miles in the desert.

Yeah, they didn't have a canteen, I guess.

No, I probably not. Well, they might have. I don't know.

I didn't get an inventory.

44 days after leaving his men on the Stanislaus River.

Plus the guy would, you don't just, it's not pervitant.

You don't just give the guy some water.

He pops right up and starts walking.

Jeez, man.

Cut the guy a break.

He passed out in the desert.

Come on, guy.

Wow.

44 days after leaving his men on the Stanislaus River,

the three of them stumbled into the rendezvous at Bear Lake.

Smith's partners had given him up for dead.

He'd been gone for over a year.

He rested, he then rested for 10 days.

Then he went back.

This time he took 18 men to the south on the longer route to California.

He knew the desert crossing would kill a larger party.

Now that he had a little bit of experience, as we know.

So he took them down the Colorado to the Mojave villages.

The Mojave folk had been friendly the year before.

They weren't anymore.

Other trappers had passed through since Smith's first visit,

caused problems and killed tribal members.

Their reputation is spoiling the passage for these peaceful men.

The Mojave were waiting.

Mid crossing, they attacked the men.

10 of Smith's 18 were killed in the river.

All the horses were taken, leaving Smith and eight survivors

to walk the rest of the way to California.

The Mexican governor arrested him again and again,

eventually releasing him each and every time.

Smith eventually bought 300 horses and mules

and drove them north up the Sacramento Valley,

trapping as he went.

The plan was to reach the Columbia River

and loop back to the Rockies,

but the valley flooded with a spring melt

and the herd bogged down in the marshes.

You couldn't find a route east through the mountains,

so he cut west to the coast and went north.

On the Umpka River in Oregon,

while Smith and two men were away from camp

scouting a river crossing, the Kelwata set attacked.

15 of the 18 men were killed.

They took everything.

Furs, horses, equipment, all of it, gone.

Smith and the survivors walked north to Fort Vancouver

where the British took them in.

He wrote a letter to his brother Ralph saying,

quote, you may well suppose that our society

is one of the roughest type.

Men of good morals seldom enter into business of this kind.

He also said, I have need of your prayers

to bear me up before the throne of grace.

There's a little bit of guilt here.

In 1830, Smith sold his shares in the company

and settled in St. Louis.

Eight years in the wilderness,

he bought a house and sent money to his father.

His mother had died while he was gone.

He started a trading business and began planning

to publish his maps and journals,

the kind of work that might have changed

the story of westward expansion

if he had lived long enough to finish it.

On May 27, 1831, Smith rode ahead of a trading expedition

on the Santa Fe Trail to Scout for Water.

A Comanche War Party found him out there alone.

His body was never recovered.

He was 32. His journals went largely unpublished.

His maps circulated secondhand through people

who never credited him.

A proper biography for this man did not appear

until 1953, over a hundred years too late.

He explored more of the American West

than any single person before or since,

and he did all of it between 23 and 32 years old.

So we have him to thank for the Oregon Trail.

We have him to thank for the Pony Express

and for US Highway 50.

People still drive this road today,

and they don't even think about this guy.

I was just thinking about the sheer expanse that he traveled.

Like, you and I have driven across the country several times.

What if every time we tried, someone stole our car

and we had to walk home?

Like, yeah, you don't even comprehend.

Like, even driving, you're like, wow, this is far.

Like, this sucks.

With nothing, Jake.

With nothing.

They steal your car.

You walk.

And then you have nothing, and you just start walking.

With nothing.

We would be dead.

Yeah.

We'd be dead.

You and I would die.

We would be absolutely slim.

Why is Owen Wilson there?

Uh, Mrs. Producer?

That's Owen Wilson from Shanghai News.

Open your microphone, Mrs. Producer.

Are you sure?

Is that not Owen Wilson from the movie Shanghai Noon?

Oh.

What was that better?

Oh, really?

Jebediah Smith is Owen Wilson in Night of the Museum?

Really?

There you go.

Why does he look like a cowboy and not an explorer?

Well, it's, A, it's Owen Wilson.

And B, this is Hollywood.

Okay.

Yeah.

There you go.

All right.

In the late summer of 1823, we're advancing in years a little bit here.

A man is lying face down in the dirt in what will someday be South Dakota.

A grizzly bear just tore his back open.

His ribs are showing.

His leg is broken and his throat has a hole in it.

Two men were supposed to stay with him until he died and bury him properly, as they should.

They took his rifle, his knife and his flint and laid a bear hide over him and left him.

The nearest help?

200 miles south.

He can't even stand.

That can't even walk.

He can't do anything.

That is where Hugh Glass woke up.

Not much is known about this man before then.

He was born around 1783, probably Pennsylvania.

There are stories he was captured by the pirate Jean Lafitte and forced to serve on his crew before escaping.

There were stories he lived with the Pawnee for years and learned to forage and find water on an open prairie,

to read terrain the way the man, literate man reads a book.

It's all smoke and none of it can be confirmed.

He showed up in St. Louis, answered the same Ashley Henry ad as Jebediah Smith did.

Signed on.

In late August, the expedition was moving over land near the forks.

If you're not watching, you should be watching the podcast.

I need a portrait of me like that.

I'll never be that rugged.

How old was the guy at this point?

Well, this is he was a summer of 1823 is when this happens.

He's 40.

40 years old.

Wow.

He was 40 when it happened.

Yeah.

40 when the bear attacks him.

In late August.

I'm not even 40.

And I can't imagine like healing that well or at all anymore.

Stop it.

In late August, the expedition was moving over land near the forks of the Grand River.

Glass was out ahead scouting for game.

He walked into a thicket and found himself face to face with a mother grizzly and two cubs.

She was on him before he could do anything about it.

Slamming into the ground, biting into his back and tearing his flesh open.

She broke his leg, ripped at his throat until there was a hole in it and clawed him until his ribs were showing through his back.

His men heard him screaming, ran in and killed the bear.

They pulled her off him.

And the sight of what was underneath was about as bad as anything those men had ever seen.

Andrew Henry thought they couldn't stay.

Erika Erakara.

That was Ashley's one of Ashley's business partners led the Oberlin group there.

The Erakara were close and every Indian tribe were close.

Every day they sat was a day they might get found.

He could not hang around.

They'll find you.

Henry offered payment for two men to stay behind.

Tend him until he died and give him a proper burial.

I'll pay you.

Just bury me.

Don't leave me alone.

Bury him.

John.

No, it was the group leader was like, hey, we need to take care of him.

He's going to die.

Someone's going to stay.

Just to hang out.

Yes, you're right.

The other guy was not telling too many stories at that point in time.

He was a little under the weather.

They wanted him to attend a glass nearly dying him proper burial.

John's Fitzgerald and experienced frontiersmen volunteered.

So did a kid named Jim Bridger, 19 years old.

There's a third of his men, Bridger.

We're not sure if this is the Jim Bridger, the legendary mountain man,

but it's accepted.

I didn't really dig into him too much.

All right.

Five days go by.

Five days.

He's got his throat torn open.

He can't move.

He wouldn't.

This man would not die.

His eyes moved and he breathed, but with a gaping hole in his throat,

he couldn't talk.

He also couldn't move and he could not eat.

Fitzgerald was convinced that the archer were going to find them at any moment.

Five days watching a man breathe.

We should have stopped a long ago knowing that every hour they stayed was

another hour closer to getting killed themselves.

Eventually he talked Bridger into leaving.

So since the guy was dead anyway, they took the rifle, the knife, his flint,

everything a man needed to survive, placed them next to his stream,

laid the bears hide over him like a shroud and walked away.

In their minds, they were burying a dead man who just hadn't finished dying yet.

Imagine like that.

You're, you're, you're cute.

You're next to the river and these guys slowly pull this bear hide over you

and go, God bless.

See you later.

See you in the next life.

And they just leave you and you're under this pelt of the bear that

realize that this is the story that the Revenant, the movie, the Revenant

with Leonore Capio.

This is the story of the Revenant.

Yes.

Which, yeah, that, that, I mean, say what you will about many

inaccuracies that we'll talk about later, but they did a very good job of.

Do you have some inaccuracies?

Do you have, you have a little bit to talk about?

I don't have any.

Sure I do.

Oh really?

No.

Yeah.

I didn't dig into that.

I don't have time for that.

Well, first of all, this was South Dakota.

This was the plains.

If you remember the movie, it was the woods and the mountains,

which was actually filmed up in Canada.

And then also in Argentina, I believe.

So like totally different.

Let me get through this.

And then you can tell me all your things because I don't want to spoil it for

anybody.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

That was the big one that like doesn't matter, but there's another bigger one at the end.

Okay.

But all I was going to say is like that, that, that drama or that mentality of like,

like leaving him there, that was, I think captured very well by the movie.

Like that was a haunting movie.

Oh.

Wow.

Is it Mr. Hugh Glass himself?

It is, it is from the dead.

Um, Mrs. Producers or something.

You know, it says the same man who left Hugh Glass for dead, um, later lied to the Donner

Party about Hastings cut off, setting them to their fate.

Mrs. Producers.

Really?

You got to be kidding me.

This guy sucks.

Because, because that was the other inaccuracy in the movie, the Revenant, like the whole

thing, Leo's or Hugh's, um, like motivation for keeping on was revenge for leaving him.

Yes.

When in reality, Hugh.

That's him.

That's the guy.

That's the coward right there.

That's the coward.

But in reality, it's said that Hugh didn't blame them at all.

He's like, he doesn't feel revenge.

He didn't go out and kill them.

He did not kill those people as they did in Revenant.

But it was, it was a motivation.

He's like, yeah, he did.

He eventually, now that we've gotten to the end of the story and spoiled it, yes, um,

he eventually does forgive them.

But I believe it was his motivation was to kill them.

Like that was one of his motivations to survive.

But.

Sure.

Um, we'll, we'll get into that.

So Glass sets his own broken leg.

Uh, he wrapped himself in the high that was supposed to be his burial cloth.

I don't know, dude.

I don't know how you say.

I don't know.

He wrapped himself in the bear high that was supposed to be his burial cloth and drank

from the stream.

He ate berries, roots and bugs.

He killed a rattlesnake with a rock, but could not chew it.

So he crushed the pieces of it between stones and soaked them with water until they were

soft enough to swallow.

Then he started crawling south toward the Cheyenne River, navigating by a butte that he

saw on the horizon.

He crawled with all his muster.

It was just a few yards at the time.

Then he rested.

Then he crawled a few more.

His back was wide open.

He let the maggots eat the dead flesh and his wounds.

His shattered leg was splinted.

At some point he stumbled across wolves pulling down a buffalo calf.

He waited in the grass until they'd had their fill, then dragged himself to the carcass.

The raw meat was the first real food he'd had in days.

He stayed near the kill until he'd eaten what he could stomach, then started moving again.

Eventually he could walk just a few steps at first, then a few more, close to a mile a day.

When he reached the Cheyenne River, a group of friendly Lakota, can you imagine the sight?

You're on a horse, you're this Lakota brave or whatever, sitting up there.

This dude comes watering out of the forest wearing a bear pelt and blood on his face.

Got a stick for a split.

I don't think you would really realize the extent of his injury until meeting him face to face.

He looked pretty rough and then he takes his bear pelt off and he's like, Jesus!

Yeah, exactly.

They gave him a high boat and he floated downstream.

Dude, I can't help you, I don't know, here's a boat.

That's it, that's what you guys say, you have a boat.

I mean, that's pretty generous, I imagine at the time.

Six weeks after being left for dead, a month and a half,

Glass walked through the gate at Fort Kiowa, over 200 miles, crawling, walking, floating.

Broken leg, exposed ribs, whole in his throat.

At the time, he was driven by one thing, he wanted to find Fitzgerald and Bridger and kill them both.

He recovered, went upriver and found Bridger first.

The kid was terrified and he had every right to be.

Glass looked at him for a long time, in his head he'd been planning to kill the boy,

but Bridger was 19, Glass forgave him and let him go.

Fitzgerald had joined the U.S. Army and killing a soldier happened to be a federal offense.

Glass got his rifle back and moved on.

Wait, Glass got his rifle back, meaning he confronted the dude and was like...

He probably got it from Fitzgerald.

Give me my gun back, at least.

Yeah, pretty awesome, pretty awesome.

He went back to trapping.

In the winter of 1883 on the Yellowstone, the Ericara killed him and two companions.

He was around 50 years old.

The four earliest accounts of what happened to Hugh Glass don't agree on the distances, the timeline, or whether he crawled the whole way.

They all agree on the core of it, though.

A man was mauled, robbed and left for dead and crawled across a prairie to survival.

Whoa, look at that statue.

Oh man, that is really cool.

So years after the bear, a little footnote here, a shoshone arrow left a metal arrow head embedded in his back

and he endured the flamed wound across 700 miles back to Taos where a fellow trap removed it with nothing but a straight razor.

Yikes.

I mean, it was probably like a walk in the park compared to what he endured before.

I also looked up, I couldn't believe that he was 50 at the time, which the life expectancy of like the global life expectancy was 43 for a man.

And if a trapper was like maybe 30, like he lived very long.

Yes.

For especially enduring all those injuries.

Yeah, he was an absolute beast.

Like absolutely.

Yeah, just the will.

We ever seen a grizzly bear?

You ever seen a big bear like that?

They're insane.

Like go to the zoo, you see a bear, you're just like.

Well, yeah, like in the zoo or like a, you know, amount of one, but I can't imagine.

All right.

Wow.

In the winter of 1787, we kept things off.

Do you want to tell me about any of our partners that helped keep this podcast on the road here?

Yeah.

I was waiting for like a better point to talk about Nokia.

And I suppose when they were like going through the passes that were really snowy, that would have been really opportune.

Because, you know, if they had had Nokia in tires, they would have had no problem transversing in a mountain pass, especially.

I don't know how much it would have helped them with a horse instead of a car.

I know, I know, but like assuming you have Nokians, you probably had a car to put them on at that point.

True.

So, especially the new Hakaplita that has their crazy new studded, what did they call it?

The, I don't have it in front of me, but they have the studs that retract themselves into the tire, the automatic studs.

Here it is.

Hold on.

I'm getting my different thing.

Yeah.

The double action stud technology on the Hakaplita 01.

They actually have automatically engaging studs for colder temperatures, which of course would be great when traversing a mountain pass.

They respond through an advanced tire compound where the road temperature is at a below freezing.

The rubber stays stiff and keeps the studs firmly in place.

But when it's warmer, the compound softens, allowing the studs to sink deeper into the tire, which of course is great for eliminating the noise that Chris hears all the time in the winter.

Not anymore.

Just in time to put my summer tires on, now it's going to sleet and snow.

Now, apparently where I live, they're saying seven to nine inches of snow.

I saw one here.

So I think you should check again.

I think they're lying or hyping it up.

I'm sure they are.

I would like you to thank me because I put summer compound on.

So what's my fault?

100%.

You also could have just switched to the Supras AS01, the other amazing tire from Nokia, which is a high performance all season tire specifically made for folks that want a high performance driving tire without giving up the traction and performance and capability of the traction when roads get wet and snowy and sleety.

So check them out at nokiantires.com.

In the winter of 1787, a man is walking east across.

We went backwards.

That's right.

Across.

No, I'm just noting to myself.

Yeah.

Ah, yes.

These are all over the place, Jake.

They're not anymore.

I know.

He's walking east across Siberia.

Siberia.

And 1787.

He's got no money, no sponsorship for the journey, no permission to be there.

The plan is to cross Russia, reach the Pacific, cross the Bering Strait and walk south through Alaska and cross the entire North American continent to Virginia.

This entire plan was Thomas Jefferson's idea.

Do you think they knew how big that country or area was?

No.

Like Siberia or Alaska or the entire continent?

Well, we didn't have, when did we get Alaska?

Was that like 1860?

It was much later.

Much, much later.

No, that was 1955?

No, that can't be right.

Alaska and Hawaii were very, very late, Chris.

That's statehood, not when we bought it.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because I didn't realize the 48th leg.

That was close.

1867 by US Secretary of State Seward.

Remember it was like Seward's Folly or something like that?

Because that was just the worst idea ever.

Yeah, why would you buy that much?

You wasted all that money and they're like, oh wait, oil, that's a thing.

Yes, it's a thing.

And plus it's a great defense.

Yeah, strategic thing.

But we didn't know that back then.

I mean, where Christ were right, horses.

Sorry.

I just, to my point, I just learned that the United States flag only had 48 stars up until 1956 or something.

Yeah, Hawaii and Alaska were not added to statehood.

I was talking about when we owned it.

It was just a territory at the time.

Correct.

Yes, I understand that.

So this is 80 years before that.

So this is really early.

So this plan to go across all of this was Thomas Jefferson's idea.

And John Ledger said yes immediately.

He said yes to everything.

That was his problem.

He was born in Groton, Connecticut.

His father was a sea captain who sailed for the West Indies a day after his son was born and died young.

So when he was dad, Ledger bounced around relatives in Hartford, ending up at Dartmouth.

At Dartmouth.

Yes, Dartmouth.

And lasted about a year.

He left by building a dugout canoe and paddled 50 miles down the Connecticut River.

He's been sent there.

He left college in a canoe that he made.

Yeah, they actually ended up using the canoe club at Dartmouth as named after him now.

That's ironic.

That's really ironic.

He eventually became a sailor, ended up in London and got pressed into the Royal Marines.

In 1776, this boy was assigned to Captain James Cook's third and final voyage.

Yes, that Captain Cook, the most celebrated explorer of his age in the British Royal Navy.

Three major Pacific voyages.

This was his last one.

So while Washington is crossing the Delaware,

Ledger, our boy here, is standing on the coast of Alaska with Captain Cook.

Wild.

Also, why did he go over to the UK?

Do we know?

He was, he just bounced around.

He became a sailor, probably rode a boat over there to, you know, just a sailor.

I'm just curious, like, how do you get, like, forced into the Royal Marines or Navy as a non,

like, I'm sure it's only for, quote, citizens.

And then he's like, oh, no, I'm not a citizen.

They're like, uh-huh.

Yeah, right.

That's called conscription, really, is what it is.

If you commit a crime or you're destitute or you don't have money or there's a debt,

you get pressed or constricted into the, that's my guess of what happened.

That makes sense.

So four years on the water, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga, Tahiti, Hawaii, can you imagine?

The northwest coast of America, Alaska, the Bering Sea, Kamchatka, Ledger,

Ledger was probably.

I don't even know where Kamchatka is.

I don't either.

Maybe a Mississippi producer can type that up for us.

I have no idea where Kamchatka is.

Like when you, yeah, but maybe it doesn't exist anymore.

That's my guess.

Uh, maybe not.

Ledger was probably the first American citizen to set foot on the western coast of his own continent.

Whoa.

Okay.

So just to give you perspective, he's the first American to set foot on the western side of the United States.

That's wild.

He didn't come from the east.

He came from the Pacific and went all the way around on a British ship while his countrymen were fighting the British back home.

Wow.

In Canton, he watched sea otter pelts purchase from natives on the northwest coast for almost nothing.

Uh, sell for enormous months, sums of money.

He had filed that away.

It would drive him for the rest of his life.

Now, here's a, here's an interesting story.

So, you know, we all know cook is a famous explorer.

Mm-hmm.

Ledger watched cook die on a beach in Hawaii.

Cook is probably the most famous explorer alive at the time.

Three voyages.

Oh, there's Kim Chuka.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's just on the other side of the Bering Strait.

Okay.

I was like, I don't recognize where that is.

That was, that was Russia.

That map didn't have, that map did not have labels.

I have no idea.

Are you sure that's not just North America and like way up there to the, like the, the Canadian?

Jacob, look at the map on the, on the top left is Norway and Sweden and Finland.

And on the, all of Russia right there.

And on the right, you've got Kim Chuka.

And below that is Japan.

Why is Russia look all like split up?

Because, because, well, that's all the like Siberia, Tibet, all these different.

That's the, so it's the, the Republic.

It's all the different provinces of the Republic.

So, okay.

That was at the time, I assume.

Yeah.

You got to remember that Russia was not Russia.

Russia.

Right.

Yeah.

There's all kinds of different things.

Fun fact, I have swam off of Captain Cook Beach.

There you go.

Pretty sure is where he died.

Well, yeah, I'm going to give you a little bit of a lesson here on, on what happened.

Oh good.

Cause it's kind of interesting.

Cook was at the time the most famous explorer alive and one of the most famous explorers all

time.

He'd mapped more of the ocean than any person in history.

When the expedition first arrived at the bay in Hawaii, Kila Ke Kawa Bay, 10,000 Hawaiians

paddled out to meet him.

Why?

They thought Cook might be Lono, the fertility God.

Yeah.

I did know that.

Which is, I mean, I'd be pretty cool.

Yeah.

The timing of his arrival lined up with their festival.

Exactly.

He treated him like a deity, lavished him with gifts, held ceremonies in his honor.

Cook and his men stayed for a month, took everything the Hawaiians offered and left.

Before we continue the story, why don't you tell me a little bit about Common Gear, our

friends over at Common Gear.

We'll talk about Mr. Cook.

Okay.

Because I'm excited about, yeah, the history of Captain Cook.

But speaking of history and stories, the story of your car matters as well.

Just as much as the machine itself sometimes.

Every receipt, every late night fix, every travel, mile, rallies, that's your car's identity.

But most of us have that history scattered everywhere if it's recorded at all.

You know, whether it's in your glove box or it's maybe a photo on Instagram or it's,

I don't know where.

But the Common Gear fixes that.

It's a platform built by real car people that allows you to digitize everything.

Your maintenance records, your build photos, your provenance, all of the details, all of

your maintenance, all organized, searchable in one place.

If you've got decades of paperwork, they have a white glove service that'll digitize it

for you, remote or on site.

You hand them chaos and they hand you a complete car history.

It adds credibility and it adds value.

If you go to sell your car, now you have everything right there in a singular place that's verified

and you can look at it.

Go to thecommongear.com and make your free account and start building your car's digital

legacy today.

It's free, Chris.

It doesn't cost anything.

It's free.

We don't reinforce that enough in these ads.

You know what does cost a lot, Jake?

Doing a podcast and running overcrest costs a lot.

So if you would like to support that, overcrestproductions.com, forward slash drivers club and take a look

at what we've got to offer.

There's going to be some new things there.

You can support the show.

You can support the rally.

You can support you.

It's drivers.

It's drivers team.

Driving team.

We are terrible.

Okay.

We got to do better at that.

Driving team.

It's the driving team, Chris.

Yes, the driving team.

All right.

You can support us there.

We'd love to have you sign up.

Sign up by June and you get the annual drop, which is going to be best spoke to driving

team members.

What exact day?

Is it Jake's birthday?

I think that's probably the cutoff, isn't it?

June?

I don't know when.

I think it's June 1st is the cutoff if you're not signed up by then and then everything

will get sent out.

So my birthday, June 2nd is too late.

Yep.

You cannot with Jake.

Happy birthday and sign up for this year's drop.

So sign up for the drivers club.

You're going to get some really cool stuff.

Jeff is working on one of a kind things.

You're not a member of the driving team.

It will not be for sale.

I think some of that actually arrived in my house today.

Yes.

Yeah.

Approved for that.

I think you're right.

Okay.

So he took everything the Hawaiians offered and he left Mr. Cook, a storm and our buddy

is led us on his boat.

Hold on.

I have to speculate, Chris.

I have to speculate being that they thought he was the fertility god.

And they were in the midst of a festival.

We know how festivals are and people are crazy and happy and maybe they're drinking some

coconut rum that they're making there.

Everything that the Hawaiians gave them, I imagine, was of themselves as well.

I'm just saying Captain Cook probably had a really good time.

Oh, I'm sure.

I'm sure there was there was a few things that that went with, but I was probably just

a giant pile of coconuts in gold.

I mean, that's not bad in a way.

I don't know.

Is that, is that native?

Anyway, so he turns out he, he left, he leaves so they go everywhere.

A storm breaks his mast.

So he turns around and comes back predictably.

The Hawaiians did not want him there anymore.

Wait.

The festival was over.

The welcome was spent and a God who comes back with a broken ship doesn't look much

like a God.

Yeah.

Not much divinity in that.

No.

Led Yard saw it clearly.

He later wrote that they were reciprocally tired of each other.

Things got worst fast.

They were hung over at Chris.

That's what I'm talking about.

It was too big of a party, too much.

Everyone's hung over.

I told you to leave.

Things got worse really fast.

The Hawaiians stole a cutter from one of the ships.

Cook went ashore with nine Marines to take the Hawaiian chief hostage until the boat

was returned.

It was a tactic he'd used before.

Word came across the bay that another chief had been shot by Cook's men.

The beach erupted.

Cook was stabbed from behind, clubbed on the head and went down in the shallows.

Four Marines died with him.

Led Yard watched the most celebrated explorer of his age die on the beach over a stolen

boat.

The Admiralty, the British Admiralty, confiscated everyone's journals when the expedition got

back to England.

They wanted to control the story.

Led Yard wrote his from memory.

What is that?

Is that the knife?

Oh, that's Cook's fatal dagger.

They have it?

That's a pretty nice looking knife.

Wait, so is this a...

A kill, Captain James Cook at the bay, Hawaii, blah, blah, blah, it is of Spanish origin

and quite different from the usual weapons of the...

That thing's rad.

Right.

Okay, so they like took his own dagger or something or one of those trees.

Wow.

Okay.

I didn't see that while I was there.

Yeah.

Well, it might not be there.

It might be in a museum in England.

Who knows?

So, he published his notes.

Led Yard wrote his own book.

Oh, yeah.

Because they...

Yeah.

The man who watched the most famous explorer in the world, Diana Beach, wrote the only

honest account of how it happened and he did it from memory because the government took

his notes.

Published in 1783, a full year before the Admiralty's official account hit the shelves.

It was the first book protected by copyright in the United States and he'd written the

whole thing without a single note to work from.

Led Yard's original confiscated journal has never been found.

Yeah.

No, they destroyed all of them.

But the fact that that's a first...

They're around.

Really?

They're around.

Yeah.

I think they destroyed his because it probably wasn't...

Yeah.

But they wrote like...

It's like 1,600 pages because the journals of the whole journey, like all his journeys

and everything were there.

Oh, so they do...

There are records of those.

Yeah.

There's records.

That's something I specifically...

I'm like, where are these journals?

Led Yard's is gone.

They never found it, predictably.

The British sent them to fight Americans in the Revolution.

He deserted, of course, and went back to Connecticut and spent several years trying to get someone

to start a trading operation.

This is where I'm from.

Like, thanks for the free ride.

I'm out.

He had seen the money that Trapping provided and knew the opportunity was real, but nobody

would back him.

He tried Robert Morris, who was a Continental Army guy and a signer to the Declaration of

Independence.

Yeah.

And John Paul Jones, who was a naval hero, who has the famous quote that says, I have

not yet begun to fight.

But anyway, every scheme of his fell apart.

Fun fact, Morris, the signer of the Declaration, I believe is the ancestor of the inventor

of Morris Code.

I might have made that up, but I believe I read that.

They're spelled very different.

This is Robert Morris, M-O-R-R-I-S, and Morris is M-O-R-S-E.

So, you know, Chris, you know when AI makes things up, they call it hallucinating?

Yes.

That would be one.

I just hallucinated that.

Oh, that's you.

You're AI.

That was not AI.

I can't even blame it.

A jacanation.

That was a jacanation.

In Paris, later on, Ledger met Thomas Jefferson again.

They became close.

Jefferson called him a man of genius.

Ledger called Jefferson his friend, brother, and his father.

They shared the same obsession.

What was out there past the edge of the known?

Jefferson's idea was simple.

If a ship could not be found, just walk east across Europe, east across Russia, across

the Bering Strait, south through Alaska, and across the continent to Virginia.

So, around the world, around the world is what he just said.

Essentially, yes.

He just said, go, just walk around the world, Chris.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes.

You're putting that in perspective.

Mr. Thomas Jefferson, the emissary to France, I believe, was his role at the time.

Yeah, okay.

Weird.

Ledger said yes.

He goes yes.

I'll do it.

Sure.

Yeah.

Jefferson is quoted as saying to a friend, he says, having no money, they kick him from

place to place, and thus he expects to be kicked round the globe.

December.

So, he kind of knew he was like, not taking advantage of him, but at least being like,

yeah, this guy's stupid enough and destitute enough to do it.

You think they took bets enough, are you with it?

Oh, yeah.

December, 1786, 10 years after the Revolutionary War, he left London with almost nothing.

Crossed the channel and made his way north through Denmark and Sweden, Scandinavia in

winter.

There's all kinds of stories that I can't.

It's like, I can't do too much.

He walked along the coast of the Gulf of Botnia, crossed into Finland and reached St. Petersburg.

From there, he went east, Moscow, then passed Moscow deeper into the interior across the

Earl Mountains and down the eastern side into Siberia.

Which?

Siberia.

Has lore of its own.

Like that's not somewhere you just go in.

I'm going to give you a little bit of perspective.

Siberia is a word people use often at a place without understanding the scale.

From the Earl Mountains to the Pacific is 4,000 miles.

But I'm going to give you perspective because even that is a little like, oh, I don't know.

So it is, I'm like trying to figure out, I'm dragging the little map thing around.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Miami to Anchorage is 4,400 miles.

Oh, what?

Okay.

That's a big Siberia is.

LA to New York is 3,000?

3,200 miles or something, 3,300 miles.

Holy crap.

It might only be 2,500 miles.

Is it?

Okay.

Yeah.

Cause I guess here to LA is like 2,000.

I think.

Ish.

2,700 miles.

Yes.

2,700 miles.

That was close.

Yep.

So let it walked city by city.

Omsk.

Tomsk.

Thank you for trying to travel by foot.

I do what I can.

This is a long episode.

We talked too much.

I timed it.

I read it and it was like 45 minutes.

Yeah.

He traveled by foot by sledge or merely by the charity of strangers.

When nobody offered to help, he slept where he could.

When someone let him in, he stayed until they made him leave.

Which he crossed.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, you don't blame the guy, but also like.

Take your time.

Yeah.

It's a little bit of a squatter maybe.

He sat in the back of mail sledges when drivers took pity on him.

He reached Yakutusk in 11 weeks, more than halfway across Russia.

No money.

No government backing and no permission to do any of this.

In Yakutusk, he stopped for the winter, planning to join a larger expedition to the

Pacific coast.

Russian officials had been watching him the whole time.

An American who knew the Pacific fur trade was not someone Catherine the Great wanted

wandering through her territory unsupervised.

In February of 1788, soldiers came for him.

They arrested him, put him on a sledge and hauled him 1500 miles back to Moscow at nearly

a thousand miles a week before dumping him across the Polish border.

Months of walking, the cold, charity of strangers, the frozen rivers, all of it undone in a few

brutal weeks on the back of a sledge going the wrong direction.

Oh my God.

So he went to London and tried a different thing.

Africa.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

So we, so we did give up on that, but I guess Africa now.

Sorry.

He went to London and tried again.

Africa, the association for promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa wanted someone

to find the source of the Niger by traveling from Cairo across the Sohara.

They asked Ledger, when can you be ready?

He said tomorrow morning.

Chris, no.

Like this guy clearly is skilled.

Like, don't get me wrong.

Absolutely.

The fact that he survived and this is, but also like, why?

He got to Cairo in August of 1788 and started putting an expedition together, buying supplies,

hiring contracts.

He got some money this time.

So I was going to say it's funny.

Waiting for a caravan heading south.

Yeah.

It's the association for promoting the discovery.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

The caravan kept getting delayed.

He waited for months.

He wrote Jefferson in November, frustrated by the delays, but ready to go.

He wrote his mother that he was in full and perfect health and accepted to be gone for

three years.

It was the one of the last things she ever heard from him.

He got sick, dysentery.

He tried to treat it himself with a sulfuric acid, a common purgative at the time.

It killed him.

Yeah.

Huh.

John Ledger died in Cairo.

He was 37 years old on my footnote here is 15 years later.

Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to do what Ledger tried doing alone, uh, going the wrong

direction around the planet.

Louisiana purchase.

Also, uh, uh, anyway, yeah, neither the British nor the American government bothered to claim

his body.

He was buried in a makeshift grave somewhere in the city that's never been found.

That's sad.

Quote quote from him.

I have known both hunger and nakedness to the utmost extremity of human suffering.

I have known what it is to have food given me as charity to a madman.

He saw the commercial potential of the Pacific Northwest a decade before anyone acted on it.

He tried across the continent 20 years before Lewis and Clark and tried to find the source

of the Nile and the Niger 80 years before anyone else did.

He was not unlucky.

He was early and an exploration.

That's about the same as being forgotten.

Now, hopefully a little bit less forgotten.

That is wild.

There are so many like separate like chapters of his life that could have been standalone,

but like this guy especially like wild.

I got to buy the book.

Probably not going to get a first edition.

Just okay.

I'm getting confused because this guy's life was so long.

This is the dude that took a boat out of Dartmouth.

Yes.

Right.

Okay.

Like just wild.

This is the guy that watched Cook die.

Can you imagine the story?

That's what I mean.

Like every chapter of this guy's life is just ridiculous.

Okay.

A Sandalbound Band of 10 late colonial Revolutionary War era Almanacs issue.

I'm trying to find it like what a first edition of this.

Oh, his.

Okay.

Is this a biography of his or what is this?

Well, this is his memoirs.

This is the thing that was, you know, here it is.

I have found it.

I'm going to show you what this book.

Wait, this is the thing that they captured and I thought you said haven't ever been found.

No, no, that was Jacob.

What are we looking at?

This is the book he wrote off of memory because they confiscated his journal.

This is the first copyrighted book in North America.

Published by Hartford and Nathaniel Patton 1783 first edition 1773.

This is like actually.

Oh, look, it's only $16,000.

Yes.

Yes, it is.

Wow.

Faithfully narrated from the original.

Mr. John Ledger.

The original memory of what does that even say?

You can't even read it.

It's so like.

Whoa.

Wow.

That's amazing.

I love this stuff, man.

I would love.

Can you like the problem is, can you even read it?

No.

It's just that, you know what this is, this is the same thing for me as like a guy that

wouldn't drive his car.

If I was rich out of my mind, I would buy this book and read it.

Yeah, but you have to have your white gloves and use the tweezers.

Probably.

I actually.

Because you don't want to, you're not, you're not into ruining something for the sake of

like, I'm going to be the only one.

I'm going to be the last one to read it because I don't give a rat's ass.

Like, no, you're going to want to preserve it and make it nice.

And so like, no, you buy this book to have it.

You keep it under glass and then you buy the print of it to actually read.

A journal of Captain Cook's last voyage to the Pacific in an inquest of the Northwest

passage between Asian America performed in the years 76, 77, 78 and 1779.

Yeah.

So this is the guy then that saw firsthand what these pelts were selling for, you know,

in Paris and in London.

Exactly.

And saw also firsthand that they were getting paid a dollar for the actual trappers.

And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And it's selling for a hundred bucks in France.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Just wild.

You could get a slightly newer copy for only $4,000.

No problem.

Anyway.

Okay.

So this is the first first.

Okay.

What are we, what is the three episodes?

How did you title this series?

Who is this?

Just like,

This is the great, the, the greatest explorers of the American West that you've never heard

of.

Okay.

Wow.

I'm excited.

So these are, these are pretty obscure.

There's, there's people that are more, you know, known.

I think the most known is probably Mr. Revenant.

Yeah.

Everybody kind of has seen that movie and read that.

Yes.

Mr. Glass.

That is absolutely phenomenal.

Can you, can you name to have an high school?

What's that?

No, I haven't, I haven't written the other ones yet.

I've got the names, but I haven't written.

So I was just going to ask, um, are, are we sticking within this time period of like,

Yes.

This is the time period, Jake.

When else?

Right.

So it, and I,

What else is there?

You, you talked about this in your intro, but we didn't really go back to it and talk

about it.

Sure.

Kind of consider the fact that the real rationale and the reason for so much of this was the

fact that men were forced or they were faced with no other choice.

Right.

It's like after war, after seeing and being mentally just, I don't know, you're, you're

down.

I also think, Jake, I think there's a different, think of like, back in the day, during this

similar time period where you've got a farm and you're having 10 kids, you expect like

three or four of them are probably going to die.

There's just like this different, we're very like our life expectancies.

By the time we're old, could be a hundred.

You know, these people were dead by 50.

So I think that there's this different like, I got to do this.

I got to do this.

I got to keep going.

There, I think there was just a different mentality on death and I don't think a lot of people

are having an existential crisis.

Oh, I'm sure they were.

During this period of time.

I 100% believe because you could have, okay, that's my point though.

I think it's the same thing because you're, you're saying if you have 10 kids on the farm

and the oldest is the one that actually gets the farm and so the other ones are good luck.

You're either going to go work in, you know, the, the mines or the, are there mines?

I don't know if there's mines, but you're going to, you don't have a lot of

opportunity, right?

And especially being faced with, I think it was an existential crisis of seeing, you know,

so many of your peers and countrymen and brothers die next to you that, yeah, okay,

well, I might as well go see what else is out there.

I don't know if I would describe that as an existential crisis in the modern sense.

No, I mean, I guess, I guess they had their own existential crisis, right?

Their own crisis of identity and crisis.

Yeah, I think it was certainly a factor in kind of motivating them or giving them almost

that freedom of saying like, well, you know, life is obviously short and let's see what

else is there?

What else is out there?

Where can I explore?

There's very little, there's very little to explore now.

I know.

There's very, very little.

Almost nothing.

There's almost nothing left to explore that hasn't already been.

This is like the golden era of exploration.

I've got this other book too.

That's like, it's like, it's this American woman that went and watered around China,

like super old leather bound ancient book.

And it's just her.

Like just this bizarre, she's a widow and she just inherited a bunch of money and decided

to just go travel around China in like the 1700s, which was vastly obviously different

place than it is today.

Yeah, but I can't imagine any less dangerous for a woman in the 1700s to just, I'm going

to go to China.

Nope, but this, it's just something that I don't, this is still in people's blood.

We're still, you know, think of Elspeth Beard who got on our motorcycle and drove around

the world because she just had that itch.

You know, I don't have it that bad.

I've got a little bit, but I mean, I want to do stuff.

I want to drive down to Tirgal Fuego and drive up to the ocean and see that.

And the problem for me is I just really want to use my car.

I want to use my car to do it because I love driving so much.

You're not willing to walk across Siberia.

No, no, I'm not.

All right, guys, that's it.

This was episode one of this series, which I think is three, I think is three parts,

three or four parts.

I'm actually probably going to try and find, I've got some time because we'll do, we've

got an interview coming up next week, which is, I think, but Tim, but Tim Berisha from

BBI is next week, and then we'll have the next episode of the week after that.

So I've got some time.

I'd like to find somebody that I could talk to.

That's an expert in this field to kind of give us an even better breakdown of maybe

even find out if my thesis is correct on what motivated these men.

Yeah.

I'm just guessing, but I'm sure there's the scholars of now that know about then will

be able to tell us.

Absolutely.

Well, I'm excited.

That was awesome.

All right.

On that note, I will see all of you next week.

And I suppose Jake will too.

We'll see you.

Take care.

The Forgotten Ones: Lost Explorers of the American West / Pt 1

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loaded animals

adds credibility and it adds value

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