I continued reading This Vast Enterprise, ( A New History of Lewis & Clark) this month. Craig Fehrman authored this detailed history utilizing notes from primary resources enabling me, the reader, to deep dive into the points of view about Captains, Lewis and Clark, and other members of the expedition and Native American leaders encountered over the multi-year expedition. A few people highlighted by author Fehrman are as follows; the slave York, professional soldier John Ordway, Lakota Chief Black Buffalo, the multi linguistic Arikara leader, Piahito, the teenage Indian mother, Sacajawea and Coboway, the Clatsop leader met by the Corps on the Columbia River. Of course this expedition was backstopped by the politics of the day. President Thomas Jefferson, mirroring the young United States’ appetite for the bounties of the northwest, critical commodities and trade this vast area promised, signed the Louisiana Purchase as an opening act. ( Note: Not much has changed two hundred years later as U.S. political leadership continues to browbeat our neighbors Mexico, Canada, and Greenland.)
I have to admit my ignorance about the Indian nations that populated the Great Plains through the northwest and the Rockies. This volume about the Lewis and Clark Expedition reminded me how, during my formal education I lazily glossed over swaths of very important time periods in our history. I take full responsibility for my shallow attention to this important time in U.S.History. No excuse, I was surrounded with great professors and a great library at the University in Amherst and wasted too much time. Coming of age in the 50’s and the 60’s afforded me most of my knowledge about Indians through the lens of Rawhide, Wagon Train, Bonanza,and other television westerns. My Native understandings were about the Apache, the Sioux, the Shawnee, the Comanche, the Algonquin, the Wampanoag, Nipmuck and Narragansett tribes of New England. The last three personally noticed because I grew up around the Charles River, the focus on the King Phillips War, and I had lived a decade on the Island of Nantucket where I learned the Wampanoag Nation resided thousands of years before the English arrived in1659. ( Note:The Indians living on the Grey Lady called her Natockete, meaning faraway land.) (Google search.)
You might conclude those just listed comprise a lengthy list of Indian Nations but in the great picture of North America it is only the beginning. Lewis and Clark encountered the following Nations. Some I repeat here like the Shawnee and the Yankton Sioux but I add the Lakota, the Arikara, the Otoe, the Pawnee, the Osage, the Kickapoo, the Sicongo Lakota, the Shoshone, the Mandan and the Hielatsa.
Captain Lewis, Captain Clark and the dozens of members of The Corps of Discovery not only were tasked with finding a northwest passage to the great ocean, the Pacific, they were also assigned the task of diplomatically communicating with dozens of Native American people about how our new country’s Federal Indian Policy was going to be a welcomed addition in their lives. Indians were about to be gifted with new trade and commerce opportunity.
I focus this month on just that- communication. From 1804 thru1806 this expedition, carrying a limited understanding of native language, had to take President Jefferson’s dream and sell it by using sign language buttressed with the rudimentary Indian language teachings of Sacajawea. What were they up against? The Arikara leader previously noted spoke twelve languages. Now suppose English and Spanish were two of his languages, that left ten different Indian nation languages for Lewis and Clark to verbally navigate! My point here is simple. The gifts, broken English and sign language could barely enlighten Native understanding. Maybe the real Federal Indian REMOVAL Policy was lost in the smoke of the pipe and wampum diplomacy. Once you understand preemption and removal you see references to them everywhere in expedition documents, (page 429). Written remarks by the Captains note boundaries which they, (Indian Nations), claim and to what place they might be prevailed on to remove to make room for other nations and of removal and the right of soil and occupancy. It is not surprising it took another twenty years or so for an Indian Nation, the Arikara, to rise up and fight the U.S. over fur trade disputes. It took that long to see the real writing on the wall.
This brings me to this months realization that we still practice bullshit diplomacy. I am not saying that Lewis and Clark were liars. But I am saying that even as a young newly born country we were full of hubris and the desire to look out for no one other than our politically correct ideals of that given time, in this case U.S. expansion.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of booking with a couple of our older grandchildren and their friends in a wonderful bookstore, the Northshire Bookstore. ( It is located in Manchester Vermont and if you are as addicted to books as I am, you must include them on your travel literature outings!) I found a small red book with the simple title, On Bullshit. This copy is the 2025 Anniversary Edition, published by Princeton University Press and authored by Harry G. Frankfurt. The author, Frankfurt, passed away in 2023. I believe he first wrote and published On Bullshit in 2005. He is remembered as a professor emeritus at Princeton University and as the world’s most influential moral philosopher. This edition highlighted praise as, brilliant, seminal, and unnervingly relevant, by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Financial Times respectively. I include all this detail as I convinced myself to purchase this little red book. I had to be convinced it was not just a rehash of my early philosophical education self taught by devouring Mad Magazines, my feeble attempt to learn the truths of the world I was pretending to be an adult in. No, this was about the art of bullshit and it highlighted for me a fundamental truth with Professor Frankfurt’s opening passage. One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.
A liar has a craft. A bullshitter an art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit artist”, (page 53).
Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. What he, (a bullshitter), does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise….misrepresent what he is up to, ( page 54).
A liar knows the truth. A bullshitter…… he is neither on the side of the truth nor on the side of the false, (page 56).
I truly believe that Lewis and Clark were not lying to the Indians they met during the expedition. However they could be labelled bullshitters, using wampum gifts, sign language and broken English to produce their art.
I gifted my little red book, On Bullshit, to our grandson who has just started his college career. In my note to him I passed on this truth: It took me two years to learn I couldn’t bullshit my way through college, luckily I learned that sad fact just in time and I actually studied my last two plus years. Don’t make my mistake. College professors can smell bullshit a mile away.
Another month has passed and my metaphorical Light House is finally at my back. No I am not bullshitting you, in my mind’s eye and my mind’s nose I can see the incoming tide and smell the truth on her salty waves. I end this month with the obvious. We are reminded through all the social postings, and other ironic Truth AI produced fodder that lies are the truths of today. But the few who have the real intelligence to deceive are truly great bullshit artists. Watch where you step and listen to your self first.
And Dolly, thank you for leaving a legacy of kindness! Your generous life of kindness lived is a gift we all can believe our grandchildren, born and unborn, will resonate warmly in their hearts too.
Thank you for reading.
Be at peace and joy.
Mark