Good day, Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners. Thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it this week.

It's a Smithsonian overflow. Clay recently did a Zoom call for the Smithsonian and

answered numerous questions about the Lewis and Clark expedition. You've authored a

book on Lewis and Clark and I should say edited a book on Lewis and Clark and their journal entries when they were in North Dakota

and then wrote a book on Mary Weather Lewis as well. So we got all these questions that you didn't have time to answer and

answered them this week on the show and there's a few more actually that we didn't get to.

That maybe we could just do a couple real quickly. Certainly. So this Smithsonian work is so much fun and that people are from all over the country and they're, you know, they're very dedicated people.

The Smithsonian has this

impromptu of its greatness and people from all over the country count on them for the quality of their programming.

And I've just been so pleased and honored to be asked to do some of this and met some really interesting people and they had so many questions we couldn't get to all of them, even though we extended the

Zoom event by more than half an hour. And so I said, we'll do them on the Jefferson hour. So let's do a few more.

All right. Well, a little lighting around here to start with. Was there a list of equipment and supplies that they started with?

Yes, and no. So they did have an inventory. Louis. There's a great two volume work on this called the letters of the Lewis and Clark expedition and related documents

edited edited by man named Jackson, Donald Jackson. And it's the next most important book after the journals themselves. And there is an inventory of some of the things that he bought, but there's never a complete one at no point

at Pittsburgh or in St. Louis. Did they sit down and write out a complete inventory? We can recreate a lot of it just by reading all the journals carefully, but no, we don't have that.

I'm surprised. I thought Jefferson would see to that for certain. He would have done it. Of course, Jefferson would have told you four ounces 0.237 of sugar.

What is the content of volume 12 of the journals? Is it an atlas of some sort?

There are two larger volumes. So it's 13 volumes. The last one is the index and volume one is the atlas. It's a giant folio. And it's all the maps that we that we had at the time that date from the Lewis and Clark expedition.

And then volumes two through 11 are the journals per say the journals of Lewis, the journals of Clark, the journals of Floyd, the journals of Broadway, the journals of gas, the journals of White House, all of them.

And then volume 12 is the erbarium. Lewis collected plant specimens. And you have to drape them very carefully and eviscerate them and label them. And it's actually a very significant contribution to the history of botany.

And we don't have all of Lewis's plant specimens. Some of them perished in an underground cache that they had placed at the great falls, but such as we do have.

We're photographed and reproduced in volume 12 and it needed to be larger so that they could do justice to these plants, which are often a foot and a half long. And then volume 13 is this comprehensive index someone asked if you could talk about the difference between the journal entries of Clark and Lewis.

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