Hello, everyone. Welcome to the podcast introduction to the Thomas Jefferson. I will make it short today. David Swenson is on break. I'm talking with my dear friend David the canter. David, we talked about some parts of your book.

Lewis and Clark on the Columbia River of promise Lewis and Clark on the Columbia, but of course I I really urge people to go look at that book. I just reread it and it really holds up beautifully and it is splendidly written and I only wrote in the margins about 20 times no way or whopper or are you kidding.

Well, I love because you you take some chances. Don't you so as a historian, you're not content and I mean no disrespect to someone like David Lavender or Steven Ambrose, but you're not content to tell the story.

That's narrative history yours is more of a kind of analytical history or it might even be said revisionist, although that term is somewhat tainted, but you want to look deeper and you are not unwilling to challenge received ideas and myths about this historical event.

Yes, I think that's right. I mean, the challenge. I mean, I've had people ask me, why don't you write about topics that have been so many books already written about maybe your book will stand out.

Yeah, there might be there might be some truth to that. So you're right. I write. I think if there's an approach to what I do. It's called and I've had a friend actually give it this description. It's historical inversion.

I pick stories for which there's a perceived master narrative and I pick it apart by suggesting that aspects of this story need to be turned on their head and and what that entails basically and is analyzing what other people have written about a story and without engaging in personal what's called ad hominem attacks.

I mean, I don't attack the people who might have written such and such about Lewis and Clark or Cook as it may be here McKenzie. I criticize their ideas about what they say and it seems to me that's fair game.

This, I mean, discourse. That's what the Republic of letters that we like to think we're members of the mod later day version of that's what it should be about matters of interpretation and at some level play that's a matter less a matter of choice than a necessity because usually a topic can only be revisited.

If there's new evidence that suddenly come to bear a new stash of let me imagine the excitement if there were to be six months or three months or three weeks of Lewis's journal that suddenly came to light or some other member of the expedition.

You can write a whole book just on what this what like that new documentation throws on the story so unless you have new evidence your only recourse is new interpretation and without engaging and fraud or outright exaggeration.

I do try to test the limits a dear friend of ours John Geiss once said it's the duty of the historian to fill in the gaps of the record and that's what I tried to do.

All right, so the couple quick things so I agree with your approach, of course, and greatly admire it and encourage it.

There's a book called Lies My Teacher Told Me, which talks about the way in which mythic history just gets repeated generation after generation after generation, even when we know better and a famous example, of course, is Washington chopping down the cherry tree and telling his father I cannot tell a lie.

We know that was invented by a man named Parsons Weems long after the fact and yet it continues to circulate as does the story of the first Thanksgiving or in this case, the story of seconds who we are guiding them to the Pacific and so on.

So the tenacity of received tradition, the tenacity of mythic history is almost incapable of being exaggerated.

And let me give you an example, you talked about new documents. So in the 1990s or maybe late 80s, 55 Clark letters were discovered in an attic in Kentucky and a friend of ours named James Holberg published them with annotations and an introduction.

And one of the letters comes a few weeks after Lewis's death when Clark learns about Lewis's death and he says, I fear, I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him.

It couldn't be more clear that Clark's immediate assumption was that his closest friend in the world had committed suicide and as I like to put it, although he might have been shocked, he was not surprised nor was Jefferson surprised.

They both kind of sense that, yeah, that could happen, whereas we might have said that could never happen, that could never happen, neither one of them said that, they both sort of said, yeah, unfortunate, but that does not greatly surprise me.

And yet as you know, David McCandry, in spite of that, there are thousands of people who refuse that evidence from William Clark, I fear, I fear that the weight of his mind has overcome him.

And continue to cling to the hope and myth that Lewis was murdered. And so without getting into the murder suicide story, let's just assume that suicide is the answer here.

...