#1671 Mysteries at the End of the Trail With David Nicandri

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

Historian and author David Nicandri joins Clay in the LTA Airstream in Olympia, Washington, for a conversation about lingering mysteries of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The first question was why Meriwether Lewis’ journal remained silent when he finally reached the Pacific Coast, which was the primary purpose of his transcontinental expedition. It was a dereliction of duty for the leader of the expedition to fail to write about reaching the Pacific after 18 months of gruelling travel. Clay and David attempt to make sense of Lewis’ silence. The second mystery they tackled concerns the enduring appeal of the Lewis and Clark story after 230 years. There are several dozen interpretive centers for Lewis and Clark, none for Zebulon Pike, who was exploring the Mississippi River drainage at the same time, and none for John C. Fremont, a generation later. Why? This episode was recorded September 9, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to the introduction to this week's podcast. I'm Clay Jenkinson. I'm actually at Sealy Lake in northern western Montana, about 80 miles from Missoula. Fabulous Lake. My friend Dennis and I went today to this beautiful waterfall. It's a two and a half mile hike in. And then the waterfall is, was just unbelievable.
0:25.0	This gem that I'd never, you know, we've never heard about. I've been there once before or long ago.
0:29.9	But we went there. It was a perfect day. Came back. We've had a little technical glitch with one of the recorders.
0:37.4	And I so apologized to everybody for that.
0:40.2	But now we have solved that problem,
0:43.4	and I think we will be on an even keel here.
0:45.5	But Nacandri, David Nekindri,
0:47.4	and I recorded a program about my journey
0:50.9	and sort of conclusions about Lewis and Clark
0:53.5	in my airstream at Olympia in Washington
0:57.1	when I was finishing up out there, but there was this buzz and click. And so we redid it today.
1:01.9	And actually, the one we did today was better in substance and in pace than the one that we had
1:07.5	done earlier. So I'm very glad for that. And questions we attended to
1:11.2	were these. Why is this story so important? Why do we have several dozen interpretive centers
1:18.2	to Lewis and Clark across the country and essentially none to Zebulent Pike or John C. Fremont
1:24.1	or others? So why is this story so powerful in the American memory? It has
1:31.4	something to do with Stephen Ambrose and has something to do with Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns
1:35.8	has a lot to do with Thomas Jefferson and, of course, Chicagoia. We also talked about Lewis's
1:40.3	silences. Why was Lewis silence? And particularly, particularly why was Lewis silent
1:44.6	when they finally reached the Pacific Ocean around November 15th, 1805? That's one you can't
1:50.6	not write about. That's one you must write about. And Lewis didn't. Lewis's silences are
1:55.6	one of the principal problems of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. I've written about it in my book,
	...

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