>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC.
>> John Cole: Well, good
afternoon and welcome
to the Library of Congress.
I'm John Cole.
I'm the Director of the Center
for the Book for the Library
of Congress, which is the
library's reading and literacy
and book promotion arm, and we
promote books, reading, libraries
and literacy here at
the Library of Congress
and also throughout the country.
We hinge our program, in part, our
national program, onto networks.
State centers for the book,
which are affiliates which work
with state writers largely in
promoting books and reading
in states and also nonprofit
organizations that partner
with us in various projects.
One of the biggest projects
that we are involved
in is the National Book Festival,
which I hope some of you know about,
and if not, I can just
let you in on a secret.
It looks like we're going to be
moving to late September this year
after a couple of years of Labor
Day weekend, but we'll still be
in the Washington Convention Center.
We also have programs here at the
library such as Books and Beyond,
and thank you for joining
us today on such a cold day.
I know that a number of you are
in town for professional reasons,
but we have members of the public
and you have a treat in store,
because we are talking
about a very special book.
The Books and Beyond Series is
a noontime lecture program based
on brand-new books that
have been published
that have a special connection
with the Library of Congress,
and boy do we have a
special connection today.
Often, the authors have
done their research here,
but sometimes the books are based
on projects that have been produced
by the library for
the last few years.
There are several, lots of
seats in the middle kind
of if people would
like to step across.
That would be great.
The program works like this.
We will have the book talk.
Then we also will have a
question-and-answer period.
The show is being filmed not only
by the Library of Congress but also
by C-SPAN, so you will have an
opportunity to see it later.
There will be a question-and-answer
period.
I would like to remind you to
turn off all things electronic,
and then we will have a book
signing starting at about 1 o'clock.
But I get a big kick out of being
able to hold up beautiful books
in anticipation of learning not
only the story about the book,
but a good deal about Lewis
and Clark and a good deal
from two gentlemen who will
be introducing themselves
who are experienced and have a great
deal of knowledge about the period
and a great deal of knowledge about
their respective institutions.
They are Ralph Ehrenberg, who
currently the Chief of Library
of Congress's Geography
and Map Division.
Ralph was the chief from 1990 until
1998, and we had the good luck
of having him return as Chief
of the Division in 2011 in 2011.
His partner in crime
today is Herman Viola,
who also is a veteran employee.
Your program is being brought to
you by veterans, including myself.
I've known Herman and Ralph
for a number of years.
They initially met when they
worked at the national archives
in the mid 60s, which was
when I came to the Library
of Congress in that period.
Herman had a long career
with various positions
at the Smithsonian, but he's
been brought back, he told me,
today after retiring from the
Smithsonian to work half-time
at the National Museum
of the American Indian
on another exciting project.
So it's typical that we
don't let our veterans
or our experts get away, and
we're lucky enough to have two
of them here today who are going
to not only tell us about the book,
but share their knowledge of this
period of American history with me.
They'll tell you more about
themselves at all about the book.
Let's welcome Ralph
Ehrenberg and Herman Viola.
[ Applause ]
[ Silence ]
>> Speaker 2: Well, thank you, John.
Herman and I are going to
act as a tag team today.
We've been doing that
for mean years.
We did the Lolo Trail
together a number of times.
Herman started that going over
the Bitterroot Mountains following
in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark.
The 80-mile trip over the
Bitterroots, and he initiated
that for the Smithsonian and
then carried that on himself,
and I was lucky enough to be
involved in a number of those.
So that's how we really became
interested in Lewis and Clark, and,
of course, he's a historian and
he's a historian of American Indian,
so he came at it from that point
of view, and I'm a historian
of cartography, and I
came at it from that side.
So together we put
this book together,
and as far as we know it's the
only book that focuses primarily
on the maps of Lewis and Clark.
There are, of course, huge number
of books since the bicentennial
of Lewis and Clark and on them
and on the various activities,
and some touch on maps, and there's
fine atlas that was put together
on Lewis and Clark maps, but we're
trying to correct this imbalance
of examining maps that
guided them in the field
and documented their route.
Before I continue, I do want
to thank a number of people
that were involved
with this production,
beginning with Levenger
Press and Mim Harrison,
who is a great publisher of that
press and has done a number of books
with the Library of Congress,
and I took this idea to her
about two years ago, I guess, and
she was very interested in it,
and then we met with Peggy Wagner,
who is one of the publishers
in our publishing office, and
she carried on from there.
So I want to thank both of them.
I want to thank Peggy
particularly and Peter Devereux
from the publishing office and Diane
Chugg-O'Neill from the Geography
and Map Division, who made a
special effort to scan all the maps.
We have over 100 maps in the
book, and each one of them had
to be specially scanned from
the Library of Congress.
The majority are from the
Geography Map Division.
I also want to thank Jackie
Nolan our cartographer
in the Geography Map Division,
who compiled a number of the maps,
and our reference section,
particularly Ed Redman,
who helped a great deal while
I was working on the book.
The theme of our book
is a biography of Lewis
and Clarke's great 1814 map,
and it measures 12 x 28 inches.
This is the original.
This is the original copperplate
engraving, and it's the size.
There's an American edition
and a British addition,
this was published in 1814.
So the book is really
the background,
the stories behind this story,
and this map was first published
with Lewis and Clark's journal,
The History of the Expedition
under the Command of
Captains Lewis and Clark
and was edited by Nicholas Biddle.
Thomas Jefferson was
the inspiration.
He wrote the specifications
for the map for Lewis,
but much of the mapmaking was
actually done by his co-leader,
William Clark, who
was the cartographer.
Military training,
self-educated in mapmaking.
Over 200 maps survive, 30 by
American Indians, and the majority,
although one was compiled
by William Clark.
Although Jefferson wrote, "I
cannot live without books."
He also wrote, "An inspection
of a map will give a better idea
of geography than any
description in writing."
And Thomas Jefferson
himself was a cartographer.
He published his map of Virginia
in 1787 for his notes on the State
of Virginia, and he comes
from a family of mapmakers.
Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson
published the first accurate map
of the State of Virginia
in the 1750s.
Today, Lewis -- I've
got to move ahead here.
Okay, this is a map that Dr. Mullen
[assumed spelling] is showing you,
and it's biography of this
map that we're focusing on.
Today, the Lewis and Clark map
can be produced in a few hours
or actually, probably, a few minutes
using simple programming language,
basic GIS techniques, and geographic
data downloads from onboard earth-
orbiting satellites, or obtained
from digital elevation models,
and the one we see here was done in
2003 by the US geological survey,
and it took three hours
at that point.
Today it would be much faster,
but 200 years ago, the production
of this map required a team of
some 50 explorers, soldiers,
American Indians, mountain
men, cartographers,
copperplate engravers, printers,
and an American President,
and an American Secretary of State,
and it took this group some 10 years
to produce and publish the map
that Dr. Mullen just showed you.
So our book is focused on the story
of this map, and its backstory.
Dr. Viola will begin with a
short overview of the expedition.
Then we will share several
map stories of vignettes
within the story and
conclude with a description
of several special
features of the book.
>> Herman J. Viola:
Okay, thank you, Ralph.
Okay, I'm Herman Viola, I'm a
Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian.
Ralph and I have been
friends since, what?
'66, I guess, and we've
done a lot of Lewis
and Clark adventures together.
We did the Lolo Trail on horseback.
I think I did it 20 times, and
so that we really got into it,
and my specialty is American Indians
and that's why I got particularly
interested in this story,
because they interacted
with so many Indian tribes.
Now, most of you probably know
more about this than we do,
and we're not telling you the
history of the expedition here.
We're really focusing on the
story of that map, but, you know,
the expedition started out in 1804,
ended up in St. Louis again in 1806,
and it was Jefferson's inspiration.
He wanted to know what was
beyond the Mississippi River,
and so he wanted to do this several
times, couldn't figure it out.
He actually hired a scientist
to come to the West Coast by way
of Russia, and the Cossacks
stopped him, and so, anyhow,
once he became President,
and was reality
and he picked Meriwether Lewis,
who was a neighbor, young man.
He knew the family quite well, and
talked Lewis into coming on board,
and so they planned this thing for
quite a while, and so, you know,
theoretically, I mean,
these were probably,
I don't want to offend anybody.
These were probably
Republicans at that time,
and so the Congress didn't want
to waste any money, and so they,
so anyhow, Jefferson
had to convince Congress
that this was actually an economic
adventure that would pay off
for the United States, and he
need to have a few dollars,
$2500 or so to fund a few soldiers
to go West, and he said, you know,
"We're doing this so
that we can make contact
with the native peoples
who live out West.
We don't know anything about them.
We don't know how many warriors
they have in these tribe.
They had already had a couple
wars with Indians to begin with.
Last thing we want to do is go
west find out we're going to do
with people we can,
you know, cope with.
So Congress thought that was a
very good idea, but of course,
Jefferson secretly was hoping
to discover new animals.
You know, there were all these
stories about extinct creatures,
and he was hoping that some of
those creatures were still alive.
He's the only president, I think,
who had a mastodon skeleton
in the White House, and so he
wanted to make sure that the fellows
who did this really kept good
notes, docket of the plants,
documented the animals, and, of
course, but priority make friends
with the native peoples they met.
The last thing we want to do is
have a conflict with people all
across the American West, and
so anyhow, the expedition set
out from St. Louis
in 1804, May 1804,
and you can see this wonderful
chart which gives you an idea
of the route, back and forth.
The reality is, and this is
something most people don't realize,
is that they actually thought there
would be a ship on the Pacific Coast
that these poor devils wouldn't
have to walk all the way back again,
and there would be a vote that would
take them, because there was a lot
of shipping going on in the
Pacific Coast, and is it turned out,
Lewis and Clark spend the winter
out there, and there had been a boat
about 50 miles up that they
never got contact with.
So then they just had
to tighten their belts
and go all the way back again.
So they actually ended up making
about, I'd say, about 8000 miles
on foot, and -- I mean, on
water, and 800 miles on foot,
and so they tried to use boats
primarily because the goal was
to find a water route
across the continent
that would really simplify
making contact with the Pacific
and doing international trade,
and so they set out, you know,
with a keelboat and then they
got up to the Mandan villages,
and they sent the keelboat
back with stuff
that they had already collected,
and then they went back into canoes
and went further upriver,
and the one drawback,
which none of them planned on.
Jefferson thought this thing
through very carefully,
but they never dreamed
they were going
to need horses to cross
the mountains.
Lewis and Jefferson walked along the
Alleghenies, and the theory was --
they knew that there was a
mountain range out there,
but they thought it was just a
parallel mountain range to what was
in the East, so these
fellows could just roll over
and take their boats down,
so here is poor fellows suddenly
see these huge mountains,
snow-covered mountains, and they
had something like 3000 pounds
of supplies that they were carrying.
A lot of ammunition, lead, gunpowder
paper for all the notes they took,
presents for the Indians, and
so they really had a challenge,
and then they knew then they
need horses, and who had horses?
The Indians, and fortunately,
they had with them Sacajawea,
who was a Shoshone girl, and really,
only Hollywood could
write script like this.
She was along because she was
married to this Frenchman,
who was kind of a rascal.
We won't go into that, Charbonneau,
so anyhow, she said, "Well, look,
this is where I used to live."
She recognized places where
she had been as a girl.
She was kidnapped she was
like 12 years old or so,
and then she said,
"My people are here."
And sure enough, they bump
into a Shoshone village,
and the chief of the
village was her brother.
And they met, and I can't spend too
much time with this, but it was said
to be a pretty emotional
meeting when she's interpreting
and with this man, and they suddenly
realize that they're brother
and sister, and they hadn't seen
each other in all these years,
and we hugged each other and
cried, and Lewis and Clark
in their journals, you know, to give
you an idea of what they thought
of Indian people, at the time about
Indians, they're just like us.
They have emotions just like us.
I mean, there's so many interesting
depth into the story, but anyhow,
thanks to that reunion,
they got their horses,
and then they were able to go over
the Lolo Trail, which I urge all
of you to try and do
this if you can.
There's a highway of course you
could take now, and still say,
"Oh, that's where they were."
But there are some people
out who, wranglers and stuff,
who will take horseback people,
and you'd be amazed the campsites
that they documented in their
journals are there to this day.
When we go there, we take the
journals out and say, and we'd read,
and we'd say, "This
is where they stood."
I mean, it's just astounding
so anyhow, then they made it
to Pacific Coast, and the boat
was there to take them home,
and so they had to come
all the way back again.
Now the one myth about this story
is that Lewis and Clarke went off
into an untracked wilderness.
You know, they were the first people
to see it, and no one knew anything
about it, but the reality
is they had AAA Trip Tik
from the American Indians,
and it's just, you know,
hard for us to believe but the,
you know, Canadians had been
up there earlier, the Hudson's Bay
people, and they had collected a lot
of geographical data from
native peoples, and so anyhow,
Lewis and Clark, when they go
out there, they're supposed
to make friends with
these native peoples,
and so they did that very well.
They encountered, it's documented
that they met 55 different
native groups.
Now some of them were
complete bands of people.
Some were just individuals from
tribes that bumped their way,
but they had made contact with
about 55 different tribal peoples,
and their mission was
to say, you know,
we're the new people on the block.
You may have been loyal to Spain or
to Russia or to France or England,
but now the United States
is here, and we have a boss
in the East whose going to be
very kind to you, and he's going
to be a great father,
and now another myth is the Indians
called him The Great White Father,
and that was nonsense.
They never called him
The Great White Father.
Was The Great Father, the
person who gives gifts.
Indians were colorblind that way.
So anyhow, here you'll
see one of the engravings,
the early ones showing Lewis
and Clark meeting with
the native peoples.
So anyhow, they carried gifts
to give to native peoples.
One of the big things they
carried, ribbon, colorful ribbons,
and lightweight -- but the most
important gifts were metals
and uniforms and things that
gave military significance,
and these are called peace metals,
and they're called peace metals
because on the obverse of these
coins, you see the clasp hands
of friendship nonliterate
peoples can easily understand,
them and Lewis and Clark carried
about 100 of these with them,
and so they would give,
there were three sizes,
and they gave the biggest one,
supposedly, to the head chief,
even though most tribes didn't
have such thing as a president,
and the middle sizes were
the kind of the lieutenants,
and the small ones like the
ordinary members of the community,
but these Indians valued
these things greatly,
and they'd keep them
their whole lives.
They'd be buried with them, and they
still show up in graves occasionally
out West when they do road
work and stuff like that.
Now I mentioned AAA Trip Tik.
Anyhow, the Hudson's Bay people had
been out there before us, of course,
and there is a fellow named Peter
Fidler, who worked for Hudson's Bay,
and he managed to get
Indian information,
geographical information, that
is just remarkably accurate
and significant, and you're
looking at this one map,
and on this one map, which was
done in 1801, he had recorded
for the Hudson's Bay people, the
locations of the Indian tribes
in that part of the world.
In the Rocky Mountains
are this horizontal line,
and then he's got the
rivers that feed into it,
and then he's located all these
different Indian villages, and he,
on this map, has documented the
locations of 32 Indian tribes.
So the CIA would have loved a map
like this going into Afghanistan.
I mean, here is this amazing
network of information, and then,
he then did a year
later another map,
got another map from this chief.
The man's name is Ac ko mo ki.
He was a Blackfeet Chief.
A very knowledgeable person
about the geography in this part
of the world, and so this you see
is what he did here as he simplified
by the map and he took the people,
he put in the geographical features,
and what's really astounding to
Ralph and myself is that these names
of these features that that Indian
recorded are still the names we use
today for these geographical
features,
the Tetons, the Bear Tooth.
King Mountain today
is Chief Mountain.
Heart Mountain, near Cody,
Wyoming, and so there they are.
These have transferred down
200 years, and so again,
you can see what this is such
an important bit of information,
and so here, thanks to the geography
map that folks, you have showing
that the red line here
is the Missouri River,
and then you see the
rivers that feed into it,
and this is all compiled from
Ac ko mok ki Ki's information.
Now this information went to
England and then was transferred
to the first real geographical
map of North America
by a scientific cartographer
named Aaron Arrowsmith,
and what to me is the most
significant thing of this map is
that you saw Ac ko mok
ki had filled that map
of his all these tribal
peoples all over West,
and then when this is composed
and compiled in England,
all that Aaron Arrowsmith put in
were the geographical features,
and he erased all these thousands
and thousands of people who lived
out there, and that's why I'm
convinced, people in the East said,
"Well, that's an empty landscape.
It's ours for the taking
because nobody's there."
And all done with the stroke
of a brush that thousands
of people are gone, and so to me,
this is a very significant
historical document, and of course,
though, Lewis and Clark, is they
go West, encounter these people,
and the retail at the reality is
that expedition could not have
succeeded without the help
of those Indians they encountered,
and I like to tell folks
that what Lewis and Clark did was
go follow a chain across the West,
and each link in the chain
is an Indian community,
and so they welcomed them and then
said, "Now you want to make friends
with these folks next-door."
And so that's how it worked.
It was a chain of friendship, and
I don't want to go too long here,
but anyhow, just I work
a lot with Indian people.
Just to give you an idea.
When they get over the Lola
Trail and they're starving.
They think they can't get
anywhere, and they are looking
for people, they meet the Nez Perce.
The Nez Perce had heard of
white people, never met them,
and so here Clark is going
ahead with about six of his men.
They see a village in the distance.
They've got to get food, and that
the three little boys jump up
and start running like crazy,
and so Clark gallops up.
He's on his horse.
Grabs one of the kids.
Takes him.
Says, "Stop, don't run.
We're friends.
We're here to help you."
Now remember, Clark
has flaming red hair,
and Indians at that time had never
seen anything except black hair
and brown eyes, and some of the
guys with Clark were blue-eyed,
and one of them had
a beard, but no hair,
and so they gave the boys
yellow ribbons and said,
"Tell your families, we're going
to have extra people
for dinner tonight."
And we'll be there shortly.
So these boys go running into the
village, and this is all documented.
The Nez Perce still have the
oral history to this day.
And these boys run into
the village yelling,
"We've seen monsters in the woods.
Monsters in the woods!"
And the parents tell
them to calm down.
What do you mean monsters?
"Yes! Yes!"
he says, "Some of them
have blue eyes."
And of course, only fish had blue
eyes out there, and they said,
"And one monster, his
head upside down."
[ Laughter ]
And they said, "But the worst
monster, his head is on fire!"
So anyhow, long story short, they
said to the kids, "Calm down,
and we'll see what the
monsters are really like."
They welcomed the Lewis and Clark
Expedition, and the rest is history.
Thank you very much.
Here, now if you can take over.
[ Applause ]
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg:
He's not done yet.
So this was a very important map.
So this is Aaron Arrowsmith's
map of 1802, and actually,
there are two 1802 maps,
and were just lucky enough
to acquire the second
one just recently,
which really relates more directly
to the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
but this map then, this
map, not his particular map,
but one just like this was
purchased by Jefferson,
and as part of the planning
then for Lewis and Clark,
Jefferson put together a
team to plan the expedition,
and this one of the primary
sources, and he worked very closely
with Gallatin, the
Secretary of Treasury,
and Gallatin had Nicholas King
then pull all this data together.
Nicholas King was the
British surveyor,
immigrated to the United States
in the 1790s, and then ended
up here in Washington DC.
His father also, and they both
worked in the Surveyors Department
of the City of Washington
at that time, and in 1803,
King was named the first Surveyor
of the City of Washington.
So he was surveyor of the
city Washington 1803 to 1812,
and he really implemented
Lafont's plan on the ground,
but he also worked part
time for the War Department.
He worked six hours a day for
the city and the two hours a day
for the War Department,
and he did a number of maps
for the War Department
and for Jefferson,
and this is the most important.
This is a map then that he compiled.
Let's see if I can work this again.
So he, in this part of it, he from
Arrowsmith's map, which was based
on the British surveyor's,
primarily the Hudson's Bay Company,
and then Vancouver's map
provided the West Coast outlines,
the coastal outlines, and
the interior was taken off
of the Arrowsmith map, which is,
in essence, Ac ko mok ki's map.
Then one of the nice things that
the designers did for this book,
they did insets for the larger maps.
It's always hard to reproduce
a large map in a book.
You can never read the details.
So I asked them if they would --
I told them I wanted to do insets,
and then they came up
with this great inset map.
So we have three of these in the
book, but this shows the detail,
then, of the upper Missouri River.
This is actually the Milk
River and the Missouri,
and then the same mountains.
The King Mountain,
which Herman mentioned.
Heart Mountain.
Boar's Tooth Mountain.
That really should be Bear's Tooth.
It was miscopied, and that shows
problems in transferring information
from one map to another, and this
is The Great Bend of the Missouri
around Bismarck in North Dakota,
and Mandans had their villages here.
And this part of the map was taken
from Thompson, David Thompson, 1798.
Thompson was a surveyor for
the Northwest Fur Company,
and he had visited the area
and had actually surveyed it.
He was a trained surveyor, and he
made a small map, which was copied
by the British diplomat, Edward
Thornton, and through Thornton,
Nicholas King got a copy of the map.
So we have a lot of
British information,
but it's primarily an Indian map.
So this was the objective of
Lewis and Clark, and it's based
on an Indian map, and what's
interesting to just follow,
this is a diagram that
shows the exchange of Indian
and fur trappers data at that time.
So this is the Ac ko mok ki map.
This is David Thompson's map,
the fur trader, mountain man.
So American Indian
and the mountain man.
This information makes
its way back to London
where Aaron Arrowsmith gets access
to it, and then he compiles his map
of North America, which is purchased
by Jefferson, and it's copied
by Nicholas King, and this map
is then actually carried by Lewis
and Clark to The Great
Bend of the Missouri,
so it makes a complete circle.
It's just a fascinating example
of international exchange
at a very early time in our history.
These two maps are
in our collection.
The original Nicholas King
map is in our collection.
The second great map that relates to
the final map is this one by Clark,
and this was prepared by Clark
during the first winter oversight
in Fort Mandan, which near
Bismarck, North Dakota,
and the Mandans had several villages
up here, and from the winter of 1804
to 1805, Lewis and
Clark stayed here,
and then sent information
of the Lower Missouri.
This is St. Louis, and
here's the Missouri River.
So now for the first time,
this is been mapped in detail.
The French and Spanish knew
of this part of the river.
They knew of the river from
St. Louis to Fort Mandan,
but they had mapped it in detail.
Louis and Clark were
the first to do that,
and this information was sent back
in the spring of 1805 when Lewis
and Clark set out on the second
leg of their expedition out west,
and they sent back, I don't know,
seven or eight men with them,
and Lewis and Clark are
very good commanders.
They sent back the
malcontents, along with this data,
and data reaches Washington DC, and
Nicholas King, the first surveyor
of the city of Washington, the
British-trained cartographer
and Thomas Jefferson sit on
the floor of the White House,
then the President's House, and
pull all this information together.
So Jefferson was intimately
involved with this,
and Nicholas King then
compiles his map.
He compiles four copies of this.
This is in our collection here.
This was, he compiled one for the
State Department, one for each house
of Congress, and one
for War Department,
and this is the State Department,
and the War Department copy is
in the National Archives.
The other two have disappeared.
But it really shows three
layers of information.
One we've already talked about
is the first relatively accurate
rendition of the Lower Missouri.
The second relevant information.
Well, here's the Missouri
a detail from it.
And the second relates to a census.
This being a census of
Indian military power,
and you can't probably read it.
But it's 300 tents, 800 men, and
I added these all up one time,
and it comes to 16,000 warriors.
Now the warriors could
have been young boys.
>> Herman J. Viola:
Yeah, they were, yes.
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg:
Probably, as well,
but that was the count, 16,000.
U.S. Army, at that time, was 3000
generously, and on the frontier,
probably 300, you know, in St. Louis
and along the Mississippi River.
So when they saw this, they were
probably a little concerned,
but that was one of the purposes
of this map, and the final layer
of information is the West.
The second leg of the expedition,
which was really a planning map,
which is unknown, as we saw in
that earlier map by Ac ko mok ki,
and during the winter, they
debriefed Indians returning
for war parties, from
trading parties,
and they add this new information.
They extend the Missouri River.
They, for the first time, they map,
they have a map of the Yellowstone,
which I'll go into a
little later, and these --
Ac ko mok ki's mountain
is still here,
and they don't quite know
what to do with them.
So they just push them to the north,
because they have also
other information.
Cartographers are very conservative,
and they try to retain all their
information somewhere on the map.
Now how is a map compiled?
And all of the later maps
are compiled this way,
and so the Lower Missouri,
then, was based on this survey,
it is basically an
open and traverse,
which simply involved measuring
the straight line distance
between each major
turn during the journey
and recording each compass
bearing of the next turn.
They had five separate
compasses with them.
The compass relied on
this 300 years earlier.
So nothing changed much.
It's also called dead reckoning.
So from this, as they're
going up the river,
they're taking these compass
bearings, and then summary
in the boat, Clark is
taking the bearing,
and somebody in the boat is writing
it down, and courses and distances,
July 26, 1805, May 1805, so
each turn, and as Herman said,
that was an 8000 mile trip,
and 4000 miles one way.
Each turn they recorded
this information,
the compass and distance.
So 45 degrees west of south,
45 degrees west of south.
This book by Martin Plamondon
is a tremendous true volume work
on the entire trip, and they took
readings, they took front readings,
and they also took reverse
readings, depending where they were
in the board in the corner,
and so there were errors,
but the errors seem to cancel
themselves out, as they were only
about 20 miles off at the end of a
about 4000 mile trip from St. Louis
to the mouth of the Columbia River,
and here we get the other
information, 45 degrees west
of south, which is this
one right here to the point
of an open plane on
the opposite bluff.
So here's the open plane.
Here's the opposite bluff.
Then in the evenings, when they
had some time or an extended stay
at a campsite, Lewis and Clark
plotted their daily courses
and distances on a gridded
paper that they took with them
to provide a rudimentary base map
to which additional geographic
information could be added.
So that's how the sectional
maps and these river maps,
these river sheets, were made.
And then when they had a long stay
at Fort Mandan or Fort Clatsop,
then they pulled all the old sheets
together and made a composite map
that we see here, and
this is a detail,
one of the river sheets
along the Missouri River,
and it's very interesting because
this one says, "This placed called
by the Indians Hill
of Little Devils."
And that has a very long
history in Indian mythology,
and I think Herman's going to add --
>> Herman J. Viola: How
much time do we have?
>>Ralph E. Ehrenberg:
Just -- this is worth it.
[ Laughter ]
I'm pretty sure.
So anyhow, we're talking
about the little devils.
The truth is, they're
the little people,
and Northern Plains people still
see them and still believe in them,
and they're harbingers of good luck.
If you see one, that means they're
helpful, and so, but, you know,
you don't want to cross them.
One of my Indian friends
said, "You know, Herman,
it's like Irish with
their leprechauns."
They are. They're about that size,
and I have met, in all candor,
a number of people have seen
the little people, and in fact,
one time, I was going to read a book
about it, and my Indian friend said,
"Please don't, because the last
thing we want our all these tourists
coming through our reservations
looking for the little people."
But I'll tell you one story,
if you want to hear it
that I got, and this was a family.
These are Northern Plains people.
I won't tell you what reservation,
in the family, their little boy,
was quite sick, and
relatives were there
in the kitchen drinking
coffee, praying.
They thought the boy
was going to die,
and they were there during
the night, and suddenly,
here the boy pops out of the
bedroom and comes into the kitchen,
and everybody says, "You're up!
Are you okay?"
"Yeah, what's all, what's going on?"
He said, "And where's that
little man was next to my bed?"
And so these are the stories
that, you know, are out there.
And so it's interesting that Lewis
and Clark documented the
existence of these people.
Okay? Thank you.
>> Herman J. Viola: So you
can find us in the journals,
and the journals are online now.
The original journals
are at Yale University
in the Americana Collection,
but they're online,
and they're just fascinating
to read if you have time,
but they did capture a lot
of this social and cultural
and religious information
along the way.
As I mentioned, going west of
Fort Mandan, then it was all based
on Indian information, and this
is one of the pages from our book,
and then this shows one of the
documented cases very nicely.
This is Sheheke, White Coyote,
and he visited the camp,
and it's well documented,
and he showed them this map,
Lewis and Clark of the Yellowstone,
and this is the first
reasonably accurate map
of the Yellowstone River.
They heard about the Yellowstone
River, but they didn't have any maps
and didn't know about it,
and there's see it then
on the Nicholas King maps.
You can see it was copied directly,
and the place named, as well,
and then here's the larger Upper
Missouri, but all of that west
in Fort Mandan then on the
Fort Mandan map is based
on Indian information.
So it's a marvelous map.
It's in our division, and if you'd
like to see it, we
will show it to you.
Then at Fort Clatsop, where
they spent the winter,
at the end of the trip, the
mouth of the Columbia River,
they compiled another
map, and again,
Nicholas King when this was brought
back, Nicholas King copied this
and put it together, and so here's
Fort Mandan area, St. Louis,
the Lower Missouri
we just talked about.
Now everything here is new
information, and along the route
of the expedition it's
based on Lewis and Clark.
Here's the Upper Missouri, and
then here's the Yellowstone,
and because of that information,
they found from White Coyote,
Clark came back along Yellowstone.
They wanted to explore
the Yellowstone,
as well as the Upper Missouri, and
a lot of this, the 30 Indian maps
that we have and that
we describe and discuss,
you have to buy the book now
to see it, but I want to talk
about how they communicated, and
they communicated by sign language.
Drouillard, one of the hunters,
was expert in Plains sign language,
and he also spoke eight Indian
languages, but another --
and they had members with them that
could speak the various language,
and this shows that
Lewis and Clark had to go
through to get an answer
outside of sign language,
and it was a translation chain.
Meriwether Lewis what a route
to the pierce-nosed Indians?
That was in Nez Perce.
That was just before the
start crossing the mountains.
So that's taken right
out of the journal,
and then François LaBiche
translates from English into French,
and Charbonneau, Sacajawea's
husband, translates from French
into Minitari, and then
Sacajawea translates from Minitari
to Shoshone, and that's
how they spoke.
The others spoke with her
brother, and there's one example,
there was five different
languages in one chain, and then,
of course, it has to be reversed.
So it was very difficult.
I mean, was very time-consuming,
and it affected the
way the maps were made.
Some of the maps took
a day, two days to make
because you're doing this.
You're back and forth,
and they're also talking
to different generations of Indians.
So they're generational
maps in many cases.
Where's John?
Do we want to --
>> Herman J. Viola: I think
he wants you to do questions.
Tell them the rest of
the story [inaudible].
>>Ralph E. Ehrenberg: Yeah, I
guess we're ready for questions.
The rest of the story's in
the book, as Herman says.
[ Applause ]
We can't see the clock
from here in this room.
Yes?
>> Audience Speaker:
In your one map.
I think it was the King map.
That showed the West was
basically [inaudible].
>> Herman J. Viola: Right.
>> Audience Speaker: There was
a long line between down --
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg: Yah,
the Arrowsmith map, yeah.
>> Audience Speaker: was that
to indicate the mountain range.
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg: Yeah,
the Aaron Arrowsmith map
in that indicates the
idea that mountain range,
and it was a single range,
and that was a long concept
in European traditional
view of the American West
because they compared
it to the Appalachians.
As Herman said, you go through a
valley, and you're at the next site.
Yes?
>> Audience Speaker:
Thomas Jefferson was very
interested in natural history.
What were the most
interesting new species
of animals that they discovered?
>> Herman J. Viola: Well they really
encountered so many different ones.
I mean, they saw, for example, well,
a great one is the grizzly bear.
The Indians warned them when
they were in the Mandan villages,
they said to them, "You
know, you better be careful
because once you get past us, the
monster bears are going to get you."
And they laughed, and they
wrote in their journals,
they said, "These are Indians.
You know, we have guns.
We don't have to worry about bears."
And then at the end of the trip,
that was the worst problem
they had with grizzly bears.
They chased some of their
soldiers open to trees.
The chased them into the rivers.
They would shoot these
bears five and six times,
and it didn't kill
them, and so, yeah,
the grizzly bear was probably the
most significant natural history
specimen they encountered.
Yes?
>> Audience Speaker: I'd
like to know something
about how the various
native peoples used maps.
What did they do before, perhaps,
the French came and
sort of [inaudible]?
Did they draw on the
ground [inaudible]?
The indigenous part [inaudible].
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg:
They did draw the ground.
In fact, there's an
example in the book.
We begin a book with that just
before they crossed the mountains
going West, and they'd
draw it in the ground.
They'd use stones and they pile up
to show mountains and draw lines
for rivers, and these would be
copied by Lewis or by Clark.
Many of the maps that exist.
Let me show you one.
Here's the final printed
map that we showed you.
This is the Indian app
from which it came.
So you can see they
followed it very closely.
This is Lewis River, which
is now the Lower Snake,
and here's Lewis River here,
and Clark's fork here,
and it's shown here.
So they'd sketch it in the ground.
We have a 1756 map
in our collection,
which looks like it was drawn
on some kind of animal skin.
>> Audience Speaker: Oh,
so that's how they --
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg:
Right, and birch bark.
There are maps on birch bark,
but most of them are memory maps.
They're drawn on the ground,
and, they're passed along.
Indians used maps to not show you
something new, but to remind you
where you been before or
something you had forgotten.
So they're going over the same
area, you know, the same trails,
the buffalo trails across The
Rockies for the Nez Perce,
and they might sketch a
map to help you remember
where you are your
family has been before,
but unlike the European
tradition of cartography
where we're creating a new map you
to learn something
new, that didn't exist.
[ Inaudible Speech ]
Probably just to Europeans.
Yes, there's one back here.
[ Inaudible Speech ]
Yeah, Clark was, after Lewis died.
I won't say committed
suicide, but he died,
Clark took over his position as
Superintendent of Indian Affairs
in the West, and then he
interviewed, debriefed,
all of the traders and trappers
coming back from the West,
and he had this large map
in his office in St. Louis,
and the base of this map is the
Lewis and Clark Expedition map,
and then he added this
new information,
and he starts this in 1809.
It's sent to Washington in 1810, and
then it's returned to him in 1814
after his map is published, and he
continues to add new information.
He makes corrections to it.
We were just looking at one before
relating to Cody, Wyoming area.
So he really used that map
from -- what did I say?
1809 to after 1814-1815.
He kept adding to it.
The Zebulon Pike's expedition
in the South, he added,
and let me just talk a second,
and he had this information
from John Coulter, and
John Coulter is one
of the great explorers
of the American West.
John Coulter was a hunter along
the Lewis and Clark expedition,
and on the way back, they already
met some trappers coming upriver
from St. Louis, and
John Coulter asked
if he could be discharged
and join them.
So he didn't return to
St. Louis until 1810.
He was out there that
whole time, and
Coulter was the first revenant.
How many have seen the movie?
Well, John Coulter was the first.
He was out there for six years.
He beat Hugh Glass and Leonardo
DiCaprio by 20 years and 200 years.
Coulter had three encounters
with the dreaded Blackfeet
during their continuing effort
to drive trappers from the country.
On one of these occasions,
his partner, John Potts,
was killed and dismembered.
The Blackfeet then stripped
Coulter bare and told him to run
for his life, assuming erroneously
that he could not outrun them.
During his escape, Coulter managed
to kill one of his pursuers,
and in a great feat of endurance,
he covered some 300 miles
before reaching the safety
of Manuel Lisa's Fort
seven days later.
So that's a story that
should be told.
John Coulter.
But after that, Manuel Lisa, who
was the head of the fur trading
out there, sent him
on a 500 mile tour,
trip around what is today
Yellowstone National Park
to establish a network of
trading with The Crows,
and he did it in the middle
of winter on snowshoes.
So to commemorate him really, he
came back and he was debriefed
by Clark, and then Clark adds
this new information to the map,
and we see his trip here around what
is today Yellowstone National Park.
Here's Yellowstone Lake.
Called Lake Eustis today after
the head of the War Department,
because Clark was still hoping
that the War Department
would publish this map,
and it says Coulter's Route
1807, and here's Lake Riddle.
Initially, it was Lake Biddle, and
he named it after his publisher,
which you always want to do.
You know, good graces with
your publisher, but again,
there was an error by the engraver,
and it comes out Lake Riddle,
but a great story, and there are
many more of these in the book.
I don't know if I answered
your question.
John?
>> John Cole: Just
to go into the irony.
Clark got all this information from
the Indians and relied on them,
and then the superintendent,
he's responsible for one
of the largest dispossession
of Native American land.
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg:
Well, know if Herman.
Do you want to take that?
>> Herman J. Viola: I don't
think you want to go there.
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg: Well, I don't
know if he was -- I don't know.
>> Herman J. Viola: You
don't want to be responsible.
He was the head of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs --
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg: Yeah,
he had very good relations
with the Indians personally.
>> Herman J. Viola: yeah, they
call him the red-haired chief,
and they really admired
him a great deal,
and he really admired
the Indian people.
So no, but, you know, you're right.
The Trail of Tears all occurred
in this time period because,
as I said earlier, they thought
the West was an empty place,
and people in East, running
the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
for example, said let's --
and they did that really
because they thought Indians
were getting destroyed
because of alcoholism and
other problems in the East,
and the head of the Bureau at that
time, a man named Thomas McKinney,
very Quaker, very Christian, he
said, "Let's set Indians out there
in that empty landscape where
they can start all over again.
And that's where the Trail of Tears,
that whole concept got started.
So it was really to help
Indians, but instead,
it helped destroy their
culture and their traditions.
>> John Cole: We have time
for two more questions.
>> Audience Speaker: Lewis
and Clark began [inaudible]
and they acquired maps
along the way.
>> Herman J. Viola: Oh, absolutely.
>> Audience Speaker:
[inaudible] I'm gathering
that there were maps showing
routes across The Rockies,
but they had no idea of the
magnitude of The Rockies.
Am I correct in that?
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg:
Correct, they had no idea.
>>Audience Speaker: But they did
have maps showing, okay, see,
I'm reading another --
one of my simple accounts,
and it makes it sound like it was
really kind of unknown territory,
but obviously, it wasn't.
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg: The
distances were unknown.
The distances were unknown.
The Indians kind of, on their maps,
they don't have miles and distances.
They have a number of nights or
days that it took, and actually,
on the first Lewis and Clark
map, 1805, which they copied off
of an Indian map from the Rockies
to the mouth of the Columbia,
it's written right on
the map, eight nights.
Eight nights.
I forget exactly how it says it.
But it puts it in terms
of nights traveling.
So, and that's beyond the mountains.
There isn't anything
about the mountains,
and I'm not sure the Indians
did that much in the mountains.
I mean, they're in the front ranges
of the mountains where the game was.
I mean, the crossed the mountains
of Buffalo, the Nez Perce,
and then there were the
Indians on the western side,
and that's where the fishing was.
So within the mountains themselves,
I'm not sure they did
much in that area.
>> Herman J. Viola:
know, they wanted to go
to Florida just like everybody else.
They didn't want to be up
there in that tough country.
One last thing I'll tell you.
Remember I mentioned that Lewis
and Clark gave those boys ribbons.
Would you believe that the
Nez Perce have a museum
on their reservation [inaudible],
and they still have one
of those pieces of
ribbon in that museum?
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg: Last one.
>> Audience Speaker: You
mentioned the Medals of Peace.
Where are some of them?
How many have survived?
Where are they?
>> Herman J. Viola: Well, The
Smithsonian has a good set of them,
but if you want to get copies of
them, you can go to the US Mint.
Still have the original dies for
these metals, and they were given
for George Washington, which
were, these were handmade ones,
but only when we learned how
to make coins by the time
of the Jefferson Administration
are they those stamped ones,
but they were made until the
Benjamin Harrison Administration,
and then the government stopped
issuing them because by then,
the purpose of them has so devalued
that they were giving these to kids
at Indian schools if
they got a good grade.
So they said, "We don't need
to have these big tokens.
You know, they have
solid-silver metals."
They were so significant,
but it's funny how --
they were in existence
for about 100 years,
but The Mint has copies
of all of the coin ones.
Not the stamped ones that were
created for Washington and,
you know, Adams and stuff,
but every president from them
until Harrison had those metals.
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg: And you
can buy them at the Union Station.
>> Herman J. Viola: Yeah, they
have a shop at Union Station.
>> Ralph E. Ehrenberg:
Yeah, the smaller ones.
>> John Cole; Well, thank
you, Ralph and Herman,
I'd like to thank them
not only for a great --
[ Applause ]
Really, a wonderful presentation,
but also, a wonderful book,
which we learned about, and I
want to say a word as the director
of the center about the book itself.
It is filled with a lot
of the beautiful maps
that you saw on the screen.
It also has two, as Ralph,
reproductions of maps,
which come with the book.
I'm leading up to the fact
the book sells for $99,
but you can get it today at
the staff discount price of $90
at The Library of Congress, and I
hope you'll take advantage of that,
and one more time to thank Ralph
and Herman for not only the work
but sharing their stories
and their knowledge with us.
Let's give them a final
round of applause.
[ Applause ]
And will be signing the book
at this table, and finally,
I just want to say, I want to
congratulate the publishing office,
Peggy Wagner, who's the Managing
Director, for negotiating this deal,
and bringing this book to
us, as did the two authors.
Thank you, Peggy, and see
you at the next presentation.
Please join us.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.
