July 21, 2026 • 62 mins
Its a Badass Badass of the Week Week here on Ridiculous History! In the first part of this special two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max welcome Ben Thompson and Dr. Pat Larash, the co-hosts of the legendary Badass of the Week podcast, to explore the life of a larger-than-life Revolutionary War hero you've never heard of: George Rogers Clark.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. That's our super producer, mister Max
Chesapeake Cape Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Which will make sense later, will it?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
It?
Speaker 4 (00:39):
Will?
Speaker 5 (00:41):
It?
Speaker 6 (00:41):
Will?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
It'll make I will Will.
Speaker 6 (00:44):
It make sense as it pertains to Max's personality as
a human?
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Oh, that remains to be seen. That's uh, that's mister
Noel Brown. They called me, uh, they call me Ben
Bollen here for tax purposes. Uh, we won't look into that.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Guys.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
This is very exciting. This week is huge for us
because we are joined with a mythological phenomenal duo, the
co host of bad Ass of the Week. So let
us welcome none other than doctor Pat Larish and the
(01:24):
returning guest Ben Thompson.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Hi, guys, thanks for having us back on. We are
excited to be here and tell some fun and bad
stories from history.
Speaker 6 (01:32):
Matt Max, I got to take issue if you're referring
to Ben as second chair. Ben. That is unacceptable. But
we have to Ben.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
But Ben's first chair of his bendom.
Speaker 6 (01:42):
You know they can each be that we can have
co first chairs where they're co chairs.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
I'm Ben three and Ben three in my wife's phone
because she numbered them in the order that she met them.
One was a coworker, ben to was her volleyball partner.
I'm Ben three. I was like, I keep we're married.
You gotta change it, just Ben, No, don't, don't.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I disagree. I think historical.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
Naming conventions in uh in in contacts is delightful. I
think it should always stay the same, never change a thing.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Are you sure it's a three and not like a
phonetic representation of some sort of guttural sound or something.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Oh, covered in hot pap. We love it because uh.
We were also talking off air. First off, huge fans
of Badass of the Week, We were talking off air
a little bit about your, uh, your earlier work on
the one of the most prominent authors in all of
(02:37):
the English canon, James Joyce, and we kind of warned
you about our our earlier episode regarding his quite explicit
love letters.
Speaker 6 (02:47):
Warrene Slash enticed, we'll see, we'll see how that shakes out. Yeah,
I think I described that as our only NSFW episode
to which I was told that's not quite the case.
But it's definitely our most in s f W episode.
This being a family show, we had to cat. We
had to uh, what's the word, trigger warning the hell
(03:08):
out of that one.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah, our we trigger warning the heck out of that.
Our beat button was working over time accounting did right back.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
H James Joyce.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Sarcastic.
Speaker 6 (03:25):
He was into butt stuff. That's all I'm gonna say.
Speaker 5 (03:28):
I'm gonna leave it.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
That's a poetic language about farts. So uh before, so,
Pat and Ben, before you all listen to that episode
and completely lose all academic respect for us.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Uh, James Joyce, we would.
Speaker 5 (03:45):
James Joyce, He's he's serious, He's a classic.
Speaker 6 (03:47):
No, I just mean you should lose some academic respect
for him as well, once you. We didn't write the less,
We just discussed them at length.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
No, I mean, the thing about being an academic is
that you study. What is there?
Speaker 6 (04:00):
You do? It thought up to you.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Oh, Pat, we don't have time for it, but gosh,
we want to know your opinions about Finnegan's week in.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
A future conversation.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
For now, we are launching into two different tales this week,
which are entirely about people who are bad asses. So ridiculous, Historians.
As you're tuning in, please do check out our friend's show,
Badass of the Week. There's something that was new, I
(04:41):
think to Max Noell and myself. Here a guy named
George Rogers Clark. How does this one start and what
makes them a badass?
Speaker 6 (04:52):
And also I just want to point out this. This
is Badass of the Week week here on Ridiculous History.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Badass of the Week week. It's like the Los Angeles
Angels of Anaheim.
Speaker 6 (05:02):
It's sort of a who's on third kind of situation.
But yes, please do tell let's get right into it.
When I read George Rogers Clark captures five future US States,
I think of like the Dave Clark five. Like this
is like describing some sort of jazz band. That is
not the case.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
He's doing some jazz with He's doing some jazz with the.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Military Day and Improvisation War, got it.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Yes, exactly, we are doing some of that. So, yes,
it is Badass of the Week week here, and we're
gonna talk about some cool stuff. Now we've got you know,
we've got America two fifty this year. So at Badass,
we've been doing a lot of We've been doing a
lot of stuff for US history, American Revolution, that sort
of thing. And you know, I was trying to think
(05:44):
of an interesting angle to bring to you, guys, and
one thing that I think doesn't come up as much
as it should is that America two fifty doesn't happen
without France being involved. So we're gonna have kind of
a French flavor to these next two episodes.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Sottle a little herbs to Provence. Perhaps that's right.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
Yes, So that is the plan, and we're going to
talk about some French involvement in American Revolution in some
ways that don't normally get recognized. I feel like, but
that are cool and badass and should we talked about.
So I guess it's best Seal day. Now. By the
time we're recording this, we're both like, we're both having
like collective national sadness, probably more them than us over
the World Cup stuff.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
But you know, were they ever really in the running though?
Speaker 6 (06:31):
Guys?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Are the French really known for their football skills?
Speaker 6 (06:34):
I don't know, I'm asking, Yeah, they.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Wanted two World Cups ago and they were running up
the one before, had no idea good Clearly they.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Were like the number one team in the world before
the law.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
I'm poopooing now that I just died just asking.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
I just didn't know, and I think of the French,
I guess I don't think of a football skills.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
And just to just to you know, just because bears mentioning, we,
you know, as much as we are going to say,
like the French legitimately have a lot of involvement in
America gaining its independence, we're gonna make a bunch of
jokes about the French too. I mean, we gotta keep
that theme.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Goal hanging fruits.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, it's the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
And one interesting aspect here is despite a lot of
the stereotypes about French culture in the United States, which
are kind of inherited from World War Two at least,
despite those stereotypes and those you know, kind of fun
ribbing at your buddies things that we have in this culture.
(07:36):
You raise an excellent point, Ben that America reaching dour
in fifty years, as he said, it wouldn't have happened
without French intervention.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Is that correct?
Speaker 4 (07:49):
That's correct? Yeah, I don't think that's like, I don't
think that's even up for debates. So even before they
became involved on an open military perspective. They were sending
weapons and money and equipment and uniforms. All the rifles
that we were using were made in France, legally and illegally.
There were there were guys who were like smuggling weapons
(08:09):
out of France to help help us fight the English.
You've got Lafayette, You've got you've got a lot of French,
French influence even before they joined the war officially, and
then when France and Spain joined the war, things get
really wild. And that's what we're going to talk about
in the next uh, in the next part of this,
in the next episode. So for today, we're gonna be
(08:31):
kind of in We're gonna kind of be in the
Continental US current Continental US. I do have my co
host on with me, doctor Pat Larish and.
Speaker 6 (08:42):
Away.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
And one thing that will come up occasionally as well
as I as much as I as much respect as
I have for the French and their ability to help
us when the American Revolution, Uh, my pronunciation of French
words is absolutely unacceptable.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
I would argue you should lean into it, just really
make a meal.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Of it right there with you, Ben, Because Pat, do
you speak French French? Ah?
Speaker 4 (09:08):
Okay, yes, yes, So anytime there's a French word in
our podcast, I usually just stop talking and then she
just says the word, or we just record her saying
it so we can just clip it in there.
Speaker 6 (09:17):
So in earlier days of this podcast, we had a
producer named Casey Pegrim, who we still love so well,
who we always described as a Francophile and a Francophone,
and he was our our entry point into the world
of French pronunciations.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
President of my French club in high school. And I
cannot make that our.
Speaker 6 (09:38):
Sound be a headshake and a lowering of the eyes
anytime we say a French word. And then.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I'll still text Casey on the case to say, hey man,
how do you pronounce this? And he'll say you should
get someone else.
Speaker 6 (09:57):
To do it. He's a very busy man.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
So Ben, take us take us back here.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
So we know that there is a character named George
Rogers Clark. We know that there is a huge diplomatically
put kerfuffle between various forces as the United States becomes
an emergent nation.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
Ben, can I just say you pronounced the French word
kerfuffle beautifully.
Speaker 5 (10:27):
You want to roll a little this.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
We we obviously know that the the horrors of the
creation of the United States still reverberate today in various iterations.
Uh these you know, you talk in some of your
some of your earlier work, Ben about uh, how American
(10:59):
culture for quite some time sanitized the story right of
the European arrivals. So really paint the picture for us here,
take us through revolution, tell us a little bit about
France's actual involvement, and then you know, can can Pat
can you and Ben introduce us to this Georgia guy.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Yes, so we are gonna do that. So we are
not just gonna kind of deal with We'll deal with
some stuff that's a little sticky, but I think you know,
we're gonna we're gonna try to find a good way
to approach it. Mostly we're gonna tell a badass wilderness
survival story, deception, adventure, grizzly bears, diplomacy, Bowie knives, a
guy that you've never heard of before, territory in the
(11:41):
American Revolution that ended up being five US states almost
without Frank a shot.
Speaker 6 (11:45):
Fantastic. All right, I'm excited, I'm the story. I'm primed
as in our audience. Yeah, I mean you kind of
describe in the badness of the weak piece that you
sent us about this topic, or maybe this is some
of your notes, this notion of that sanitization that Ben
was that Ben Prime, No.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
That's not fair, that ridiculous history.
Speaker 6 (12:04):
Ben was describing of this sort of Kumbaya moment of
like we met the Native Americans, we presented them with
marshmallow peeps, and then.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
We all held hands in a ring in san Kumbaya.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Yeah, it's a little more complicated and tricky than that.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
No, you say it wasn't entirely above board.
Speaker 6 (12:20):
Are you saying that maybe there was some Yeah, Okay,
let's hear it.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
So, yeah, let's kind of set the scene of where
we are here. So we are talking American revolution. We're
talking seventeen seventies. And when people think revolution, they're picturing Boston, Philadelphia,
New York City, this stamp Act and throwing throw a
tea into the harbor. But you know, the colonies extend
out to the Appalachian Mountains. So you have this whole
(12:45):
western section out here. Kentucky is there, right, Virginia extends
out to the Appalachians. There's people living on the frontier
here and they've got problems that are not associated with
the harboring and quartering of soldiers or whatever, dealing with
grizzly bears. They're dealing with starvation, cold, they're living in
the mountains. They're being attacked by tribes from the Native nations.
(13:07):
There is some crazy stuff happening out here, and it's
a very hard place to live. Now. George Rogers Clark
enters into this area. He's born seventeen fifty two outside Charlottesville, Virginia,
but he ends up moving out to the west, which
at this point is the Appalachian Mountains, is kind of
the border. He is a land surveyor, which sounds like
(13:32):
a pretty chill job. We picture the guys with the
yellow tripods in the in the high vis vests, standing
at the middle of the road with.
Speaker 6 (13:41):
The lora tiny like a tiny telescope or something, right
they're looking through.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
My dad worked as an assistant to a land surveyor
some summers when my sister and I were growing up.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
And these guys are very chill.
Speaker 6 (13:53):
By the way.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
I don't know what your experience was, pat but usually
they're they're kind of a cool head.
Speaker 7 (13:58):
Yeah, that's there the diplomatically, but I have not had
the pleasure, but I am fascinated by their vests and
their gear, and I'm always kind of wondering, what are
they doing?
Speaker 6 (14:09):
Is it like in the modern version of the land survey?
I guess it's about uh, property bare boundaries and you
know every line. In the past it would have been
literally like you know, identifying tracts of land that could
then be you know, sold way of war.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Or in the past because there's a there's a note
that you said here Ben that we cannot lose, which
was you said, our guy George Rogers Clark is out
in the west. And everybody needs to keep in mind
that at this point in history, this is pre Lewis
and Clark. Right, we haven't had any uh we haven't
(14:49):
had any official comprehensive exploration by the Europeans over to
the Pacific, for.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
We don't know what's there. Right, You're mapping uncharted mountains,
You're being attacked by wild animals, mountain lions, bears, wolves,
You're fording rivers that you don't know where they go.
You're making homemade rafts, you're sleeping in the trees to
stay dry. It's seventeen seventies, right, You're carrying heavy ass
equipment over mountains and across rivers. You're camping out. You
don't have like gortech, you don't have like a nice tent.
(15:18):
You're you know, and you're dragging this heavy gear. You're
charting uncharted land. You don't know what's there. You're trying
to track out stuff for you know, maybe people could
settle here, maybe we can move in here, maybe we
can turns out people already live there and don't want
you to live there, well, don't want you to take
their land. That's a problem for you. If you're land
survey at this time period. It's physically exhausting, it's dangerous,
(15:38):
and it requires you to kind of be a navigator,
a survivalist, our cartographer. You know, it's math and survival
at the same time.
Speaker 6 (15:48):
So just to clarify at the end of the day,
these efforts would have been to map these areas. Like
what who is he working for? And what would this
data have have been intended for? Like is he just
laying out like what's available kind of like getting a
literal lay of the land. I'm curious.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Yeah, he's kind of making maps for Virginia. He's hired
by Virginia, the state of Virginia or the colony of
Virginia at this time. And yeah, it's like potential settlements,
potential you know, we still know what's out there. Right,
it's here, there'll be monsters, and we've got to figure
out what's there. And he's he's you know, it's it's
Star Trek Enterprise right right to the world.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Yes, yeah, to boldly go where no European has gone before.
And yeah, So he's got all these skills and he's
using them and this is his background. This is why
he succeeds.
Speaker 6 (16:39):
Later.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
He doesn't need a map. He made the maps. He understands.
Clark understands the geography of the frontier better than any
random British soldier or bureaucrat sitting behind a desk in Detroit.
Speaker 6 (16:55):
Well, I mean it's sort of like you don't really
you can't really understand the land from a map alone.
Like I'm horrible at directions and a map is honestly
the only thing in mapping on my phone to get
me places. But when I ride my bike and actually
like I'm in the streets, it just commits more to
my mind and I can like actually kind of understand
the geography a little bitter when I've actually experienced it
(17:16):
actively as opposed it is like as a passive you know,
map follower.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
And I love the Detroit shout out by the way that.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
Detroit is going to feature prominently. Detroit is the It's
where the bad guys are.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
So also to level set here, how old is our
man George.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
So when the war begins, he's twenty five, He's got
this curly red hair. He's a big, strong, Virginia dude,
farm boy kind of thing. He goes through when he's
in his early twenties. He goes through the Cumberland Gap
into Kentucky to stake his claim on some lands there,
starts building a life for himself, kind of frontier picture,
like the log cabin kind of lifestyle. Right, old school
(18:00):
American Revolution kicks off, and now you know, things are
even more destabilized they were already. He was already in
the middle of nowhere. Now he's in the middle of
nowhere and in a war. And this kind of comes
home to him because speaking of Detroit, Detroit is a
major British fort at this time, and there is a
guy in chart When the war begins, the guy in
(18:21):
charge of Detroit is a dude named Henry Hamilton. He's
the Lieutenant governor of the area. Hamilton is kind of
your classic British you would be the classic bad guy
in the movie.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Here.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
You can picture him right already with the don say
anything else about him. Picture what this guy looks like.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
A lot of people are picturing the red Coats from
the film The Patriot, right exactly, who were just cartoonishly
bad for some reason.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
And these guys are cartoonishly bad, yeah right.
Speaker 5 (18:56):
Picture him wound a little tight, yes, yeah, So picture
a cartoonishly villainous British Redcoat official officer. And then also
he's got this right hand man who is a chief
justice named Philippe de Jon. And we've got the you know.
Speaker 6 (19:20):
For a stereotypical French name than Philippe.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
It's a mustard.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
So there we call them the dynamic duo of Tyranny,
if we want to continue the cartoon theme. And Hamilton
he was the mastermind and Dejon was the guy who
was able to manipulate the law to work in their favor.
He was a gallows judge sidebar. He once sentenced a
local woman named Anne Wiley to death for the horrendous
(19:55):
crime of petty.
Speaker 6 (19:57):
Theft, oh boy and a real grand standing type fellow
using okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 5 (20:06):
So he he sentenced her and her accomplice to death
by hanging, but he couldn't find a hangman. So Justice
de Jan offered to spare Anne Wiley's life if she
would act as the executioner for her accomplice. She agreed,
(20:28):
and she now keep in mind she is a petty thief,
not a career, you know, professionally traded. So she did
a horrible job. You know, she did a horrible job. Yeah,
and the crowd was absolutely horrified and okay, and she thought, well,
(20:52):
at least I got through that. But once she was
done with that, the judge had her hanged.
Speaker 6 (20:57):
Anyway, can we also just put out now that like,
what is the alternative to the crowd watching an execution
being horrified, like when it goes over, when it goes
off with a we're like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, well also I don't think they sold tickets.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
Also fair at this case.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
But but how just absolutely malevolent is that? How Colonel
Kurtz is that to uh say, we'll give you a
chance to live if you kill someone who is probably
your friend in addition to your being your accomplice. And
now whoopsie rug pull or, I guess you know, drop
the trap door on you.
Speaker 6 (21:39):
Yeah, but where who who executed her? The hang person
kind of popped up all of a sudden.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
That's a good question.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
That's so good. I don't know, but listeners may be
pleased to know that later on, and this is well
after the events of our main story today. Later he
was actually indicted by his own superiors in Montreal for
illegal acts. But before that happened, he and Hamilton ran
Detroit like their own little fiefdom.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Okay, I do love to hear that the come up
and is coming.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
Sort of, it will sort of come. It's it's history,
so it's never as clean as it is in the movies.
But but yes, so you've got Dijon and you've got Hamilton.
And Hamilton has a nickname. When the war begins, they
call him hair buyer Hamilton because he the war begins,
he doesn't have a lot of soldiers. He's got maybe
(22:33):
five six hundred guys British soldiers with him. He's managing
five states worth of territory. Ill like the entire basically
the entire Midwest. He's operating out of Detroit here, and
so he sends out a call that says, uh, you know,
any any warrior that brings me a scalp, I'll pay
money for it regard and like no questions asked, right,
(22:53):
So any scout which.
Speaker 6 (22:54):
Is up to a lot of not that the goods
the normal version of that is good. But like I
guess he could just be scalping taking scalps from anybody
on the ball.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
He's bring me some hair and I'll give you money
for it.
Speaker 5 (23:11):
Yeah, and Hamilton hair buyer. Hamilton, on the one hand,
he's actually, as we know, a talented amateur sketch artist
who has drawn some nice, realistic looking, respectful sketches of
a lot of the leaders of the local Native American nations,
(23:31):
the local Shawnee, Miami, and Wyandotte leaders. Some of these
are still preserved at Harvard today. On the one hand,
we've got that. And on the other hand, while Hamilton
is drawing these nice portraits for his sketch book, he's
also taking their very real existential struggle against colonial expansionism
(23:54):
as a cheap proxy weapon. And Hamilton, I imagine him
sitting safely by d Strong Wooden Walls sipping his tea,
offering cash and supplies to tribes to fight a war
that he didn't want to risk his own regular British
troops on. So the Shawnee, the Miami, the Delaware are
sovereign nations. They're fighting a desperate war to keep aggressive
(24:17):
American settlers off of their ancestral lands. And you know,
life is complicated, history is complicated. So even while this
is going on, and even while hairbyer Hamilton is buying
hair as we're calling it, we do know that some
of the tribal elders were actually speaking against the practice
of selling scalps to Hamilton because they thought it was
(24:40):
on many levels a bad idea, including politically it was
actually probably not a good plan in addition to other considerations.
But even with a shared distrust of the Americans, you know,
Hamilton is, when you get down to it, he's a
wealthy imperial bureaucrat who's exploiting their aspiration for the purposes
(25:01):
of the British crown.
Speaker 6 (25:03):
Now that's fascinating because I'm picturing when I'm picturing people
buying scalps, I'm picturing them paying for Native American scalps,
you know, from from troops, Like that's sort of the
version of that that I'm used to hearing about. So
this is the opposite. He's paying Native Americans for.
Speaker 4 (25:19):
Scalps, scalp American settlers, settlers.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Got it diabolical.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Add to that the the inter scene or intercommunity violence
between some indigenous groups.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
Oh, no question. And just just that influence and that
monetary component potentially throwing their civilization or their society and rules.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
It's a really interesting thing to keep in mind, and
it's going to come up a lot once we start
getting into the French involvement here, because these are not
you know a lot of times when you read about
this in history, get it gets kind of limped in
as like the British allies. Right, you have, right, it's
the the Native American tribes. But you're looking at several
tribes here, right. We've got the Shawnee, We've got the Miami,
the yan Dot, we've got the Delaware. These are different
(26:05):
tribes that are their own political units, and they're trying
to figure out what do I need to do, who
do I need to side with to not have to
not lose my lands, to the colonial invaders. But also
I don't want these guys have complex relationships with each other, right,
I don't want if the Delaware is going to take
this guy up on all this money, that suddenly they're
going to become way more powerful because they're gonna get
(26:26):
all this money, right, And so how do we negotiate
this thing?
Speaker 6 (26:30):
Right?
Speaker 4 (26:30):
So there's a whole Game of Thrones thing happening here
that is much more complicated than just like the British
Allies were attacking settlers. And it's worth mentioning when we
talk about this stuff. So for Clark, he's living in
Kentucky with his friends. They're being raided. Things go nuts
once the war starts and there are a lot more
(26:51):
attacks than normal. His already difficult life is getting more difficult.
So he goes to the governor of Virginia, Patrick Henry,
who was his boss, the surveyor, and he says, look,
I want to go get this hair buyer guy. I
want to go take care of him. And Patrick Henry says, yeah,
go for it, man, have fun.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
That's also, by the way, fellow ridiculous historians, Ben just
gave us a verbatim quote in Patrick Henry's actual accent.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
Yes, good luck, go in the war. Can you give
me some men or some some gears, some money? No, no,
I don't have any of that.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Oh no, he just co signed it and didn't help.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Yeah, go for it. Just give me a piece of
paper that says good luck, please go in the war.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
We believe in you, Yes, yeah, right, we believe in you.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
So we know that, we know that he was a
voice of relative authority right in his stomping grounds. So
he was able to gather some resources of his own
or some people.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
Yes, yes, So he's basically an unpaid intern task with
conquering a continent. And he goes out to his buddies
at his neighborhood and he's like, hey, like neighborhood, watch guys,
Like I'm gonna raise with militia. I need some people.
He gets one hundred and fifty guys. Remember the Hair
Buyers is in a fort with British trained, British soldiers
and cannons and five hundred guys. Clark's like, all right,
(28:18):
I got these hundred fifty guys. So in June seventeen
seventy eight, he just kind of walks into Illinois Country
a crosses the Ohio River into a big forest, and
these guys go on. They're they're bringing clothes from home
and rifles that they used to like hunt animals and stuff. Like,
they're leaving their families and stuff behind. They're just these
(28:39):
are just dudes that live in the woods, right. They
have a bowie knife and and a rifle and whatever
ammo then get their hands on and.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
A drone song in their heart potentially.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
So they head out. They hunt for their dinner, They
sleep under the stars, they survive the elements, and they
go out towards Their first target is a town called
Caskia in Illinois Country.
Speaker 5 (29:02):
Yeah, and Kaskaskia it was, in a sense the crown
jewel of Illinois Country. It was a thriving French town.
It was heavily fortified. And if Clark and his one
hundred and fifty guys had been walking into a standard
British fort, they would have been toast. But instead they
find themselves in this weird liminal space. Technically it's British
(29:26):
controlled territory, but in practice it's a French speaking Catholic enclave.
Speaker 6 (29:33):
Right.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
So, after the French and Indian War, right, the Seven
Years War ends, the Treaty of Paris in seventeen sixty three.
All of this stuff we think like Louisiana purchase and stuff,
but everything west of the Appalachians was French and then
the British, and there the French and Indian War and
the Seven Years War, and part of that treaty the
French have to seed all those territories between the Appalachians
(29:54):
and the Mississippi River to England. So you have these
French settlers who were some of them born in France
and have been French, you know, for generations. They live
in this little area and suddenly the French flags come
down and the British flags go up. The British don't
have the troops, and man, they're not flooding this area
with people. They just run up a new flag and
put a couple hundred soldiers in town to take over
(30:15):
the forts. So they're kind of trying to leverage these
trade networks. They're trying to These guys have to pay
their taxes to the British now, but at the end
of the day, these are Frenchmen and they don't like
the British. You have one hundreds of frenchmen here who
were at war with the British like fifteen years ago,
like in their lifetimes, they fought the British in a war.
Speaker 5 (30:38):
Yeah, and culturally it's a very different place. So we're
not talking about like Philadelphia here, We're not talking about London.
We've got French culture, Jesuit missions for trading posts, independent
mind and frontiersmen, a lot of mutually beneficial trade relationships,
even some inner marriages. The French have been building up
(31:03):
their network with the Native American nations over maybe a century.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Is this in the era of like kind of getting
the fur trade going?
Speaker 6 (31:12):
And yes.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
So that's the main difference here is that when when
the British and later the Americans are coming through, they
are trying to take this land and settle it right.
They want to settle this land for people and develop it.
And the tribes that are living here, the Shawnee, the Miami,
the Piacashaw, they don't they don't want people to move
in there and build houses. But the French have been
in there and they don't really care as much about that.
(31:34):
They're interested in the fur trade, right. They're making a
lot of money off this fur trade. They're working together
with the.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
Tribes agreeable situation, right, there's a mutual agree that makes sense.
Speaker 4 (31:43):
Everybody is getting, everybody's benefiting from this. It's a healthy trade.
The French people, the French fur traders are living with
these tribes, right, They're not setting up their own little communities.
They're they're integrating in a way that we haven't seen.
And so there is a lot of opportunity here for
George Rogers Clark to find some force multipliers for his
(32:05):
one hundred and fifty guys, because he's now in this
area that the tribes that live here don't love the
idea of They don't really love the idea of the
Americans coming in here and doing this either, But they
also don't love the idea of the British doing what
they've been doing, which is more exploitative and less collaborative.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Yeah, and he's like, Hey, don't worry, I'm America. We're
like diet British. So were fewer calories, I guess. But
as you all point out then and Pat, he also
had the advantage, our buddy George. He had the advantage
(32:41):
of not going in with some crazy hardline ideology for
the people, like he was not a missionary. He was
not religiously extremist, at least in the way he talked
about stuff. He instead just sort of have told people
(33:02):
do what you're doing, you know, go about your day
to day life. Also, just me, George being honest here,
I kind of think the British are a bunch of pills.
Do you want to help me fight them?
Speaker 4 (33:17):
Right? Right exactly? And the French, to be fair, the
French don't love the Americans either because they're worried. The
French are Catholic and the Americans are Protestant and they're
worried about this when we come in there, right, so,
you know, but so were the British. And that's been
a war that's been going off for we know, we
don't like the British, you guys, let's wait and see.
And so when Clark shows up, he's like, Hey, we're
doing this new thing. We're going to be our own country.
(33:39):
We're trying to figure out our own stuff. He shows
up with these one hundred and fifty guys. There by
the time they get here, like Kaskaski is not close
to Kentucky. They've been hiking, their boots are falling apart.
They look like they look like wild men. They look
like mountain men when they show up, huge beards and stuff.
And Koski has a British fort and he shows up
and he kind of like lines up outside the fort.
He's like, I think, if I can win this town
(34:01):
over and this region over, we can force these guys
out of the fort without having to actually fight them,
because I don't have My men are too tired, and
I don't have the guns or the experience or the
training or any of the things I need to storm
this fort. But if I could take this town, that
would be like a big step.
Speaker 5 (34:16):
And it's a big risk too, because if even one
of the Kaskaskian inhabitants decides to alert the British at
the fort, whoops, there goes.
Speaker 4 (34:27):
The plan, right right, there's one hundred and fifty just like
mostly unarmed guys out here trying to like overthrow the government.
That's a problem. So Clark needs help, and that is
where we meet a guy named I guess pat. I'm
just going to hand it off to you without setting
you up with the guy's name.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
Peerre Pierre Gibol.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
Fabulous, yes, Fatherbo.
Speaker 6 (34:49):
Not quite as devaults as I like to call him
as Pierre Dijon, but still equally flourishy and French.
Speaker 5 (34:57):
You'd buy a bottle of Merlau from him.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
The so is pair is actual, like his Christian first
name or is it his title?
Speaker 5 (35:10):
It's his title. It's like father or padre. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
Yeah, he's a Jesuit priest.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Yeah, he's a Jesuit priest. And as is sometimes the
case in these Smallish frontier towns, he's got a lot
of roles. He's also in effect the mayor, the judge,
the information broker of Illinois country. He's like the guy
everyone goes to and kind of expects he's the grown
up in the room. So he Yeah, he serves the
(35:36):
parishes in both Kaskaskia and val Sen. He knows all
the families, he knows their secrets. And also he hates
the British. He does not like the British occupation. He
sees the British as an occupying force that doesn't really
understand the French French Catholic culture of the region. And
(35:57):
in addition, Pelgibol he's the British paying for scalps and
he's absolutely appalled by that. So he wants stability. He
also maybe wants that whole buying scalp thing to end,
and he sees that the Americans say, okay, they're Protestant,
but they're Protestants who are more likely to actually respect
(36:20):
the way of life that we have here than the
British are.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Right, Okay, there guy, Protestants, but they're not imperious about
their beliefs, right, They're not like, well that's that's.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
That's kind of you can see on this right. And
so that's kind of why the French are kind of
hanging out here. They're British citizens at this point. They
don't really think of themselves as such. They think of
themselves as French. They think of theselves as French Catholics.
And so the way they know what they're going to
get with the British. And when Clark shows up, he
does a very wise thing and he's like, who's the
guy I need to talk to? Okay, Gjubau, Okay, let's
get him. And so they have dinner together and he's like, look, man,
(36:55):
like I'm not going to change. Nothing's going to change here, Like,
I'm here to get this guy out of here. I'm
here to get the British out and if you that
sounds good to you, Let's let's work together. And Clark
is persuasive enough in this meeting that Gebaut is like
all the way all in, and Jebau starts going around
Kaskaskia and he's like, hey, guys, like, let's help these
(37:18):
let's help these guys out. Let's make sure that they're
not going to raise arms against them. They're not gonna
like join the army or anything, but they are not
They're going to like, there's a lot of things that
the civilian population of this town can do that will
destabilize British rule here. And they start doing that.
Speaker 5 (37:35):
Yeah, and this is not just in Kaskaskia. Father people
rides all the way to Valcen, which was one hundred
miles away, hundreds of miles away in Indiana, and he
does the same thing with his parish, his parishioners there.
He basically neutralizes the entire territory through winning over hearts
and minds. It's this huge diplomatic whisper campaign. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Yeah, and then the and then Clark goes one step
further than that. He go he and Gibou together they're like, well,
we need to get the support of the local tribes
as well, and so he goes and meets with the
chief of the Piankesha tribe, a guy whose name is
Tobacco's Son, which is a complicated it's a mixed things
complicated when you're reading about it. But his name is
(38:18):
Tobacco's son, and he's called the Grand Door to the Wabash,
which means he's like, hits the Wabash is the river
system there, and he's kind of the guy who's he's
the diplomatic person you need to talk to for the
tribes in this region.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
He's their version of the French priest.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Right, yes, so he's their chief I think so he Yeah, exactly,
he's an important person to get to know. Clark hits
hidden down and has dinner with him and they're talking about, uh,
you know, what they're going to do and what the
American civilization is going to look like when it shows up.
And he's able to convert Tobacco's son to his cause
as well. So this ends up being a big wind
(39:06):
for him to where at some point it becomes clear
to the British in Kaskaskia that like, they don't have
a lot of guys at the fort. Here it becomes
clear that like the town is against them, and the
Piakasha and the French are bringing food and guns and
AMMO and supplies and information to Clark and his guys,
(39:26):
and so the ford in Kaskaskia, those guys leave, They
leave the town to Clark without him having a fire shot.
They leave in the night, and they go and they
go to Vincennes, which is the next biggest towns. You've
got Casciar, You've got Vincenza, that you've got Detroit. Those
are the three main settlements for our story here. Clark
(39:47):
ends up in Kaskaskia in February seventeen seventy nine. Winter
is here. It's a brutal Midwestern winter. He's got one
hundred and seventy two guys. He's actually been able to
recruit a few from the locals, and the British troops
at Kaskaskia have gone to Vincennes. Now, while Clark is
hold up here in Kaskaskia waiting out the winter, he
(40:11):
gets news that Hairbier Hamilton is not just sitting around,
He's on the move. So Hamilton has taken five hundred
guys from Detroit and marched them down to Vincenes as well.
So now we got trouble. They're coming for me. Like,
(40:32):
my thing works. I've got this town, but I actually
do have to fight this guy, and he's got five
times the number of people I do, and cannons and
weapons and food and all the things that I don't have. Okay,
So he's looking at his guys and he's like, what
are we gonna do here? It's the dead of winner.
He's like, we got to go. I think we got
(40:52):
to go now. We've got to go to Vincennes now,
because the longer they sit there, the more they're going
to fortify it. So we've got to go. He's got
one hundred and seventy two just regular dudes. These are
not trained soldiers, and he's like, we have to march
one hundred and eighty miles to Vincenne's in the dead
of winter to ambush these guys when they're not expecting it.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Just imagine the pitch. Hey, guys, you know how we
all like hiking right.
Speaker 4 (41:18):
Sitting by a nice campfire indoors. We got to go
out there. The door opens, the whipping wind.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
But it's a great point too as well, given the
brutality of the season, and given the the importance of
not letting these British forces really entrench themselves, right, because
it's one of those things where if you don't solve
the problem as soon as you can, the problem will
(41:47):
only exacerbate over time.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Right, yes, yes, and so we've got to do it.
But if you've ever been to Chicago in February.
Speaker 6 (41:56):
Are thrilled there when the summer hits, it's like it's
a new least life. Yeah, brutal.
Speaker 5 (42:02):
So this hike, when we say hike, we usually picture,
you know, maybe you're having fun, maybe you're not, but
we usually picture a hiking on dry land. So this, however,
this territory is known as the drowned Lands, and the
Illinois river systems have flooded over, so the entire march
they have to deal with freezing shoulder deep ice water.
Speaker 6 (42:25):
The drowned Lands should be a region on the Elden
Ring map, just putting that out there, right.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
Definitely, it's like that, right, it's survival horror. Seventeen days,
these guys hike one hundred and eighty miles, which is like,
I don't know, Seattle to Portland. It's like, yeah, this
is a this is a long this is a long hike.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
That's so great pace.
Speaker 4 (42:45):
Yeah, seventeen days. Yeah, through the through the water, right
through the mud and the water and the snow. At
one point, the water gets so deep. They have this
drummer boy with them, this kid, and he has to
ride on his snare drum like a life raft because
he can't it's what water is too deeper, so over
his head before before.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
We chuckle at this because you just it's such a
vivid image.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
It's adorable. Can you tell us he survived?
Speaker 4 (43:08):
I cannot confirm that, but he probably did otherwise, Yeah, hardly.
Like spoiler alert, very few members of most of Clark's
group is going to make it back. There's not a
he's a so I will say yes. I will say
yes with a certain degree of confidence.
Speaker 6 (43:24):
I will give him the benefit of the doubt. There
definitely wasn't room for Jack on the snare drum. Okay,
as the large floating door in the Titanic universe. Just
putting it out there.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
Yeah, there, this is a miserable thing. This is Yes,
they're getting sick. It's so cold. Guys are hallucinating at night.
They have to sleep in trees because the mud freezes
and if you sleep on the ground, even with like
like you know, pads and stuff like, the mud will
freeze your stuff to the ground.
Speaker 5 (43:53):
How do you sleep in a tree? I mean, wild
turkeys sleep in trees, But do you have to build
a little.
Speaker 6 (43:58):
Well, turkeys are also udents and abominations, just putting that
out there.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Yeah, Pat, no offense. I know, I know both you
and Ben are in the Boston area, but we're fairly
anti turkey on this show.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
They'll come at you, man, come at you.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
They'll go at you. They're mad at They're mad at us.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
Oh oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I am neither pro nor
anti wild turkey. I just accept them as a force
of nature.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Don't they well said, don't they roam Harvard campus? They
really do.
Speaker 6 (44:26):
I saw them in the in the wild, literally and
I was like, is this acceptable?
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Who?
Speaker 3 (44:31):
Who green with these turkeys?
Speaker 5 (44:33):
The turkeys act like they're on the place, because actually
they kind of do.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
They're a gang.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
I remember, I've spent a lot of time in Boston,
and no offense you all, but it can be an opinionated,
somewhat divisive place. And the one thing that I see
all Bostonians agree on is that wild turkeys are kind
of a gang.
Speaker 5 (44:56):
Yeah, do not mess with wild tur turkeys.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
So despite the fact that these guys are not actively
actively in life or death battles with wild turkeys, they
are running into a lot of dangerous wildlife. The environment
is inhospitable. Sleeping in trees if you've ever done it before, folks,
(45:22):
just a regular tree, not a fancy tree house, not
a chiropractor. But your back's gonna hurt. It kind of sucks. Yep.
Speaker 4 (45:30):
You gotta tie yourself in so you don't fall out
when you're sleeping, or you got to build a little
stand there. And yeah, I mean seventeen days these guys
do this. They have them by the time they arrive
and Clark it bears mentioning that this is not Clark
is not wearing an officer's uniform here and carrying a
sword and sleeping in a tent like he's walking at
the front of the line, right, He's just walking with
these guys. He's twenty five. Guys are all about his age.
(45:52):
They're they're not trained soldiers. They don't really know what
they're doing. They got no food, their clothes are falling apart.
They don't have the cold way their gear. They need
for this to like not be absolutely miserable. By the
time they get there, they lose two guys on the hike,
and by the time they get there, they're basically like skeletal.
They have eaten the last of their food. They're out
(46:13):
of food entirely. They they're so tired they can barely
hold their rifles. And then they get there and they
get to Vincense, which nobody has ever been to before.
And they take one look at it and it's like
an uphill approach into a wooden fort with cannons and
like garden positions and like portholes to like stick your
gun out. There's five hundred Red coats sitting there by
(46:33):
their campfires inside, eating food with their with their and yeah,
and they have AMMO for their rifles and for their cannons. Okay,
what do we do here?
Speaker 1 (46:47):
Tire ourselves to a tree and hope there aren't any
turkeys around.
Speaker 5 (46:51):
I don't know, Oh that's always a good move, but yeah, yeah,
so so Clark Clark sends the letter.
Speaker 4 (46:59):
He sends a messenger into the town of Vincennes, and Vincenzees,
you know, it's a frontier town, but it's it's French, right,
And he sends the town, he sends me messengers into
the town and he says, I'm going to take the
town tomorrow. If you're with us, stay in the town,
don't leave your houses. If you're with the British, go
to the fort now, so that we know who's on
our side and who's not.
Speaker 5 (47:21):
And this could be a huge gamble because again, you
just need one person to tip off the British. But
he knows that the French settlers in Valsennese trust the
word of Father Gibo. They don't run to the fort.
They stay inside. And not only do they stay inside,
(47:41):
they also sneak food and ammo and supplies to Clark
and his men.
Speaker 4 (47:46):
Yes, so the people of the town so word, you know,
they don't they don't rat on him. They bring stuff
out to him. And then eventually Hamilton does find out.
Hamilton's there, he's in Vincennes. He's there, and he gets
word that's like, okay, there's something weird going on here.
These guys are moving around and then he starts asking
people and they're like, yeah, what somebody says it right,
(48:07):
And he's like oh, shoot, there's like an American army
out there, and like they're gonna take the town. He
say they're going to take the fort tomorrow. Is that right? Then,
Like he starts hearing the drums, that drummer boy, he
starts hearing the drums. He starts seeing guys, he starts
seeing flags, and there's just so they start marching around.
So we're in the forest, right, there's a clearing between
the forest wall and the and the fort where the
(48:28):
you know, like at area so you could shoot people
when they're trying to attack the fort. But he starts
walking around that tree line in a circle, over and
over and over again with his dudes waving little banners,
changing the little banners around. He's got snipers up in
the trees, like he's got these guys are marksmen right there, hunters.
He's got guys up in the trees shooting rounds into
(48:48):
the He's trying to tell him to shoot it through
the portholes of the of the of the fort, not
necessarily to like kill a guy standing on the other side,
but just to like freak them out that like we
can shoot through the whole of we could shoot through
this target here and uh, don't stick your head out
the window, because you know we might be able, we
might shoot you.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
So this is like a Pioyeah.
Speaker 4 (49:09):
Absolutely, he's got one hundred and seventy two guys with frostbite,
and and he's shooting basically every bullet he has as
like a warning shot to scare these guys. He's just
just ping, ping around off the cannon so that they
know we could hit the cannon if we wanted to.
They can't see where the Americans are shooting from. They
can't see how many of them there are. They're hearing
word that like the town is against them. They're hearing
(49:31):
word that there was this big force in uh In
Kaskaskia that was on the move. Here. They're hearing word
that the Native American tribes in the area have joined up.
They're hearing word that the frendship joined up. Suddenly, that
five hundred guys in the wooden fort with eleven foot
walls and cannons doesn't seem quite so stable. This is
like you said, it's a siop. He's he's tricking, tricking
(49:53):
these guys. Hamilton panics and he's like, I've got to
meet with I've got to meet their commander. This is
like the old days, right, we just did this. This
is like a very American revolution thing where he's like,
I would like to meet were I shall meet your
commanding on.
Speaker 6 (50:07):
In a little FaceTime. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
I know we've had our differences, but let's grab dinner.
Speaker 4 (50:12):
Yeah, they do. They go to a church in town
and they meet.
Speaker 6 (50:16):
Oh well, that's fun because the church being sort of
a neutral location where you're not supposed to do acts
of violence, right.
Speaker 4 (50:23):
Right, right, And so he meets Clark and Hamilton I
imagine with the powdered wig and the red coat and everything.
Clark is just a mess, right. This guy's like he's
wearing a buckskin shirt that's like covered in mud from
one hundred and eighty mile hike, and he just looks
like a wild man. He looks like, I don't know,
something out of a something of a movie from the seventies,
you know. And Hamilton's like, all right, I'm lieutenant governor
(50:49):
of Detroit. We can talk. Let's talk like gentlemen. He's
expecting a very revolutionary war parlay here. And Clark is like, look, man,
if you don't surrender right now, I'm going to storm
the place, and once I storm the place, I won't
be My men are just wild men. They're all insane
maniacs with bowie knives. I can't promise, I can't promise
I can control them once we get into the walls.
Speaker 1 (51:09):
Oh that's classic diplomacy too, because people in those parlays,
people always or typically will assume that kind of that
kind of moral stance where they'll go, look, I'm the
guy you can talk to. Okay, you and me, man,
we're just hanging at the church. We can reason this through.
But my boys, those folks, man, you thought you bought hair.
Speaker 4 (51:36):
Yeah, yeah, that's a good cop, bad cop. Right. He's
got three, like, he's got his three craziest look of
dudes standing around him just being like like frothing at
the mouth. And it's like, look, I mean, I don't
know about Big Jim here. He doesn't really do what
I tell him to.
Speaker 2 (51:52):
You, No, does it work?
Speaker 4 (51:56):
It works? Yeah, Hamilton's threnders. Hamilton signs the surrender that night,
surrenders the fort, and as the last moment of like,
you know, he doesn't raise there's a there's a very
which I'm sure he thought was like a big disc
but like he doesn't the morning he's supposed to hand
the ford over, he doesn't raise the flag that morning
because he doesn't want to run it down so that
they can run up the American flag. You would normally
(52:17):
run a flag up the at morning roll call or whatever,
but he doesn't run it up because he doesn't want
the disgrace of running it down. And so that was
kind of his I don't know, I feel like that
probably carried a lot more weight in seventeen seventy eight
than it does now. It just kind of seems repeated. Yeah, yeah,
but it's mentioned. It's mentioned in multiple places when you
read about this, so I feel like Bear's mentioning here.
(52:40):
But anyway, he's the renders and then he's got to
hand his guys over, He hands his weapon's over and
pat it's a he's a.
Speaker 5 (52:48):
It's a wo wof moment, a kick in the teeth moment.
Hamilton looks at the massive army that beat him, and now.
Speaker 4 (52:59):
He's got a mars. Five hundred guys out of that court. Yeah,
five hundred unarmed men marching out through one hundred and
fifty guys that look like they haven't slept in a month.
Or carrying like weapons. That would be a joke, right.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
That's crazy because you know there was at least of
the one hundred and fifty American dudes, there was at
least one who didn't have any kind of firearm, just
had a big stick.
Speaker 4 (53:24):
It was like haha, right, exactly. Yeah, it's like surrendering
guantanamotive guys with like bolt action rifles. Right, it's just
like you're like, what is what the what the hell?
And so it's you know, the hair buyer is taken prisoner,
he's put in a cell and and he hates it.
He writes, he writes so much. You were talking about
the Joys letters. He writes so much like poetic, like
(53:48):
complaining about how he has to go into the guess
to sit there with the quote felons and malefactors. They
don't put him in a special cell for like the gentleman.
Put him in just a regular cell. There's a there's
a toilet bucket in there. He calls it a kind
of throne that is truly methitic, which means foul smelling.
Speaker 3 (54:08):
Great words. I'm writing all of these down.
Speaker 1 (54:11):
Have you no separate prison for an officer?
Speaker 6 (54:14):
Right?
Speaker 4 (54:15):
I wish I could do the accident. It would be
so funny if I just.
Speaker 1 (54:18):
Like what he thought he was going to be pooping
in first class.
Speaker 4 (54:22):
No he is not. He is he is pooping in
a wilderness prison.
Speaker 2 (54:25):
C that's terrible.
Speaker 4 (54:31):
And yeah, so basically with al Fryon shot, you know,
the British lose some guys to those snipers, but mostly
that was that was a sigh op. But they do
take out a couple of his guys. So Hamilton loses
a few guys to gunfire and Clark loses a couple
of guys to the extreme temperatures. But at the end
of the day, Clark writes home to Patrick Henry, who
(54:53):
kind of gave him a pat on the back and
sent him off. He says, great things have been affected
by a few men well conducted.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
Indeed, indeed well said.
Speaker 1 (55:05):
Hey, I imagine Clark got uh got a promotion from
this right?
Speaker 2 (55:12):
Maybe?
Speaker 4 (55:13):
Yes, I mean he gets promoted, he gets militarily promoted.
In the end, well, yeah, I mean to put it
in perspective, this guy, with one hundred and fifty men
and no funding from the government, using entirely diplomacy and
psychological warfare. He captures when the British, because the British
have now surrendered and they surrendered torqu Detroit, because this
(55:36):
is the extent of their forces. Hamilton is has the
extent of their forces in the region. So when the
war ends, Britain has to sign all this stuff over
because possessions nine tenths of the law and the colonials
have it. The region that George Rogers Clark has just
captured through this operation will become the states of Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin,
and Indiana.
Speaker 5 (55:59):
Can you imagine how many pages in your atlas that
would take up. That's that is a not small portion
of land. And to do all this, Clark was okay,
he got a pat on the back from Patrick Henry,
but he did not get any support from the Virginia
government for expenses. So Clark was paying out a pocket
(56:22):
to feed his men and get supplies and he went
into a lot of debt for this, and his creditors
they just kept going after him and hounding him. So yeah, yeah,
So in exchange for you know, saving the securing the
future of the Midwest, he just gets a stack of
(56:42):
bills and honestly, he can't he really can't dig himself
out of it. And yeah, poor guy dies in poverty.
Speaker 4 (56:51):
Yeah, I'm an alcoholic. He dies in poverty. Just really
tragic end of this guy. He's Yeah, the later years
are like pretty rough for him. And she's not penniless. Yeah, yeah,
here's the kicker. Hamilton gets out of prison after the war,
He gets paroled, he gets promoted. He becomes the governor
of Bermuda and Dominica.
Speaker 2 (57:11):
So how do you get a promotion after that?
Speaker 4 (57:14):
I don't know. But he lives out the rest of
his days sitting on a beach in the Dominican sipping
rum cocktails and just complaining about.
Speaker 2 (57:23):
What went down earlier.
Speaker 1 (57:25):
I just said, hey, you guys have to understand, the
forest was pretty dense. We thought there were a lot
more of them than there were.
Speaker 4 (57:34):
Yeah, I don't know, I don't know the you know.
Desjawn ends up getting arrested and running away, so at
least he gets what's coming to him. He gets indicted
and spends most of his life on the run. Clark
is interesting because yeah he does. He struggles later in life.
But one interesting way to kind of end this story
(57:55):
is when Napoleon sells the eighteen O one when Napoleon
does Louis Louisiana purchase and Thomas Jefferson sends the Lewis
and Clark Expedition out to explore the new territories that
have been discovered. That Clark is George Rogers Clark's little brother,
(58:17):
so William Clark is the younger brother of George Rogers Clark.
So it's kind of like a relay race where where
George Rogers Clark expands west and then and then his
brother William picks it up and goes on the Lewis
and Clark expedition all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
So I think that's kind of a fun way to
wrap that or to tie that off.
Speaker 5 (58:35):
George walked so William could run, or George.
Speaker 1 (58:38):
Trusge William could trug.
Speaker 2 (58:42):
Yeah, there we go.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
And we had a we hadd an episode, uh not
too long ago, Noel, Max and I about how scientists
were able to track the passage of the Lewis and
Clark expedition, uh.
Speaker 2 (58:58):
Through there through through their poop.
Speaker 1 (59:01):
Sorry to make this so poop centric, guys, but but
that's part of it. I think we can all unanimously
agree the award for badass does rightly go to George
Rogers Clark, and I'm so mad to hear that. Ol
Hamilton just got to spend time on the beach.
Speaker 4 (59:24):
Is the governor of Bermuda.
Speaker 1 (59:26):
Yeah, during a very difficult time for Bermuda. By the way,
I think it was probably still kind of a chump
during his governorship.
Speaker 4 (59:34):
It's possible, that's possible, he said. He just becomes a
colonial administrator, which doesn't selling a terrible.
Speaker 3 (59:40):
Life, right, what they call a cushy government job.
Speaker 1 (59:44):
Yes, just so, and we are we are going to
wrap this exploration here. Thank you so much, Ben, Thank
you so much Pat for joining us. I don't know.
I think it's fair to say neither of us knew
George Rogers Clark.
Speaker 6 (01:00:01):
Absolutely not. I mean for the longest time, I was like,
where's the where's the Lewis and Clark connection? These seem related,
these seem adjacent, And we got there.
Speaker 4 (01:00:10):
Finally we got there. Yeah. Yeah, it's a huge expansion
of the American colonies. Big it became became five states,
and we couldn't have done it without this one guy
and the aid of the French people who lived in
the region and the Piankashaw Nations and the other nations
that helped out in the in the process. So this
is kind of the French connection. Next time we're going
(01:00:31):
to talk about a little bit more of a direct
action that the French took, which is also badass, but
in a very different way.
Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
And congratulations by the way to all of us, including
you Max for not making references to the musical Hamilton.
I didn't know if we would get through it, but guys,
we did it. We did it as a crew, We
did it as a team. Where can people go to
learn more about.
Speaker 4 (01:00:53):
You all's work, Well, we are at Badass of the
Week basically everywhere anywhere you find podcasts, you can search
for bad and you'll see my face a kidding.
Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
You could also check out the Wikipedia disambiguation page for
Ben Thompson, which is one of my favorite parts of
your bio. Pat. We can't wait to uh, we can't
wait to hear what you think of our Notorious James
Joyce episode. Uh.
Speaker 4 (01:01:21):
Yeah, we're gonna live stream, are listening to it on
our twitch. We're gonna create a twitch.
Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
We can record it like a commentary track. Yeah, like
a rip rip It's worthy of that, it's pretty crunch.
Speaker 1 (01:01:34):
Big big thanks to our super producer mister Max Williams.
Will allid the credits a little bit for now, but uh, folks,
please do tune in very soon when we get to
the next Badass of the Week.
Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
We've got double Badasses.
Speaker 6 (01:01:51):
Of the Week week.
Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
That's the one.
Speaker 6 (01:01:55):
You're ridiculous history. Thanks you all so much for joining
us again and we'll see you next time, folks. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. That's our super producer, mister Max
Chesapeake Cape Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Which will make sense later, will it?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
It?
Speaker 4 (00:39):
Will?
Speaker 5 (00:41):
It?
Speaker 6 (00:41):
Will?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
It'll make I will Will.
Speaker 6 (00:44):
It make sense as it pertains to Max's personality as
a human?
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Oh, that remains to be seen. That's uh, that's mister
Noel Brown. They called me, uh, they call me Ben
Bollen here for tax purposes. Uh, we won't look into that.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Guys.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
This is very exciting. This week is huge for us
because we are joined with a mythological phenomenal duo, the
co host of bad Ass of the Week. So let
us welcome none other than doctor Pat Larish and the
(01:24):
returning guest Ben Thompson.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Hi, guys, thanks for having us back on. We are
excited to be here and tell some fun and bad
stories from history.
Speaker 6 (01:32):
Matt Max, I got to take issue if you're referring
to Ben as second chair. Ben. That is unacceptable. But
we have to Ben.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
But Ben's first chair of his bendom.
Speaker 6 (01:42):
You know they can each be that we can have
co first chairs where they're co chairs.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
I'm Ben three and Ben three in my wife's phone
because she numbered them in the order that she met them.
One was a coworker, ben to was her volleyball partner.
I'm Ben three. I was like, I keep we're married.
You gotta change it, just Ben, No, don't, don't.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I disagree. I think historical.
Speaker 6 (02:03):
Naming conventions in uh in in contacts is delightful. I
think it should always stay the same, never change a thing.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Are you sure it's a three and not like a
phonetic representation of some sort of guttural sound or something.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Oh, covered in hot pap. We love it because uh.
We were also talking off air. First off, huge fans
of Badass of the Week, We were talking off air
a little bit about your, uh, your earlier work on
the one of the most prominent authors in all of
(02:37):
the English canon, James Joyce, and we kind of warned
you about our our earlier episode regarding his quite explicit
love letters.
Speaker 6 (02:47):
Warrene Slash enticed, we'll see, we'll see how that shakes out. Yeah,
I think I described that as our only NSFW episode
to which I was told that's not quite the case.
But it's definitely our most in s f W episode.
This being a family show, we had to cat. We
had to uh, what's the word, trigger warning the hell
(03:08):
out of that one.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah, our we trigger warning the heck out of that.
Our beat button was working over time accounting did right back.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
H James Joyce.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Sarcastic.
Speaker 6 (03:25):
He was into butt stuff. That's all I'm gonna say.
Speaker 5 (03:28):
I'm gonna leave it.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
That's a poetic language about farts. So uh before, so,
Pat and Ben, before you all listen to that episode
and completely lose all academic respect for us.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Uh, James Joyce, we would.
Speaker 5 (03:45):
James Joyce, He's he's serious, He's a classic.
Speaker 6 (03:47):
No, I just mean you should lose some academic respect
for him as well, once you. We didn't write the less,
We just discussed them at length.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
No, I mean, the thing about being an academic is
that you study. What is there?
Speaker 6 (04:00):
You do? It thought up to you.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Oh, Pat, we don't have time for it, but gosh,
we want to know your opinions about Finnegan's week in.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
A future conversation.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
For now, we are launching into two different tales this week,
which are entirely about people who are bad asses. So ridiculous, Historians.
As you're tuning in, please do check out our friend's show,
Badass of the Week. There's something that was new, I
(04:41):
think to Max Noell and myself. Here a guy named
George Rogers Clark. How does this one start and what
makes them a badass?
Speaker 6 (04:52):
And also I just want to point out this. This
is Badass of the Week week here on Ridiculous History.
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Badass of the Week week. It's like the Los Angeles
Angels of Anaheim.
Speaker 6 (05:02):
It's sort of a who's on third kind of situation.
But yes, please do tell let's get right into it.
When I read George Rogers Clark captures five future US States,
I think of like the Dave Clark five. Like this
is like describing some sort of jazz band. That is
not the case.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
He's doing some jazz with He's doing some jazz with the.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Military Day and Improvisation War, got it.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Yes, exactly, we are doing some of that. So, yes,
it is Badass of the Week week here, and we're
gonna talk about some cool stuff. Now we've got you know,
we've got America two fifty this year. So at Badass,
we've been doing a lot of We've been doing a
lot of stuff for US history, American Revolution, that sort
of thing. And you know, I was trying to think
(05:44):
of an interesting angle to bring to you, guys, and
one thing that I think doesn't come up as much
as it should is that America two fifty doesn't happen
without France being involved. So we're gonna have kind of
a French flavor to these next two episodes.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Sottle a little herbs to Provence. Perhaps that's right.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
Yes, So that is the plan, and we're going to
talk about some French involvement in American Revolution in some
ways that don't normally get recognized. I feel like, but
that are cool and badass and should we talked about.
So I guess it's best Seal day. Now. By the
time we're recording this, we're both like, we're both having
like collective national sadness, probably more them than us over
the World Cup stuff.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
But you know, were they ever really in the running though?
Speaker 6 (06:31):
Guys?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Are the French really known for their football skills?
Speaker 6 (06:34):
I don't know, I'm asking, Yeah, they.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Wanted two World Cups ago and they were running up
the one before, had no idea good Clearly they.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Were like the number one team in the world before
the law.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
I'm poopooing now that I just died just asking.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
I just didn't know, and I think of the French,
I guess I don't think of a football skills.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
And just to just to you know, just because bears mentioning, we,
you know, as much as we are going to say,
like the French legitimately have a lot of involvement in
America gaining its independence, we're gonna make a bunch of
jokes about the French too. I mean, we gotta keep
that theme.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Goal hanging fruits.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, it's the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
And one interesting aspect here is despite a lot of
the stereotypes about French culture in the United States, which
are kind of inherited from World War Two at least,
despite those stereotypes and those you know, kind of fun
ribbing at your buddies things that we have in this culture.
(07:36):
You raise an excellent point, Ben that America reaching dour
in fifty years, as he said, it wouldn't have happened
without French intervention.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Is that correct?
Speaker 4 (07:49):
That's correct? Yeah, I don't think that's like, I don't
think that's even up for debates. So even before they
became involved on an open military perspective. They were sending
weapons and money and equipment and uniforms. All the rifles
that we were using were made in France, legally and illegally.
There were there were guys who were like smuggling weapons
(08:09):
out of France to help help us fight the English.
You've got Lafayette, You've got you've got a lot of French,
French influence even before they joined the war officially, and
then when France and Spain joined the war, things get
really wild. And that's what we're going to talk about
in the next uh, in the next part of this,
in the next episode. So for today, we're gonna be
(08:31):
kind of in We're gonna kind of be in the
Continental US current Continental US. I do have my co
host on with me, doctor Pat Larish and.
Speaker 6 (08:42):
Away.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
And one thing that will come up occasionally as well
as I as much as I as much respect as
I have for the French and their ability to help
us when the American Revolution, Uh, my pronunciation of French
words is absolutely unacceptable.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
I would argue you should lean into it, just really
make a meal.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Of it right there with you, Ben, Because Pat, do
you speak French French? Ah?
Speaker 4 (09:08):
Okay, yes, yes, So anytime there's a French word in
our podcast, I usually just stop talking and then she
just says the word, or we just record her saying
it so we can just clip it in there.
Speaker 6 (09:17):
So in earlier days of this podcast, we had a
producer named Casey Pegrim, who we still love so well,
who we always described as a Francophile and a Francophone,
and he was our our entry point into the world
of French pronunciations.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
President of my French club in high school. And I
cannot make that our.
Speaker 6 (09:38):
Sound be a headshake and a lowering of the eyes
anytime we say a French word. And then.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
I'll still text Casey on the case to say, hey man,
how do you pronounce this? And he'll say you should
get someone else.
Speaker 6 (09:57):
To do it. He's a very busy man.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
So Ben, take us take us back here.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
So we know that there is a character named George
Rogers Clark. We know that there is a huge diplomatically
put kerfuffle between various forces as the United States becomes
an emergent nation.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
Ben, can I just say you pronounced the French word
kerfuffle beautifully.
Speaker 5 (10:27):
You want to roll a little this.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
We we obviously know that the the horrors of the
creation of the United States still reverberate today in various iterations.
Uh these you know, you talk in some of your
some of your earlier work, Ben about uh, how American
(10:59):
culture for quite some time sanitized the story right of
the European arrivals. So really paint the picture for us here,
take us through revolution, tell us a little bit about
France's actual involvement, and then you know, can can Pat
can you and Ben introduce us to this Georgia guy.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Yes, so we are gonna do that. So we are
not just gonna kind of deal with We'll deal with
some stuff that's a little sticky, but I think you know,
we're gonna we're gonna try to find a good way
to approach it. Mostly we're gonna tell a badass wilderness
survival story, deception, adventure, grizzly bears, diplomacy, Bowie knives, a
guy that you've never heard of before, territory in the
(11:41):
American Revolution that ended up being five US states almost
without Frank a shot.
Speaker 6 (11:45):
Fantastic. All right, I'm excited, I'm the story. I'm primed
as in our audience. Yeah, I mean you kind of
describe in the badness of the weak piece that you
sent us about this topic, or maybe this is some
of your notes, this notion of that sanitization that Ben
was that Ben Prime, No.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
That's not fair, that ridiculous history.
Speaker 6 (12:04):
Ben was describing of this sort of Kumbaya moment of
like we met the Native Americans, we presented them with
marshmallow peeps, and then.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
We all held hands in a ring in san Kumbaya.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Yeah, it's a little more complicated and tricky than that.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
No, you say it wasn't entirely above board.
Speaker 6 (12:20):
Are you saying that maybe there was some Yeah, Okay,
let's hear it.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
So, yeah, let's kind of set the scene of where
we are here. So we are talking American revolution. We're
talking seventeen seventies. And when people think revolution, they're picturing Boston, Philadelphia,
New York City, this stamp Act and throwing throw a
tea into the harbor. But you know, the colonies extend
out to the Appalachian Mountains. So you have this whole
(12:45):
western section out here. Kentucky is there, right, Virginia extends
out to the Appalachians. There's people living on the frontier
here and they've got problems that are not associated with
the harboring and quartering of soldiers or whatever, dealing with
grizzly bears. They're dealing with starvation, cold, they're living in
the mountains. They're being attacked by tribes from the Native nations.
(13:07):
There is some crazy stuff happening out here, and it's
a very hard place to live. Now. George Rogers Clark
enters into this area. He's born seventeen fifty two outside Charlottesville, Virginia,
but he ends up moving out to the west, which
at this point is the Appalachian Mountains, is kind of
the border. He is a land surveyor, which sounds like
(13:32):
a pretty chill job. We picture the guys with the
yellow tripods in the in the high vis vests, standing
at the middle of the road with.
Speaker 6 (13:41):
The lora tiny like a tiny telescope or something, right
they're looking through.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
My dad worked as an assistant to a land surveyor
some summers when my sister and I were growing up.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
And these guys are very chill.
Speaker 6 (13:53):
By the way.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
I don't know what your experience was, pat but usually
they're they're kind of a cool head.
Speaker 7 (13:58):
Yeah, that's there the diplomatically, but I have not had
the pleasure, but I am fascinated by their vests and
their gear, and I'm always kind of wondering, what are
they doing?
Speaker 6 (14:09):
Is it like in the modern version of the land survey?
I guess it's about uh, property bare boundaries and you
know every line. In the past it would have been
literally like you know, identifying tracts of land that could
then be you know, sold way of war.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Or in the past because there's a there's a note
that you said here Ben that we cannot lose, which
was you said, our guy George Rogers Clark is out
in the west. And everybody needs to keep in mind
that at this point in history, this is pre Lewis
and Clark. Right, we haven't had any uh we haven't
(14:49):
had any official comprehensive exploration by the Europeans over to
the Pacific, for.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
We don't know what's there. Right, You're mapping uncharted mountains,
You're being attacked by wild animals, mountain lions, bears, wolves,
You're fording rivers that you don't know where they go.
You're making homemade rafts, you're sleeping in the trees to
stay dry. It's seventeen seventies, right, You're carrying heavy ass
equipment over mountains and across rivers. You're camping out. You
don't have like gortech, you don't have like a nice tent.
(15:18):
You're you know, and you're dragging this heavy gear. You're
charting uncharted land. You don't know what's there. You're trying
to track out stuff for you know, maybe people could
settle here, maybe we can move in here, maybe we
can turns out people already live there and don't want
you to live there, well, don't want you to take
their land. That's a problem for you. If you're land
survey at this time period. It's physically exhausting, it's dangerous,
(15:38):
and it requires you to kind of be a navigator,
a survivalist, our cartographer. You know, it's math and survival
at the same time.
Speaker 6 (15:48):
So just to clarify at the end of the day,
these efforts would have been to map these areas. Like
what who is he working for? And what would this
data have have been intended for? Like is he just
laying out like what's available kind of like getting a
literal lay of the land. I'm curious.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Yeah, he's kind of making maps for Virginia. He's hired
by Virginia, the state of Virginia or the colony of
Virginia at this time. And yeah, it's like potential settlements,
potential you know, we still know what's out there. Right,
it's here, there'll be monsters, and we've got to figure
out what's there. And he's he's you know, it's it's
Star Trek Enterprise right right to the world.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Yes, yeah, to boldly go where no European has gone before.
And yeah, So he's got all these skills and he's
using them and this is his background. This is why
he succeeds.
Speaker 6 (16:39):
Later.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
He doesn't need a map. He made the maps. He understands.
Clark understands the geography of the frontier better than any
random British soldier or bureaucrat sitting behind a desk in Detroit.
Speaker 6 (16:55):
Well, I mean it's sort of like you don't really
you can't really understand the land from a map alone.
Like I'm horrible at directions and a map is honestly
the only thing in mapping on my phone to get
me places. But when I ride my bike and actually
like I'm in the streets, it just commits more to
my mind and I can like actually kind of understand
the geography a little bitter when I've actually experienced it
(17:16):
actively as opposed it is like as a passive you know,
map follower.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
And I love the Detroit shout out by the way that.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
Detroit is going to feature prominently. Detroit is the It's
where the bad guys are.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
So also to level set here, how old is our
man George.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
So when the war begins, he's twenty five, He's got
this curly red hair. He's a big, strong, Virginia dude,
farm boy kind of thing. He goes through when he's
in his early twenties. He goes through the Cumberland Gap
into Kentucky to stake his claim on some lands there,
starts building a life for himself, kind of frontier picture,
like the log cabin kind of lifestyle. Right, old school
(18:00):
American Revolution kicks off, and now you know, things are
even more destabilized they were already. He was already in
the middle of nowhere. Now he's in the middle of
nowhere and in a war. And this kind of comes
home to him because speaking of Detroit, Detroit is a
major British fort at this time, and there is a
guy in chart When the war begins, the guy in
(18:21):
charge of Detroit is a dude named Henry Hamilton. He's
the Lieutenant governor of the area. Hamilton is kind of
your classic British you would be the classic bad guy
in the movie.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Here.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
You can picture him right already with the don say
anything else about him. Picture what this guy looks like.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
A lot of people are picturing the red Coats from
the film The Patriot, right exactly, who were just cartoonishly
bad for some reason.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
And these guys are cartoonishly bad, yeah right.
Speaker 5 (18:56):
Picture him wound a little tight, yes, yeah, So picture
a cartoonishly villainous British Redcoat official officer. And then also
he's got this right hand man who is a chief
justice named Philippe de Jon. And we've got the you know.
Speaker 6 (19:20):
For a stereotypical French name than Philippe.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
It's a mustard.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
So there we call them the dynamic duo of Tyranny,
if we want to continue the cartoon theme. And Hamilton
he was the mastermind and Dejon was the guy who
was able to manipulate the law to work in their favor.
He was a gallows judge sidebar. He once sentenced a
local woman named Anne Wiley to death for the horrendous
(19:55):
crime of petty.
Speaker 6 (19:57):
Theft, oh boy and a real grand standing type fellow
using okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 5 (20:06):
So he he sentenced her and her accomplice to death
by hanging, but he couldn't find a hangman. So Justice
de Jan offered to spare Anne Wiley's life if she
would act as the executioner for her accomplice. She agreed,
(20:28):
and she now keep in mind she is a petty thief,
not a career, you know, professionally traded. So she did
a horrible job. You know, she did a horrible job. Yeah,
and the crowd was absolutely horrified and okay, and she thought, well,
(20:52):
at least I got through that. But once she was
done with that, the judge had her hanged.
Speaker 6 (20:57):
Anyway, can we also just put out now that like,
what is the alternative to the crowd watching an execution
being horrified, like when it goes over, when it goes
off with a we're like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, well also I don't think they sold tickets.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
Also fair at this case.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
But but how just absolutely malevolent is that? How Colonel
Kurtz is that to uh say, we'll give you a
chance to live if you kill someone who is probably
your friend in addition to your being your accomplice. And
now whoopsie rug pull or, I guess you know, drop
the trap door on you.
Speaker 6 (21:39):
Yeah, but where who who executed her? The hang person
kind of popped up all of a sudden.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
That's a good question.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
That's so good. I don't know, but listeners may be
pleased to know that later on, and this is well
after the events of our main story today. Later he
was actually indicted by his own superiors in Montreal for
illegal acts. But before that happened, he and Hamilton ran
Detroit like their own little fiefdom.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Okay, I do love to hear that the come up
and is coming.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
Sort of, it will sort of come. It's it's history,
so it's never as clean as it is in the movies.
But but yes, so you've got Dijon and you've got Hamilton.
And Hamilton has a nickname. When the war begins, they
call him hair buyer Hamilton because he the war begins,
he doesn't have a lot of soldiers. He's got maybe
(22:33):
five six hundred guys British soldiers with him. He's managing
five states worth of territory. Ill like the entire basically
the entire Midwest. He's operating out of Detroit here, and
so he sends out a call that says, uh, you know,
any any warrior that brings me a scalp, I'll pay
money for it regard and like no questions asked, right,
(22:53):
So any scout which.
Speaker 6 (22:54):
Is up to a lot of not that the goods
the normal version of that is good. But like I
guess he could just be scalping taking scalps from anybody
on the ball.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
He's bring me some hair and I'll give you money
for it.
Speaker 5 (23:11):
Yeah, and Hamilton hair buyer. Hamilton, on the one hand,
he's actually, as we know, a talented amateur sketch artist
who has drawn some nice, realistic looking, respectful sketches of
a lot of the leaders of the local Native American nations,
(23:31):
the local Shawnee, Miami, and Wyandotte leaders. Some of these
are still preserved at Harvard today. On the one hand,
we've got that. And on the other hand, while Hamilton
is drawing these nice portraits for his sketch book, he's
also taking their very real existential struggle against colonial expansionism
(23:54):
as a cheap proxy weapon. And Hamilton, I imagine him
sitting safely by d Strong Wooden Walls sipping his tea,
offering cash and supplies to tribes to fight a war
that he didn't want to risk his own regular British
troops on. So the Shawnee, the Miami, the Delaware are
sovereign nations. They're fighting a desperate war to keep aggressive
(24:17):
American settlers off of their ancestral lands. And you know,
life is complicated, history is complicated. So even while this
is going on, and even while hairbyer Hamilton is buying
hair as we're calling it, we do know that some
of the tribal elders were actually speaking against the practice
of selling scalps to Hamilton because they thought it was
(24:40):
on many levels a bad idea, including politically it was
actually probably not a good plan in addition to other considerations.
But even with a shared distrust of the Americans, you know,
Hamilton is, when you get down to it, he's a
wealthy imperial bureaucrat who's exploiting their aspiration for the purposes
(25:01):
of the British crown.
Speaker 6 (25:03):
Now that's fascinating because I'm picturing when I'm picturing people
buying scalps, I'm picturing them paying for Native American scalps,
you know, from from troops, Like that's sort of the
version of that that I'm used to hearing about. So
this is the opposite. He's paying Native Americans for.
Speaker 4 (25:19):
Scalps, scalp American settlers, settlers.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
Got it diabolical.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Add to that the the inter scene or intercommunity violence
between some indigenous groups.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
Oh, no question. And just just that influence and that
monetary component potentially throwing their civilization or their society and rules.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
It's a really interesting thing to keep in mind, and
it's going to come up a lot once we start
getting into the French involvement here, because these are not
you know a lot of times when you read about
this in history, get it gets kind of limped in
as like the British allies. Right, you have, right, it's
the the Native American tribes. But you're looking at several
tribes here, right. We've got the Shawnee, We've got the Miami,
the yan Dot, we've got the Delaware. These are different
(26:05):
tribes that are their own political units, and they're trying
to figure out what do I need to do, who
do I need to side with to not have to
not lose my lands, to the colonial invaders. But also
I don't want these guys have complex relationships with each other, right,
I don't want if the Delaware is going to take
this guy up on all this money, that suddenly they're
going to become way more powerful because they're gonna get
(26:26):
all this money, right, And so how do we negotiate
this thing?
Speaker 6 (26:30):
Right?
Speaker 4 (26:30):
So there's a whole Game of Thrones thing happening here
that is much more complicated than just like the British
Allies were attacking settlers. And it's worth mentioning when we
talk about this stuff. So for Clark, he's living in
Kentucky with his friends. They're being raided. Things go nuts
once the war starts and there are a lot more
(26:51):
attacks than normal. His already difficult life is getting more difficult.
So he goes to the governor of Virginia, Patrick Henry,
who was his boss, the surveyor, and he says, look,
I want to go get this hair buyer guy. I
want to go take care of him. And Patrick Henry says, yeah,
go for it, man, have fun.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
That's also, by the way, fellow ridiculous historians, Ben just
gave us a verbatim quote in Patrick Henry's actual accent.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
Yes, good luck, go in the war. Can you give
me some men or some some gears, some money? No, no,
I don't have any of that.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Oh no, he just co signed it and didn't help.
Speaker 4 (27:34):
Yeah, go for it. Just give me a piece of
paper that says good luck, please go in the war.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
We believe in you, Yes, yeah, right, we believe in you.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
So we know that, we know that he was a
voice of relative authority right in his stomping grounds. So
he was able to gather some resources of his own
or some people.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
Yes, yes, So he's basically an unpaid intern task with
conquering a continent. And he goes out to his buddies
at his neighborhood and he's like, hey, like neighborhood, watch guys,
Like I'm gonna raise with militia. I need some people.
He gets one hundred and fifty guys. Remember the Hair
Buyers is in a fort with British trained, British soldiers
and cannons and five hundred guys. Clark's like, all right,
(28:18):
I got these hundred fifty guys. So in June seventeen
seventy eight, he just kind of walks into Illinois Country
a crosses the Ohio River into a big forest, and
these guys go on. They're they're bringing clothes from home
and rifles that they used to like hunt animals and stuff. Like,
they're leaving their families and stuff behind. They're just these
(28:39):
are just dudes that live in the woods, right. They
have a bowie knife and and a rifle and whatever
ammo then get their hands on and.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
A drone song in their heart potentially.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
So they head out. They hunt for their dinner, They
sleep under the stars, they survive the elements, and they
go out towards Their first target is a town called
Caskia in Illinois Country.
Speaker 5 (29:02):
Yeah, and Kaskaskia it was, in a sense the crown
jewel of Illinois Country. It was a thriving French town.
It was heavily fortified. And if Clark and his one
hundred and fifty guys had been walking into a standard
British fort, they would have been toast. But instead they
find themselves in this weird liminal space. Technically it's British
(29:26):
controlled territory, but in practice it's a French speaking Catholic enclave.
Speaker 6 (29:33):
Right.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
So, after the French and Indian War, right, the Seven
Years War ends, the Treaty of Paris in seventeen sixty three.
All of this stuff we think like Louisiana purchase and stuff,
but everything west of the Appalachians was French and then
the British, and there the French and Indian War and
the Seven Years War, and part of that treaty the
French have to seed all those territories between the Appalachians
(29:54):
and the Mississippi River to England. So you have these
French settlers who were some of them born in France
and have been French, you know, for generations. They live
in this little area and suddenly the French flags come
down and the British flags go up. The British don't
have the troops, and man, they're not flooding this area
with people. They just run up a new flag and
put a couple hundred soldiers in town to take over
(30:15):
the forts. So they're kind of trying to leverage these
trade networks. They're trying to These guys have to pay
their taxes to the British now, but at the end
of the day, these are Frenchmen and they don't like
the British. You have one hundreds of frenchmen here who
were at war with the British like fifteen years ago,
like in their lifetimes, they fought the British in a war.
Speaker 5 (30:38):
Yeah, and culturally it's a very different place. So we're
not talking about like Philadelphia here, We're not talking about London.
We've got French culture, Jesuit missions for trading posts, independent
mind and frontiersmen, a lot of mutually beneficial trade relationships,
even some inner marriages. The French have been building up
(31:03):
their network with the Native American nations over maybe a century.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Is this in the era of like kind of getting
the fur trade going?
Speaker 6 (31:12):
And yes.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
So that's the main difference here is that when when
the British and later the Americans are coming through, they
are trying to take this land and settle it right.
They want to settle this land for people and develop it.
And the tribes that are living here, the Shawnee, the Miami,
the Piacashaw, they don't they don't want people to move
in there and build houses. But the French have been
in there and they don't really care as much about that.
(31:34):
They're interested in the fur trade, right. They're making a
lot of money off this fur trade. They're working together
with the.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
Tribes agreeable situation, right, there's a mutual agree that makes sense.
Speaker 4 (31:43):
Everybody is getting, everybody's benefiting from this. It's a healthy trade.
The French people, the French fur traders are living with
these tribes, right, They're not setting up their own little communities.
They're they're integrating in a way that we haven't seen.
And so there is a lot of opportunity here for
George Rogers Clark to find some force multipliers for his
(32:05):
one hundred and fifty guys, because he's now in this
area that the tribes that live here don't love the
idea of They don't really love the idea of the
Americans coming in here and doing this either, But they
also don't love the idea of the British doing what
they've been doing, which is more exploitative and less collaborative.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Yeah, and he's like, Hey, don't worry, I'm America. We're
like diet British. So were fewer calories, I guess. But
as you all point out then and Pat, he also
had the advantage, our buddy George. He had the advantage
(32:41):
of not going in with some crazy hardline ideology for
the people, like he was not a missionary. He was
not religiously extremist, at least in the way he talked
about stuff. He instead just sort of have told people
(33:02):
do what you're doing, you know, go about your day
to day life. Also, just me, George being honest here,
I kind of think the British are a bunch of pills.
Do you want to help me fight them?
Speaker 4 (33:17):
Right? Right exactly? And the French, to be fair, the
French don't love the Americans either because they're worried. The
French are Catholic and the Americans are Protestant and they're
worried about this when we come in there, right, so,
you know, but so were the British. And that's been
a war that's been going off for we know, we
don't like the British, you guys, let's wait and see.
And so when Clark shows up, he's like, Hey, we're
doing this new thing. We're going to be our own country.
(33:39):
We're trying to figure out our own stuff. He shows
up with these one hundred and fifty guys. There by
the time they get here, like Kaskaski is not close
to Kentucky. They've been hiking, their boots are falling apart.
They look like they look like wild men. They look
like mountain men when they show up, huge beards and stuff.
And Koski has a British fort and he shows up
and he kind of like lines up outside the fort.
He's like, I think, if I can win this town
(34:01):
over and this region over, we can force these guys
out of the fort without having to actually fight them,
because I don't have My men are too tired, and
I don't have the guns or the experience or the
training or any of the things I need to storm
this fort. But if I could take this town, that
would be like a big step.
Speaker 5 (34:16):
And it's a big risk too, because if even one
of the Kaskaskian inhabitants decides to alert the British at
the fort, whoops, there goes.
Speaker 4 (34:27):
The plan, right right, there's one hundred and fifty just like
mostly unarmed guys out here trying to like overthrow the government.
That's a problem. So Clark needs help, and that is
where we meet a guy named I guess pat. I'm
just going to hand it off to you without setting
you up with the guy's name.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
Peerre Pierre Gibol.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
Fabulous, yes, Fatherbo.
Speaker 6 (34:49):
Not quite as devaults as I like to call him
as Pierre Dijon, but still equally flourishy and French.
Speaker 5 (34:57):
You'd buy a bottle of Merlau from him.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
The so is pair is actual, like his Christian first
name or is it his title?
Speaker 5 (35:10):
It's his title. It's like father or padre. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
Yeah, he's a Jesuit priest.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Yeah, he's a Jesuit priest. And as is sometimes the
case in these Smallish frontier towns, he's got a lot
of roles. He's also in effect the mayor, the judge,
the information broker of Illinois country. He's like the guy
everyone goes to and kind of expects he's the grown
up in the room. So he Yeah, he serves the
(35:36):
parishes in both Kaskaskia and val Sen. He knows all
the families, he knows their secrets. And also he hates
the British. He does not like the British occupation. He
sees the British as an occupying force that doesn't really
understand the French French Catholic culture of the region. And
(35:57):
in addition, Pelgibol he's the British paying for scalps and
he's absolutely appalled by that. So he wants stability. He
also maybe wants that whole buying scalp thing to end,
and he sees that the Americans say, okay, they're Protestant,
but they're Protestants who are more likely to actually respect
(36:20):
the way of life that we have here than the
British are.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Right, Okay, there guy, Protestants, but they're not imperious about
their beliefs, right, They're not like, well that's that's.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
That's kind of you can see on this right. And
so that's kind of why the French are kind of
hanging out here. They're British citizens at this point. They
don't really think of themselves as such. They think of
themselves as French. They think of theselves as French Catholics.
And so the way they know what they're going to
get with the British. And when Clark shows up, he
does a very wise thing and he's like, who's the
guy I need to talk to? Okay, Gjubau, Okay, let's
get him. And so they have dinner together and he's like, look, man,
(36:55):
like I'm not going to change. Nothing's going to change here, Like,
I'm here to get this guy out of here. I'm
here to get the British out and if you that
sounds good to you, Let's let's work together. And Clark
is persuasive enough in this meeting that Gebaut is like
all the way all in, and Jebau starts going around
Kaskaskia and he's like, hey, guys, like, let's help these
(37:18):
let's help these guys out. Let's make sure that they're
not going to raise arms against them. They're not gonna
like join the army or anything, but they are not
They're going to like, there's a lot of things that
the civilian population of this town can do that will
destabilize British rule here. And they start doing that.
Speaker 5 (37:35):
Yeah, and this is not just in Kaskaskia. Father people
rides all the way to Valcen, which was one hundred
miles away, hundreds of miles away in Indiana, and he
does the same thing with his parish, his parishioners there.
He basically neutralizes the entire territory through winning over hearts
and minds. It's this huge diplomatic whisper campaign. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
Yeah, and then the and then Clark goes one step
further than that. He go he and Gibou together they're like, well,
we need to get the support of the local tribes
as well, and so he goes and meets with the
chief of the Piankesha tribe, a guy whose name is
Tobacco's Son, which is a complicated it's a mixed things
complicated when you're reading about it. But his name is
(38:18):
Tobacco's son, and he's called the Grand Door to the Wabash,
which means he's like, hits the Wabash is the river
system there, and he's kind of the guy who's he's
the diplomatic person you need to talk to for the
tribes in this region.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
He's their version of the French priest.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Right, yes, so he's their chief I think so he Yeah, exactly,
he's an important person to get to know. Clark hits
hidden down and has dinner with him and they're talking about, uh,
you know, what they're going to do and what the
American civilization is going to look like when it shows up.
And he's able to convert Tobacco's son to his cause
as well. So this ends up being a big wind
(39:06):
for him to where at some point it becomes clear
to the British in Kaskaskia that like, they don't have
a lot of guys at the fort. Here it becomes
clear that like the town is against them, and the
Piakasha and the French are bringing food and guns and
AMMO and supplies and information to Clark and his guys,
(39:26):
and so the ford in Kaskaskia, those guys leave, They
leave the town to Clark without him having a fire shot.
They leave in the night, and they go and they
go to Vincennes, which is the next biggest towns. You've
got Casciar, You've got Vincenza, that you've got Detroit. Those
are the three main settlements for our story here. Clark
(39:47):
ends up in Kaskaskia in February seventeen seventy nine. Winter
is here. It's a brutal Midwestern winter. He's got one
hundred and seventy two guys. He's actually been able to
recruit a few from the locals, and the British troops
at Kaskaskia have gone to Vincennes. Now, while Clark is
hold up here in Kaskaskia waiting out the winter, he
(40:11):
gets news that Hairbier Hamilton is not just sitting around,
He's on the move. So Hamilton has taken five hundred
guys from Detroit and marched them down to Vincenes as well.
So now we got trouble. They're coming for me. Like,
(40:32):
my thing works. I've got this town, but I actually
do have to fight this guy, and he's got five
times the number of people I do, and cannons and
weapons and food and all the things that I don't have. Okay,
So he's looking at his guys and he's like, what
are we gonna do here? It's the dead of winner.
He's like, we got to go. I think we got
(40:52):
to go now. We've got to go to Vincennes now,
because the longer they sit there, the more they're going
to fortify it. So we've got to go. He's got
one hundred and seventy two just regular dudes. These are
not trained soldiers, and he's like, we have to march
one hundred and eighty miles to Vincenne's in the dead
of winter to ambush these guys when they're not expecting it.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Just imagine the pitch. Hey, guys, you know how we
all like hiking right.
Speaker 4 (41:18):
Sitting by a nice campfire indoors. We got to go
out there. The door opens, the whipping wind.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
But it's a great point too as well, given the
brutality of the season, and given the the importance of
not letting these British forces really entrench themselves, right, because
it's one of those things where if you don't solve
the problem as soon as you can, the problem will
(41:47):
only exacerbate over time.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Right, yes, yes, and so we've got to do it.
But if you've ever been to Chicago in February.
Speaker 6 (41:56):
Are thrilled there when the summer hits, it's like it's
a new least life. Yeah, brutal.
Speaker 5 (42:02):
So this hike, when we say hike, we usually picture,
you know, maybe you're having fun, maybe you're not, but
we usually picture a hiking on dry land. So this, however,
this territory is known as the drowned Lands, and the
Illinois river systems have flooded over, so the entire march
they have to deal with freezing shoulder deep ice water.
Speaker 6 (42:25):
The drowned Lands should be a region on the Elden
Ring map, just putting that out there, right.
Speaker 4 (42:29):
Definitely, it's like that, right, it's survival horror. Seventeen days,
these guys hike one hundred and eighty miles, which is like,
I don't know, Seattle to Portland. It's like, yeah, this
is a this is a long this is a long hike.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
That's so great pace.
Speaker 4 (42:45):
Yeah, seventeen days. Yeah, through the through the water, right
through the mud and the water and the snow. At
one point, the water gets so deep. They have this
drummer boy with them, this kid, and he has to
ride on his snare drum like a life raft because
he can't it's what water is too deeper, so over
his head before before.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
We chuckle at this because you just it's such a
vivid image.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
It's adorable. Can you tell us he survived?
Speaker 4 (43:08):
I cannot confirm that, but he probably did otherwise, Yeah, hardly.
Like spoiler alert, very few members of most of Clark's
group is going to make it back. There's not a
he's a so I will say yes. I will say
yes with a certain degree of confidence.
Speaker 6 (43:24):
I will give him the benefit of the doubt. There
definitely wasn't room for Jack on the snare drum. Okay,
as the large floating door in the Titanic universe. Just
putting it out there.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
Yeah, there, this is a miserable thing. This is Yes,
they're getting sick. It's so cold. Guys are hallucinating at night.
They have to sleep in trees because the mud freezes
and if you sleep on the ground, even with like
like you know, pads and stuff like, the mud will
freeze your stuff to the ground.
Speaker 5 (43:53):
How do you sleep in a tree? I mean, wild
turkeys sleep in trees, But do you have to build
a little.
Speaker 6 (43:58):
Well, turkeys are also udents and abominations, just putting that
out there.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Yeah, Pat, no offense. I know, I know both you
and Ben are in the Boston area, but we're fairly
anti turkey on this show.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
They'll come at you, man, come at you.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
They'll go at you. They're mad at They're mad at us.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
Oh oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I am neither pro nor
anti wild turkey. I just accept them as a force
of nature.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Don't they well said, don't they roam Harvard campus? They
really do.
Speaker 6 (44:26):
I saw them in the in the wild, literally and
I was like, is this acceptable?
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Who?
Speaker 3 (44:31):
Who green with these turkeys?
Speaker 5 (44:33):
The turkeys act like they're on the place, because actually
they kind of do.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
They're a gang.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
I remember, I've spent a lot of time in Boston,
and no offense you all, but it can be an opinionated,
somewhat divisive place. And the one thing that I see
all Bostonians agree on is that wild turkeys are kind
of a gang.
Speaker 5 (44:56):
Yeah, do not mess with wild tur turkeys.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
So despite the fact that these guys are not actively
actively in life or death battles with wild turkeys, they
are running into a lot of dangerous wildlife. The environment
is inhospitable. Sleeping in trees if you've ever done it before, folks,
(45:22):
just a regular tree, not a fancy tree house, not
a chiropractor. But your back's gonna hurt. It kind of sucks. Yep.
Speaker 4 (45:30):
You gotta tie yourself in so you don't fall out
when you're sleeping, or you got to build a little
stand there. And yeah, I mean seventeen days these guys
do this. They have them by the time they arrive
and Clark it bears mentioning that this is not Clark
is not wearing an officer's uniform here and carrying a
sword and sleeping in a tent like he's walking at
the front of the line, right, He's just walking with
these guys. He's twenty five. Guys are all about his age.
(45:52):
They're they're not trained soldiers. They don't really know what
they're doing. They got no food, their clothes are falling apart.
They don't have the cold way their gear. They need
for this to like not be absolutely miserable. By the
time they get there, they lose two guys on the hike,
and by the time they get there, they're basically like skeletal.
They have eaten the last of their food. They're out
(46:13):
of food entirely. They they're so tired they can barely
hold their rifles. And then they get there and they
get to Vincense, which nobody has ever been to before.
And they take one look at it and it's like
an uphill approach into a wooden fort with cannons and
like garden positions and like portholes to like stick your
gun out. There's five hundred Red coats sitting there by
(46:33):
their campfires inside, eating food with their with their and yeah,
and they have AMMO for their rifles and for their cannons. Okay,
what do we do here?
Speaker 1 (46:47):
Tire ourselves to a tree and hope there aren't any
turkeys around.
Speaker 5 (46:51):
I don't know, Oh that's always a good move, but yeah, yeah,
so so Clark Clark sends the letter.
Speaker 4 (46:59):
He sends a messenger into the town of Vincennes, and Vincenzees,
you know, it's a frontier town, but it's it's French, right,
And he sends the town, he sends me messengers into
the town and he says, I'm going to take the
town tomorrow. If you're with us, stay in the town,
don't leave your houses. If you're with the British, go
to the fort now, so that we know who's on
our side and who's not.
Speaker 5 (47:21):
And this could be a huge gamble because again, you
just need one person to tip off the British. But
he knows that the French settlers in Valsennese trust the
word of Father Gibo. They don't run to the fort.
They stay inside. And not only do they stay inside,
(47:41):
they also sneak food and ammo and supplies to Clark
and his men.
Speaker 4 (47:46):
Yes, so the people of the town so word, you know,
they don't they don't rat on him. They bring stuff
out to him. And then eventually Hamilton does find out.
Hamilton's there, he's in Vincennes. He's there, and he gets
word that's like, okay, there's something weird going on here.
These guys are moving around and then he starts asking
people and they're like, yeah, what somebody says it right,
(48:07):
And he's like oh, shoot, there's like an American army
out there, and like they're gonna take the town. He
say they're going to take the fort tomorrow. Is that right? Then,
Like he starts hearing the drums, that drummer boy, he
starts hearing the drums. He starts seeing guys, he starts
seeing flags, and there's just so they start marching around.
So we're in the forest, right, there's a clearing between
the forest wall and the and the fort where the
(48:28):
you know, like at area so you could shoot people
when they're trying to attack the fort. But he starts
walking around that tree line in a circle, over and
over and over again with his dudes waving little banners,
changing the little banners around. He's got snipers up in
the trees, like he's got these guys are marksmen right there, hunters.
He's got guys up in the trees shooting rounds into
(48:48):
the He's trying to tell him to shoot it through
the portholes of the of the of the fort, not
necessarily to like kill a guy standing on the other side,
but just to like freak them out that like we
can shoot through the whole of we could shoot through
this target here and uh, don't stick your head out
the window, because you know we might be able, we
might shoot you.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
So this is like a Pioyeah.
Speaker 4 (49:09):
Absolutely, he's got one hundred and seventy two guys with frostbite,
and and he's shooting basically every bullet he has as
like a warning shot to scare these guys. He's just
just ping, ping around off the cannon so that they
know we could hit the cannon if we wanted to.
They can't see where the Americans are shooting from. They
can't see how many of them there are. They're hearing
word that like the town is against them. They're hearing
(49:31):
word that there was this big force in uh In
Kaskaskia that was on the move. Here. They're hearing word
that the Native American tribes in the area have joined up.
They're hearing word that the frendship joined up. Suddenly, that
five hundred guys in the wooden fort with eleven foot
walls and cannons doesn't seem quite so stable. This is
like you said, it's a siop. He's he's tricking, tricking
(49:53):
these guys. Hamilton panics and he's like, I've got to
meet with I've got to meet their commander. This is
like the old days, right, we just did this. This
is like a very American revolution thing where he's like,
I would like to meet were I shall meet your
commanding on.
Speaker 6 (50:07):
In a little FaceTime. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
I know we've had our differences, but let's grab dinner.
Speaker 4 (50:12):
Yeah, they do. They go to a church in town
and they meet.
Speaker 6 (50:16):
Oh well, that's fun because the church being sort of
a neutral location where you're not supposed to do acts
of violence, right.
Speaker 4 (50:23):
Right, right, And so he meets Clark and Hamilton I
imagine with the powdered wig and the red coat and everything.
Clark is just a mess, right. This guy's like he's
wearing a buckskin shirt that's like covered in mud from
one hundred and eighty mile hike, and he just looks
like a wild man. He looks like, I don't know,
something out of a something of a movie from the seventies,
you know. And Hamilton's like, all right, I'm lieutenant governor
(50:49):
of Detroit. We can talk. Let's talk like gentlemen. He's
expecting a very revolutionary war parlay here. And Clark is like, look, man,
if you don't surrender right now, I'm going to storm
the place, and once I storm the place, I won't
be My men are just wild men. They're all insane
maniacs with bowie knives. I can't promise, I can't promise
I can control them once we get into the walls.
Speaker 1 (51:09):
Oh that's classic diplomacy too, because people in those parlays,
people always or typically will assume that kind of that
kind of moral stance where they'll go, look, I'm the
guy you can talk to. Okay, you and me, man,
we're just hanging at the church. We can reason this through.
But my boys, those folks, man, you thought you bought hair.
Speaker 4 (51:36):
Yeah, yeah, that's a good cop, bad cop. Right. He's
got three, like, he's got his three craziest look of
dudes standing around him just being like like frothing at
the mouth. And it's like, look, I mean, I don't
know about Big Jim here. He doesn't really do what
I tell him to.
Speaker 2 (51:52):
You, No, does it work?
Speaker 4 (51:56):
It works? Yeah, Hamilton's threnders. Hamilton signs the surrender that night,
surrenders the fort, and as the last moment of like,
you know, he doesn't raise there's a there's a very
which I'm sure he thought was like a big disc
but like he doesn't the morning he's supposed to hand
the ford over, he doesn't raise the flag that morning
because he doesn't want to run it down so that
they can run up the American flag. You would normally
(52:17):
run a flag up the at morning roll call or whatever,
but he doesn't run it up because he doesn't want
the disgrace of running it down. And so that was
kind of his I don't know, I feel like that
probably carried a lot more weight in seventeen seventy eight
than it does now. It just kind of seems repeated. Yeah, yeah,
but it's mentioned. It's mentioned in multiple places when you
read about this, so I feel like Bear's mentioning here.
(52:40):
But anyway, he's the renders and then he's got to
hand his guys over, He hands his weapon's over and
pat it's a he's a.
Speaker 5 (52:48):
It's a wo wof moment, a kick in the teeth moment.
Hamilton looks at the massive army that beat him, and now.
Speaker 4 (52:59):
He's got a mars. Five hundred guys out of that court. Yeah,
five hundred unarmed men marching out through one hundred and
fifty guys that look like they haven't slept in a month.
Or carrying like weapons. That would be a joke, right.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
That's crazy because you know there was at least of
the one hundred and fifty American dudes, there was at
least one who didn't have any kind of firearm, just
had a big stick.
Speaker 4 (53:24):
It was like haha, right, exactly. Yeah, it's like surrendering
guantanamotive guys with like bolt action rifles. Right, it's just
like you're like, what is what the what the hell?
And so it's you know, the hair buyer is taken prisoner,
he's put in a cell and and he hates it.
He writes, he writes so much. You were talking about
the Joys letters. He writes so much like poetic, like
(53:48):
complaining about how he has to go into the guess
to sit there with the quote felons and malefactors. They
don't put him in a special cell for like the gentleman.
Put him in just a regular cell. There's a there's
a toilet bucket in there. He calls it a kind
of throne that is truly methitic, which means foul smelling.
Speaker 3 (54:08):
Great words. I'm writing all of these down.
Speaker 1 (54:11):
Have you no separate prison for an officer?
Speaker 6 (54:14):
Right?
Speaker 4 (54:15):
I wish I could do the accident. It would be
so funny if I just.
Speaker 1 (54:18):
Like what he thought he was going to be pooping
in first class.
Speaker 4 (54:22):
No he is not. He is he is pooping in
a wilderness prison.
Speaker 2 (54:25):
C that's terrible.
Speaker 4 (54:31):
And yeah, so basically with al Fryon shot, you know,
the British lose some guys to those snipers, but mostly
that was that was a sigh op. But they do
take out a couple of his guys. So Hamilton loses
a few guys to gunfire and Clark loses a couple
of guys to the extreme temperatures. But at the end
of the day, Clark writes home to Patrick Henry, who
(54:53):
kind of gave him a pat on the back and
sent him off. He says, great things have been affected
by a few men well conducted.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
Indeed, indeed well said.
Speaker 1 (55:05):
Hey, I imagine Clark got uh got a promotion from
this right?
Speaker 2 (55:12):
Maybe?
Speaker 4 (55:13):
Yes, I mean he gets promoted, he gets militarily promoted.
In the end, well, yeah, I mean to put it
in perspective, this guy, with one hundred and fifty men
and no funding from the government, using entirely diplomacy and
psychological warfare. He captures when the British, because the British
have now surrendered and they surrendered torqu Detroit, because this
(55:36):
is the extent of their forces. Hamilton is has the
extent of their forces in the region. So when the
war ends, Britain has to sign all this stuff over
because possessions nine tenths of the law and the colonials
have it. The region that George Rogers Clark has just
captured through this operation will become the states of Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin,
and Indiana.
Speaker 5 (55:59):
Can you imagine how many pages in your atlas that
would take up. That's that is a not small portion
of land. And to do all this, Clark was okay,
he got a pat on the back from Patrick Henry,
but he did not get any support from the Virginia
government for expenses. So Clark was paying out a pocket
(56:22):
to feed his men and get supplies and he went
into a lot of debt for this, and his creditors
they just kept going after him and hounding him. So yeah, yeah,
So in exchange for you know, saving the securing the
future of the Midwest, he just gets a stack of
(56:42):
bills and honestly, he can't he really can't dig himself
out of it. And yeah, poor guy dies in poverty.
Speaker 4 (56:51):
Yeah, I'm an alcoholic. He dies in poverty. Just really
tragic end of this guy. He's Yeah, the later years
are like pretty rough for him. And she's not penniless. Yeah, yeah,
here's the kicker. Hamilton gets out of prison after the war,
He gets paroled, he gets promoted. He becomes the governor
of Bermuda and Dominica.
Speaker 2 (57:11):
So how do you get a promotion after that?
Speaker 4 (57:14):
I don't know. But he lives out the rest of
his days sitting on a beach in the Dominican sipping
rum cocktails and just complaining about.
Speaker 2 (57:23):
What went down earlier.
Speaker 1 (57:25):
I just said, hey, you guys have to understand, the
forest was pretty dense. We thought there were a lot
more of them than there were.
Speaker 4 (57:34):
Yeah, I don't know, I don't know the you know.
Desjawn ends up getting arrested and running away, so at
least he gets what's coming to him. He gets indicted
and spends most of his life on the run. Clark
is interesting because yeah he does. He struggles later in life.
But one interesting way to kind of end this story
(57:55):
is when Napoleon sells the eighteen O one when Napoleon
does Louis Louisiana purchase and Thomas Jefferson sends the Lewis
and Clark Expedition out to explore the new territories that
have been discovered. That Clark is George Rogers Clark's little brother,
(58:17):
so William Clark is the younger brother of George Rogers Clark.
So it's kind of like a relay race where where
George Rogers Clark expands west and then and then his
brother William picks it up and goes on the Lewis
and Clark expedition all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
So I think that's kind of a fun way to
wrap that or to tie that off.
Speaker 5 (58:35):
George walked so William could run, or George.
Speaker 1 (58:38):
Trusge William could trug.
Speaker 2 (58:42):
Yeah, there we go.
Speaker 1 (58:43):
And we had a we hadd an episode, uh not
too long ago, Noel, Max and I about how scientists
were able to track the passage of the Lewis and
Clark expedition, uh.
Speaker 2 (58:58):
Through there through through their poop.
Speaker 1 (59:01):
Sorry to make this so poop centric, guys, but but
that's part of it. I think we can all unanimously
agree the award for badass does rightly go to George
Rogers Clark, and I'm so mad to hear that. Ol
Hamilton just got to spend time on the beach.
Speaker 4 (59:24):
Is the governor of Bermuda.
Speaker 1 (59:26):
Yeah, during a very difficult time for Bermuda. By the way,
I think it was probably still kind of a chump
during his governorship.
Speaker 4 (59:34):
It's possible, that's possible, he said. He just becomes a
colonial administrator, which doesn't selling a terrible.
Speaker 3 (59:40):
Life, right, what they call a cushy government job.
Speaker 1 (59:44):
Yes, just so, and we are we are going to
wrap this exploration here. Thank you so much, Ben, Thank
you so much Pat for joining us. I don't know.
I think it's fair to say neither of us knew
George Rogers Clark.
Speaker 6 (01:00:01):
Absolutely not. I mean for the longest time, I was like,
where's the where's the Lewis and Clark connection? These seem related,
these seem adjacent, And we got there.
Speaker 4 (01:00:10):
Finally we got there. Yeah. Yeah, it's a huge expansion
of the American colonies. Big it became became five states,
and we couldn't have done it without this one guy
and the aid of the French people who lived in
the region and the Piankashaw Nations and the other nations
that helped out in the in the process. So this
is kind of the French connection. Next time we're going
(01:00:31):
to talk about a little bit more of a direct
action that the French took, which is also badass, but
in a very different way.
Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
And congratulations by the way to all of us, including
you Max for not making references to the musical Hamilton.
I didn't know if we would get through it, but guys,
we did it. We did it as a crew, We
did it as a team. Where can people go to
learn more about.
Speaker 4 (01:00:53):
You all's work, Well, we are at Badass of the
Week basically everywhere anywhere you find podcasts, you can search
for bad and you'll see my face a kidding.
Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
You could also check out the Wikipedia disambiguation page for
Ben Thompson, which is one of my favorite parts of
your bio. Pat. We can't wait to uh, we can't
wait to hear what you think of our Notorious James
Joyce episode. Uh.
Speaker 4 (01:01:21):
Yeah, we're gonna live stream, are listening to it on
our twitch. We're gonna create a twitch.
Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
We can record it like a commentary track. Yeah, like
a rip rip It's worthy of that, it's pretty crunch.
Speaker 1 (01:01:34):
Big big thanks to our super producer mister Max Williams.
Will allid the credits a little bit for now, but uh, folks,
please do tune in very soon when we get to
the next Badass of the Week.
Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
We've got double Badasses.
Speaker 6 (01:01:51):
Of the Week week.
Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
That's the one.
Speaker 6 (01:01:55):
You're ridiculous history. Thanks you all so much for joining
us again and we'll see you next time, folks. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
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Noel Brown
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