November 15, 2018 • 29 mins
Before Lewis and Clark set out to explore the western side of the continent, they tried to prepare for every possible contingency — including medical conditions like constipation. Join the guys as they explore how a dangerous laxative didn’t just save members of the expedition, but also may have preserved their campsites for posterity.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Yeah, is your crew of otherwise intrepid adventurers, soldiers and
scouts falling prey to the depredations of life On the
edge of the map are the challenges of the untamed wilds,
leaving your men with syphilis, constipation, scurvy, brain shutter stickyy,
(00:35):
welshman's ear, and the other tragic, painful conditions so common
to modern explorers. If so, fret not, good friends and neighbors.
Dr Benjamin Russia has discovered a brilliant, innovative solution to
all your ills. Dr Russia's world famous Billious pills use
a proprietary combination of pure ingredients to gently purge the
body of excess biling contaminants that caused these dreadful, incommodious conditions. Hi,
(00:56):
I'm bett Who is that though? Oh? That was an
average heisman for Dr Benjamin Rush's Billious Pill, not Dr
Benjamin Boland's bills. No, No, he beat me. He beat
me to this wind, to the gut punch, Yes, to
the to the thunderclap. Oh, my goodness, gracious, So I
think he left out a key component in that ad, though, Ben, Yeah,
(01:18):
there was a little bit of a pr spin there.
Nol what was What was that key ingredient that got
left out? I think it was mercury. Ben, I believe
you are correct, my friend. We are here a ridiculous
history along with our super producer, Casey Pegram, and I
don't think we told Casey what this episode is going
(01:38):
to be about. No. I think I think from our
pre pro conversations he sort of gleaned that it was
something to do with mercury and poop and possibly exploration, yes,
possibly exploration, Probably exploration, definitely exploration. Can you take us back, Noll,
where where we headed? Who? Who are our protagonist today? Okay? Ben?
(01:59):
For today episode, we are in fact going to time
travel so that we can physically travel along with our
companions for the day, Merryweather Lewis and William Clark otherwise
known as Lewis and Clark. Yes. Yes, and there's an
amazing Superman spinoff television program called Lowis and Clark that
they were really capitalizing on people having fond memories of
(02:20):
this intrepid traveling duo. Um, but this is an eighteen
o four and that was more like in nineteen nine.
I want to say, so this is the important pair. Um,
So we've got Lewis and Clark who go out on
a journey. It's sort of like a Lord of the
Rings esque journey to more Door, only it's to survey
this land that President Jefferson, you know, basically bought from Louisiana.
(02:43):
And in another creative title for an event, the Louisiana Purchase,
he purchased some land from Louisiana and they called it
that um. And so this journey started from St. Louis
and very very slowly and deliberately its way to the
west coast right the Sacific. They wanted to. They were
(03:05):
tasked to find a passage from the Missouri River to
the Pacific, and they left as you said, Mayo, eighteen
o four. It took them twenty eight months to complete
the journey. They lucked out, though, because almost everyone survived,
which was amazing when you consider that they were going
through the untamed wise. I think they only lost one person.
(03:27):
Just why, how? How did he go? On August, Sergeant
Charles Floyd died of what they called at the time
Billius Corlick. Interesting, wasn't that word in the name of
that pill that that a disembodied U announcer gave us
at the top of the show Billius pills. Today we
(03:48):
call Billius corlick c h O r l I c K.
By the way, we call that a ruptured appendix. Really,
so Billius referring to bile correct absolute, and that's what
your appendix is kind of chock full of. And it
is a poisonous substance if if leached out into the body,
right right exactly. Bilious is a word that can trace
(04:11):
its origin back to the old belief. In the old
medical belief, humors, Yes, exactly, the four bodily humors would
be black, bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. So you
might be phlegmatic, you might be bilious. And when Lewis
and Clark set off with their thirty odd people, they
wanted to really be boy scouts about it. They needed
(04:33):
to prepare as much as possible for any contingency, and
one of the things that they were very concerned with
was the possibility of growing sick like indigestion, diarrhea, constipation,
constipation mainly right, that's the big one, because how how
many months was this journey again months? So you know,
(04:57):
it would be almost impossible to bring enough food that
would not that would keep for that long let alone
that you could actually carry through the completely untamed wilderness
that they were traveling through. Um, so they had to
be prepared to have to catch their own food, which
would end up being like super kind of gamey stuff.
I believe they ended up eating a lot of dogs
(05:18):
on this trip. Yeah, that was a thing. And this
led them to having some pretty severe tummy troubles, most
specifically constipation. So they packed these pills in large quantities. Yes. Yeah.
The weird thing about the Billious pills is they were
actually in effect anti bilious. Back then, a patient was
(05:41):
said to be billious when supposed poor flow of bile
in their body gave them any number of symptoms headache, lassitude, constipation,
and Dr Rush had actually spoken to Louis to merriwether
Lewis before they left, and he said, if you see
(06:02):
a sign of an approaching disease, if you see one
of these symptoms pop up, headaches, constipation, just hand them
one or two of these pills. But they had that nickname, right, Thunderbolts. Thunderbolts.
It sounds like some kind of like truck stop speed.
Doesn't like mans yellow jackets, yellow jackets, that's the one um.
But here here's the kicker though. It contained something called
(06:25):
calamel ten grams per serving um, which the active ingredient,
and calamel is in fact mercury mercurous chloride. Yeah, and
this calamel stuff had been used in medical practice since
the sixteen hundreds because it was actually a milder form
(06:49):
of a mercury compound. The liquid medical mercury had been
applied externally in different ways since ancient times to treat
a variety of skin diseases, and then because it's been
used so often externally, it evolved into an internal medicine.
But wasn't the problem with mercury is that, sure it
(07:09):
does knock out some conditions of the skin, for example,
but it also like poisons the person that's taking it, right, right,
Like the the old haberdashers who would go crazy from
exposure to mercury, right, Yeah, like that guy that killed
John Wilkes booth. We did an episode on back in
the right yea, yeah, you know the guy who gastrated himself,
(07:32):
Thomas Corbett. Corbett, that's right, that's right. So we know
that mercury could actually treat some medical conditions. People used
it often to combat syphilis, for instance. But we also
know that this stuff had a range of terrible, terrible
(07:53):
side effects. If you took small doses of this mercurous
chloride over time, it would give you mercury poisoning. We
just didn't call it that at the time. You would
have a lot of saliva, your gums would get sore,
your teeth would loosen, your breath would smell like metal,
which is super gross, and you would have discolored stool.
(08:16):
But in large doses, this stuff acted very quickly as
a laxative. Right, Yeah, it absolutely did, and that is
of course the purposes that was being employed for here
with the Lewis and Clark team. Um, they took so
much of it that they would spend like an entire
day they would lose to multiple party members just you know, purging,
(08:40):
spray and pray, that's what I like to call it. Yeah,
that's a good one. But thankfully, there was a popular
kind of wisdom, I guess, surrounding camping that you should
dig your latrine a certain distance away from your campsite
as not to contaminate your your food, or you know,
just just keep things not gross. It's a quality of life,
especially if you got a dude like hovering over this
(09:02):
like a hole in the ground, just like expelling his
bowels just explosively. Nobody wants to be around that. How
if you remember how far it was, what was the
recommended distance? I would just think surely, given the circumstances,
they would have like up that whatever it may have been. Yeah,
it may have changed depending on their terrain, but the
rule of thumb nowadays is about a hundred yards away
(09:25):
as a minimum in a secluded area. They were probably
not that far away, because a hundred yards that's a
football field, you know what I mean? Well, and exactly
like if you were in some kind of small clearing,
like in a wooded area, you might not have that
much space to work with. Yeah, it was probably just far.
It was at least far enough away that you wouldn't
(09:46):
be haunted by the smell or the sounds. The horrible,
horrible sounds, right, the groans of anguished human misery and
like cartoonish splattering sounds. Can you even imagine? Ben? I can?
And it bothers me? It bothers me too? Does it
bother you listeners? Does it bother you? Casey? Yeah, I'd
say that bothers me. It is decided it's an unpleasant
(10:10):
thing to be around, right, We took it to the
highest authority in the land as far as this podcast
is concerned. The weird thing about these pills is that
it was a large enough dose of mercury to actually
kill a human being, but it went through their bodies
(10:31):
so fast, and one end out of the other because
it was fast acting too. That was another part. That's
why they were called lightning pills, I imagine, right, yeah, exactly,
And they had to be named after the sound, you know,
which just still bothers me a little bit null. But
here's here's something he's saying. It sounded like lightning when
they evacuated their bowels. Yeah, yeah, it sounded that. It
(10:53):
sounded like the clap of thunder, you know, like is
a storm coming in? Or is Louis sick again? You know.
But here's something that hopefully made the pain of the
journey worth it for these for these intrepid explorers. For
a long time, archaeologists were attempting to trace the exact
(11:13):
path that Lewis and Clark took. And these guys stated
over six hundred different sites, so you might know the
general trend, and you can see some stuff that they
have documented themselves. But if you want to find the
specific actual facts camp sites, you're looking at a needle
in the haystack situation, or so one would assume, or
(11:36):
you could call it a pile of human excrement and
a hole in the ground situation. That's true, that's probably
more accurate, more accurate, which honestly seems to me would
be pretty difficult to find as well. But find it
these intrepid archaeologists did, did they not been? They did,
know they did, and they did it with the incidental
help of Dr Benjamin Rush's billious Because remember how just
(12:01):
a moment ago we said that these things are like mercury,
mercurius chloride, or call mill. There was so much mercury
running through these poor guy's bodies that the mercury stayed
in the ground where their latrines were like an unusual
cartoon ish I'll say it, disgusting amount of mercury. And
(12:24):
that is how, given the opportunity, archaeologists could differentiate between
the Lewis and Clark poop and the poop of of
others who may have passed through a similar location. But
then They had to have had a vague idea. They
couldn't have been like, you know, going willy nilly to
every random campsite like this seems like an insane process.
How how did this go down? It's a good question,
(12:46):
my friend. Uh. There's a writer for the Chicago Tribune
named Maurice Postley who walks us through a little bit
of this. In his journals. Merryweather Lewis refers to a
camp site near a place called Lolo Creek, which is
just a few miles south of Missoula, and he calls
his place travelers Rest. And they all thought. Everybody thought
(13:11):
for a long time that this camp was at the
confluence of the Bitter Root River and Lolo Creek, about
a mile and a half away. But this all changed
when a vapor analysis verified this unusual amount of mercury there.
I was that much that a vapor analysis would do it.
It was like in the air. It's crazy. They were
(13:35):
able to They were able to analyze the soil pretty easily.
And once they once they find that one site and like, oh,
this proves it. Let's see if we can test other
specific sites and traces of mercy and maybe and maybe
get to the source by seeing how the concentrations change, right, Yeah, exactly,
(13:55):
you could in theory, I guess, find that that hole
in the ground um by tracking like the concentration of mercury. Yes,
And there's an interesting thing here that you and I
have talked about off air. We we've been mentioning mercury
as a treatment for constipation, but it was also used
(14:16):
to treat an entirely different medical condition. That's the thing.
They were getting this mercury from from two different sources.
That the Billiest pills, which was kind of considered a
cure all, but then they also had a cash of
another type of medication that was specifically designed to treat syphilis.
Because they were they basically kind of prepared for the
fact they were going to have a lot of what
(14:37):
other kind of sex was there at the time, unprotected
sex with um, some Native women. There's an article in
The Atlantic that came out in twenty sixteen that it
seems to dispel this belief for a while. People believe
that syphilis actually came somehow from the New World, but
(14:59):
all the other and syndicates, we still don't know exactly
where syphilis came from. And I think you and I
had always assumed that syphilis came with the Europeans into
the New World, which I know we're not supposed to
use the term New World anymore, but that's what they
called it at the time. We know we're talking about Yeah,
(15:19):
so the disease already had a long history in Europe,
but maybe the syphilis epidemic seemed like a new disease
at the time because it had previously been mistaken for
something else, you know, or maybe it was a particularly
virulent strain of syphilis, whatever the case may bee. Um,
(15:40):
these travelers knew damn well that they were going to
be exposed to this condition, but they weren't gonna let
that stop them from, you know, having a nice fling
with with an attractive lady. Um, and they took this
stuff to either. I guess it wasn't really it could
be a safeguard against I guess they just accept that
they were going to get it. Apparently just resign themselves
(16:02):
their their syphilitic faith, which is no joke, right. Syphilis
is the one that like can kind of like make
you go insane over time, right in the late stages.
So they had syphilis and mercury poisoning. I would imagine
by the end of this journey, these dudes, we're not
well right and mentally right. And let's see, it was
even just in the first year of the expedition. On
(16:24):
October fIF eighteen o four, Clark writes down that the
party had arrived at a place called the camp of
the Aracarra, and that quote, their women were very fond
of caressing our men and company. And by March of
eighteen o five he noted that the men were quote
generally healthy, except venereal complaints, which is very common amongst
(16:48):
the natives here. The men catch it from them, So
they were blaming the native population. But you know, it
was just out. It was apparently just crazy talk for
them to you know, not pursue these flings. I mean,
they had to occupy their time somehow, I guess, right.
So they were just on this cycle of unprotected sex,
(17:08):
syphilis and mercury, wild times, my friend, and eating dogs
and eating dogs and just laying some epic flagellations. What
I don't know about this what the farts, the thunderclaps,
Oh that's different. It was man of fart destiny like
ow Ben that's that's horrible. I love you so much.
There is another thing too, about the times that they
(17:30):
spent on the on the old Rugged trail. Apparently every
man got a ration of whiskey. Um, they had barrels
of whiskey, and that was a really important part of
their staying sane in these intense circumstances. And one man
I believe was caught taking more than his fair share
of and he got fifty stripes on the back, um
(17:52):
with a cat of nine tails or some such you know,
bull whip. Oh wow. And that they took that stuff
really seriously, and you know that stuff left scars, oh
big time. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean that was like
the height of of punishment. And if they did that
for just you know, taking a little extra shot of whiskey,
I can't imagine what they would have done for more
severe crimes. Right. And this is fascinating, I think, to
(18:14):
both of us because growing up here in the States,
when you hear about the Lewis and Clark expedition, you
just hear the bare bones, and it's sometimes it's a
little romanticized. You know, It's like these this noble group
of people who are the harbingers of Western civilization at
this point, trying to explore a great unknown, at least
(18:38):
unknown to Europeans land and so, as so often happens
in so many stories like this, we skip over a
lot of the nitty gritty details. The epidemic of syphilis,
the epidemic of diarrhea, the mercury in the ground everywhere,
the dog eating the dog eating. No, no no, that's very
(18:59):
sexy at all. No, that's not what you want to
think about. What you think about this. We're left with
this image of conquering, you know, the great outdoors, and
you've got these trails named after Lewis and Clark. And
now we know that they went to I think more
than six hundred campsites throughout this journey, and like Traveler's Rest,
because of these intrepid archaeologists and their ability to analyze
(19:23):
some of these sites for its mercury content, we know
a little bit more about where these folks passed through. Yes,
and we have also learned that, what you know, neither
of us are doctors. Casey is not a doctor either.
We've also learned uh the perils of mercury. Don't take it,
don't break the thermometer and play with it. Did you
(19:43):
ever do that as you kid? You know what? I've
seen videos of it looks pretty cool. It's like the
T one thousand exactly. Yeah, but it's still not worth it.
You can do horrible things to it. Just happened in
today's episode to preserve for posterity the details of the
Lewis and Clark expedition. And one thing that's surprising is
(20:09):
although we we hold the Lewis and Clark expedition in
such high regard today, it only became popular relatively recently,
like fifty years ago or so. Well. I think when
these men returned, they expected like a hero's welcome, right,
and it just never really came. And Merryweather Lewis. In fact,
(20:30):
his death has been a source of much speculation, but
one very plausible one is that he kind of spiraled
into despair and self doubt uh and that he ultimately
took his own life in in a quite outlandish fashion.
UM walk us through. Yeah, well so. Thomas Jefferson himself
(20:51):
had reported that Lewis's family had a history of depression
bipolar disorder, specifically UM, and that he himself Lewis had
been suffering from this condition himself since he was a child.
And here's a quote from a great article on history
dot n D dot gov, where Jefferson says, this Governor
(21:12):
Lewis had from an early life been subject to hypochondriac affections.
It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches
of the family of his name. It was more immediately
inherited by him from his father. While he lived with
me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind,
but knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course by
what I had seen in the family. This is really
(21:34):
interesting because this idea of mental illness can having such stigma.
It's still around today. I mean, it hasn't gotten that
much better. So back in these days it certainly wouldn't
have been something that you would have talked about. But um, yeah,
So he suffered from these you know, great highs and
great lows, and the story of his demise goes like this.
Oh sh also mentioned just to in reject that he
(21:56):
is rediscovered letters show that he had written his will
but for the journey, and he also attempted suicide on
the expedition but was restrained. Yeah. Good, A good thing.
He had his bros around him to kind of hold him,
pull him back from the letage, I suppose. So what happened?
How how did he pass away? So the story goes
like this, Um, he had booked himself a room at
(22:19):
an end a tavern and he shot himself. Um, but
that didn't take because I guess I don't know, maybe
those little musket balls, those those guns don't always discharge properly.
Maybe it just didn't didn't wasn't a death blow. And
so he did it again and that didn't quite take either.
So he decided to go to sleep. He went to sleep,
(22:39):
and he woke up, um, you know, not dead. And
then he apparently ran out into the hallway and said, quote,
give me some water and heal my wounds, and all
the guests were freaking out, and he went back to
sleep and then woke up and someone witnessed him quote
cutting himself from head to foot. So it took about
(23:01):
twelve hours of time, two bullets, a little bit asleep,
and um a blade for Louis to finally die. And
that is like some tortures of the damned kind of
stuff right there. Because Lord self inflicted is the belief right.
This was at the Grinder's stand. It's in on the
Natchez trace, and I believe he had one gun shot
(23:23):
in the head, one to the gut, and you know,
as said, he ran out and scared the hell out
of everyone. Uh. Nashville newspaper had reported that his throat
was cut. There is one complicating factor here. Money that
he had borrowed from a guy named Major Gilbert Russell
to complete the journey was missing. Oh, the plot thickens.
(23:46):
The plot thickens. And Thomas Jefferson, as you pointed out,
along with some modern historians, generally accepted the idea that
Lewis died of suicide. But there's still a debate. There's
still people who say it was homicide for one reason
or another. That is pretty fascinating. Um, it does seem
like the groundwork was laid for him, having already demonstrated
(24:10):
suicidal tendencies. But this whole missing money business and the
muddies the water. So he might have spent it because
there Uh. The historian Paul Russell cut right, completely believes
this was suicide, and he has a pretty detailed takedown
in the murder slash robbery theory. He says Louis had
a lot of debt. He was a heavy drinker. He
(24:31):
may have been using morphine and opium. Uh, he was
running late preparing the expeditions journals for publishing. He just
couldn't get a romantic partner, and he was on the
outs with Thomas Jefferson. The relationship was going downhill. So
he's saying that it's plausible that Lewis, given his history
(24:52):
right his his own mental struggles. He's saying it's more
plausible that Louis eventually took his own life. Well, that's
a real bummer, and that is a surely a down
our way to end this episode. Um So I'm just
gonna throw in one more thing to kind of like
change like a palate clan, a little bit of palicillanser.
And that is the fact that or the idea that
Thomas Jefferson. One of the big things he was super
(25:13):
excited about them finding on this expedition was like giant animals, Yes,
like Mammoth's American right, yeah, big time. And uh, something
called a megalonics or a mega megal Yeah, megalonics, which
is like some kind of giant cat And he described
it as as pre eminent over the lion in size
(25:35):
as the mammoth is over the elephant. And if you
want to see a really cool exploration of this as
if it were real, there is a comic book series
called Manifest Destiny. I've read it. It's on issue thirty
six right now, that's ongoing, but you can get the
Collected Trades or what have you. Check it out. I've
read like the first Trade and it's really cool. But
it has some of these crazy creatures. Yeah, it's a
(25:58):
big part of it. In this comic they're finding, um well,
i'll tell you this without spoiling it. In in this
story in the graphic novel slash comic book Manifest Destiny,
the expedition does run into mega fauno just the generic
term for large animals. But they also keep finding these
structures that look like the Gateway arch there in St. Louis.
(26:20):
And you know what if if you're a fan of
good stories, we highly recommend that. I'm so glad you
mentioned this on Aara he was reading it. I was
rereading it last night and prep for the podcast. All
that good historical data in there, because I think there
is some stuff in there that is historically accurate, but
it's largely a fictionalized version with some of these more
(26:40):
high and lofty ideas of what this this unsettled wilderness
might be like. So pretty cool stuff. Yeah, check it out.
I like that we I like that we made a
good comic recommendation. We do whatever we can have we
made one before. Um, we may have mentioned comics were like,
but I don't know if we out not recommended one.
I pledge from this day fourth to always recommend a
(27:02):
comic on every episode. Okay, no, that's too much. No, no,
as long as caveat, as long as it doesn't have
to completely tie in with the episode. And we're gonna
do an episode on every state and we're gonna complete
it by the end of this year. WHOA, No, I
don't think we can. We're only coming out twice a week.
(27:23):
I at least forget. It's under promise over deliver. So
there's also another commy called The Black Monday Murders. Has
nothing to do with today's episode, but you will thoroughly
enjoy it. And I'm a fan of Lock and Key,
which you loaned me trying to get my way through it.
But it's by Joe Hill, who is Stephen King's son.
Nothing really like anything Stephen King ever did, though he's
(27:45):
got his own thing. Yeah. Yeah, Joe Hill is a
fantastic gregor. You know what, let us know what comic
books do you like, historical or otherwise? Yeah, and you
can let us know right now as you're listening to
this episode. You have to do is hop on Instagram,
Twitter or face look especially our Facebook community page Ridiculous Historians,
or you can write us a good old fashioned email
(28:05):
at ridiculous at how stuff works dot com. M We'd
love to thank super producer and Casey Pegraham. I'd like
to thank you Ben. I'd like to thank you Noel,
along with Alex Williams who composed our track, our research
associate Gabe who does just an amazing jobs, right, and
big shout outs to Christopher and Eves who have done
an incredible job. At this point, I still think we've
got a few of their ideas kicking around on the cancer.
(28:26):
We'll make sure that we shout them out when those happen.
And uh a shout out to Dr Benjamin rush Uh.
I don't know if you're meant to be in the
history books this way, Doc, but congratulations. Nonetheless, Casey, can
we get an appropriate sound cue
Yeah, is your crew of otherwise intrepid adventurers, soldiers and
scouts falling prey to the depredations of life On the
edge of the map are the challenges of the untamed wilds,
leaving your men with syphilis, constipation, scurvy, brain shutter stickyy,
(00:35):
welshman's ear, and the other tragic, painful conditions so common
to modern explorers. If so, fret not, good friends and neighbors.
Dr Benjamin Russia has discovered a brilliant, innovative solution to
all your ills. Dr Russia's world famous Billious pills use
a proprietary combination of pure ingredients to gently purge the
body of excess biling contaminants that caused these dreadful, incommodious conditions. Hi,
(00:56):
I'm bett Who is that though? Oh? That was an
average heisman for Dr Benjamin Rush's Billious Pill, not Dr
Benjamin Boland's bills. No, No, he beat me. He beat
me to this wind, to the gut punch, Yes, to
the to the thunderclap. Oh, my goodness, gracious, So I
think he left out a key component in that ad, though, Ben, Yeah,
(01:18):
there was a little bit of a pr spin there.
Nol what was What was that key ingredient that got
left out? I think it was mercury. Ben, I believe
you are correct, my friend. We are here a ridiculous
history along with our super producer, Casey Pegram, and I
don't think we told Casey what this episode is going
(01:38):
to be about. No. I think I think from our
pre pro conversations he sort of gleaned that it was
something to do with mercury and poop and possibly exploration, yes,
possibly exploration, Probably exploration, definitely exploration. Can you take us back, Noll,
where where we headed? Who? Who are our protagonist today? Okay? Ben?
(01:59):
For today episode, we are in fact going to time
travel so that we can physically travel along with our
companions for the day, Merryweather Lewis and William Clark otherwise
known as Lewis and Clark. Yes. Yes, and there's an
amazing Superman spinoff television program called Lowis and Clark that
they were really capitalizing on people having fond memories of
(02:20):
this intrepid traveling duo. Um, but this is an eighteen
o four and that was more like in nineteen nine.
I want to say, so this is the important pair. Um,
So we've got Lewis and Clark who go out on
a journey. It's sort of like a Lord of the
Rings esque journey to more Door, only it's to survey
this land that President Jefferson, you know, basically bought from Louisiana.
(02:43):
And in another creative title for an event, the Louisiana Purchase,
he purchased some land from Louisiana and they called it
that um. And so this journey started from St. Louis
and very very slowly and deliberately its way to the
west coast right the Sacific. They wanted to. They were
(03:05):
tasked to find a passage from the Missouri River to
the Pacific, and they left as you said, Mayo, eighteen
o four. It took them twenty eight months to complete
the journey. They lucked out, though, because almost everyone survived,
which was amazing when you consider that they were going
through the untamed wise. I think they only lost one person.
(03:27):
Just why, how? How did he go? On August, Sergeant
Charles Floyd died of what they called at the time
Billius Corlick. Interesting, wasn't that word in the name of
that pill that that a disembodied U announcer gave us
at the top of the show Billius pills. Today we
(03:48):
call Billius corlick c h O r l I c K.
By the way, we call that a ruptured appendix. Really,
so Billius referring to bile correct absolute, and that's what
your appendix is kind of chock full of. And it
is a poisonous substance if if leached out into the body,
right right exactly. Bilious is a word that can trace
(04:11):
its origin back to the old belief. In the old
medical belief, humors, Yes, exactly, the four bodily humors would
be black, bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. So you
might be phlegmatic, you might be bilious. And when Lewis
and Clark set off with their thirty odd people, they
wanted to really be boy scouts about it. They needed
(04:33):
to prepare as much as possible for any contingency, and
one of the things that they were very concerned with
was the possibility of growing sick like indigestion, diarrhea, constipation,
constipation mainly right, that's the big one, because how how
many months was this journey again months? So you know,
(04:57):
it would be almost impossible to bring enough food that
would not that would keep for that long let alone
that you could actually carry through the completely untamed wilderness
that they were traveling through. Um, so they had to
be prepared to have to catch their own food, which
would end up being like super kind of gamey stuff.
I believe they ended up eating a lot of dogs
(05:18):
on this trip. Yeah, that was a thing. And this
led them to having some pretty severe tummy troubles, most
specifically constipation. So they packed these pills in large quantities. Yes. Yeah.
The weird thing about the Billious pills is they were
actually in effect anti bilious. Back then, a patient was
(05:41):
said to be billious when supposed poor flow of bile
in their body gave them any number of symptoms headache, lassitude, constipation,
and Dr Rush had actually spoken to Louis to merriwether
Lewis before they left, and he said, if you see
(06:02):
a sign of an approaching disease, if you see one
of these symptoms pop up, headaches, constipation, just hand them
one or two of these pills. But they had that nickname, right, Thunderbolts. Thunderbolts.
It sounds like some kind of like truck stop speed.
Doesn't like mans yellow jackets, yellow jackets, that's the one um.
But here here's the kicker though. It contained something called
(06:25):
calamel ten grams per serving um, which the active ingredient,
and calamel is in fact mercury mercurous chloride. Yeah, and
this calamel stuff had been used in medical practice since
the sixteen hundreds because it was actually a milder form
(06:49):
of a mercury compound. The liquid medical mercury had been
applied externally in different ways since ancient times to treat
a variety of skin diseases, and then because it's been
used so often externally, it evolved into an internal medicine.
But wasn't the problem with mercury is that, sure it
(07:09):
does knock out some conditions of the skin, for example,
but it also like poisons the person that's taking it, right, right,
Like the the old haberdashers who would go crazy from
exposure to mercury, right, Yeah, like that guy that killed
John Wilkes booth. We did an episode on back in
the right yea, yeah, you know the guy who gastrated himself,
(07:32):
Thomas Corbett. Corbett, that's right, that's right. So we know
that mercury could actually treat some medical conditions. People used
it often to combat syphilis, for instance. But we also
know that this stuff had a range of terrible, terrible
(07:53):
side effects. If you took small doses of this mercurous
chloride over time, it would give you mercury poisoning. We
just didn't call it that at the time. You would
have a lot of saliva, your gums would get sore,
your teeth would loosen, your breath would smell like metal,
which is super gross, and you would have discolored stool.
(08:16):
But in large doses, this stuff acted very quickly as
a laxative. Right, Yeah, it absolutely did, and that is
of course the purposes that was being employed for here
with the Lewis and Clark team. Um, they took so
much of it that they would spend like an entire
day they would lose to multiple party members just you know, purging,
(08:40):
spray and pray, that's what I like to call it. Yeah,
that's a good one. But thankfully, there was a popular
kind of wisdom, I guess, surrounding camping that you should
dig your latrine a certain distance away from your campsite
as not to contaminate your your food, or you know,
just just keep things not gross. It's a quality of life,
especially if you got a dude like hovering over this
(09:02):
like a hole in the ground, just like expelling his
bowels just explosively. Nobody wants to be around that. How
if you remember how far it was, what was the
recommended distance? I would just think surely, given the circumstances,
they would have like up that whatever it may have been. Yeah,
it may have changed depending on their terrain, but the
rule of thumb nowadays is about a hundred yards away
(09:25):
as a minimum in a secluded area. They were probably
not that far away, because a hundred yards that's a
football field, you know what I mean? Well, and exactly
like if you were in some kind of small clearing,
like in a wooded area, you might not have that
much space to work with. Yeah, it was probably just far.
It was at least far enough away that you wouldn't
(09:46):
be haunted by the smell or the sounds. The horrible,
horrible sounds, right, the groans of anguished human misery and
like cartoonish splattering sounds. Can you even imagine? Ben? I can?
And it bothers me? It bothers me too? Does it
bother you listeners? Does it bother you? Casey? Yeah, I'd
say that bothers me. It is decided it's an unpleasant
(10:10):
thing to be around, right, We took it to the
highest authority in the land as far as this podcast
is concerned. The weird thing about these pills is that
it was a large enough dose of mercury to actually
kill a human being, but it went through their bodies
(10:31):
so fast, and one end out of the other because
it was fast acting too. That was another part. That's
why they were called lightning pills, I imagine, right, yeah, exactly,
And they had to be named after the sound, you know,
which just still bothers me a little bit null. But
here's here's something he's saying. It sounded like lightning when
they evacuated their bowels. Yeah, yeah, it sounded that. It
(10:53):
sounded like the clap of thunder, you know, like is
a storm coming in? Or is Louis sick again? You know.
But here's something that hopefully made the pain of the
journey worth it for these for these intrepid explorers. For
a long time, archaeologists were attempting to trace the exact
(11:13):
path that Lewis and Clark took. And these guys stated
over six hundred different sites, so you might know the
general trend, and you can see some stuff that they
have documented themselves. But if you want to find the
specific actual facts camp sites, you're looking at a needle
in the haystack situation, or so one would assume, or
(11:36):
you could call it a pile of human excrement and
a hole in the ground situation. That's true, that's probably
more accurate, more accurate, which honestly seems to me would
be pretty difficult to find as well. But find it
these intrepid archaeologists did, did they not been? They did,
know they did, and they did it with the incidental
help of Dr Benjamin Rush's billious Because remember how just
(12:01):
a moment ago we said that these things are like mercury,
mercurius chloride, or call mill. There was so much mercury
running through these poor guy's bodies that the mercury stayed
in the ground where their latrines were like an unusual
cartoon ish I'll say it, disgusting amount of mercury. And
(12:24):
that is how, given the opportunity, archaeologists could differentiate between
the Lewis and Clark poop and the poop of of
others who may have passed through a similar location. But
then They had to have had a vague idea. They
couldn't have been like, you know, going willy nilly to
every random campsite like this seems like an insane process.
How how did this go down? It's a good question,
(12:46):
my friend. Uh. There's a writer for the Chicago Tribune
named Maurice Postley who walks us through a little bit
of this. In his journals. Merryweather Lewis refers to a
camp site near a place called Lolo Creek, which is
just a few miles south of Missoula, and he calls
his place travelers Rest. And they all thought. Everybody thought
(13:11):
for a long time that this camp was at the
confluence of the Bitter Root River and Lolo Creek, about
a mile and a half away. But this all changed
when a vapor analysis verified this unusual amount of mercury there.
I was that much that a vapor analysis would do it.
It was like in the air. It's crazy. They were
(13:35):
able to They were able to analyze the soil pretty easily.
And once they once they find that one site and like, oh,
this proves it. Let's see if we can test other
specific sites and traces of mercy and maybe and maybe
get to the source by seeing how the concentrations change, right, Yeah, exactly,
(13:55):
you could in theory, I guess, find that that hole
in the ground um by tracking like the concentration of mercury. Yes,
And there's an interesting thing here that you and I
have talked about off air. We we've been mentioning mercury
as a treatment for constipation, but it was also used
(14:16):
to treat an entirely different medical condition. That's the thing.
They were getting this mercury from from two different sources.
That the Billiest pills, which was kind of considered a
cure all, but then they also had a cash of
another type of medication that was specifically designed to treat syphilis.
Because they were they basically kind of prepared for the
fact they were going to have a lot of what
(14:37):
other kind of sex was there at the time, unprotected
sex with um, some Native women. There's an article in
The Atlantic that came out in twenty sixteen that it
seems to dispel this belief for a while. People believe
that syphilis actually came somehow from the New World, but
(14:59):
all the other and syndicates, we still don't know exactly
where syphilis came from. And I think you and I
had always assumed that syphilis came with the Europeans into
the New World, which I know we're not supposed to
use the term New World anymore, but that's what they
called it at the time. We know we're talking about Yeah,
(15:19):
so the disease already had a long history in Europe,
but maybe the syphilis epidemic seemed like a new disease
at the time because it had previously been mistaken for
something else, you know, or maybe it was a particularly
virulent strain of syphilis, whatever the case may bee. Um,
(15:40):
these travelers knew damn well that they were going to
be exposed to this condition, but they weren't gonna let
that stop them from, you know, having a nice fling
with with an attractive lady. Um, and they took this
stuff to either. I guess it wasn't really it could
be a safeguard against I guess they just accept that
they were going to get it. Apparently just resign themselves
(16:02):
their their syphilitic faith, which is no joke, right. Syphilis
is the one that like can kind of like make
you go insane over time, right in the late stages.
So they had syphilis and mercury poisoning. I would imagine
by the end of this journey, these dudes, we're not
well right and mentally right. And let's see, it was
even just in the first year of the expedition. On
(16:24):
October fIF eighteen o four, Clark writes down that the
party had arrived at a place called the camp of
the Aracarra, and that quote, their women were very fond
of caressing our men and company. And by March of
eighteen o five he noted that the men were quote
generally healthy, except venereal complaints, which is very common amongst
(16:48):
the natives here. The men catch it from them, So
they were blaming the native population. But you know, it
was just out. It was apparently just crazy talk for
them to you know, not pursue these flings. I mean,
they had to occupy their time somehow, I guess, right.
So they were just on this cycle of unprotected sex,
(17:08):
syphilis and mercury, wild times, my friend, and eating dogs
and eating dogs and just laying some epic flagellations. What
I don't know about this what the farts, the thunderclaps,
Oh that's different. It was man of fart destiny like
ow Ben that's that's horrible. I love you so much.
There is another thing too, about the times that they
(17:30):
spent on the on the old Rugged trail. Apparently every
man got a ration of whiskey. Um, they had barrels
of whiskey, and that was a really important part of
their staying sane in these intense circumstances. And one man
I believe was caught taking more than his fair share
of and he got fifty stripes on the back, um
(17:52):
with a cat of nine tails or some such you know,
bull whip. Oh wow. And that they took that stuff
really seriously, and you know that stuff left scars, oh
big time. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean that was like
the height of of punishment. And if they did that
for just you know, taking a little extra shot of whiskey,
I can't imagine what they would have done for more
severe crimes. Right. And this is fascinating, I think, to
(18:14):
both of us because growing up here in the States,
when you hear about the Lewis and Clark expedition, you
just hear the bare bones, and it's sometimes it's a
little romanticized. You know, It's like these this noble group
of people who are the harbingers of Western civilization at
this point, trying to explore a great unknown, at least
(18:38):
unknown to Europeans land and so, as so often happens
in so many stories like this, we skip over a
lot of the nitty gritty details. The epidemic of syphilis,
the epidemic of diarrhea, the mercury in the ground everywhere,
the dog eating the dog eating. No, no no, that's very
(18:59):
sexy at all. No, that's not what you want to
think about. What you think about this. We're left with
this image of conquering, you know, the great outdoors, and
you've got these trails named after Lewis and Clark. And
now we know that they went to I think more
than six hundred campsites throughout this journey, and like Traveler's Rest,
because of these intrepid archaeologists and their ability to analyze
(19:23):
some of these sites for its mercury content, we know
a little bit more about where these folks passed through. Yes,
and we have also learned that, what you know, neither
of us are doctors. Casey is not a doctor either.
We've also learned uh the perils of mercury. Don't take it,
don't break the thermometer and play with it. Did you
(19:43):
ever do that as you kid? You know what? I've
seen videos of it looks pretty cool. It's like the
T one thousand exactly. Yeah, but it's still not worth it.
You can do horrible things to it. Just happened in
today's episode to preserve for posterity the details of the
Lewis and Clark expedition. And one thing that's surprising is
(20:09):
although we we hold the Lewis and Clark expedition in
such high regard today, it only became popular relatively recently,
like fifty years ago or so. Well. I think when
these men returned, they expected like a hero's welcome, right,
and it just never really came. And Merryweather Lewis. In fact,
(20:30):
his death has been a source of much speculation, but
one very plausible one is that he kind of spiraled
into despair and self doubt uh and that he ultimately
took his own life in in a quite outlandish fashion.
UM walk us through. Yeah, well so. Thomas Jefferson himself
(20:51):
had reported that Lewis's family had a history of depression
bipolar disorder, specifically UM, and that he himself Lewis had
been suffering from this condition himself since he was a child.
And here's a quote from a great article on history
dot n D dot gov, where Jefferson says, this Governor
(21:12):
Lewis had from an early life been subject to hypochondriac affections.
It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches
of the family of his name. It was more immediately
inherited by him from his father. While he lived with
me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind,
but knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course by
what I had seen in the family. This is really
(21:34):
interesting because this idea of mental illness can having such stigma.
It's still around today. I mean, it hasn't gotten that
much better. So back in these days it certainly wouldn't
have been something that you would have talked about. But um, yeah,
So he suffered from these you know, great highs and
great lows, and the story of his demise goes like this.
Oh sh also mentioned just to in reject that he
(21:56):
is rediscovered letters show that he had written his will
but for the journey, and he also attempted suicide on
the expedition but was restrained. Yeah. Good, A good thing.
He had his bros around him to kind of hold him,
pull him back from the letage, I suppose. So what happened?
How how did he pass away? So the story goes
like this, Um, he had booked himself a room at
(22:19):
an end a tavern and he shot himself. Um, but
that didn't take because I guess I don't know, maybe
those little musket balls, those those guns don't always discharge properly.
Maybe it just didn't didn't wasn't a death blow. And
so he did it again and that didn't quite take either.
So he decided to go to sleep. He went to sleep,
(22:39):
and he woke up, um, you know, not dead. And
then he apparently ran out into the hallway and said, quote,
give me some water and heal my wounds, and all
the guests were freaking out, and he went back to
sleep and then woke up and someone witnessed him quote
cutting himself from head to foot. So it took about
(23:01):
twelve hours of time, two bullets, a little bit asleep,
and um a blade for Louis to finally die. And
that is like some tortures of the damned kind of
stuff right there. Because Lord self inflicted is the belief right.
This was at the Grinder's stand. It's in on the
Natchez trace, and I believe he had one gun shot
(23:23):
in the head, one to the gut, and you know,
as said, he ran out and scared the hell out
of everyone. Uh. Nashville newspaper had reported that his throat
was cut. There is one complicating factor here. Money that
he had borrowed from a guy named Major Gilbert Russell
to complete the journey was missing. Oh, the plot thickens.
(23:46):
The plot thickens. And Thomas Jefferson, as you pointed out,
along with some modern historians, generally accepted the idea that
Lewis died of suicide. But there's still a debate. There's
still people who say it was homicide for one reason
or another. That is pretty fascinating. Um, it does seem
like the groundwork was laid for him, having already demonstrated
(24:10):
suicidal tendencies. But this whole missing money business and the
muddies the water. So he might have spent it because
there Uh. The historian Paul Russell cut right, completely believes
this was suicide, and he has a pretty detailed takedown
in the murder slash robbery theory. He says Louis had
a lot of debt. He was a heavy drinker. He
(24:31):
may have been using morphine and opium. Uh, he was
running late preparing the expeditions journals for publishing. He just
couldn't get a romantic partner, and he was on the
outs with Thomas Jefferson. The relationship was going downhill. So
he's saying that it's plausible that Lewis, given his history
(24:52):
right his his own mental struggles. He's saying it's more
plausible that Louis eventually took his own life. Well, that's
a real bummer, and that is a surely a down
our way to end this episode. Um So I'm just
gonna throw in one more thing to kind of like
change like a palate clan, a little bit of palicillanser.
And that is the fact that or the idea that
Thomas Jefferson. One of the big things he was super
(25:13):
excited about them finding on this expedition was like giant animals, Yes,
like Mammoth's American right, yeah, big time. And uh, something
called a megalonics or a mega megal Yeah, megalonics, which
is like some kind of giant cat And he described
it as as pre eminent over the lion in size
(25:35):
as the mammoth is over the elephant. And if you
want to see a really cool exploration of this as
if it were real, there is a comic book series
called Manifest Destiny. I've read it. It's on issue thirty
six right now, that's ongoing, but you can get the
Collected Trades or what have you. Check it out. I've
read like the first Trade and it's really cool. But
it has some of these crazy creatures. Yeah, it's a
(25:58):
big part of it. In this comic they're finding, um well,
i'll tell you this without spoiling it. In in this
story in the graphic novel slash comic book Manifest Destiny,
the expedition does run into mega fauno just the generic
term for large animals. But they also keep finding these
structures that look like the Gateway arch there in St. Louis.
(26:20):
And you know what if if you're a fan of
good stories, we highly recommend that. I'm so glad you
mentioned this on Aara he was reading it. I was
rereading it last night and prep for the podcast. All
that good historical data in there, because I think there
is some stuff in there that is historically accurate, but
it's largely a fictionalized version with some of these more
(26:40):
high and lofty ideas of what this this unsettled wilderness
might be like. So pretty cool stuff. Yeah, check it out.
I like that we I like that we made a
good comic recommendation. We do whatever we can have we
made one before. Um, we may have mentioned comics were like,
but I don't know if we out not recommended one.
I pledge from this day fourth to always recommend a
(27:02):
comic on every episode. Okay, no, that's too much. No, no,
as long as caveat, as long as it doesn't have
to completely tie in with the episode. And we're gonna
do an episode on every state and we're gonna complete
it by the end of this year. WHOA, No, I
don't think we can. We're only coming out twice a week.
(27:23):
I at least forget. It's under promise over deliver. So
there's also another commy called The Black Monday Murders. Has
nothing to do with today's episode, but you will thoroughly
enjoy it. And I'm a fan of Lock and Key,
which you loaned me trying to get my way through it.
But it's by Joe Hill, who is Stephen King's son.
Nothing really like anything Stephen King ever did, though he's
(27:45):
got his own thing. Yeah. Yeah, Joe Hill is a
fantastic gregor. You know what, let us know what comic
books do you like, historical or otherwise? Yeah, and you
can let us know right now as you're listening to
this episode. You have to do is hop on Instagram,
Twitter or face look especially our Facebook community page Ridiculous Historians,
or you can write us a good old fashioned email
(28:05):
at ridiculous at how stuff works dot com. M We'd
love to thank super producer and Casey Pegraham. I'd like
to thank you Ben. I'd like to thank you Noel,
along with Alex Williams who composed our track, our research
associate Gabe who does just an amazing jobs, right, and
big shout outs to Christopher and Eves who have done
an incredible job. At this point, I still think we've
got a few of their ideas kicking around on the cancer.
(28:26):
We'll make sure that we shout them out when those happen.
And uh a shout out to Dr Benjamin rush Uh.
I don't know if you're meant to be in the
history books this way, Doc, but congratulations. Nonetheless, Casey, can
we get an appropriate sound cue
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