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Still seeking Western adventures
TV hasn’t lurched forward since pros like Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball and Milton Berle began the thing in the ’50s, so it’s now doing what movies are doing — going backward.
You know who is Sacagawea? The name probably hasn’t come with your cornflakes in at least two weeks.
She spoke Shoshone. Also Hidatsa. I mean, don’t we all?
Native American. The name means “Bird Woman.” Age 16. Already had one child. Carrying her infant on her back she was the guide on Lewis and Clark’s schlep from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
Tough lady. Born 1788 in Lemhi County, Idaho, which even out-of-towners know is a big shlep from Coney Island, she was their guide. She calmed intervening tribes because she was the nonthreatening only woman among 31 older men. Nobody could do that now. Skilled at locating edible plants, she was also never paid for that. Nobody’d do that now.
Understand that President Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase had just nearly doubled the size of this country. Because of Sacagawea this territory became part of the United States of America. (Even the part that’s unfortunately hardcore Democrat.)
She — absolutely a toughie and no wallflower — later lived in some outpost called Wyoming — and passed on in 1812.
The territory is still with us — but so is the adventure story now again being reprised on PBS and C-SPAN and even some thing called YouTube. If you figure it out, recording the saga anew at the Library of Congress were authors Craig Fehrman and Elizabeth Adelman who have spent five years researching and retelling the expedition.
These experts say the original trip cost as much as our schlep to the moon. They equate it to what is now being spent on NASA.
Fehrman, journalist and historian, spent five years in the library’s archives and came up with “The Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark,” told from the points of view of people on the expedition.
He says: “Americans have shaped Native nations, but Native nations have shaped America, too.”
Adelman, an attorney who gardened on weekends until she got digging into the plants found and eaten on that westward schlep. That research became “Chasing Lewis’s Monkeyflower: The Amazing Afterlife of the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s Wild Plants.”
She says, on why some plants disappeared between then and now: “It’s one ghostwriter writing for another ghostwriter. What could possibly go wrong?”
Interviewed by Ken Biberaj of Coffee with Ken. The experts explain why the expedition had to survive Washington before it could survive the Missouri River and two years in the wilderness.
These smarties say that if you see the name Pursh after a plant’s scientific name, it was almost certainly collected by Lewis.
They also say — pay attention — that the whole thing almost got sidelined because “politics nearly sank the expedition.”
Hell hath no fury like an elected pol.
“Rediscovering Lewis and Clark.” Watch it now.
ABOUT one of TV’s news ladies: “Who cares how old she is. She looks like a million dollars — after taxes, of course.”
Only in New York City, kids, only in New York City.