I dunno if Bibliophage is still around, but I enjoyed this staff report. Well done.
Thanks. I’m still alive the last time I checked.
Good to know.
The last paragraph was a topper.
Came here to say the very same thing. What a well-written, informative and thoroughly entertaining report!
Thanks for the link. That was a great read.
I want to point out that Sacajawea did much more. She also had a desire for exploration and had a thirst for knowledge. Thing is she really felt like she was a part of the expedition and like Lewis and Clark and after coming part of the way and seeing all their scientific instruments like microscopes, wanted to see the rest of the country all the way to the Pacific ocean so when they were about to leave her with her home village she refused and demanded to continue.
So they took her all the way to the Pacific. During the winter when the group stayed on the Oregon coast the word came out that a dead beached whale had been found and they made plans to go and see it. But poor Sac, being the only woman, was told to stay at home but she insisted on seeing it too so she got to go along.
Once they got back to “civilization” Sac again turned down returning to her home village and went to live in white society. They even paid her for her services.
She was a remarkable woman.
Urbanredneck, from what source are you deriving those conclusions? I don’t think the journals of the expedition said much about how she was feeling, and I can’t imagine what other source would be available. I mean, maybe she did have a love of discovery and a thirst for knowledge, but I don’t see how we, over a century later, would know.
Her son Jean-Baptiste, nicknamed Pomp by Lewis, had a very interesting life as well, touring Europe and living for a while as an honored guest-employee-resident in this little place.
About his father I don’t think I’ve ever read anything nicer than he wasn’t an asshole all the time. He had a history of abusing native women before Sacagawea and Otter Woman (his other wife when he was married to Sacagawea) and kept doing so after she was dead or otherwise out of the picture. He was husband-owner to a young wife he’d somehow aquired when he died as an old man. Luckily for Pomp he had little to nothing to do with the raising of his children.
Well from what I read he had one redeaming quality. He was good at making sausage. A skill good for persons needing to have a way to preserving and transporting meat.
I would have to look around but its in a book I had.
Thing is much of what we were taught was IMO, designed for kids in school so they leave a LOT out - like sexual behaviors.
My guess is that not only do they leave thing out, they stick in lots of made up things. What kind of school text was this?
I also did think that it was a great report, only nit is that there was something of symbolical importance that took place in the Pacific:
I remember historians pointing out that having agents of the government recording a vote that, while it was not about government representation, it was nevertheless a powerful symbol for women and black people that would not get the right to vote until many decades into the future.
I wonder if the suffragists also looked at that vote when they pointed at Sacagawea as important for their movement.
I think that unless the vote was well known to the public it would have very little symbolic value, no?
Of course, not well known then, but by I’m talking about the time of the suffragists and beyond.
Ok, found the book: Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, by Duncan and Burns,LINK
The whale is mentioned on page 170.