Craig Fehrman
speaker
1,260 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 1 Jun
Craig Fehrman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So there's like a long tradition of horse raids on the plains that that was kind of a – that's a different thing.
But going for guns, obviously that's an escalation.
And so Lewis in his journal entry says they went for our guns.
But once I read Wolf Calf saying, well, actually all we wanted were the horses, and once I read a bunch of scholarship by people like John Ewers who like dedicated their whole lives while he worked at the Smithsonian to studying these horse raids, the horse raids were almost never violent.
They were focused on horses.
So then I went back to Lewis's journal entry, and I noticed something that nobody had seen before.
And this is like – this is not a discovery because that journal has been there for anybody to find, but you can read things differently.
And what was interesting is that Lewis was a sleeper.
when things went sideways.
So like when they either went for the horses or guns, Lewis, by his own admission, was in a deep sleep.
So what you have here is not Lewis's word versus Wolfcalf's word.
You have this one enlisted soldier who was probably asleep while on watch, which was a capital crime.
You have his word against Wolfcalf's word.
And the American soldier had every reason to play up the violence of the native people because he screwed up.
He's the one who fell asleep.
He let this happen.
He's the one who his brother ended up killing one of the native people in the battle that followed.
So for the American guy, these two brothers are the ones who tell the story to Lewis after the fact, and they have every incentive to make it seem as scary as possible because they're the ones who let it happen.
And so in my book, I try to hedge here carefully, and I try to say, I think Wolf Calf was right.
I think his version makes more sense, but I'm not going to say that his version is completely right because we'll never know.
Showing 101–120 of 1,260 · page 6 of 63
← Previous
Next →