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