It took me months to recover, and that gave me time to think. I thought about my body, which hurt in ways I'd never felt—not just in worse ways, but in new ones. Even my throat burned and ached. At some point, I realized it was because I'd never screamed so loudly before.
I also thought about the book I was writing, a history of the Lewis and Clark expedition. To me, the animal attack felt so brutal, so irrational, so life-changing. But to Lewis and Clark and their men, it was just a Saturday.
I mean this literally: On Saturday, July 26, 1806, a wolf attacked a few of the soldiers. It bit one man "through his hand," in Clark's words, before another soldier shot and killed it.
"This animal," Clark wrote in his journal, "was so vicious." But that's all he said. No one else even mentioned the incident.
Once I was ready to write again, I decided to revise my approach. Historians and nonfiction authors often glide over lived experience. They prefer actions, citations, details, dates. But I had just gone through something primal—something beyond my control and beyond the boundaries of modern life. Gliding no longer felt honest or accurate. I thought I needed to dig deeper, to consider the intensity, the uncertainty, and the violence that defined the expedition.
You likely know the outline from elementary school: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark departed from near St. Louis in 1804, traveling up the Missouri River, across the Rocky Mountains, and to the Pacific Ocean. By the time they returned in 1806, they'd covered about 8,000 miles.
Countless emotions and experiences lurked beneath those facts, and I tried to capture as many as I could. Take the first winter at Fort Mandan, which the Americans built in present-day North Dakota, one of many places where they relied on Native help. The winter was brutally cold. Lewis, ever the scientist, recorded the temperature twice a day. Some of his readings dipped to 40 degrees below zero.
But how cold did it feel? And how did their bodies respond to that feeling? After the dog attack, that's what I wanted to know.
John Ordway, a sergeant and hardy New Englander, declared the weather worse "than I ever knew it to be in the States." He noticed frost creeping down the fort's chimneys. He adjusted his soldiers' schedules, relieving the outdoor sentinels once an hour, then once every 30 minutes.
Everyone else hunkered in rooms that were always somehow simultaneously smoky and cold. They braced before they stepped outside. They got frostbite, their faces tingling until they didn't, their skin beginning to peel. One day York, a black man enslaved by Clark, hunted buffalo for so long that he took more extensive damage. "My servant’s feet also frosted," Clark wrote, "and his penis a little."
