Craig Fehrman was working on a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition when he was attacked by a dog. He recovered, but the violent experience—which was something the expedition crew was no stranger to—ruptured the boundaries between his life and his subjects’ lives. Names and dates were important, but they were also an abstraction of sorts; his solution was to dig for the crux of what people actually experienced.
I was trying to find the human side of history, and humans were often my best source. When I thought about Sacajawea in the Rockies, trying to keep her infant son alive, I thought about my own kids at that age—about my wife breastfeeding them, both parties always hungry, always thirsty. Breastfeeding burns an extra 500 calories a day, and the Rockies were a time of serious hunger for the expedition. The men ended up killing and eating some of their horses. When I interviewed Shoshone people, though, they told me that eating horse flesh was a Shoshone taboo.
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