Lewis and Clark are often thought of as some of the earliest explorers of the western U.S. But more than a century before, Moncacht-Ape, a Yazoo explorer, reached the Pacific Ocean mainly by foot. The Indigenous explorer’s accounts were documented by French colonists, but were often dismissed as being untrue. But as featured in an article in Outside Magazine, historians and explorers may have been looking at the accounts all wrong.
Mike Bezemek, author of “Mysteries of the National Parks,” wrote about his experience following the Yazoo explorer’s trail in the documented accounts and argues that Moncacht-Ape’s accounts are true. Bezemek joins us to share more on his journey and who this Yazoo explorer was.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Jenn Chávez: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Jenn Chávez. The names Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, aka Lewis and Clark, are known to many Northwesterners. They’re often thought of as some of the earliest explorers of this part of the continent. But an Indigenous explorer named Moncacht-Apé traversed America more than a century before that, reaching the Pacific mostly on foot. Accounts of his journey have been dismissed by some as untrue, but not Mike Bezemek, the author of “Mysteries of the National Parks.” He set out to follow Moncacht-Apé’s trail, which he recently wrote about for Outside Magazine and he joins me now to tell us more. Mike Bezemek, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Mike Bezemek: Hi, thanks for having me.
Chávez: So how did you first learn about Moncacht-Apé?
Bezemek: So I was doing research for “Mysteries of the National Parks,” specifically I was thinking I might include a chapter about the Lewis and Clark expedition. There are a number of interesting mysteries related to the expedition and as I kept doing that research, I kept actually finding more and more mysteries about the Lewis and Clark expedition and I started to go, OK, I’m gonna set that aside. And one of those mysteries that I found was the journey and the account of Moncacht-Apé.
Chávez: And you describe Moncacht-Apé as nearly forgotten. What documentation of him and his travels does exist?
Bezemek: Yeah, so a lot of it relies on just a couple primary sources by a single author. He was a French colonist named Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz. Moncacht-Apé’s journey is theorized to happen around the 1690s. Around the mid 1720s, he tells his journey to Le Page du Pratz in Natchez. Le Page stays in that area for a while longer, eventually relocates to New Orleans, and he goes back to France. By about the 1750s, he starts to publish his memoirs, and then this kind of a memoir, in installments. And it goes in a journal called “Journal Economique.” And then eventually he’s gonna do a book, “A History of Louisiana,” and that’s published in the 1750s.
Chávez: And I know initially the account of Moncacht-Apé’s expedition was accepted as true and accurate, but that changed at a certain point. Why was that account dismissed?
Bezemek: That’s a really interesting part of this sort of mystery. It seems that Moncacht-Apé’s journey is generally accepted as true throughout the 1700s. Thomas Jefferson knows about the story, and at his suggestion Meriwether Lewis acquires a copy of Le Page’s book, the translation, and they actually take it on their expedition to the West. So they have Moncacht-Apé’s story with them in the barge as they’re going up the river.
And so, generally what happens seems to be this. The story is dismissed, for three reasons. The first thing is that in the account, Le Page writes, and we can assume that Moncacht-Apé said, that he ascends the Missouri River. Now, when Lewis and Clark go there, it’s not gonna match. And so they get to the headwaters and in the Moncacht-Apé story, he describes what seems to imply a relatively gradual and easy crossing of the continental divide. Lewis and Clark go up the Missouri in boats. When they get there to the headwaters they find just these impenetrable mountains, including the Bitterroots. It’s gonna take them a month to get through what Moncacht-Apé says that he gets through with a couple other travelers that he meets in a couple days. So that’s one reason.
Now, there are other reasons, of course. After the Lewis and Clark expedition, there’s this huge push of nationalism to sort of celebrate them as first. And then also racism, Moncacht-Apé’s story is dismissed. I mean, commonly Natives were called savages, said they could not accomplish something of this sort of noble and difficult nature. And those are kind of the main three reasons.
So when I came across the account, I came across the criticism. Most of it focuses on the geographic discrepancies, and I was like, interesting, but being an outdoor writer, I’ve spent a lot of time in certain regions around the West and so I get a hold of different translations, accounts, whatever I can. And I’m reading it, I’m like, well, wait a second, while they named the Missouri River, his descriptions of the direction that he travels, the rivers, the mountains, and all that, I was like, it’s very clearly not the Missouri River. And there’s a number of reasons why that makes sense, but it’s very clear that he’s describing the Platte River. And he’s also describing South Pass, and this makes a lot of sense because Moncacht-Apé went on foot.
And Lewis and Clark went on boats, because they’re trying to find a water passage to the Pacific. Moncacht-Apé, one, he speaks the language, he’s a friendly interpreter, he spends a lot of time with the region, the local tribes as he progresses. He’s asking where the best routes are. He would be told about the best route, and that is what he describes. And the reason that this makes a lot of sense also is that that route along the Platte and over South Pass at the Continental Divide, that becomes the Oregon Trail. And a lot of times when history of the Oregon Trail is told, it’s almost as if just a couple of fur trappers just find a route, they create it, they establish it. No, that’s not how it went. What becomes the Oregon Trail was a Native trade route that existed for centuries, if not longer. And so, my basic argument is that his descriptions are, while they can be a little vague at times, it’s a perfect match for what becomes the Oregon Trail.
Chávez: OK, so having realized all of this, what made you ultimately decide to undertake the journey you went on to follow his trail according to what is documented?
Bezemek: It didn’t happen overnight. It was a very gradual sort of thing. At first, when I started to just sort of read and kind of delve into the Moncacht-Apé journey and account, I developed a hunch somewhat early, but would just go, well, it’s just a hunch,
I mean, I’ll just have this hunch and maybe at some point I’ll be able to write a little bit about this. But as time goes on and I keep looking at the account, and I keep learning more, more and more pieces start falling into place and there’s this big thought kind of lurking in the back of my head, which is that one of the common criticisms of the story is that perhaps it was just made up, right? If Lewis and Clark find something very, very different at the headwaters in Missouri than what they believe the Moncacht-Apé story is saying, then perhaps it was just made up, whether it was made up by Moncacht-Apé or maybe even Moncacht-Apé was made up by Le Page.
And several major prominent 20th century historians are going to essentially dismiss the account in very insulting ways toward both individuals, Le Page and Moncacht-Apé. And so I’m looking at it and I had spent a lot of time working in those areas around South Pass, along the Platte, the mountains, those different passes for different projects and I’m like, wait a second. At the time, at all those dates that I mentioned – 1690s, 1720s, 1750s – French, Europeans, they do not know almost anything about this area of the Northwest. There are maps that are just giant blank spots.
So if Moncacht-Apé comes home and he accurately reports on that route and that area, he provides a lot of details, or clues, frankly, direction he’s traveling, location of mountains in relation to his route, water bodies, crossings, but also tribes, foods, cultural elements, languages and so forth. And I was like, well, if he comes back and he reported on that accurately, there’s no way that could be faked. So that started to get me really excited. I was like, well, wait a second, if they can find a way to sort of reconstruct his route and show that it is pretty much for the most part entirely accurate, then that means that he did the journey, and that there frankly is not a lot of ways that you can dispute it further. Le Page can’t just fictionally make up all this stuff. If it’s correct in the account, then that means that the journey happened.
Chávez: OK, so you set out on this trip and you write about this in the piece in Outside Magazine, but on your trip, these major pieces of the puzzle do start falling into place. For example, there was a mountain range that Moncacht-Apé said he avoided for fear of hurting his feet. And I know that was a key thing on your mind, right? And so this was a piece that fell into place for you. And I’m wondering if you could talk about what it felt like to have an epiphany like that on the trail, to have something show up as evidence to what you have been looking for and what you think is true.
Bezemek: And even at the time that I’m still at home having these sort of epiphanies, I’m starting to get that kind of thrill. Just every now and then I’m looking left and right, I’m like, I can’t believe something like this is just a mystery, like this has lingered so long, that it still remains to be solved and that it might be possible to do that. And ultimately from past projects where I have done this, where I followed the routes of historic explorers, I learned how much I start to understand the journey better by going out to the places.
And so that’s pretty much what I did. At the first step, I go down to old French Louisiana, and I make some discoveries, and that’s thrilling, and then I go home and I’m continuing to develop the project. I’m like, well, the mystery really happens in the West, so that’s where I need to go. And so, my wife comes with me at the beginning, and there were a set of sort of kind of open questions and I was like, if we can satisfy or figure out the answer to these open questions, then that’s really helping develop this theory, I call it the “route shift theory” for my own purposes.
And I was like, so we need to find these major landmarks and junctions or whatnot that Moncacht-Apé describes. So we take off, and he had mentioned mountains to the right of his route. So he’s following a river, and he says he’s following this river that pretty much goes on this kind of Northwest trajectory, and that is a great match for the Platte. And then he says, eventually he’s about a month, or actually I think a little more as he’s moving across the plains, to his right, he sees mountains. OK, his account will become really ridiculed for this observation that he makes. Bernard DeVoto is just insulting. He’s like, what idiot sees mountains to the north of Missouri, where there are no mountains? And in my head, I’m like, I know where there are those mountains. I don’t know exactly which one they are, but north of the Platte, as you keep going up and then eventually it becomes the North Platte and then the Sweetwater, these are tributaries. I was like, I know there are mountains. I don’t know exactly which ones are visible, I have to go out there and look for them.
So my wife is with me and we’re towing our camper and we’re going really slow, and we’re talking to a lot of regional experts along the way and I’m really just seeing hills and hills and I’m like, no, no. And we’re getting pretty far, but Moncacht-Apé, his name means “a killer of difficulties or fatigue”, and he’s known for being incredibly physically fit and his daily mileage numbers are pretty significantly high. I mean, 20 miles, I think is maybe a conservative estimate. My wife has to fly home to teach after a while, and it’s still at that point. We’ve been out for a couple of weeks, we’ve not found these mountains. And I say, well, do you want to go a little further to the west where the topography gets a little more rugged and have a nice day out there, and I don’t really think we’re gonna find anything. But we head west and we go to some Oregon Trail landmarks, and I did not expect for anything to be here, but these are in what are called the Granite Mountains.
And we’re hiking around on these paths that go on hard rock and we go to, I think, Independence Rock, and then we go to Devil’s Gate, Slot Canyon. We’re hiking out of Devil’s Gate, and my wife just comments, man, my feet hurt today. And I go, yeah because we’ve been walking on hard granite. And then I’m like, wait a second. And then, because we come around a corner and the light has shifted and clouds have come in, now there’s this interesting modeled shade and light.
I look and I’m like, there’s this line of mountains, and they’re just this bare bedrock granite, and they’re right in the area where we would expect, based on the route instructions he was given by the Kansa or Kaw tribe further back on the plains near the Missouri River. We expect something around here, and exactly where he said they would be there’s this line of mountains, and it is the Granite Mountains, a fairly forgotten range today.
Chávez: Wow. So Mike, I know that you specifically sought out descendants of the tribes that Moncacht-Apé is believed to have learned from and at times traveled with or encountered on his journey. I know one of the groups that you spent time with was the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, here in Oregon. Can you tell me what you learned from them that deepened your understanding of this story?
Bezemek: Sure, yeah. And if I could, I’ll back up just a little bit to the tribe I spoke with before them. I met with the Eastern Shoshone, particularly Robyn Rofkar, as a culture director for their museum. Because in that portion of that, the journey that I was just describing around the Granite Mountains, Moncacht-Apé is not actually alone. He’s come across a party of hunters, and then two of them are going to break off from that group and lead him on a preferred route. They’re like, you almost went a wrong route. He’s apprehensive because of those Granite Mountains, but he’s been told he needs to bear to the north, and there’s this gap between the Granite Mountains and the jagged Wind River Range, which just looks terrifying as you kind of slowly approach it.
And so, he describes them by a nickname “the otters”, and as I’m developing the route shift theory, what’s becoming a little more clear is where he might have been and who the otters might be. I theorized the Shoshone. Well, so then after the continental divide, he followed the otter couple over the continental divide to a river that’s navigable for 18 days. And I theorize that must be the Snake River.
The next part of the puzzle is he describes that when he goes down this river for 18 days with a party that is probably related to the Shoshone, but may have been Bannock, it’s unclear, a mixed group. I’ve learned a lot from the different tribes on how they would sort of move together at times and commingle. And this is all described well by Moncacht-Apé. It’s a little hard to understand if we don’t understand all this sort of Indigenous knowledge.
But at the end of that canoe journey of 18 days, he’s told, it’s best for you to actually leave us now. You need to go to a group that speaks a different language, and that language is spoken further along the way on your journey. And so, I am in the Snake River Plain last year and I think by now I have a theory of who it might be. I think it’s the ancestors of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and they, from linguistic research I’ve found, do speak a different language. They speak Sahaptin.
And so I got in contact with them. I arranged a visit, and I explained the purpose, what we’re trying to do is I got this account. I think that people have been looking too far to the north all this time. I’m looking further south, and on average about 300 miles further to the south throughout the whole sort of inner mountain region. And what I’d love to do is bring the account, we look at it together, I try to understand more about your people, your ancestors, your tribe, your region, and we’re going to see if anything matches.
And stunningly, once again, as it happened further to the east, as it came across the plains and then through the mountains, granite and so forth, meeting with the Shoshone, once again, we find a bunch of really stunning and thrilling things, including
Moncacht-Apé at this part of the account, he’s describing a lot of foods to me that makes sense if he’s walked this far. He’s remembering all these foods. There are a lot of unique foods as you move in this direction across the country, many of which were not known very well by the French, back in Louisiana.
And so I think some of the descriptions and transcription translations, it gets a little bit muddled, we’re told that he likes a food, it’s like a porridge that’s made from small grains, about the size of French peas. And now as we come this way, this happens, they didn’t really eat a lot of grains, and I’m finding that out in museums even before I meet with the tribal representatives. But I’ve started to wonder, well, could it be a root? Roots are a staple, and Moncacht-Apé actually says he’s like, well, it’s not sown, it’s not planted, it springs up wild and then it’s harvested. The sizes didn’t match, cause he’s talking about something the size of French peas. So I’m at the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, and I was there for several days. I was working and meeting with director Bobbie Conner and we’re finding certain things, but there’s just this one, I call it the French pea problem. I’m like, what’s the French pea?
And everyone I show it to, we don’t know. We’re like, no, it’s, I talked to so many people, some of the tribes, others are National Park people, historians, we’re not finding it. Well, one day I arrived at Tamastslikt Cultural Institute and they say, hey, we actually have a food expert here today. That’s great! I go over, I meet Linda, and I give her the backstory a little bit about what I just said. And without even skipping a beat, and she’s got a little table set up, and it’s got different foods and bags. It’s like a really excellent museum presentation. She just lifts a bag up and she goes, well, this is cous root when it comes out of the ground and dried. And then she lifts up this other bag, and she goes, and this is cous root when it’s ground. And then it’s turned into a delicious meal. People say it’s like oatmeal, it’s really filling. You can add things to it, flavor it, and she’s like, everyone loved it. And I look at the grains and they are the exact size of a French pea. And I’m like, that’s it, that’s the match. And so there were a lot of really thrilling moments like that along the way.
Chávez: That’s amazing, and folks can learn much more about the story of Moncacht-Apé in your story for Outside Magazine at outsideonline.com. Mike Bezmek, thank you so much for joining us and sharing some of these epiphanies that you’ve had with us today.
Bezemek: Great, thank you.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
