Lewis and Clark marked their trail with laxatives
89 comments
·August 31, 2025kylecazar
suzzer99
Hunter-gatherer tribes probably had some natural laxative they called some version of "thunder-clapper" and giggled as they said it.
jug
Yeah. The oldest known gag is a Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap"
You also have another joke from 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? Sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile - and urge the pharaoh to go fishing."
Barbing
I bet.
Source: the amount of time it takes to scroll through the Wikipedia page for “it’s all Greek to me“ (variations common across dozens of languages)
maxbond
Esperanto's translation being "it's all Volapük to me" is exactly the kind of linguistic shade I was hoping to find in that article.
djmips
Besides the mercury compound, the Lewis and Clark contained a natural laxitive called Ipomoea purga (jalap) which was native to Mexico. Presumably the natives there used it and maybe laughed about it.
vintermann
Made me look up what "jalap" actually means, but apparently it's just a reference to the city it grows near, and means "sand water" or something like it.
bobmcnamara
In Taiwan they served me some thin mushrooms with dinner
My host: they're called see-you-tomorrow
Me: oh ok
Host: because they're indigestible
Me: awkward pause
Host: you're gonna shit!
Me to myself: oh thank God. Between the flights and insomnia it's time.
Cthulhu_
I bet they got drunk / high on loads of things too on the regular.
throwaway173738
Most likely sasparilla and root beer. Sasparilla in particular is made from Sassafrass which in its natural state contains safrole and produces a euphoric feeling when imbibed.
jvm___
I just got back from backwoods camping, each site has a wooden chest/thunderbox/toilet out in the open woods near the site. I'm not sure if the thunder is the heavy wooden lid closing or the noises that come from it. Some are out of sight of the campsite but ours was only 75ft away, fortunately the lid blocked your view if it was in use.
cheema33
I could be wrong, but I don't think that is the thunder the "thunder clappers" was named after.
chasil
'The main active ingredient in “thunder-clappers” was a mercury salt.'
This doesn't seem particularly safe or good for the environment.
I doubt if the product is sold now.
saagarjha
Forget about the environment, that thing will poison you.
bobmcnamara
Ah mercury, sweetest of the transition metals.
anon7725
Travelling thousands of miles overland, in constant fear of ambush from a fearsome plains tribe war party, alternating between intense constipation and explosive diarrhea - bet they didn't put all that on the brochure when they were signing folks up to paddle the canoes.
kcplate
No, but didn’t need to. Pretty sure frontier people knew exactly what life in the wild would entail.
throwaway173738
These guys were members of the US Army, so that too.
physicsguy
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose is a great book about the expedition. I picked it up on a trip to the US and really enjoyed it.
One of my favourite things I didn't know was that they kept getting to new 'untouched' villages of Native Americans who would come out to trade and knew perfectly well that white people existed as they'd been visited for years by various fur traders.
ralfd
I read that too! Ambrose is a bit patriotic, but one can read between the lines.
- The expedition was like StarTrek/Voyager if it were a satire. A technological advanced boat with phaser weapons and futuristic medicine going boldly up the Mississippi to search for a wormhole to the Pacific and make first contact with new civilizations. Every village (and every random Indian dude) they met they presented their shiny uniforms and gave long-winded speeches (which were badly translated by Neelix/a good-for-nothing French trapper) about how they should ally with idealistic Starfleet (United States) instead of the evil Romulans and Ferengi (British and French). The Indians politely heard the speeches, than sat stoically in silence for a while during which they wondered how clueless from One to a thousand L&C were, and then asked for guns, alcohol and tobacco as gifts.
- Lewis & Clark give instead out medals of the Great Father Thomas Jefferson and funny hats left and right to make diplomacy with “chiefs”. Often the guy is just some hunter in the wilderness or some dudes being left in the village, I wonder how many big men and new hierarchies L&C created by randomly giving out a cool hat. Anyway the Indians politely take the gifted hat and then ask for guns, alcohol and tobacco.
- Every village they visit they ask that the tribe shouldn’t war against other tribes anymore as the US is strong enough to protect everlasting peace. Sometimes a village made the mistake to believe them and was promptly raided by the opportunistic warriors of a neighboring tribe.
- The L&C crew fucked more Indian women than Kirk kissed green girls from Orion. Of course women like exotic men in shiny uniforms giving expensive gifts, but often it was the men who brought their squaws without jealousy, because the advanced “medicine magic” must surely rub off through sex.
- The first contact between Starfleet and the Klingons (Prairie Sioux) was friendly but a big culture clash! The Americans polished their uniforms extra shiny and marched in formation and the Sioux one-upped them with their feather regalia and drum dancing. The Sioux proudly showed of the many slaves they just had raided in a war, look how mighty warriors we are! tlhIngan maH taHja!, and Lewis&Clark meekly suggested that the war captives look quite wretched, it would be christian to release at least the poor women and children?, and the Sioux are “Wtf, why? What is wrong with you Earthlings?”
- The Indian men treat their women shockingly bad. I guess I expected the “noble savage” from the westerns movies of my childhood, a wise hero who is in tune with nature and Gaia-feminism. No, the Prairie is a brutal Mad Max patriarchy! One time L&C (who are Virginia gentlemen) call the Indians out why they make their squaws do all the work and their excuse is that they are warriors who always have to be on guard and keep their hands free in case enemy tribes are attacking right now. Yeah, sure…
Edit: It seems I cant decide if I tell a story plot points in past (it is 200 year old history) or present tense (I remember it like a movie).
lazystar
great read, thanks!
> No, the Prairie is a brutal Mad Max patriarchy
this is the hard truth about tribal societies - a peaceful tribe is rare because they're at risk of being wiped out in a single day by an experienced warfaring tribe. I wish our schools taught the truth, rather than dancing around it and showing those optimistic "Dances with wolves" type films that glorify the tribal lifestyle.
anonu
> THESE PILLS WERE the pride and joy of Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Later, a descendent of Dr Rush would go down in infamy for a foolhardy escapade to the Titanic in a carbon-fiber submersible called Titan.
> Dr. Rush’s style of “heroic medicine” had caused his star to fall quite a bit by this time — especially after the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, when his patients died at a noticeably higher rate than untreated sufferers.
Seems familiar...
cco
The head of our health and services department is not so far off Dr Rush's opinions on how human health works.
250 years after Dr Rush and somehow the head doctor in our country believes in the miasma theory of disease, only marginally more modern (still ancient Greek).
n4r9
Oh my Lord, you're right: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine...
tim333
Interesting from that article that he as diagnosed with mercury poisoning, famous for making people a bit mad, hence the mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland as hatters in the day used mercury.
antonvs
> The section is titled "Miasma vs. Germ Theory," in the chapter "The White Man's Burden" [in his book attacking Fauci, titled "The Real Anthony Fauci"]
RFK Jr. seems to be trying to answer the question, how misguided can one man be?
goodluckchuck
The article defeats itself by acknowledging that he uses the term in a different sense… which doesn’t deny the existence or effect of germs, but focuses on the fact that for example many of the worst effects from COVID-19 were in obese people. His point is we have 364 days a year to address obesity, but - in practice - the medical community waits until the last day and tries to develop a vaccine that will allow us to stay overweight and just kill the germ. He’s saying we miss the forest for the trees when we forget to focus on the underlying health of our bodies. Of course they wanted to write a hit piece… and what he’s saying isn’t actually controversial.
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robocat
We disbelieved in miasma during Covid: yet Covid turned out to be transmitted by "bad air" . . . regardless of how strongly it was argued against at the beginning of 2020.
Even wrong theories can have a kernel of truth. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
vintermann
If we go by theories by their earliest incarnations, "germ theory" rejected that diseases could be caused by deficiency in micronutrients. "Terrain theory" arguably was the closest to the truth on those.
Also, by the standards of so-called "evidence based medicine" where we care less about the proposed mechanism a treatment works by, and more about whether it actually works, then miasma theory (or maybe it's more accurate to call it miasma practice, then?) doesn't look so bad. Florence Nightingale didn't bury horses because she believed in germ theory, she did it because they stank - and because she had developed statistical evidence that such hygiene interventions worked, whatever the mechanism. It took a long time for germ theory to get sophisticated enough that we can say it started saving more lives than sanitation (which was developed based on miasma theory).
The first incarnations of an ultimately correct theory often work worse in practice at the start.
Not that it excuses Kennedy.
jibal
There were no arguments against a virus causing respiratory disease being carried airborne. There was uncertainty as to whether the disease could be contracted from surfaces.
And viruses being airborne (carried on droplets) simply isn't what miasma theory is. Actual miasma theory is wrong and has no kernel of truth ... a fine example of how correlation is not causation.
And let's get back to the point:
> somehow the head doctor in our country believes in the miasma theory of disease
The man is an extraordinarily dangerous crank who is putting the health of Americans at grave risk ... he has already killed numerous children and it will soon get much worse. Any attempt to defend him in any way is vile.
n4r9
So what? Geocentricity can predict some observations but it's bonkers to believe in it today.
Cthulhu_
I guess if we're doing mental gymnastics, an airborne virus is indeed "bad air", and opening a window helps get the bad air out and wearing a mask keeps the bad air in.
If "bad air" convinced people to take measures then I'll take it as a win.
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DonHopkins
[flagged]
flanked-evergl
[flagged]
ffsm8
The vaccine wasn't even close to 99% effective nor is any medication 100% safe, and neither was this vaccine. It had severe side effects in a lot of people.
This kind of messaging is a large part of the problem, because it's trivially verify-able to be a lie, muddying the waters of wherever it should be used.
jibal
> It had severe side effects in a lot of people.
False. The only way to reach that conclusion is by misusing/misinterpreting the VAERS data.
Sardtok
There's this thing called sarcasm
wizzwizz4
I wouldn't say "a lot of people". See https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27746/interactive...: only a few conditions, such as Myocarditis, are linked to the mRNA vaccines. I'd be way better off taking even the dodgiest vaccine (Oxford–AstraZeneca, which is no longer in production) than no vaccine, if exposed to actual COVID-19: the reduction in COVID-19 severity would be well worth it in terms of health outcomes (let alone the herd immunity consequences).
Evidlo
Here is an article that actually describes the search for the mercury in the laxatives: https://www.discovermagazine.com/following-lewis-and-clarks-...
ljlolel
Out of the more than 600 potential locations Lewis and Clark stopped at, only one has been verified by mercury analysis: Travelers’ Rest in Lolo, Montana. We know from their journals that the Corps visited on two occasions. The first was in mid-September of 1805, after attempting to pass over the Bitterroot Mountains and being forced back by deep snow. Then they returned at the end of June and into early July of 1806, on their way back east.
dboreham
Finding the locations for their camps is tricky. They passed within a mile of my house and I've spent some time trying to identify the trail route and camp site. However the journals turn out to be mostly very brief, lacking sufficient detail. Also all the geographic feature names they use are different than today's, so you need a translation map for those, which in turn may be inaccurate.
neya
Meta: I love these 90s-2000s website aesthetic. Simple HTML, less CSS, extremely good readability, very little telemetry and data collection (in general). I wish we could go back to that era. It felt like every website was a beautiful discovery journey than just the same old bland minimalist, flat design bs every site has today with "aCcEpT cOokIeS" banners with dark patterns throughout.
/endrant
jibal
The site actively discourages readers by scrolling text in a semi-transparent window over an image. It's an awful aesthetic.
nextzck
The iOS reader view is spectacular. Easy to read source code makes for a better experience for both humans and machines :)
sublinear
The reader view is broken. Despite my other comment this is really bad web design. So bad that I couldn't share this article with normal people who won't put up with this. I really wanted to since the story is so interesting.
sublinear
Haha this page uses google adsense and the CSS is so bad that the page source has apologies in the comments. I wouldn't doubt if they didn't add the GDPR banner simply because nobody cares.
This site would otherwise be fine and not lose any charm if it just had a media query to switch to a single column layout and larger font size for screens below a certain px width (768px usually for mobile).
I don't get why it's not implemented. I didn't really have to do much in my user styles except remove the float in the "barBod" class and set the width to 100% on the table elements.
Anyway the obligatory related guideline:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
UncleSlacky
Relevant: https://justfuckingusehtml.com/
tim333
That site kind of defeats its objective by looking ugly and making it clear why people don't make sites like that.
The https://offbeatoregon.com/ one looks ok though if a bit busy maybe.
cbdevidal
I wonder if they did eat some plants, but just didn’t get enough fiber? I eat no fiber (strict carnivore) but have no problem with regular bowel movements.
jeffwass
I’m curious to know what your diet is like. Eg, if you are only eating meat, do you eat more bones and sinews than the usual omnivore to get enough “roughage” for digestion?
Eg, birds at a falconry can’t be fed just the usual bird “meat”, they need to have the skin and feathers attached which is essential for their digestive tract.
hedgehog
They may not have understood the vegetation well enough, and stuck to meat out of caution. Apparently when they got close to the west coast they tried eating camas and got very ill the first time because they didn't prepare it properly. Lots of ways to go wrong when you are in an unfamiliar area (see also: death camas).
bbarnett
I think such a diet just means you need to drink more water than your body expects. Meat digestion seems to take more water.
shermantanktop
Iirc from “Undaunted Courage,” a daily diet consisted of 10 pounds of bear meat, for men who were burning thousands of extra calories a day.
sandspar
From that description, undaunted courage sounds like an apt title.
gadders
Interesting. Just reading the Lonesome Dove series of books, and the cowboys often seem to have the opposite problem after drinking from alkaline rivers, puddles etc.
hereme888
This article just shows up on the front page of HN as I drink senna tea... perfect.
bradley13
File under: Things I didn't really want to know. An interesting read nonetheless...
judge123
I'm dying laughing. Imagine Lewis and Clark, thinking they're forging this epic, heroic legacy for the ages... and their most permanent, scientifically-proven trail is literally toxic poop. History has a WILD sense of humor.
Cthulhu_
I do wonder if they went in there thinking they're "forging this epic, heroic legacy for the ages", or if that was hindsight / US historians drumming up the story for the history books.
If they shat themselves to death halfway, would they have been remembered as much?
ivanbalepin
> the men (and woman) of the party probably weren’t thinking much about their place in history
that's like the first sentence
loa_in_
Bother sides of one brown coin. Or a brown multifaceted die.
cowLamp
mystery biscuitssss ohhhh yeah
"600 giant pills that the men called 'thunder-clappers,'"
I love little reminders that people haven't changed that much over the centuries