Have You Ever Tried Ashcakes?

We know from the internet that everything has its freaks. There are freaks for Legos, for presidential graves and for women who kill rodents with stiletto heels. But with the Internet, you always suspect that these people are half ironic, that part of their fun is pretending to be obsessed. The Lewis and Clark fanatics, for the most part, do not build fan sites.

I went to meet some of these people when my editors decided they'd like me to eat the kind of food that Lewis and Clark ate. This was not the subtlest of the many ways in which they have tried to kill me, but it's a soft job market. I talked to Leandra Holland, a woman writing a book on the food history of Lewis and Clark and the author of "Preserving Food on the Trail," a recent cover story in We Proceeded On, the journal for serious Lewis and Clark obsessives. Holland and some of her L&C buddies set up a big cookout for me. I was to be the first person ever to fly to Bozeman, Mont., expressly for a meal.

My editors, though, are wimps. They were afraid that my pursuit of historical accuracy--killing a buffalo with a black-powder musket, for instance--would upset you. They were also concerned about the law, in terms of eating animals like grizzly bear, beaver, horse and whale. Worst of all, they certainly weren't going to let me eat dog. The Corps of Discovery reached the Upper Columbia during the run of the fall Chinook and coho salmon. But instead of eating the fish, they bought the local tribes' dogs for butchering. Bill Yallup Jr., a descendant of Lewis and Clark's West Coast host Chief Yellept, says of the explorers' eating habits, "All this wonderful salmon everywhere, and along come Lewis and Clark to our village. Two days later, they leave again, and we're looking around, and our people are saying 'Hey, what happened to all our dogs?'"

When I get to Bozeman, I meet Holland, her husband and eight other Lewis-and-Clarkheads at a neighbor's property, where we put up an American flag and set up a campfire right beside the East Gallatin River. R.G. Montgomery, a retired biology teacher who gives lessons on Lewis and Clark and does the occasional bit of re-enacting, shows up in period dress--moccasins, a red kerchief over his head--carrying a box of reproduction supplies. Since the Corps of Discovery is the ultimate Boy Scout story, most of these guys, all of whom are grandparents, are only recently retired from the troop. They have a fire going in four minutes.

Like any other group of the obsessed, Lewis-and-Clarkheads like to display their obscure knowledge by arguing over factoids, which creates a menu issue. There is a bitter disagreement over how much meat the explorers ate each day. One camp sticks to the commonly believed nine-pounds-a-day-per-person theory, while the other camp puts its estimates closer to three. Philosophically, the nine-pounders are vested in the fantasy that the explorers were dreamy, testosterone-packed macho men, while the three-pounders like to believe they were more like themselves. Leandra is firmly in the nine-pound group.