Following the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail—and the Story It Left Out
Unpacked by Afar | Travel Smarter, More ResponsiblyShow Notes
Welcome to Unpacked Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story. In this episode, executive editor Katherine LaGrave sits down with writer Latria Graham, Afar's Unpacked columnist.
Latria spent seven weeks driving the nearly 5,000-mile Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail—alone—to report a story about the Corps of Discovery's most essential and least credited member: York, an enslaved man whose skills, knowledge, and presence helped make the entire expedition possible.
Latria traces the trail from Kentucky to the Pacific Northwest, stopping at massacre sites, Indigenous mounds, sunflower fields, and a 50-foot statue of an Indigenous woman with a star quilt—asking what it means to travel responsibly through landscapes layered with historical trauma, and the questions that still remain about York's life.
Meet this week's guest
Latria Graham is a writer and Afar's Unpacked columnist, whose work turns over some of travel's biggest and most difficult questions—from whether we should visit museums with complicated histories to how we can better support hospitality workers. Follow her on Instagram at @missgraham.
Episode highlights
Why York—the enslaved man who traveled the entire Corps of Discovery expedition—was essential to its survival, and how historical accounts minimized him for generations while Black historians have spent decades restoring his full dimensions
What Latria found at the statue of York in Louisville, the Dignity of Earth and Sky sculpture in Chamberlain, South Dakota, and Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park in North Dakota: three sites that grappled honestly with what the trail erased
How to travel responsibly through landscapes layered with trauma: spending money with local restaurants and farms, practicing leave no trace principles, sitting with hard history in small museums, and knowing when not to take the riskier hike
Why the rivers mattered most: every confluence, every overlook, every moment the water changed direction—the one thing on the trail that was there before the history and will be there after it
The questions the trail left open: what actually happened to York after the expedition ended, whether a GIS map or an app might tell these stories better than a book, and what it means to make sure history lives as fully realized human lives rather than names and dates
Links & resources
Follow Latria Graham on Instagram
Read her Lewis and Clark trail story for Afar
Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail
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