Everyone’s like “those Germans have a word for everything” but English has a word for tricking someone into watching the music video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.
Molly and Arthur Weasley raised seven kids on one government salary.
Molly and Arthur Weasley raised those seven children to be courageous and loyal and kind.
Molly and Arthur Weasley were purebloods who made it a point to be known as “the biggest blood traitors there are”.
Molly and Arthur Weasley raised Fred and George during their accidental magic stages without letting the house burn down.
Molly and Arthur Weasley treated Harry as their own child, not because of his fame, but because he was Ron’s friend and he was in desperate need of a family.
Molly and Arthur Weasley made sure that everyone who entered their home felt loved and cared for and well fed.
Molly and Arthur Weasley won money and spent it on a family trip to see their son and help their daughter out of the depression she was sinking into.
Molly and Arthur Weasley sent Easter eggs and Christmas sweaters and fudge to their children while making sure to include enough for friends.
Molly and Arthur Weasley went out of their way to secure two tickets to the Quidditch World Cup on top of the eight for their own family, just to ensure that Hermione and Harry were included.
Molly and Arthur Weasley warned Harry about Sirius Black and tried to keep him with them after Voldemort’s return and tried to shield him from Order business because they remembered how young he was, how utterly unfair it was for the world to expect so much from him.
Molly and Arthur Weasley are so damn important.
Arthur Weasley was supposed to die and JK Rowling couldn’t bring herself to kill him because he was the only living example in the entire series of a good father.
Molly Weasley made Harry eat third helpings of every meal, despite how difficult it may have been for their family just to put food on the table, because she knew that his guardians often deprived him of meals as punishment.
I was working on my dissertation in the library when I spotted a pigeon outside. I got out my phone and loaded up Pokemon Go. Then stopped… My tired fucking brain deadass tried to catch a real life freaking bird with my phone. I want to die, please, it would be a favour.
i want to run away…but like in ghibli movie. like i take a block of cheese a loaf of bread and some apples and wander through the flower-specked mountains wrapped up in a shawl and i happen to wander into a moving castle and fall in love with a cute wizard
me (deep in the woods, dragging dufflebag of Kraft Singles™
and hopelessly lost): where’s totoro
why does no one ever talk about how lewis and clark met why isn’t that taught in history classes it’s like some rom-com meet-funny trope and i’ve literally never heard it brought up. literally the start of one of the most famous friendships in america and no one talks about it.
Wasn’t Clark just Lewis’ commanding officer? I guess I don’t know this story either. Can you tell it?
yes!! oh my god!!
so at twenty-one years of age, stupid stubborn hotheaded ensign meriwether lewis decides to get hella drunk and crash the party of one of his superior officers, starting an argument over politics (namely, defending thomas jefferson, his neighbor and veritable father figure) and insulting his host and basically being an embarrassment. so, he’s arrested and leveled with a court martial!! because this ridiculous boy can’t mind his fucking manners when he’s tipsy apparently!!
but instead of having to explain to his poor mother why he got booted out of the continental army, he’s acquitted (”with honor” bc apparently i’m not the only one who plays favorites when it comes to meriwether lewis), but he has to be reassigned so he doesn’t piss off his commanding officer again (awk). and whose brand new sharp-shooting rifle unit does he get transferred to?? take a wild guess!!!! that’s right, william clark’s!!!! and over the next six months meri falls deepfuck in totally platonic bro-love with him until clark resigns his commission for family reasons. then, roughly eight years later, lewis writes him to ask if maybe he’d like to travel to the ends of the earth by his side and, well, the rest is history.
But how do you know it was platonic
i hope you guys understand that when i say “platonic” i say it in the patronizing sarcastic tone of voice i always use when i talk about meriwether lewis’s big ol’ crush on his bff. maybe i can’t prove totally that he was v gay and probably at least a little bit madly in love with clark, but damn i wanna believe love exists ok.
lewis’s obvious sexual repulsion of women, his inability to find a wife, his desire to live with clark after the expedition, that last letter he wrote to clark before his violent death that we don’t have because clark burned it – we can read a lot into all of this if we want to, but even besides all of that the point remains that meriwether lewis was intensely fond of clark, and that they cared deeply for one another, and that their personalities complemented and completed one another in a way that makes you think twice about soulmates.
actually, sacagawea was a sixteen-year-old kidnapped shoshone girl sold into sexual slavery to a french trader named toussaint charbonneau, who pissed power couple lewis and clark off to no end due to generally just being who he was as a person.
whereas lewis had no real interest in women from what we can tell from his writings, he actually wrote about how much he admired sacagawea’s extreme fortitude and numerous skills that helped them throughout their journey. lewis also actually delivered sacagawea’s child!! she had a very difficult birth (probably because she was a child), which sent lewis into multiple kinds of panic. clark, however, really doted on sacagawea and her son; he gave them both nicknames, looked out for their safety during the trip, and was very close to them even after the expedition and ended up adopting sacagawea’s son. he was also a notoriously bad speller and i don’t think he ever spelt charbonneau’s name correctly ever not even once (which makes me think of the blenderdick cucumberpatch meme tbh).
i mean yeah there’s also a lot of angst here too because after the expedition their lives went in very different directions.
clark comes home and immediately acclimates to a hero’s life. he gets married and has a son who he names meriwether lewis clark after his best friend. he has a respectable government position and lives a long and happy life.
meanwhile lewis struggles to get accustomed to civilized life again. he misses the freedom of the expedition. he still sleeps on buffalo skins spread out on his bedroom floor. he writes that he is determined to find himself a wife but no woman can seem to stand him; one even flees town in the middle of the night to avoid seeing him again the next day. with his lifelong history of depression (which comes in bursts which, to me, seem a lot like manic depression), lewis spirals downward. he’s hated and conspired against in his political career, he starts to drink heavily, he stops talking to all of the people who had been closest to him.
he finally works himself up to taking a trip to dc to deliver his journals to jefferson and on the boat trip up he attempts to kill himself multiple times. he’s described as appearing frantic and afraid, and tries to calm himself down by repeatedly telling himself that clark is on his way, that clark will be coming to save him. we know that at this time he wrote clark a letter, but clark burned it so we don’t know what it said. i’m ashamed of the things i’d do to get my hands on that letter.
lewis dies in an inn on the natchez trace of two bullet wounds, and it’s still debated whether it was suicide or murder; everyone close to him seemed to accept it was suicide, including clark, who wrote, “oh, i fear the weight of his mind has overcome him”.
But what happened to Sacagawea and her son?
ok, more on sacagawea, because she deserves any and all the credit she gets plus a whole lot more honestly:
when sacagawea was about 12 years old, she was kidnapped by the hidatsa tribe and sold alongside another shoshone woman to charbonneau as his “wives”. charbonneau was officially hired by lewis and clark not just because he was a french fur trader who knew the pacific northwest territory as well as the hidatsa language, but because sacagawea’s knowledge of the shoshone language and people would benefit them as they traveled through their lands. sacagawea was not just some inconvenient extra, she was a purposeful and valued addition to the corps.
sacagawea had her son, jean-baptiste, while l&c and co. ™ were still wintering at fort mandan, so she was literally carrying this child on her back for the entire journey. she was also the only woman travelling in the corps! and she was given duties! strong and capable and literally perfect i love her so much!
while travelling on a riverway, the boat sacagawea was travelling on capsized, and along with saving her son she also rescued valuable supplies and papers; both the captains were blown away with how well she acted under that sort of duress (and how badly her husband did lmao). travelling through native lands, tribes were more likely to think these men were not dangerous purely because sacagawea was with them, so she literally saved their white asses through association. she was a necessary and important figure in council meetings between the corps and tribal chiefs. clark called her “janey” and called her son “pompy”. (cute.) when they do get to the ocean, sacagawea literally demands clark (which she would have to do through like three layers of translators) to let her go to the shore with them, because damn it she worked just as hard as anyone else and she wants to see the fucking whales man.
perhaps most remarkably, when the corps finally did encounter the shoshone tribe, among the very first group of people they encountered was sacagawea’s brother, who she hadn’t seen for five years. that’s. so incredible. like, that’s one of the most amazing things to me. this survivor of child sexual abuse bravely treks across huge stretches of territory with a military expedition and is reunited with her family, however briefly, and. god. i’m crying.
sacagawea was not paid for her contributions to the expedition, because the contract was with her husband. she gave birth to a daughter, lisette, six years after the expedition. she died at 25 years old of a sickness she apparently had throughout her adulthood (which may have been further complicated from her early abuse and pregnancies). after her death, clark adopted both of her children.
i love this beautiful brave bird woman just as much if not more than i love my adventurous southern sons.
i’ve seen a lot of comments about the really sorry state of spelling and grammar in the expedition journals, and just wanted to let everyone know that, since no one had a dictionary with them on the expedition, they had to spell out words phonetically, and for the most part everyone wrote how they talked. by that logic, linguists have determined that by reading the journals of expedition members aloud you can actually start to mimic their accents! lewis was a virginian with some book learning, so his passages tend to have more eloquent language and less visible accent. however, clark was kentucky born and bred, and manages to misspell “mosquito”more than sixteen different ways.
Also, there’s a national memorial in Montana that Clark carved his name into, called Pompey’s Pillar. Clark named it after Sacajawea’s son.
