The story
History left a message. Someone wants it erased.
In the winter of 1804, the Corps of Discovery camped beside the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the Missouri River, in what is now North Dakota. William Clark filled his journals with spellings so creative that readers have been chuckling at them ever since.
Before the expedition left, Thomas Jefferson handed Meriwether Lewis a secret cipher. In The Core of Discovery, those “mistakes” are a code built on Jefferson’s cipher, and they point to a secret hidden in the North Dakota landscape.
More than two centuries later, the scholar who finally cracks it learns how far powerful people will go to keep the past buried. It’s a story about what we owe the land, and the people who came before us.
Inside the book
Real history. Real places.
- Lewis and Clark’s winter at Fort Mandan
- Thomas Jefferson’s real 1803 cipher
- Theodore Roosevelt in Dakota Territory
- North Dakota history, from 1805 to today
- A modern-day race to decode the past
Written by the founder of National Day Calendar, who has called Mandan, just down the river from Fort Mandan, home for decades.