STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Did you know that one of the most important tools in Lewis and Clark’s medical kit was a bone saw? Or that you might be able to trace the Corps of Discovery’s footsteps across the Louisiana Purchase by detecting mercury droppings with a metal detector?

Comic strip author and illustrator Nathan Hale gave Wood River Middle School seventh-graders a history lesson they’ll never forget Wednesday as he revealed little known facts about the Lewis and Clark expedition that kept them in stitches.

Hale, a New York Times best-selling author of 13 graphic novels charting American history, recounted his version of this episode in American history as he drew pictures on a tablet that was transmitted to a screen, sometimes expanding the pictures he drew with his fingers and shaking the board to show characters laughing.

Nathan Hale, who recounted history as he drew, said he would like to create stories about ancient history at some point—“I’d love to do the Greeks and maybe European history with the plague.”

“I don’t like to talk about myself. I prefer to tell stories,” he told the youngsters.

Hale, who lives in Provo, Utah, is in Sun Valley for two weeks as The Community Library’s Writer-in-Residence at the Hemingway House where he is writing a graphic novel on the recruitment of Hitler’s youth and, perhaps, getting started on his fourth “Mighty Bite” book.

While here, he talked to 120 kids at The Community library and made a presentation at Hemingway STEAM School. He is presenting a free workshop on writing a comic strip at 3:30 today—Thursday, March 13—at Hailey Town Center West.

“This is a remarkable opportunity to have Nathan Hale...he doesn’t do school visits,” WRMS Librarian Samantha Arichibald  Mora, who instigated Hale’s visit, told the kids.

“He’s a huge deal in the literary world—a rock star,” added DeAnn Campbell, children’s librarian at The Community Library.

In addition to penning graphic novels, Hale also creates sci-fi and a quirky “Mighty Bite” series inspired by a fossil of a trilobite, an extinct marine anthropod that his uncle gave him when he was young. The third book in the series will come out in a month.

But, he said, he loves to tell history in a hilarious way.

He started Wednesday’s talk off by drawing a map showing how tiny the United States was when Thomas Jefferson doubled it by purchasing the mid-section of the United States.

“Why are you spending our taxpayer dollars on this this? We don’t want it! We don’t even know what’s there!” he whined, showcasing some of the sentiment of the time.

Jefferson charged Meriwether Lewis and Capt. William Clark with finding out what was in the land, instructing them to go further—all the way to the Pacific, he told the students. And he told them not to fight but to hand out gifts of silver medallions displaying his image.

Lewis and Clark picked 40 men to go with them, including York, a big African-American whom Indians called “Buffalo Man” because they said he was the size of a buffalo. They also took “a big puppy”—a Newfoundland with webbed feet.

“They got all dressed up wearing shoulder pads called epaulettes –Captain Crunch wears them, as well,” Hale noted.

Originally, the expedition postulated they didn’t need a doctor because they wouldn’t get hurt, Hale quipped. But, informed that was the stupidest plan ever, Lewis consented to sitting down with Dr. Benjamin Rush, the U.S. Surgeon General of the day, who gave him a box full of leeches for bloodletting.

He instructed Lewis to fix a broken arm by poking his fingers around until he found the pain. Inside the medical chest, you will find a bone saw, he said. Use it and the entire broken leg will be gone.

“I’m not telling you this to make you laugh,” Hale told the kids. “This is what they would do. They tried letting bones heel, rather than set them with plaster. If the bone ended up crooked, they would amputate.”

Also, contained in the medical kit were 600 of Rush’s Bilious Pills, which the men tried after they became constipated on a diet that consisted of six pounds of coyote, antelope and bison meat. This gave way to little bathroom humor as Hale describe the explosive reaction the pills had on man.

The pills contained liquid mercury, which the men on the expedition would come to call “Thunderclappers.” And you can find traces today with a metal detector, Hale said.

“And that is a true story from American history!”

Hale said his favorite part of the story is that 150 years before the Civil Rights movement, the men gave York the right to vote alongside them. And, in a country where Native Americans and women couldn’t vote, they gave Sacajawea the right.

“My whole job is to dig through history and find things that are positive,” he said. “That can be difficult to do since history is filled with so many horrible things.”

Hale told the kids that he began creating books as a youngster, drawing stories on paper his mother gave him. He knew he was called to write books after reading Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild things Are,” but the first book he sent to a publisher was rejected.

Now, he’s published a couple dozen, along with a book due out next Halloween that will feature some of the scariest stories he could find of the Civil War and other periods of American history.

Hale studied illustration in college, leaving early to design a mural at the North American Museum of Ancient Life near Salt Lake City. Inspired by those who made dioramas and the research he did for his natural history exhibits, he began writing novels.

“It’s easy to go from that to the human history,” he said.

He writes two books a year, reading through books and books looking for fun things the average person would not know.

“I have to be excited about it—I can’t spend a year researching something if I’m not excited about it. Someone asked, ‘Will you do a book on the Depression?’ I don’t know if it illustrates well. I want to draw action, battles, explosions.”

The biggest challenge, he said is figuring out what something from a century ago looks like, such as the flax breaker tool Harriet Tubman used.

Nearly two years ago--after 12 years of visiting a hundred schools a year, he retired from school visits even though, he said, it can be rewarding when a parent tells him their child recognized some obscure guy in history, such as Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of Navy, on the History Channel.

“I missed a lot of my own kids growing up.”

Hale hasn’t been able to ski Sun Valley while here, having ruptured his Achilles tendon a couple weeks ago skiing Deer Valley. But he says he wants to come back as he’s fallen in love with the town.

“And in the future,” he said, “I want to do a mini-comic about staying in the Hemingway House.”