About author Mike Bezemek and the search for Moncacht-Apé
Hello! I’m an award-winning author of books and magazine stories with an adventurous spin. I’m particularly interested in topics related to the outdoors, exploration, history, science, and travel. Over the years, I’ve explored widely across the United States, including the regions where Moncacht-Apé journeyed.
It was my past fieldwork and research that helped me recognize the rivers and routes this impressive explorer was describing. Based on the accuracy of Moncacht-Apé’s descriptions, I soon came to feel that his journey had been unfairly dismissed and forgotten. I hope to correct this mistake and bring this fellow adventurer the recognition he deserves. I hope you will join me in this coast-to-coast quest to rediscover the amazing true story of Moncacht-Apé.
Adventures Lead to Discoveries
When I started hiking, paddling, biking, camping, and just generally exploring across this vast country, I never expected that someday I would stumble across a story like this. But I long had a fascination with two overlapping topics, earth history and human history. As I built my writing career, I knew there were remote places and turbulent stories from our nation’s past that had been mostly forgotten. I wanted to dig into those lost locations and hidden histories and create an adventurous life around them.
Several past experiences put me in a unique position to investigate Moncacht-Apé’s journey. Starting in the early 2000s, I worked as a part-time whitewater rafting and wilderness backpacking guide for six years, mostly in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. During that time, I began to independently explore more widely across the West and other regions.
I’m originally from the West Coast, but I’ve since lived in the Midwest, worked extensively in the Mountain West, and I currently live with my wife in the Southeast. My undergraduate degree was in geology at UC Davis, and I worked for several years as a field researcher on river science projects involving topographical surveying, water quality, and paleo-ecological studies. Then I got a master’s degree in writing at Washington University and taught college courses for nearly ten years in topics like research writing, science writing, and travel writing.
Today, my writing and photography can be found in publications such as Outside, Smithsonian, Saturday Evening Post, National Parks Mag, American Heritage, Men’s Journal, Blue Ridge Outdoors, Terrain, Canoe & Kayak, Ski Mag, Paddling Mag, Adventure Cyclist, Sourcebooks, Mountaineers Books, the University of Nebraska Press, Falcon Guides, and others. Links to my work can be found on my author website.
The fieldwork for several past books and stories ended up being instrumental in unraveling Moncacht-Apé’s actual routes. These field projects included following the river routes of Western explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell. During that fieldwork, I repeatedly stumbled across an overlapping network of bandit routes and hideouts informally called the Outlaw Trail, which I began to explore across the Mountain West. Simultaneously, for many years, I’d been visiting ancestral ruins and Native sites around the country. Due to my interest in exploration history, I gradually began to research and retrace the historical routes of early fur trappers, North American explorers, and overland emigrants, including the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Oregon Trail. My extensive visits to National Park System units eventually led to my most popular book Mysteries of the National Parks.
Motivations for the Search
The research and writing for Mysteries of the National Parks overlapped with a particularly challenging personal time, when I began caring for my mom, who was suffering from a mysterious and aggressive neurodegenerative disorder. Eventually, we moved her across the country to live with us, and I became her live-in caregiver. During that time, I would regularly share stories from my research with my mom, sometimes during short walks around the neighborhood, even as she increasingly struggled with physical activities.
One day during this homebound period, while researching some lingering mysteries about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, I stumbled across a brief mention of Moncacht-Apé. In the coming months, I continued to learn more about the Yazoo explorer’s journey, which eventually led to my theory that he followed a different river than was stated in Le Page’s 1758 book.
Several times in the past, my mom had confessed to feeling so distraught about the plight of Native Americans. She believed our country has never truly reckoned with the atrocities done to Indigenous people during the expansion of the United States. I generally agreed but didn’t know what else to say or do.
This chance discovery about Moncacht-Apé’s journey was one of the last stories I shared with my mom. When I told her I might be able to prove his journey happened, she briefly lit up like I hadn’t seen in years. Not long after this discovery, one morning I sadly found her writhing in agony, the final horrific stage of her incurable illness. After three terrible months in hospitals and hospice, my mom passed away.
Lessons from Native Knowledge
About a year later, I decided to use the money that she left me to fund my search for the truth about Moncacht-Apé. That got me out into the world to investigate. What convinced me that the Yazoo explorer’s journey truly happened were the stunning discoveries, cultural lessons, and new evidence found together with Natives and other folks across the country.
I’m not Native but a white author with expertise in mysterious exploration stories. I hope this investigation will be an opportunity for readers to learn more about Native people and cultures, from the pre-contact era to today.
During my fieldwork thus far, different tribe members—descendants of the people who Moncacht-Apé would have met—have offered insightful observations about the value of this project. This is a story about Native people of North America that’s not about disease or war or cultural destruction. This is an uplifting story about curiosity and exploration during an increasingly turbulent time on this continent. The long journey happened during a period in history that most Americans know little about today. It was a time when many Native tribes were thriving, especially in the pre-contact regions of the Northwest.
Moncacht-Apé’s story offers us many fascinating lessons from the past. But the first steps involve showing that his journey was true. By working with others, I hope to rediscover and reconstruct how he crossed the continent over three centuries ago, and ultimately prove that this Yazoo man from a sadly extinct tribe was one of the greatest explorers in American history.
Please know that much more is coming soon! Thank you so much for joining the search for Moncacht-Apé.