A coast-to-coast quest to unravel the mysteries and investigate the journey of Moncacht-Apé.
The following is expanded from a short section of the feature article “The Long Shadow of Moncacht-Apé” by Mike Bezemek in Outside Magazine, US 250th issue, summer 2026
Several years ago, while homebound for a time, I began researching some lingering mysteries related to the Lewis and Clark expedition. I was curious why the co-captains expected to find an easy crossing of the Continental Divide at the unmapped headwaters of the Missouri River. A few paragraphs in The Way to the Western Sea, a 1988 book by historian David Lavender, suggested their belief might have been influenced, in part, by the journey of Moncacht-Apé.
This was the first time I’d ever heard of the Yazoo explorer from the Mississippi Valley. He claimed to have crossed the entire continent around the late 1600s, which would have been over a century before Lewis and Clark. Traveling mostly on foot and by dugout canoe, Moncacht-Apé allegedly spent eight years reaching both the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of North America. Along the way, this friendly interpreter visited with numerous tribes, learning their languages and the best routes to follow (see the Journey).
In the mid-1720s in Natchez, Moncacht-Apé told his story to a French colonist named Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz. After Le Page returned to France, he published the explorer’s account as three chapters in his 1758 book Histoire de la Louisane (see the Interview). For about fifty years, Moncacht-Apé’s journey was generally accepted as true. At President Thomas Jefferson’s suggestion, Meriwether Lewis even carried a copy of the English translation during his expedition across the West.
An Exploration Mystery
In his book, Le Page writes that Moncacht-Apé walked up the banks of the Missouri River for about six weeks before turning north. After what seems to be a gradual crossing of the Continental Divide, he reached a river flowing west that eventually led to the Pacific Ocean. That’s not how it went for Lewis and Clark. In 1805, they spent a grueling month struggling over the treacherous Bitterroot Range. With the upper Missouri River now mapped, Moncacht-Apé’s descriptions clearly didn’t match.
After the expedition, the Yazoo explorer’s story was dismissed as a fraud by U.S. historians, with nationalism and racism playing a role. How could a primitive “savage,” as critics of the 19th and 20th centuries often called Moncacht-Apé ever have accomplished the same feat as heroic Lewis and Clark? Some observers, such as the renowned 20th century historian Bernard DeVoto, suggested Le Page must have invented the story. Occasionally, believers argued the account was vague but still plausible.
Enthralled by this exploration mystery, I quickly tracked down several translations of the Moncacht-Apé narrative. I was struck by two things. First, it sounded genuine to me, and similar to other published accounts by the earliest white explorers to the West, who often didn’t know exactly where they were or which rivers they came across. Second, from my past fieldwork as an outdoor writer focused on lesser-known places and adventurous history, I believed that I recognized the northwest-trending route Moncacht-Apé followed. Except he wasn’t describing the Missouri River. He was describing the Platte.
The Platte is a major river of the Plains that’s somewhat forgotten today. However, along with its two principal tributaries, the North Platte and Sweetwater River, the Platte River Valley played a critical role in U.S. history as the preferred route for westward migration. It came to be called the Oregon Trail, which most Americans would forget was based on a major Native trading path that existed for millennia.
The idea that Moncacht-Apé would have followed the Platte made perfect sense to me. Lewis and Clark ascended the Missouri River in boats because they were searching for the mythical Northwest Passage, an interior continental water route to the Pacific that didn’t exist. Moncacht-Apé went across the Plains on foot, and being a friendly interpreter who visited with tribes along the way, he surely would have learned that a better overland path existed.
Three centuries after Moncacht-Apé’s journey, I found myself increasingly stunned by this discovery. With this simple route-shift, roughly three hundred miles to the south, the pieces of an exploration mystery were falling into place. While examining historical maps and sources, I would pause and glance side to side. Did discoveries like this still happen?
So much time had passed, but maybe it wasn’t too late to investigate. Moncacht-Apé left plenty of clues to unravel, including vague references to tribes, landmarks, plants, and animals. If these pre-contact clues could be matched to plausible answers, especially when considering the limits of French knowledge at the time, there was no way this story could have been faked.
With endless questions, I needed help. It seemed that past U.S. scholars had neglected the Native point of view. Perhaps, one way to search for Moncacht-Apé route was by finding the descendants of the tribes he visited. Together, maybe we could come up with answers that had gone missing for centuries. So, first chance I got, I hit the road to begin the search.
More coming soon!
In the future, I’ll be sharing more findings and stories from my ongoing fieldwork to unravel the mysterious coast-to-coast journey of Moncacht-Apé.
So far, I have visited or corresponded with numerous Native people, tribe members, historians, museum curators, park rangers, and others across the country. Meanwhile, the investigation continues, and I hope to meet many more people to discuss the project. Please feel free to reach out using this contact form!
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For now, readers can learn about several major discoveries made in the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest by reading the feature article:
“The Long Shadow of Moncacht-Apé” in Outside Magazine‘s US 250th / summer 2026 print issue, now available at Barnes & Noble and other stories!
