On July 6th, 1934, Charles Bedaux set off on an expedition from Edmonton to British Columbia. This was no ordinary trek -- the travelers moved in style, bringing along every imaginable luxury. Tune in and learn what happened next in this episode.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we're gonna be talking about an expedition with a very unusual packing list. Um, some of the items on the Champagne French novels, what else, truffles, silk pajamas. Yeah, they sound pretty nice. We liked them a lot, and we think that if we were going to go on a safari or a trip, we might bring similar items, but we'd also make sure that our trip was in cars and that it was also on paved roads, not pack horses in the mud, unlike the Champagne Safari, which was technically known as the Bideaux Canadian Subarctic Expedition. So for all of you people who have been clamoring for Canadian history, here you go. And we've mentioned Charles Bideaux in our podcast about the Nazi king because he owned the Chateau de Conde where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were married. But his life is far more interesting than just that one small episode, and the safari is part of that. So to talk a little bit about his life before Safari. He was born in Paris and either eighteen eighty six or eighteen eighty seven and dropped out of school fairly young when he started working with a pimp. Yeah, he helped the pimp find girls for business, and the guy helped him get you know, rare, flashy clothes and learned to fight and all that until the pimp was shot and started out there where their working relationship ended. And that's when he moved to the United States. He was about nineteen or twenty. All he had with him was a dollar in his pocket, and so he started working as a manual laborer and then is a dishwasher until he took up entrepreneurship and he was really fantastic at it. Apparently he sold all sorts of strange inventions, like a toothpaste that removed ink stains, and then he went on to become an efficiency expert and he worked with some huge companies like DuPont. Yeah, he invents the Bideaux system, and employers and managers love this thing. Employees and unions hate it because basically it establishes a Bideaux unit, which is how much work you can do in a minute, and if you complete sixty Bideaux units in an hour, well then good job. You've done your job adequately and you can keep it. So we're really hoping our boss won't pick up on that because I don't even know what a Bideaux unit. How many podcasts do we do in a Bideaux unit, Katie, I have no idea. But Bideaux made millions from this venture, so he was really living the American dream. He'd shown up as an immigrant with a dollar in his pocket and now he was a millionaire, hanging out with people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and working with big companies. Do Yeah. But the money and the famous friends weren't enough for Bideaux, and he needed adventure in he was the first man to cross the Libyan Desert. He'd sailed the South Pacific, you know, hunted, big game, did all those thrilling, adrenaline rush types of activities. But then he had a big idea. He's going to go through the Rockies and the Keen Mountains to the Pacific from Edmonton, Alberta. So this is a big trip all the way to Telegraph Creek, British Columbia, and we've gotten different numbers for just how long that was, depending on what we're reading, um anywhere from kilometers to eighteen hundred. So if you've got a more solid number, feel free to send it to us. But this trail hadn't been attempted since the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie did it in seventee. Much of it had no roads at all and was unmapped. But Bidou said, it's fun to do things others call impossible. So Bidow brings along his wife Fern and his mistress, the Italian Swiss Countess Belogna Kisa. The wife and the mistress, it sounds like an awkward trip already, but he also had with him a bunch of other people, a Swiss skiing instructors, some cowboys, a dental student, a bush pilot, geologist, guides, a surveyor, his pet fox terrier, a gamekeeper and a mechanic, and lots of cameramen, including Floyd Crosby, who eventually goes on to be the cinematographer for High News and win an Oscar for it. They also brought along with them five Citron half tracks. There were these all terrain vehicles, that had wheels in front, but caterpillar tracks and back, kind of like a tank. They also brought along a hundred pack horses and fifteen tons of supplies, some of which Sarah and I had already mentioned. The champagne, candied fruits, French novels, truffles, silk pajamas, flatwear, one pack horse that just carries Mrs Bideaux Fern her shoes for park As, Devonshire cream, and chicken livers, which I think that's the one item I might leave off this list. I don't know. I like my my livers. But we were saying this reminded of of the Birke and Wills Expedition podcast and all the bizarre things they brought them unnecessary arry for your rustic trek across the wilderness. But on July six they set off for this big trip with all of their stuff. They've got a champagne breakfast and a big send off in Edmonton in the rain, which also starts off with two limousines escorting them. So this is not just any safari. Well, they obviously ditched the limos pretty quickly because the roads that they're traveling on are made of something that the cowboys called gumbo. It's more like clay than mud, and it sticks to everything. It's impossible to get through, and it's kind of like a bog. They actually call it muskeg. And these wonderful citrons who are supposed to be, you know, so fabulous and don't actually do so great on the terrain. They have to haul them through a swamp. They're so slow their gas guzzlers, so things aren't proceeding quite as blithely as you might wish. And it just rains and rains and rains. He should just imagine this rain for the rest of the podcast. That's how I feel in Georgia Ray now. So they're not gonna lie. They do make it through eight hundred kilometers of mud roads though, so you know, despite their difficulties, they make it through. But that's the point when they hit the wilderness and there are no roads anymore, there are no maps. They're on the round. This is Monteney, British Columbia, and it's the last outpost from this Depression relief cut trail. So it's the edge of the wilderness. And Bide turns out to be tough to deal with, perhaps not surprising considering who he is, but he likes, you know, everything done his way. He likes it done right then, even if that's not the way it needs to go. And when he was called on it, he said, this is the sort of thing you must be prepared to put up with when you pack a millionaire through the wilderness, which you know, I guess he had a point. I'm not gonna lie. That kind of reminds me of Gilligan's Island. That's exactly what I was thinking too. Um Bdoll fires his radio operator to which makes his team mad, understandably because without the radio, the surveyor can't get a Greenwich time signal and do his job. Bidous come back for that was that they never heard anything from the radio other than the fact that John Dillinger had been shot sore and again. The citrons are even worse in the mountains, are always getting stuck, they're slow, they're eating all that fuel. They decide, you know what, we're gonna pull a plug on this whole thing. It hasn't worked out for us, but we're not going to do it just any old way, and to go out with a bang. So they get Crosby to start recording and they send one of these vehicles down the river on a raft and the idea is that it would bang into this cliff that had been rigged with dynamite and then explode and you would have the spectacular cinematic Yeah, it didn't really work out. The dynamite did not explode and instead of just kept on going down that river where a rancher found it and drove it for the next thirty years. So not a bad vehicle. And two others were pushed off cliffs and two were abandoned. One ends up in a Saskatchewan museum. You can apparently see it today if you want to. I want to get us ends for the Champagne Safar, I do want to. Bidou told The New York Times that he'd lost the vehicles in a freak accident, which I mean it was a freakish incident, not a freak out. So now they've just got their horses, and around August four, their hundred horses crossed the Arctic Halfway River and then they all come down with half rot, which is a really really painful thing for a horse to go through. And apparently from what I've read, if I'm wrong, please let me know, once like a whole herd of horses comes down with it, you're pretty much screwed there. You can treat them with antibiotics, but once it spreads through the whole thing, you're done. One. Of course, they wouldn't have had antibiotics with them, No, they did have trouffles tobiotics. Now, Um, by September eighth, they crossed the Cudata River and toast with champagne. Because what do you do when you've abandoned your vehicles and your horses are sick. But this is they'll blown a little bit out of proportion. They have a case of champagne which is twelve bottles and actually one is sadly broken. But still just something about tasting with champagne at this dire point, when it just became one of those moments by which the entire expedition was known, when people were trying to paint him as being ridiculous, It's like, well, look what they did with the champagne. I don't know if that's fair or not. I guess we'll see. Because in mid September they start shooting their horses. Um, they're exhausted, they're hungry. They started running out of horse feed, and of course they all have half rot and they start shooting two or three horses a day, which takes its toll on everyone in the expedition. It was very difficult. Yeah, And it also gets the wolves attention, and so packs start following them and they don't have any fresh meat for themselves. Things aren't going well, and they finally get to the point where they decide they're not going to make it. They're going to turn around go back home, even though there's several hundred kilometers from where they wanted to be, So they hired canoe and head back. The funny thing is that when Bideaux returned, he tried to paint the expedition as a success, but the public's reaction was more along the lines of okay, so you spent two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for what, Like, what did we get out of this? It was a trip, right, And after the trip he got into some some sketchy business. For one thing, he arranged for Hitler and the Duke of Windsor to meet, which we talked about in our other podcast. Yeah, and he did business with some pretty shady characters and um, yeah, any any Nazi connection during this time is they're disturbing. He worked a lot with France's Vichy government. He did one weird experiment and roke four where instead of money, he suggested they all use a unit called the backs. There would be no confined In his head, what that unit, You're going back to the bidou units. There was no commerce, and he thought of it, I guess his capital as within communism. He called it the theory of equivalism, and some have said it was a reaction to to his Bideux system. It really bothered him how many people thought his system was cruel to workers, and this was his his answer to that and more utopian idea. Yeah, I mean, especially from somebody who's coming from such humble beginnings, you can imagine how it would bother him that he was hated by the working man exactly. Some of the shady business dealings we were talking about too. He may have given financial information to the Nazis about the companies he worked for, So I mean, remember these companies that we're talking about, DuPont and Ge I mean huge American companies. Um, And the Nazi connection goes even further. There's a bust of him shown with those of Hitler and Goring, so not a company you want to keep Master Bidoux. He also got in trouble for something we have yet to verify. Sarah and I keep finding different accounts some sort of trans Saharan pipeline, either for we found different things, edible peanut oil, um actual oil, or perhaps a railroad. But either way, it was to be able to transport things to German occupied lands. And kind of hope in it's the edible peanut oil because that would be more interesting. Yes, but he was seen in North Africa drinking brandy with a German officer and on December five, Nino he was arrested as a collaborator, and because he's an American citizen, he goes on trial for treason in Miami, and while he's awaiting trial, he kills himself with peano barbital on February fourteenth, Valentine's Day in nine. This is where it gets a little crazy again, because he left a very cryptic note saying that he couldn't tell the truth about what happened because of powerful people, and said that he was a good American and that he loved his wife. And some think that maybe he was murdered because he wouldn't talk about the wartime activities of certain industrialists, or because he couldn't talk about the wartime activities of these very powerful people. So we have a little history mystery ei there. Um he's ultimately buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And uh. One other sort of strange little factoid about this is some people say that the Citron half tracks were being tested from military use. So if you know anything about this kind of stuff, please send us an email at history podcast at how stuffworks dot com. From what Sarah and I were reading, it sounded like this was a particularly compelling period of Canadian history, or you know, just one of those fun stories that people know. So if you know anything more about it than we do, drop us a line. Years after this whole thing went down, film footage from all of these filmmakers who are along in the trip was actually found and a documentary was made. So Katie and I know, I know, we're in s did in and checking this out explosion, and it turned out the whole thing wasn't awash. Some of the information from this trip was used to make the Alaska Highway, so it did indeed have a purpose besides the fantastic title of the Champagne's Ring. But I think that's about it, and I guess it's time for a listener mail now. Sarah and I got a couple of corrections on our Haitian Revolution podcast about Tucson Luberture and the first one is from Doug, who might be my favorite because he starts off with small correction pun intended, and we do love a pun. He says, during Napoleon's autopsy, it was concluded that he was five ft two inches. These measurements were, however, given in French feet and measure that was slightly larger than a standard foot. Napoleon in current terms was about five feet six And we got another comment on the blog from David Markham, who is president of the International Napoleon Anxiety, who said the same thing. So we're sorry for saying that Napoleon was short. I would, however, like to say that he is shorter than the both of us. So short time. That's the story and we're sticking to it. So if you'd like to learn more about the Champagne Safari and all sorts of interesting adventure stories, come to our website at www dot how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out this stuff you missed in the History Class blog on the how stuff works dot com home page