What was the Champagne Safari?

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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

(00:20):
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

(00:41):
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

(01:03):
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

(01:25):
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

(01:46):
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,

(02:07):
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

(02:27):
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,

(02:50):
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

(03:11):
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

(03:31):
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

(03:53):
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

(04:16):
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

(04:39):
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

(05:01):
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

(05:22):
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.

(05:44):
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,

(06:05):
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

(06:26):
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

(06:47):
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,

(07:10):
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

(07:31):
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

(07:53):
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.

(08:13):
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

(08:34):
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

(08:56):
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,

(09:17):
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

(09:37):
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

(09:58):
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,

(10:19):
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

(10:39):
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

(11:01):
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

(11:23):
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

(11:44):
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

(12:05):
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

(12:27):
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

(12:50):
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

(13:12):
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

(13:34):
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.

(13:57):
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,

(14:19):
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

(14:39):
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

(15:00):
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

(15:25):
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