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3. Memories

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Though largely ignored for almost a century, the Lewis and Clark expedition began to take on new meaning and attract new attention in the late 1890s. In the process, this neglected historical subject was transformed into an epic quest that has never since lost its central place in the nation's collective memory. The expedition has become an origin story of the first order that invariably portrays Lewis and Clark as prophets of the future, as if the history of national development were a natural occurrence and the two explorers simply on a journey into the future—with each group of commemorators as their chosen destination.

Lewis and Clark, and Sacagawea even more than the coleaders, were honored in the first decades of the twentieth century with the publication of several books about the expedition, a new edition of the journals, the holding of a successful exposition, and the placement of numerous statues and monuments throughout the country. In every instance, the expedition was celebrated as the foremost symbol of a new century's faith in material progress and overseas empire. By mid-century, the desire to commemorate the expedition with monuments and celebrations was replaced by an increased fascination with the expedition route itself. “The Trail” became a sort of national pilgrimage route, a development that reflected the rise in automobility, along with postwar prosperity and a growing middle-class interest in outdoor recreation. Lewis and Clark's ability to capture the spirit of every age that sought to commemorate them also made the expedition a powerful symbol for critiquing the values it represents. For this reason, the expedition has also served as the subject for potent counter narratives about American progress and development. The three essays in this section speak to these issues in various ways, but all remind us of how memories of Lewis and Clark have often taken on more significance than the expedition itself—and in the process have a great deal to tell us about the way national identity is defined and contested.

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7. “We are not dealing
entirely with the past”

Americans Remember Lewis & Clark

John Spencer

Are we getting too much of Lewis and Clark? The Germans are said to have complained because the Goethe admirers have edited the very shaving-papers of their idol and even the contents of his waste baskets. … For our part we are not so minded. In the coming of these heroes the eyes of intelligent men first beheld the nobler features of the beautiful land that is our mother when at last the veil of mystery began to depart from them. From no achievement of our history have flowed consequences more important.

Book review, The Nation, 1904

While we propose that this exposition shall be primarily for the purpose of commemorating the Lewis and Clark exploration expedition, we are not dealing entirely with the past.

Charles Fulton,

U.S. senator from Oregon,1903

The importance the Nation's reviewer attached to Lewis and Clark is striking, considering that books by or about “these heroes” had been hard to come by for most of the nineteenth century. Their route remained obscure to most Americans, and public celebrations of their expedition were apparently unknown. But all of that had changed by the time the reviewer wrote in 1904, a year of centennial celebration of Lewis and Clark. Americans had not completely forgotten the explorers before 1900, but they now remembered them in new ways and new media, including popular literature, reprints of the original expedition journals, and a world's fair. Lewis and Clark have been American icons ever since, with the bicentennial of the expedition providing yet another spike in their visibility. In recent years the historian Stephen Ambrose has written a best-seller about them, the film-maker Ken Burns has produced a popular documentary film about them, and politicians, historical societies, and history buffs have planned a multitude of public events to celebrate them.^[1]

Some of the themes of these commemorations have held constant for

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more than a century. One is a fascination with the details of the journey itself and with the endurance and heroism of Lewis and Clark—their “undaunted courage,” to take the title of Ambrose's book as the most familiar recent example. Another is the didactic importance of the expedition, which enthusiasts have seen as containing larger meanings and a wealth of “lessons,” especially for young people.

It is striking, however, amid the ongoing fixation on legacies and lessons in Lewis and Clark, how wildly those meanings have fluctuated over time. At the turn of the twentieth century, publishers, writers, historians, artists, and promoters of world's fairs made Lewis and Clark into standard-bearers for the industrialism, imperialism, and racism that permeated late nineteenth-century society. These centennial images were not entirely new—Thomas Jefferson's expansionism and ethnocentrism were at the heart of the expedition from the first—but they did reflect the special concerns of the moment.^[2] A new social order—more hierarchical, more dominated by corporate power, and more focused on the spread of white, Anglo-Saxon supremacy on a world scale—had taken shape after the Civil War, and proponents of that new order invoked Lewis and Clark to justify it. Commemorations of the expedition offered a chance to link the new society to a more fluid, democratic past. In the same way, the social and political upheavals of the 1960s have reverberated into our own time to give us a bicentennial Lewis and Clark who symbolize exactly the opposite of what they stood for a hundred years ago: environmentalism and respect for nature instead of industrial development, multiculturalism instead of racism and imperial conquest. What remains constant is the way in which ideas about the past exploits of Lewis and Clark are shaped by present conflicts over economic growth and inequality, cultural diversity, and the proper role of the United States in the world.

Historians have noted that a golden age of Lewis and Clark scholarship since 1962 has resulted in more varied and thoughtful images of the expedition. These scholars argue that while “popular” or “folk” images of Lewis and Clark were long plagued by distortions and a neglect of such stories as the scientific achievements of the expedition, the gap between those images and a more sober, “literate-elite” tradition is closing.^[3] This characterization is certainly accurate to a point, but it must be qualified. Popular and scholarly views of Lewis and Clark were not always so different; both were shaped by the same cultural environment at any given historical moment. What is more, distorted or oversimplified images of Lewis and Clark are not only inescapable; they are revealing. Historical commemorations of Lewis and Clark inevitably say as much about the rememberers as the explorers themselves. They provide a fascinating index of changes in American society and culture over time, reminding us that, as Senator Fulton noted in 1903, “we are not dealing entirely with the past.”^[4]

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Efforts to immortalize Lewis and Clark began as soon as their journey ended in September 1806, but the explorers did not linger in the public mind during the nineteenth century. The leading account of the expedition during that time was Nicholas Biddle's History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clarke (1814), compiled in consultation with William Clark after Meriwether Lewis died without completing a manuscript of his own. Biddle edited the voluminous field journals into a triumphant tale of national progress, employing what one scholar has called the “language of adventure and empire.”^[5] But the original print run of 1,417 copies did not sell well. It was poorly timed, appearing nearly a decade after the expedition had ended and competing accounts had begun to circulate, and it did not offer a clear case for the importance and success of the expedition.^[6] Jefferson's main goal had been for Lewis and Clark to find a trans continental waterway—a “passage to India”—that would facilitate the growth and expansion of the United States. Careful Biddle readers discovered no such passage. The president also meant for the expedition to advance science by making detailed observations of the flora, fauna, and native peoples along the way. Biddle edited that material out of his narrative. Meanwhile, as “adventurers” Lewis and Clark did not capture the nineteenth-century imagination the way Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, and a host of other folk heroes did. The Biddle edition soon went out of print.^[7]

The work was reprinted several times in the 1840s and 1850s, the first time Americans rediscovered Lewis and Clark for topical reasons.^[8] During those decades, proponents of “manifest destiny” saw in Lewis and Clark a compelling justification for their territorial claims in the Far West. In 1845, the year President James Polk sounded the cry of “Fifty-four Forty or fight,” one commentator wrote, “from this expedition … our claim to Oregon receives not a little accession of strength.”^[9] Five years later, after the United States had won that claim and the Mexican War as well, another writer celebrated Jefferson and his expedition for “anticipat[ing] the day when the energy and enterprise of American citizens would span the continent, and republican institutions diffuse themselves to the shores of the Pacific.”^[10]

Such commentary, however, was more the exception than the rule in the nineteenth century. In 1876, as the United States celebrated its centennial, the expedition scarcely appeared in histories of the nation.^[11] The Biddle edition of 1814 still stood as the standard account of the expedition, but it was hard to find. The original journal books, today a priceless artifact, languished in obscurity in Philadelphia. In 1893 a natural scientist named Elliot Coues did publish a major revision of the Biddle text, annotating it with copious amounts of scientific material from the journals.^[12] He did not alter the basic narrative, though, and the costly, three-volume edition apparently had little impact on public knowledge of Lewis and Clark; among major periodicals, only The Nation reviewed it.^[13]

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As the centennial of the expedition approached, however, Americans began to celebrate Lewis and Clark with something of the fervor Thomas Jefferson had envisioned. Popular accounts of the expedition proliferated as never before. A handful of publishers offered reprints of the 1814 edition. The journals themselves were slated for publication for the first time ever, in an eight-volume edition to be edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Portland, Oregon began planning a federally subsidized world's fair to commemorate the explorers. It was clear, in some of the talk surrounding these developments, that Americans had not completely forgotten Lewis and Clark in the nineteenth century. One booster of the Portland exposition, Senator Charles Fulton of Oregon, called their journey “familiar history to the American public.”^[14] A publisher of one of the new Biddle reprints wrote that “few names are more familiar upon the tongue than Lewis and Clark.” Still, that publisher noted that “a full and adequate account of what they did has long been almost unattainable. The published work of 1814 has quite disappeared from the market.”^[15] The senator and the publisher, each in his own field of endeavor, were among those who pushed the names and the story of Lewis and Clark into the national spotlight at the turn of the twentieth century.

Why did Lewis and Clark resonate for Americans at the turn of the twentieth century? The fact of the centennial anniversary was part of it, but that alone did not explain why the expedition became one of the most celebrated stories in American history. The country was ripe for Lewis and Clark at the turn of the century. To understand their centennial revival, and the themes that emerged from it, we must examine the social and cultural climate in which it took place.

In the decades prior to the centennial many Americans came to feel that the confident, westward-moving democracy of a former time—Lewis's and Clark's time—was disintegrating. In 1893, at Chicago's Columbian World Exposition, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner crystallized those fears by announcing the “closing” of the nation's frontier, which he defined as the disappearance of “free land” in the West.^[16] For Turner and his audience, the news was not just about territory filling up; it was about the future of the United States as a democratic republic. Turner conceived of the frontier in Jeffersonian terms, as a safety valve for Americans who had run out of opportunity in the settled part of the country. It made the United States different from Europe with its multitudes of degraded city dwellers and tenant farmers. It was the basis of America's “manifest destiny.” Jefferson had hoped the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition would lay the groundwork for a thousand years of agrarian expansion—an “empire

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of liberty.” Less than a century later, Turner lamented the end of the frontier experience in American history, a turning point that one historian has described as the “end of American exceptionalism.”^[17]

Turner's “frontier thesis” was dubious; historians have pointed out that the West was far less democratic than he believed and that the frontier did not really “close” in the 1890s.^[18] Still, Turner had good reason to feel that his country was at a crossroads. The Jeffersonian ideal—a nation of self-sufficient, self-governing farmers—was a distant dream. Capital was concentrated in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population. The gap between rich and poor never had been wider. Nothing symbolized and fueled these trends more powerfully than the railroad corporations, and nowhere was their impact felt more powerfully than in the Far West. After the Civil War the railroads fueled the transformation of a land of homesteaders into a land of agribusiness and industrial mining. Prices fell and small farmers suffered as the railroads facilitated large-scale production for national and international markets.

The class conflicts of the post–Civil War period came to a climax in the 1890s, one of the most turbulent decades in American history. In 1893, farm debt and a reckless overexpansion of the railroads were among the key factors that sent the nation spiraling into the worst economic crisis it had ever known. The panic lasted five years, but the situation hit rock bottom in 1894, when bands of desperate, unemployed men like “Coxey's Army” crossed the continent on foot and in hijacked trains to demand federal relief in Washington, D.C. A strike wave involving hundreds of thousands of workers, notably those of the Pullman Palace Car Company, paralyzed the nation. The administration of Grover Cleveland put down many of the rebellions with the help of federal courts and troops, often resulting in violence; one of the worst incidents occurred on the Fourth of July, in Chicago, when thirteen people died and dozens were wounded in a violent confrontation between the U.S. Army and the striking Pullman workers. Meanwhile, the People's Party (also known as the Populists), founded in 1892 by economically strapped farmers, mounted a serious challenge to the two major parties. In the final decade of a century that began with Jefferson sending his Corps of Discovery into a land of unknown possibility, the nation faced a crisis over the apparent demise of its democratic promise.

That crisis shaped America's cultural climate in the years leading up to the Lewis and Clark centennial but so too did the robust recovery and the return to territorial expansion, this time overseas, that followed the depression and rang in a new century. President William McKinley presided over an upturn in the business cycle and conquests in Cuba and the Philippines after his election in 1896, but it was a member of his administration who, more than anyone else, shaped and symbolized the jingoistic new era. That

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man was Theodore Roosevelt, who became McKinley's vice president in 1900 and succeeded him after the president was assassinated the following year.

Roosevelt was the only New Yorker to become president, but his identity was bound up with the West and the meaning of the frontier. Before becoming a politician, he explored those interests as a historian, in his multi-volume study The Winning of the West. Roosevelt, like Frederick Jackson Turner, was alarmed at the “closing of the frontier,” but for somewhat different reasons. His frontier was not a tide of anonymous farmers steadily converting the wilderness into democratic settlements; it was individual, Anglo-Saxon heroes being put to the test by a violent race war, and winning. Consequently, he was less concerned in the 1890s about the future of democratic opportunity than about the fate of the Anglo-Saxon leadership class of which he was a member. Together with record immigration and declining birthrates among white Protestants (what Roosevelt called “race suicide”), the end of the frontier experience threatened to diminish the potency of the Anglo-Saxon elite just as it faced a new challenge: ruling and bringing order to a modern, industrial society.^[19]

Turner was more influential among historians, but Roosevelt made the greater mark on his times by ascending to the presidency and pursuing policies designed to usher in a new era of national greatness. One aspect of his program was progressivism, which to Roosevelt meant a rejection of unchecked corporate power but an acceptance, nonetheless, of the hierarchical society embodied by the modern corporation. Another Roosevelt emphasis had to do with preserving the salutary influence of the frontier, by preserving both its history and select portions of its wilderness, where men might continue to learn the lessons of what Roosevelt called “the strenuous life.” And a third, and perhaps most important, element of Roosevelt's pursuit of national greatness was his vigorous extension of McKinley's imperial aggressions in Latin America and Asia—in effect, an extension of the western frontier overseas, under the same banners of white Anglo-Saxon supremacy and market expansion.^[20]

The Lewis and Clark centennial thus unfolded in a climate of blustering nationalism layered over depression and doomsaying. Some Americans were dismayed by the transformation of Jefferson's simple republic into a corporatized, imperial nation, while a good many others—notably Theodore Roosevelt and his followers—praised that development as progress. Somewhat ironically, the latter camp would make Lewis and Clark, figures from the bygone era of Jefferson, into icons of its Progressive vision.

The Biddle image of Lewis and Clark held firm at the turn of the twentieth century; centennial celebrants still portrayed the expedition as a heroic

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“adventure” in the service of national expansion. But, as in Roosevelt's treatment of the “winning of the West,” they cast that romantic western tale as a prelude to, and justification for, specific developments of the moment: modernization and the extension of “Anglo-Saxon” power overseas.

In January 1904 the U.S. Senate Committee on Industrial Expositions, calling the Lewis and Clark expedition “one of the most interesting and important events in the history of this country,” announced its support for the most visible commemoration of the era: the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition and Oriental Fair in Portland, Oregon.^[21] Actually, no one in Congress had much interest in Lewis and Clark; the bill might not have passed without the intervention of President Roosevelt, an admirer of Lewis and Clark and, perhaps more important, a friend of the fair organizer and Oregonian editor Harvey Scott.^[22] Many of the Oregon sponsors of the exposition were not primarily interested in history, either. Like Philadelphia's centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 or Chicago's Columbian exposition of 1893, the Lewis and Clark fair was about the future more than the past, about commerce more than history. What Congress, the president, and the fair organizers did care a great deal about was “mastery of the Pacific,” as Scott described the imperatives of Pacific Rim trade, and Lewis and Clark turned out to be convenient symbols for that enterprise.^[23]

Congressional debates over appropriations for the fair showed how the present could shape perceptions of the past and how the past could justify policies in the present—especially the pursuit of empire in Asia. Roosevelt, speaking to Congress in support of the fair, praised the Lewis and Clark expedition for “making ready the way for our ascendancy in the commerce of the greatest of oceans.”^[24] Senator Fulton of Oregon noted that Lewis and Clark had “suffered terribly, yet uncomplainingly, for they realized that they were battling for an empire.” And, while the fair was “primarily” for the purpose of commemorating their journey, when Fulton spoke of “empire” he was thinking very much of current foreign policy in Asia. The United States, he said, had assumed “great and grave obligations and responsibilities in the Far East and it now concerns our honor as it concerns our interest that we shall discharge those obligations and meet those responsibilities wisely.”^[25] One of Fulton's fellow Oregonians in the House, Binger Hermann, was more direct: “The Pacific Ocean,” he said, “is the place of battle for the commercial supremacy of the world.”^[26]

The quest for a commercial empire governed the presentation of the Lewis and Clark story on the fairgrounds, too. The most revealing historical image at the Expo was also the most ubiquitous: Lewis and Clark striding triumphantly into the Pacific Ocean toward the setting sun, accompanied by a flag-draped female figure variously described by contemporaries as “Progress” or “Columbia” (Figure 4). Appearing on posters, maps, tickets,

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and other memorabilia, this image of the next frontier needed little explanation; the fair had an unmistakable “Oriental” theme in its title as well as its exhibits. Most of those exhibits displayed Asian products, but one, the popular Igorrote Village exhibit, displayed people: head-hunting, dog-eating Filipino tribesmen whose “savage” appearance and practices helped legitimize Roosevelt's recent annexation of the Philippines.^[27] Special events reinforced the same message; on one occasion, the fair thrilled nighttime visitors with a reenactment of the battle of Manila Bay. For anyone who missed the symbolism of these displays, a large banner greeted fairgoers with the message “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” The nation that had mourned the closing of its frontier barely a decade before had taken up a new arena of westward expansion. Yet fairgoers learned that the American military and economic advance into the Pacific Rim was not so

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new after all; it was, according to the banners and iconography, an extension of the hundred-year-old expedition of Lewis and Clark.

Promoters also invoked Lewis and Clark as precursors of industrial progress close to home, in the Pacific Northwest. The Lewis and Clark Journal, launched to publicize the fair and the region, trumpeted the Expo as a “timekeeper of development” in northwestern industry since Lewis and Clark and cited railroad expansion as the first step toward an even brighter future.^[28] A special “Centennial Number” of Leslie's Weekly revealed the poetic flights of fancy taken by some publications in their praise for a century of commercial progress:

	When Clark and Lewis first beheld
	The rippling Willamette,
	The virgin forest round them lay
	with many a snare beset.
	Before them rose Mt. Helen's snows,
	Untrodden, cold, and pale,
	The only path was here and there
	A narrow Indian trail

	Still seaward rolls the Willamette
	With waters bright and clear,
	Still folded in eternal snows
	The mountain peaks appear;
	But now a splendid city rears
	Its roofs to meet the morn,
	And writes its name around the world
	In timber, wheat, and corn.[29]

Promoters even celebrated the Pacific Coast as the latest frontier safety valve for excess population, Turner's 1893 pronouncement notwithstanding. In his opening-day address to dignitaries and fairgoers, the president of the exposition commission, Jefferson Myers, announced that further development of the Northwest's “abundance of industries” would provide “homes of peace and plenty to the people from the over-crowded portions of the country”—a comment that took on pointed significance in light of a concurrent report, in the Pacific Monthly's fair coverage, of a Chicago teamsters’ strike that had turned into “little less than a social war.”^[30]

Lewis and Clark to some extent were the vanguard of economic development in the Far West, and that development was in some ways a fulfillment of Jefferson's vision of an “empire of liberty.” But the fair's confident proclamations masked underlying conflicts and contradictions. It was a curious distortion to wrap the railroads and other industrial corporations in the mantle of Lewis and Clark; these were the very economic forces that undermined the agrarian ideals of Jefferson's day and that spurred the populist revolt of the late 1800s.

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But distortion was exactly the point. Lewis and Clark boosters used the past to serve their needs in the present—in this case to foster national unity at a time of turbulence. Economic boosterism belied class conflicts right on the fairgrounds: several strikes occurred during construction of the temporary buildings. The exposition directors, hoping to dampen labor strife and inspire workers with the magnificence of the grounds and exhibits, declared a Workingmen's Day. Employers throughout the city let their workers take the day off and attend the fair, where they enjoyed reduced admission. As the Oregon Journal remarked, no doubt echoing the sentiments of Portland's business elite, “the working people and their families need to see the exposition at considerable length. It will do them good.”^[31] By the time it closed, the Oregonian believed the fair had done a great deal of good, indeed. The paper's editorial page, reflecting on the “lesson” of the exposition, captured the strained exuberance of the time: “America is not an aggregate of little semi-hostile communities antagonistic in feeling and welfare,” the paper declared. “We belong to a united and homogeneous Nation, one in aspiration, one in feeling and one in interest. There are no bad Americans. We are all good; and the better we are acquainted the more we like each other.^[32]

The Portland extravaganza, despite its heavy commercial emphasis, did fuel a rediscovery of Lewis and Clark history. Having a major exposition named in their honor pushed the explorers into a national spotlight; they became a current event. Writers and editors took the centennial as an occasion to recount the expedition, and when they did, they emphasized the same themes of imperial and industrial progress that were so evident at the fair itself.

Numerous popular accounts of the expedition appeared after 1900, and most praised the expedition as a grand “adventure.” Current Lewis and Clark scholars understandably wince at the overblown romanticism of this literature, but it did strike a powerful chord in the cultural context of the early twentieth century, a time that one reviewer of a new Biddle edition referred to as “days of historical romances and adventure stories.”^[33] America was in the throes of becoming a modern society—urban, bureaucratic, corporate—and writers on Lewis and Clark spoke to a nostalgia for a simpler time.^[34] Sounding very much like Theodore Roosevelt and his celebration of “the strenuous life” as an antidote to decadence and over civilization, they enthused over “hazardous adventures” in “wild nature.” “Those were hero days,” wrote one, “and they produced hero-types, who flung themselves against the impossible—and conquered it.”^[35] One Biddle reviewer quietly lamented his own unstrenuous life, writing that “the joy of exploring unknown portions of the earth's surface was a joy of our ancestors, but little for ourselves, and almost none at all for our descendants. … Since then,” he

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continued, “there are so few modern explorers telling of new adventures, in new books, we quiet home-stayers must read the old books again.” Still, this “home-stayer” held out hope that he might find deliverance from the monotony of modern city life in the “day by day narrative of the explorer, telling of his strife with nature in her most unpleasant hours.” Such stories appealed to “that portion of the wild man which, deep down within most of us city-bred men, still calls us to the woods.”^[36]

Wilderness imagery, as an antidote to effete urban life, went hand in hand with tales of racial violence and conquest. Of the many books that emphasized these themes at the turn of the century, one of the most popular was Eva Emery Dye's The Conquest. Dye, a Portland author and suffragette, incorporated the travels of Lewis and Clark into a larger account of the “pressing back of the red race.”^[37] With its emphasis on racial conquest, her self-proclaimed “Iliad of the West” must have pleased Theodore Roosevelt, who became president the year before it was published.

The Conquest and books like it were not simply backward glances at the favorite themes of Roosevelt the historian (that is, manliness and Anglo-Saxon conquest); they may as well have been polemics for the policies of Roosevelt the president. Dye's account of the past also celebrated imperial ambition in the present. “Five trans continental lines bear the rushing armies westward, ever westward, into the sea,” she wrote. “Bewildered a moment they pause, they turn to the Conquest of the Poles and the Tropics. The Frontiersman? He is building Nome City under the arctic; he is hewing the forests of the Philippines.”^[38] Dye was not the only author to present Lewis and Clark as act one in a great drama of overseas empire building. Agnes Laut's Pathfinders of the West put Lewis and Clark in a pantheon of “heroes who carved empire out of wilderness.”^[39] A writer for The Dial enthused that “all that has come since—the great conquest of 1898, Alaska, Hawaii, Porto Rico [sic], the Philippines, Panama—are but the sequence of that immortal journey in 1804–06.”^[40]

Asia had been on Jefferson's mind a century before, and Lewis and Clark did launch the United States’ expansion across North America. But to describe Lewis and Clark as “conquerors” was a stretch, considering the diplomatic nature of the expedition. What is more, to portray them as imperialists was a politically charged act. Expansion was a matter of intense partisan controversy, as in Jefferson's time, with Democrats in Congress denouncing the overseas ambitions of the Republican presidents McKinley and Roosevelt. It is hard to define a cause and effect relationship between administration policies and the imperialist themes of books like The Conquest, but it is safe to say the political climate of 1898 influenced the imperialistic tone of those histories, and vice versa.

The romantic, imperialistic image of Lewis and Clark was not simply a

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“popular” view, or a product of crass commercialism; it was standard practice among academic historians, too. James Ronda has noted that Reuben Gold Thwaites, while predicting that his publication of the complete field journals would lead to new understandings of Lewis and Clark, offered in his own writings “nothing more than a vision of the expedition as an agent of a triumphant Manifest Destiny.”^[41] To some extent the same was true of Thwaites's friend Frederic Young, a history professor at the University of Oregon and a leading booster of Portland's centennial fair. Young exemplified a university-based historical profession that had begun to coalesce around ideals of objectivity and science, but he and his colleagues could sound as partisan as any politician or popular novelist. In 1903, Young pointed to Theodore Roosevelt's assessment of Lewis and Clark in The Winning of the West—that they had opened “the door into the heart of the West”—and suggested that an updated version, based on the recent events of Roosevelt's own presidency, might say they had “made inevitable the American mastery of the Pacific and American supremacy among the nations of the world.”^[42]

The imperialim age of Lew isand Clark not only shows how current events molded the telling of history; it shows how American concepts of empire and expansionism had turned upside down. For much of the nineteenth century Americans had conceived of “empire” in Jeffersonian terms, as the agrarian “empire of liberty.” From the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to the huge territorial acquisitions of the 1840s, westward expansion was celebrated by Democrats—and disparaged by Federalists and Whigs—as a way to build and preserve a republic of yeoman farmers. Expansion and empire took on a more industrial image, however, as railroads transformed the agricultural economy of the Middle and Far West. Lewis and Clark commemorations revealed this change in the making. Centennial treatments of the explorers celebrated industrialization at home much as they did imperialism abroad. Indeed, the two themes were closely linked.

Jefferson's idealized yeoman farmer still showed up in turn-of-the-century writing on Lewis and Clark—many authors saw Roosevelt's “adventurers” and Turner's tide of pioneers as two aspects of the same story—but he did not necessarily symbolize the agrarian ideal. One writer, for example, praised Lewis and Clark as “world conquerors” who “blazed the way for thousands of sturdy homeseekers who soon followed in their wake, building homes, cities, manufacturing plants, railroads, and telegraph lines where once had roamed the lordly bison.”^[43] Here, Jefferson's “sturdy home-seekers” had evolved into the builders of the very cities and factories that Jefferson and many of his Jacksonian heirs had abhorred. The ideological shift from agrarian to industrial empire was not entirely new; John Gast's famous 1873 painting American Progress, for example, presented more or less the same glorification of railroads and telegraph wire. But this writer,

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in referring to Lewis and Clark as “world conquerors,” linked industrial and imperial progress in a way that was specific to the early twentieth century.

Historically, the relationship between railroads and the “sturdy home-seeker” had been anything but peaceful, and in the 1890s, especially, populists raged at the locomotive and all it symbolized. But this critical perspective did not appear at the Lewis and Clark fair or in the burgeoning literature on the explorers. On the contrary, perhaps the most widely reviewed book on Lewis and Clark at the turn of the century also was the most enthusiastic about the railroads and the industrial development of the West. In The Trail of Lewis and Clark: 1804–1904, the amateur historian Olin Wheeler inaugurated a genre and theme that remains popular to this day: retracing the trail and using the Lewis and Clark journals as a benchmark for changes in the landscape. Wheeler brought along several professional photographers—a new approach to illustrating Lewis and Clark—and cited their work as proof of a century of steady American progress.

Wheeler was no stranger to economic boosterism; he also worked for the Northern Pacific Railway, editing the promotional publication Wonderland.^[44] In fact, The Trail of Lewis and Clark originated as one of those shorter books. One of Wheeler's main purposes in writing it, he said, was to “show, without undue prominence, the agency of the locomotive and the steam-boat in developing the vast region that Lewis and Clark made known to us.”^[45] In a 1902 Biddle edition, James Hosmer, a historian and editor, had taken up the same theme, marveling at the tremendous influence of the railroads in Lewis and Clark country; the “New West,” he wrote, “may rightly be called the child of the locomotive.”^[46] Specifically, he might have called it the child of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railways; their Northwestern lines, completed in the 1880s, more or less paralleled the explorers’ route.

Hosmer hinted at a less approving view among some contemporaries, and he correctly sensed that future generations would grow even more critical of land use practices in the Far West. “It is not strange that some feel we have gone quite too rapidly,” he wrote, “and our grandchildren may wish their forbears had been slower in the exploitation of the resources of the fine domain.” Likewise, Wheeler anticipated a revisionist stance on Native American history, noting that Lewis's and Clark's “almost uniformly kind reception by and treatment of the Indians, and their absolute and utter dependence upon them, time after time … furnishes the most caustic criticism upon the Government's subsequent treatment of the red man.”^[47]

Still, Hosmer, Wheeler, and the rest of their contemporary commentators on Lewis and Clark were generally uncritical of the racism, imperialism, and industrialism that shaped their culture and, in the process, their ideas about Lewis and Clark. “What Lewis and Clark laid open is a world upon

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which nature has lavished her bounties,” wrote Hosmer. “The present fruition is scarcely calculable: the hope for the future is boundless.”^[48]

Fast forward several generations and it would be hard to imagine a more different story. In 1975 the Oregonian, which in 1905 had gloried in pronouncing the nation “united and homogeneous,” expressed a dismal nostalgia for the supposedly golden age of Lewis and Clark. On the eve of the nation's bicentennial, observed one of the paper's reporters, “recalling the epic exploits of this brave little band provides an upbeat in the daily barrage of gloom and doom.” He went on to suggest that there was “no better way to spend a holiday, a weekend, or a vacation out of doors than by retracing and perhaps reliving vicariously the way it was in those glorious times.”^[49] The nation faced serious social and economic problems, as it had at the turn of the century. This time, though, conflicts over economic development, foreign policy, and race relations burst into the open, and it showed in commemorations of Lewis and Clark. The expedition came to stand for exactly the opposite of what it symbolized at the turn of the century.

Public images of the expedition had remained fairly constant for many years after workers dismantled the temporary buildings of the Lewis and Clark exposition. The idea of Lewis and Clark as heroic conquerors and courageous frontiersmen lost none of its appeal. Life magazine, in a prominent series entitled “How the West Was Won,” devoted a section to Lewis and Clark's “first great adventure.”^[50] Another article began, “Lewis and Clark didn't know where they were going—but they got there, and clinched our title to a continental empire.”^[51] Celebrations of industrial development endured, too. Railroad men continued to invoke the land of Lewis and Clark as a symbol of their ongoing story of economic progress. In a booklet published for the sesquicentennial anniversary of the expedition, Robert Macfarlane of the Northern Pacific Railway gushed over the “long way we have traveled as a nation in the past 150 years since Lewis and Clark opened an unexplored wilderness to settlement. With the potential of our natural resources scarcely known and largely undeveloped, a future of great promise still lies ahead of us.”^[52] In 1950 President Harry Truman sounded a similar note after a nine-day tour of the Pacific Northwest: “Where they found only Indian villages, herds of buffalo, and trackless wilderness and sage-brush,” he said, “I saw great cities, immense structures like Grand Coulee Dam, and rich farmland.”^[53] Alone among Lewis and Clark enthusiasts, the historian and novelist Bernard DeVoto adopted a more critical stance, placing Jefferson's Corps of Discovery within a longer history of grasping American imperialism and considering the impact of that history on Native Americans and western landscapes.^[54]

Commemorations of Lewis and Clark changed dramatically after the

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1960s, however, as DeVoto's environmental and cross-cultural sensitivities went from being the exception to the rule. By that time, ever-increasing numbers of Americans were getting in their cars to retrace the route of the explorers, and a 1965 travel guide showed that they did so in a very different cultural climate than Olin Wheeler in 1904—or even Harry Truman in 1950. The Lewis and Clark Trail was introduced by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and some of his themes would have been familiar to Americans of previous generations: that the expedition symbolized “the self-reliance with which we probed and later settled the West”; that it showed Americans they possessed the land and water resources to achieve “great national goals”; that it “fired a national spirit of adventure which yet persists.” But Udall also sounded a new theme of stewardship. The route of Lewis and Clark offered “an unmatched opportunity to demonstrate a higher concept of conservation,” he wrote. “There is even the prospect that we will in time realize the importance of a tie to the out-of-doors with the same intensity we once reserved for the development of material values.”^[55] In making his call for “resource stewardship,” Udall reminded Americans of “the heritage we derive from the expedition”; he believed that Lewis and Clark could and should inspire contemporary environmental awareness. In fact, the opposite process was just as evident, as a cultural shift toward ecological awareness altered the meaning of the expedition.

Udall recognized threats to the nation's natural landscape, but he was optimistic about the government's power to protect it. He believed the Lewis and Clark expedition had left Americans a “land-conscious people.” And the secretary of the interior was not alone in stressing what remained of America's scenic heritage. In 1967, for instance, the New York Times ran a lengthy feature that promised scenic fulfillment for travelers of the Lewis and Clark trail: “The prairies are tilled now, and much of the swift, 2,135-mile Missouri has been dammed to form placid lakes,” the article noted. “However, only a little imagination is needed to recreate much that Lewis and Clark encountered.”^[56]

Other observers were far less hopeful. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, some writers and historians embraced the Lewis and Clark journals as a benchmark for measuring a dark side of progress. In 1965, as Udall pointed hopefully to Lewis and Clark as harbingers of the conservation ethic, NBC aired an hour-long news special called “The Journals of Lewis and Clark.” The network had commissioned the news producer Ted Yates to recreate the Lewis and Clark expedition “in authentic detail.” Yates headed west, expedition journals in hand, looking for scenes the explorers had seen. He was intensely disappointed by what he found—or did not find—and wrote up the experience for the magazine The American West. “Their challenge was the wilderness,” he wrote. “Our challenge was civilization. In a century and a half of relentless civilizing, the country

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seen by Lewis and Clark has vanished. It is gone. Their journals seem to be a myth, a romantic fiction, as one compares their observations to the land of today.” Yates, like Olin Wheeler sixty-five years before him, ticked off a list of changes in the national landscape. Yet he inverted the symbols of progress that dominated from Wheeler's time through mid-century. Strip mines offended his “eye and intellect,” factories “belch[ed] smoke,” and dams had turned rivers into “victims of hydroelectric progress”—all in great contrast to the “unwounded” America of Lewis and Clark.^[57]

Most striking were Yates's explicit indictments of “civilization” and “progress,” the watchwords of American expansionism. “It seems,” he said, “that we in our short history have at times confused vandalism with progress, wanton waste with riches. We have not used our resources, we have looted them.” Quoting Meriwether Lewis's wish at the Great Falls of the Missouri in Montana—that he “might be able to give to the world some just idea of this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object”—he lamented that the scene had “vanished in a maze of hydroelectric dams, wires, and technology. Progress has concealed it from civilized man.” Yates, like Udall, felt the nation's “heritage” was at stake. But if the secretary of the interior defined heritage as an environmental ethic that could be learned from Lewis and Clark, Yates saw it as actual places linked to the expedition, and he condemned their destruction.^[58]

Nonetheless, in 1965, millions of television viewers saw an “authentic” reenactment of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Yates, despite mixed feelings, did his best to “crop out the ugliness.” “We all felt great sadness,” he concluded in his article, “because in a way we had added to a delusion and helped to sustain the myth that America is, from sea to shining sea, a spectacle of beauty, of love and care, instead of a debacle of neglect and abuse.”^[59]

Yates and Udall were the first of many observers who used Lewis and Clark as the symbol for a critique of progress. The tendency reached a peak in the 1970s, with the rise of the environmental movement. The pages of the Reader's Digest reflected the changing times. Prior to the 1960s, the magazine had reprinted articles with titles like “Our Greatest Exploration” and “Heroine in Buckskin” (about Sacagawea). In 1971, by contrast, it featured “The Trampled Trail,” a “vivid and troubling journal of nature, a nation, and its people.” The author, Jules Loh, captured a sense of environmental concern in the nation and explained the usefulness of retracing the steps of Lewis and Clark, writing: “A twentieth-century American,” he wrote, “aroused over the deteriorating quality of a finite environment, can find no better example of man's treatment of nature's resources than to reexamine the route of those two explorers.” Like Yates, Loh quoted extensively from the journals of Lewis and Clark as he made his way across the industrialized landscape and chronicled what he called “paradise lost.” Like Udall, he

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pointed to a growing ecological awareness in America, concluding that “people in the final analysis prefer clean Columbias and Missouris and ultimately will insist on them.” However mixed the conclusion, though, the meaning of Lewis and Clark was clear: they and their journals had become a symbol of some Americans’ disillusionment with the ideology of industrial progress.^[60]

This symbolism was evident again in 1976, when the Seattle Art Museum chose Lewis and Clark as the subject of its bicentennial celebration. The exhibit consisted of three parts: a collection of nineteenth-century paintings of western landscapes and Indians (none from the Lewis and Clark expedition, as no painter accompanied them), artifacts from the West Coast Indian cultures they encountered, and a contemporary photographic record of the Lewis and Clark trail. A New York Times reviewer emphasized what did not appear in the photographic part of the exhibit:

There was an opportunity here for a before and after horror show of environmental mutilation, but in the upbeat spirit of the Bicentennial year, Mr. and Mrs. Macapia chose instead to approximate as nearly as possible the record that a photographer would have made if there had been such a thing as a camera to take along in 1803. They were able to find not only secluded woodland spots, but great vistas of mountains, rivers and fields without so much as a distant television aerial to reverse the situation and to reveal the wilderness itself as an anachronism in the 20th century.^[61]

The Seattle exhibit, like Ted Yates's NBC news special a decade earlier, had to “crop out the ugliness” at a time when such ugliness was a pressing concern for many Americans. Representations of the Lewis and Clark expedition could inspire with scenes of pristine beauty or shame with “a before and after horror show.” Never again, though, would Americans use the expedition to celebrate industrial progress in quite the way Harry Truman had only twenty-five years before.

Environmental destruction was just one of many serious problems that compromised the “upbeat spirit” of the nation's bicentennial. Conflicts over race and foreign policy, largely invisible or marginalized during the turn-of-the-century Lewis and Clark revival, had exploded into view and changed the nation's politics and social relations. The “course of empire” seemed to have run its course in Vietnam. The civil rights and American Indian movements had pressed the nation into painful confrontations over long-suppressed histories of racial oppression. Together with the Watergate scandal, the OPEC oil embargo, and the end of decades of unbroken economic growth, these problems sent the nation spiraling into an unprecedented crisis of confidence. On many of these subjects as on environmental questions, images of Lewis and Clark reflected the larger social situation.

At their annual meeting in 1975, members of the leading group of Lewis

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and Clark enthusiasts, the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation (LCTHF),^[62] heard a speech that crystallized the divisiveness and disillusionment of the period and, at the same time, the hope that the legacy of Lewis and Clark held a key to a more harmonious future. Michael P. Gleason, coordinator of the western region of the Virginia bicentennial commission, hinted at the social conflicts of recent years when he spoke of the United States in 1801 and reminded his audience that it was “a divided nation then too.” Gleason was optimistic, however, that the study of history could instill a “national spirit” in America's youth. History had “too often been for the elite,” he said, and that was wrong; it needed to be “as much for the poor, the working man, the woman, the black, the youth, as anyone else, but only if we can make it exciting!”^[63] In that context, Gleason emphasized the value of studying Lewis and Clark, in living history museums and historical reenactments, among other “exciting” formats.

Had it remained the story of two heroic men leading the westward expansion of white, Anglo-Saxon America, the Lewis and Clark expedition would hardly have made a good subject for the more inclusive history proposed by Gleason. But the story had changed a great deal from the day when historians and writers counted racial conquest and imperial expansion as its greatest legacies. The social movements of the 1960s changed the historical profession along with the rest of society, resulting in the development of environmental history, a “new social history,” and a “new western history,” among other approaches and subdisciplines that emphasized legacies of conflict and diversity in American society. Historians of these fields, in turn, shaped new public understandings of the Lewis and Clark expedition as a symbol of multicultural awareness. The work of James Ronda, to take one of the most important examples of this trend, has influenced scholars and enthusiasts to view the expedition from multiple perspectives—those of its members as well as those of the Native Americans with whom they had contact.^[64]

The airing of new perspectives on Lewis and Clark has at times been fraught with tension. In 1993, LCTHF President James Fazio, noting the “frenzy of expose-type articles and protest demonstrations” that marked the five-hundred-year commemorations of Columbus, predicted that Lewis and Clark, too, would be “forced to run the dreaded gauntlet” when “Ph.D. candidates and the mass media” became aware of the expedition's bicentennial commemoration. Indeed, he gave evidence that Lewis and Clark revisionism already was under way, recalling a recent conference in Montana at which critics lambasted Lewis and Clark buffs for their “antiquarian interest” in what the members of the expedition wore, for instance, or what kinds of tools they used. One speaker had charged that such minutiae obscured the real significance of the journey: that it began the invasion of Americans into western Indian country. At least one Lewis and Clark enthusiast

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left in disgust, reporting a general “berating of all whites for attempted genocide.”^[65]

Notwithstanding such conflicts, though, Fazio hoped and expected the bicentennial to be less acrimonious than that of Columbus, and with good reason. At the Montana conference, as he noted, the Salish tribe member and historian Betty White had said her purpose was not to vilify Lewis and Clark but simply to offer a native perspective on the “glorification” of the explorers.^[66] And by the time enthusiasts began to plan the commemorative activities, simple glorification had been overshadowed by messages of multicultural sensitivity and environmental awareness anyway. Those messages came through clearly in statements made by Henry Hubbard, president of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council, shortly after the LCTHF created that body in 1993 as a clearinghouse for commemorative activity: “The Council believes that the Bicentennial can be more than the anniversary of a historical event,” he said. “Some of the benefits that can accrue from the observance are geographic knowledge, ecological awareness, and the appreciation of cultural diversity.” Hubbard went on to acknowledge the explorers’ debt to native peoples, noting that they had “skillfully and peacefully negotiated their way through territory dominated by native peoples who, in many instances, aided and supported their efforts.”^[67]

Six years later, as the bicentennial drew near, the council's executive director, Michelle Bussard, echoed those themes, citing the need for “stewardship of our resources” and “respect for other cultures” as the two most compelling lessons in the Lewis and Clark experience.^[68] Those lessons, and with them the changed cultural and political climate since 1905, are dramatically displayed in the bicentennial council's carefully conceived logo (Figure 5). Where Lewis and Clark once strode into the Pacific Ocean, fulfilling the dream of a Northwest Passage to Asia, mountains now stand in the way, symbolizing, according to the council's web site, “the beauty and grandeur of the American landscape as well as the reality that the Northwest Passage existed only in myth.” And, exemplifying recent tendencies toward seeing the expedition as a series of encounters with two perspectives rather than one, the council explains that the eight-pointed ring suggests “both a compass and a Native American medicine wheel,” that the eagle feathers refer to “peaceful interactions with and contributions by the nearly fifty Native American tribes encountered,” and that the tips of the feathers are dipped in blood to signify “the subsequent sacrifices of the native peoples.”^[69]

Much of the activity that Bussard's organization is coordinating between 2003–06 no doubt will be devoid of history altogether. Commerce, tourism, and regional boosterism will fuel the upcoming bicentennial the same way they did the centennial exposition a century ago. But the bicentennial (again, like the 1905 Expo) also will serve as a showcase for historical interpretation,

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for ideas about the meaning the Lewis and Clark expedition holds for American society.

Those interpretations of Lewis and Clark are at once timeless and time-bound. Americans always have been and no doubt always will be fascinated by what the explorers did and what it must have been like to venture so far into an uncharted world. At the same time, the historical meaning of the story has changed dramatically over time, according to changing circumstances. Olin Wheeler, one of the leading commemorators on Lewis and Clark at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote that it had taken a hundred years for the United States to “come to something like a real conception of what Lewis and Clark, the leaders in the exploration of the West, did for their country.” Yet Wheeler's “real conception” of Lewis and Clark—that they paved the way for the railroads and the industrial development of America's wilderness—was a product of his time and circumstances. Changing circumstances and political climates—especially the rising influence, since the 1960s, of critical views on racism, imperialism, and industrialization—have produced different conceptions of Jefferson's Corps of Discovery. In the years ahead thousands will continue to retrace the trail and reflect with amazement on how the land has changed, but few, if any, will celebrate those changes as unambiguous progress. Nor will Americans use the expedition to justify overseas expansion. Those themes have become

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historical artifacts, superseded in our own time by the idea that the expedition highlights the importance of ecological awareness and cultural diversity. Wheeler was more nearly correct when he said that the story of Lewis and Clark “gains in interest and value with advancing years, even as wine improves with age.”^[70] History, unlike wine, does not change, but historians—amateur as well as professional, all with culture-bound perceptions of “interest and value”—do.

NOTES

The author wishes to thank Carl Prince, Ellen Noonan, Stephen Dow Beckham, Kris Fresonke, and Mark Spence for their helpful suggestions and criticisms.

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8. Sacajawea, Meet Cogewea

A Red Progressive Revision of Frontier Romance

Joanna Brooks

The Journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark offer incidental, idio-syncratic glimpses of Sacajawea: her pregnancy and delivery (January–February 1805); her skill as a gatherer of wild artichokes, apples, and “Lickerish” (April and May 1805); her extended illness (June 1805); her relationship with the sometimes abusive French trapper Toussaint Charbonneau (August 1805); her return to the site of her childhood abduction and her reunion with family (July–August 1805); her vote to establish winter quarters at a site plentiful with “potas” (November 1805); and her insistence on seeing the Pacific Ocean (January 1806). Clark additionally acknowledges her work as a “pilot,” negotiator, and “interpretess.”^[1] Two hundred years of Lewis and Clark studies have confirmed little more about the factitious Sacajawea. Some local historians still like to debate her name, her tribal origins, her role in the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the circumstances of her death.

Her postfactual afterlife has meant fuller celebrity and broader circulation for Sacajawea. In her most recent incarnation, she has joined a select group of American Indians—real and imagined—to be featured on the currency of the United States. Now, as a replacement for the ill-fated Susan B. Anthony, she appears on a golden dollar, smiling, an infant strapped to her back. Ironically, this image of Sacajawea was invented and popularized by Anthony and other suffragettes a century ago. In 1902, the Oregon suffragette Eva Emery Dye published The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark. Dye's novelistic treatment of the expedition recuperated Sacajawea as a heroine of western women's history, amplifying her role as an expeditionary guide and emphasizing her travails as a new mother in the wilderness. Dye also presented Sacajawea as a pioneering liaison between white and Indian worlds—in sum, as the “Madonna of her race.”^[2] Dye set out to materially

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incorporate her vision of Sacajawea with the organization of the Sacajawea Statue Association in 1903. The association raised more than $7,000 to commission from the sculptor Alice Cooper a seven-foot bronze of the Shoshone woman as Dye had imagined her: a pioneer-Madonna, facing westward, carrying a cradle-boarded infant. The statue was unveiled and dedicated on 30 June 1905, “Women's Day” at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. Officials of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which had been invited to hold its annual convention concurrently with the exposition, spoke at the dedication ceremony. In her opening address, Susan B. Anthony hailed Sacajawea as an unsung heroine of western history:

This recognition of the assistance rendered by a woman in the discovery of this great section of the country is but the beginning of what is due. Next year the men of this proud State, made possible by a woman, will decide whether women shall at last have the rights in it which have been denied them so many years. Let men remember the part that women have played in its settlement and progress and vote to give them these rights which belong to every citizen.^[3]

Following Anthony at the podium, Anna Shaw, the association's president, lauded Sacajawea in the popular, pathetic rhetoric of the “Vanishing Indian”:

Sacajawea. … Your tribe is fast disappearing from the land of your fathers. May we, the daughters of an alien race who slew your people and usurped your country, learn the lessons of calm endurance, of patient persistence and unfaltering courage exemplified in your life, in our efforts to lead men through the pass of justice, which leads over the mountains of prejudice and conservatism, to the broad land of the perfect freedom of a true republic.^[4]

Shaw and Anthony poetically transferred the westward movement of the Lewis and Clark expedition onto the movement for women's suffrage. They claimed for Sacajawea historical value as the woman who “made Oregon possible” and symbolic value as an icon of woman-piloted progress (Figure 6). But Sacajawea's career as a suffragette was short-lived: after Oregon voters defeated women's suffrage in a 1906 state referendum, her statue was rededicated to “the pioneer mothers of old Oregon” and permanently installed at Portland's Washington Park.^[5]

Following the Lewis and Clark exposition, more conservative clubwomen redefined Sacajawea as a mascot of true western womanhood and regional pride. Monument campaigns and historical pageants in North Dakota, Washington, and Montana honored her as both an instrument of Manifest Destiny and a model of its civilizing successes. Typical of these projects was the North Dakota Women's Club's effort to install a statue of Sacajawea on the state capitol grounds in Bismarck. Promotional pamphlets published by

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the club erroneously celebrated the Shoshone woman as the “first Indian west of the Missouri River to convert to Christianity.” In 1912, when the Bird Woman statue was dedicated, the secretary of the North Dakota State Historical Society claimed that Sacajawea made it possible for “our good friends” the Indians to be educated in government schools. His eulogy of Sacajawea as an emblem of Indian education was met with an ironic response from Native Americans in the audience. A group of young Shoshone, Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara, and Sioux government-school graduates, featured as honored guests, told reporters from the Bismarck Tribune that they had never heard of Sacajawea before the statue campaign.^[6] Her incorporation

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into colonialist historical romance did not secure Sacajawea's legacy among American Indians.

American Indian intellectuals were solicited to settle emerging disputes over the Shoshone woman's biography. Conventional historians held that Sacajawea died in Missouri in 1812, but the University of Wyoming professor Grace Raymond Hebard asserted that Sacajawea died in Wyoming in 1884. Controversy flared in 1924 when Hebard lobbied for a federal Sacajawea memorial in Wyoming. The Bureau of Indian Affairs commissioned Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux), a Dartmouth- and Boston University-educated medical doctor then serving as general inspector for the agency, to establish an authoritative account of Sacajawea's final years. After collecting testimony from tribes in Wyoming, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, Eastman concluded in support of Hebard: Sacajawea had outlived Charbonneau, wandered south, married a Comanche man, and died in Wyoming in 1884. East man also offered an explanation for the shadowy, contested character of Sacajawea's history:

At the time history was unknown to even some of the Rocky Mountain white men, much more so with the Indians. One of the striking characteristics and habits of the Bird Woman is that she is very modest in claiming any honors of being guide to that party; one reason for this is the Indian woman will put her husband as the head in any matter of that kind. She never considered herself as a guide or interpreter. She evidently assumed that the great duties performed by her were the natural consequences of the expedition. … It was not her choice but fate seemed to have compelled her to live the life that she did.^[7]

In his books Indian Boyhood (1902) and The Soul of the Indian (1908), Eastman had promoted Indian culture as an innately, if primitively, virtuous alternative to anxious, illsridden modernity. The same aims shaped his public presentation of Sacajawea as a model of traditional Indian modesty. Privately, Eastman maintained a more radical view of Sacajawea, describing her in his personal correspondence as the “Ben Hur” of Native America.^[8] What began as a project of historical reconnaissance, for Eastman, ultimately produced another species of Sacajawea romance.

Sacajawea's transformation from historical personage into cultural icon ensured her survival in popular memory, but it sacrificed important dimensions of her story. As Philip Deloria demonstrates in Playing Indian, the long American tradition of turning Indians into symbols—a tradition reaching from Pocahontas, Chief Logan, and King Tammany to Chief Seattle—both perpetuates and masks the darker aspects of colonialist cultural politics. The celebration of Sacajawea as protosuffragette ignored, if not obscured, the federal disenfranchisement of Native Americans: most Indians, male and female, did not enjoy the right to vote until granted citizenship by an act of Congress in 1924. More egregious was conservative clubwomen's use

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of Sacajawea to affirm their assimilationist programs and policies. Charles Eastman's presentation of Sacajawea as a model of traditional gender values may have appealed to the nostalgia of white audiences, but it did little to advance respect for Native women as modern beings. Indeed, little about Sacajawea's story was traditional: her career as interpreter and borderlands guide significantly extended and complicated white-Indian relations. Romantic representations of Sacajawea transmitted little of this complexity.

We find a very different view of Sacajawea in one of the first novels published by a Native American woman. Christine Quintasket (1885?–1936) grew up a Salish-speaking Okanogan, indigenous to northeastern Washington. Like many Native people of her generation, she was educated in convent and government schools with intensely assimilationist agendas. In 1912, while living in Portland, Oregon, Quintasket chose a pen name—Mourning Dove—and penciled a first draft of a novel. There, in the birth-place of the iconic Sacajawea, Mourning Dove developed her own story about a young northwestern Native woman negotiating the dislocations of colonialism. The protagonist was an interpreter and mediator between white and Indian worlds; she eventually rejected romance with an exploitive white fortune seeker for a more satisfying partnership with an Indian man. Down to the detail of its protagonist's nearly homophonous name, Mourning Dove's Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range suggests a critique of popular Sacajawea romance. Mourning Dove used the novel to record, preserve, and perpetuate tribal perspectives—once passed down as oral narrative—on the coming of the Lew isand Clark expedition. Her story also offers distinctive insights into the complexities of contact between white men and Indian women in the aftermath of the expedition. According to the novel, what Cogewea experiences as a conflicted, race-conscious, thoroughly modern “half-blood” is a predicament shared by northwestern Native women since the time of Sacajawea. Cogewea's survival and happiness depend on her ability to hear, understand, and interpret that legacy.

Cogewea is a revisionist Western, a love story that rejects the premises and reworks the novelistic conventions of frontier romance. Mourning Dove knew these conventions well: she first learned the English alphabet by reading dime novels, introduced to the Quintasket household by an adopted white orphan named Jimmy. She also learned from her Okanogan elders an indigenous perspective on the story of Lewis and Clark. She explains in her

Autobiography,

When Lewis and Clark made their famous exploration, they did not reach Okanogan territory, but my people heard many stories of white-skinned

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strangers who wintered at the mouth of the Columbia. The stories came from the south—from Yakima who told Wenatchi, who told Okanogan. … The first white explorer to enter our country was David Thompson of the Northwest Company of Montreal, a rival in the fur trade with the great Hudson's Bay Company.^[9]

The conventional American view of Lewis and Clark did not hold for her people: among them, “the first white explorer” was a Canadian fur trader. Lewis and Clark entered Okanogan territory as a story, a story transmitted from tribe to tribe. Mourning Dove's account deauthorizes Lewis and Clark as producers of their own history, and it decenters their party as one among several to “explore” the region. Additionally, it emphasizes that the land was already inhabited by distinct Native populations—Yakima, Wenatchi, Okanogan, and others—who were known to one another before their “discovery.” To Mourning Dove, the story of Lewis and Clark was not an unprecedented epic, a narrative progressing from east to west. Rather, it was another installment of the stranger-comes-to-town genre, a story set entirely in the Pacific Northwest.

Mourning Dove brought this perspective to bear on the composition of Cogewea. Its frontier setting is not the boundary between civilization and wilderness, nor between white and red. Rather, it is a simultaneously wild and settled space, where cattle ranches abut open rangeland; it is a social borderlands, home to a range of highly differentiated and dynamic identities. Its protagonist, Cogewea McDonald, is a half-blood, the daughter of an Okanogan mother and an errant white father, and a recent graduate of Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Both her situation as a half-blood and her education place her in the borderlands of racial identity and cultural belonging. She has returned home to the Horseshoe Bend—or “H-B,” for “half-blood”—Ranch, which is owned by her sister Julia and her white brother-in-law, John Carter. The ranch hands are a comic crew of mixed-bloods and migrants: “Rodeo Jack,” a “quarter-blood Texan of uncertain qualities”; “Celluloid Bill,” a trickster “half-blood Cheyenne”; “Silent Bob,” a displaced, drawling West Virginian; and James La Grinder, the half-blood Flathead foreman.

The plot of Cogewea feminizes frontier-adventure by mixing in key elements of the captivity narrative and the novel of seduction. As the novel opens, Cogewea stands on a bluff overlooking the Pend Oreille River, facing west, surveying the landscape, and musing aloud over her future. “What had the future in store for her? What would it bring? Would it, through her, illuminate the pathway of others?”^[10] Mourning Dove positions her protagonist to pilot readers through the social complexities of Indianness in the twentieth century. The plot thickens with the arrival of Alfred Densmore, a dastardly, duplicitous city dweller “with a cold, calculating grey eye” (43).

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Cogewea finds herself strangely attracted to the Eastern fortune seeker, and she volunteers herself as Densmore's guide to life on the range. Densmore erroneously believes that Cogewea owns large land holdings; he plots to seduce, marry, and abandon her. Densmore's seduction strategy is a calculated appeal to Cogewea's liminality: he feigns interest in Indian customs and sympathy for Cogewea's situation as a half-blood. This indulges her tendency to lapse into impassioned soliloquy, to play the native informant, to reveal and explain her vulnerabilities. At times, Cogewea becomes so absorbed in her own internal debates that she fails to read and interpret Densmore's motivations. Here Mourning Dove remakes the novel of seduction in modern Indian terms, and she turns the captivity narrative formula into an indictment of white men who entrap Indian women.

The voice of Native tradition in the novel belongs to Cogewea's grandmother Stemteema, a full-blooded Okanogan who has been entrusted with the stories of the tribe. Stemteema staunchly opposes her granddaughter's deepening fascination with Densmore, whom she sees as the latest in a series of opportunistic “Sho-yah-pee,” or white men, who have come west to take advantage of the women of the tribe. Stemteema recounts their fates to Cogewea: an ancestor given as a wife to a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition; a childhood friend seduced and abandoned by a white American soldier; and Cogewea's own mother, left alone by her gold miner husband with three girls to raise. She warns,

My grandchild! You talk too much to that pale face. He does not mean right by you! He is having sport with you. He wants to make a fool of you, that all the young people may laugh. You think he has love because he follow you. Not so! He is blind you with false words. He is here to cheat you; all that any white man wants of the Indian girl. It is only to put her to shame, then cast her aside for his own kind, the pale faced squaw. (103)

In an attempt to derail the romance, Stemteema insists that Densmore and Cogewea meet with her to hear the customs and histories of the tribe. “I will tell this Sho-yah-pee a tale of the long ago. I will tell him of the coming of the pale face; when the tribes were many and strong. … Yes! I will tell him of the invasion by the despoiler, and of the wasting of my people. … I will speak and you shall interpret my words” (105). In commanding Cogewea to interpret these difficult stories, Stemteema forces her to disengage from her solipsistic, romantic reverie and to recognize the historical context of her relationship with Densmore. Stemteema's story contests the privileged discourse—the romance of discovery—which assures Densmore that the West and its indigenous people exist to be explored and exploited.

The meeting between Densmore, Cogewea, and Stemteema takes place in Stemteema's tepee, located at some distance from the H-B ranch houses. Similarly, Stemteema locates her story and her authority in the context of

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tribal tradition: “This story I am telling you is true. It was given me by my father who favored me among his many children. … He told me the tales that were sacred to his tribe; honored me with them, trusted me. Treasured by my forefathers, I value them” (122). She describes Okanogan life as it existed before contact, then recounts the portents, history, and impact of colonial incursion. According to Stemteema, “Black Robes,” or priests, preceded Lewis and Clark among the Okanogan. She continues, “Then they saw the pale face again, two of them. They had no black robes, but the people tried to pray to them, as they remembered the words of the Black Robe. The pale faces only laughed at them. But this is another story which I may tell you some time” (128). As they leave the tepee, Densmore interrogates Cogewea about the accuracy of Stemteema's narrative. His motive is “more to court favor” with Cogewea than to advance his understanding of Native history, “a subject in which he felt no particular interest”: “Cogewea! are all those supposed facts as narrated by your grandmother concerning the first coming of the white man, or only legend? They seem to be no part of the chronicles. … Lewis and Clark were the first Caucasians to reach and explore the great Northwest. That is recognized history” (129).

Cogewea defends Stemteema's story: “They were the first white explorers of the Northwest, but not the first to penetrate its sylvan wilds. It is my belief that the last two ‘pale faces’ Stemteema mentioned were the famous path-finders sent out by the Government, and I am sure that when you hear her story of these men, you will agree with me on that score. Stemteema was a small child at the time of this second coming, and she has certainly seen more than a hundred snows” (129–130). Cogewea continues, goaded by Densmore's resistance into a critique of Christianity, white supremacy, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Densmore does not find these subjects “altogether engaging” but nonetheless assumes a look of “studied intent” (133). Ultimately, he begs to learn more about “tribal marriage ceremonies,” as a way of distracting and entrapping her (136). When she tells him she must marry a half-blood, he appeals to her sense of modernity: “Why erect an imaginary barrier about your life? A true mate is one who has sympathy for your ideals; who understands and is willing to adapt himself to your ways. Don't you think I would make a good half-breed?” (150). Densmore successfully captivates Cogewea with the absurdity of his question, and the significance of Stemteema's story is lost. Cogewea and Densmore never return to hear the complete history of Lewis and Clark, and the seduction scheme advances.

Stemteema finds a more reliable audience in the ranch's half-blood foreman, Jim LaGrinder. LaGrinder shares her suspicions about Densmore, and he watches over Cogewea with protective affection. “You are an Indian,” she pleads, “you will understand me, what I am to tell you I am distressed and need your help” (216). To enlist his help in preventing Cogewea's impending

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elopement, Stemteema relates the story of “the second coming of the Shoyahpee.” She herself witnessed the arrival of Lewis and Clark as a child “more than a hundred snows” ago: “The men with hair on their pale faces impressed me. … I remember well both Shoyahpees. I was afraid! I clung to my mother for protection. With pleading and coaxing, she made me to understand that I was not to be afraid of them; that they were not common mortals as we were the warriors and medicine men, but were gods—a higher people than the Indians—which all my tribe believed to be true” (218).

Stemteema relates how her father established contact with Lewis and Clark, seeking them out at their camp. “The pale faces were both holding weapons against us. Even the strange Indian woman who was with them, held a gun in aim. She was a brave squaw! We found afterwards that she came to show them the trail to the big water, towards the sunset” (220). She continues, recounting a prophecy made by one of her ancestors:

Evil and death will come to my people in the wake of these two pale faces. … I saw on this great new trail a might nation sweeping over our hunting grounds, armed with dread weapons of war. I saw our villages made desolate with fire and the graves of our fathers profaned. I saw the death-trail worm smooth by the moccasined feet of the dead and the death wail grew loud on the storm-rack of night. (224)

Stemteema concludes by connecting the story of Lewis and Clark directly to Cogewea's predicament. “You now know why I do not want Cogewea to marry this Shoyahpee. They are all false to our race” (226). As a half-blood, Jim hears the story of Lewis and Clark as a commentary on his white ancestors. His responds feelingly, “I have heard Stemteema and I am not proud of my white blood” (226–227). Jim tells Stemteema that “the white man's law” trumps “tribal rules” and allows Cogewea to choose her husband. However, he promises to take revenge if Densmore proves false. With Jim as her audience, Stemteema successfully rehistoricizes the mythology of frontier romance. Her testimony confirms the agency of Indian women—Sacajawea and Cogewea—as accomplices to white explorers’ schemes. Jim also recognizes Cogewea's autonomy in negotiating the terms of white-Indian contact, and for this reason he refuses to interfere as she chooses her own path.

As Mourning Dove reconnects the predicament of Sacajawea to the situation of modern half-breeds, she comments on the strategies used by her Indian contemporaries to address the white world. Her generation of Indian intellectuals, like Cogewea, had been educated in both white schools and tribal customs. They cultivated a ground-breaking awareness of their shared status as Indians and founded intertribal organizations such as the Society

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of American Indians to advance their common cause. The so-called “Red Progressives”—including Charles Eastman; Henry Roe Cloud (Winne-bago), the first Native graduate from Yale University; the noted authors Gertrude Bonnin / Zitkala Sa (Sioux) and Francis LaFlesche (Omaha); the anthropologists Arthur Parker (Seneca) and Ella Deloria (Yankton Sioux), and others—were deeply divided over how Indians should advance into modernity. Some were strong advocates of complete assimilation; others were firebrand opponents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. All seemed to share a consciousness of the opportunities for cultural and political power their precarious position as Indian intellectuals afforded them. Philip Deloria explains that the Red Progressives “wanted to become bridge figures, using antimodern primitivism to defend native cultures against the negative stereotypes left over from colonial conquest.”^[11] Like the Sacajawea of popular imagination—if not the Sacajawea of history—the authority and power of the Red Progressives derived from their liminality and their skills as interpreters and mediators.

Mourning Dove experienced the limits of this power and authority in the process of composing and publishing her novel. Cogewea was the product of editorial collaboration between Mourning Dove and Lucullus V. McWhorter, a West Virginia–born archeologist and Indian affairs activist. Mourning Dove first met McWhorter in 1914 at the Walla Walla Washington Frontier Days celebration; he encouraged her literary ambitions and offered his assistance in securing publication for her drafted manuscript. During the winter of 1915–16, Mourning Dove lived in the McWhorter home and dedicated herself to manuscript revisions.^[12] Consequently, the published novel is marked by McWhorter's editorial interventions: poetic epigraphs, anthropological annotation, and extended political invective.^[13] While awaiting the long-delayed publication of Cogewea, Mourning Dove began work on a collection of Okanogan folklore. There too she found her efforts hampered by the intervention of white “professionals.” She wrote to McWhorter:

There are some that are getting suspicious of my wanting folklores and if the Indians find out that their stories will reach print I am sure it will be hard for me to get any more legends without paying the hard cash for them. A white-man has spoiled my field of work. … This Mr. James Teit has collected folklores among the Indians and has been paying five dollars a piece for good Indian legends. (viii)

Teit, an assistant of Franz Boas, compiled wordlists and folklores still considered authoritative. Still, Mourning Dove did manage to compile her Okanogan folklore, which was published as Coyote Stories in 1933.

In Cogewea, Mourning Dove created a protagonist who shared her Red Progressive authorial ambitions and who encountered many of the same

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limitations.^[14] Cogewea states early in the novel that her ambitions are to be an “authoress.” One motive for this ambition is to correct inaccurate and demeaning literary representations of Indians. Cogewea reacts violently to The Brand, a dime novel romance in which a self-hating half-breed hero offers himself in a self-abasing marriage to a white girl of the Flathead range. Pitching the book into the kitchen stove, she criticizes the colonialist mis-conception of Indianness: “Cogewea reflected bitterly how her race had had the worst of every deal since the landing of the lordly European on their shores; how they had suffered as much from the pen as from the bayonet of conquest; wherein the annals had always been chronicled by their most deadly foes and partisan writers” (91–92).^[15] Cogewea considers it her responsibility to use her education to advance public awareness of and respect for Indian culture. She also envisions print as a venue for the preservation of Indian traditions. Cogewea fears that “the new order of things” threatens the survival of tradition and believes that “her people's philosophy must be irretrievably lost unless speedily placed on record” (33). Her duality, her liminality positions her uniquely between white and Indian, oral tradition and print literacy. As the novel explains,

Most of the old people do not make use of English, although the majority of them understand many words and can speak them but will not do so unless absolutely necessary. If alone with the whites, they will talk if occasion demands; but if in the presence of the younger Indians, they can hardly be induced to do so. … Recognizing the linguistic ability of the educated youth, it is expected to them to assume the role of interpreter. (118)

Only an English-literate Indian like Cogewea could translate traditional Indian lore into the modern medium of print. Cogewea's liminality between white and Indian worlds also situates her in a unique position to mediate Indian culture for a broader reading public.

Yet the offices of translation, mediation, and interpretation place Cogewea and her contemporaries in a difficult position. Education in government schools could teach them English literacy, but it could also inculcate a deep resentment of white incursions into Indian territories, cultural and geographic. Thus, while younger Indians knew how to communicate with outsiders, they were more distanced from Indian traditions and more resentful of the beneficiaries of their translation. The complexities of this situation are demonstrated in an anecdote from the novel, an anecdote—according to McWhorter's annotations—drawn from Mourning Dove's life. One winter when Stemteema, Cogewea, and her sisters were living on the banks of the Columbia River, two young white men came to ice-fish. The fishermen inquired at the tepee about the condition of the ice; Cogewea and her sisters pretended not to understand English. Chastised by Stemteema for failing to warn the fishermen about the thin ice, “What did you

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learn the language and books of the pale face for? They do no good unless you make use of them when needed!” Stemteema cried out in “a jargon of English,” successfully warning the boys off (119). The McDonald sisters’ mischievous refusal to interpret for and to guide the two young white explorers reveals the potential for resistance. This strategy is corroborated also by the half-breed ranch foreman, Jim LaGrinder, who admits that he and the boys of the HB ranch have fed would-be white authorities tall tales and half-truths about range life and Indian lore. When Alfred Densmore suggests that “confidence” might improve Indian relations with whites, “facilitating both social and business interests,” Jim replies, “That there ‘confidence’ card has been our undoin” (94). The indictment of Densmore as confidence man becomes more provocative when considered in connection with his last name; Frances Densmore was the early twentieth century's leading scholar of American Indian music. Perhaps Alfred Densmore is a stand-in for all the opportunistic “friends of the Indian,” from Lewis and Clark to the romancers, land speculators, and anthropologists of the modern age. Jim's comment reveals a little recognized aspect of the Sacajawea predicament: in a colonialist context, the relationship between Indian and white, “interpreter” and explorer, is never in good faith.

Indeed, Cogewea herself will discover the bad-faith basis of Densmore's marriage plot. After the pair elopes, Densmore learns that his intended bride has no large land claims. He robs her of a small cash fortune, ties her to a tree, and abandons her on the range. But Mourning Dove does not leave Cogewea to die in the wilderness. Resisting the conventions of the seduction novel, she allows Cogewea to recover and learn from her mistakes. In a chapter entitled “The Cost of Knowing,” the heroine is rescued by Jim LaGrinder, to whom she reveals, with some humiliation, the extent of Densmore's duplicity. At novel's end, after a lapse of some years, an older, wiser Cogewea and LaGrinder resolve to marry in a happy joining of half-blood equals. The conclusion of Cogewea marks a way to survive the Sacajawea predicament: it is “knowledge,” self-knowledge, rather than service as someone else's tutor or guide. Playing Sacajawea subscribes Indians to the schemes of whites rather than advancing their own independent interests. Acting as an interpreter recycles and reinscribes the colonialist mythology of the frontier.

Here, then, is a powerful Red Progressive response to popular representations of Sacajawea. In historical novels, on statehouse lawns, in public parks, and at roadside historic sites, the name and the image of Sacajawea indexed a broadly accepted romance of how the West was won with the help of a Indian woman, a story white people told themselves about their relationships with Indians. For many Indian intellectuals of the Progressive era, playing the Sacajawea role—patient guide and interpreter—seemed one of most effective avenues to broadening Indian cultural and political power.

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But Mourning Dove's novel reveals a darker aspect of the Sacajawea predicament. It challenges Native women to resist the bad-faith lure of colonialist romance and to pilot their own meaningful path through the chaos of modernity.

Cogewea also challenges contemporary readers to imagine the Corps of Discovery from the perspective of the “discovered.” From this perspective, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacajawea are not singular characters. Rather, they belong to a broader genre of strangers-come-west stories, a genre that the expedition neither pioneered nor exhausted. Cogewea restores this sense of multiplicity to the record. It decenters the legacy of Lewis and Clark. It reminds us that there were multiple Indian witnesses to the expedition, that Sacajawea was not the only Native woman with a Lewis and Clark tale to tell, and that our singular fascination with her proceeds from a paucity of knowledge about American Indian women. Similarly, the novel resists our ambitions to “discover” and establish new knowledge about Lewis and Clark; it will not use Native oral tradition to authenticate or legitimate our historical fascinations. Rather, it counters the heroic formulas of historical narrative with a more profound, primeval, place-based, and cyclical sense of story. As Louise Erdrich asks in the conclusion to her novel The Antelope Wife, “Did these occurrences have a paradigm in the settlement of the old scores and pains and betrayals that went back in time? Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern? Who is beading us? Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bit of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of this earth?”^[16] Mourning Dove's novel Cogewea suggests that Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea were but beads in a more extensive pattern. They were the elements but not the authors of randomness and chaos. Cogewea—like the best Native American literature—asks us to confront the idea of sovereignty: to recognize that “discovery” does not confer authority, mastery, or ownership. Two hundred years after Lewis and Clark, we have yet to learn this lesson.

NOTES

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9. On the Trail

Commemorating the Lewis & Clark Expedition
in the Twentieth Century

Wallace Lewis

Concerned over the nation's inadequate commemoration of the explorers’ 1804–06 journey to the Pacific Ocean and back, delegates from more than twenty communities in the Pacific Northwest and Montana gathered at Lewiston, Idaho in 1929 to form the Lewis and Clark Memorial Association (LCMA). “It seems almost incredible,” the group's initial report states, “that through all those years there has been no national monument erected in their honor. Perpetuated only in a few place names, they claim but scant present attention, except from close students of western history.” The association may have overstated the case, ignoring the two world's fairs that commemorated the centennial of the expedition in 1904 and 1905, as well as the many statues, monuments, and books those two events inspired in the ensuing decades. Nevertheless, popular interest in Lewis and Clark had diminished considerably since the early twentieth century, as had the number of people who even knew where or when the expedition occurred. Though disheartening, it was probably not surprising to the members of the LCMA when their efforts failed to stir much interest in the approaching 125th anniversary of the trek across the continent.^[1]

While they failed in their initial goals, the members of the association realized that part of the problem lay in the ways that Lewis and Clark had been memorialized in the past. Their first goal was to inculcate a “better understanding” among the American public, which would in turn “inspire a higher conception of what is suitable to commemorate them.” That “higher conception” apparently involved road building along the expedition route, since promotion of a multistate Lewis and Clark highway underlay the association's agenda. Making the route of the expedition serve as the nation's memorial to the expedition represented a radical new way of commemorating the past, and no one at the 1929 meeting of the LCMA seemed to

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recognize what their goals implied or how to enact them. This partly reflected the new but half-understood excitement about automobile tourism that appealed to every kind of western booster. This new leisure industry briefly flourished in the late 1920s with the availability of inexpensive vehicles and the construction of continuous paved highways across the Great Plains and the mountain west, then faded altogether in the midst of the Great Depression and wartime rationing. It required the economic expansion of the post–World War II era to make automobile tourism a persistent and widespread feature of American culture, which in turn provided the context in which the expedition route developed into the principal monument for commemorating the Lewis and Clark expedition. “The Trail”—as the route became known—was not the result of “better understanding,” as the LCMA once predicted. Rather, it became the means through which many Americans came to understand the Lewis and Clark expedition. In the process, touring the Trail provided an important benchmark for assessing the magnitude of change in the American landscape over the short course of two centuries.^[2]

Commemorating the past has commonly been a way for Americans to validate the present and create a sense of common identity. This usually occurs in one of two ways: traditionally through plaques, statues, and other monuments, the most visible and fundamental means of memorializing; or through “public historical imagery” like rituals, reenactments, and pageants. While both types of commemoration marked public awareness of the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition after the turn of the century, new ways of identifying historic sites have proliferated in the past forty years or so and become meaningful to the public in ways that traditional commemorative types do not. These include simple markers to elaborate replicas of structures and multimedia interpretive centers that interpret historical events at a particular site. The popularity of these new forms of commemoration probably derives from their convenience to vacationers and purported educational value, but they also appeal to the imagination in ways that commemorative statues and monuments simply cannot. Place becomes the hero: this is where something significant occurred.^[3]

While all of this has been fairly recent, it clearly distinguishes past commemorations of Lewis and Clark from more recent efforts to memorialize their expedition. Lewis and Clark received relatively little attention in the nineteenth century. The national government seems to have permitted the fiftieth anniversary of the expedition to pass unrecognized. Local communities, which normally would have celebrated the passage of the expedition through their vicinity, were few and far between. For Captain John Mullan, builder of the Mullan trail across the Bitterroot and Rocky mountains, the explorers’fame as forerunners of civilization seems to have been adequately memorialized by progress and settlement. “Here with you,” he told the Historical

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Society of the Rocky Mountains in 1861, “their [Lewis and Clark's] monument is to be found, industrious people, who have built towns & cities where there was the wilderness, & their epitaphs are found engraved upon the hearts & affections of an appreciating people, who are ever willing to pay homage & respect to the very mention of the names of Lewis & Clark.” But Mullan castigated the national government for its failures to “maintain the claim … established by the explorations” and to fully publish the journals produced by the explorers.^[4]

The unavailability of the original journals partially explains early failure to commemorate the expedition. After the 1814 Biddle edition, which sold relatively few copies, no legitimate narrative of the journey again appeared until Elliott Coues's in 1893. Moreover, no original edition of the journals was published until Reuben Gold Thwaites's in 1904 and, according to Paul Russell Cutright, no “book of consequence written about the Expedition” until Olin D. Wheeler's two-volume Trail of Lewis and Clark, also in 1904. As the historian Donald Jackson observed, the two explorers do not occupy the same sort of mythical frontier space as figures like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, or even Zebulon Pike; consequently, books must be “the real source of public knowledge about the expedition.” Publications of the original journals in the twentieth century by such editors as Thwaites, Milo Milton Quaife, Ernest S. Osgood, Jackson, and Gary Moulton, as well as Bernard DeVoto's popular condensation, largely account for expanding interest in the expedition. During the nineteenth century, in contrast, disillusionment and lack of interest obscured its history. The Corps of Discovery's accomplishments had already begun to be overshadowed by events when Biddle's history of them finally appeared, the scientific observations remained all but unknown for eighty years, and the path they blazed fell quickly out of favor. Soon after the explorers’ views of the Pacific Northwest had been distorted to promote settlement in the Oregon country during the 1830s, Lewis and Clark “receded into the American memory” until the Thwaites edition of the journals and the centennial celebration brought them to the fore.^[5]

A “merging and melding” of what John L. Allen calls “literate elite” and “folk” images of Lewis and Clark in the twentieth century helps explain shifts in the way the expedition has been commemorated. The “folk image,” on the one hand, has tended to focus on “the explicit purpose of exploring and evaluating the newly acquired lands,” essentially the viewpoint expressed by Captain Mullan. The “literate elite” image, on the other hand, focuses on the scientific purposes of the expedition and, as Donald Jackson noted, the “personalities involved.” For the elite image, the journals became central, and they made the specific path taken by the expedition central as well. The geographic regions through which that path runs, however, were not settled until the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and long

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stretches of the expedition route remained largely inaccessible through the first half of the twentieth century. Though these conditions certainly help explain a previous lack of local interest in the history of the expedition, they also forced the elite image of the expedition to remain book-bound until the 1950s.^[6]

The folk image of the expedition flowered during the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposition in St. Louis and the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Exposition and Oriental Fair in Portland, Oregon. The two centennials came at a time when American imperialistic ambitions were in full flood and providing an anodyne to anxiety about the recent closing of the frontier. The image of Lewis and Clark carrying an American flag to the edge of the Pacific fit very well into a vision of the nation expanding its trade and influence across the ocean to Asia, while anxiety over the loss of the frontier inspired a growing interest in the history of the American West. As Warren I. Susman notes, Americans sought in the frontier past “a native epic, an epic that extolled the virtues of extreme individualism, courage, recklessness, aloofness from social ties and obligations.” The story told in the journals provided an ideal candidate and has in fact been called “our national epic” on the basis of those qualities and virtues with which it represents the nation's ideals.^[7]

The world fairs held in St. Louis and Portland stimulated public interest in “our national epic,” but they largely presented the Lewis and Clark expedition as an emblem of progress and national expansion. At the Louisiana Purchase exposition in St. Louis, the Oregon exhibit included a rather grandiose and nonhistorical representation of Fort Clatsop surrounded by a log stockade and “gardens of rose-flushed Clarkia,” and other plants discovered by the explorers. Organizers also claimed to fly the same “flag carried by” Lewis and Clark over the structure. Still, history was overshadowed by boosterism and commercialism, much as had been the case at the great centennial celebration in Philadelphia (1876) and the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago (1893). To borrow from Karal Ann Marling, the exposition was “ a vast entertainment to which a dollop of history lent some semblance of high-minded dignity.” At Portland's Lewis and Clark exposition in 1905, ceremonies honored Lewis and Clark and speakers like Exposition President Harvey W. Scott expounded upon the magnitude of their achievement: “through as humble an undertaking as the settlement at Plymouth or Jamestown, [the expedition] was the prologue to the theme of our later national expansion.” Yet, despite these ostensible signs of commemoration, the Portland exposition was overshadowed by the promotion of municipal and regional economic investments and claims that “the twentieth century was to be America's Pacific century.” Carl Abbott points out that such commercial concerns reflected more national interests, which became evident when exposition organizers approached the federal government

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for assistance in planning their “Great Extravaganza.” “No one in Congress,” he writes, “ had much interest in the historical heroes and their … trek.” What they were interested in was the “vision of Pacific trade that had motivated the exploration and settlement of the Oregon Country.” In order to garner support, “Oregonians learned quickly in the winter of 1903–04 to cut the references to Lewis and Clark and to hammer home the idea that a Portland fair was ‘an undertaking of national interest and importance.’”^[8]

Their being identified with America's commercial destiny probably worked against popular appreciation for the explorers and their party. Abetting national expansion and stimulating economic development, no matter how much reverent praise it may earn in 1905, is decidedly less exciting or dramatic in the public mind than conquering by force of arms or heroically and tragically failing. But the figure of Sacagawea invited celebration of a more human and personal type of heroism. This would become manifest in the dozens of statues, monuments, and markers that have been erected in her honor, as well as the countless stories, place-names, musical compositions, paintings, pageants, and other forms of representation that have been commissioned over the years. Indeed, Sacagawea often seems to occupy a plane apart from the rest of the expedition, and her story, historical or legendary, has been put to various uses over the past century. The beginnings of Sacagawea's transformation in the popular imagination can be traced back to Elliott Coues, who emphasized her heroic contribution to the expedition, and to Eva Emery Dye's book The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark, which described Sacagawea as an Indian princess of equal or greater significance to the expedition than either Lewis or Clark.^[9]

Sacagawea assumed the leading historical role at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition when the National American Woman Suffrage Association accepted an invitation to hold its 1905 national convention in Portland. In the convention's presidential address, Anna Howard Shaw called voting rights for women “the logical conclusion of Sacagawea's heroic efforts.” The Woman's Club of Portland had already established a “Sacajawea Statue Association,” with Eva Emery Dye as president, and raised money for a statue by selling souvenir “‘Sacajawea spoons’ and ‘Sacajawea buttons.’” The finished bronze statue, designed by Alice Cooper of Denver, which portrayed Sacagawea pointing the way for the explorers, was unveiled on 6 July 1905 at a ceremony in which both Susan B. Anthony and the Portland suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway were on hand to praise her in speeches. Anthony noted that it was “the first time in history that a statue has been erected in memory of a woman who accomplished patriotic deeds.”^[10] Cooper's statue was only the beginning. Also in 1905 the General Federation of Women's Clubs in North Dakota raised money and commissioned a twelve-foot-high bronze statue entitled Bird Woman, which was completed by the Chicago sculptor Leonard Crunelle in 1910 and dedicated in 1912 on the

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North Dakota state capitol grounds in Bismarck before an estimated 5,000 spectators. More typical monuments to Sacagawea included a bronze plaque on granite that was placed at the site of Camp Fortunate near Armstead, Montana by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1915. The Camp Fortunate monument came a year after Laura Tolman Scott of Armstead spoke at a meeting of the Montana Federation of Women's Clubs, and called Sacagawea the “unsung heroine of Montana.” While these monuments certainly reflected the interests of western suffragists, Sacagawea symbolized more than the progress toward women's rights in the early part of the century. As Donna Kessler points out, Sacagawea came to embody many of the characteristics that had long been attributed to Pocohantas; at least as often as she represented political equality between men and women, Sacagawea also became an “Indian princess” who served as handmaiden to the noble cause of manifest destiny.^[11]

Public monuments to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark appeared less frequently in the early twentieth century, and sometimes with considerable difficulty. In 1843 the state of Tennessee had erected a marble monument and column more than twenty feet high to mark Meriwether Lewis's grave, and in 1904 Congress authorized the War Department to place a second monument at Hohenwald, Tennessee. The gravesite of Sergeant Charles Floyd on Floyd's Bluff near Sioux City, Iowa had also drawn attention, particularly in 1857 when local residents, noticing that the remains of the Corps of Discovery's only fatality were in danger of crumbling into the Missouri River, reinterred them in a safer spot. Then in 1895 a national Floyd Memorial Association was formed, which placed a stone slab on the grave site and set out to raise money for a more imposing monument. That memorial, a one-hundred-foot sandstone obelisk dedicated in 1901, is said to be the first registered National Historic Landmark in the United States. One of the monument's plaques commemorates not only the “heroic members” of the Lewis and Clark expedition, but also the Louisiana Purchase, the “valor of the American soldier,” and the “courage and fortitude of the American Pioneer.” Perhaps the earliest heroic-scale statue (life-size or larger) that includes both Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, was created in 1919 by the New York sculptor Charles Keck and placed in Charlottesville, Virginia's Midway Park. Set atop a fourteen-foot pedestal surrounded in bas-relief depicting scenes from the expedition, the bronze statue rises another eight feet, four inches and portrays the two explorers standing beside a sitting Sacagawea.^[12]

While the state of Montana commissioned a number of large murals for the new west wing of the state capitol building in Helena, including Charles M. Russell's Lewis and Clark Meeting Indians at Ross’ Hole (1912) and Edgar Paxson's Lewis and Clark at Three Forks (1912), state and community leaders failed to establish any other monuments to the explorers for several decades.

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The first of many unsuccessful efforts apparently began with a proposal around the time of the Portland exposition to place a statue on the site of Camp Fortunate, where the expedition met the Shoshone and bargained for horses, but nothing came of this original proposal. In 1917 a bill introduced in the Montana Legislature called for heroic bronze statues of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at Great Falls and at the three forks of the Missouri River. The measure passed in both houses but for some reason was never acted upon. A Montana governor's commission appointed in 1926 to propose means of honoring the explorers also called for a substantial monument and considered several cities for the site, including Great Falls, Three Forks, Helena, Butte, Bozeman, and Livingston. The commission ultimately recommended monuments in both Great Falls and Three Forks, but if only one were approved, it should be at Great Falls. Once again, nothing came of this proposal—possibly because of the intense municipal rivalry and the commission's apparent inability to decide whether to have monuments indifferent places or just one. Yet the competition among towns continued. A committee of the Three Forks Chamber of Commerce published an elaborate pamphlet in 1928 arguing that community's claim for a national monument on the basis of it being practically on the site of the expedition's “first and most important goal” (the headwaters of the Missouri River) as well as the point where the “great Yellowstone Trail, the National Parks Highway and the Geysers to Glacier Trail” all came together. Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler even introduced, fruitlessly as it turned out, a bill in Congress that would have appropriated $50,000 to erect a memorial at Three Forks. In 1929, the same year the regional Lewis and Clark Memorial Association was formed to address the problem of public neglect, the Montana Legislature passed a resolution designating Fort Benton as the single site for a Lewis and Clark monument, using an earlier design for Great Falls done by the artist Charles M. Russell. Still, nothing came of the design or the resolution, and interest in constructing monuments to Lewis and Clark seems to have dissipated altogether.^[13]

The sesquicentennial of the expedition brought a sharp increase in national interest in the Lewis and Clark expedition. The Far Horizon, a romantic depiction of the expedition starring Fred MacMurray (Meriwether Lewis), Charlton Heston (William Clark), and Donna Reed (Sacajawea), was released by Paramount Studios in 1955. The Pulitzer prize-winning author Bernard DeVoto also published books related to Lewis and Clark, The Course of Empire (1952), which won the National Book Award, and the still widely read Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953). Such popularity did not translate into a national memorial, but the sesquicentennial did inspire a great deal of local and regional interest in commemorating Lewis and Clark. For the most part, these commemorative efforts steered clear of monument

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building and focused instead on community celebrations that would foster local pride and attract tourists to sites along the expedition route.^[14]

In the midst of this growing national interest in the Lewis and Clark expedition, the governors of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana proclaimed 1955 as “Lewis and Clark Year.” They subsequently appointed a joint committee of representatives from the sesquicentennial committees in those states, who met in Spokane, Washington in December 1954 to plan commemorative celebrations. Events were scheduled to take place between May and October and spaced so that none would conflict. In some cities a Lewis and Clark theme was added to regular annual events, while other communities staged elaborate celebrations dedicated to the sesquicentennial. In Astoria, Oregon a full week of activities accompanied the dedication of a newly completed replica of Fort Clatsop, the 1805–6 winter quarters of the expedition. In Salmon, Idaho a large cast performed the Salmon River Saga, which combined drama, music, poetry, and narration to tell the story of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea in eight episodes that began with Sacagawea's abduction by the Minatarees and concluded with Old Toby leading the expedition over the Bitterroots. At the Missouri River headwaters near Three Forks, Montana, Professor Bert Hansen of the University of Montana directed a pageant that had been performed each of the previous four summers. Episodes depicting the expedition's outward bound and homeward bound journeys were each performed twice on alternate evenings. In conjunction with the Three Forks celebration, the American Pioneer Trails Association, which served as the national sponsor of the sesquicentennial, held its twenty-sixth annual “Rendezvous” at the Sacajawea Hotel in Three Forks—and event that included an appearance by the grandson of the expedition member Patrick Gass. Just five days after the pageant at Three Forks, an estimated five thousand spectators crowded a “natural amphitheater near the site of Camp Fortunate on the Beaverhead River as Dillon offered its commemoration, a two-hour dramatization directed by Professor Joe Ryburn of Western Montana College of Education that featured a cast of “more than 100.”^[15]

A new emphasis on the expedition's route appeared during the sesquicentennial, and many commemorative events were not specifically tied to towns or cities in the region. Approximately one thousand Boy Scouts gathered in Great Falls, Montana to begin retracing the expedition's route from the great portage to Astoria, using dugout canoes and packhorses. The Greater Clarkston (Washington) Association sponsored an “automobile caravan” that would travel over the Lewis and Clark route for nine days between Bismarck, North Dakota and the Oregon coast. The caravan planned to camp along the way and to stop at “all Lewis and Clark museums and roadside markers.” Celebrants even took to the air, as one hundred pilots

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made an air tour over the trail from St. Louis to Astoria with stops in Missoula, Montana and Walla Walla, Washington. In a public relations coup that trumped all other efforts to retrace the explorers’ route, the Montana state committee announced that it would help pay expenses for seventeen-year-old Meriwether Lewis of Tacoma, Washington, “a seventh direct descendant of an uncle” of the famous explorer, to travel the length of the trail from St. Louis to the Pacific.^[16]

Besides these various retracings of the Trail, other commemorative efforts were targeted more broadly to the various communities in the vicinity of the expedition route. The Washington state committee prepared out-lines for talks on Lewis and Clark as well as lists of available speakers and offered suggestions for program topics and activities, including art displays, pageants, and radio or television programs. The Northern Pacific Railway Company agreed to finance a special sesquicentennial book with maps to familiarize readers with events in the journals and the nature of the country the explorers traversed. Oregon Senator Richard Neuberger introduced bills in July 1955, cosponsored by Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Henry Dworshak of Idaho, to establish national monuments at what was believed to be the original site of Fort Clatsop near Astoria and the rock cairns at Indian Post Office on the Lolo trail in Idaho. But many residents of Idaho and Montana would have preferred that Congress provide the means for completing the Lewis-Clark Highway between Lewiston, Idaho and Lolo Pass on the Idaho-Montana state line. The highway (now U.S. 12), which follows the route Lewis and Clark took down the Clearwater River and roughly parallels the Lolo trail for about a hundred miles, still had not been completed some forty years after construction first began. The completion of the highway had been a special concern of the now defunct Lewis and Clark Memorial Association, and now fewer than thirty miles remained to be constructed along the Lochsa River as the region prepared to celebrate the Corps of Discovery's 150th anniversary.^[17]

Following the sesquicentennial, the Lewis and Clark trail—the combination of routes from Wood River to the Pacific Ocean and back to St. Louis, as described in the journals kept by several of the company—became the true memorial to the expedition. For many enthusiasts in the second half of the twentieth century, the most inspiring and appropriate way to commemorate Lewis and Clark has been to follow in their footsteps, to retrace as much of the route as possible. The tradition of following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark goes back to the turn of the twentieth century and Wheeler's two volume Trail of Lewis and Clark. In order to prepare a separate chapter on Lewis and Clark for the 1900 issue of the Northern Pacific's annual publication, Wonderland, Wheeler set out to “visit many places that were important and critical points in their exploration.” Closely relating sites and landmarks visited to passages in the journals, Wheeler attempted to match

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them with the geographic features he encountered in order to connect “the exploration with the present time.”^[18] Of particular significance are the hundreds of photographs Wheeler took of the entire journey from Missouri to Oregon and back, providing the first complete visual record of the places visited by the expedition.

Retracing the expedition route became easier in the 1920s, when a rudimentary system of national highways permitted auto tourists to drive along the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Jefferson, and the Columbia Rivers and gain access to at least some of the significant campsites and other land-marks. Few people ever made this pilgrimage in the decades before World War II, however, and none wrote books about their journeys in the same way as Wheeler. All this would change in the postwar era, when a number of latter-day explorers “rediscovered” Lewis and Clark and published illustrated accounts of their journeys. Albert and Jane Salisbury, Calvin Tomkins, and Ingvard Eide all effectively depicted the ground covered by Lewis and Clark and stimulated strong public interest in seeing and marking the trail. Wheeler's effort to trace the exact route of the expedition, even over the tortuous Lolo trail, would also find new expression in the efforts of Ralph Space, John J. Peebles, and others to plot the exact routes and pin down the precise locations of campsites in some of the most remote parts of northern and central Idaho.^[19]

Whereas following the expedition by water and foot might represent the “Holy Grail” of Lewis and Clark aficionados, experiencing the route by highway and road has become the goal of many enthusiasts and engendered a body of related writings. For example, Dayton Duncan's engaging and personal observations based on his own retracings of the Lewis and Clark trail juxtapose present-day people and places to those described in the journals. Books by Roy E. Appleman for the National Park Service and by Archie Satterfield have contributed detailed maps indicating how to drive to Lewis and Clark sites, and several tourist guides now exist that offer practical advice for following all or part of the route.^[20]

One of the most challenging sections of the expedition route to retrace by foot or car has always been the stretch through Idaho's Bitterroot Range. In his 1955 speech to the Senate memorializing Lewis and Clark, Senator Neuberger said he thought that he and his wife were “among the comparative handful of people who have traveled the whole Lolo Trail.” That was true, but by the 1950s it was probably a fairly large “handful.” The Lolo Motorway, a nearly one-hundred mile forest road completed in 1932 that approximates the route taken by Lewis and Clark over the Lolo trail, had become surprisingly popular with motor tourists. In 1953 the writer Ralph Gray and his family took on the rough, narrow road in their station wagon rather than detour north or south as they traced the Lewis and Clark trail across the country from east to west. Rather than turn back when a tire blew

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after only five miles, the Grays persevered without a spare for the remaining ninety-five miles to Pierce, Idaho, averaging about ten miles an hour up and down, skirting “the brink of yawning chasms” without encountering “any vestige of civilization” other than the road itself. Two years later Space led an automobile caravan over the same road, an excursion from Pasco, Washington to Fort Benton, Montana to promote completion of the Lewis-Clark Highway's missing link along the Lochsa River. But only a handful of other intrepid motorists had tried that road by the early 1960s when the Lewis-Clark Highway finally opened, making it possible to approximate the route on pavement at much lower elevation.^[21]

When the summer of sesquicentennial celebrations in the Pacific North-west came to a close with a two-day gala in Lewiston, Idaho, interest in some-how preserving and interpreting the trail of Lewis and Clark as a national memorial began to gain momentum. In 1956 Senator Warren G. Magnuson of Washington headed a campaign for a Lewis and Clark “national tourway,” that would include State Highway 14 along the Washington side of the Columbia River. It was a more ambitious version of a proposal made in 1948 by the National Park Service, a designated “Lewis and Clark tourway” along the Missouri River between St. Louis and Three Forks, Montana. One critic of Senator Magnuson's proposal questioned its appropriateness. The secretary of the South Dakota Historical Society sniffed that “while the idea of [a] Lewis & Clark Highway is picturesque they were only one [sic] of hundreds of pioneers … who used the Missouri as a path to the development of the Northwest.” The remark suggests that Lewis and Clark represented something different in the Pacific Northwest than they did in the Northern Plains states. In fact, the sesquicentennial celebration had been a Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon thing, while the Dakotas and states further down-stream had scarcely participated, but that would all change once the idea of commemorating the entire route from the mouth of the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean gained currency. While the issue of appropriately selecting and labeling highways remained, emphasis in the 1960s shifted to the actual path of exploration and the campaign to establish a national historic trail.^[22]

While anxiety over the closing of the frontier may have stimulated interest in Lewis and Clark at the turn of the twentieth century, anxiety in the 1960s over the loss of parts of the historical landscape almost certainly did the same for creating a nationally designated Lewis and Clark trail, as did the relative isolation of the route by the new interstate freeway system. Donald B. Alexander, executive director of the National Conference on State Parks, complained in 1966 that the expedition had disappeared into the history books and that, except for “a few memorial stones and restored camp sites,” most of which could not be seen from the new interstate free-ways, almost nothing of historical interest remained. In the same year, Roy E.

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Appleman pointed out that “only in the high Bitterroot Range of Idaho and in the badlands of the White Rocks section of the Missouri in Montana can one today see this western wilderness for any considerable extent essentially as Lewis and Clark saw it.” Hydroelectric power dams had shorn the Great Falls of the Missouri and its companion waterfalls of much, or in some cases, all, of their spectacular beauty. Camp Fortunate, where Lewis and Clark had conferred with the Shoshone and bargained for horses to cross the mountains and where Sacagawea had immeasurably improved their chances by recognizing her brother Cameahwait, had been covered over by the reservoir waters behind Clark Canyon Dam in 1963. At Kamiah, Idaho on the Clearwater River, a sawmill had obliterated the site of Long Camp where the expedition prepared to recross the Bitterroots in the spring of 1806. Ted Yates, who made a film based on the journals for NBC in the early 1960s, bemoaned the “relentless civilizing” that had made the “country seen by Lewis and Clark” vanish, through cultivation, dam building, and other forms of development. Clear-cut logging marred the Lolo trail, even at that time. “Our film remained unexposed until we reached North Dakota,” Yates noted bitterly, because reservoir impoundments on the Missouri River had obliterated so many of the sites mentioned in the journals, and there still remained another hundred miles in Montana covered by the waters of Fort Peck Reservoir. As for the Columbia River, Yates found it “impossible to photograph most of the way. Its technology, its wires and signs and roads and motels and picnic sites and highways and barges and locks and docks, defied our best efforts to film the wild and awesome river that the explorers wrote about.” Even without “road signs and high-tension wires,” the Lolo trail was difficult to photograph, he said, because of the pervasive evidence of clear-cut logging. Yates concluded that he and his crew had with great difficulty “reconstructed America to look the way many of us dream it looks,” yet they had also managed to add to a “delusion” and “sustain” a myth of American scenic beauty.^[23]

Awareness, at least among many affluent members of the middle class, that a significant part of the country's historical heritage was slipping away combined in the 1960s with heightened concern for the environment to generate public and governmental support for a national Lewis and Clark trail. In 1961 the Iowa conservation writer and newspaper cartoonist J. N. “Ding” Darling proposed creating “a scenic avenue” and “recreation ribbon” along the entire length of the expedition's route. A foundation in Darling's name created after his death pushed the concept, while the Department of Interior's newly created Bureau of Outdoor Recreation studied the feasibility of a national historic trail through ten states. In October 1964 Congress established a national Lewis and Clark Trail Commission to identify and seek means for making the route “available” for the American people and to “advance public awareness and knowledge of [its] far-reaching

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and historic influence.” Perhaps the most grandiose and interesting proposal for a monument heard by the commission came in 1968 from the sculptor Archie M. Graber, who had designed a “landsculpture … for the space age” that would alter the natural topography at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers with earthmoving equipment to “create cameo-like statues of the explorers” visible from the air, with one head facing east and the other west. This superheroic commemoration never became reality, of course, but it demonstrates the degree of imaginative vision inspired by the commission's mandate. And its outright rejection also underscores the new emphasis away from monument building and the strong interest in maintaining or recreating the physical conditions of the expedition route as experienced by Lewis and Clark. The original intent of the original Lewis and Clark trail proposal was best captured in the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation's final report in 1975, which recommended that the entire 3,700 mile route be designated as the Lewis and Clark national historic trail and that recreational development be planned for twenty-one selected segments. On 10 November 1978 it officially became part of the National Scenic and National Historic Trails system.^[24]

As the Lewis and Clark bicentennial begins, the array of “suitable” means for commemorating this national epic and the list of individuals who participated in it have both widened considerably over the past century. The emergence of a national network of paved highways and mass automobile tourism had incalculable effects on public attitudes toward the Corps of Discovery, as did intense concern for historical heritage in a landscape altered and threatened by economic development. There will be many more monuments, pageants, and other traditional means of expressing the expedition's significance, but the Trail itself, as it exists both within the journals as a literary representation and as a physical entity marked by signs and interpretive features, will certainly assume the central role.

NOTES

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