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4. New Perspectives

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With the bicentennial of the expedition approaching, interest in Lewis and Clark has grown exponentially. From St. Louis, Missouri to Seaside, Oregon, various states, counties, and cities are planning to cash in on the millions of latter-day explorers who will cruise the expedition route in the next few years. In the words of David Borlaug, president of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council, the bicentennial “is shaping up to be the tourist event of the 21st century.” All of this reflects an increased focus on the Trail as the appropriate site for commemorating the expedition, but a four-thousand-mile, two-and-a-half-year “event” raises new questions and problems about how to understand and incorporate the lessons of the past.

The three essays in this section present very different assessments of the promises and prospects of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial. In many regards, there is much to celebrate—not about Lewis and Clark, but in the opportunities that such a unique commemorative event presents. Fascination in the expedition has led countless individuals and families to “rediscover” largely unvisited portions of the United States, from the Dakotas to the Columbia Plateau, and in the process learn a great deal about the peoples and histories of these places. Likewise, the bicentennial represents a powerful opportunity for Native peoples to tell their stories and in the process shape the nature and significance of this massive commemorative event. Because two hundred years have profoundly altered the lands traversed by Lewis and Clark, the bicentennial also gives pause for reflection on the expedition's destructive legacies. Yet it remains to be seen whether such reflection will lead to constructive understanding, or if it will become little more than a brief and unproductive lament.

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10. Let's Play Lewis & Clark!

Strange Visions of Nature and History at the Bicentennial

Mark Spence

The middle weeks of October can be a cruel time of year in the Dakotas. It is not uncommon to experience four seasons in a day, when a mild afternoon can give way to cold rain and a bone-chilling night. Travelers in the open must contend with the blasting winds of the Great Plains, which swing wildly about the compass as continental weather patterns shift between the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic. Gray skies from the north become more prevalent with each passing day, however, and early morning frosts settle into the dry grasses and put an urgency to the winter preparations of all living things. For the Sahnish (Arikara), Mandan, and Hidatsa villagers who lived along the upper Missouri River in the early nineteenth century, the short autumn season was a time for brief hunts, final harvests, and preparations for the move to more sheltered dwelling sites. This time also marked the end of the business season for nonresident traders from St. Louis, who left in early fall before the river level dropped to its lowest ebb and the water turned frigid. How strange it must have seemed, then, for a group of nearly forty men and three watercraft to arrive from the south in the fall of 1804.^[1]

For the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition, “strange” was probably too mild a word. Something with more sinister connotations might have better described their predicament, as weather and the Missouri River seemed to conspire against their efforts at every turn. On the morning of 5 October, just a day after passing into the territory of the Sahnish, they were surprised to awake beneath a white frost. The following day, shallow water and a cold north wind forced expedition members to drop sail and drag their fifty-five-foot single masted keelboat across sandbars and gravel shoals. William Clark described these efforts in brief but telling fashion: “we have been obgd [obliged] to hunt a Chanl. for Some time past the river being

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devided in many places in a great number of Chanels” (3:147).^[2] Their struggles soon brought them to a principal village of the Sahnish, the southernmost of the three horticultural groups that lived and farmed along the upper Missouri River, and “Great numbers of Spectators” gathered along the river to watch and comment on the expedition (3:151). The diplomatic goals of Lewis and Clark and the ritual hospitality of the Sahnish allowed for a brief respite from the challenges of river travel, but the winds of the Northern Plains still found a way to stymie the expedition: the first official meeting with village leaders was postponed because, in Clark's words, it was too “windey rainey … and Cold” (3:155).^[3]

A few consecutive days of fair weather seemed to bode well for the expedition, and after several meetings with different village leaders the self-described Corps of Discovery renewed its daily struggle against shallow currents and variable winds. Its number was increased by the addition of a Sahnish leader named Piahito (Eagle Feather) and his retinue, who agreed to accompany the captains upriver for a series of meetings with the Mandan and Hidatsa. For several days they passed smaller Sahnish settlements and encountered returning parties of hunters. According to the observations of a French trader who lived among the Sahnish and served the expedition as a translator, all marveled at the keelboat and the strange instruments it carried as “supernatural and powerful.”^[4] For Piahito at least, the most peculiar aspect of the expedition and its members was manifest not so much in their tools as their behavior. A day after the Sahnish leader was brought on board, the captains initiated a court-martial of Private John Newman. Charged with “having uttered repeated expressions of a highly criminal and mutinous nature,” Newman was sentenced to seventy-five lashes on his bare back (3:170). As the punishment was being delivered, Piahito cried out in alarm and apparently tried to halt the whipping. Corporal punishment in public was completely foreign to the peoples of the upper Missouri, and he protested that no one ever whipped another person for any reason. Clark “explained the Cause of the punishment and the necessity,” which he believed was sufficiently convincing to his guest, but it is impossible to assess how much was understood between these two men. Nevertheless, the event was certainly discussed at length by Piahito and the Sahnish who visited the boat later that day.

Nothing quite so dramatic or unsettling would occur again during the one-hundred-mile journey to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, but upriver travel grew increasingly difficult. On 17 October, Clark reported that a wind from the northwest blew so hard that the expedition was forced to halt after just a few hours, making no more than six miles the entire day. Strong headwinds and cold squalls of rain not only made it impossible to use the sail but also caused the keelboat to swing about as it was poled through the shallows or hauled with towlines from the shore. The expedition also included

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two smaller pirogues—open vessels with low-slung gunwales—but these were perhaps even more difficult to operate; their smaller sails were also useless and, when the oarsmen were not fighting their way into a constant spray of cold spindrift, they too were forced to clamber along the frozen clay banks of the river and pull their vessels against the current (3: 179–181, 222).

As they made their way toward the great bend of the Missouri, where the eastward-flowing river makes a broad sweeping turn toward the south, it was clear that five months of river travel were rapidly coming to an end.^[5] The expedition members had experienced the first snow of the season and already suffered through several “verry Cold” nights. On the day before their first official meeting with Mandan leaders, and under the curious gaze of numerous onlookers from shore, they suffered through one of their most difficult days yet. Clark gave a brief summary: “this evening passed a rapid and sholde [shoaled] place in the river were obliged to get out and drag the boat—all the leaves of the trees have now fallen—the snows did not lye” (3:222). The cold and strain proved especially hard on Clark and at least two or three others, who complained of a severe, debilitating rheumatism once they finally stumbled into the Mandan villages.^[6]

For the Sahnish and Mandan who watched this little flotilla move slowly upriver, covering in two weeks what a heavily laden and equally large group might travel by foot or horseback in just a few days, the Corps of Discovery presented a bizarre sight indeed. Made up of an odd assortment of young American backwoodsmen, a black slave, several French Canadian engagés, a number of men of mixed Indian and European or American parentage, and two military officers, the expedition defied easy interpretation. At times it must have been a quite humorous spectacle as the members of the expedition slipped in the freezing mud, cursed in various languages, and struggled to pull “towlines that remained slick and stiff with ice until mid-morning.”^[7] Far stranger was the captains’ boast that they planned to travel in this fashion all the way to the headwaters of the Missouri River, where they would cross the Rocky Mountains and head downriver a short ways to the Pacific Ocean. What made these plans so audacious was not the vast distances they entailed, but the manner in which they would be covered. The Sahnish knew that peoples they traded with, including the Comanche and Kiowa, made journeys between the upper Missouri River and what is now the American South west in a matter of weeks. Likewise, the Hidatsa, who lived just upriver from the Mandan, were familiar with the headwaters of the Missouri and frequently raided the peoples who lived on the western slope of the Rockies; yet they also made the journey in a fairly short time.^[8]

Though it must have seemed a form of collective madness, the Sahnish no doubt judged the behavior of the Corps of Discovery with a generous eye.^[9] Based on close observation and intimate contact, they may well have

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concluded that the Lewis and Clark expedition was a sort of mass vision quest. In many respects this was brilliant deduction. No other reasoning could so completely explain the unnecessary hardships that expedition members endured, the physical abuse they inflicted on one another, or their pathological devotion to river travel. The two captains were obviously not traders, given the time of year they arrived and the stingy manner in which they hoarded a relatively large amount of valuable goods. Their declared intention to move on to the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean also distinguished Lewis and Clark from other traders, as did their relatively potent collection of firearms, but the expedition did not seem to have any immediate military objectives. Instead, the expedition's behavior mirrored a common form of vision questing among the Sahnish and other groups along the upper Missouri. Though usually done by individuals within a particular community context, this powerful and deeply personal ritual often involved self-torture, arduous travel, and the hauling of terrible burdens to the point of absolute physical and mental exhaustion. A state of self-induced delirium, achieved through personal deprivation and sacrifice, opened one up to visitation by a spiritual helper or reciprocated for a previous divine intervention.^[10]

Lewis or Clark would have dismissed such an interpretation as ridiculous and “not worth while mentioning,” but it serves as a good indication of just how absurd the idea of exploration must have seemed to peoples already familiar with the places to be discovered.^[11] More significantly, the Sahnish interpretation should also draw our attention to a simple yet frequently over-looked fact: no one would travel with so much pain, hardship, and deliberate slowness, except on purpose. The expedition members did not throw themselves against the “challenge of the continent” and “triumph over an unforgiving wilderness,” as so many Lewis and Clark aficionados proclaim. Such romantic hyperbole disguises what the Sahnish and others saw so clearly: the Corps of Discovery brought its own obstacles and proved the source of nearly all the physical adversities it encountered.

Understanding the significance and purposes of the expedition must begin with a clear sense of how and why Lewis and Clark dragged so many burdens across the continent. This should in no way undermine our appreciation for the arduous nature of their task, but it can provide a meaningful alternative to the simple recipe of “heroism” and wilderness adventure espoused by Steven Ambrose and others.^[12] Focusing less on the physicality of the expedition's task and more on the reasons why Lewis and Clark would have viewed their actions as appropriate and worthwhile (as opposed to unnecessarily difficult) can also provide a new basis for interpreting the expedition's significance at the bicentennial. In the process we might begin to recognize how current efforts to commemorate Lewis and Clark draw on popular ideas about history and nature that cloud our understanding of the

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expedition, ignore its historical legacies, and perpetuate a set of social and ecological burdens that are becoming increasingly intolerable.

“FOR THE PURPOSES OF COMMERCE”

Over nearly half of the territory they crossed, Lewis and Clark were not the first “civilized men” to experience the lands and peoples of the Missouri and Columbia watersheds.^[13] And of course, their claims of “discovery” in the areas where they knew that no European or American had ever visited were still anywhere from twelve to twenty thousand years late. Nevertheless, they were the first to experience these places within the context of Thomas Jefferson's vision of an expanding agrarian empire. As Jefferson's “eyes,” Lewis and Clark saw the West in terms of the president's ideas on Indian relations, foreign policy, and the role of the federal government in shaping future national economic development.^[14]

The objectives and route of the expedition, as well as the time and tools required to make it possible, reflect two fundamental aspects of Jefferson's goals for Lewis and Clark. According to the president's instructions, the expedition's entire energies were devoted to a careful survey of two major river systems “for the purposes of commerce,” and an effort to convince Native leaders of the “peaceful and commercial dispositions of the United States.” These concerns were manifest in the vast array of equipment and trade goods carried by the expedition, which constituted the bulk of the cargo it so laboriously hauled up the Missouri River. Jefferson also made explicit his desire that Lewis and other members of the expedition keep journals. While paper and ink did not represent a weighty physical burden, their use required a great deal of time and care. According to Jefferson's instructions, most of this was devoted to descriptions of “the soil and face of the country, it's growth and vegetable productions,” “the animals of the country generally,” “the mineral productions of every kind; but more particularly metals, limestone, pit coal, & saltpetre; salines & mineral waters,” “volcanic appearances,” and climate. In other words, the journal writers were to methodically observe and report on the potential of these lands for future commercial development and agricultural settlement.^[15]

The combined writings of Lewis, Clark, and other expedition members have often been called a “national epic,” but the journals do not fit this genre at all. Daily records of temperature, longitude, soils, Native markets, river courses, plants, minerals, and animals are not the stuff of epic poetry. Rather, they more closely resemble the crude field notes of a land assessor or early-nineteenth-century surveyor, and in that respect they are absolutely true to the original purpose of the expedition.

While the expedition was primarily an extended venture in land assessment, it was predicated on the desire to initiate a strong American presence

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in the western fur trade. Toward these ends, Jefferson directed Lewis and Clark to seek a river route across the continent, announce to Native leaders that the United States was now their primary commercial partner, and appraise the trade possibilities of the West Coast. The immediate interest in a transcontinental water route reflected the desire to make St. Louis the center of a global fur trade that extended to the Pacific and the markets of the Far East. Establishing diplomatic and commercial relations with Native leaders would also undermine the position of imperial rivals in North America's lucrative fur trade, thus confirming the authority of the United States in the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and bringing much needed revenue into the fledgling nation.

As important as these concerns were both financially and diplomatically, they were only the necessary preliminaries to Jefferson's vision of a vast expanse of American farms stretching out to the Pacific. Once the West had been skinned of its peltry, commercial ties with Native leaders would become irrelevant. As Jefferson wrote Benjamin Hawkins in 1803, the period of the fur trade should be a time to “familiarize [Indians] to the idea that it is for their interest to cede lands at times to the United States, and for us thus to procure gratifications to our citizens, from time to time, by new acquisitions of land.”^[16] “The obtaining [of] lands from the Indians … as fast as the expansion of our settlements,” as Jefferson put it in a letter to Andrew Jackson that same year, was the ultimate goal of the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition.^[17] The establishment of commercial and diplomatic relations with Native leaders was thus a necessary first step in Jefferson's aggressive efforts to convert tribal lands into American farms.

“TWO HUNDRED YEARS TO THE FUTURE”

Two hundred years after Thomas Jefferson formulated his disturbing vision of Native dispossession and national expansion, the Lewis and Clark expedition has acquired a new set of meanings that reflect the concerns of the twenty-first century. Zealous desire to “develop” the West has been tempered by fears of global ecological crisis, and the cultural certitudes that explained the motives of an early-nineteenth-century imperial enterprise have been eclipsed by more relativistic thinking. These changes are not unrelated, and both are found in recent films and books in which Lewis and Clark are presented as protoecologists and culturally sensitive diplomats of the frontier.

The contrasts between the Jeffersonian vision that produced the expedition and the concerns that are shaping current bicentennial understandings of Lewis and Clark are both subtle and dramatic. They are also bizarre. One need only wonder at how William Clark, suffering from a severe rheumatism brought on by physical strain and intense cold, might have

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responded to the following description of the Missouri River in the recent Ken Burns documentary of the expedition: “[The Missouri] is a river that immediately presents to the traveler, ‘I am a grandfather spirit. I have a source; I have a life.’ … [T]hat grandfather spirit … of the Missouri River helped draw them on. … [It is a] river which seems to say to the traveler, ‘Come up me.’”^[18] Clark would certainly have found the “grandfather spirit” description of the Missouri River somewhat daft, but he would no doubt be even more perplexed by a new twist on the old Sahnish interpretation of their expedition. As we learn in the companion volume to the Burns documentary, “Lewis and Clark, on behalf of America, set off up the great Missouri on a kind of national, if unrecognized, vision quest.”^[19]

The bicentennial version of the vision-quest theory comes with some important new elements while it omits other key aspects of the old Sahnish interpretation. It does not emphasize the peculiar behavior of the expedition members or the difficulties they created but instead presents the expedition in mythic yet elemental terms. As we learn from recent depictions of Lewis and Clark, their purpose was simply to proceed on with undaunted courage and face whatever challenges wild nature threw their way. According to the precepts of dramatic storytelling, the expedition members were transformed by the experience and, through a strange kind of alchemy, both they and the territories they encountered became more fully American.^[20] To paraphrase from Robert Frost's poem “The Gift Outright,” Lewis and Clark opened up a “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced” country and gave of themselves “outright” so that Americans could realize that “the land was ours … [and] we her people.”^[21] In short, the expedition was nothing less than a holy act of national transubstantiation.

The expedition across the continent has also come to represent a journey through time as well. It might seem unfair to single out Ken Burns and company, but their Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery is certainly the most potent example of contemporary understandings of the expedition, and we hear in the conclusion of that documentary one of the clearest statements on the timeless qualities of Lewis and Clark: “It matters less what they went to find as what it is that they did find. … They discovered the American future. They went, literally, from east to the west coast, and that is what America did in their footsteps. It was … a physical journey of the nation to go to the Pacific Ocean to discover its own future.”^[22]

Jefferson may not have included time travel in his instructions to Meriwether Lewis, but these concerns obviously speak more to the current fascination with Lewis and Clark than the original purposes of the expedition. Using the past to satisfy the desires of the present is hardly a new development, nor is it especially unique to commemorations of the expedition. Like all origin stories, whether religious or secular in nature, the expedition retains a peculiar ability to conflate the past with the present with each retelling.

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When the National Park Service proclaims “two hundred years to the future” as the motto for its Corps of Discovery II bicentennial program, the agency is participating in a long tradition of using Lewis and Clark to celebrate the values and conditions of the present. Yet there is a quality about the bicentennial version of this story that sets it apart. Past commemorations have invariably placed Lewis and Clark at the beginning of a celebratory narrative about unrelenting national progress. At the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon, for instance, technological and commercial developments subsequent to the expedition were highlighted to connect the past to the present, explain the expedition's original purposes, and illustrate its ongoing inspirational significance for future national growth.^[23] The bicentennial version of the expedition continues to see in Lewis and Clark the embodiment of current needs and concerns yet rejects the old narrative of national progress through conquest and industrial development. Instead, the bicentennial is seen as an elusive chance to incorporate the virtues of the distant past, erase the mistakes of the past two hundred years, and set the American future back on the course it should have followed at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

MILLENNIAL HISTORY

A recent membership solicitation from the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation begins with a simple but telling statement: “As we start the third millennium, we approach the third century since the Corps of Discovery made its epic journey across the young American continent.”^[24] To understand the ideas and concerns that are shaping the bicentennial observance of the Lewis and Clark expedition, we must first begin with an appreciation for its millennial context. More than a simple accident of calendars and centuries, the bicentennial is rooted in the classical sense of the millennium as a time of apocalypse and regeneration. Indeed, the Lewis and Clark bicentennial reflects the abiding sensibility of a nation that continues to present itself in millennial terms—as “the last best hope of earth,” to use Abraham Lincoln's powerful phrase. True to these deeper sentiments, the bicentennial of the expedition is increasingly described as nothing less than a unique and profound opportunity for national redemption. With almost religious zeal, fans of Lewis and Clark see the bicentennial as an opportunity to incorporate the virtues of a mythic past (when the continent was “young”), leave behind the mistakes of more recent history, and press ahead with a new sensitivity. Commemorating the expedition is “a chance to finally get things right, to start over,” a member of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council recently told me. “We need to get back to the original spirit of Lewis and Clark. They cooperated with Indians and appreciated Nature; they didn't try to dominate.”^[25]

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It is nice to see that multicultural concerns and a certain environmentalist sensibility have begun to take the place of older mythologies about conquest and national progress. Replacing one misguided understanding of the past with another historical fiction is not a satisfying alternative, however. Native peoples certainly assisted the expedition on repeated occasions, but it is wrong to assume that Lewis and Clark represent a tragic lost opportunity in the history of Indian-white relations. “The sorrow behind the Corps of Discovery,” according to the writer William Least-Heat-Moon (a.k.a. William Trogdon), “is that what they did so well, later people were not able to do half so well, and that is in, in dealing with the native peoples who were there.”^[26] Such an interpretation overlooks an essential feature of the expedition: a transient group of people in unfamiliar country was almost entirely dependent on the hospitality and support of resident communities. Aggressive or belligerent behavior would have undermined the objectives of the expedition and could well have proved suicidal. The fact that Lewis and Clark did not maniacally blast their way across the West is hardly the result of a special cultural sensitivity that future generations of Americans failed to emulate.

No one was more conscious than Meriwether Lewis of the need to maintain what Jefferson called a “most friendly & conciliatory manner” toward Native peoples. Lewis's journal entries are full of references to his frequent struggles to keep his fears and prejudices in check when dealing with people he regarded as capricious “savages who are ever as fickle as the wind” (5:106). The young captain was not always successful in these matters, however. On the occasions when his deeper sentiments did determine his actions, especially during the expedition's encounters with the Lakota, the winter at Fort Clatsop, the eastward and westward journeys along the Columbia River, and among the Blackfeet, Lewis was not above theft, threats of violence, or killing.^[27] Such behavior may have been rare by necessity, but it hardly contradicted the ultimate purpose of the expedition. The conversion of Native lands into American farms was always the central tenet of Jefferson's Indian policy, and thus a guiding force behind the expedition. The president did warn Lewis to prepare for “hostility” during the expedition but also forbade him to engage “superior force[s]” since “we value too much the lives of citizens to offer them to probable destruction.” Yet Jefferson did not shy from advocating extreme violence to achieve his larger objectives. “[I]f ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe,” he wrote William Henry Harrison in 1807, “we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated.” “[I]f they wish to remain on the land which covers the bones of their fathers,” he continued, “[they must] keep the peace with [us] who ask their friendship without needing it.” “In war,” Jefferson added ominously, “they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”^[28]

It would be wrong to attribute an entire century of conquest to the attitudes

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and behaviors of Lewis and Clark or the bellicosity of Thomas Jefferson. And yet it does no good to view the expedition as some kind of innocent encounter, a fleeting moment in the wilderness when Native peoples and Americans managed to briefly escape the violent course of history. Native leaders certainly did not receive Lewis and Clark as the harbingers of a bright future of cooperation and harmonious cultural exchange. Most viewed the expedition with apprehension or, like the Sahnish, outright confusion. At best, “even those Indians whom [Lewis and Clark] came to know best regarded the explorers as the advance party of a great trading company, ‘the United States.’”^[29] At worst, the expedition represented a dangerous new rival in the contest to shape the scope and terms of wide-ranging trade networks. This was certainly the case for the Lakota and Blackfeet, as well as the peoples of the lower Columbia River. With key political and commercial interests at stake on all sides, violence or the threat of violence was often a central feature of the expedition's encounters with these and other groups.^[30]

At times a bitter and abiding prejudice developed on both sides of the diplomatic and commercial divide. Within a few years of their return to St. Louis, at least three members of the expedition were killed by Blackfeet while trapping beaver near the Rocky Mountains, and another lost a leg as a result of a violent incident among the Sahnish.^[31] William Clark, in particular, harbored a deep hatred for the Lakota through his more than twenty years as a superintendent of Indian affairs. His views of the Lakota grew out of the expedition's tense encounters with several bands along the Missouri River but also reflected that powerful nation's ability to challenge and thwart the objectives of the federal government. Clark's ideas about a people he described as “fierce deceitfull unprencipaled robers” (3:483) were also conditioned by his previous experience in the brutal wars of the 1790s that ravaged the Native communities of the Ohio country—an arena of conflict that had earlier made his brother, George Rogers Clark, a national icon.^[32]

MILLENNIAL NATURE

The temper of the expedition's relations with the various groups they encountered was intimately connected to the manner in which they perceived and described the lands they coveted. That is, both were described in accordance with the purposes of commerce. In a strange parallel, current efforts to celebrate Lewis and Clark have linked the expedition's supposed good intentions toward Native peoples with a special ability to appreciate nature. Not surprisingly, modern readers and editors of the journals often pause at the two captains’ frequent use of the word “beautiful” when describing the lands they traversed along the Missouri River. While this conjures up images of an unspoiled landscape for present-day readers and implies

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a stark contrast with the “ugly” developments that have since altered an earlier vista, this was certainly not the intent of the original journal writers. In American dictionaries of the early nineteenth century, the primary definition for “beautiful” was: “fair arrangement” or “pleasing quality.”^[33] This carries into our own usage in a phrase like “Everything comes together beautifully; the villain loses and the heroes live happily ever after.” It is less a reference to scenic qualities than a description of how well various features of a place match a particular end or purpose. On a very few occasions the journals do make explicit reference to the purely aesthetic, as when Lewis described the white cliffs of the Missouri: “As we passed on it seemed as if those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end” (4:226). On the countless other occasions when Lewis, Clark, or some other member of the expedition described an area as “beautiful,” the meaning was something that modern tourists would find infinitely less exciting—as in William Clark's description of modern-day Kansas City as “a butifull place for a fort, good landing place,” or his use of “butifull Plain” to describe the agricultural potential of an area in what is now southeastern Nebraska (2:113, 157).

This is hardly the kind of stuff that would inspire a national celebration. A book titled Lewis and Clark: First Assessors of Western Agricultural Potential might be good history, but it hardly stands a chance against something along the lines of Saga of Lewis and Clark: Into the Unknown West, or Those Tremendous Mountains: The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.^[34] What excites people today is to imagine being in the shoes of Lewis and Clark. No one, it seems, tries to get inside their heads. Though it is an interpretation that would have made no sense to the members of the expedition, Lewis and Clark have become symbols of environmental appreciation and preservation. At a recent demonstration in Washington, D.C., two men dressed as Lewis and Clark to advocate for the restoration of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest by removing dams from the Columbia and Snake Rivers. Dam removal may be sound policy, but using Lewis and Clark to symbolize the virtues of salmon and wild rivers is deeply ironic. The expedition generally avoided salmon as a food source (preferring dogs instead), struggled often with the fierce and turbulent nature of the Columbia, and held a pronounced disdain for the Native peoples who lived along the river. If anything, they would have supported the construction of dams that decimated salmon, eased river navigation, and undermined Native communities.^[35]

Using the expedition as a symbol for environmentalist causes is part of a deep-seated American fascination with wilderness and national origins. In the case of Lewis and Clark the symbolic order is especially wilderness-driven since they are situated within the very heart of a simple but profound maxim: American History Begins When Americans Encounter Nature. Of

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course, the uninhabited places that outdoor enthusiasts seek out today are devoid of the peoples who actively shaped and maintained the cultural landscapes they called “home” when Americans first “encountered Nature.” Consequently, the idea that history begins at the point of contact with this modern recreational wilderness erases thousands of years of human history and equates national origins with the commercial and aesthetic experience of the modern tourist. This presents a dual tragedy: on the one hand it ignores the dispossession of Native peoples that makes current “wilderness experiences” possible; on the other it promotes an idealized sense of nature in which a human is never more than “a visitor who does not remain.”^[36]

These are central problems with the upcoming bicentennial, which advertises outdoor recreation as the best way to imbibe the special environmental sensitivities of Lewis and Clark. At scenic locales along the trail, tourists are encouraged to “relive the adventure” at places that still “look much the same as they did when Lewis and Clark explored.”^[37] Of course it depends on what your definition of “as” is, but this generally means seeing “what” the expedition members saw as opposed to how they saw it. In either case, little is gained and much is lost when Lewis and Clark are fashioned as the first ecotourists.

Two centuries of history have transformed the cultural landscapes that Lewis and Clark experienced (what they saw), as well as the ideas they carried in their heads (how they saw them). Of course there is a direct if problematic correlation between these transformed places and ideas, and any effort to understand the changes in one must also look to changes in the other. However, using Lewis and Clark to celebrate today's conception of wilderness or to criticize two centuries of exploitation, environmental degradation, and Native dispossession creates a false distinction between the past and the present, between nature and history. The tools and time required for outdoor leisure pursuits are available only because of the hyper-development and mass consumption that define our society. The wilderness ideal we associate with Lewis and Clark is actually a product of the comforts and desires that characterize early-twenty-first-century America. Using a contemporary idea of wilderness to find the virtues of the distant past and escape the mistakes of the last two centuries is a perversion of historical understanding that builds dreams on false premises.

RE-CREATION AND RECREATION

Much as wilderness is largely understood in recreational terms, ideas about history have also recently become influenced by the ethic of re-creation. Placing a premium on reenactments or living history, historical re-creation first became a popular form of recreation in the early 1970s. This is a phenomenon that only continues to grow, particularly in regards to subjects like

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the Civil War, overland migrations, and the fur trade. In the story of Lewis and Clark, of course, reenactment is most closely linked with popular ideas about wilderness. And in the upcoming Lewis and Clark bicentennial, out-door recreation certainly provides the means for developing “a true sense of exploration.” According to an outfit called Lewis and Clark Trail Adventures, all one needs to understand history and appreciate the environments that Lewis and Clark experienced is “a sense of adventure and a desire to discover the Trail as Lewis and Clark did nearly two hundred years ago!” Even purchasing merchandise from “the Lewis & Clark Collection provides an ideal way for today's outdoor oriented person to capture The Adventure In Their Life!”^[38]

Playing Lewis and Clark can offer an exciting, personalized sense of history, but there is something insidious about the way recreational concerns are shaping our conceptions of history and nature. Among other things, they allow us to assume that a beckoning “river spirit” has relevance across all time, and not just within the context of a pleasant excursion on the Missouri River. To persist in such a claim, as if this “spirit” represented an essential truth about “discover[ing] the Trail as Lewis and Clark did,” is to commit a series of profound historical errors. For starters, it implies that all peoples on the Missouri somehow longed for the Corps of Discovery to come up to them. The fact that most Indian communities encountered by the expedition did not themselves migrate up the Missouri also suggests a certain deficiency in Native abilities to hear or answer the river's calling. This conception of the river also perverts the objectives of the expedition into a mystical quest across space and time: they did not set out with Jefferson's instructions so much as they were beckoned onward by a vast continent patiently awaiting their arrival; or, as First Lady Laura Bush noted at a recent White House ceremony for the bicentennial, “the new frontier begged for exploration.”^[39] Gone are the encounters with Native peoples, gone are the two hundred years of environmental and cultural change that succeeded the expedition; in their stead is a long-silent spirit that once again calls the Lewis and Clark enthusiast.

As absurd as this sounds, what compounds it further is a penchant to view the expedition as a kind of ecotourist fantasy. Hardly the difficult and mundane imperial venture described in the expedition journals, the Corps of Discovery has instead become an ideal model for a “true wilderness experience.”^[40] When the Lewis and Clark expedition becomes “the greatest camping trip of all time,” to quote Stephen Ambrose, we can be certain that the musings of a comfortable excursionist at the beginning of the twenty-first century have completely redefined a continent and its history.^[41] The two hundred years that separate the tourist in 2004 from the historical Lewis and Clark all but disappear, and the many thousands of years that preceded the expedition become irrelevant.

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Much as current efforts conjoin Lewis and Clark to problematic ideas about Nature as recreational space, attempts to reenact the expedition are fraught with peculiar understandings of the past that entertain without teaching. They are not unique to the bicentennial or the subject of the expedition, but their source is the same emphasis on leisure that shapes the “outdoor oriented” person's desire “to capture The Adventure In Their Life.” Nothing better illustrates the problems endemic to this kind of approach to history as re-creation, or recreation, than the current passion for Civil War reenactments. The real war was certainly about slavery, race, and fear. But Civil War reenactors convert this into a story about heritage,

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courage, and valor. With its intense focus on the historical accuracy of costumes, weaponry, and troop movements, this recreational form of history gives its participants and audiences a powerful sense of authenticity. The result is a pleasant, even exciting excursion to “the past, a more authentic time,” to quote a Union soldier I recently met.^[42] But this only ignores the unseemly legacies of slavery, race, and fear and, by actively ignoring them, only encourages their perpetuation into the future. In short, “living history” does not lead to deeper understandings of the past, nor does it let us see how the past shapes our world—it too often leads to shallow escapes from the deep historical problems of the present. In regards to the Lewis and Clark bicentennial (Figure 7), one need only reflect on the absence of Native participants from living history portrayals of an expedition that was shaped by “[n]nearly two and a half years of almost constant contact between explorers and Indians.”^[43]

PROBLEMS AND PROMISES

When nature is regarded as a place “out there,” and history is “back then,” they are not processes with which we live. At best, nature and history become abstracted into commodities for tourism. In this context, “experiencing” nature or history through recreation becomes an escape from both. How history shapes our world, and how the environment connects where we work and where we play, become invisible. In terms of Lewis and Clark, the world they helped create becomes divorced from the purposes of the expedition, and the world we inhabit loses its historical grounding. The personalized sense of history that comes from visiting expedition sites or reconstructing early-nineteenth-century experiences can hardly be considered a bad thing. However, the tendency to conflate the distant past with the immediate, individuated present tends to make the historical roots of ecological and cultural issues disappear—the very issues that shape current understandings of Lewis and Clark. Through a sort of mental sleight of hand, the comforts of tourism both escape and satisfy multicultural and environmental concerns. Perhaps therein lies the real appeal of these newly constituted heroes for the new millennium, and there also can be found reasons for deep concern about our abilities to meet the challenges of the new century.

The problems and promises of the bicentennial surfaced at a recent planning meeting between the Army Corps of Engineers and members of the Columbia River Treaty Tribes. The corps announced it had $200 million to help Native communities present their side of the Lewis and Clark story. The money could largely be used to construct signboards, parking lots, and bathrooms at interpretive waysides. The corps also hoped to use this money for a new pet project: a bike path from the Rocky Mountains to

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the Pacific. It assumed everyone would favor a plan that equated playing on the Lewis and Clark trail with the best way to commemorate the expedition.

Presented with a huge sum of money, and the tangled strings that came attached, Native participants balked. They certainly welcomed support for their efforts to engage and inform tourists, but the emphasis seemed too focused on the visitor experience and not tribal concerns. One woman captured the mood perfectly: “What good will parking lots, bathrooms, and bike paths be in a few years? We are thinking about where we will be in 200 years. What about funding to support language instruction, or restore some important cultural sites and animal habitats, or tearing down some of your dams?”^[44] Her point was sharp but simple. Honoring the past obliges us to make history part of our present and relevant to our future. For her and many others, living history is not a game of dress up or a chance for touristic rediscovery. It means commemorating the past by confronting persistent problems and actively incorporating their solutions into the places where we live.

Coming to terms with the legacy of Lewis and Clark must begin with an honest assessment of the expedition as a long, difficult, imperial venture with tragic consequences for the peoples and places they encountered. But that is only a beginning. Understanding the world that Lewis and Clark encountered is important, but that means commemorating the expedition in a way that ensures that world's continuing relevance. Nothing could be more relevant than strengthening the vitality of the languages that first described the expedition, and no obligation to the future could be more pressing than working to ensure the economic and political autonomy of the people who first described Lewis and Clark. Making the bicentennial into a grand extravaganza for recreational tourism and automobile pilgrims only ensures that those priorities will be ignored and old problems will persist.

If the bicentennial is a chance to “get things right,” then residents of the areas crossed by the expedition should demand that the attention and fantastic amounts of money it attracts must first—and perhaps only—go toward building connections between the world Lewis and Clark experienced and the places millions of people now call home. Imagine the lasting impact of a bicentennial project that helped people build parks and plant gardens to attract healthy and sustainable populations of currently threatened species—and bring them back in to the places where people live and work. Compare that with current plans to accommodate a fleeting parade of tourists by constructing directional signposts, parking lots, interpretive waysides, campgrounds, marinas, forest roads, and visitors centers with no more than a three-year life span.

Commemorating Lewis and Clark is frequently presented as an opportunity to “relive history” and recapture “a spirit of adventure.” Yet this tends

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to reject the mundane or unsettling aspects of history by simply ignoring them. The bicentennial offers a real chance to address historical problems and start the process of actively recovering what has been lost, damaged, or threatened. Spending enormous sums of money to play at Lewis and Clark or rediscover past values that never existed is something the future cannot afford.

NOTES

This essay was composed with the generous support of a fellowship from the Humanities Center at Oregon State University. I also gratefully acknowledge research funding and assistance from Knox College. Portions of this essay appeared in different form in “Harmless Fun or Reckless Abandon? Re-Creation and Recreation as History at the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial,” History News 56 (spring 2001): 17–21.

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11. On the Tourist Trail with Lewis & Clark

Issues of Interpretation and Preservation

Andrew Gulliford

Western states are bracing for a huge influx of Lewis and Clark tourists who will follow the explorers’ routes before, during, and after the 2004–06 Lewis and Clark bicentennial. Tourists will travel along a 4,000-mile route from St. Louis, Missouri to Astoria, Oregon, even though some scholars argue that the Lewis and Clark trail begins not in St. Louis, but in Pittsburgh or in Washington, D.C. These matters are of little or no concern to those who readily identify the two explorers with the lands they encountered. Some especially dedicated enthusiasts will follow the entire Trail, embarking from St. Louis then paddling and walking in the footsteps of their heroes. Most will travel in a more comfortable manner, with some opting for luxurious accommodations aboard vintage trains like the American Orient Express or modern cruise ships on the Columbia and Snake Rivers like the Columbia Queen, the Spirit of the West, and the Spirit of Discovery. Besides first-class meals and sumptuous accommodations, these rail and ship tours have established guided excursions where historians and naturalists lecture on everything from the location of Lewis and Clark campsites to Sacagawea's love for wapato roots. Just how many will don backpacks, board cruise ships or set out in the family car is anyone's guess, but certainly thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions will follow some portion of the expedition route in the next few years. Regardless of how Americans will get up the Missouri River, across the Dakotas and Montana, through the Bitterroot Range of Idaho, and down the canyons of the Snake River into the magnificent Columbia River Gorge, they will come.^[1]

Unlike other commemorations or celebrations of historical events, the Lewis and Clark bicentennial is unique in that visitors want to cover the route, see the terrain, smell the prairie after a thunderstorm, and hike steep mountain slopes in Montana and Idaho.^[2] Revisiting the route of the Corps

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of Discovery is an unprecedented commemoration in terms of geography, length of the trip, and potential lessons. Though tourists seek deep, personal experiences with the landscape, the flood of banal curios is anything but unique and is an unavoidable corollary of the explorers’ newfound popularity.^[3] The bicentennial is drawing Americans out of the suburbs and on to the Great Plains. It is without precedent as a commemorative event. Citizens visit Civil War battlefields, and the Oregon trail's 150th anniversary generated much travel along that migration route, but this is a different sort of patriotic pilgrimage, and one that may have lasting impacts. In the process, this bicentennial event is focusing unprecedented attention upon a vast, linear western corridor, and this essay reflects what tourists expect, what they will experience, and what they may learn.

PERSONAL DISCOVERIES

Most Americans have seen the central regions of their country only from 30,000 feet out the window of commercial jets, or through the car window as they sped along interstate highways. The Lewis and Clark route, however, like the old Indian trails, follows the contours of the land. Tourists have rarely been drawn up the Missouri River to North and South Dakota, but that is changing. Today, people want to come into the country the way the captains did: slowly, upriver, moving out of the humid east and across the vast western landscape of open sky and few fences.^[4] The prairie states are delighted with this newfound tourist desire, and momentum for the bicentennial is resulting in everything from new visitor centers to extra motel rooms along the route. On the western edge of the continent, traveling on the Columbia River is more developed and luxurious than in the Dakotas. Yet in both parts of the continent, river travel is a new medium for most Americans and is growing in popularity thanks to the newfound excitement about Lewis and Clark.

Travelers following the Corps of Discovery are not arriving at a single tourist destination; instead they are encountering an entirely new landscape not visible from jets or four-lane highways. The entire route has its appeal and no one particular historic campsite, mountain ridge, or museum visitor center can claim to be the tourist nexus. Just as the explorers had not completed their journey until they had arrived back home, this commemoration is about crossing America—by river, trail, and back roads—and returning with new understanding. Following the captains’ route is a personal voyage of discovery, a tourist odyssey linking landscape and history as described by the Lewis and Clark journals.

Walking down the main street of Three Forks, Montana, after rocking on the porch of the Sacagawea Inn, provides a special delight for suburban tourists who may never have experienced a western barbecue cooked in an

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old oil drum behind a restored railroad hotel. Few Americans have visited small Montana towns with only two stoplights but at least six bars. The open prairies of the Dakotas have been habitually shunned by traveling tourists, but now as they follow Lewis and Clark, they are stopping to see the wild-flowers, staring at the buffalo, and marveling at the prairie dogs. The Lewis and Clark lens focuses on a large landscape, and Americans in search of Lewis and Clark are encountering one another in small towns, quiet valleys, forested hills, and shallow unpolluted rivers they never knew existed.

Four things the captains had in a bundance that we have lost in the twenty-first century are silence, solitude, darkness, and proximity to mammals like wolves and grizzlies. These qualities of the wilderness landscape are unknown in subdivisions and on city streets. Nevertheless, the words of T. K. Whipple from Study Out the Land still apply to the Corps of Discovery as well as to the legions of tourists traveling the Lewis and Clark trail: “All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”^[5]

Lewis and Clark tourists reawaken their senses on the plains of eastern Montana, on the Weippe Prairie of Idaho, and on open riverboats at the Missouri River's Gates of the Mountains near Helena, Montana. There travelers can visit Meriwether Campground and view the Joe and Reuben Fields Gulch where the expedition stayed on 19 July 1805.^[6] For many suburban visitors to the West, just seeing an uncluttered starry sky makes the trip worthwhile. For others, following the Lewis and Clark trail is both a historical pilgrimage and a personal spiritual quest.^[7]

Lewis and Clark in their buckskin shirts and with their hunting rifles symbolize a freedom and independence unknown in modern America. They represent an irresistible draw for the young who want to follow in Lewis and Clark's footsteps and learn about the landscape as they learn about themselves. For senior citizens it is also a journey about youth and self-discovery. Sitting around a campfire at the Triple O Hunting Camp deep in Idaho's Bitterroot Range, a woman from Rhode Island more accustomed to cocktails and card parties explains after a week of rafting, hiking, and horseback riding along the trail, “I never knew I could do these things. My friends told me I was a fool to come. Now I know that they are the fools. Why have I limited my life? I was ready to lie down and retire and snooze away my afternoons. Not now. Not ever. I hurt. I’m sore, but I’m stronger than I've ever been.”^[8]

A widow from Baton Rouge, Louisiana stares into the fire and says, “I've never been so free. The kids are grown. I’m on my own. All my life I've wanted to follow Lewis and Clark and see these woods. This journey has

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changed me.” For Harlan and Barb Opdahl of Triple O Outfitters, such campfire revelations are nothing new. Get the right people sleeping in those canvas tents, drinking that deep black Idaho camp coffee, and eating ham for breakfast and steak for dinner, and they’ll forget all about that dark, chilly trip to the outhouse behind the corrals. Slowly, tourists realize that they do not need all those creature comforts and all that internet access. What endures is the landscape and the stories of those who came before.^[9] The appeal is more than nostalgia, more than a longing for a return to some frontier golden age. Instead, it is about movement, about distance; it is about personal exploration along a shared historic route. Tourists find a piece of themselves they did not know they had lost.

PATRIOTISM AND SUSTAINABLE HEROES

Both the young and the old are rediscovering America in a patriotic impulse not seen since the nation's bicentennial in 1976. Patriotism is back in style, and the Lewis and Clark expedition is being recognized as the precursor to Manifest Destiny and the settlement of the West as well as a symbol of America's national virtues. Thomas Jefferson may have bought Louisiana, but Lewis and Clark gave us the continent. By embracing them, we embrace ourselves and our yearning for a simpler time. Imagine the members of the Corps of Discovery struggling along rocky shoals near the three forks of the Missouri as they tried to find a nonexistent water route across the continent.^[10] In many ways, their epic journey represents one of the nation's primal origin myths just as the Pilgrims who shivered through their first winter near Plymouth Rock gave us the first Thanksgiving. But this story is different, and Americans are fascinated by the distances covered and the immense difficulties the corps faced.

Lewis and Clark tourists are also captivated by the leaders’ bonds of friendship, and they retrace the journey as an antidote to much of the negative history taught since the 1960s. A quarter century after the Vietnam War, Americans want to be proud of themselves and their accomplishments. Captains Lewis and Clark have earned their place as heroes, and tourists want to visit the exact spots where heroic deeds took place.^[11]

Lewis and Clark are sustainable heroes and role models who reflect human weakness and prejudice. Their ultimate success is therefore all the more remarkable. Clark's anger at the Sioux who blocked their river route as the corps ascended the Missouri River, and Lewis's fatal use of weapons against young Blackfeet can be understood as errors in judgment. Despite the mistakes, including almost losing one of the young Kentucky hunters who had been missing for three days, deep friendships and human bonds forged by both the prairie heat and the frigid Great Plains winters kept them all together.

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Near present-day Great Falls, Montana, cactus thorns reduced the soles of William Clark's feet to a pulpy mass, and his good friend Meriwether Lewis had to remove those thorns by firelight. Later on the homeward journey, when all the men wore elkskin, Pierre Cruzatte mistakenly shot Lewis in the buttocks with his .54 rifle. The bullet went through both cheeks, and Captain Clark cleaned the wounds to stave off infection.

The captains’ respect for each other represents one of the great friendships in American history. As Stephen Ambrose has pointed out, theirs was a shared command, unheard of in military annals, and yet it succeeded. American veterans who are tourists, and who remember when they were young and seemingly invincible, recall in the captains’ friendship their own deep bonds with soldiers and comrades now at rest.

The Lewis and Clark journey was as complicated and as full of danger as going to the moon and back, but more so because the Apollo astronauts had maps and photographs of the moon. Lewis and Clark had their Indian guides, but no reliable maps, and certainly no photographs. Beyond Fort Mandan in North Dakota, they were on their own.^[12] The appeal of Lewis and Clark to many Americans is that the captains did not know where they were most of the time, and yet they persevered. Today's tourists may panic driving across the plains with a quarter tank of gasoline and no small towns insight. The openness of the prairies can be unnerving, but Lewis and Clark never panicked. Perhaps they faced a longer interval between meals, but they had the inner resources we seem to have misplaced. We depend upon technology instead of on ourselves. That, too, is part of the captains’ appeal—their resourcefulness across so many different landscapes.

Tourists who are business professionals and chief executive officers ponder the logistical aspects of outfitting the expedition, worrying about the subcontractors, and finding all the supplies. Executives contemplate Lewis and Clark's management style and the captains’ ability to hone forty-five disparate young men into efficient soldiers, explorers, and the vanguard of what became mountain men. Not surprisingly, Lewis and Clark's leadership style has become a model for corporate management seminars. The expedition's accomplishments are all the more remarkable when compared to the next exploring party to head from St. Louis to the Pacific Coast. Financed by the millionaire John Jacob Astor in 1811, this group had the benefit of Lewis and Clark's information and took comfort in the fact that supplies would come by water to the mouth of the Columbia River. Many of these Astorians died en route, others starved, and at least two men went mad. Why did the captains succeed while other later and better-equipped companies fell apart? Tourists are justifiably impressed by the group cohesion exemplified by the Corps of Discovery, and they marvel at the captains’ ability to lead their men through such diverse and difficult terrain, under trying circumstances and with an unswerving common purpose. Retired

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business leaders and executives are awed at the consummate skills of the captains to organize, motivate, inspire, and even heal their men.^[13]

The appeal of Lewis and Clark stems, in part, from the American fascination with wilderness. As the historian James Ronda makes clear, however, the American West of the early nineteenth century was “a crowded wilderness.”^[14] The expedition would have failed miserably without the constant support and guidance of Native Americans. Contemporary Native Americans can tell us about the captains’ dependence upon their ancestors. The captains may have been self-sufficient woodsmen blazing trails through the wilderness, but they also depended upon Indian women, wapato roots, and the kindness of strangers.

SACAGAWEA'S LEGACY AND WOMEN'S HISTORY

By far the most important Native individual to assist the expedition was Sacagawea, the Shoshone (some say Hidatsa) woman who joined the expedition in the spring of 1805. Not surprisingly, Sacagawea elicits a great deal of conversation on the Lewis and Clark tourist trail. Some of this reflects the influence of romantic novels like Anna Lee Waldo's Sacajawea (1984), some pulls from debates among historians, and some comes from unclear or inconclusive passages in the expedition journals. Invariably, questions arise about the pronunciation and spelling of her name—is it Sacajawea, Sacagawea, or Sakakawea? The answer is never definitive, but it is usually “Sacagawea,” with a hard “g.”^[15] The question, or the answer, matters less than the continuing fascination that surrounds the historical figure. Although each generation wants to see a different symbol in Sacagawea, she remains central to how people understand the expedition and its significance. Of course, there is always deep fascination about her personal and psychic survival as the only female among two dozen men. In the early twentieth century, this made her a key symbol for the women's suffrage movement.^[16] At other times, her position within the expedition has led to more personal reflection—for artists, writers, and tourists alike.

The expedition journals provide some dramatic scenes that have piqued the imaginations of many. In the freezing Bitterroots, facing starvation, Sacagawea offered to share with Captain Clark a crust of bread that she had kept hidden on her person to feed her baby, Jean Baptiste. And during that cold, wet Christmas at Fort Clatsop she presented Captain Clark with a stunning gift of two dozen white weasel tails—the most valued fur from the Rocky Mountains.^[17] Did she admire Clark, because he was such a contrast to her lout of a husband, Charbonneau, or was there more to their relationship? Historians and Lewis and Clark aficionados lightly pass over such questions, but tourists on the Trail still wonder. After all, for months Lewis,

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Clark, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and the baby stayed together in the same quarters whether it was a tepee or wooden hut.^[18]

Until very recently no one has dealt with the complex issues of female representation surrounding Sacagawea. This is surprising, since she has more statues erected to her honor than any other American woman. The height of Sacagawea representation came at the turn of the twentieth century as the Daughters of the American Revolution and other women's groups sought to create a female heroine to take her rightful place in American history. Sacagawea succeeded as a female symbol of bravery and personal independence, yet she also represented stoicism, loyalty, motherhood, and Native participation in the expedition. What does that say about us as Americans, and what does that say about her?^[19]

Besides frequent debates on the correct form of her name, tourists on the Lewis and Clark trail frequently discuss Sacagawea's tribal origins, her life after the expedition, and her final resting place. Today, she is claimed by the Northern Shoshone at Fort Hall, Idaho, the Eastern Shoshone at Fort Washakie, Wyoming, and the Hidatsa in North Dakota. The National Park Service and the historian James Ronda are convinced that Sacagawea died of a “putrid fever” on 20 December 1812 and was buried at Fort Manuel, on the Missouri River near the present-day border between North and South Dakota. According to John C. Luttig, the clerk at Fort Manuel, “she was a good and the best woman in the fort, aged abt 25 years.”^[20] The Eastern Shoshone Indians have a different story and believe she lived to be an old woman and is buried in the Wind River Mountains to the west of the Sacagawea Cemetery near Fort Washakie. When asked to explain the contradiction between the Park Service's version of her death and their own, Eastern Shoshone elders smile and state that when Charbonneau took Sacagawea for a wife, he had a second young wife who did not make the trip, and she is the one who died in the Dakotas. In other words, Luttig erred.^[21]

Sacagawea's story thus becomes a prism, which reflects not only the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, but also the significance of the bicentennial to Native peoples. She is enormously important to western tribes who regard her with compassion and treat her as a valued ancestor. The old woman who came to live on the Shoshone reservation knew many strange things, told interesting stories, sang beautiful songs, and remembered visiting the great water and seeing the great fish, that is, the beached whale at the Pacific Ocean near Cannon Beach. What is the truth? When will we let Indian tribes interpret their own story of contact with the Corps of Discovery? Encouraging American Indians to tell their stories may become a significant achievement of the bicentennial.^[22]

From the Native American perspective, a band of white men wandered through their territory begged for food, made many promises they never

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kept, and then in a different season came blundering back on their return route. For Columbia Plateau tribes who have fished and prayed and hunted in the same valleys and creek bottoms for eleven thousand years, the expedition's brief visits in 1805 and 1806 are but moments in time.

The Nez Perce tell the story of an old woman who had been taken captive as a child, much like Sacagawea. The woman regained her freedom when a Canadian trapper helped return her to her people. She was there when Lewis and Clark stumbled starving out of the Bitterroots, bloated themselves with salmon and camas roots, and suffered miserably from intense stomach pains. The Nez Perce seriously considered killing the explorers for their valuable rifles and ammunition, but the old woman said, “Do them no harm.” A white man had once befriended her so she felt they should be spared. The Nez Perce had never seen whites before and distrusted them, but she argued that the debilitated explorers should be nursed back to health and not killed for their guns.

For Native American tribes two elements of this story are important. The first element is that in the history of the expedition two different Indian women saved the corps—Sacagawea, as a translator whose brother Cameahwait sold them horses, and a Nez Perce female elder who spared their lives. Second, though white women had little social standing in the Virginia of the captains’ birth and were rarely consulted on important decisions, among Indian communities, then and now, women's opinions are highly respected. Few interpreters get that story straight or understand the nuances of Native American history. Clearly, Indian interpretation needs to be central to the bicentennial.^[23]

Tourists need to know that Lewis and Clark moved, not through an unknown wilderness world, but rather through an Indian landscape where even the rocks and trees had names. The Corps of Discovery were strangers at the mercy of powerful tribes who let them pass in peace. To see Lewis and Clark as explorers of a vast wilderness is to miss the context of the expedition and the reasons for its successful completion.^[24] Lewis and Clark ran out of trade goods on their way home and even had to barter their buttons.

Tourists should learn about the corps's desperation, but Americans also need to understand the irreversible changes the captains wrought including the spread of diseases, the availability of guns, and the disappearance of certain Indian bands who befriended them. Tourists have always seen Lewis and Clark as the epitome of “Great White Men” who led America westward, but in 2004–06 tourists must rethink their stereotypes and learn that American history is not the seamless, unchangeable past they once believed. Such an awakening will be jarring, but inevitable. Whether or not tourists set out to find cultural diversity along the Lewis and Clark trail, they will find it anyway, and the full richness and complexity of American history will resonate deeply. Understanding the cultural complexity of the expedition, in terms

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of its survival and success, may be one of the real achievements of the bicentennial. The National Park Service and the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council are committed to this crucial reappraisal.

CLEAN CAMPSITES AND THE ABSENCE OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Given the vast expanse of land covered by the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the changes wrought by two hundred years, tourists are understandably curious about what sites can still be visited. If commemorating the expedition means following its trail, then how can visitors still walk in the actual footsteps of the Corps of Discovery? Their concern gives special importance to archaeology, because this science can significantly aid interpretation at wayside exhibits, visitor centers, and local, state, and regional museums. Emphasis on the archaeology of Lewis and Clark sites is a recent phenomenon, but it illustrates well some of the special challenges of commemorating the expedition. Unlike a Civil War battlefield or a visit to a historic antebellum house, the expedition's route yields very little physical evidence. Lewis and Clark campsites have been difficult to validate, because the explorers left few traces. After years of searching, Ken Karsmizki, the curator of history at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center, has found only a rifle flint, a wooden stake, and butchered buffalo bones at Lower Portage Camp, where the corps spent weeks near Great Falls, Montana (Figure 8). The results have been equally dismal along the entire eight thousand mile round-trip route.^[25]

One interesting new lead in the hunt for traces of Lewis and Clark has to do with sex, venereal disease, and three pewter penis syringes, which Lewis bought in Philadelphia and took along the trip. He used them to inject mercury compounds up the urethra of the enlisted men who found too much delight with Indian women. Mercury is a deadly heavy metal and some of the corps probably went to early graves because of their promiscuity. Archaeologically, heavy metals remain deep in stratified soil, so a search has been undertaken to find the latrine at Fort Clatsop and to use that location to identify the fort's actual site. This archaeological strategy assumes the captains followed strict military procedure in building the latrine at a specified distance from the fort. Archaeology may prove the exact location of the 1805–6 winter quarters along the cold and wet Oregon coast.^[26]

INTERPRETIVE CENTERS

Lewis and Clark tourism is an economic reality among western states and a potent force reshaping small towns along the expedition's route. Tourists will traverse the Lewis and Clark trail, which is now clearly marked and identified, thanks in large part to the efforts of the Lewis and Clark Trail

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Heritage Foundation from Great Falls, Montana. Begun only thirty years ago, the heritage foundation has gone from 1,200 members to 2,500 members in the last few years. It has also succeeded in building a multiagency, $7 million-dollar Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center at Great Falls, Montana, which features dramatic exhibits on the 18-mile portage around the falls.^[27] Other public and private agencies are building or upgrading interpretive centers in the Columbia River Gorge and along the trail in North Dakota. The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic area may get a $7 million gateway center near Washougal, Washington to interpret the 292,615-acre scenic area traversed by Lewis and Clark two centuries ago.^[28] Camp Wood, Illinois will see its own 15,000-square-foot, $7 million interpretive center to commemorate the site where the Corps of Discovery spent the first winter of 1804 near the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Likewise, Sioux Falls, Iowa gets a new $2.5 million visitor center to honor the corps's only fatality, Sergeant Floyd, who probably died of appendicitis.

The size and scope of the upcoming bicentennial is perhaps best indicated by the attentions of the federal government. Congress has designated a special caucus just to oversee the bicentennial and to appropriate additional

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commemorative funds, which are being hotly contested by states along the route. Eleven federal agencies, including the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and others have signed a memorandum of agreement and appointed full-time staff members to handle logistics and interpretive issues. The National Park Service has its own full-time superintendent for the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. Out of his Omaha, Nebraska office, Gerard Baker keeps track of a mailing list with 1,200 names and his staff continually updates the Park Service web site.^[29]

Park Service plans also include driving three diesel tractor-trailers on the route and stopping at selected sites during the same time of year as the corps's visits. One truck would hold artifacts, another would contain satellite dishes and e-mail links to school children across the nation, and the third truck would be staffed with scientists and biologists who would study plants and animals at each stop and compare them with historic descriptions from the journals.^[30] As its name—The Corps of Discovery II—suggests, the concept is a “multi-agency project designed to augment and enhance, but not duplicate or replace, local bicentennial events already in the planning stages. Hundreds of communities and Indian nations throughout the United States will be visited by this traveling education center.”^[31] The Park Service also plans to join forces with Amtrak to place interpretive guides aboard trains between Grand Forks, North Dakota and Portland, Oregon.

NEW INTERPRETATION ON THE WASHINGTON COAST

Along with these novel interpretive efforts, the bicentennial may also lead to significant, and permanent, changes in how visitors access Lewis and Clark sites. In southwestern Washington state, Rex Ziak has urged the removal of portions of U.S. Highway 101 along the coast because he believes it runs too close to campsites where Lewis and Clark suffered miserably from cold November winds, pelting rain, surging tides, and high waves. A close reading of the journals, expertly combined with a local's knowledge of the raw fall weather and with tidal charts from the U.S. Navy, have helped Ziak to understand that those November days on the Washington coast represented epic endurance in the face of miserable weather, rotting elk-skin clothing, and starvation so severe that Clark named one site “Camp Despair.”

The state of Washington has funded a feasibility study to move U.S. Highway 101 away from the coast to provide more walking access to these valuable sites. Ziak's personal vision for commemoration includes creation of a large rotunda near the beach to be shaped like the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Inside the rotunda, a bronze plaque would repeat Jefferson's

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instructions to the captains. Ziak believes the true success of the expedition was achieved when the corps finally made it to the ocean some days after Clark exulted in his journal: “Ocian in view! O! The joy.”^[32]

Ziak's efforts have even begun to alter accepted approaches to Lewis and Clark interpretation in the Pacific Northwest. For decades Oregon has claimed the significant West Coast site for the end of the Lewis and Clark trail at the Fort Clatsop National Memorial near Astoria. Now historians and experts are scrutinizing campsites on the Washington side. The state of Washington may implement a new state park at Station Camp near Long Beach where the explorers stayed between 16–25 November 1805.^[33] The competition between Washington and Oregon over what is more historically important to Lewis and Clark—the Washington side or the Oregon side of the Columbia River, is creating interesting new scholarship and will inevitably result in increased interpretation.^[34]

SUPPORTING ROLES

One of the marvels of the Lewis and Clark saga is that American tourists are attracted to more than just the captains, and this affection is leading to bicentennial commemorations of Sacagawea's offspring and even the corps's faithful canine companion. There are new children's books about Seaman, Lewis's loyal Newfoundland dog who guarded the camp at night, woofed and barked at grizzlies, and was so powerful he could kill fleeing deer and drag them out of rushing rivers. Sculptors have even completed statues of the dog!^[35]

Dozens of men in western states have joined Lewis and Clark reenactor groups, which are thriving in the Northwest and in Montana. Reenactors study the journals and become first-person interpreters of the voyageurs, privates, sergeants, and captains of the Corps of Discovery. Men grow beards, hand-sew leather clothing, hack out wooden dugout canoes, practice their black powder shooting, and try to entice their wives with blue beads.^[36]

Irish Americans now claim an affinity for Sergeant Patrick Gass and his-carpentry expertise. Never mind that Captain Lewis loathed the fact that Gass got his book published first, Irish Americans are proud to claim him. Likewise, African Americans want to learn more about York, who accompanied Captain Clark the entire route, and French Canadians want to know more about Drouillard, or “Drewyer” as the captains called him.^[37] A Drouillard descendant explained that family members know what Drewyer knew—how to cook muskrat in a savory fashion. The recipe has been handed down for generations.^[38] Fiddlers, of course, choose to reenact the nearsighted French-Canadian Pierre Cruzatte.

Just as Lewis and Clark campsites have been discovered on the Washington

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coast, also coming out of historical obscurity is the grave of Jean Baptiste in the high deserts of eastern Oregon. Born in a frigid North Dakota winter after his mother, Sacagawea, swallowed a potent folk remedy of warm water and crushed rattlesnake rattles to help her through a difficult child-birth, Jean Baptiste earned the adoration of Captain Clark, who nicknamed him “Pomp” and named Pompeys Pillar along the Yellowstone River after him.^[39] Following Sacagawea's death, Clark paid for her son to have formal parochial schooling in St. Louis; then Jean Baptiste went to Europe to learn new languages. Pomp eventually returned to the West to guide for European royalty on hunting expeditions, worked with Kit Carson, and helped lead John C. Fremont to California. Jean Baptiste died from an unknown illness in 1866 while crossing eastern Oregon on his way to the gold strikes in Montana. Now his grave has been relocated, authenticated, and spruced up for the truly dedicated tourist for whom no Lewis and Clark related historic site is too remote. Pompeys Pillar along the Yellowstone River has been designated a new national monument to be administered by the Bureau of Land Management.^[40]

INDIAN VOICES

Rarely do historic site staff discuss Lewis and Clark as the vanguard of expanding American capitalism, as a moving front of the lucrative fur trade, and as the progenitors of enormous social and economic transformations. Those perspectives need to be raised along with the historical impact of forcing tribal peoples into the orbit of American diplomacy.^[41] Tourists know about Sacagawea, but they need to learn about the other western tribes who befriended the Corps of Discovery and their descendants’ perspectives on the bicentennial. Moreover, contemporary issues including sacred site protection and the return of human remains and burial goods should be more central to how the legacies of the expedition are understood.^[42]

Because of the bicentennial, at least one sacred site on the Great Plains may now become protected. The National Park Service is working to acquire Spirit Mound in South Dakota. Native beliefs about this lone hill in the midst of a vast expanse of flat prairie greatly intrigued the two explorers. On 25 August 1804, accompanied by nine expedition members and Lewis's dog Seaman, the captains crossed the Missouri River from their camp and hiked for nine miles in hot, humid weather to climb the mound and determine the reasons for its sacred attributes. The captains noted an abundance of insects, and hence bird life, but they sensed no spirits, despite the Indian name. Native Americans will be glad to have that site in public ownership

as a vindication of their oral traditions. Besides Spirit Mound, other sacred sites along the expedition route that need protection include the Smoking Place in the Bitterroots (Figure 9) and, along the Columbia River, the rock

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outcroppings called the Twin Sisters, sacred to the Cayuse and Umatilla tribes and now marred by roadside graffiti.^[43]

The bicentennial will also shed new light on relations between the Corps of Discovery and Native peoples that may help confirm a number of Indian stories about the expedition. The Nez Perce claimed that when the corps delayed their departure because of deep snow in the spring of 1806 and had to stay on the Weippe Prairie an extra two weeks, William Clark fathered a son. This may be an Indian legend that is provable. Recent DNA evidence verified that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings had a romantic liaison. As part of the forthcoming Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibition sponsored by the Missouri Historical Society, a telescope from the Clark family went to Colonial Williamsburg for cleaning. Conservators found a red hair between two glass lenses. DNA testing may be possible, and if Nez Perce genealogy is accurate, and if a descendant of the supposed offspring of Captain Clark still lives, another story from the expedition could be proven. The journals frequently mentioned dalliances of other men, but perhaps the captains also enjoyed the attentions of Native American women.

At Fort Clatsop, so much fraternizing went on between the enlisted men and the local Indians that the captains felt obligated to close the doors to

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the fort after dark and require all Indians to leave. Far too often the men came down with venereal diseases, which weakened their ability to work. Despite the fort's closed door policy, Natives remained friendly, and the corps could not have survived the winter without help from the Clatsop and Chinook Indians. Now two centuries later those Native peoples are almost invisible on the Pacific Coast after being decimated by disease and forced into assimilation with white coastal communities. In the Northwest, the Clatsops no longer exist, yet in Pacific County, Washington about 1,800 Chinooks remain. For decades they had to go underground, hide their culture, tolerate local racism, and disguise their Indian identity. Beginning in the 1950s, and with increasing fervor over the last two decades, the Chinooks applied for federal recognition, but to no avail. Finally, in December 2000 the Bureau of Indian Affairs officially recognized the Chinooks on the Washington coast as an American Indian tribe. Kevin Grover, assistant secretary of Indian affairs, stated, “Today we have the opportunity to address directly a historical injustice lasting many years. What more fitting memorial for the bicentennial than to honor those coastal tribes who helped the Corps of Discovery survive that dreary, wet winter.” Given this explicit reference to the upcoming bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, it is especially unfortunate that President George W. Bush decided to perpetuate the old historical injustices when he reversed the earlier ruling and unilaterally stripped the Chinook Indian tribe of its government-to-government relationship with the United States. Consequently, the Chinooks will no longer receive federal funds to help restore their language, improve economic development, housing, and health care, and acquire their own land base where their ancestors once lived along the Columbia River and Willapa Bay. Regardless of the Bush administration's actions, Lewis and Clark tourists should meet the last descendants of those coastal tribes who befriended the corps and provided a variety of foodstuffs to supplement their meager rations of “pore elk.”^[44]

CONTROVERSY AND THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN LEWIS

William Clark's grave can be found in the prestigious Belle Fountain Cemetery of St. Louis where the gravestone reads, “His life is written in the history of his country.” Well known in his own lifetime, and a significant figure in the history of the American West, Clark administered Indian affairs for all of the Upper Louisiana Territory from 1813 until his death in 1838. In the process he earned the respect of tribes who nicknamed him “the Red-headed Chief,” and referred to St. Louis as “Red Hair's Town.” Such respect, and the tremendous service he provided his country through most of his life, never brought William Clark a captaincy in the U.S. Army. While Thomas Jefferson's best efforts to confer an equal rank to Lewis and Clark

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never succeeded, another outcome of the bicentennial has been Congress's posthumous awarding to Clark of the rank of captain. Such a fitting tribute for his military service matches the prestige of his massive tombstone in the heavily populated Belle Fountain Cemetery.^[45]

In contrast, Captain Lewis's remains lie in a remote area of rural Tennessee far from the Lewis and Clark trail, yet at a site integral to understanding the Lewis and Clark legacy in the nineteenth century. The site is important as a link to other Lewis and Clark sites in the east, specifically Monticello, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson. The bicentennial will make the Lewis gravesite better known and incorporate it into the tourist pilgrimage, because understanding Lewis's death makes the contributions of his short, vital life more meaningful. Lewis's prolonged downfall into alcohol and drug addiction, his several suicidal attempts, and finally his violent death along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, lend tragedy to the expedition's heroism.

The story of Lewis's death resonates deeply; as Stephen Ambrose has written, it “is the great mystery of Lewis's life.” Ambrose rightly argues that Lewis's suicide served to obscure the success of the expedition. Nineteenth-century scholars could not come to terms with Lewis's death, and so the value of the corps's contribution to American exploration diminished. According to Ambrose, “Lewis's suicide hurt his reputation. Had Cruzatte's bullet killed him, he would be honored today far more than he is. … [T]hrough most of the nineteenth century he was relatively ignored and in some danger of being forgotten.”^[46]

Lewis's stone grave marker in Lewis County, Tennessee has recently been repointed and structurally assessed by the National Park Service whose experts pronounced the 1848 Tennessee monument to be sound. Designed to “express the difficulties, successes and violent termination of a life which was marked by bold enterprise, by manly courage and devoted patriotism,” the monument's broken shaft represents Lewis's premature death.^[47]

Amateur historians claim Lewis was murdered by members of the Grinder clan, who owned the run-down cabin where he stayed that fateful night, but he died by his own hand. Besides the wide acceptance among Lewis's contemporaries that he died by his own hand, scholars are convinced that Lewis was clearly inclined toward suicide.^[48] A forthcoming book by the Lewis interpreter Clay Jenkinson discusses Meriwether Lewis and the “Other,” an anthropological term often used to consider explorers and their ambiguous relationships with Native peoples. Jenkinson believes that after his return to St. Louis, Lewis failed to adjust back to “civilization”; indeed, he claimed never to have slept on a bed after returning from the journey but instead slept on wooden floors wrapped in his robes. Scholars also question Lewis's sanity and his relationship to other men. In one of Lewis's last letters, posted from New Orleans, he confessed that there was always an

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emptiness in him that he could not fill, except in the bracing presence of other men—with Captain Clark and Thomas Jefferson, for example, or in the U.S. Army. The psychiatrist Alfred J. R. Koumans writes about Lewis's “unusual actions … not to mention his awkward approaches to marriageable women, even with his good looks, and his intense attachment to his mother.” Dr. Koumans muses about Lewis: “Was he the kind of man who excels only when closely linked to another man?” Because William Clark married, did that leave Lewis with a “painful inner emptiness and unable to live up to the expectations the successful expedition brought him?”^[49]

Meriwether Lewis's botched management of the Louisiana Territory, his alcoholism and painful bouts of depression, his egregious failure to publish the journals, his difficult social adjustments after the expedition, and his poignant inability to impress marriageable women all point to a complex, tortured personality that tourists still debate but cannot fathom two centuries later. One explanation for his death has been described by the noted epidemiologist Reimert Thorolf Ravenholt, who believes Lewis contracted syphilis in Chief Cameahwait's camp the same evening he struck the bargain to procure horses. Ravenholt argues that the onslaught of neurosyphilis resulted in skin eruptions, weeks of convalescence, erratic behavior, poor financial decisions, febrile attacks with extreme disorientation, and at least two suicide attempts en route to Memphis.^[50]

Few people visit Meriwether's grave on the historic Natchez Trace just south of Nashville, but at least the National Park Service, which manages the Lewis Monument, has resisted all efforts by self-seeking archaeologists to exhume Lewis to prove or disprove his suicide. Along the Natchez Trace, current National Park Service interpretation leaves open the matter of Captain Lewis's death but honors his life and his outstanding accomplishments. As befitting the bicentennial, visitors need to pay homage to his grave but let Lewis's remains stay buried in Tennessee soil. Let him receive in death the peace he could not find in life.^[51]

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

An understanding of the corps and its significance at the bicentennial requires an understanding of landscape change. Twenty-first-century tourists must recognize what has been forever altered in the American West since 1806, and tourists must appreciate the captains not only as frontier patriots, but also as naturalists in elkskin who provided us with scientifically valid observations on a once diverse and healthy environment. The bicentennial commemoration must also be aware of its own environmental “footprint,” as tens of thousands of people follow in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark and seek out the same remote locales.

Positive and negative environmental impacts of the 2004–06 Lewis and

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Clark bicentennial are numerous and will vary from too many tourists visiting fragile riparian ecosystems to tourist-driven recreational vehicles getting stuck in Montana mud or snowed in on remote Idaho mountain passes. Yes, there will be too many visitors to a few very special places, but in the end if our appreciation for natural ecosystems in the West is heightened, and if some of those ecosystems are restored, then the short-term bicentennial impacts may result in long-term ecological gains. Environmental understanding must come with historical appreciation. One of the great opportunities for the Lewis and Clark bicentennial is to blend visitation along the historical landscape with environmental restoration.

The conservation biologist Daniel Botkin's Passage of Discovery: The American Rivers Guide to the Missouri River of Lewis and Clark (1999) may well become the cornerstone for a major movement during the bicentennial to restore the Missouri River, one of the most dammed rivers in the West, and make portions of it free flowing. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri at great cost, but with few benefits. The Missouri was made safe for heavy barge traffic that never materialized. The dams generated hydroelectric power for markets that did not need it, and reservoirs stored irrigation water for crops that do not need to be grown. Now, however, the Corps of Engineers may turn over a green leaf and undo some of the needless damage. In both Passage of Discovery and Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark (1995), Botkin wrote superbly about the mighty force of the Missouri in spring flood and the roils of muddy water that forced the men of the Corps of Discovery to tug and pull on tow lines as they dragged their keelboat upriver in the spring of 1804. Their accounts of fish, animal, and bird life stand as vivid biological markers of all that has been lost, and as a challenge in the twenty-first century to restore natural wetlands cleared for agriculture. This may be a lasting legacy of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial—returning the Missouri River watershed into bird sanctuaries, rich river meanders, and Great Plains habitat for small mammals and white-tailed deer.^[52]

Equally pressing are environmental issues related to survival of endangered stocks of salmon. In the Shoshone camp of Chief Cameahwait, Lewis tasted his first piece of broiled salmon and realized he was about to cross into the Columbia River system. For millennia salmon have been a sacrament for Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest. In little more than a century, however, logging, agriculture, urbanization, bad fishery science, and dams along the Columbia and Snake Rivers have diminished the salmon runs to tiny fractions of what they once were. When Lewis and Clark passed the great fishery at Celilo Falls, they marveled at its seemingly infinite supply of huge fish. The fishery was drowned in 1957, behind the waters of The Dalles Dam.^[53]

It would be appropriate to combine the commemorative tourist bicentennial

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brouhaha with serious science and environmental restoration. Biological audits should be conducted, and baseline studies should compare plant and animal species in specific locations with those described two centuries ago in the journals. Protecting and designating historic vegetation will also enhance the tourist experience. A few trees that are two hundred years old remain along the expedition route. At the top of Lemhi Pass, just on the east side of the Continental Divide, there are two grandfather trees that were young when Jean Baptiste was a baby and Sacagawea a new mother (Figure 10). These are sacred trees for northwestern tribes, and biological commemorations are in order, too.

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The bicentennial has already resulted in special issues in Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, about wild and scenic places and the need to save special areas along the four-thousand-mile route.^[54] The best places to visit are the upper Missouri wild and scenic river section in eastern Montana, which Lewis wrote about in grand detail; Lemhi Pass on the Montana and Idaho border along the Continental Divide; select sites like the Sinque Hole and Smoking Place deep in the Bitterroot Range of Idaho; steep trails on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge; and the last twenty miles of the wild, western Washington coast. Here tourists confront the dynamic wilderness landscape of Lewis and Clark where ecological integrity of place still exists. To stand on the top of Lemhi Pass at dawn, to be caught in a freezing late November rain in the Columbia Gorge, and to walk among the wild, windswept bracken on the Washington coast is to experience a new sense of awe for the captains and their tenacity. Here is an opportunity to come face to face with both ecological wonder and ecosystem loss.

For the bicentennial, dedicated Lewis and Clark enthusiasts will canoe the Clearwater River and paddle down the Snake to the Columbia. They will traverse the many locks and dams of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Sea kayakers will travel the Washington side of the Columbia passing sloughs, islands, and sheltered stretches of backwater. There is a proposal for a Lewis and Clark Columbia River water trail from Portland to Astoria for tourists who favor canoes, kayaks, and small shallow-draft boats. Thus, for seasoned paddlers, Lewis and Clark's journey will become a personal voyage of discovery.^[55]

Using waterways to experience history is one more special aspect of the bicentennial, and these forms of ecotourism represent a whole new form of historical commemoration. A century ago local business leaders, Daughters of the American Revolution, and small-town promoters erected statues, parks, immense log buildings, and other edifices including the Astoria Column at Astoria, Oregon, which features scenes from the expedition. A century ago the heroes were commemorated for bringing the seeds of civilization, which they helped to sow; now they are being commemorated for the wild spaces they traversed, the rapids they shot, and their hardy endurance in crossing barren landscapes.^[56]

In 1904 Americans revered the expedition for what changes the captains wrought. Hitting the tourist trail with Lewis and Clark a hundred years later is a different experience. In the twenty-first century Americans seek the solitude, the silence, and the darkness that come only from wild landscapes and undeveloped stretches of the American West. Tourists want to experience the Lewis and Clark landscape as the explorers saw and traversed it, and this longing suggests that we may have come of age as a nation. Perhaps at last we are willing to consider Manifest Destiny and western conquest not

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just for what was gained, but also for what was lost and what should be restored.

NOTES

The author would like to thank Mark Spence for his editorial encouragement, and David and Linda Tozer for locating Oregon newspaper sources. Betty Bauer and Alfred J. R. Koumans read early drafts. Rex Ziak gets a thank-you for his enthusiasm and wisdom when it comes to Lewis and Clark in Washington state. Thanks also to Gary Ripley of Portland, Oregon, for designing a Smithsonian Associates study tour of Lewis and Clark sites in Montana and Idaho and for helping me lead the Smithsonian tours by horseback and canoe.

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12. The Lewis & Clark Bicentennial

Putting Tribes Back on the Map

Roberta Conner

passed above our camp a small river called Youmalalam riv. … we continued our march accompanied by Yellept and his party to the village. … This chief is a man of much influence not only in his own nation but also among the neighbouring tribes and nations. This village consists of 15 large mat lodges. … Yellept haranged his village in our favour intreated them to furnish us with fuel and provision and set the example himself by bringing us an armful of wood and a platter of 3 roasted mullets. The others soon followed his example with rispect to fuel and we soon found ourselves in possession of an ample stock. … the Indians informed us that there was a good road which passed from the Columbia opposite to this village to the entrance of the Kooskooske on the S. side of Lewis's river; they also informed us, that there were a plenty of deer and Antelopes on the road, with good water and grass. We knew that a road in that direction if the country would permit would shorten our rout at least 80 miles. The Indians also informed us that the country was level and the road good, under these circumstances we did not hesitate in pursuing the rout recommended by our guide whos information was corrobertated by Yellept & others.

Captain M. Lewis, 27 April 1806

some time after we had encamped three young men arived from the Wallahwollah village bringing with them a steel trap be Ionging to one of our party which had been neglegentiy left behind; this is an act of integrity rarely witnessed among indians. during our stay with them they several times found knives of the men which had been carelesslv lossed by them and returned them. I think we can justly affirm to the honor of these people that they are the most hospitable, honest, and sincere people that we have met with in our voyage.

Captain Lewis, 1 May 1806

The descendants of the people described in these journal entries still live in much the same area as when the expedition traversed their homeland in 1805 and again in 1806.^[1] The Walla Walla, Umatilla, and Cayuse tribes, as they are now known, make up the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation just east of Pendleton, Oregon. The population of the confederacy is about 2,200 enrolled members. About two-thirds of the

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tribal membership plus about 1,000 Indians from other tribes and 1,700 non-Indians reside within the present-day reservation. Relative tribes include, among others, the Warm Springs, Wanapum, Palouse, Yakama, and Nez Perce.

The Umatilla and Walla Walla dialects of the Sahaptin language were very different from the Cayuse language isolate. Now that the Cayuse language is extinct, save about 350 documented words, most Cayuse descendents who speak a native language speak lower or upper Nez Perce. The few persons who speak Walla Walla as a first language are all elders. Those who speak Umatilla as a first language are a handful of adults and the rest elders. Like the cultures, the landscape and all the species that inhabit the Blue Mountains and Columbia River Plateau have undergone many dramatic changes in the past two hundred years.

More than fifty modern tribal governments representing over a hundred tribes will decide in the next eighteen months whether they will observe and participate in the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. Some tribal leaders met with delegates of federal agencies to begin discussing their plans in the spring of 1999. Then, and in every subsequent meeting, the following themes emerge consistently. For us, this is not a celebration. It is an observance or commemoration. We want both sides of the story told—the army expedition's and our own—and we want to tell our own story. We want to protect resources on the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, including burial sites. We want to help create economic opportunities for our people. We want the nation to realize and recognize tribal contributions to this great country including aid given the Corps of Discovery. We want the U.S. government to do what it has promised. And, above all, we want to protect the gifts the Creator gave us.

Why should I want to know Native peoples’ perspectives on the Lewis and Clark bicentennial? There are some easy, glib answers. Because people like colorful, intimate stories. Oral histories from Native communities are often likened to quaint and entertaining folklore. Because we say we want the truth, the unvarnished, unadulterated truth until it spills over us with overwhelming force, or volume and repetition, as in the Clinton impeachment hearings of 1999. Because people are curious about what happened to the Indians that met the expedition, now almost two hundred years later. Because it is very unlikely that you have heard our story. It is not typically represented in history books or classroom lessons or contemporary politics.

Another obvious reason is that we rarely see ourselves the way others see us and vice versa. The journal entries by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, as well as those by the other writers of the expedition, tell us what they observed, what they perceived, and what they believed. They cannot reflect the impressions of the only other participants in this significant time

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in history—the indigenous peoples. The travelers were clearly at a disadvantage in language and knowledge of the terrain. As deft as Clark was at measuring and as astute as Lewis was in observation and dialects, they were still left to conjecture frequently. As remarkably thorough as their diplomacy and records are, they are not always aware of how they have insulted Natives or crossed a cultural taboo, nor do they tell of their own liaisons with Indian women. There is no need to demonize these American heroes; the Native observers’ perspective humanizes them and brings history to life.

Another reason to consider our perspective is that President Jefferson considered Indians important, as evidenced in his second inaugural address and first, third, and sixth annual messages to the Senate and House of Representatives as well as his directive to Captain Lewis. This great man—who was a student of science, culture, and linguistics and authored the Declaration of Independence, declaring to the world the thirteen colonies’ independence from all nations—wrote about Indians.

In his 20 June 1803 missive to Captain Lewis, along with all other studies, reports, and transactions Jefferson instructs Lewis:

The commerce which may be carried on with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue, renders a knolege of these people important. You will therefore endeavor to make yourself acquainted, as far as diligent pursuit of your journey shall admit, with the names of the nations & their numbers; the extent & limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes or nations; their language, traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war arts, & the implements for these; their food, clothing, & domestic accommodations; the diseases prevalent among them, & the remedies they use; moral and physical circumstance which distinguish them from the tribes they know; peculiarities in their laws, customs & dispositions; and articles of commerce they may need or furnish & to what extent … it will be useful to acquire what knolege you can of the state of morality, religion & information among them, as it may better enable those who endeavor to civilize & instruct them, to adapt their measures to the existing notions & practises of those on whom they are to operate. … In all your intercourse with the natives treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit; allay all jealousies as to the object of your journey, satisfy them of it's innocence, make them acquainted with the position, extent, character, peaceable & commercial dispositions of the U.S., of our wish to be neighborly, friendly & useful to them, & of our dispositions to a commercial intercourse with them. … Carry with you some matter of the kine-pox, inform those of them with whom you may be of it's efficacy as a preservative from the small pox; and instruct them & encourage them in the use of it. This may be especially done wherever you may winter.^[2]

In his second inaugural address on 4 March 1805, President Jefferson reports,

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The aboriginal inhabitants of these countries I have regarded with the commiseration their history inspires. Endowed with the faculties and the rights of men, breathing ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the stream of overflowing population from other regions directed itself on these shores; without power to divert, or habits to contend against, they have been overwhelmed by the current, or driven before it. … These persons inculcate a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors; that whatsoever they did, must be done through all time; that reason is a false guide, and advance under its counsel, in their physical, moral, or political condition, is perilous innovation; that their duty is to remain as their Creator made them, ignorance being safety, and knowledge full of danger.^[3]

One obvious reason for wanting to know our perspective is that we are still here to offer it. Against pretty overwhelming odds, many indigenous groups have survived the past two hundred years. Many also perished. Languages of our ancestors are no longer spoken in many Native communities. Despite efforts to document and preserve dialects, languages, and songs, many are dangerously close to language loss. Contemporary life makes traditional tribal activities compete with every new entertainment device or program targeted at American youth. Two hundred years from now, distinct cultural practices and oral histories may not exist in living cultures if we are passive now. By trying to learn more about our historical accounts, visitors reinforce the notion that our knowledge has value and help inspire our young people to pursue learning more.

How about an even more urgent reason? The United States of America is a great nation as well as a large one, and it is located on lands obtained from Native people through conquest, purchase, treaty, and governmental protections that didn't work. Less than a half century after Lewis and Clark's troupe went right through the middle of the homelands of the Walla Walla, Umatilla, and Cayuse, we ceded in peace treaty proceedings over six million acres of land to the United States. In the Walla Walla Treaty Council of 1855, we reserved for ourselves a half million acres so that we might continue to live according to the natural laws given to us by the Creator. The half million acres became a quarter million acres when the Umatilla Reservation was surveyed in 1871. It became 158,000 acres after the Slater Act of 1885 allotted lands to individual Indians and the U.S. government declared the balance to be surplus and open for settlement. And we are among the “lucky” ones. Some tribes have no lands. Some no longer live anywhere near their home on the Lewis and Clark trail. The federal government does not recognize some tribes. Some agreed to treaties that were never ratified by Congress. And still other tribes were “terminated” by federal policy.

Interestingly enough, loss of ownership rights did not extinguish our personal or tribal responsibility for the more than six-million-acre aboriginal

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homeland or the rivers or the creatures that rely on our covenant with them and the Creator. We pursue clean water, clean air, restored habitats, and watershed protection and hope to prevent species extinction in our homeland—regardless of who else lives here and who claims title—because we promised to do so in exchange for the sustenance the Creator provides. Great nations should honor their treaties and promises.

Tribes were regarded as nations when President Jefferson dispatched the expedition to conduct their exploration, and they are nations today. The lessons we have learned along the way in assimilation, subjugation, termination, and litigation, as well as mitigation, cooperation, and collaboration, should be worth something to the planners of tomorrow. We should not have to ask to have our voices heard. Unfortunately, we have contemporary national elected officials who still think the government gave Indians land. These leaders think that tribes should not be allowed to exercise their sovereignty through fishing and hunting rights or gaming enterprises. In some states citizens have voted to disestablish reservations.

The journals of the expedition comprehensively document our fishing practices, our numerous tule mat lodge villages, our vast horse herds, and our games of chance and skill. We have used games and gambling to redistribute wealth for centuries if not millennia; get used to it. There is an uninterrupted continuum present in the mid-Columbia region in our culture and people. Sadly, our once great horse culture is now a remnant of what it once was, and the richest salmon fishery in the West is no longer visible. And tribes like ours that have successfully reintroduced spring Chinook salmon to the Umatilla River after an absence of seventy years must endure the genetic purist arguments about hatchery fish. As nations, we should join forces to solve our problems.

As communities, towns, counties, states, and an assortment of organizations including federal agencies make plans for commemorating the national bicentennial, tribes are getting invitations to participate. That's not surprising considering that tribes were the only chambers of commerce for the first visitors. These recent invites run the gamut. The more predictable ones are requests to provide Indians in regalia for drumming and dancing at a local festival. The more extraordinary invitations are inquiries about whether we all might have mutual goals or how we might create substantive partnerships on lasting projects.

Many groups are creating maps for itineraries and tours. The National Park Service is working on a new Lewis and Clark trail map. The map project coordinator states that the new one will include the names of tribes, unlike the last one, which showed state boundaries that didn't exist during the expedition but did not reflect the presence of tribes who had dealings with the expedition. Communities and trail states that are creating plans that will “put them on the map” should consider putting tribes on their maps. Without

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tribal homelands, Indian reservations, or Indian attractions, the maps tell domestic and international travelers that we are no longer here. And, after all, we helped Lewis and Clark with content for their maps.

Historians, interpreters, teachers, tour guides, and heritage travelers all make decisions about which events, people, and places are sufficiently significant to warrant their attention. Each determines what is interesting as well as believable or valid and authentic. During the bicentennial and at any other time, visitors will vote with their feet, or tires, or itineraries. Those who choose to travel the expedition route should come prepared for a variety of experiences, just as the first group did.

In Indian country, tribes may choose to boycott the bicentennial, bear silent witness to another migration of non-Indians through their lands, develop visitors’ facilities and interpretive activities, publish accounts of contact with the expedition, or create reenactments or documentaries. In our region, we have been welcoming travelers for a couple of centuries. We are hospitable and friendly, but please be mindful this is the place the Creator gave us. It is our only home. We may reside elsewhere temporarily but this is the only place we’ll ever be from. It is part of us, and we are part of it. And just as the first travelers did, bring gifts.

THE INFAMOUS BUSINESS TRIP

A Umatilla Story on the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial

Wish-low-too-latin (Raymond Burke), Umatilla Tribal Chairman

The Umatilla Indian tribe's story of the Lewis and Clark journey is at best a story about a couple of guys out west on a “not so well Intended” business trip. In 1803 the president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, ordered Lewis and Clark to head up a trip into unknown territory to develop trading partners with the local residents and open trade routes for U.S. business interests before the Russians, British, or Spaniards got a foothold in the marketplace.

Indian tribal leaders have recently been looking at this upcoming bicentennial as the last chance for our generation, and further removed generations, to give an accurate account of “our side of the Lewis and Clark story.” I think I can speak for the Umatilla tribes in saying we have been looking with too much emphasis at interpreting this historic moment in the past when our story is in the present and the future.

In 1805, when Lewis and Clark passed through our homeland, we were (relatively speaking) a wealthy nation. Our successful business interests were built on trading with our Indian partners near and far. Our business interests consisted of our salmon fishery, our extensive herds

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of cattle and horses, and the natural returns from the assets of our land base. The extent of our market distribution areas reached into Mexico. We traded willingly and shrewdly with these potentially new business partners from the United States in expectation of a mutually beneficial business relationship as outlined by their leader, President Jefferson.

Through the moccasin telegraph, Indians out west had already been warned by eastern tribes of the potential dangers of this so-called business partnership. “It's your land they want to take and sell, and you will have to fight to keep it.” Over the next 50 years United States government sanctioned business interests were, indeed, not just interested in opening trade to new market but planned to exploit the vast land-based assets that were the foundation of our Indian people's business livelihood. The U.S. government's business plan was based on a much farther reaching concept, that of Manifest Destiny. A doctrine of the time that said, “Anglos, as the chosen people, will dominate the Western Hemisphere.”

For the last 150 years, the Umatilla tribe's businesses have been in a state of recession and oppression that would have bankrupted and dissolved most any other national corporation. Only because we have a homeland, a cultural and spiritual identity, and blood ties to hold us together, has our nation's corporation survived. Like most U.S. businesses, we have had our share of help from government subsidies, tax breaks and concessions, deregulations and bailouts. In our case, they did not come from political power, special interest groups, paid lobbyists, or public opinion. Fortunately our survival has been based on a much stronger legal commitment than a quick fix from Congress. It is the right to do business as a sovereign nation by contract; that is, the treaty negotiated by our visionary leaders at the Walla Walla Treaty Council in 1855.

After 150 years of government control that diminished our asset base, blocked our trade routes, suppressed our trading partners, and systematically broke down the self-respect and productivity of our nation's people, we have staged an unprecedented business recovery.

Today, the Umatilla Indian nation is in the process of building a diverse multimillion-dollar corporation that not only is gaining wealth and improving the well-being of its member stockholders but contributing significantly to the regional economy by increasing employment opportunities, payroll, and support of local businesses, as well as human and community development.

Our story is about taking control of our destiny. Our original 1855 Treaty Lands comprised 512,000 acres. However, the federal government surveyed out 245,000 acres. The 1885 Allotment Act again reduced our lands to 158,000 acres and allowed white people to buy land

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on the reservation. Consequently, the reservation is a checkerboard of Indian and non-Indian lands. The tide of land loss and fragmentation is ending, and today we have increased the agriculture, timber, and grazing land holdings on our reservation so that now more than 50 percent of the land base is in Indian ownership.

For the first time since the federal government began “surplusing” our homeland to nonmember stockholders, more than half the people who live on the Umatilla Reservation are Indians. After 75 years of depletion of our salmon fishery, tens of thousand of salmon are returning to our homeland waters.

We have been successful politically by uniting with other tribes in the Northwest to remove from office one of the strongest opponents in the U.S. Congress to Indian sovereignty and a successful Indian business climate, Slade Gorton.

We have planned, financed, built, and are now operating a successful resort complex employing over 500 people (Indian and non-Indian) providing quality customer service to the public.

We are now in the process of partnering with other local governments and businesses to build an environmentally and technically correct power plant to contribute to the diversification of our economy and do our part to reduce the energy shortages in the region without damaging vital northwestern resources.

We are, for the first time, operating our own agriculture, timber, and grazing enterprises to assure more sustainable and resource sensitive management yields from our natural assets.

We have cooperated successfully with our neighbors in the agriculture and business community and continue to work toward achieving a balance of competing objectives for the region's interest as a whole on the use of limited water supplies. For example, in northeastern Oregon the Umatilla River and Walla Walla River Basin Projects, respectively, are designed to restore salmon and water, and at the same time protect the local economies that are dependent upon irrigation. Although these projects repair damages to treaty rights, support from all stake-holders and beneficiaries is needed to make them successful. We are also working with the larger Columbia River Basin Forum, the Wheat Growers Columbia River Forum, and Save Hanford Reach to ensure that there is enough water for salmon.

We have employed and retained the skills and experience of competent professionals and managers in the fields of finance, law, community and economic development, human resources, public safety, health, education, government affairs, investment, and business operations to build a strong corporate nation and Indian community.

The Lewis and Clark bicentennial provides a benchmark for measuring

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the business recovery of the Umatilla nation's history. We have just begun to rebuild the weal and cultural pride that 200 years ago belonged to our people. But rebuilding our business and economy is just the start. We now must look to the future, and that future is to rebuild the self-respect, well-being, and health of our people, the respect of our neighbors, the citizens of this country, and the businesses that have prospered for the last 200 years on the Umatilla Indian nation's assets. We now and over the next 50 years will continue to work with our neighbors to restore the natural resource base and environmental qualities that once were the basis of our strong economy.

As Umatilla national sovereignty and self-government grow stronger, we are better able to temper the exploitive excesses of the Manifest Destiny doctrine. For example, hydroelectric power does not have to decimate the Pacific Northwest's salmon runs. People built the dams, and people can save the salmon. Because the Umatilla nation and other Northwest tribes have treaty fishing rights, our interests are essential to the design of effective and lasting good salmon policies. Salmon and hydroelectricity do not have to be incompatible, any more than economic strength and cultural vitality have to cancel each other out. Of course, economic empowerment does not solve all our problems, but you have a better chance to keep your culture, and your salmon, if you build and own the system yourself.

This legacy of struggle, survival, and recovery of the Umatilla nation's business corporation and people is our most important bicentennial story.

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