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9. On the Trail

Commemorating the Lewis & Clark Expedition
in the Twentieth Century

Wallace Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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