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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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