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.