In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

Early Commemorations and the Origins of the National Historic Trail

Wallace G. Lewis

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781646426232, 9781607320265
• eBook ISBN: 9781607320272
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Although it was 1806 when Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis after their journey across the country, it was not until 1905 that they were celebrated as national heroes. In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark examines how public attitudes toward their explorations and the means of commemorating them have changed, from the production of the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905 to the establishment of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail in 1978 and the celebrations of the expedition's bicentennial from 2003 through 2007.

The first significant stirrings of national public interest in Lewis and Clark coincided with the beginning of a nationwide fascination with transcontinental automobile touring. Americans began to reconnect with the past and interact with the history of Western expansion by becoming a new breed of "frontier explorer" via their cars. As a result, early emphasis on local plaques and monuments yielded to pageants, reenactments, and, ultimately, attempts to retrace the route, promoting conservation and recreation along its length.

Wallace G. Lewis details the ingenuity that inspired the establishment of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, opening a window to how America reimagines, recreates, and remembers its own past. In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark will appeal to both scholarly and armchair historians interested in the Western frontier as experienced by both Lewis and Clark and those retracing their steps today.

CHAPTER ONE

Monuments

ON JUNE 1, 1905, PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT tapped a telegraph key in Washington, D.C., to officially signal the opening of Portland, Oregon’s, Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair. Dignitaries on hand in Portland included Vice President Charles Fairbanks and Speaker of the House Joe Cannon. The fair’s motto was “Westward the course of Empire Takes Its Way,” and its official emblem included a woman, said to represent “Progress.” She had an American flag draped over her shoulder and her arms around two men, presumably William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. The three are standing on the Pacific shore and facing the setting sun, stylized in a way to suggest Japan’s Rising Sun. At the time of the centennial, the Pacific Northwest was being touted as the logical jumping-off point for trade with the Pacific Rim and East Asia. The national enthusiasm for imperialistic expansion—whetted by the recent acquisition of Spanish colonial possessions—had brought the United States to the threshold of dominance in the Pacific and an insistence on an “open door” to immensely profitable trade with China. American business leaders and politicians anticipated that the twentieth century would be “America’s Pacific century.”¹

The exposition, which Roosevelt had pressured a reluctant U.S. Congress to help fund, thrust Portland into the “mainstream of American boosterism.”² A national mania for large-scale international fairs had begun in 1876 with the Philadelphia centennial celebration of U.S. independence and was heightened by Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. This had led to such extravaganzas as Nashville’s Centennial Exposition in 1897, Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi celebration in 1898, and Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition in 1901. Closely preceding the Lewis and Clark Exposition was the 1904 centennial commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase in St. Louis.

As its name indicates, the 100th anniversary of the expedition to the Pacific led by Lewis and Clark was the ostensible occasion for Portland’s exposition. Yet like many of the popular international expositions in the United States during the late nineteenth century, the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition was much more about the present and the future than about the past. American expositions used historical commemoration as an excuse to display commercial wares, to educate the public on the benefits of economic progress, and to mark the end of one era and the beginning of another. Exposition scholar Burton Benedict and his colleagues called them “mammoth rituals” that utilized clusters of symbols in an attempt to “manufacture tradition” and “impose legitimacy.” In the late nineteenth century, international fairs reiterated and justified middle-class morality and goals, linking patriotism with economic growth. They focused national aspirations and provided tangible proof that such aspirations were desirable and just. In short, they symbolized what was thought to be good about America.³

For Portland, Oregon, as for many western cities, the extravagant exposition also served as a rite of passage from childhood or adolescence as a booming frontier town to maturity and respectability on par with eastern cities. Further, the Lewis and Clark Exposition represented a chance for Portland to overcome economic stagnation. When planning for the exposition began in earnest in 1900, the city had not fully recovered from the depression of the early 1890s. Portland’s collective ego also required a boost in view of the speed with which rival port city Seattle was expanding. A total of sixteen states had exhibits at the exposition. Oregon, Washington, and California, as might be expected, put up the largest structures, but considerable efforts were also made by Massachusetts, New York, and Missouri. Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Illinois, and Maine contributed “modest exhibit buildings.” Twenty-one foreign countries were represented. Japan, regarded as key to American Pacific trade dominance in the new century, had the most impressive exhibit—a $1 million display featuring fine silks and porcelains. Paid attendance at the Lewis and Clark Exposition totaled 1,588,000 (although attendance figures range as high as 2.5 million), of which 540,000 were from Portland, 640,000 from elsewhere in Oregon and Washington, and 408,000 (16 percent) from the rest of the United States and Canada. The celebration spurred half a dozen years of rapid economic growth, an impressive increase in real estate values, and a jump in Portland’s population.⁴

The city’s annual Rose Festival began as a commemoration of the spirit of the Lewis and Clark Exposition and continues to this day. Yet to what extent did the exposition commemorate the Corps of Discovery and its two leaders? The answer, it appears, is “very little.” True, the effort considerably exceeded what had been done over the previous century, but little suggests that the expedition was seen as more than a symbol of the “glory” of westward expansion. The world fairs held in St. Louis and Portland in 1904 and 1905, respectively, although stimulating public interest in Lewis and Clark, presented the expedition’s story primarily as an emblem of progress and national expansion, in keeping with the true themes of those events.

Public images of both the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the celebration of the Louisiana Purchase flourished as the nation geared up for the centennial anniversaries of the two events. The two celebrations came at a time when America’s imperialistic ambitions beyond its shores, particularly in the western Pacific, were in full flood and provided an anodyne to anxiety about the recent closing of the frontier. The image of Lewis and Clark carrying an American flag to the Pacific edge of the continent fit the image of the nation expanding its trade and influence to the very edge of the Pacific Rim. On the other hand, anxiety over the loss of the frontier helps account for a steady increase in popular writings about the West and possibly for increasing interest in Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea. In celebrating the frontier past, Americans sought what Warren I. Susman has called a “native epic, an epic that extolled the virtues of extreme individualism, courage, recklessness, aloofness from social ties and obligations.” An official publication for the Lewis and Clark Exposition, in fact, referred to the story told in the journals as “our national epic” on the basis of the qualities and virtues with which it was seen to represent the nation’s ideals at the time.⁵

At the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, the Oregon exhibit included a rather grandiose and non-historical representation of Fort Clatsop, surrounded by a log stockade and “gardens of rose-flushed Clarkia,” as well as other plants the explorers discovered. Organizers claimed that “the flag carried by” Lewis and Clark would fly over the structure.⁶ Both captains were commemorated at the fair with monuments: Meriwether Lewis, buckskin and moccasin clad, in a heroic- (larger-than-life) sized statue by Charles Lopez and William Clark in a separate statue by sculptor F. W. Ruckstuhl. (Both statues were later shipped to Portland for the Lewis and Clark Exposition, where they mysteriously disappeared.) In addition, a granite obelisk and a bronze bust of Clark were dedicated on October 2, 1904, to mark his grave at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.⁷ Still, history was overshadowed at the St. Louis fair, even as it had been at the great centennial celebration in Philadelphia and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, by boosterism and commercialism. Thus the fair became, in Karal Ann Marling’s words, “a vast entertainment to which a dollop of history lent some semblance of high-minded dignity.”⁸

At Portland’s Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905, ceremonies honored Lewis and Clark, and speakers expounded upon the magnitude of their achievement. An article by H. W. Scott in the fair’s official publication states that “the expedition of Lewis and Clark, though as humble an undertaking as the settlement at Plymouth or Jamestown, was the prologue to the theme of our later national expansion.”⁹ Yet despite the fair’s ostensible signs of commemorating that undertaking, it remained overshadowed by the promotion of municipal and regional economic potential. Carl Abbott points out that this made it easier to obtain national funding for the exposition: “No one in Congress had much interest in the historical heroes and their . . . trek.” What the members of Congress were interested in was the “vision of Pacific trade that had motivated the exploration and settlement of the Oregon Country.” To garner support, Oregonians learned quickly in the winter of 1903–1904 to cut the number of references to Lewis and Clark and to hammer home the idea that a Portland fair was “an undertaking of national interest and importance.”¹⁰

The rhetoric commemorating the Corps of Discovery’s feat had a distinctly imperialistic ring. In his 1904 article, Scott called the expedition “that Anabasis of the Western World” and explained the “Historical Significance of the Lewis and Clark Expedition” as a “prologue to the theme of our later national expansion [that] pushed our National boundary line to the shores of the Pacific.” Scott proclaimed that the expedition “epitomized” the movement of and conquest by the “races of the North” in “one of the great dramas of history.” Scott was not shy about using Lewis and Clark to support American expansionism, such as the recent annexation of the Philippines.¹¹

Perhaps the fact that they were known at the time primarily as agents of American Manifest Destiny worked against the explorers and their party being idolized as romantic heroes. Abetting national expansion and stimulating economic development, no matter how significant to politicians and boosters in 1905, was decidedly less exciting or dramatic in the public mind than conquering enemies by force of arms or heroically and tragically failing (all but one of the Corps of Discovery’s crew, after all, survived the adventure). The figure of Sacagawea, on the other hand, invited celebration of a more human and personal type of heroism in Portland and with increasing frequency throughout the twentieth century. Around two dozen statues, monuments, and markers have been erected to honor Sacagawea; and she is widely celebrated in writings, place names, music, paintings, pageants, motion pictures, and other forms of representation. Public perceptions of Sacagawea, her popularity as a historical icon, and the legends that have grown up around her life and death constitute topics unto themselves. As far as commemoration is concerned, Sacagawea often seems to occupy a place apart from the rest of the expedition, perhaps because of the various purposes to which her story—historical or legendary—has been put.¹²

Fig 1.1 Although dated 1908, this photograph depicts a parade in Helena, Montana, celebrating the Lewis and Clark Centennial. Photo by Edward Reinig. Courtesy, Montana Historical Society Research Center, Helena.

The young Shoshone woman, who had been captured and separated from her people years before she encountered Lewis and Clark at Fort Mandan, accompanied the expedition all the way to the Pacific Coast and back in 1805–1806. She has become perhaps the leading popular icon related to that journey. Some authors have even claimed that the expedition would have failed without her. Donna Kessler has pointed out that different editions of the expedition journals and accounts of the expedition indicate different “versions of Sacagawea’s function.” One is that she had “no specified role,” as Sergeant Patrick Gass’s journal and the Biddle edition suggest. Sacagawea was just along for the trip. Accounts by both William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, however, document several ways the Shoshone woman contributed.¹³ Esther Burnett Horne and Sally McBeth categorize them as “interpreter,” “guide,” “emissary,” and “unconventional counselor.” The first two categories are probably the most recognized, although ther...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Monuments
• CHAPTER TWO Tracing the Route
• CHAPTER THREE The New Explorers
• CHAPTER FOUR The 1955 Sesquicentennial
• CHAPTER FIVE The National Commission
• CHAPTER SIX Commemoration and Authenticity on the Trail
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index