In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (2 page)

This should not be regarded as a guidebook to historical sites and monuments. Those described are presented as examples, in no sense exhaustive. Further, the book is not intended to be an administrative or institutional history of the agencies and organizations that have cooperated to make the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail what it is today, as much as such an account deserves to be told.

Starting with the Lewis and Clark Centennial celebration in Portland, Oregon,
Chapter 1
examines the use of statuary and other monuments to memorialize the explorers and Sacagawea, particularly during the Progressive Era when overseas imperialism gave the sentiment of Manifest Destiny a new lease.
Chapter 2
temporarily diverts the reader from the subject of commemoration to a chronological overview of the expedition's journey, relating land forms and routes taken in 1804–1806 to present-day towns and highways and sketching the background of Native American groups the expedition encountered. Since numerous references to specific locations are made throughout the book, it is important for readers to become familiar with the geography of the expedition's routes—especially because what follows is a discussion of how interest began to shift toward the trail itself and toward later “explorers” who sought to retrace the trail, often by automobile.
Chapter 4
examines the 1955 sesquicentennial and its commemorative activities, while
Chapter 5
focuses on the five-year existence of the National Lewis and Clark Commission that prepared the way for institutionalizing the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.
Chapter 6
concludes the book with a discussion of historical authenticity and conflicting viewpoints on interpretations of the trail and the purposes of commemoration.

I am especially grateful to my wife, Marilyn, for her constant encouragement and support and also for helping me research this book. For close readings of earlier drafts of the manuscript, I am indebted
to Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado, and to Professor Christine Jespersen at Western State College. For their gracious assistance, I thank Patrick Muckleroy at Western State's Savage Library (a master at obtaining interlibrary loans); Keith Peterson, the Idaho Lewis and Clark Bicentennial director; Jennifer Rusk and Chris Mullin at the University of Montana's Mansfield Library Archives; Deborah Knudsen and Donnie Sexton at Montana Travel (Montana Department of Commerce); Peg Owens at the Idaho Department of Commerce; Robben Johnston, archaeologist for the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho; David Nicandri, director of the Washington State Historical Society; Vinola Squires and Bette Hull at the Beaverhead County Museum in Dillon, Montana; Terry Abrams, University of Idaho Library Special Collections; and the staffs of many other libraries and archives, including especially the Montana Historical Society (Helena), Clatsop County Heritage Museum (Astoria, Oregon), Overholser Historical Research Center of the Schwinden Library and Archives (Fort Benton, Montana), University of Wyoming American Heritage Center (Laramie), Idaho Historical Society (Boise), Lewis and Clark Heritage Trail Foundation (Great Falls, Montana), Washington State University Library (Pullman), Three Forks Public Library and Three Forks Headwaters Museum (Montana), and the Nez Perce County Museum (Luna House, Lewiston, Idaho). I am thankful as well for the help and support of Monika Lewis, Jeff Curry, Richard Weholt, and Charlie Knowles.

In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

T
HE OFFICIAL OPENING
of the national Lewis and Clark Bicentennial in January 2003 ushered in nearly four years of commemorative events and activities that dwarfed all earlier attempts to recognize the expedition's historical significance. The bicentennial celebration represented a variety of purposes with regard to public historical consciousness, including expressing patriotism, maintaining myths of national identity, educating family members through hands-on history, boosting tourism in communities along the expedition's routes, and so forth. For many, it provided an opportunity to enlighten Americans by making their understanding of the past broader and more inclusive.

What should the history of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's Corps of Discovery mean to us? The answers are varied, but it seems clear that we can no longer accept the white American
view of “progress” through conquest that characterized earlier writings and commemorations up until at least around 1975. Regarding Lewis and Clark as simply heroic icons not only glorifies conquest and dispossession but also distorts the nature of the expedition and obscures much else that is interesting in the history of the West. With the exception of Sacagawea, who provided numerous essential services but has been often miscast as the expedition's guide, Native Americans have traditionally been given short shrift in this story. Lewis and Clark's dependence for survival on the help of tribes such as the Mandan, Hidatsa, Lemhi Shoshone, Salish, Nez Perce, and Clatsop was integral to the entire journey, yet it did not fit into a Eurocentric heroic narrative. Since the 1970s, a more enlightened and realistic view has predominated among scholars and students of western expansion. That view was largely reflected in bicentennial efforts to publicize and interpret the history of the Corps of Discovery.

However, what for convenience I call the “standard model” of public attitudes toward the Lewis and Clark Expedition prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century and in some ways continues today. That model, epitomized in the phrase “our national epic of exploration,” extolled the frontier past as a glorious march toward “progress” and “civilization.” In 1966 Helen B. West, secretary of the Montana Lewis and Clark Trail Advisory Committee, reapplied the label “our national epic” to the expedition. Further, she used the terms “unique saga” and “allegory” and compared “this odyssey” to
Pilgrim's Progress.
Nationalistic rhetoric of this type has more often than not shaped the means by which Lewis and Clark have been memorialized. As a putative American “epic,” the collective account of the journey was celebrated as a master narrative of Manifest Destiny and a great adventure tale.
¹

In a commercial sense, these were the expedition's strongest selling points. Pride in the national myth could be easily converted into economic gain. Much of the groundswell for a designated trail during the 1960s and 1970s came from boosters in towns along the routes, who sensed the potential for tourism. It is, in fact, almost impossible to separate such boosterism from the desire to honor national heroes in either the 1905 centennial or the 1955 sesquicentennial, although
the same is true of nearly all public representations of the American past. When it comes to tourism, history sells.

The fact that historical commemorations express public memory may seem obvious, but the term “memory” in this sense is open to numerous interpretations. French historian Pierre Nora, for example, distinguishes public memory from written history. History, according to Nora, is studied analysis and representation of the past based on an examination of factual evidence. Memory, on the other hand, entails imaginative and symbolic conceptions of the past and is subject to change according to present interests and circumstances. Public memory, according to Nora, is also tied more to places or “sites” that foster collective identity than it is to historical events. In other words,
where
something occurred is more mythically important than is an accurate account of what actually took place there.
²

The distinction between scholarly history and public memory is not clear-cut, however. Few historians today would accept Nora's stringent ideal of written history as simply objective analysis based on evidence. Present interests and circumstances appear to affect scholarly work as well. The French theorist's connection between public memory and place, however, does apply particularly to popular attitudes toward the Lewis and Clark trail. Certainly, far more people have established a connection between themselves and the Lewis and Clark Expedition by visiting sites along the trail than by reading journals or interpretive narratives about the expedition. The physical environment and the expedition's narrative are very closely related; visiting a Lewis and Clark site induces a common sense of historical meaning.

In Nora's view, memory consists of more than simply a popular view of history; it encompasses “remembrances, traditions, customs, habits, practices,” and similar phenomena—all aspects of what is known as cultural history. In speaking about his native France, Nora assumes a considerable degree of cultural homogeneity, but in the United States there are as many versions of memory as there are groups seeking to define themselves in terms of the past. When it comes to public rituals of commemoration, the question of “whose memory,” which often turns on ideological differences, becomes an issue that leads to a variety of representations.
³

While Nora sees memory as a conception of the past that is free from nationalistic or official history, American public commemoration often transforms popular myths into national institutions. Historian John Bodnar, for example, argues that “public memory emerges from the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions.” Here, “vernacular” means local and grassroots, while “official” refers to acts by government or “cultural leaders.”
⁴
Applying this concept to commemorations of Lewis and Clark, one might say that communities along the expedition's route have developed their own, often mythical or stylized, versions of related events that occurred in their locales. Once an occasion—such as a centennial—calls for state or national recognition, governments step in to alter local expressions of the event and to establish a sanctioned version.

According to Bodnar, the official expression often co-opts and institutionalizes the vernacular to enlist it for symbols or functions that uphold loyalty to the nation-state. Like Nora, he emphasizes the practical flexibility of public memory, defining it as a “body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.” Public memory's main “focus,” according to Bodnar, “is not the past . . . but serious matters in the present such as the nature of power and the question of loyalty to both official and vernacular cultures.”
⁵
I believe Bodnar is only partially correct. The “matters” he mentions undoubtedly condition the ways we explain the past to ourselves, but they do not completely account for the desire to make authentic, personally intimate contact with that past. Nonetheless, the shifting nature of public memory ensures changes in the ways that past is expressed, a case in point being the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Both the historical meaning of that event and the means for publicly acknowledging it have changed over time at local, state, and national levels.

Differences in the way the Lewis and Clark Expedition is commemorated today compared with its commemoration in the first half of the twentieth century spring from changes not only in attitudes toward history but also in the means of commemoration itself. Monuments and statues have largely given way to historical parks and interpretive centers. The biggest change, however, has been the shift in attention from Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea as historical icons to
the network of routes the Corps of Discovery took from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back (plus, more recently, Meriwether Lewis's route down the Ohio River in 1803).

The growing veneration of the trail, in my view, merges with the development of a federally funded highway system that, in turn, spurred massive automobile tourism. Both scenic and historical landscapes across the country became more easily accessible and popular as destinations for vacation travel. By the late 1920s, community business leaders in the Pacific Northwest and Northern Plains states were hoping to cash in on the relationship between the new long-distance highways and the routes Lewis and Clark took. For tourists aware of the Lewis and Clark trail and the historical associations of the countryside they were passing through, the highway served as a surrogate for the trail. Auto tourists became a new type of explorer in a very broad sense, imaginatively—and now physically as well—reproducing the experience of the historic journey.