In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (21 page)

Although responsibility for the park passed to a state commission in 1957, Maudlin stayed on as caretaker. That same year he traveled to St. Charles, Missouri, to visit one of the jumping-off points for the expedition and publicly expressed disappointment at the lack of any marker commemorating the event in that historic location. In 1961 the Three Forks of the Missouri in Montana was designated a National Historic Landmark. Clark Maudlin died in 1972, just a few years before the creation of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.
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Although cultural historian David Glassberg never refers to Lewis and Clark or Sacagawea in his study of historical pageantry in the United States, the outdoor productions of the sesquicentennial seem
to echo what he saw as an earlier golden age of local historical pageants. These commemorative local history pageants, Glassberg notes, combined boosterism and community patriotism with an “idealized” representation of the “behavior of past generations.” The pageants usually reflected “cultural conservatism” in their imagery, and their texts often contained a great deal of “saccharine moralism.”
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According to another scholar, Naima Prevots, American pageants flourished particularly between 1905 and 1925, during which time the aesthetic and social values of the American Pageant Association (APA) encouraged proliferation of the form and influenced the quality of productions. The desire “to develop popular art of quality in every community . . . and [to] develop American thematic material” engaged the talents of such writers, directors, and educators as Percy MacKaye, George Pierce Baker, and Frederick H. Koch. To be sure, during the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century, pageants that involved the widespread participation of community members were also seen as means for reform and for reviving democracy through art. MacKaye especially believed that theater should be treated as “an important civic institution [with the] power to reach the masses” and to instill such democratic values as “cooperation, clear thinking, and true moral action.” Pageant performances, held in appropriate outdoor settings, drew audiences of between 2,000 and 80,000 people and depended mostly on community members to assume the performance roles.
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Between 1908 and 1917 the APA reported performances of several hundred pageants, of which more than eighty were historical in nature. Most of these pageants depicted history east of the Mississippi, particularly in the upper Midwest and New England. The figures of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea were represented, however, in one of the most spectacular events,
The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis
, performed for four days in May 1914 on the site of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposition. The pageant portion, written by Thomas Wood, presented significant periods in the region's history, including those of the Plains Indians, early French explorers, and the founding of St. Louis. The departure of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in boats was depicted, as was the later arrival of settlers. The pageant carried through to the end of the Civil War and was
followed by Percy MacKaye's symbolic masque about Cahokia, the center of the early Native American mound-building culture, which was tied in somehow to the life of the French king for whom the city was named.
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The Lewis and Clark Expedition played a much greater role in
A Pageant of the Northwest
, written by Frederick H. Koch and “eighteen of his students” at the University of North Dakota and produced outdoors in the Bankside Theatre on the Grand Forks campus. Koch, who had taken a leave of absence from the university to study “dramatic literature” at Harvard University with George Pierce Baker, became closely associated with the burgeoning pageant movement and “a leader in the APA.” The outdoor theater in which the pageant was performed in 1914 was constructed especially for the production, making use of a stream that “flowed across the university campus.” “The Bankside Theatre,” Koch later wrote, “was the first to utilize the natural curve of a stream as the foreground of the scene, between the stage and the amphitheatre. It is unique in that entrances and exits can be made by water as well as by land. . . . [O]n this very spot, by this same stream . . . the buffalo herds ranged at will and the Indians met the white man in friendly trade. . . . [
A Pageant of the Northwest
] marked a distinct contribution because it demonstrated that the community, under proper direction, can not only enact its own traditions and outlook, but, more than this, [can] actually create the pageant-form, thus cultivating communal literary as well as histrionic art.” This also, according to Prevots, marks the first spelling of the “Bird Woman's” name as “Sakakawea,” the spelling preferred in North Dakota today.
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The first pageant in Montana to reenact an aspect of the Lewis and Clark Expedition occurred at Armstead, about fifteen miles south of Dillon. On August 30, 1915, at the unveiling of the Daughters of the American Revolution's
Sacajawea
plaque, residents of Armstead depicted the Corps of Discovery's meeting with the Lemhi Shoshone and Sacagawea's return to her band and her brother Cameahwait. Conceived by Laura Tolman Scott, the pageant took place at the confluence of Horse Prairie Creek and the Beaverhead River, the approximate site of the expedition's Camp Fortunate. According to a newspaper account, the cast included around thirty “Shoshone Indians from
the Lemhi reservation” who (oddly, considering the peaceful nature of the meeting with Lewis and Clark) “gave their famous war dance following the program.”
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Seven years later a procession and pageant depicting scenes from the city's history “kicked off” the grand opening of the five-story Lewis and Clark Hotel in Lewiston, Idaho. Capping the Lewis and Clark segment, “Sacajawea,” represented more as a promotional icon than as a historical figure, was presented with keys to both the city of Lewiston and its newest hotel—which she ceremoniously tossed into the Snake River. A “scalp dance” (again, rather inappropriate) was performed with the help of Nez Perce Indians.
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The enlistment of Native Americans, usually as supernumeraries to the main action, was characteristic of pageants held at various places along the Lewis and Clark trail. Referring to urban historical pageants and festivals around the turn of the twentieth century, tourism scholar Catherine Cocks argues that something more than historical authenticity was at work in the battles and dances commonly staged by Indians. “Without the proper accoutrements and stylized activities,” she writes, “onlookers might have to encounter the Indians as fellow citizens rather than living souvenirs of a dying, primitive, and alien race. The requirement that the Indians perform their culture as a series of entertainments reduced irreconcilable conflicts to sideshows.”
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The popularity of historical pageants in general declined rapidly in the 1920s, in part as a result of increasing competition from motion pictures and radio. Today, Lewis and Clark pageants have largely given way to a variant: the historical reenactment, which places a premium on technical and factual accuracy. But in a general sense, the early–twentieth-century history pageant described by Prevots and Glassberg provided a model for commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, although in pageants in the 1950s, noble rhetoric and symbolism seemed tempered by more vernacular speech and realism.
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One of the major pageants performed in the summer of 1955, the one at the Missouri Headwaters where Clark Maudlin and others were establishing a memorial park, had some history. In 1949 Albert Erickson, advertising director for the Montana State Highway Commission, informed Maudlin that he had visited Professor Bert
Hansen at the University of Montana in Missoula and discussed putting on a pageant at the Three Forks during the summer of 1950. Hansen responded by co-writing (with Virginia Buttleman), directing, and producing an outdoor program that would be presented during four consecutive summers leading up the sesquicentennial.
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Professor Hansen was well prepared for the task. He had been writing, producing, and directing historical pageants in Montana for several years. This grew out of his interest in using the pageant form as an educational tool, as Henry Koch had done. Hansen advocated broadening the understanding of students in speech and drama programs by having them participate in creating group psychodramas he called “sociodramas,” a term coined by Dr. Jacob Moreno in the 1930s. As a means for “analyzing and treating [the] social problems of a group,” sociodramas begin with spontaneous role playing and evolve into productions written and rehearsed for public performance.
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Beyond the classroom, Hansen believed participation in sociodramas at all levels would foster unity and community cohesion. Years before being asked to create an outdoor spectacle using non-professionals to depict the Corps of Discovery and Sacagawea at the Three Forks of the Missouri, Professor Hansen was working on ways to evoke local history by harnessing community creativity.

He put the sociodrama process to work as part of a grant-supported research program called the Montana Study, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The purpose of the Montana Study was to find ways to develop community culture in small towns throughout the state and prevent flight to larger cities. Two of the eleven small towns that participated were Darby and Stevensville, both near Hamilton in southwestern Montana.
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Hansen took a leave of absence from his academic duties to establish a “dramatic vehicle” that would involve as many residents as possible. He took care to distinguish community-based “sociodrama in the form of a pageant” from the commonplace historical pageant. The method was intended, at least in part, to foster community identity and not just be a vehicle for perfunctory celebration of past events.
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Beginning with Darby, which in the mid- to late 1940s was facing the loss of much of its lumbering operations (a perception not shared by many of Darby's residents), Hansen initiated basically the same
process he had used with speech classes. To make “the whole community conscious of its predicament,” a group of residents wrote a sociodrama entitled
Darby Looks at Itself
and performed it in early December 1945. Fifty-three people out of a population of 500 participated in the writing, and 127 residents took part as actors.
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After the Darby project, Hansen engaged the citizens of Stevensville. The town was one of the oldest in the region, but Hansen said its residents lacked an “appreciation of its singularly historic past,” a “vision for its future,” or even “an interest in its present.”
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According to historian Carla Homstad, “Nearly three thousand people—roughly one-fourth of the population of Ravalli County”—saw a production of
A Tale of the Bitterroot
in August 1946.
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One aspect that seems to have set the Stevensville pageant apart from run-of-the mill dramatized historical celebrations was, Hansen stated, “its solemn adherence to a belatedly recognized truth that had never before been told by Indians and whites together at a public gathering.” In four episodes that dealt with the Christianizing of the Flathead Indians and their eventual removal from the Bitterroot Valley, the sociodrama “portrayed the story of a fifty year period of ruthless aggression on the part of the white men, and of their determination to drive the Flathead Indians from their native lands in the fertile Bitter Root Valley where Stevensville is located.” Hansen insisted on “realistic treatment” and authenticity, seeking to incorporate, among other things, “real Indians with their tepees.” But they were not merely extras. Participants in the Stevensville pageant included descendants of the Flathead Indians who had been removed in 1891. Paul Charlot, chief of the Salish tribe, played the part of his grandfather, Chief Charlot, an important historical figure during the removal period.
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A year later, in 1947, Hansen helped study groups in the towns of Arlee and Dixon to dramatize local history related to the Flathead Indian Reservation and the founding of the communities north of Missoula, Montana. Homstad points out that performances of the pageants ceased after the Montana Study concluded in 1948. For Bert Hansen, however, they proved to be a warm-up for the Lewis and Clark pageants for which he would be best known.
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Hansen's 1950 Lewis and Clark pageant, performed at the Three Forks of the Missouri, depicted four episodes related to the expedition. Although most of the dialogue is fictional, the pageant is a far cry from Hollywood's conception of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Its title,
Corridor of an Empire
, reflects a traditional and popular view of western expansion and of the expedition's significance to white America. The “corridor” referred to is virtually the trail of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Yet, as in the case of the first Stevensville pageant Hansen supervised in 1947, the Three Forks script demonstrates sensitivity to Native American viewpoints well ahead of its time. As a historical pageant, it also presented a refreshingly realistic approach that paid close attention to the historical record, particularly the Lewis and Clark journals.
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The pageant does contain a certain amount of celebration of conquest and destiny, but
Corridor of an Empire
avoids much of the chauvinism and mawkishness that characterized occasional pageants at the time. It also avoids the typical high-flown rhetoric and stiff attempts to imitate language of the period, and symbolic poses are kept to a minimum. Many of the speeches Bert Hansen and Virginia Buttleman devised are intended to realistically represent normal conversation, and the usage tends to have a rather modern ring. The content of the dialogue among expedition members is closely based on actual comments in entries from the journals, yet the completely fictionalized scenes about Sacagawea and her people tend to have a poetic and prophetic character. For example, Episode I of
Corridor of an Empire
presents an imagined scene from Sacagawea's childhood in which her mother vaguely glimpses the destiny of her “little Bird Child,” and the chief of the Lemhi Shoshone band suggests that the river formed by the Three Forks seems aware of having a “mission.”
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This betrays an underlying celebratory theme. Despite its overall attempt to present a more inclusive and realistic view of history, the pageant occasionally turns Indian characters into cheerleaders for western expansion.