In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (25 page)

The agencies lobbied heavily for their respective proposals—the Pick Plan and the Sloan Plan. But when the U.S. Congress threatened to take responsibility for the Missouri River away from both agencies and set up an independent authority, the corps and the bureau met to find a way to cooperate. What Pick and Sloan eventually agreed on in October 1944 was something less than a compromise, however. Rather than half a loaf, each side settled for the entire plan. The resulting Missouri River Basin Project agreement basically included the main goals of both plans. Eventually, the project was renamed the Pick-Sloan project.
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Dam building on the Missouri did not begin with Pick-Sloan, however. The Corps of Engineers had already constructed the massive Fort Peck earth-fill dam in northeastern Montana between 1933 and 1937. The reservoir that filled in behind the dam covers the river's course for 180 miles upstream and is 16 miles wide at its widest point.
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The first of the Pick-Sloan dams to be completed in the 1950s were Fort Randall and Gavins Point in South Dakota. Garrison Dam in North Dakota, which formed Lake Sakakawea, and Oahe Dam near Pierre, South Dakota, soon followed. The last major main-stem dam in the project was Big Bend, completed in 1963, which backed up Lake Sharpe above Chamberlain, South Dakota.
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By the time it was completed, the system was presenting a thorny problem for those planning and promoting the commemorative trail. In the late 1960s, however, the National Lewis and Clark Commission shifted its
focus to such problems as road access and descriptions of sites that no longer existed above water, thus ignoring an entire aspect of the expedition's historical heritage.

In terms of the lives of Indian peoples, the ecology of the river itself, and the route of Lewis and Clark regarded as an extended historical site, the impact of the Pick-Sloan project must be considered devastating rather than simply underachieving. The economic, social, and cultural costs to Indians who lived in the vicinity of the Missouri River widely overshadow the difficulties of restoring historical authenticity, yet the indirect relationship between the two suggests a dark irony. Inundation of lands behind the new dams had an immediate and lasting impact on descendants of the Indian peoples Lewis and Clark had encountered on the journey upriver in 1804 and with whom the expedition had wintered before setting out for the Pacific Coast in early 1805. As they filled, the Pick-Sloan reservoirs swiftly covered bottomlands used to grow food and shelter livestock by the Three Affiliated Tribes: the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara in North Dakota. The tribes' Fort Berthold Reservation was rent asunder by Lake Sakakawea. Land also disappeared on five Sioux reservations in South Dakota: Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Yankton, Crow Creek, and Lower Brulé. Lewis and Clark's edgy councils with the Teton (Lakota) Sioux took place just downstream from where the Oahe Dam is today, but the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock reservations would eventually border, and lose ground to, the great reservoir behind the dam.
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Altogether, the five dams took away “more than 550 square miles of tribal land and dislocated more than 900 Indian families.” Compensation for lost land turned out to be paltry, substituted lands were of poor quality, and the relocation process was traumatic. In addition, the adverse effect on these peoples has not been confined to loss of land. Shore erosion, reduction of fish and game habitat, destruction of bottomland and river ecology, and an inability to utilize many benefits of the projects—for example, electrical power, irrigation, and recreational tourism—are just some of the economic disadvantages for Native Americans that came in the wake of the dam building. In general, Pick-Sloan has damaged attempts to reduce poverty on the reservations and disrupted or destroyed community and
traditional culture, severing native peoples from much of the river that had nourished them long after they were sequestered on small reservations.
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Vine Deloria Jr. has called Pick-Sloan “the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States.” The same inundations that deprived the Indians of wooded bottomlands also impoverished the natural environment of the upper Missouri and obscured the historical relationship between the two.
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The Pick-Sloan and other dams have made seeing the route of Lewis and Clark even remotely the way the explorers saw it a much more strenuous act of imagination. Not only has a considerable portion of the Missouri River become lake, but vegetation, wildlife habitat, and landforms have been obliterated as well. Channelization has corseted the river and cut through its bends, preventing it from spreading out to form or extend zones of vegetation and habitat. Most striking, perhaps, is the loss of timber and shade along many stretches of riverbank.
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Sites of Indian camps have disappeared, as have the more recent sites occupied by the Corps of Discovery. A survey and search for artifacts initiated in 1946 under the aegis of the Inter-Agency Archeological Salvage Program yielded much archaeological data on plains Indians. But historical points “looked upon and probably camped upon by earlier explorers,” at which Lewis Freeman had marveled in his 1928 journey down the Missouri, will be looked upon no more.
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Gone are most of the sites related to William Clark's description and commentary in the journal entries except those for about a week sometime between August 31 and October 19, 1804, including the Arikara villages upstream from Oahe Dam; from April 9 to April 22, 1805; and from May 10 to May 22, 1805.

These are just the portions of the outward-bound route affected by the Pick-Sloan and Fort Peck reservoirs. Numerous other sites described in the journals and occupied by the expedition are now inaccessible to tourists attempting to trace the route. Even before the reservoirs had filled, it became apparent that one type of accessibility had also disappeared. Roadways that had followed both banks of the Missouri were now under the waters of Lake Sakakawea, Lake Oahe, and other reservoirs in the Dakotas. For a time, there was no way to approach the Lewis and Clark trail by automobile along any of the Pick-Sloan impoundments. On the Columbia River in the Pacific
Northwest, Bonneville Dam, built in the mid-1930s, and The Dalles Dam, built in the mid-1950s, back up reservoirs that cover more than forty miles of the Lewis and Clark route. No longer visible are Celilo Falls, the cascades of The Dalles, or the Short and Long narrows that had bedeviled the expedition on its way both down and back up the river. More portions of the route were inundated by the John Day and McNary dams along the lower Columbia.
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The National Lewis and Clark Commission and the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation thus faced a daunting task in proposing ways to mark and interpret a historical route that was, in effect, a linearly extended historical site that now existed primarily in the imagination. The search for recreational opportunities, however, shored up the more tenuous historical aspects. In view of “Ding” Darling's original concerns, the congressional mandate to explore multiple uses is unsurprising, particularly with respect to the Missouri River portion of the route. The Corps of Engineers had already set out to provide water recreation sites on the lakes it had created, and individual states quickly saw an opportunity to copperplate their chances for attracting tourism by dotting the trail with recreational facilities. It is safe to say that nothing that equaled the scope of the National Historic Trail would have been possible without a strong emphasis on outdoor recreation and wildlife preservation.
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Along much of the Missouri and Columbia rivers, over the preceding two decades the explorers' route had become exceedingly watery. Long segments of both rivers were now chains of reservoirs. The problem of luring tourists off the interstate highways and onto designated trail secondary highways where they would discover history was solved in part by the appeal of a “recreational ribbon” of day-use parks, campgrounds, and boating facilities. Designating and interpreting the proposed historic trail, however, was more complicated.
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For tourists, highways would serve as surrogates for the path of exploration, and officially marking the appropriate highways was one of the earliest issues that concerned the commission. For uniformity and continuity, a standard logo had to be agreed upon. In 1964 the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation announced a contest and a $500 prize for the best design, as judged by the J. N. “Ding” Darling Foundation. Although the prize was awarded, the winning insignia
“depicting Sacagawea and her baby Baptiste” was not adopted, for reasons undisclosed. Instead, all designated roadways would bear signs depicting Lewis and Clark in silhouette, one holding a rifle and the other pointing, above the words “Lewis and Clark Trail.”
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Also to be worked out were means by which sites along the trail would be interpreted for travelers. South Dakota Historical Society director Will Robinson pointed out that the minimal symbol markers would tell travelers that they were on part of the Lewis and Clark trail but not “what they [the explorers] did here and where did they do it . . . the
REAL MEAT
of the program.” Helping tourists
visualize
events associated with particular places, such as the meeting with the Teton Sioux at the mouth of the Bad River or the first encounter with the Nez Perce in Idaho, might, one federal official thought, “be the most important and perhaps the most difficult aspect of the entire Trail concept.”
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The National Lewis and Clark Commission spent much time discussing the concept of a “continuous” Lewis and Clark trail highway. At its November 1968 meeting in Portland, Oregon, the commission called upon the U.S. secretary of transportation to seek congressional funds to expedite “the interstate planning and coordination” of such a highway.
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A few months later, an article in the
Wall Street Journal
conveyed criticisms, such as those levied by Congressman John Kyl of Iowa, that the commission had tried to “expand into the roadbuilding business” with “ambitions [that] were getting it off the track.” Sherry Fisher responded that a continuous road was needed because many parts of the trail were far from existing highways. “How in the hell,” Fisher is quoted as asking, “is anybody going to enjoy these wilderness areas if you can't get people there so they can look [at them]?”
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It is true that the reservoirs had wiped out most road access along the river route, but there were no “wilderness areas” to be found along the middle or lower Missouri River. Still, following the Lewis and Clark route by automobile had become extremely difficult because of river dams, especially in the Dakotas and eastern Montana. A University of Wisconsin professor wrote to Fisher complaining about his frustration in four attempts to follow the expedition route along the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. “It was all well and good,” he wrote, “to mark the highways as you have done,” but, for the most
part, the highways designated did not come anywhere near the trail in the Dakotas.
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Actually, there never had been highways as such along the Missouri River in South Dakota, even before the dams were built. In the 1920s a proposal had surfaced to construct a “River Highway” from Sioux City, Iowa, to the North Dakota line. This route, a South Dakota Highway Commission editorial stated, “would give the tourists a different inspiration of South Dakota . . . a highway that would be both scenic and historic.”
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The proposal was never realized, however. A 1949 highway map of the state indicates, with few exceptions, dirt or gravel road access to the river. By the mid-1960s plans were being drawn up to construct a system of perimeter roads along the reservoirs in South and North Dakota to replace those that had been inundated. A 1965 engineering study report for the South Dakota Department of Highways proposed nearly 422 miles of paved perimeter roads that would provide recreation access. No mention was made of historical significance.
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Criticism, such as that reported in the
Wall Street Journal
in May 1969, that the Lewis and Clark Trail Commission was involving itself in road building probably stemmed from state attempts to squeeze the federal government for more construction funding on the excuse that the perimeter roads were integral to the creation of an official Lewis and Clark trail highway across the country.
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Although it refused to succumb to such a scheme, the commission did resolve to designate new paved reservoir perimeter roads in North and South Dakota as part of the trail.
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In 1969 the North Dakota Highway Department numbered the new highways 1804 on the east bank and 1806 on the west to commemorate the years in which the expedition passed up the Missouri (1804) and, on its return, back down (1806). Eventually, South Dakota adopted the same numbering system.
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By October 1966 the commission had designated the existing highways that would bear the official Lewis and Clark trail signs. It had also held four meetings. Following an organizational meeting in Washington, D.C., in January 1965, the members went to work on September 30 and October 1, 1965, in a meeting at the Old Court House in St. Louis, at which time the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation presented its plan and the commission accepted the highway marker
symbol. Among other recommendations made at the meeting were that the Recreation Advisory Council study and appropriately implement the Bureau of Recreation plan, that consideration be given to acquiring the Pompey's Pillar historical site, and that the Lewis and Clark trail be surveyed for archaeological sites in danger of being “destroyed or marred.” In addition, the commission recommended that “a fitting memorial to commemorate the achievement of Captain Clark in establishing mutual trust and goodwill [with and among the Missouri River Indian tribes] be erected at an appropriate location along the trail.” Following the session, the group traveled by boat to the mouth of the Missouri River and visited a site near the 1803–1804 Wood River encampment, where the state of Illinois was planning to establish a commemorative state park. In mid-February 1966 the commission convened its third meeting in Portland, Oregon, reviewing proposals from various agencies and groups and touring Lewis and Clark sites near the mouth of the Columbia River, including Fort Clatsop in Oregon and Chinook Point, Washington. In early July 1966 commission members took a three-day float on the Yellowstone River and attended “the official dedication of Pompey's Pillar as a registered national historic landmark.” Meeting in Billings, Montana, on July 11 and 12, the commission heard reports on progress in designating and marking official Lewis and Clark trail highways and prepared its first interim report to President Richard Nixon and the U.S. Congress.
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