In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (3 page)

An emerging system of highways and the car culture it fostered were preconditions for a significant shift in the way Americans commemorated Lewis and Clark. Until the young states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas had been sufficiently “settled” by Euro-Americans, consciousness of the Corps of Discovery's route as a significant aspect of the local and national historical heritage probably languished, at least until those states participated in Portland's 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition. Even then, a lack of transportation routes limited access to most of the sites; and rail tourism, by its nature, was confined to crossing the open spaces as quickly as possible to reach or return from national parks and other resort destinations. It was only when the 1955 sesquicentennial celebrations emphasized statues, monuments, pageants, and other traditional styles of commemoration that the Lewis and Clark story began to give way to an emphasis on the expedition's physical route, although the ingredients for this change had been simmering for half a century.

Highway and tourism history was interwoven with other historical developments in the twentieth century, including movements to preserve both the natural environment and historical heritage sites. Those preservation movements did not become the focus of wide public attention until the 1960s, however, by which time interest in
Lewis and Clark had been regenerated by the expedition's sesquicentennial. Its 150th anniversary—although commemorated mostly in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana—did much to overcome inertia regarding designation of a national historic route. Compared to preparations for the bicentennial, excitement about a designated route was rather mild and somewhat ad hoc, but interest generated by the 1955 celebration never subsided. Anxiety in the 1960s over degradation of the environment, destruction of wildlife, and loss of historical sites helped spur attempts to preserve Lewis and Clark's route and make it available for the public to appreciate and enjoy. In 1964 the U.S. Congress created the national Lewis and Clark Trail Commission to consider ways of carrying the plan forward.

High on the list of the tasks addressed were designating and marking highway routes and access and developing historical interpretations of important sites. However, these tasks were complicated because many of the expedition campsites along the Missouri River had been inundated by Pick-Sloan Project dams and reservoirs. The loss of much of what could be regarded as the authentic trail—individual sites and long segments of free-flowing rivers—created a gulf that would have to be bridged by interpretation and imagination. Following termination of the Lewis and Clark Trail Commission in 1969, state committees, private organizations, and several federal agencies cooperated to carry on the task. The Bureau of Outdoor Recreation (Department of the Interior) completed a final report for including the Lewis and Clark trail in the National Trails network. The National Trails System Act of 1968 helped finance the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails and designated other hiking trails across the country. Eventually, the legislation was amended to include partially motorized “recreation” and “historic” routes. In 1978 Congress authorized the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.

The subsequent institutionalizing of the various paths the Corps of Discovery took to the Pacific Coast and back in 1804–1806, though beyond the scope of this book, raises issues regarding authenticity and national memory. The route (or skein of routes) exists as a sort of historical replica and a heritage site that extends for thousands of miles. The trail had to be artificially reproduced because virtually no physical trace of it remains, and much of the original trail is covered
by water today. Expedition structures, such as forts Mandan and Clatsop, have been reproduced and signs and interpretive centers provided to enhance understanding of the expedition for modern-day travelers, who, by tracing the trail in their automobiles, assume the role of explorers and participate in the trail's historic replication. Yet the interpretation of heritage sites in general has proven problematic because of public attitudes toward history and the authenticity of its artifacts and explanations. Tourists bring expectations of what must be true and respond to a variety of stereotypes. To appeal to those expectations—if not to the stereotypes as well—heritage site developers may sometimes feel compelled to artfully design the appearance of authenticity.

Although the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail is not free of such issues, its spatial extension and interrelationship with the landscape have a mitigating effect. The trail is largely an imaginative construct anyway, for much of the route represents little more than interpretation applied to landscape, largely in the form of official signage. This makes manifest certain aspects of the journals. The National Historic Trail also differs from most other heritage sites because of its long relationship to highways and personal exploration by automobile. Designated highways merge with the trail and often become equivalent to it, at least in the mind of the traveler.

In fact, highway tourism and the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail developed virtually in tandem. The first significant stirrings of public interest in Lewis and Clark, stimulated by the 1905 centennial celebration, nearly coincided with the start of a nationwide fascination with transcontinental automobile travel. Up to that time, Lewis and Clark had all but faded from public memory. The Lewis and Clark Expedition garnered relatively little public attention in the nineteenth century. The U.S. government allowed its fiftieth anniversary to pass unrecognized. Local communities, which might later have been expected to celebrate the Corps of Discovery's passage through their vicinities, were few and far between, even after construction of the Northern Pacific and Great Northern transcontinental railway lines. Cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky maintains that periodic historical commemorations did not become common in the United States until the late nineteenth century, although it
appears that events associated with the Revolutionary War and the nation's founding are major exceptions.
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In any case, Americans eventually began to commemorate important historical events and figures in quarter-century anniversaries or even more frequently. Thus, it may be significant that Lewis and Clark remained uncelebrated for 100 years following their expedition.

True, there was little or no scholarly interest in the West in general until Frederick Jackson Turner expounded his “frontier thesis” in the 1890s, claiming that westward movement explained American history. Still, Lewis and Clark's relatively low status compared with other individuals regarded as frontier heroes by white Americans in the nineteenth century is curious. During the aggressively expansionist 1840s and 1850s, when the phrase “Manifest Destiny” ruled the rhetoric of nationalism, frontiersmen and exploratory groups of every stripe achieved celebrity. During Andrew Jackson's presidency, for example, Davy Crockett, following the example of Daniel Boone, became a living legend and an even greater heroic icon following his death at the Alamo. Washington Irving's popular 1836 narrative
Astoria,
about the founding of Astor's trading post on the Columbia River, as well as his
Adventures of Captain Bonneville,
indicate that the public was eager for accounts of the western and Rocky Mountain fur trade. Both Benjamin Bonneville and government explorer-surveyor John Charles Fremont, whose 1840s expedition journals fascinated the American reading public, left legacies of place names scattered across the West.

Not even the rising issues of slavery and sectional conflict in the 1850s completely diverted public attention away from western conquest. Hotly debated questions about the spread of slavery into newly acquired territories were at the core of these issues. Captain John Mullan, who built the Mullan Trail across the Bitterroot and Rocky mountains, clearly regarded Lewis and Clark as forerunners of what Anglo-Americans at the time regarded as “civilization.” For Mullan, their fame had been memorialized primarily by white settlement. “Here with you,” he told the Historical Society of the Rocky Mountains in 1861, “[Lewis and Clark's] monument is to be found, industrious people, who have built towns & cities where there was the wilderness, & their epitaphs are found engraved upon the hearts
& affections of an appreciating people, who are ever willing to pay homage & respect to the very mention of the names of Lewis & Clark.” But Mullan castigated the U.S. government for its failure to “maintain the claim . . . established by the explorations” and to publish the complete journals produced by the expedition.
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The unavailability of the original journals kept by Clark, Lewis, and four other members of the expedition may help explain why the Corps of Discovery faded in the public imagination during the nineteenth century. After the 1814 Nicholas Biddle/Paul Allen edition, which sold relatively few copies, no legitimate narrative of the journey appeared until Elliott Coues's account in 1893.
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Coues was a retired U.S. Army surgeon who had developed an interest in the Lewis and Clark Expedition while serving in Dakota Territory in the 1870s. His later reputation as an expert ornithologist and lexicographer earned Coues a commission to produce an expanded reissue of the Biddle-Allen text,
The History of the Expedition under the Commands of Captains Lewis and Clark
. Coues examined as many original sources as he could locate, including the original manuscripts of the journals held at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. The result of Coues's labors was a vastly expanded version rather than simply a “reissue” of the Biddle-Allen book, which in addition to new sources and material contained a great deal of commentary and annotation.
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Still, Coues's version was not entirely an original edition of the journals themselves. Such a work did not appear until Reuben Gold Thwaites of the Wisconsin State Historical Society edited a set of the journals that was published in 1904.
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According to historian Paul Russell Cutright, the first “book of consequence
written about
the Expedition” was Olin D. Wheeler's two-volume
Trail of Lewis and Clark
, also published in 1904.
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Historian Donald Jackson observed that since the two explorers do not share the frontier mythical space occupied by such figures as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, books constitute “the real source of public knowledge about the expedition.”
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The mythical fame to which Jackson refers would seem to stem more from oral folk tales than from journals and other published writings. Moreover, a number of conditions may help account for
the mythical status of Boone and Crockett. For example, Daniel Boone epitomized what Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries regarded as a frontier “hero,” and he apparently served as the model for James Fenimore Cooper's main character in the Leatherstocking novels. Davy Crockett died (by legend, heroically) in defense of the Alamo, an almost mythical event in itself. But even earlier he had achieved fame as expert rifleman, Indian fighter, and congressman. Both Crockett and Boone fit the national ethos of individualism associated with the frontier better than did Lewis and Clark, whose exploits were based on cooperation and teamwork. And, as indicated, journals and books constituted the basis for their revival in the public memory during the twentieth century.

Twentieth-century publications of original portions of the journals by editors such as Thwaites, Milo M. Quaife, Ernest Staples Osgood, and Donald Jackson, as well as Bernard DeVoto's popular condensation, largely account for expanding interest in the expedition.
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During the nineteenth century, however, disillusionment and lack of interest obscured history. The Corps of Discovery's accomplishments had begun to be overshadowed by other events when Biddle's history of them finally appeared. The expedition's scientific observations remained virtually unknown for eighty years, and the path Lewis and Clark blazed fell quickly out of favor. Soon after the explorers' views of the Pacific Northwest had been distorted to promote settlement in Oregon country, Lewis and Clark, as geographer and historian John L. Allen puts it, “receded into the American memory” until the Thwaites edition of the journals and the centennial celebration brought them to the fore. According to Allen, Oregon settlement booster Hall Jackson Kelley ignored the generally negative comments the explorers had made about their surroundings at Fort Clatsop in the winter of 1805–1806 and used Biddle's book “to paint a glowing, rosy picture of the Oregon Country.”
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A merging of what Allen calls “literate elite” and “folk” images of Lewis and Clark in the twentieth century may help explain the subsequent rediscovery and commemoration of the expedition. The “folk image,” according to Allen, has tended to focus on “the explicit purpose of exploring and evaluating the newly acquired lands,” essentially the viewpoint expressed by Captain Mullan.
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Once the
Lewis and Clark Centennial had generated popular writings, this image was over-layered by romanticism and the ingredients of legend, particularly in the case of Sacagawea. But knowledge of the expedition often stops there. In general, according to Zelinsky, American explorers “may have been duly honored by historians, but only casually noted by the general public.”
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Only recently have Lewis and Clark achieved a “heroic apotheosis.” Yet a series of questions posed to college freshman in survey courses over several decades in the second half of the twentieth century, designed to determine the extent of their “historical memory,” revealed only slight recognition of why Lewis and Clark are historically significant. In the students' responses, Lewis and Clark were usually fused as a single unit or even as one individual. Sometimes they were referred to as “Lewis N. Clark.”
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What Allen calls the “literate elite” image, on the other hand, focuses on the expedition's scientific purposes and, as Donald Jackson stated, the “personalities involved,” including those of the enlisted men.
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