In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (4 page)

The journals became central to developing the elite image, and they made the specific path of the expedition central as well. Allen notes that the “merging and melding” of the “literal elite” with the “folk” image has resulted in the publication and popularity of “an unprecedented number of popular works which, by and large, have presented the expedition in a light more similar to that of the elite image than did earlier popular histories.” Regardless of whether one accepts Allen's categories, it seems clear that a more scholarly or serious approach to the history of the expedition in the late twentieth century tempered the traditional romantic views based on a myth of the West and centered commemorative attention on the trail itself.
¹⁹

The emerging emphasis on designating the Lewis and Clark trail contrasts sharply with earlier attitudes toward the expedition. When the National Historic Trail was created in 1978, eleven states claimed portions of it. But most of those geographic regions were not settled by Euro-Americans until the last three decades of the nineteenth century, which helps explain the previous lack of local interest in the history of the expedition. Accounts in popular magazines occasionally transported the reader to regions through which the explorers had traveled at the beginning of the century, but few attempts seem to have been made to memorialize the route or events associated with
it. Early examples included journalist E. W. Carpenter, writing for
Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine
in the late 1860s, who was greatly impressed by the “Citadel Rocks” downstream from Fort Benton on the Missouri River. These are actually the White Rocks Meriwether Lewis lavishly described in May 1805. Carpenter called them “the most beautiful scenery in Montana,” although his description appears to have been based on Lewis's description rather than on personal observation, since low water had forced him and his party to cover the last 250 miles to Fort Benton by land through a “desert of dry mud hills” and “badlands” with no redeeming qualities. He agreed with Lewis's assessment of the beauty of the Great Falls but again quoted nearly all of the explorer's passage from the journals. Regarding the rest of the Corps of Discovery's route up the Missouri River from St. Louis, Carpenter admitted a total lack of interest and referred the reader to the daily journal accounts.
²⁰

In another article from 1869, C. M. Scammon discussed a trip to Astoria, Oregon. He managed to describe Cape Disappointment, Chinook Point, Baker's Bay, and other landmarks now associated strongly with the expedition's arrival and sojourn at the mouth of the Columbia River during the winter of 1805–1806 with barely a mention of Lewis and Clark, and then only as a reference to the river bearing their names.
²¹
In the context of the times, however, that is not surprising. Scammon's readers were probably more interested in the nature of the small community that had developed around the old Astoria trading post and in commercial and transportation possibilities there. Virtually no one set out to follow and describe any of these places with the purpose of commemorating the expedition, at least not before the 1890s.

In a sampling of mid–nineteenth-century magazines available on-line that contain the names Lewis and Clark, none does more than refer to the expedition in passing. One reference in
Debow's Review
in 1843 mentions Lewis and Clark's “celebrated but ill-conducted expedition across the continent” in a discussion of the Rocky Mountains. Lewis and Clark are briefly alluded to in two other articles in
Debow's Review,
in 1856 and 1857, respectively. One article is about the Mississippi River, and one is about climate in the western regions. Otherwise, nineteenth-century periodical literature tends to mention
Lewis and Clark only in reviews of the Biddle and Coues editions of the journals.
²²

Elliott Coues's expanded and annotated account, although it drew heavily on the original journals, was insufficient to ignite general interest in the Corps of Discovery. As might be expected, however, the 100th anniversary of the expedition did so—but to a degree that may seem rather tepid today. The centennial celebration was mainly confined to Portland's 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, and even there the expedition received relatively scant attention.

O
N
J
UNE
1, 1905, P
RESIDENT
T
HEODORE
R
OOSEVELT
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