In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (6 page)

Fig 1.2
Distant view of
Sacajawea
statue in Washington Park, Portland, Oregon. The statue was central to commemorations of the “Bird Woman” organized by women's suffrage advocates during the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1906. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.

Veneration of Sacagawea at the Lewis and Clark Exposition was just the beginning of her transformation into a popular historicalicon.
While interest in the two explorers waned, the expedition's female star rose in esteem. Speaking at a meeting of the Montana Federation of Women's Clubs in 1914, Laura Tolman Scott of Armstead called Sacajawea the “unsung heroine of Montana.”
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That same year, the Montana Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) dedicated a monument to Sacajawea (the spelling of the name preferred at the time and still favored by the Shoshone) at the Three Forks of the Missouri. It was a stone marker with a tablet that cited Sacajawea's “courage, loyalty, and intelligence,” which “had done so much towards blazing the pathway to the great northwest.”
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Interest in Sacagawea's role was further stimulated by the republication of Eva Emery Dye's book ten years after Portland's Lewis and Clark Exposition.
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In 1915 the DAR placed a bronze plaque on granite at the site of Camp Fortunate near Armstead, Montana, to honor Sacagawea. The Oregon Short Line Railroad graded and prepared a concrete site for the memorial. Scott also noted that “the Butte Tombstone Company presented a huge boulder, that was also transported free of charge, and excursions ran from Butte, Dillon and other
neighboring cities.”
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Montana senator William A. Clark's speech at the dedication of the memorial called attention to Sacagawea's “services” to the expedition and also to her overall qualities “and her exemplary womanhood.”
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This remark appears to have been underscored by Mrs. Clarence Holt's costumed depiction of Sacagawea and singing of the “Sacajawea Lullaby,” composed by Zillah Harris of Portland, to a baby doll as part of the Armstead ceremony (which included personifications of expedition members in a pageant).
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Fig 1.3
Close-up of Washington Park
Sacajawea
statue. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.

Numerous DAR memorials and plaques to Sacagawea followed in Montana and elsewhere. One can still be seen just east of State Highway 28 between Tendoy and Salmon, Idaho, which confidently marks the spot where Sacagawea was born. Based on the alternative theory of Sacagawea's life after the expedition, in 1915 the DAR erected a concrete monument at her purported grave on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
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The monument contains “a brass plate bearing the inscription ‘Sacajawea, died April 9, 1884. A guide with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806. Identified by Rev. J. Roberts, who officiated at her burial.'”
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In 1929 the Original Hickory Stick Club erected an obelisk commemorating “Sakakawea” near U.S. 12 west of the Missouri River bridge at Mobridge, South Dakota.
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Five years after Cooper's exposition statue of Sacagawea was moved to Washington Park in Portland,
Bird Woman
, by sculptor Leonard Crunelle, was dedicated on the North Dakota state capitol grounds in Bismarck. Although a 1922 suggestion that a statue of Sacagawea mark “the Trail's End” turnaround in Seaside, Oregon, did not come to fruition,
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several heroic-sized (life-size or larger) statues of her have been produced since then, including the 1980 painted sculpture at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming.

It is not surprising that the increase in public enthusiasm for Sacagawea around the turn of the twentieth century would find expression in monuments and statues. Intellectual and cultural historian Michael Kammen reports that the “greatest vogue” for erecting statues to commemorate heroic figures in the United States was during “the 1880s to the 1920s.” Kammen suggests that this was a carryover from the fervor to erect monuments following the Civil War, although it seems likely that both the war with Spain and World War I did much to stimulate the trend.
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However, early–twentieth-century
public monuments to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—more substantial than roadside plaques—appeared less frequently than those to Sacagawea and sometimes met with considerable difficulty. In fact, no likenesses of the two explorers appeared in stone during much of the heyday of public sculpture described by Kammen and for fourteen years after the expedition's centennial celebration. The only significant monuments to the two captains erected prior to the Lewis and Clark Centennial were their grave markers. Regardless of whether the existence of statuary reliably indicates esteem for public figures in the early twentieth century, the complete absence of such surely suggests a remarkable lack of such esteem. For Lewis and Clark, however, the situation had begun to change by the 1920s. In fact, enthusiasm for creating and placing sculptures representing the central characters of the expedition increased in the decades following the golden age of heroic statuary.
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Fig 1.4
Dedication at Traveler's Rest, in 1925, of one of several plaques commemorating the expedition placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution in Montana and Idaho. Laura Tolman Scott, who was also involved in planning and implementing the monument and pageant dedicated to Sacagawea at Armstead, Montana, in 1915, is at the
far left
. Photo by F. Ward. Courtesy, Montana Historical Society Research Center, Helena.

Fig 1.5
Although no heroic-sized statue of Clark and Lewis appeared before 1919, the explorers were memorialized with this column monument in Washington Park, Portland, Oregon, as part of the centennial. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.

Perhaps the earliest heroic-scale (life-size or larger) statue that includes both Meriwether Lewis and William Clark was created by New York sculptor Charles Keck for the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, and was dedicated in that city's Midway Park in 1919. For the first time, Sacagawea was associated with the two explorers in a major public sculpture rather than presented as a solitary figure (although sometimes with her child). This might suggest that by this time she had come to be regarded more as a member of the expedition than as the singular heroine earlier exalted by the women's suffrage movement, although statues of Sacagawea alone continued to be produced on occasion. The Keck statue in Charlottesville consists of bronze figures of the two men standing and Sacagawea sitting. The work is eight feet, four inches high at its highest point. The sides of the impressive pedestal, which stands more than fourteen feet high,
contain bas-reliefs depicting, among other things, Clark and Lewis taking part in an Indian council, York being admired by Indians, a buffalo hunt in which the explorers participated, and Sacagawea returning to her people.
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While the Keck sculpture in Charlottesville elevates the stature of the expedition's three “heroes” as larger than life, the bas-reliefs on its base establish a context of particular incidents from the journals. Although this is only a minimal beginning, such contextualizing became even more common in future historical markers and monuments to the expedition. As was the case with Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark emerged from a historical vacuum of sorts, in which they served mainly as iconic figures, and became more widely associated in public memory with the entire journey of discovery and with other historical events and figures associated with the opening of the West.