In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

by Wallace G. Lewis

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.”27 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.”28 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.29 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.”30 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.”31 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).32

  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.33 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.’”34 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.35 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,36 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.37 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.38

  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.39

  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.

  Along similar lines, the 1926 Astoria Column in Oregon incorporated a frieze depicting events of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and commemorating the explorers as major players in the conquest of the Pacific Northwest. Although not devoted entirely to Lewis and Clark (and not an example of heroic statuary), the Astoria Column stands out as the most grandiose monument to westward expansion in the Northwest and surely the most expensive historical site in the region prior to the nearby construction of a Fort Clatsop replica in the 1950s. This 123-foot-high cylinder, modeled to some extent on the second-century Trajan victory column in Rome, was erected on the crest of Coxcomb Hill, 640 feet above the Columbia River and the Astoria docks. The Great Northern Railway Company and descendants of John Jacob Astor, whose Pacific Fur Company had built the Astoria trading post in 1811, financed the structure to commemorate significant events in the history of Astoria and American expansion into Oregon country. Italian sculptor Attilio Pusterla wa
s commissioned to create a frieze commemorating those events in a sequence of scenes spiraling from the bottom to the top of the column. Over the concrete surface, Pusterla put down layers of colored plaster depicting aspects of Chinook Indian life, Captain Robert Gray’s discovery of the Columbia River, the arrival of Lewis and Clark in 1805, Wilson Price Hunt’s overland expedition to help establish Fort Astoria, and other historic scenes. Visitors to the Astoria Column could ascend an interior spiral staircase to the viewing platform at the top. The monument’s dedication ceremony and the subsequent activities of dignitaries attending as participants in the Great Northern “expedition” indicate that Lewis and Clark were its principal—and heretofore largely forgotten—honorees.40

  The dedication of the finished monument on July 22, 1926, presided over by Oregon governor Walter M. Pierce, featured speeches by historian Samuel Elliot Morrison of Harvard; Howard Elliot, chairman of the board of the Northern Pacific Railway; and Major General Hugh L. Scott of the U.S. War Department—“a great authority on the American Indian.” A descendant of John Jacob Astor, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, replied. In his address, Morrison referred to Astoria as the “Plymouth Rock of the West,” having an older pedigree of European discovery even than New England.41

  General Scott spoke specifically about the exploits of the Corps of Discovery. The reputation of this “great American epic,” he said, “grows higher with time as it becomes better known and appreciated.” Scott noted that Sacagawea had been commemorated by two bronze statues but that Clark and Lewis had “been forgotten by the government they served so nobly.” Scott was unaware of any previous monuments to the two captains along the route except for a 1925 marker indicating the northernmost point Lewis reached during a probe up the Marias River in Montana. Now, through the “patriotic efforts of the Management of the Great northern Railway, which parallels their course for long distances,” that neglect was being corrected. Yet, he said, the “great Northwest . . . is itself their grandest monument—may it endure forever.”42

  The Columbia River Historical Expedition, headed by Ralph Budd, president of the Northern Pacific Railway, was the second of two company-sponsored “pilgrimages” to sites related to early exploration—the Missouri Historical Expedition in the summer of 1925 and the foray the following year that climaxed with the dedication of the Astoria Column. According to Kammen, both expeditions did much to arouse public awareness of the West’s historical heritage—albeit in a triumphal vein that glorified conquest—and gave numerous historical societies along the routes “a shot in the arm.” Budd felt that far too much emphasis had been given to historical locations in the eastern United States and too little to those on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier, particularly in the northern portion and on the Lewis and Clark trail. Budd’s special train carried a select group of observers, whose purpose was to study the historic areas through which the Great Northern and Northern Pacific lines ran and to dedicate various monuments and works. The 1925 expedition had visited sites in the Dakotas related to fur trade on the Missouri River, including Fort Union, near Williston, North Dakota, and the Bear Paw battleground in northern Montana where Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce band surrendered to the U.S. Army in 1877. The 1926 Columbia River excursion went further, traveling west of Glacier Park through northern Idaho to Wishram, Washington, and thence along the Columbia to The Dalles, Portland, and Astoria, Oregon. There, the more than 150 “notables,” including Great Northern executives, took part in the dedication ceremony for the Astoria Column.43

  Fig 1.6 This 123-foot-high column on a hill overlooking Astoria, Oregon, and the Columbia River estuary was dedicated in 1926, with elaborate ceremony. It commemorates the arrival of Lewis and Clark and other important events in Astoria’s history. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.

  Fig 1.7 A close-up of the Astoria Column shows details of sculptor Attilio Pusterla’s historic frieze, including the building of Fort Clatsop just a few miles west of Astoria, where the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1805–1806. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.

  From Astoria, the group moved on to attend a ceremony dedicating a flagpole at what was believed to be the site of Fort Clatsop. An Astoria newspaper reported that “[t]hey are paricularly [sic] interested in [that] event and in the site of Old Fort Clatsop, wishing to tread the ground where the intrepid explorers passed their winter in the west.” From there it was on to Seaside, Oregon, “down to the end of the long, long trail of Lewis and Clark,” to dedicate improvements made around the Salt Cairn site.44 There, during the winter of 1805–1806, a small detail had been assigned to boil seawater to obtain salt for preserving meat. The Salt Cairn site was originally marked by the Oregon Historical Society in 1900 “through the testimony of Jenny Mishel of Seaside, who was born in that vicinity in 1816 and died in 1905. Her Clatsop Indian father remembered seeing the white men boiling water at the site, and pointed out the place to her when she was a young girl.” The Great Northern paid to establish a “stonewall base, surrounded by an iron railing,” to replace the original “rustic” marker. A recreation of the actual cairn with its row of kettles was produced by the Seaside Lions Club in 1953.45 North of the Cairn site, a sign and eventually a statue marked the end of the trail at the street turnaround in Seaside next to the Pacific Ocean beach. The designation was apparently made by the Oregon State Highway Commission.46

  Fig 1.8 In 1900 the Oregon Historical Society designated the Salt Cairn site at Seaside, Oregon, where a detachment of men from the Fort Clatsop winter quarters (1805–1806) boiled ocean water to make salt. Later, the Great Northern Railway Company provided a wall and an iron railing enclosure for the spot, now located just two blocks from the beach. In 1955 the Seaside Lions Club supplied the replica of a stone cairn and kettles. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.

  Meanwhile, for decades the state of Montana unsuccessfully attempted to establish heroic statue monuments to the explorers, apparently beginning with a proposal around the time of the Portland exposition to place a statue at the site of Camp Fortunate, where the explorers met the Shoshone and bargained for horses, but nothing came of the original proposal.47 In 1917 a bill introduced in the Montana Legislature called for heroic-sized bronze statues of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to be erected at Great Falls and at the Three Forks of the Missouri River. The measure, passed by both houses of the legislature, appropriated $5,000 but carried a stipulation that the Society of Montana Pioneers raise an additional $15,000 to help pay for the two statues.48 The funds were not raised, and the proposal to create bronze figures lapsed.

  Fig 1.9 End of the Trail: Seaside, Oregon’s, heroic-sized statue of the explorers, locate inside the street turnaround at the Pacific Ocean beach. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.

  Fig 1.10 Plaque at the base of the End of the Trail statue. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.

  A Montana Governor’s Commission, appointed in 1926 to propose means of honoring the explorers, also called for a substantial monument and considered several cities for the site—including Great Falls, Three Forks, Helena, Butte, Bozeman, and Livingston. “During the next two years a series of public meetings were held at which seven communities presented proposals for the new memorial: Armstead, Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls, Helena, Livingston, and Three Forks.” The proposals included “monuments with sculptured figures” or “buildings.” Bozeman proposed “a building and museum,” which the commission liked but did not feel the state could afford at the time. Further, they did not think Bozeman was the appropriate site. Nothing was done, possibly because of the intense municipal rivalry and the commission’s apparent inability to decide whether to have several monuments in different places or just one in one location. The commission ultimately recommended monuments in both Great Falls and Three Forks; if only one were approved, however, it should be located in Great Falls.49

  The
competition among the towns continued. In addition to the commercial advantages of luring tourism, community pride and perhaps a sense of local historical identity were at stake. A heroic-sized sculpture, which Montana residents agreed would be the symbol of the Corps of Discovery’s sojourn in the state, would significantly recognize the historical primacy of the town in which it was located. The winning community would become the official site for both state and national shrines. In 1928 a committee from the Three Forks Chamber of Commerce published an elaborate pamphlet arguing in favor of that town’s claim because it was practically on the site of the expedition’s “first and most important goal” (the headwaters of the Missouri River) as well as the point where the “great Yellowstone Trail, the National Parks Highway and the Geysers to Glacier Trail” all came together, among other reasons. Montana senator Burton K. Wheeler introduced—fruitlessly, as it turned out—a bill in the U.S. Congress that would have appropriated $50,000 to erect a memorial at Three Forks.50

  In 1929, the same year the regional Lewis and Clark Memorial Association was formed to address the public neglect of the explorers, the Montana Legislature passed a resolution designating Fort Benton as the sole site for a Lewis and Clark monument, using an earlier design created for Great Falls by artist Charles M. Russell.51 According to a special 1976 Lewis and Clark edition of Fort Benton’s The River Press, sculptor Henry Lion of Los Angeles was enlisted to develop Russell’s design into a heroic-sized bronze statue. The city of Fort Benton donated the proposed site, a circular turnaround at the north end of Front Street next to the river embankment. However, as the Great Depression deepened in 1930, Montana’s state government shied away from appropriating the anticipated cost of nearly $18,000. Nothing came of the design or the resolution, although the legislative act apparently was not rescinded. These attempts by the state of Montana to establish a Lewis and Clark monument during the 1920s—and the attendant squabbling over where it should be located—temporarily raised public consciousness of the expedition’s history; however, it is difficult to tell whether this reflected changing public views of Lewis and Clark themselves. The emphasis on the creation and placement of a statuary monument suggests that the “folk” image still dominated public attention paid to the explorers.52