In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

by Wallace G. Lewis

  The cumulative efforts of Koch, Space, Peebles, and numerous other researchers since have gradually provided a more accurate physical understanding of the Lewis and Clark trail. Some locations, however, will always be difficult to pinpoint, since readings of the various journals provide the only evidence and the journals are often ambiguous, as Wheeler pointed out 100 years ago. While specifically locating material evidence requires more stringent location criteria, tourists following highway maps and searching for Lewis and Clark campsites are generally satisfied with approximations.

  The automobile age that began at the turn of the twentieth century opened a new frontier in the American West. Armed with guidebooks offering mile-by-mile advice on how to locate landmarks, cowpaths, and intermittent roadways, an intrepid breed of motorists picked their way across the plains and mountains. Although they rarely encountered dangers greater than mechanical breakdowns, adverse weather, or becoming mired in mud, auto tourists repeated many of the patterns of earlier explorers, at least generally. Despite a lack of continuous highways, they followed well-worn paths into regions largely unknown to them and about which they entertained complex sets of expectations about the landscape and inhabitants that experience would modify, as had happened with Lewis and Clark, Fremont, and others before them. They planned their expeditions, carrying as many necessities as possible and depending on strangers along the way to provide their sustenance for a price. They often kept journals and later narrated their adventures in popular accounts.

  Western tourism was not new in 1900. Railway companies had quickly tapped the potential market by promoting scenic wonders and whisking vacationers across the continent in Pullman sleeper cars. The railroads even established their own resorts as destinations, such as the Northern Pacific in Yellowstone National Park and the Union Pacific (in the 1930s) in Sun Valley, Idaho. Railway travel, similar to later interstate travel, provided a regularized and protected experience for the tourist. As historian Anne Farrar Hyde put it, “Encased in a steel train and swaddled in Victorian luxury, wealthy American tourists could now look out at the far western landscape with no thought of danger.”28 The landscape, sometimes seen and sometimes not, slid past relentlessly. There was little sense of interaction with the environment outside the passenger cars. Even a tourist who possessed a copy of Olin D. Wheeler’s guide to the Lewis and Clark trail vis-à-vis railroad routes would have barely been able appreciate the historical scenes and landmarks that passed. Since railroad travelers were destination tourists in the early 1900s and the destination was usually a posh resort, lodge, international exposition, or national park, they were generally confined to the vicinity of the rail lines.29 As mentioned earlier, Wheeler himself had complained about railway tourists as largely “oblivious” to the historical import of nearby segments of the Lewis and Clark trail.30 Historical legacy did not compete with scenery, luxury, and recreational activities on cross-country rail vacations. Still, train tourism did introduce those who could afford it to the wonders of the western landscape, an experience heavily promoted by the See America First movement during World War I.

  Even as railroad passenger service dominated tourism, however, automobiles began to present a new dimension in long-distance travel for pleasure. Automobiles freed tourists from the confines of rail routes and resort destinations and introduced new elements of uncertainty and adventure, especially in the era before federally funded highways spanned the West. As the use of automobiles increased, the economic benefits of tourism spread, bringing business not only to towns and cities situated along rail lines or within national parks but to roadside enterprises as well. By the late 1920s, scenic two-lane blacktop routes, such as U.S. 40 and Highway 66, had become tourist destinations in themselves. Olin Wheeler’s desire to relate historical heritage tourism to cross-country travel was eventually realized, but only after the new highway system had increased access to historical sites. Automobile tourism (often referred to as “auto tourism” in the literature) evolved in fairly distinct phases.

  In the years before World War I, cross-country touring remained largely the province of well-off adventurers and professional drivers sponsored by automobile manufacturing companies. As inexpensive, mass-manufactured automobiles became available, some democratization occurred, although only a few isolated stretches of improved roadway existed across the West. In the 1920s the western states, aided by the federal government, built a system of paved interstate highways. Auto tourism took off as a result but was heavily dampened during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Perhaps the final phase occurred in the 1950s and 1960s as middle-class prosperity boomed and the National Defense Interstate Highway system was constructed. Each phase of development, beginning in the 1920s at least, influenced public awareness of, and interest in, the concept of a Lewis and Clark trail. As we shall see, businesses and community promoters along the new highways were eager to tout both historical and scenic wonders. The routes of Lewis and Clark seemed perfect for attracting tourism because they traversed so much of the country and so many miles of the highway system ran close to or paralleled those routes.

  Auto touring began as a sporting activity for a handful of specialists and wealthy enthusiasts. Between 1897 and 1903 hardy motorists with considerable time on their hands struggled across the countryside over rural roadways dotted with gumbo mud, over rocky and rutted wagon roads, even over two-track paths through sagebrush plains and deserts. In 1903, three automobile touring expeditions crossed the continent. The first to successfully make it from coast to coast was a two-cylinder Winton piloted by Vermont physician H. Nelson Jackson and mechanic Sewall Crocker. They set out from San Francisco on May 23, 1903, and drove nearly 6,000 miles through Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and eastward to New York City in sixty-four days.31 The publicity the Winton Company reaped from Jackson and Crocker’s odyssey encouraged other automobile manufacturers to sponsor attempts to duplicate the feat and set new time records. Lester Whitman, who had also crossed the country in 1903, cut the time record in half the following year; he and his co-pilot Clayton Carris halved it again, to just over fifteen days, in 1906, driving an air-cooled Franklin automobile.32

  As the quality and power of automobiles improved, so did their endurance and the average time of a cross-continental run. By 1916 a professional race driver, Ralph Mulford, with the help of relay drivers, was able to make the journey from San Francisco to New York in just over five days.33 The improvement in automobiles was not matched by the roadways they traveled, however, and drivers and the companies that supported them soon began to call for construction of a transcontinental touring highway. In 1905 the federal government’s Office of Public Road Inquiry and the Olds Motor Company tried to draw attention to that need by “promoting a transcontinental race between two Oldsmobiles . . . from New York City to the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon,” although apparently no attempt was made to follow the explorers’ route west. Thousands of affluent motorists had already taken to the road, or what there was of it, the previous summer in “moderately priced” Packards and curved-dash Oldsmobiles.34

  Armed with Blue Book guides that offered mile-by-mile descriptions of landmarks, hazards, and routes that varied from unmarked double tracks to country roads, this new breed of explorer contended with breakdowns, mud, and other obstacles without the benefits tourist services later provided. The pioneer motor tourists engaged in what John Jakle has called “an athletic relationship with their environment,” and drivers enjoyed the experience of “mastering” their machines by being their own repairmen.35 Many later described their journeys in print, establishing a new journalistic subgenre. Hugo Alois Taussig, for example, wrote a short account privately published in 1910 entitled Retracing the Pioneers: From West to East in an Automobile. Others seem to have made the trip for the express purpose of writing about it. The most famous accounts were Emily Post’s By Motor to the Golden Gate (1916) and Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Southwest tour in The Out Trail (1923).36


  While such feats were widely publicized in motorist periodicals and books describing individual adventures, automobile touring did not become widely popular until the advent of Henry Ford’s Model T in 1908. At a price of $400 or less, the “Tin Lizzie” or “flivver” was available to almost anyone. By the time the United States entered World War I, Ford was selling about half of the new cars purchased in the country. According to historian James J. Flink, Ford’s Model T and other American mass-market vehicles were simple to repair, had the power and clearance to “readily negotiate steep grades and wretched roads, and were easier to drive [than earlier vehicles] because they required less frequent shifting of gears.” Long-distance travel by automobile, even transcontinental touring, was no longer confined to the wealthy. While the vehicles were readily available, however, the requisite highways still were not—or at least no coherent system was in place before the 1920s.37

  The lack of highways did not completely deter automobile tourism in the West, however. Aided by detailed guides and transcontinental automobile route associations, intrepid motorists made their way across the landscape on fragments of improved roadways, interconnecting farm roads, and double tracks worn through sagebrush. The route associations raised money from the public and corporate sponsors to construct cross-country highways piecemeal. The first to be completed, and perhaps the most famous, was the Lincoln Highway. The Lincoln Highway route, much of which later became U.S. 30, began at Times Square in New York City and “ended at the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park.” In the plains and western states it ran through Nebraska, southern Wyoming, and Utah to Salt Lake City; from there it went across eastern Utah and Nevada to Donner Pass in the Sierras and on to the Bay area. Long portions of the route followed that of the Pony Express, and travelers passed close enough to some of the station sites to be able to eat lunch in the ruins.38

  The Lincoln Highway, which took more than ten years to develop, was the brainchild of Carl Graham Fisher, promoter and builder of Miami Beach and founder of the Prest-O-Lite automobile headlight manufacturing company. Fisher proposed a coast-to-coast highway in 1912 and the following year helped organize the Lincoln Highway Association. With financial contributions from Prest-O-Lite, the Packard Motor Car Company, Goodyear Tire Company, and other corporations associated with the automobile and tourist industries, the Lincoln Highway Association began to coordinate and plan what was expected to be an all-weather paved route across the country.39

  In fact, the Lincoln Highway was a piecemeal operation, in the beginning little more than a marked route that often zigzagged along preexisting rural roads or deteriorated into a pair of tire tracks across the prairie. “In the beginning,” according to Drake Hokanson, “the highway afforded its patrons more adventure than many of them had bargained for. . . . The association’s first mapmakers drew it as a thick, black line across the country’s midsection. In reality, however, it was a poorly marked assortment of existing roads, full of doglegs and detours, stretching 3,389 miles and lacking all but the most casual maintenance and conveniences.” States, counties, and local community groups contributed to upgrading the highway. An official of the Lincoln Highway Association estimated that, even before paving, between 5,000 and 10,000 automobiles had carried people across the country to visit the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. The Lincoln Highway captured the public imagination and became the model for a spate of transcontinental routes that bore colorful names.40

  In addition to the Lincoln Highway, by 1924 the National Old Trails Road (later Route 66) from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles; the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, across the northern tier of states; the Bankhead Highway from Washington, D.C., through the South and Southwest to Los Angeles; the Old Spanish Trail from Florida to California; the Pikes Peak Ocean to Ocean Highway from New York City and Philadelphia to San Francisco; and the Yellowstone Trail from Plymouth Rock through Illinois and the north-central states to Puget Sound were added to lure traffic east and west. The Evergreen Highway, promoted in 1916 by caravans of motorists who called themselves the “Evergreen Pathfinders,” sought an all-season touring route between Galveston, Texas, and the northern Pacific Coast.41 In Wyoming, the Yellowstone Trail Association was formed to develop and promote a route from Denver to Yellowstone National Park. Later, the route grew in two additional directions, eventually linking Massachusetts with the Pacific Northwest.42 In Montana, historian Marilyn Wyss points out, association members “were recruited all along the route and special Trail days were designated when entire communities . . . turned out to work on the road.” Soon, Montana automobile clubs were promoting the construction of a “good all-weather road” between Glacier and Yellowstone national parks. Dubbed the Park-to-Park Highway, it became part of a system of similar routes connecting national parks in the West (the Great Parks National Automobile Highway).43 “At one time,” Bill Rishel of the Salt Lake Tribune reported, “there were no less than fourteen highway and trail associations claiming State Street [in Salt Lake City] from South Temple to Twenty-first South as their own particular route.”44

  People in the Pacific Northwest were likely to find the Columbia River Scenic Highway more impressive than any of the transcontinental trails. Running above and along the walls of the Columbia Gorge east of Portland, the Scenic Highway opened in 1915. S. C. Lancaster, the engineer who designed this new sightseeing route, paid exceptional attention to aesthetic and environmental considerations. Lancaster’s highway was undoubtedly the first constructed that closely paralleled a portion of the Lewis and Clark trail. For those who built highways through the mountainous West during the 1920s and 1930s, the Columbia Gorge route was the ultimate model of achievement. But advances in automobile technology and speed, as well as the advent of long-distance freight trucking, quickly doomed this beautiful and imaginative segment of the highway, and it fell into disuse.45 Today, however, a segment can be traversed between Troutdale and Bonneville Dam, descending from the high bluffs near Multnomah Falls.

  In 1916 Congress responded to the demands of motorists and a burgeoning Good Roads lobbying movement by passing the first federal aid to highways act, which established uniform road construction specifications and matching funds for states. Federal funding, increased by subsequent legislation, was essential for building longdistance, paved highways within the states of the high plains and interior West because of the area’s low population and small tax base. By the end of the 1920s, improved roadways linked western state capitals and the national parks.

  Automobile tourism quickly overshadowed the more expensive and elite destination tourism associated with rail travel. For auto campers, or “tin can” tourists, the process of getting there was at least as important as arriving. In time, however, improved highways and the plethora of new services that sprang up along them removed much of the uncertainty and adventure associated with early auto touring. In addition, the increasing speeds the better highways permitted tended to isolate motorists from their immediate surroundings, putting greater emphasis on getting someplace than on experiencing the journey.46 Yet for many, the essential aspects of personal exploration remained. While aristocratic wilderness enthusiasts may have bemoaned the mass movement of automobile tourists throughout the West as representing a loss of connection with the pioneering past, the new motorized explorers “craved” the experience, according to Hal K. Rothman, “as a rite of passage, and the sense of power that came from navigating the roads, trails, and paths of the American West.”47 Or, as Robert Athearn pointed out, “the West again was a frontier,” and “the new frontiering was a family matter.”48

  Except for the Columbia River Scenic Highway, which Oregon had opened in 1915, any highway that commemorated Lewis and Clark’s route would have to be built from scratch. Although federal highway matching funds had been increased since their inception in 1916, few western states had made much progress by the time the federally numbered interst
ate highway system was designated in the late 1920s.49 Auto tourists who might have wished to follow the route the Corps of Discovery took faced a daunting challenge, at least north and west of Iowa and Nebraska. Virtually no paved highways existed in the Dakotas or Montana in 1925. Major gravel roads in North and South Dakota ran east and west, with only in a few segments beyond the Missouri River. South Dakota did build three highway bridges across the Missouri in 1924. South to north, they were the U.S. 14 crossing at Pierre, in the vicinity of the nearly violent confrontation between the Lewis and Clark Expedition and a Teton Sioux band on the group’s upriver journey; the U.S. 212 crossing; and the U.S. 14 crossing near Mobridge, the site of the Arikara villages Lewis and Clark visited in 1804.50 Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, also had a new bridge across the Missouri River by 1925, but it was accessed in both directions by dirt roads. A gravel roadway in North Dakota ended 100 miles east of Bismarck and the Missouri River in 1925 but included a segment north of the Missouri between Minot and Williston and the Montana line. Often proceeding in right-angle jogs, the gravel road afforded occasional approaches to a portion of the river the Corps of Discovery followed when it was outward bound in the spring of 1805. Only county or unmarked prairie roads were available for actually paralleling the river route.51

  Prospects for following the river in Montana were also meager. At the point where the Yellowstone River joins the Missouri southwest of Williston, North Dakota, segments of gravel road followed both rivers—one to just beyond Glendive, Montana, on the Yellowstone, and one straight west along the Missouri. Otherwise, motorists could be assured of gravel road only as far west as Glasgow or connecting such cities as Great Falls, Butte, Helena, and Missoula. The route that later became U.S. Highway 2 proceeded on to Shelby, Cut Bank, and East Glacier on a path far to the north of the Missouri River that intersects the one Lewis and the Field brothers took up the Marias River in 1806.52 After their grueling portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri, the explorers had continued south, up the river through the present-day sites of Holter and Canyon Ferry dams near Helena and on to the Three Forks. In rainy weather the unpaved road, which during the mid-1920s covered only the 100 miles from Great Falls to Helena, could take nearly twelve hours to traverse. The often zigzagging road that continued southeast to Three Forks and Bozeman by way of Townsend was also slow going. Motorists contending with swampy areas near the river where the roadway deteriorated into mud might be lucky to average ten miles per hour. Highway construction in all these states developed rapidly thereafter, however. By 1939, for example, about 5,000 miles of Montana’s highways in the federal system had been surfaced with oil. Roadway width tended to be somewhat narrower than it is today, and safe speeds ranged from ten to forty miles per hour.53