In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark
Page 12
By 1955 the heritage of the Corps of Discovery’s 1804–1806 journey had achieved more than purely historic or even nationalistic interest in the states through which the route had passed. For cities and communities in the region, the memory of Lewis and Clark represented growing commercial and promotional opportunities. Such opportunities, as indicated earlier, were closely tied to the national highway system, which, in the far West at least, had come into being in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Automobile tourism, especially after World War II, breathed new life into many dying towns. As described earlier, from the very beginning of the automobile age, promoters had touted particular highway routes in an effort to attract tourists, and, when possible, regional boosters attached colorful names and historical themes to these routes. The Lewis and Clark Expedition route seemed to be a natural for this sort of promotion, and highways played a major role in commemorations during the mid-1950s and thereafter.
With the advent of the sesquicentennial in 1955, local and regional activities increased sharply. The governors of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana proclaimed 1955 “Lewis and Clark Year” and appointed a joint committee of representatives from the sesquicentennial committees in those states that met in Spokane, Washington, in December 1954 to plan commemorative celebrations. Events were scheduled to take place between May and October 1955 and were spaced so that none would conflict. In some cities a Lewis and Clark theme was added to regular annual events, while others staged elaborate celebrations dedicated to the sesquicentennial.3 Ever since the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, the Seaside, Oregon, Chamber of Commerce had been determined to “hold an annual festival commemorating the first Americans to cross the continent.” In Astoria, Oregon, a full week of activities accompanied the dedication of a newly completed replica of Fort Clatsop, the small log habitation where the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1805–1806.4 Special guests included William Glasgow Clark, said to be a “direct descendent” of William Clark, and Lydia Large, whose lineage as “Sacajawea’s . . . great-great-grand niece” had been sworn to by the superintendent of the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. From August 20 through August 28, 1955, the Astoria celebration included dances and athletic contests, a regatta, various teas, and guided historical tours, to name a few of the activities. Days were devoted to commemorations in both Seaside and Cannon Beach, but commemorative activities in Oregon were spread among the communities of Gearhart, Warrenton, and Hammond as well.5
The public was also invited to inspect the new replica of Fort Clatsop. This site, considered one of the most important historical sites in Oregon, had been shabbily marked until recently. For years, a local newspaper noted, the site’s supposed location on the Lewis and Clark River five miles southwest of Astoria near U.S. Highway 101 had been indicated by a “simple flag pole” and a plain “concrete marker.” By the late 1940s the marker was overgrown with berry vines. Its plaque, which contained historical background, had been removed for safekeeping, and the rotted flagpole had been cut down. No clear directions from the nearest roadway existed to guide visitors to what remained of the marked site. As the newspaper story put it, “From there the pilgrim is on his own, much as were Lewis and Clark. If he turns off by instinct (there is no sign) over a muddy lane, he will find a pile of beer cans, the trail markers of civilization. There in an unkempt grove hangs a small wooden sign ‘site of Fort Clatsop.’” Funds were not available to organizations in the area—including the Oregon Historical Society, the Clatsop County Historical Society, and the American Pioneer Trails Association—that were interested in improving or maintaining the site. In 1946 historian Bernard DeVoto followed the Lewis and Clark trail west as part of his research for what would become a hugely popular abridged edition of the expedition journals. When DeVoto publicly “expressed his horror” at the condition of the Fort Clatsop site, the general response was that “the war had prevented financing” its improvement. The writer of the news story added that it is “high time that something be done about Fort Clatsop.”6
An attempt to more accurately pin down the location of the fort was announced in 1948 by Walter Johnson, president of the Clatsop County Historical Society. “That summer,” the Astoria Evening Budget recalled, Louis Caywood, an archaeologist for the National Park Service, “began excavations at a location suggested by old surveys and photographs.” Caywood quickly encountered a layer of charcoal and uncovered several stone-lined firepits, which he concluded had been made and used by white men. Caywood’s findings convinced the Oregon Historical Society and other interested persons that the location of the actual fort was only about ten feet from the marker the society had placed in 1901.7 As part of its preparations for the Lewis and Clark sesquicentennial celebration, the Oregon Historical Society—which owned the land on which excavations had been carried out—sponsored and oversaw the construction of a replica of the fort in 1955, based on the description in the journals. The Crown-Zellerbach wood products corporation agreed to provide logs for the replica, and local architect John Wicks designed the structure based on a drawing by Rolf Klep, formerly of Astoria. The “second-growth hemlock logs” were pre-fitted and marked so they could be easily assembled on the site. In May 1955, Astoria Jaycee and Lions club members began constructing the Fort Clatsop replica and completed it in time for Astoria’s sesquicentennial celebration. Members of the American Legion Auxiliary hand-sewed an American flag with fifteen stars to fly over the replica of the fort. In July, Oregon senator Richard Neuberger introduced a bill to establish what was believed to be the original site of Fort Clatsop as a national monument.8
Fig 4.1 Doorway at the first Fort Clatsop replica near Astoria, Oregon. Following several years of archaeological work to determine the probable location of the expedition’s 1805–1806 winter quarters, the replica was constructed in time for the Lewis and Clark sesquicentennial in 1955 and was designated a national monument. An interpretive center was added in the early 1960s. Photo by Jeffrey Phillip Curry. Courtesy, Jeffrey Phillip Curry.
As part of the 1955 commemoration, the Northern Pacific Railway Company agreed to finance a special sesquicentennial book with maps to familiarize readers with events in the journals and the nature of the country the explorers traversed. A section by northwestern author James Stevens extolled the expedition’s role in blazing a trail for settlement and development. Included in the rather modest booklet is the text of a speech by Northern Pacific president Robert MacFarlane to the Western Railway Club in Chicago. In his address, entitled “The Lewis and Clark Country a Century and a Half Later,” MacFarlane tied Lewis and Clark to the march of “progress” represented by the great transcontinental railroads. There seems to be no conscious irony in his emphasis on the just-completed Missouri River reservoirs, which had yet to be filled and would obliterate much of the Lewis and Clark trail. The booklet’s cover lists the members of the Northwest Sesquicentennial Organizing Committee, which included three representatives from the Dakotas. Chapin D. Foster from South Dakota was co-chair.9 Yet except for the fact that some groups tracing the trail passed through the Dakotas, little evidence exists that the sesquicentennial was widely commemorated east of Montana. South Dakota officials, in fact, admitted that there would be “no exclusively Lewis and Clark celebrations” in the state in 1955 and stated that communities would refuse to support a series of planned pageants.10
It is understandable that residents of the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Montana would show greater interest in the Lewis and Clark Expedition than people further east. In many communities between Seaside, Oregon, and Great Falls, Montana, the names of the explorers and their exploits appear ingrained in the public consciousness. At the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake rivers in northern Idaho and eastern Washington, for example, the names were ubiquitous long before the creation of the National Trail. The Corps of Discovery passed this way twice, in 1805 and 1806. A bridge across the Snake River connects Clarkston, Washington, with Lewiston, Idaho. Lewiston boasts the Lewis and Cl
ark Hotel, Lewis-Clark State College, and Lewis-Clark Memorial Gardens, to name a few. “Nowhere along the route of the explorers,” an Associated Press story claimed, “are the names of Lewis-Clark so commercially evident” as in Lewiston and Clarkston.11 Yet the names are unavoidable elsewhere throughout the region as well. Both Clark and Lewis counties are found in Washington and Idaho, and Montana’s capital is in Lewis and Clark County.
A site that, along with the Fort Clatsop replica in Oregon, played a particularly significant role during the sesquicentennial was Missouri Headwaters State Park near the town of Three Forks, Montana, about thirty miles northwest of Bozeman. In late July 1805 the Corps of Discovery had spent several days at the location where the Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin rivers come together to form the Missouri. It was near this spot, Sacagawea had told the men, that a Minataree (Hidatsa) raiding party had attacked her Shoshone band and taken her captive. From the Three Forks of the Missouri, the expedition proceeded up the Jefferson River. The park at the Three Forks was founded in conjunction with the most celebrated enactments of pageantry along the Lewis and Clark trail.
The idea of establishing a state park at the famous Headwaters of the Missouri dates back to the summer of 1928, when Clark Maudlin, a cement plant worker in nearby Trident, Montana, was picnicking with his wife and son at the Three Forks. Maudlin’s wife, a former schoolteacher, pointed out that Lewis and Clark had visited that spot and that “this would be [an] ideal place for a park.” Both she and their son, Billy, succumbed to influenza the following summer, but years later, as he drove past the forks on his way to work each day, Clark Maudlin often remembered her words and was inspired to create a park to commemorate the expedition. He purchased the only parcel available for sale at the site and donated it to the state of Montana. The state was unable to fund further purchases, but it gave Maudlin the authority to raise the money needed to complete the park. By 1946 he had convinced civic and business leaders throughout the state to join “historical-minded” residents in the community of Three Forks in supporting the project and had recruited John G. Buttelman to head a new fund-raising organization called the Founders Club of Montana, of which Maudlin became vice president. More parcels were purchased, and in July 1951 the Missouri Headwaters State Park was officially opened.12
Although responsibility for the park passed to a state commission in 1957, Maudlin stayed on as caretaker. That same year he traveled to St. Charles, Missouri, to visit one of the jumping-off points for the expedition and publicly expressed disappointment at the lack of any marker commemorating the event in that historic location. In 1961 the Three Forks of the Missouri in Montana was designated a National Historic Landmark. Clark Maudlin died in 1972, just a few years before the creation of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.13
Although cultural historian David Glassberg never refers to Lewis and Clark or Sacagawea in his study of historical pageantry in the United States, the outdoor productions of the sesquicentennial seem to echo what he saw as an earlier golden age of local historical pageants. These commemorative local history pageants, Glassberg notes, combined boosterism and community patriotism with an “idealized” representation of the “behavior of past generations.” The pageants usually reflected “cultural conservatism” in their imagery, and their texts often contained a great deal of “saccharine moralism.”14
According to another scholar, Naima Prevots, American pageants flourished particularly between 1905 and 1925, during which time the aesthetic and social values of the American Pageant Association (APA) encouraged proliferation of the form and influenced the quality of productions. The desire “to develop popular art of quality in every community . . . and [to] develop American thematic material” engaged the talents of such writers, directors, and educators as Percy MacKaye, George Pierce Baker, and Frederick H. Koch. To be sure, during the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century, pageants that involved the widespread participation of community members were also seen as means for reform and for reviving democracy through art. MacKaye especially believed that theater should be treated as “an important civic institution [with the] power to reach the masses” and to instill such democratic values as “cooperation, clear thinking, and true moral action.” Pageant performances, held in appropriate outdoor settings, drew audiences of between 2,000 and 80,000 people and depended mostly on community members to assume the performance roles.15
Between 1908 and 1917 the APA reported performances of several hundred pageants, of which more than eighty were historical in nature. Most of these pageants depicted history east of the Mississippi, particularly in the upper Midwest and New England. The figures of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea were represented, however, in one of the most spectacular events, The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, performed for four days in May 1914 on the site of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposition. The pageant portion, written by Thomas Wood, presented significant periods in the region’s history, including those of the Plains Indians, early French explorers, and the founding of St. Louis. The departure of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in boats was depicted, as was the later arrival of settlers. The pageant carried through to the end of the Civil War and was followed by Percy MacKaye’s symbolic masque about Cahokia, the center of the early Native American mound-building culture, which was tied in somehow to the life of the French king for whom the city was named.16
The Lewis and Clark Expedition played a much greater role in A Pageant of the Northwest, written by Frederick H. Koch and “eighteen of his students” at the University of North Dakota and produced outdoors in the Bankside Theatre on the Grand Forks campus. Koch, who had taken a leave of absence from the university to study “dramatic literature” at Harvard University with George Pierce Baker, became closely associated with the burgeoning pageant movement and “a leader in the APA.” The outdoor theater in which the pageant was performed in 1914 was constructed especially for the production, making use of a stream that “flowed across the university campus.” “The Bankside Theatre,” Koch later wrote, “was the first to utilize the natural curve of a stream as the foreground of the scene, between the stage and the amphitheatre. It is unique in that entrances and exits can be made by water as well as by land. . . . [O]n this very spot, by this same stream . . . the buffalo herds ranged at will and the Indians met the white man in friendly trade. . . . [A Pageant of the Northwest] marked a distinct contribution because it demonstrated that the community, under proper direction, can not only enact its own traditions and outlook, but, more than this, [can] actually create the pageant-form, thus cultivating communal literary as well as histrionic art.” This also, according to Prevots, marks the first spelling of the “Bird Woman’s” name as “Sakakawea,” the spelling preferred in North Dakota today.17
The first pageant in Montana to reenact an aspect of the Lewis and Clark Expedition occurred at Armstead, about fifteen miles south of Dillon. On August 30, 1915, at the unveiling of the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Sacajawea plaque, residents of Armstead depicted the Corps of Discovery’s meeting with the Lemhi Shoshone and Sacagawea’s return to her band and her brother Cameahwait. Conceived by Laura Tolman Scott, the pageant took place at the confluence of Horse Prairie Creek and the Beaverhead River, the approximate site of the expedition’s Camp Fortunate. According to a newspaper account, the cast included around thirty “Shoshone Indians from the Lemhi reservation” who (oddly, considering the peaceful nature of the meeting with Lewis and Clark) “gave their famous war dance following the program.”18 Seven years later a procession and pageant depicting scenes from the city’s history “kicked off” the grand opening of the five-story Lewis and Clark Hotel in Lewiston, Idaho. Capping the Lewis and Clark segment, “Sacajawea,” represented more as a promotional icon than as a historical figure, was presented with keys to both the city of Lewiston and its newest hotel—which she ceremoniously tossed into the Snake River. A “scalp dance” (again, rather inappropriate) was performed with the help of N
ez Perce Indians.19
The enlistment of Native Americans, usually as supernumeraries to the main action, was characteristic of pageants held at various places along the Lewis and Clark trail. Referring to urban historical pageants and festivals around the turn of the twentieth century, tourism scholar Catherine Cocks argues that something more than historical authenticity was at work in the battles and dances commonly staged by Indians. “Without the proper accoutrements and stylized activities,” she writes, “onlookers might have to encounter the Indians as fellow citizens rather than living souvenirs of a dying, primitive, and alien race. The requirement that the Indians perform their culture as a series of entertainments reduced irreconcilable conflicts to sideshows.”20