In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

by Wallace G. Lewis

  The popularity of historical pageants in general declined rapidly in the 1920s, in part as a result of increasing competition from motion pictures and radio. Today, Lewis and Clark pageants have largely given way to a variant: the historical reenactment, which places a premium on technical and factual accuracy. But in a general sense, the early–twentieth-century history pageant described by Prevots and Glassberg provided a model for commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, although in pageants in the 1950s, noble rhetoric and symbolism seemed tempered by more vernacular speech and realism.21

  One of the major pageants performed in the summer of 1955, the one at the Missouri Headwaters where Clark Maudlin and others were establishing a memorial park, had some history. In 1949 Albert Erickson, advertising director for the Montana State Highway Commission, informed Maudlin that he had visited Professor Bert Hansen at the University of Montana in Missoula and discussed putting on a pageant at the Three Forks during the summer of 1950. Hansen responded by co-writing (with Virginia Buttleman), directing, and producing an outdoor program that would be presented during four consecutive summers leading up the sesquicentennial.22

  Professor Hansen was well prepared for the task. He had been writing, producing, and directing historical pageants in Montana for several years. This grew out of his interest in using the pageant form as an educational tool, as Henry Koch had done. Hansen advocated broadening the understanding of students in speech and drama programs by having them participate in creating group psychodramas he called “sociodramas,” a term coined by Dr. Jacob Moreno in the 1930s. As a means for “analyzing and treating [the] social problems of a group,” sociodramas begin with spontaneous role playing and evolve into productions written and rehearsed for public performance.23 Beyond the classroom, Hansen believed participation in sociodramas at all levels would foster unity and community cohesion. Years before being asked to create an outdoor spectacle using non-professionals to depict the Corps of Discovery and Sacagawea at the Three Forks of the Missouri, Professor Hansen was working on ways to evoke local history by harnessing community creativity.

  He put the sociodrama process to work as part of a grant-supported research program called the Montana Study, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The purpose of the Montana Study was to find ways to develop community culture in small towns throughout the state and prevent flight to larger cities. Two of the eleven small towns that participated were Darby and Stevensville, both near Hamilton in southwestern Montana.24 Hansen took a leave of absence from his academic duties to establish a “dramatic vehicle” that would involve as many residents as possible. He took care to distinguish community-based “sociodrama in the form of a pageant” from the commonplace historical pageant. The method was intended, at least in part, to foster community identity and not just be a vehicle for perfunctory celebration of past events.25

  Beginning with Darby, which in the mid- to late 1940s was facing the loss of much of its lumbering operations (a perception not shared by many of Darby’s residents), Hansen initiated basically the same process he had used with speech classes. To make “the whole community conscious of its predicament,” a group of residents wrote a sociodrama entitled Darby Looks at Itself and performed it in early December 1945. Fifty-three people out of a population of 500 participated in the writing, and 127 residents took part as actors.26

  After the Darby project, Hansen engaged the citizens of Stevensville. The town was one of the oldest in the region, but Hansen said its residents lacked an “appreciation of its singularly historic past,” a “vision for its future,” or even “an interest in its present.”27 According to historian Carla Homstad, “Nearly three thousand people—roughly one-fourth of the population of Ravalli County”—saw a production of A Tale of the Bitterroot in August 1946.28 One aspect that seems to have set the Stevensville pageant apart from run-of-the mill dramatized historical celebrations was, Hansen stated, “its solemn adherence to a belatedly recognized truth that had never before been told by Indians and whites together at a public gathering.” In four episodes that dealt with the Christianizing of the Flathead Indians and their eventual removal from the Bitterroot Valley, the sociodrama “portrayed the story of a fifty year period of ruthless aggression on the part of the white men, and of their determination to drive the Flathead Indians from their native lands in the fertile Bitter Root Valley where Stevensville is located.” Hansen insisted on “realistic treatment” and authenticity, seeking to incorporate, among other things, “real Indians with their tepees.” But they were not merely extras. Participants in the Stevensville pageant included descendants of the Flathead Indians who had been removed in 1891. Paul Charlot, chief of the Salish tribe, played the part of his grandfather, Chief Charlot, an important historical figure during the removal period.29

  A year later, in 1947, Hansen helped study groups in the towns of Arlee and Dixon to dramatize local history related to the Flathead Indian Reservation and the founding of the communities north of Missoula, Montana. Homstad points out that performances of the pageants ceased after the Montana Study concluded in 1948. For Bert Hansen, however, they proved to be a warm-up for the Lewis and Clark pageants for which he would be best known.30

  Hansen’s 1950 Lewis and Clark pageant, performed at the Three Forks of the Missouri, depicted four episodes related to the expedition. Although most of the dialogue is fictional, the pageant is a far cry from Hollywood’s conception of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Its title, Corridor of an Empire, reflects a traditional and popular view of western expansion and of the expedition’s significance to white America. The “corridor” referred to is virtually the trail of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Yet, as in the case of the first Stevensville pageant Hansen supervised in 1947, the Three Forks script demonstrates sensitivity to Native American viewpoints well ahead of its time. As a historical pageant, it also presented a refreshingly realistic approach that paid close attention to the historical record, particularly the Lewis and Clark journals.31

  The pageant does contain a certain amount of celebration of conquest and destiny, but Corridor of an Empire avoids much of the chauvinism and mawkishness that characterized occasional pageants at the time. It also avoids the typical high-flown rhetoric and stiff attempts to imitate language of the period, and symbolic poses are kept to a minimum. Many of the speeches Bert Hansen and Virginia Buttleman devised are intended to realistically represent normal conversation, and the usage tends to have a rather modern ring. The content of the dialogue among expedition members is closely based on actual comments in entries from the journals, yet the completely fictionalized scenes about Sacagawea and her people tend to have a poetic and prophetic character. For example, Episode I of Corridor of an Empire presents an imagined scene from Sacagawea’s childhood in which her mother vaguely glimpses the destiny of her “little Bird Child,” and the chief of the Lemhi Shoshone band suggests that the river formed by the Three Forks seems aware of having a “mission.”32 This betrays an underlying celebratory theme. Despite its overall attempt to present a more inclusive and realistic view of history, the pageant occasionally turns Indian characters into cheerleaders for western expansion.

  In the second episode, at a social event Meriwether Lewis and Thomas Jefferson discuss Jefferson’s “dream” of sending an expedition to the headwaters of the Missouri River. This is a highly compressed bit of exposition that contrives to be conversational but also to present Jefferson’s views on the possibilities of a Northwest Passage and the purchase of Louisiana Territory from France. Jefferson tells Lewis, his secretary, that he has been selected to lead a “scientific” expedition up the river. After initial astonishment at the news, Lewis requests that his “longtime friend,” William Clark, be allowed to go along to share the experience. Significant aspects of the expedition’s initiation and purpose are, fairly deftly, presented to the audience, albeit highly telescoped in time because of the constraints of the dramatic presentation. At the end of the scene,
“Lewis stands in wonderment as Jefferson blends into the crowd.”33

  New Year’s Day 1805 at Fort Mandan on the Missouri River is the setting for Episode III, which explains why and how Sacagawea was allowed to accompany the expedition westward from the 1804–1805 winter quarters. It also offers conversation between York and Meriwether Lewis and a dancing exhibition by York. Sergeants Ordway and Pryor also have a few lines of dialogue. But central to the episode is Clark and Lewis’s discussion of Sacagawea’s background, as well as her husband, Charbonneau’s, efforts to persuade them to bring along the “Indian princess.” The two captains are particularly interested in Sacagawea’s knowledge of the Missouri River headwaters and the fact that she was kidnapped from her Shoshone band near there and brought to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. They are concerned about her advanced state of pregnancy but have come to understand how important she would be to the journey, with or without Charbonneau’s florid and blustery arguments. The Frenchman storms offstage, dragging his wife with him, after Clark suggests that they would prefer to take her along rather than Charbonneau. Ultimately, of course, the explorers decide to accept both Sacagawea and “the windbag and faker.”34

  The final episode brings the audience back to the site of the first episode, which depicted Sacagawea and her parents. Now, however, it is Saturday, July 27, 1805. Stage directions call for boats to “come out from behind some trees about 400 yards” from the point of land on which the dramatic action will take place. As the boats approach, conversations begin that involve a number of the men, including John Ordway, Silas Goodrich, George Gibson, John Collins, and Joseph Whitehouse. They present more exposition about their experiences coming up the Missouri, as recorded in the journals. They also grumble about having to continue on to the Pacific Ocean, for which they will need horses from Sacagawea’s people so they can cross the mountains. Clark and Lewis agree that “this is the place,” the headwaters of the Missouri River. But Lewis notes that Jefferson was wrong. This was not “a low-lying watershed, easily portaged.” Before them were mountains, the magnitude of which they had “never dreamed.” He observes that “the men don’t seem exactly thrilled over our discovery” and bows to Private Whitehouse’s suggestion that “an extra portion of brandy” be distributed “to celebrate this Three Forks Place.” (The journals indicate that the brandy was finished off earlier to celebrate the Fourth of July at the Great Falls.) Lewis drinks to “an even more interesting experience into the unknown” and dubs the path they are blazing “a Corridor of an Empire.” The 1950 performances at the Three Forks of the Missouri set the pattern for sesquicentennial pageantry there and for numerous future revivals.35

  On July 23–26, 1955, Hansen’s pageant became a significant event in the celebratory schedule. Episodes depicting the expedition’s outward- and homeward-bound journeys were each performed twice, on alternate evenings. Bound scripts of former pageants were offered for sale. In conjunction with the Three Forks celebration, the American Pioneer Trails Association—national sponsor of the sesquicentennial—held its twenty-sixth annual “Rendezvous” at the Sacajawea Hotel in Three Forks. Patrick Gass’s grandson, James S. Smith, a retired California teacher, was slated to attend the festivities.36

  Just five days after the pageant at the Three Forks, an estimated 5,000 spectators crowded a “natural amphitheater” near the site of Camp Fortunate on the Beaverhead River as Dillon offered its commemoration, a two-hour dramatization directed by Professor Joe Ryburn of Western Montana College of Education that featured a cast of “more than 100.” The Camp Fortunate pageant opened with a “Shoshone prayer and Indian tribal songs” and depicted, among other things, members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition “hauling their boats up the narrowing Beaverhead River,” the recognition scene between Sacagawea and her brother, and “the smoking of the pipe of peace by the Indians and whites.”37 The printed program pointed out that the pageant’s “colorful tipis” were not used by the Shoshones at the time they met the expedition and that Drewyer (Drouillard) was incorrectly portrayed as speaking Shoshone but otherwise vouched for the presentation’s accuracy as based on passages from the journals.38

  Fig 4.2 Encampment on Horse Prairie Creek near Armstead, Montana, for the 1955 Dillon Lewis and Clark Sesquicentennial Pageant—held before Clark Valley Reservoir inundated the site of Camp Fortunate. Photo by Joe Ryburn. Courtesy, Beaver-head County Museum, Dillon, Montana.

  In the summer of 1955 Bert Hansen, who was a member of the state Lewis and Clark Sesquicentennial Committee, had also been commissioned to write, direct, and produce a “triple” commemoration pageant for the Missoula, Montana, Kiwanis Club and the U.S. Forest Service. Performed on August 12 and 14, the pageant celebrated the sesquicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s passage through the Missoula area, the centennial of Isaac Stevens’s Council Grove Treaty with the Flathead Nation that would open that nation to white settlement, and the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905. The first episode of Your Land Forever dramatized Thomas Jefferson’s role in launching the Lewis and Clark Expedition and depicted the Corps of Discovery at Traveler’s Rest (south of Missoula, near present-day Lolo) on September 10, 1805, as the group prepared to cross the Bitterroot Mountains on the outward-bound journey. During the pageant, about 100 members of the Flathead, Salish, Pend Oreille, and Kootenai tribes occupied an encampment on an island in the Clark Fork River in downtown Missoula. Two of the Indians, Aggie Woodcock and Adolph Ninepipe, played the roles of Sacagawea and the Shoshone guide Old Toby, respectively. The day following the performances, a motorcade sponsored by the Missoula Automobile Dealers Association drove to the top of Lolo Pass on the Montana-Idaho state line for a picnic.39

  Fig 4.3 Men pulling boats up the Beaverhead River as part of the 1955 Dillon Sesquicentennial Pageant. Photo by Joe Ryburn. Courtesy, Beaverhead County Museum, Dillon, Montana.

  Montana did not monopolize dramatizations of the Lewis and Clark story during the sesquicentennial, however. A historical pageant entitled Salmon River Saga, written and directed by Vio Mae Powell, director of speech and drama at Idaho State College in Pocatello, was performed in Salmon, Idaho, on August 20 and 21, 1955, following six weeks of rehearsal. Salmon is north of the location where the Lemhi Shoshone band of Cameahwait (Sacagawea’s brother) was encamped when visited by the Corps of Discovery in August 1805. The company had lingered there for about two weeks while the explorers bargained for horses to carry them over the Bitterroot Mountains. Under the stars at the Lemhi County fairgrounds, with the silhouetted Salmon River Mountains as a “dramatic backdrop,” an impressively large cast combined drama, music, poetry, and narration to tell the story of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea in the Salmon area. Eight episodes were depicted, beginning with Sacagawea’s abduction by the Minatarees (Hidatsas) and concluding with the Shoshone guide Old Toby leading the expedition over the Bitterroots. The pageant was “acted in pantomime, with actors dubbing in the dialogue over a public address system.” This was the method used in all the large outdoor presentations, including the pageants at Three Forks. At Salmon, the Horace Johnson group of dancers from the Fort Hall Shoshone-Bannock Reservation in eastern Idaho performed “authentic” Indian dances during intermission. Total paid admissions for the two nights amounted to 2,274, and between 500 and 600 schoolchildren were admitted for free, setting a record for attendance at the fairgrounds.40 A newspaper story proudly pointed out that “cars from five states” other than Idaho “were noted on the parking lot within the fairgrounds gates.”41

  While historical pageants were the most complex sesquicentennial activities, the schedule included numerous other events spread over the years 1955 and 1956 and planned to correspond to the weeks the expedition was in a particular area. Lewiston, Idaho’s, turn came in the fall of 1955 and featured a three-day “water pageant,” a buffalo barbecue, breakfast with the governors of Idaho and Washington, and a Nez Perce encampment. The featured speaker at a convocation on Friday night, October 7,
was Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist A. B. Guthrie Jr., author of The Big Sky and other books about the early West.42 Similar events took place throughout the Clearwater Valley. A barbecue at Kamiah drew 2,000 people, and the winning parade float depicted—significantly—the uncompleted Lewis-Clark Highway route against a backdrop of snow-covered mountains.43

  However, not all events were specifically tied to towns or cities in the region. Approximately 1,000 Boy Scouts gathered in Great Falls, Montana, to begin retracing the expedition’s route from the great portage to Astoria, using dugout canoes and packhorses. The Greater Clarkston (Washington) Association sponsored an “automobile caravan” that traveled over the Lewis and Clark route for nine days between Bismarck, North Dakota, and the Oregon coast. The caravan planned to camp along the way and to stop at “all Lewis and Clark museums and roadside markers.” More than 100 pilots prepared to fly an air tour over the trail from St. Louis to Astoria, with stops in Missoula, Montana, and Walla Walla, Washington. A pair of Air Force F-84 jet fighters “retraced” the expedition’s path between St. Louis and Great Falls, Montana.44 The Montana State Committee announced that it would help pay expenses for seventeen-year-old Meriwether Lewis of Tacoma, Washington, “a seventh direct descendant of an uncle” of the famous explorer, to travel the length of the trail. The Washington State Committee prepared outlines for talks on Lewis and Clark and lists of available speakers and offered suggestions for program topics and activities, including art displays, pageants, and radio and television programs.45