In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

by Wallace G. Lewis

  In 1956 the Northwest Sesquicentennial Organizing Committee turned its attention to the exploration party’s journey back to St. Louis from the Pacific Coast in the spring and summer of 1806. Even as the summer of sesquicentennial celebrations in the Pacific Northwest came to a close with Lewiston, Idaho’s, two-day gala, interest in preserving and interpreting the trail of Lewis and Clark as a national memorial began to gain momentum. Montana’s 1945 celebration of the 140th anniversary of the expedition had centered on a rededication of the trail, “planned,” according to the Great Falls Tribune, “as a special highlight of the American Pioneer Trails Association’s 1945 project, Explorers of America.”46 Meetings and programs were scheduled in communities from Missoula to the North Dakota line and on parts of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. The principal activity appears to have been another automobile caravan, led by Esther Horne of Wahpeton, North Dakota, who claimed to be a “direct descendent of Sacajawea.” This retracing of the route from west to east was also intended to build support for a Lewis and Clark “National Tourway.” The tourway was a more ambitious version of a 1948 proposal by the National Park Service, calling for a designated highway route along the Missouri River between St. Louis and Three Forks, Montana. The 1956 National Tourway campaign, headed by Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, would extend all the way to the Pacific Coast and include, incidentally, State Highway 14 on the Washington side of the Columbia River.47

  Enthusiasm for this plan remained lukewarm east of Montana. The secretary of the South Dakota Historical Society expressed the view that, although the idea was “picturesque,” numerous pioneers besides Lewis and Clark had “used the Missouri as a path to the Northwest.”48 The remark suggests that Lewis and Clark represented something different in the Pacific Northwest than they did in the Northern Plains states. In fact, the sesquicentennial celebration had been focused primarily in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, while the Dakotas and states further downstream had barely participated. That would change, however, once the idea of commemorating the entire route from the mouth of the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean gained currency. While the issue of appropriately selecting and labeling highways remained, emphasis in the 1960s shifted to the actual path of exploration and the campaign to establish a national historic trail.

  There was little initial interest in the Dakotas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa for commemorating Lewis and Clark with historic highway markers. Many residents of Idaho and Montana, moreover, would have preferred that the U.S. Congress provide the means for completing the Lewis-Clark Highway between Lewiston, Idaho, and Lolo Pass on the Idaho-Montana state line. The highway (now U.S. 12), which follows the route Lewis and Clark took down the Clearwater River and roughly parallels the Lolo Trail for about 100 miles, still had not been completed forty years after construction began. Less than thirty miles remained to be completed along the Lochsa River in 1955 as the region celebrated the Corps of Discovery’s 150th anniversary. Once the missing link was finally spanned and the Lewis-Clark Highway was dedicated in 1963, the regional goal of a continuous highway commemorating the expedition’s route resurfaced. State commissions, appointed (as the sesquicentennial committees had been) by western governors, began to surface in the early 1960s. Soon those states along the route that had virtually ignored the sesquicentennial—the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Illinois—joined in.

  Although the National Park Service did establish an interpretive center at the Fort Clatsop replica in Oregon, the federal government’s involvement in the sesquicentennial had been minimal. Part of the reason may have been that the National Park Service focused on individual historical locations and was highly selective in choosing which ones to interpret and improve for public visitation. The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis fit the pattern. So did battlefields and famous structures. But the trail of Lewis and Clark consisted of numerous significant sites spread over thousands of miles, and the terrain through which it ran was inextricably tied to the expedition’s historical significance. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the momentum for commemorating the Corps of Discovery’s journey, which increased in intensity during the sesquicentennial, was maintained at the regional level into the next decade. The federal government weighed in as well, stimulated by the public’s demand for reform. By the mid-1960s nationwide fears that traces of the past were rapidly being obliterated combined with concern over the environmental health of rivers and wildlife to stimulate the assumption of new responsibilities by the federal government, and an expanding movement to create a Lewis and Clark National Trail captured the public’s imagination.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The National Commission

  PUBLIC OPINION HAD BEGUN TO SWING in favor of preserving wilderness and cleaning up parklands by the time John F. Kennedy became president. A new vision of “wilderness” as something human beings would define and manage took hold as a basis for national government policy. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall’s push for legislation to preserve natural places and roadless areas resulted in the 1964 Wilderness Act, which established a new set of rules for wilderness. The act stands as a landmark for preservation, but the struggle over which lands should be set aside for that purpose continued. The Wilderness Act was followed by a stricter Water Quality Act and Lady Bird Johnson’s Highway Beautification bill in 1965. The Johnson administration also turned its attention to establishing recreational hiking trails and expanding the number of historical sites to be preserved. “Environmentalism,” writes historian Walter Nugent, “frequently appealed to the same people who supported historic preservation, and the aging of those born from the 1920s through the baby boom provided a more affluent and nostalgic demographic base.” The focus in western communities in the 1960s began to shift from “slash-and-burn renewal” to preservation of historic sites.1

  The Missouri River portion of the Lewis and Clark trail, at least, brought together initiatives affecting clean water and wildlife preservation, demands for additional outdoor public recreation, and historical interpretation.2 In May 1961 conservationist and celebrated political cartoonist J. N. “Ding” Darling proposed that the Missouri River be incorporated into “a national outdoor recreation and natural resources ribbon along the historic trail of Lewis and Clark.” Gravely ill, Darling knew he would not live to see such a project carried out. However, he secured banker and fellow conservationist Sherry Fisher’s promise to initiate a campaign for the proposal. Darling, who had helped found the National Wildlife Federation, was famous for his syndicated editorial cartoons for the Des Moines Register promoting wildlife sanctuaries and opposing dam construction, particularly on his beloved Missouri River. Following his friend’s death in February 1962, Fisher helped form the J. N. “Ding” Darling Foundation, which he steered toward the creation of a Lewis and Clark trail zone that would also provide habitat for wildlife. Encouraged by Udall, representatives of the foundation, federal agencies, and the states through which the Lewis and Clark trail passed met in Portland, Oregon, in the fall of 1962 to discuss the Darling proposal.3

  In 1963 the U.S. Congress approved a trail plan in principle, and the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation began to study development along a ten-mile corridor for inclusion in a proposed nationwide system of scenic trails. On August 7, 1964, legislation that would create a national commission to conduct hearings on the Lewis and Clark trail was introduced in the House of Representatives by John Kyl and Ben F. Jensen of Iowa; shortly thereafter, Iowa senator Jack R. Miller introduced a similar bill in the U.S. Senate. The bills moved through committee very quickly, and H.R. 12289 was soon passed by both houses of Congress. On October 6, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed Public Law 88-630 authorizing creation of a Lewis and Clark Trail Commission to promote public understanding of the expedition’s historical significance and review proposals for developing “desirable long-term conservation objectives” and recreation opportunities along its length. The commission was also
authorized to advise government agencies on selecting and marking a “suitable connecting network of roads” along the route.4 Of the twenty-seven members, ten represented the states of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon (in 1966 a member from Illinois was added). Four were congressmen and four were senators, five represented cabinet departments, and four were appointed by the Darling Foundation.5 Sherry Fisher chaired the commission during its five-year existence. It met several times a year in various cities along the trail, including St. Louis, Bismarck, Billings, and Portland. Thus began an institutionalizing of the route the Corps of Discovery took between 1804 and 1806.

  The Lewis and Clark Trail Commission’s mandate drew on several streams of reform energy. It authorized a high-profile assault on water and air pollution and other forms of environmental degradation. It tied together the concept, if not the reality, of wilderness with symbols of national identity and heritage. It called for restitution of wildlife and natural conditions in conjunction with expansion of public recreation facilities. In pursuing these ideals, the commission enlisted the support of a number of states and municipalities in cooperation with agencies of the federal government. Along with current support for rescuing historical traces on the landscape, it could count on burgeoning enthusiasm about the expedition that had developed during the sesquicentennial celebrations in the Pacific Northwest.

  The new Lewis and Clark Trail Commission would serve as a clearinghouse for ideas and a disseminator of information. It would listen to advice and offer recommendations for action. It would educate a populace generally ignorant of history, especially of Lewis and Clark, and promote tourism. It would work closely with seven agencies within the Department of the Interior to coordinate the national government’s effort. Particularly significant was the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. At its second meeting, held in St. Louis, the commission considered and accepted the report of a two-year study of historical preservation and recreational potential along the expedition route carried out by the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. The Lewis and Clark Trail—A Proposal for Development proposed, among other things, acquisition of lands along the Lewis and Clark route for historical interpretation sites and outdoor recreation. The Land and Water Conservation Fund Act of 1965 authorized the bureau to dispense matching grants to the various states and local governments along the trail for acquiring such parcels. The report also stressed “interpretations of segments of the Trail” and designation of “existing roads and highways” that followed the original route as closely as possible as portions of a Lewis and Clark Highway.6

  While anxiety over the closing of the frontier may have stimulated interest in Lewis and Clark at the end of the nineteenth century, anxiety in the 1960s over the loss of parts of the historical landscape almost certainly did the same for stimulating national interest in a designated Lewis and Clark trail. The route’s relative isolation following construction of the new interstate highway system probably contributed as well. The traffic flow of tourism in the plains states and the West moved too quickly to make much contact with historical sites associated with Lewis and Clark. Who would search out or even notice the markers and plaques denoting those sites? Donald B. Alexander, executive director of the National Conference on State Parks, complained in 1966 that the expedition had disappeared into the history books and that, except for “a few memorial stones and restored camp sites”—few of which could be seen from the new interstate highways—almost nothing of historical interest remained. More serious, at least for portions of the route, was the fact that the landscape itself had been altered to the point that no access to the original sites remained.7

  The same year Alexander lamented the fact that superhighways were helping to consign historical remembrance to the ash heap, Roy E. Appleman wrote that “only in the high Bitterroot Range of Idaho and in the badlands of the White Rocks section of the Missouri in Montana can one today see this western wilderness for any considerable extent essentially as Lewis and Clark saw it.” Appleman, a National Park Service historian, laments that sites had been obscured or wiped out by industrial activity and especially by dam construction on the Missouri, Snake, and Columbia rivers. Around 2,350 miles of Missouri River bottomland, on which the expedition camped, Appleman complains, had disappeared beneath the waters of impoundments, accounting for more than 500 miles of shoreline in South Dakota alone.8 Hydroelectric power dams had shorn the Great Falls of the Missouri and its companion waterfalls of much, and in some cases all, of their spectacular beauty. Camp Fortunate, where Lewis and Clark had conferred with the Shoshone and bargained for horses to cross the mountains and where Sacagawea had immeasurably improved their chances for success by recognizing her brother Cameahwait, was covered over by reservoir waters behind Clark Canyon Dam in 1963. On the Clearwater River at Kamiah, Idaho, a sawmill had obliterated the site of Long Camp, where the expedition had prepared to recross the Bitterroots in the spring of 1806.9

  In the mid-1960s Ted Yates set out to produce a documentary film for NBC that would tie the landscapes through which Lewis and Clark traveled to descriptions from the expedition’s journals. He found the task nearly “impossible.” Yates bemoaned the “relentless civilizing” that had made the country Lewis and Clark saw vanish as a result of cultivation, dam building, and other forms of development. As for the Columbia River, Yates found it “impossible to photograph most of the way. Its technology, its wires and signs and roads and motels and picnic sites and highways and barges and locks and docks defied our best efforts to film the wild and awesome river that the explorers wrote about.” Even without “road signs and high-tension wires,” the Lolo Trail was difficult to photograph, he said, because of the pervasive evidence of clear-cut logging. Yates concluded that he and his crew had, with great difficulty, “reconstructed America to look the way many of us dream [that] it looks,” yet they had also managed to add to the “delusion” and “sustain” the myth of American scenic beauty.10

  The scenes from the journals had largely vanished. “We followed the Missouri River west nearly two thousand miles,” Yates later wrote, “before we came upon remnants of the land they saw.” The river itself had also changed. “It is corseted, dammed, and polluted, a kind of superbly engineered sewer. . . . Our film remained unexposed until we reached North Dakota,” where sixty miles of free-flowing river could be found. Of the Great Falls of the Missouri, in western Montana, Yates noted that the film crew had to arrange “with the Montana Power Company to put some water over one of the falls for us.” Numerous dams built by the Army Corps of Engineers had altered aspects of the route along the Snake and Columbia rivers as well. Two of the dams, The Dalles and Bonneville, erased a fifty-five mile stretch of cascades, falls, and rapids through which the Corps of Discovery had passed with great difficulty on both the outward and return trips. In general, it can be said that the mission carried out by the Corps of Discovery ushered in developments that resulted in such alterations to the landscape and the expedition’s path of discovery. In any case, the conditions confronting Ted Yates were the same as those that confronted the National Lewis and Clark Commission in 1964, when it began to study and designate a national trail honoring the expedition. Inundated portions of the route represented a particular challenge for interpretation. For this reason, perhaps, public recreation appears to have been as important as history, at least in the case of the lower Missouri, where the emphasis was on developing water recreation sites—something both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation had been pursuing for some time.11

  Fig 5.1 Concrete monument marking the site of Camp Fortunate at Armstead, Montana, had to be moved to higher ground when Clark Canyon Reservoir filled in 1963. Photographer unidentified. Courtesy, Beaverhead County Museum, Dillon, Montana.

  Of course, not all changes have been caused by human settlement and industry. Even in Lewis and Clark’s time, the Missouri River was in a constant state of flux. Flooding, siltati
on, and bank erosion created new channels, islands, and bends while abandoning old ones. Floodplain cottonwood groves and thickets of willows and other vegetation grew in some stretches of the river and dried up or were inundated in others, all of which has altered or eliminated many sites associated with the expedition. The most significant locations affected by river activity include the approximate site of Camp Wood, where the Corps of Discovery wintered in 1803–1804 before setting out on the expedition. The bed of the Missouri River has moved several miles to the south, that of the Mississippi has moved east, and the mouth of the Wood River in Illinois has moved northeast. In short, the geographical site today is believed to be on the Missouri side of the Mississippi and well north of the mouth of the Missouri River. The Council Bluffs site, where Lewis and Clark first conferred with Missouri Valley tribes, has moved west three miles from the river into Nebraska. The actual location of the winter camp of 1804–1805, Fort Mandan in North Dakota, has wandered into the body of the stream.12 Within fifty years of his burial, erosion of the riverbank near Sioux City, Iowa, had threatened the original grave of Sergeant Charles Floyd, the only member of the expedition who perished. In 1857 Floyd’s remains were moved 600 feet from the river and re-interred.13

  Interest in tracing the route Lewis and Clark took by way of the Missouri River, as opposed to land, goes back at least seventy-five years. Few enthusiasts attempted to follow the trail upstream by water, although that had been a common—if hazardous—option by river steamer upstream to Fort Benton, Montana, before completion of the Northern Pacific. The Missouri River was changeable and dangerous, as the expedition journals note abundantly, and the currents were notoriously strong and treacherous at times.14 In 1928 travel writer Lewis R. Freeman rode a light steel skiff down the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers and described his adventure along a portion of the Corps of Discovery’s water route in National Geographic Magazine. Beginning at Livingston, Montana, Freeman braved Whitewater “riffles,” snags, and shallow bars as he bobbed down the Yellowstone, carefully noting likely locations and topographical features mentioned in Clark’s journal. Freeman floated all the way to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, romantically conscious of the fact that the shorelines were redolent of history. “From the Grand [River] on down,” he wrote, “every bend and every bluff was peopled with memories of the men who had blazed the way. Every hedge and point beyond reach of the claws of the river I knew had been looked upon and probably camped upon by earlier explorers.”15