In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

by Wallace G. Lewis

  By the summer of 1966, all the states along the Lewis and Clark route had formed trail committees. Many had had active advisory groups before the creation of the national commission, but these organizations “were given new life by the Commission’s actions.” The members of these diverse committees included “housewives, bankers, representatives of State agencies, editors, and amateur historians.” One of the most active states was Missouri. Governor Warren E. Hearnes appointed a thirteen-member Lewis and Clark Committee in December 1965. In addition, twenty-five Missouri counties responded to the governor’s request that each county form its own three-member committee to help promote the trail efforts and “select sites of historic, archeologic, and recreation interest.” The state committee held meetings at communities along the Lewis and Clark trail, including Jefferson City, Boonville, and Herman. A regional meeting in St. Joseph that included committee members from Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas was held to discuss “mutual problems” and exchange ideas. The Missouri State Committee also published a newsletter. State agencies began to acquire lands along the river to develop small lakes and build campgrounds and “group camping facilities.” The state legislature passed several laws intended to reduce water pollution in recreation areas.42

  Kansas, Iowa, and North and South Dakota took similar measures. The Montana Trail Committee noted that the state had 1,650 miles of designated Lewis and Clark highways. Thirty-seven Lewis and Clark historical markers, which the Montana Highway Department had placed on the state’s highways “for many years,” were being relocated to nearby rest areas. Montana, its delegation reported, had asked the Department of the Interior to designate the part of the Missouri River between Fort Benton and the western end of Fort Peck Reservoir “for immediate Wild River status in pending legislation.” The Montana committee also organized an advisory group of “interested and informed persons” who lived along the Lewis and Clark routes to, among other tasks, “help develop educational programs” and recommend specific historical sites. The Idaho legislature donated Spalding State Park and the Canoe Camp site near Orofino to the Nez Perce National Historical Park. In Washington state, interpretive displays were added at Sacajawea State Park south of Pasco, Beacon Rock State Park in the Columbia Gorge, and Fort Columbia State Park across the river from Astoria, Oregon. In addition to acquiring lands for state parks and constructing recreational facilities in the Columbia Gorge, Oregon reported marking the trail across Tillamook Head and the trek to the Salt Cairn from Fort Clatsop.43

  In May 1968 the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial was dedicated. The stainless steel Gateway Arch, towering 630 feet over the St. Louis riverfront, had originally been authorized in the mid-1930s as a memorial to Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, as well as to the Lewis and Clark Expedition and other developments related to U.S. westward expansion. Historian Hal K. Rothman wrote that the monument “was designed to articulate the glory of the American past and to link it to the future of the nation,” but unlike Williamsburg, whose “physical structures” had been restored, the memorial in St. Louis “rehabilitated ideas, giving them new vitality.”44 Both federal and city funds were appropriated for the project, and the National Park Service acquired a site. Architect Eero Saarinen’s design was selected in 1949, but the gigantic arch was not built until the 1960s. Construction of the $15 million structure took place between February 1964 and October 1965. The arch easily spans the football field–sized Museum of Westward Expansion, which includes an “overview” of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.45

  Montana, one of the states along the Lewis and Clark route invited to participate in the dedication of the arch, sent a “display” illustrating the role of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in that state and depicting the paths of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. The large Montana group attending the ceremony included several who had volunteered their efforts for years to preserve and interpret Lewis and Clark sites: Orvin B. Fjare, state advertising director and chair of the Montana Lewis and Clark Trail Committee; Harold Stearns, Harlowton publisher and vice chair of the committee; and E. E. “Boo” MacGilvra of Butte, a state committee member.46 On the Fourth of July 1968, around 2,400 Boy Scouts and their leaders participated in commemorating both the Gateway Arch and the Lewis and Clark Expedition by setting up relays along the route to the Pacific Coast. They traveled by boat and canoe, backpacked, rode bicycles and horses, “floated in rubber rafts,” and “piloted motor schooners” to retrace the path the Corps of Discovery had taken.47

  In addition to publicizing the trail, coordinating the plans presented by various government and private groups, and preparing recommendations, the National Lewis and Clark Commission listened to proposals from organizations and individuals seeking financial support for their projects. Perhaps the most grandiose and interesting proposal for a monument was made in 1968 by sculptor Archie M. Graber, who had designed a “landsculpture . . . for the space age” that would use earth-moving equipment to alter the natural topography at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers and “create cameo-like statues of the explorers” visible from the air, with one head facing east and the other west. This super-heroic commemoration never became reality, but it demonstrates the degree of imaginative vision the commission’s mandate inspired.48

  Another request came from the Lewis and Clark Festival Association in Oregon. The association wanted to build a permanent outdoor amphitheatre in Clatsop County where summer performances dramatizing the expedition could be held. At the National Lewis and Clark Trail Commission meetings in November 1968, Festival Association director Jim Cameron made his pitch for the project, using a miniature model crafted by artist Bill Steidel of Cannon Beach. The theater, estimated to cost between $300,000 and $500,000, “would feature a revolving grandstand with a convertible cover and a man-made body of water to represent the Missouri and Columbia rivers.”49 The sponsoring Festival Association had been formed in 1965 for the purpose of conducting “an annual arts festival” in the Astoria-Seaside area, but the group’s first activity—a forty-car caravan that traveled the route to the Salt Cairn—indicated that Lewis and Clark was actually their main consideration.50 Within two years the Festival Association was seeking a “professional dramatist” to “get the show on the road”—the show being a summer dramatic production called Oregon Dream that would depict the part of the expedition that had taken place in the area. Oregon Dream, written in part by arts donor and activist Virginia Haseltine, was based on the expedition journals and touted as “highly accurate.” It was hoped that the drama would be staged annually at Ecola State Park or elsewhere in Clatsop County. The group set out to raise $4,000 in donations to employ an executive director. Cameron, who had been director of the Portland Civic Theatre, agreed to take on the task. He also coordinated various community theater projects in the vicinity, including those at Clatsop Community College, where he became an instructor.51

  Finding a permanent location for the performances proved difficult, however, since officials in charge of both Ecola State Park and the Fort Clatsop National Historic Site turned down the proposal. The Oregon Dream was not presented that summer. A December 1967 joint meeting of the Oregon Arts Commission, Oregon’s Lewis and Clark Trail Advisory Committee, and the Festival Association was to provide the occasion for an evening of readings drawn from the journals, written by Haseltine and directed by Cameron. The presentation was to be multimedia, combining “numerous films, slides, maps, and tape recordings,” as well as dramatic readings. Cameron, who had attended “a national convention on outdoor drama,” told the association members that he had been strongly encouraged by writers and directors throughout the country, including Paul Green, who won the Pulitzer Prize for an outdoor pageant that had successfully dramatized the Lost Colony at Roanoke for thirty-four years. Green, according to Cameron, pointed out “that we have one of the best stories in the world to tell here . . . it’s a natural.”52

  The Festival Association received a $3,000 grant f
rom the National Endowment for the Arts that month. It pressed on with its plans to float a major summer production about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, trying to raise the remainder of the money it needed by presenting musicals and other popular theater offerings. Cameron expressed the hope that an outdoor drama would become a reality “within five years,” comparing the possibility with the highly successful Ashland Shakespearean Festival. However, the organization was beginning to run out of operating funds. The 1968 summer season proved financially “bleak,” but the outdoor theater proposal revived hope. Unfortunately, the National Lewis and Clark Commission, although impressed by the plan for an outdoor amphitheatre with a revolving stage, could not offer any funding. The idea withered on the vine. In December 1968 the Lewis and Clark Association Festival was forced to release its executive director and relinquish, for the time being at least, the dream of an annual historical extravaganza.53

  By the time the commission issued its final report in October 1969, much had been done to interpret the trail and to draw public attention to it through various activities, including canoeing and hiking expeditions. Four new National Historic Landmarks had been designated along the trail: Weippe Prairie, north of the Clearwater River in Idaho, and the Portage Route, Camp Disappointment, and Pompey’s Pillar in Montana. The commission reported that “the Missouri State Committee identified the probable locations of the Expedition’s fifty-two campsites in Missouri.” In addition, the Bureau of Land Management had mapped “12 miles of the most probable route of the Expedition in the Lemhi Pass area of Montana and Idaho, located eight of the expedition’s campsites in the area, and selected nine additional historical sites on the Yellowstone River,” while the Forest Service had installed sixty interpretive signs in national forests in Montana and Idaho and acquired several “key areas along the trail.” In Montana, “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Urquhart, Sr., conveyed a Great Falls Portage site to the Boy Scouts of America.” Local volunteer organizations initiated projects for establishing and developing additional sites. While relocating “an old Indian graveyard on the banks of the Snake River,” archaeologists from Washington State University discovered one of the original Jefferson peace medals “given by Lewis and Clark to important Indian chiefs.”54

  By 1969 numerous memorials had “been dedicated along the Trail,” and congressional legislation had changed the name of Garrison Reservoir to Lake Sakakawea. The J. N. “Ding” Darling Foundation paid for a bronze plaque commemorating Captain Clark’s “fairness in dealings with the Indians,” which “can be considered a measure of his character, since it took place in an era when such treatment was uncommon.” The plaque text goes on to extol Clark’s success in fostering “mutual trust and good will” with the native peoples, somewhat ironically concluding that “by so doing Clark and his small band of men advanced the western expansion of this nation and strengthened its claim to all of the land in the Missouri River and Columbia River systems.”55

  The creation of a national trails system gave both the National Lewis and Clark Commission and the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation new possibilities to consider.56 In March 1966, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall proposed legislation creating a national system of trails “for hiking, horseback riding, bicycling, and motorbike riding.” There would be three categories: scenic long-distance trails, “recreation trails in Federal and State parks and forests, and metropolitan area trails.” The same legislation authorized a study of the Lewis and Clark route for inclusion as a national scenic trail. Other proposed scenic trails related to the Lewis and Clark trail included the Oregon, Mormon, Mississippi River, and Santa Fe trails. While these routes would be historically interpreted, generally followed, or paralleled by highways, the proposed Pacific Crest and Continental Divide trails would be primarily for hiking. A Bureau of Outdoor Recreation study that supported the legislation had originated “as a result of a directive in President [Lyndon] Johnson’s Natural Beauty Message of February 8, 1965.”57 In 1966 the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation was also directed “to study the Missouri River between Fort Benton, Montana, and Yankton, South Dakota, to determine whether the entire stretch of the river or portions thereof should be managed as a National Recreation Area.”58

  The commission held eleven meetings and three public hearings during its five-year existence—gathering information, promoting public interest, coordinating efforts at all levels, issuing fifty-six resolutions and three reports, and approving an icon for signs to mark highways designated as part of the system.59 Public and official consciousness had been raised about environmental issues, particularly with respect to clean water. But the process of creating a national historic trail had only begun. In the waning months of its authorized existence, the commission became the focus of controversy over whether it should be extended, since guidance and a high public profile were necessary to maintain momentum for the project. Members at a Portland meeting in early 1969 voted to recommend national legislation that would, in effect, make the commission permanent. Senators Jack Miller (R-Iowa) and Quentin Burdick (D–North Dakota) cosponsored a bill that would have extended the life of the commission to the end of 1974.60

  Objections quickly followed from different quarters. The Wall Street Journal article that had lambasted the commission for promoting road building had also criticized it for blending “historical scholarship and promotional showboating” and “succumbing to crassly commercial tourist promotion.”61 Life Magazine called on all federal commissions to dissolve themselves, and even Representative John Kyl of Iowa, who had authored the bill creating the National Lewis and Clark Commission, opposed granting indefinite life to temporary commissions on principle.62 Kyl’s suggestion that the commission be replaced by a private organization was echoed by North Dakota commissioner John Greenslit, who also served as coordinator of the North Dakota State Outdoor Recreation Agency. He acknowledged that “a new organization is needed with state initiative,” since Congress appeared unlikely to renew the commission.63 Indeed, the U.S. Congress rejected a bill to extend the National Lewis and Clark Commission for five more years, and it was disbanded in October 1969. Within days, representatives of the eleven states that had participated in the commission’s work began to seek ways to continue the project themselves, in cooperation with various citizen volunteer groups and federal agencies.64

  The initiative now rested with local, state, and regional organizations. In every state that had been represented on the National Lewis and Clark Commission, groups—both public and private—began to implement the commission’s recommendations. Even more important, perhaps, the volunteers and state organizations worked to maintain public interest in the Lewis and Clark trail. County committees had been established in Missouri and Iowa. In many of the other eleven states concerned, governors appointed state committees to pick up the slack, but an umbrella organization that would continue to coordinate efforts and keep the idea of a national historic trail in the public eye was clearly needed.65

  One of the final recommendations the National Lewis and Clark Commission had made was that “one or more groups should be organized to further the broad program” it had originated. In 1970 a nonprofit organization, the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc., was formed for that purpose.66 Also, a mimeographed publication, The Lewis and Clark Journal, edited by G. Edward “Gus” Budde of the Lewis and Clark Trail Committee of Missouri, appeared quarterly during the early 1970s. The publication reported on meetings, legislative efforts, issues related to historical sites, trail development news, and projects supported by the Heritage Foundation. Budde, described in a newspaper article as “one of the last of the old-time publicity men,” had “personally retraced” the trail from Wood River to Fort Clatsop eight times.67 In the winter of 1974–1975 the first issue of We Proceeded On, the official publication of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, noted that the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation was ready to submit legislation to the U.S. Congress to establish historic as well as scenic trails.68
In the summer of 1976 the Valley County (Montana) Lewis and Clark Trail Society began to publish A Squawl of Wind, a periodical dedicated to articles and news about Lewis and Clark sites in northeastern Montana. Much of the writing was done by Bob Saindon of Glasgow, who later served as president of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.69