In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (18 page)

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 interstate 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

One of the first initiatives for relating these and other new highways that spanned the West to the path of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was launched in 1929. Concerned about the nation's failure to adequately commemorate the explorers' 1804–1806 journey to the Pacific Ocean and back, delegates from more than twenty communities in the Pacific Northwest and Montana gathered at Lewiston, Idaho, to form the Lewis and Clark Memorial Association. “It seems almost incredible,” the group's initial report stated, “that through all
those years there has been no national monument erected in their [the explorers'] honor. . . . Perpetuated only in a few place names, they claim but scant present attention, except from close students of western history.” The 1905 Portland Exposition, the delegates pointed out, “created nothing permanent, was as much commercial as sentimental, and many of those connected with the movement have gone to their reward.” They referred to the nearly twenty years that had “intervened” since the centennial as a “vista of silent years.”
⁵⁴

A committee appointed by the Lewiston Chamber met with Idaho congressman Burton L. French, who offered his “unqualified endorsement” of the association. Directors and officers were elected and articles of association drawn up. In its list of aims, the Lewis and Clark Memorial Association sought to commemorate the two captains. No other member of the expedition is mentioned. Second on the list, the group vowed to “expedite the completion of a highway following the route” that would “through its utility stand as a lasting memorial” to the explorers. Rescuing “important historical points along the route from oblivion” came next, followed by “a campaign of education” and erection along the route of “suitable monuments and markers” indicating the significance of events in various locations. Anyone could join the association, and other chambers of commerce along the Lewis and Clark route were invited to become members, with dues graduated according to the size of the community. Lewiston, Idaho, would remain the organization's seat of business.
⁵⁵

Although its inaugural report reflected a growing sense that the expedition's exploits had been largely ignored in the twentieth century—despite the centennial celebrations—the Lewis and Clark Memorial Association failed to stir much enthusiasm for the approaching 125th anniversary of the trek, which occurred during the depths of the Depression. Nevertheless, it gave some thought to promoting local celebrations of the expedition's 125th anniversary in appropriate states that would be “more fitting than” one planned for the spring of 1930 in Mandan, North Dakota, which would merely commemorate the date on which the explorers left Fort Mandan to head west. The report suggested the possibility of forming an automobile “caravan to follow as nearly as possible the route taken by the explorers.
”
⁵⁶
The idea of designating a commemorative highway was not completely ignored. In September 1933 a stretch of paved highway connecting Lewiston, Idaho, with Umatilla, Oregon, by way of the Wallula Gap on the Columbia River was dedicated as an “Important link of [the] Lewis-Clark Memorial Route,” indicating that sentiment behind the Lewis and Clark Memorial Association's proposals established an important precedent.
⁵⁷

The enshrinement of Sacagawea as a heroic figure, publication of the original journals, and celebrations of both the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark centennials occurred during a surge of U.S. imperialism that had already thrust the expedition and its chief figures into the public consciousness following a long period of neglect. Yet this was not enough recognition for some, as indicated by the 1929 lament that the nation had lost interest in the expedition. It was significant for the future that the promotion of a multistate Lewis and Clark highway route had been central to the association's agenda. The association's prediction that a “better understanding” of the expedition and those who conducted it would “inspire a higher conception of what is suitable to commemorate them” turned out to have been accurate. Highways and automobile tourism eventually became essential components in recreating the trail as a form of commemoration.
⁵⁸

Even without an officially designated memorial highway, it would have been possible in the early 1930s to trace most of the Lewis and Clark trail by automobile if one knew which routes to follow. Major exceptions were the Missouri River downstream from Loma, Montana, to Fort Peck Reservoir and the crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho. The Bitterroot gap was partially closed during the Great Depression when U.S. Forest Service crews succeeded in constructing a crude road that connected Pierce, Idaho, with Lolo Pass. The Forest Service began building roads up to the ridges above the Lochsa River in 1931. These were only “low standard ‘truck trails',” however, in accordance with an agreement made with the Bureau of Public Roads. The roads were needed for fire management and access for other Forest Service practices.
⁵⁹
Most of the construction of what became known as the Lolo Motorway took place between 1930 and 1935. Work proceeded on a “single track road with turnouts” each summer during those years to approximate portions of both the Lolo Trail and the route taken by Lewis and Clark.
⁶⁰

Fig 3.1
Lolo Motorway, a forest road completed in 1935, follows portions of the Lolo and Lewis and Clark trails through northern Idaho. This vista is from a site on the motorway called “Smoke Place.” Photo by Peg Owens. Courtesy, Idaho Department of Commerce.

By 1933 the Lolo road had been extended eastward as far as Sherman Saddle, along the 1806 portion of the route, north of the 1805 diversion down into Hungry Creek, and about ten miles from Weitas Meadows where Olin B. Wheeler had established his main camp in 1904.
⁶¹
The Lolo Motorway was completed in late summer of 1935. Seventy-five men, working in two groups moving from opposite directions, met up at Indian Grave. On September 24 they celebrated connecting the first roadway across the Bitterroots with a chicken dinner and a day off.
⁶²
With the opening of the Lolo Motorway (Forest Road 500), automobilists who wanted to trace the trail as authentically as possible gained a significant addition to the route, including its most awesome and beautiful segment.
⁶³