In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (22 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A newspaper story proudly pointed out that “cars from five states” other than Idaho “were noted on the parking lot within the fairgrounds gates.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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