In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (28 page)

Guidebooks and published accounts of automobile journeys along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail began to appear even before the trail bill was signed and rapidly proliferated as the nation prepared for the expedition's bicentennial in 2003–2006, demonstrating the importance of motor routes for public appreciation of the new national trail and of autotourism for personal exploration of the West. In 1978, for example, Archie Satterfield, a member of the Washington State Lewis and Clark Trail Committee, published a short narrative on the expedition and an account of an automobile tour he and his family took from the Pacific Coast eastward along most of the Lewis and Clark route. Much of the book summarizes the history of the expedition, but in an appendix Satterfield describes the look of “the trail today,” in the tradition of Wheeler and Gray, and includes a series of maps depicting segments of the route and a key to trail sites and recreational areas and facilities.
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On their journey east, the Satterfield family sought to explore the Lewis and Clark route (as well as provide grist for a book), but they did not pursue the quest as dedicated expedition buffs. As is the case with most vacationers who follow the trail, they were also looking for recreational opportunities and were selective in choosing which historical sites to visit. In his book, Satterfield offers a short, chatty narrative of his family's summer trip to Missouri, which included inspection of only some segments of the Lewis and Clark route. He wrote that he did not recommend following “the exact route,” much of which he
considered “uninteresting” (for example, the locations of Traveler's Rest, Canoe Camp, and Camp Disappointment on Cut Bank Creek). “There is no sense of discovery involved,” he wrote, “while standing elbow-to-elbow with a crowd of people atop Pompey's Pillar.” He was also unimpressed with Lolo Pass.
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While it is not clear what qualifications a site had to possess to impart “moments of illumination” or a “sense of discovery,” the Satterfields went on to visit Giant Springs and the Great Falls of the Missouri, the Gates of the Mountains, and the general location of Camp Fortunate, vowing to hike up to Lemhi Pass on a future trip. From there they took in Yellowstone National Park before rejoining the trail at Livingston, Montana, and following the Yellowstone River down to Fort Union, near the location where the Yellowstone meets the Missouri: “We drove down the Missouri a few miles on a road so rough that we expected at almost any minute to find it dead-ending in some rancher's corral.”
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The next day they drove to a point near Washburn, North Dakota, to see the replica of Fort Mandan built in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the McLean County Historical Society. After traveling south through Pierre, South Dakota, and Sioux City, Iowa, where they stopped to visit the Sergeant Floyd monument, Satterfield and his family left the Lewis and Clark route. “Below Sioux City,” Satterfield complained, “the Missouri River loses nearly all its remaining charm and becomes less and less a river. Instead, it is something of a liquid highway. So we gave up our diligent route tracing and drove directly south to visit my family.”
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Much more thoughtful and introspective is the approach to tracing Lewis and Clark's path by road and highway taken by author and filmmaker Dayton Duncan. Duncan expressed the feelings of many in his 1987 account,
Out West: An American Journey
: “The route I plan to take—and the spirit in which it is followed—will be the same as theirs. Nearly everything else will be vastly different.”
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E
VEN BEFORE THE
U.S. C
ONGRESS
officially added the Lewis and Clark trail to the National Scenic Trail system, interest in the history of the expedition was heightened by the nation's bicentennial, celebrated in 1976. Within a few years of that event, the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation began to establish local chapters. Eventually, individual chapters all along the trail began to host the organization's annual summer meetings, at which members attended lectures on various topics, watched costumed reenactments, visited nearby expedition sites, and socialized. In 1980, nearly two years after the creation of the National Historic Trail, Bert Hansen's pageant was revived at the Three Forks of the Missouri. To commemorate the 175th anniversary of the expedition's arrival at the headwaters, Nick Nixon of Bozeman, Montana, wrote and produced a revised version of the pageant, which was performed at Missouri
Headwaters State Park on July 26 and 27, 1980.
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The performance by a cast of forty took place between the west side of Fort Rock and the river. The roles of “Sacajawea” and her brother Cameahwait were played by Oliviane Baier of Bozeman, a White Mountain Apache, and Rodger Spotted Eagle of Three Forks, a Blackfeet, while many other Native Americans appeared as villagers and Indian horseman. The same cast performed the pageant the following summer, aided by the Waa-No-Inee-Git Indian dancers.
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While Native Americans participated in the expedition's sesqui-centennial, major differences in their attitudes toward it and future events have developed over the past fifty years. The Salish Indians who took part in Bert Hansen's 1955 pageants in Three Forks and Missoula, for example, added authenticity and color to what were essentially celebrations of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The same might be said of members of the Nez Perce tribe who camped that summer by the Clearwater River at Lewiston, Idaho, and of lower Columbia River Indians who appeared at sesquicentennial ceremonies in Astoria, Oregon. Those who claimed to be direct descendants of “Sacajawea” appeared as featured guests in major sesquicentennial functions and pageants. By the end of the twentieth century, however, Native Americans who lived along the route had become divided in their opinions about the upcoming bicentennial and of Lewis and Clark in general. These opinions ran the gamut from bitter opposition, on one hand, to a desire to at least share in the expected profits and to use the event as a springboard for educating non-Indians about Indian history.

Even those who supported participation in the bicentennial argued that it should be a commemoration rather than a celebration. Their view, shared by bicentennial organizers, was that one commemorates an event or individuals to remember them in significant ways rather than necessarily to exalt them. There is often bitterness in recognizing the cost to Native American peoples of the expansion of white America that followed in the wake of the Corps of Discovery. The journals themselves offer cause for resentment: for example, the attitudes Clark expressed about the Teton band of Lakota that confronted the expedition in South Dakota or Lewis's account of the fracas near the Marias River that resulted in the deaths of two Piegan Blackfeet warriors. A traditional Blackfeet explanation
of what happened insists that the “warriors” were actually twelve-and thirteen-year-old boys who had been invited to camp overnight with Lewis and his men but who were attacked when they tried to leave during the night. This account denies, however, that the Piegans tried to steal a rifle and a horse. Morever, many Blackfeet today appear to regard Lewis and Clark with either indifference or anger—as insignificant or villainous.
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This attitude is widely shared. At a 1992 conference at the University of Montana, held to discuss the expedition's impact, scholar Betty White—a member of the Salish tribe—criticized the explorers for the way they dehumanized the native peoples they encountered, treating them as objects in the same cold, “scientific” way they treated plant specimens. White also excoriated the expedition for its mission to spy in the far West in preparation for the ultimate conquest and destruction of the region's native inhabitants.
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In 2004 a reenactment of the Corps of Discovery's meeting with Teton Sioux at Fort Pierre, South Dakota, met with protest from twenty Lakota tribal members, one of whom carried an upside-down American flag and another a sign accusing the explorers of “genocide.” The group promised to carry on its protest at other commemorative reenactments upriver. Even tribal members who participated in the reenactment expressed agreement with the protesters.
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As was the case with the paid Lakota reenactors at Fort Pierre, commemoration of historical events does not necessarily entail approval of those events, but it can offer profitable advantages and an opportunity to reassess the past.
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This was clearly evidenced in a resolution passed by the National Congress of American Indians in 2001 entitled “Preparation for, and the Safeguarding of, Native American Interests during the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commemoration.” In addition to the demand that Indian peoples benefit economically from the festivities, the resolution, among other things, called for the opportunity to educate visitors about “culturally appropriate and legal conduct in, on and near Indian lands,” to “restore vitality to fragile and irreplaceable natural resources,” to “rejuvenate” native culture, and to “unite” native communities.
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In addition to Native Americans' points of view, an array of differing opinions regarding not only Lewis and Clark but commemorative
heritage sites in general has arisen over the years since the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail came into being. In the introduction to their collection of essays on “American sacred space,” editors David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal note that the movement to preserve and manage historical sites in an effort to promote “patriotic orthodoxy” and national unity has ignored diverse and competing views of history and of the sacredness of historical space.
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To some extent, this diversity of opinion reflects or parallels historians' competing interpretations. But it is also grounded in the multifarious claims of popular memory, the imaginative and symbolic engagements with the past that Pierre Nora has described as essential to different groups' identities. In John Bodnar's terms, it might be said that diverse views of the past emerge at both the “vernacular” and local levels. Both Nora and Bodnar see interaction between commemorative expressions of popular memory and those instigated and supported by government. For Nora, historical commemoration (in France) underwent a shift in the decades following World War II, from “the concentrated expression of a national history” to growing accommodation by the state to “a series of initiatives with no central organizing principle, each subject to the overlapping and intersecting influences of the media, the tourist trade, the entertainment industry, and advertising and marketing.” However, Nora's explanation of this breakdown within French national history clearly does not apply to the United States because of much different circumstances. For example, Nora ascribes the change in France to the country's decline as a world power after the mid-twentieth century, but the United States has assumed increasingly greater global power and influence during that same period. Also, as this book has shown with respect to Lewis and Clark, the media, tourism, entertainment, and advertising have always shared the stage in historical commemoration.
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Regarding the “official,” or governmental, role, Bodnar points out that institutional and cultural leadership in the United States has tended to adopt and channel “vernacular” expressions of public memory as means of serving the demands of unity, patriotism, and nationalism.
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Yet preparations for the Lewis and Clark bicentennial seemed to indicate that a new spirit of cooperation had developed
during the last few decades of the twentieth century between official and grassroots, or local, efforts. Furthermore, greater sensitivity to multicultural views has made commemoration in general more inclusive and less Anglo- or Eurocentric. The resulting input on issues involving historical commemoration seems to parallel Erika Doss's observation, in reference to public art, that controversy has been largely resolved by open debate, demonstrating “an outstanding example of how cultural democracy is being rediscovered and reconsidered.”
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