In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (29 page)

The meaning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition for most Americans has developed over time, especially in the last half century, adding the respect for scientific accomplishment inherent in the “literate elite” image to the glorification of national exploration and expansion characteristic of the “folk” image. The ways such common meanings are commemorated have changed as well. The Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail has become a vehicle for public education, although historian Mark Spence has pointed out that serious consideration of the legacies of the Lewis and Clark Expedition has been overwhelmed by a “tourism juggernaut.” Commemorations, interpretation centers, and various promotions spurred by the bicentennial tended to portray the expedition primarily as a great adventure into the wilderness. Spence argues that the journals do not constitute a literary epic and that sentimentalizing or romanticizing the exploits of Clark, Lewis, and the other expedition members can only obscure an understanding of their purposes and of how our national attitudes toward nature are derived from the past.
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In general, relationships between the publicly perceived meaning of the Lewis and Clark trail and ways the significance of that trail is represented help shed light on ways the American public views its history, particularly with respect to questions of interpretation and authenticity. Interpretation, in this case, usually means establishing historical context and conveying portions of the narrative in as succinct and simple a manner as possible. It zeros in on
fact
and on the relation of fact to place. As Michael Kammen points out, the American public has come to suspect any other forms of historical interpretation and to believe that “trustworthy history consists of true facts . . . accurately organized and presented. No more and no less.”
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Authenticity is the desired effect, one that appears to confer most of the educational value on which the appeal to tourism is based. In this sense, authenticity means genuine, realistic, and accurate. But in reality its meaning is rarely straightforward, even in terms of visitors' experience and perceptions of historic sites. Since the mid-1990s, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to questions regarding both historical interpretation of heritage tourist sites and historical authenticity. What counts as authentic or even simply genuine can change as cultural values and expectations change. Early–twentieth-century historical pageants appeared less genuine and real to audiences fifty years later. Bert Hansen's pageant scripts from the 1950s may seem stilted and artificial to audiences today. In addition, historical authenticity depends largely on interpretation, both visual and textual, and such interpretation tends to eliminate other possibilities of, and viewpoints on, history. Authenticity, for example, may embody richness and depth of meaning (closer to the way historians would define the word) or aesthetic considerations. An obvious problem for the creation and management of heritage sites is how to offer an interpretation that will at least appear authentic to the largest number of tourists. What appears to be authentic may not actually be so in the most objective sense. In other words, tension seems to exist between factual accuracy, on one hand, and interpretation processed to satisfy the present-day visitor to historical sites, on the other.
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Reproductions, which have the effect of bringing the past vividly into the present, represent one aspect of that tension. For example, such replicas as Fort Mandan on the Missouri River and Fort Clatsop near the mouth of the Columbia River—based on plans described in the Lewis and Clark journals—may have more authenticity for the modern tourist than would preserved ruins (if they existed). While carefully constructed replicas seem satisfying, any tampering, if apparent to the visitor, adversely affects a site's perceived authenticity. Yet certain kinds of unavoidable distortion remain transparent to the visitor.
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Tourism scholar Peirce Lewis notes that the very existence of markers, viewing points, graphic and textual signs, and other interpretive aids contrives to “funnel our attention and to isolate the historical site from its present-day surroundings, roping off certain sites, as if everything else around them was
not
historical or worth
paying attention to.”
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Thus, historical tourism often becomes a matter of hurrying from one sanctified and somewhat artificial site to the next, with little regard for what lies between. The modern highway system gives tourists the freedom to do just that.

Automobile tourism, especially the quest for historical sites and specific scenic attractions, has been a bonanza for small towns throughout the West. This is particularly true for those not located on railroad trunk lines or near popular tourist destinations. Communities quickly exploited whatever curiosities, landscapes, or historical claims to fame they possessed or could create in the public mind through promotion. In this quest they were aided by state and federal historical markers and monuments, as well as by commercial organizations that advertised vacation highway loops and routes that offered motorists the most efficient use of their travel time. Making contact with the historical past increasingly became a major motivation to explore the West by automobile after World War II. As historian John Jakle has noted, “Historical sites offered a sense of permanence in an ever-evolving world of new, highly standardized landscapes.”
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As economic expansion wiped out material traces of that past and threatened the ties to national identity that historical consciousness provides, pressure grew to preserve physical manifestations of, and links to, the past. Members of the middle class who began to support environmental preservation in the 1960s tended to also support historical preservation. The fact that attitudes in western communities, large and small, began to change from those of “slash-and-burn renewal” to preservation of historic structures during this period can be seen as the result of both a new preservationist ethic and awareness of the commercial opportunities inherent in convincing tourists that an authentic historical past was available for their enjoyment and for the education of their children.
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While most communities had to rely on their ties to individual historical events, those on or near the routes of the Corps of Discovery could exploit a broad continuity that connected them to other towns and to a unified theme; they did not have to establish completely different appeals or draw potential tourists away from other attractions. The Lewis and Clark trail potentially represented a linearly extended heritage site, in many ways the perfect raison d'être for a designated tourist route. Yet it
faced problems of access and interpretation. By the mid-twentieth century, dams on the Missouri and Columbia rivers had inundated sites along a considerable portion of the trail. Although a few enthusiasts traveled those segments by water, in boats and canoes, the general public would not do so. To identify in the public mind secondary highway routes with this linearly extended site and provide adequate interpretation, initially, an effort was needed to institutionalize the expedition's route as a National Historic Trail.

While public representation of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and its relationship to a far-flung sequence of geographic sites focuses on fact and narrative over interpretation and analysis, the trail has some unusual characteristics and a unique authenticity. For one thing, the Lewis and Clark trail exists more as an imaginative construct than do most other heritage objects, such as buildings and historic districts. Administered today by the National Park Service, the trail constitutes little more than interpretation added to landscape; that interpretation, largely in the form of official signage, instantiates our understanding of the expedition's journals. The Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail can be considered a sort of historical replica that extends for thousands of miles—“replica” because virtually no trace remains of the expedition's journey, and much of the route today is covered by water. Except for William Clark's etching of his name and the date on Pompey's Pillar during his party's return along the Yellowstone River, no known trace of the route has survived. Relics left behind (as opposed to those purposely sent east) are also few: they include only some Jeffersonian peace medals and a branding iron bearing Lewis's initials.

Since virtually no traces of the Corps of Discovery remain upon the landscape, replicas of structures, salt cairns, and dugout canoes must fill the gap. Reconstructing the Lewis and Clark trail essentially demands such an approach. The fact that signs and other interpretive figurations subtly alter the historical landscape and condition our perception of it, as Euro-American settlement and industrial and agricultural development more obviously have, is beside the point if the entire trail is viewed as a sort of imaginative replica. Linkages between the journals and the trail as a linearly extended heritage site, on the one hand, and between the trail and the landscapes through which
it runs, on the other, may inspire in the visitor an imaginative vision that overcomes the impress of progress and civilization. At best, the trail and the transformed landscape may blend in the viewer's mind to reestablish continuity between past and present. It is much more likely, however, that tourists will try to see what is
not
there—unfettered waterfalls on the upper Missouri and lower Columbia rivers or the Bitterroot forest as Lewis and Clark saw it, for example—and not see what actually
is
there: extensive clear-cuts, high-power transmission lines, hundreds of miles of reservoirs, paper mills, cabins, towns, and so forth.

For more than twenty years, efforts continued to carry out the general recommendations of the National Lewis and Clark Commission, and it is safe to say that the bicentennial commemoration—particularly as manifested in the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail—both reflected and molded public attitudes toward this historical enterprise. Today, the National Park Service has overall responsibility for the trail, but development and management of individual sites have largely been carried out by other agencies and organizations. By the end of the twentieth century there were four major interpretive centers along the route: the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the Fort Clatsop National Monument and Interpretive Center near Astoria, Oregon, the North Dakota Fort Mandan Interpretive Center at Washburn, and a newer Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, Montana. Located along the Missouri River, just upstream from the Rainbow Falls overlook, the Great Falls center opened with a week-long celebration in July 1998. As the bicentennial approached, existing facilities—such as Cape Disappointment (Fort Canby State Park) at the mouth of the Columbia River in Washington state, the Nez Perce National Historic Park in Spalding (donated by the state of Idaho), and the Lolo Pass Interpretive Center on the Montana-Idaho state line (renovated in 2002)—were joined by numerous other commemoration locations, including the Sacajawea Interpretive Cultural and Education Center in Salmon, Idaho; the Travelers' Rest State Park and National Historic Landmark near Lolo, Montana; Pompey's Pillar National Monument on the Yellowstone River northeast of Billings, Montana; and the Wood River/Camp Dubois State Park in Illinois.
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The route taken by the Corps of Discovery and its institution-alization as the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail represent the fusing of two twentieth-century phenomena: the rise of auto tourism as a form of personal exploration, or “frontiering,” and the movement to establish an authentic historical heritage as a basis for both education and commercial opportunity. For modern auto tourists, the designated highway—with its distinctive periodic logo signs depicting the explorers pointing the way—merges with, and become equivalent to, the trail itself. After all, except for the occasional canoe trip or chartered boat ride, it is virtually the only way to experience the route. Passing through eleven states between Illinois and Oregon, this is
not
primarily a hiking trail. Further, unlike the Santa Fe Trail, none of it has been romanticized as a major tourist destination. With the exceptions of Interstate 84 through the Columbia Gorge in Oregon and Interstate 90 along the Yellowstone River in Montana, most of the highways along or adjacent to the route of exploration are secondary, two-lane roads. To follow the trail is to abandon the interstate superhighway and explore “blue” highways and even the occasional unpaved road, such as the one that crosses the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass or the more treacherous Lolo Motorway, Forest Road 500 in Idaho.

Although it faces challenges of interpretation similar to those of other heritage projects, the Lewis and Clark trail has enjoyed unique advantages, not the least of which is the way viewers continually reinforce its historical authenticity through reenactments. Like recreational tourism, this form of heritage tourism invites participation rather than simple observation. But in terms of historical consciousness, the trail has also bound together communities in the northern mountain states and the Pacific Northwest with those in the Midwest and the high plains, a web of interrelationships that was only strengthened by the 200th anniversary commemoration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.