Trail to the Pacific : Legend Lives on Route of Lewis, Clark

A few miles out of town, past the Gateway Arch, over the McKinley Bridge and up Route 3, a little-used road in Illinois leads to the banks of the Mississippi River and a granite monument honoring the men who explored the American West nearly two centuries ago.

Uncollected trash bags are piled against a nearby picnic table and some vandal’s obscenity is scrawled on the door of the wooden restroom. The monument is chipped and scarred, its 11 narrative plaques largely illegible, and what greets a visitor to the site are not the stirring words of Capts. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark but the admonition of some graffito writer: “Trust Jesus.”

However unfitting the tribute may be, it was here at Camp Wood, one May afternoon 184 years ago, just upstream from the French fur-trading post of St. Louis, that a handful of bachelors began an epic journey into the future of a fledging republic.

Wrote Clark: “I set out at 4 o’clock P.M., in the presence of many of the neighboring inhabitants, and proceeded on under a gentle breeze up the Missouri.”

Area Now 11 States

Lewis and Clark’s journey to the Pacific and back would carry them through what now are 11 states. It would take more than two years and cost something in excess of the $2,500 allocated by Congress.

They skirted what is now Dick Tokach’s drought-ravaged ranch in North Dakota and passed by Jean Whittmaekers’ country inn in Montana and nearly starved in Idaho, where travelers today follow their footsteps across the West in mobile homes with ice makers, air conditioners and hot showers.

Every summer, the lure of this great expedition brings thousands of Americans onto the highway to experience in comfort what the 33 members of the Corps of Discovery endured in deprivation.

At commemorative campsites and parks and roadside historical sites--all caringly maintained, except for the one outside St. Louis--they find that the legend lives: Lewis and Clark wrote the chapter of history that made the United States one country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

40 Minutes Versus Two Days

Just south of Camp Wood--or Ft. Dubois as Lewis and Clark called it when they wintered there in 1803-04--Interstate 270 cuts across the Mississippi River and connects with the Mark Twain Expressway, heading west to St. Charles. The trip to St. Charles, the oldest city on the Missouri River, takes about 40 minutes, including a stop at the visitors’ center on the Illinois-Missouri border to ask directions. The Corps of Discovery, following the river and having no one to tell them where they were going, needed two days.

“From this hill,” Clark wrote, “the village of St. Charles may be seen at seven miles distance . . . . A number of spectators, French and Indians, flocked to the bank to see the party . . . . These people appear poor, polite and harmonious.”

St. Charles had 450 inhabitants in 1804. One of them, a 70-year-old man with failing eyesight, Daniel Boone, was building what was to be his last home on Femme Osage Creek, a few miles outside the village. No sooner had the expedition pulled its three boats onto the shore than two privates, William Werner and Hugh Hall, took off without permission to explore the local taverns.

It was hot in this town of 40,000 residents the other afternoon, and cold beer flowed freely over the bar at Lewis and Clark’s Cafe on Main Street. Once a weary place virtually swallowed up by St. Louis, St. Charles has been reborn thanks to a community-sponsored renovation campaign that has brought back the charm of brick streets, gaslights and quaint shops. The two-story former state Capitol--St. Charles was Missouri’s first capital--looks as new as the day it was built, in 1821, as does Boone’s limestone home with its original furnishings and hand-hewn mantle.

One on River, One on Shore

The currents were strong and the rain heavy in this now drought-stricken land as the expedition moved north through plains populated by great buffalo herds grazing on 12-inch-high grass. Clark, the better river man, usually stayed on the boat, balancing his journal on his knee. Traveling with him was his black slave, York. Lewis walked on shore, making notes on topography, flora and fauna. With him was his Newfoundland dog, Seaman.

“This scenery, already rich, pleasing and beautiful,” Clark wrote at one point, “was still farther heightened by immense herds of buffalo, deer, elk and antelopes, which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exaggerate when I estimate the number of buffaloes which could be comprehended at one view to amount to 3,000.”

At what is now Kansas City, they found nothing except a rattlesnake sunning itself on the banks. Near the empty plains where Sioux City, Iowa, stands today, they paused on Aug. 20, 1804, to bury Sgt. Charles Floyd, the victim of a ruptured appendix.

“I am going away,” he whispered to Clark just before his death. “I want you to write me a letter.” Floyd, the only fatality during the entire expedition, is buried on a hill near a town named in his honor, Sergeant Bluff (population 2,500). Venturing farther into the unknown, Lewis and Clark held council with friendly Yankton Sioux. If they had made the trip in 1988, they would find the Gavins Point Dam--one of six major dams on the Missouri--at the site of their meeting and they would have to visit a reservation to find any Indians.

Jefferson’s ‘Literary Pursuit’

It was out here, beyond the frontier, that President Thomas Jefferson believed the nation’s future lay. Jefferson, who had never been west of Staunton, Va., himself, asked Congress to back an expedition in a confidential message delivered in January, 1803. To quiet federalist objections, he disguised his proposal as a “literary pursuit” designed to gain geographic and scientific knowledge of a region once ruled by Napoleon.

Napoleon’s dream of a French North America had recently been dashed by his Army’s defeat in Santo Domingo, and for $15 million--or 3 cents an acre--he sold Jefferson’s government the American West. The Louisiana Purchase comprised all or part of 14 states and 830,000 square miles of mountains, valleys, prairies, rivers and ports. The Senate ratified the deal in October, 1803.

Said Napoleon: “This accession of territory strengthens forever the power of the United States, and I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.”

To lead the expedition, Jefferson appointed Meriwether Lewis, 29, who was earning $500 a year as his personal secretary. Lewis in turn asked his friend and former commanding officer, William Clark, 33, to be co-leader and to assemble a group of outdoorsmen “capable of bearing bodily fatigue in a pretty considerable degree.” The expedition’s principal objective was to find a Northwest Passage, a river route across the West to the Pacific--and the trade centers of Asia. Not until they struggled over the Rocky and Bitterroot mountains and descended into Idaho did they learn that were wasn’t one.

Ranch Damaged by Drought

Dick Tokach’s ranch near Bismarck, N.D., an hour’s drive from where Lewis and Clark spent the bitter, snowy winter of 1804-05, is withering in drought this year. He has only harvested 150 bales of hay for winter feed but should have eight times that much for his 300 head of cattle by now. He remembers too well that his father lost the place to a federal land bank in the dry years of the 1930s, then had to battle to buy it back.

“I’ve always thought when we got to be 50 years old, we’d have things made,” his wife, Teresa, said. “Oh, you know the dreams women have--the kids are gone now and you can do this and that. Then, all of a sudden, you find out you can’t do that, and you’re afraid of losing what you have.”

“It makes it awfully tough to plan because you don’t know what’ll happen day to day,” Tokach said. “We haven’t had any real rain since last August, and now they keep talking about weather patterns. This is really going to set us back, but if we don’t get rain for another year or two, we’d be devastated.”

Outside, the southeast wind blew and the cottonwoods groaned and swayed. The sky was hazy blue, the temperature was climbing and the ranch baked in the heavy morning heat, its earth parched and full of grasshoppers skittering among frail stalks of grain.

Worry About Future

“I woke up the other morning,” recalled Teresa Tokach, “and I said to Dick: ‘Dick, are we going to make it?’ ”

Lewis and Clark, whose journey would have failed without the help of Indians, camped on the Missouri’s banks not many miles from the Tokach Angus Ranch one night in October, 1804, also without daily plans, although their journals never reflected desperation. Wrote Clark: “Camped . . . above a bluff containing coal of an inferior quality. The bank is immediately above the dead village of the Mandans. The country is fine, high hills at a distance with gradual ascent. I killed three deer.”

The country there is still splendid. The Missouri, wide and dotted with protruding sand bars, meanders through fields of stunted alfalfa, and a trickle of cars moves slowly along Highway 1804 in the distance. Far off is the outline of North Dakota’s tallest building, the 17-story state Capitol in Bismarck, and closer at hand, just a bluff or two away, are Ft. Lincoln’s three hand-hewn timber blockhouses, each with rifle slots. The fort was one of the most important on the northern plains during the 1870s war against the Sioux.

On a quiet knoll, sweet with the smell of new-mown hay, stands the fort’s cemetery. The soldiers who died with Gen. George Custer at Little Big Horn were buried there in 1876, their bodies transported from Montana on the steamboat Far West. Other wooden markers bear testimony to the world that would follow Lewis and Clark: Three Indian scouts--Red Bear, Crow Tail and Youngman Chief--killed Oct. 2, 1872; Albert Sharp, shot by a civilian; Michael Donlyn, drowned; Charles Page, frozen to death; Frederic Berowsky, diphtheria; John Steinkes, suicide by opium.

Cocktails were served at 6 p.m. and dinner at 7 at the banquet in Bismarck the other evening. By the podium of the Kirkwood Motor Inn were life-sized wax figures of Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea--the Shoshone woman who, with her infant son Baptiste (“Little Pump”) on her back, guided the explorers from North Dakota to the Pacific and back. Historian James Ronda rose to give the keynote address. The audience of 250--a white, middle-aged and sober group--sat in rapt attention as he told how the five winter months spent at Ft. Mandan near Bismarck had transformed the Corps of Discovery from a brawling, boozing group of individuals into a harmonious, well-disciplined unit with a common purpose.

Heritage Foundation Meets

This was the final night of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation’s annual meeting, and the audience included descendants of expedition members Sgt. Patrick Gass, Pvt. Moses Reed and St. Louis fur trapper Joseph Graveline. “It’s a part of our history that fascinates me and I try to get to the meeting every year,” said Robert Graveline, an insurance broker from Palmer, Mass. Indeed, for both laymen and scholars, the Lewis and Clark adventure continues to capture a nation’s imagination as no other American undertaking.

The University of Nebraska Press is publishing an 11-volume edition on the expedition, a project that will take more than a decade to complete. Lewis and Clark have inspired more than 300 books and several movies, including one starring Fred MacMurray as Lewis, Charlton Heston as Clark and Donna Reed as Sacajawea. (“It was a wonderful movie; everything in it was wrong,” said Ronda). The Smithsonian Institution sponsors annual hikes along Lewis and Clark’s overland route across the Bitterroot Range; archeological digs are under way at Discovery campsites near Great Falls, Mont., and Orofino, Ida., and the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation’s quarterly magazine, We Proceeded On, reaches 1,400 subscribers. Countless counties, parks, towns, colleges, schools, highways, restaurants and motels between St. Louis and Astoria, Ore., bear the names of Lewis and Clark.

First Whites in Idaho

The expedition left Ft. Mandan in April, 1805, and Lewis wrote in his journal: “We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man has never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine.” No non-Indian had ever scaled the Rockies or set foot in Idaho. Crossing Montana would take four months, and, along the way, the Corps of Discovery would encounter not a single human, red or white.

“Angela, where’s my camera?” the shirtless man from Wisconsin asked. “Get over there with grandma so I can take a picture. Hurry up, Angela. It’s bitchin’ hot, ain’t it?” The child obeyed, squinting in the August sunlight. In the background, where Lewis and Clark had spread their soaked cargo on a grassy bank to dry, complained about the mosquitoes and hunted elk, three rivers--the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin--quietly join to form the Missouri and begin a 2,464-mile journey to St. Louis. It had taken the Corps of Discovery 14 months to reach what is now the hurting town of Three Forks, Mont. (population 1,400).

‘The Town Didn’t Die’

“Oh, this town will come back, I’m sure of that,” said Francis Denning, 71, who sat on the long, wide veranda of the Sacajawea Inn in Three Forks, sipping a glass of ice tea. “Even when the Milwaukee Road quit in 1980, the town didn’t die. Sure, it went down some without the trains, but it didn’t die.”

“I’m going to help make it come alive,” said her friend, Jean Whittmaekers, who recently moved here from Jacksonville, Fla., and is restoring the inn with loving touches befitting a 126-year-old landmark. “This could become a charming little town. The Sacajawea was where everyone always came to drink, to dance, to eat, to just be together. I want that to happen again.”

Three Forks had been a prosperous place when four trains a day stopped there, carrying passengers to Harlowton via Dot, Bruno, Sixteen and Deep Park. It boomed so fast for a while that newcomers had to sleep in open boxcars, and the Three Forks Herald, unable to find office space, published its first editions in a tent. Then the trains pulled out, the depot at the top of Main Street was shuttered and the Sacajawea Inn closed down.

‘Kept Drawing Me Back’

Whittmaekers, who has traveled from Australia to Mongolia and lived in Europe and Venezuela, discovered the empty Sacajawea last Thanksgiving, when she came to Three Forks to visit relatives. She didn’t know at the time that her parents had been introduced to each other over dinner at the inn years earlier. “Something just kept drawing me back to the place,” she said. She spent the winter bundled up in ski clothes, shoveling out debris, painting, mopping--the pail would freeze over each night--and supervising the restoration that is bringing back turn-of-the-century elegance.

“The town used to be this big,” Denning said, holding a photograph of Three Forks in 1914. “Violet Lilly’s was over here. She rented rooms. The Greenhouse was down the street. They didn’t sell any flowers; the ladies who worked there at night did something else. The railroad people had their own clubhouse, very nice. But the Sacajawea was always the place to go. I learned to square-dance downstairs here.” “People love to dance in Montana, you know,” Whittmaekers said.

Rough Trip Through Montana

Across the open expanses near Three Forks that Lewis described as “one vast plain in which innumerable herds of buffalo were attended by their shepherds, the wolves” races today Interstate 90, a single highway from Boston to Seattle interrupted only once, by a stoplight in Wallace, Ida. But Montana was no easy passage for Lewis and Clark. They had run out of whiskey here. The timberless mountains grew taller, the valleys deeper. Game was scarce and, having abandoned the river to find an overland route across the mountains, they needed desperately to find Indians who would sell them horses.

“I fear the successful issue of our voyage will be very doubtful . . . “ Lewis wrote. “We are now several hundred miles within the bosom of this wild and mountainous country . . . however, I still hope for the best and intend taking a tramp myself in a few days . . . . “ They climbed each mountain with the hope of seeing westward valleys leading to the Pacific, but instead all that lay ahead, as far as they could see, were more mountains.

Off the interstate, past Missoula, Mont., a sign on Highway 12 warns: “Winding Road, 77 miles.” The party was reduced to eating roots, a raven, a slaughtered horse and candles made of bear fat by the time its members passed here on the 11-day ordeal over Idaho’s Lolo Pass. The campsites they left behind testified to their anguish: Colt Killed Creek, Hungry Creek, Portable Soup Camp, Lonesome Cove. Sick men lay by the side of the trail, waiting to be helped by the next man. Everyone, Lewis said, was “complaining of their bowels,” and when a heavy, premature snowstorm struck Sept. 15, 1805, Sgt. Gass called the Bitterroots “the most terrible mountains I ever beheld.”

The mountains are now in the Clearwater National Forest, with campground facilities, and along with the Missouri Breaks in Montana are the place where one most senses that nothing has changed since Lewis and Clark passed through. Virgin pines tower into the clear, crisp night and the silence is absolute. The nearest Idaho town is a three-day walk away and the dark, wooded peaks surround their visitors like a fortress.

Lawyer Becomes Guide

Cort Conley, who forsook a career as a California lawyer to become an Idaho wilderness guide and book publisher, was preparing a meal over the campfire the other evening: salmon and spinach, strawberry shortcake and cowboy-style coffee, with the grounds thrown into a kettle of boiling water. Judy Moore, a teacher from Spokane, Wash., was sitting on a rock at the edge of the Lochsa River, writing in her journal. Steve Brunsfeld, a botanist with the University of Idaho, was pointing out to several students some of the then-unknown species of plants that Lewis and Clark had discovered and recorded in their journals, even as they struggled against disaster.

“You know, you crawl into a nice, warm sleeping bag at night and you look up at the stars and you wonder how they did it, how they put up with such misery and suffering,” said Bert Hinkley, a teacher from New Hampshire.

The group was part of a class the University of Idaho brings every summer into the mountains for a one-week hike along the route of Lewis and Clark. The participants pay $175 each--seven times the monthly pay of the expedition’s chief interpreter and hunter, George Drouillard--and receive two credits in history toward their degree. The party’s leader, historian Carlos Schwantes, offers lectures along the way.

Good Leaders, Followers

“After Lewis and Clark left Ft. Mandan, the expedition worked like a well-oiled machine,” Schwantes said. “In some ways, they made it seem too easy. They only lost one man. They only had one serious encounter with the Indians. Certainly one important element of their success was good leadership and good followership. You can’t have good leaders unless you have good people willing to follow.”

On Oct. 7, 1805, the Corps of Discovery, having escaped the mountains, pushed their canoes into the Clearwater River and headed toward the Columbia River and the sea, a month’s journey away. The Indians here were fishermen who lived in houses made of rushes. Mt. Hood was soon visible in the distance, as it is today from Interstate 84, which parallels the route, slicing through Oregon’s thick forests and tidy little towns.

“The pleasure I now felt,” Lewis wrote, “in having triumphed over the Rocky Mountains and descending once more to a level and fertile country where there was every rational hope of finding a comfortable subsistence for myself and party can be no more readily conceived than expressed.”

Much Different Today

Flushed with anticipation, the Corps of Discovery swept through the Columbia, its canoes sometimes covering 30 miles a day. Along that route today, the party would pass the stack of the Trojan Nuclear Plant, billowing smoke, and come within shouting distance of the Hanford facility in Washington that made plutonium for the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The canoes would float under the 4-mile-long bridge in Astoria (population 11,000) that carries traffic on Highway 101 over the wide Columbia estuary to Washington and would, no doubt, look lost among the gathering of Korean and Japanese freighters in port, exchanging cars and electronic products for grain and timber. “Great joy in camp,” Lewis wrote Nov. 7, 1805. “We are in view of the ocean . . . this great Pacific Ocean which we have been so long anxious to see, and the roaring noise made by the waves breaking on the rocky shores may be heard distinctly.”

Near the beach where Lewis and Clark finally reached their destination, the waves break heavily today over the hulk of the Peter Iredale, a British freighter that went aground in 1906. A fog bank lingers just off shore and the figures on the sand--a few bathers, a man alone reading, a half-dozen teen-agers with bicycles resting nearby--appear as apparitions, caught in a veil of mist and the timeless rhythm of pounding surf.

Military Post Constructed

Lewis and Clark moved a few miles inland and the corps built a 50-foot-square fort with two rows of cabins facing a small parade ground. It was the first U.S. military post west of the Rockies and they named it Ft. Clatsop, for the neighboring Indian tribe. The rain was so constant on the Oregon coast during the winter of 1805-06 that everyone’s buckskin clothes rotted. The last of the tobacco was divided up on Christmas Day. The men tired of fish, and someone shot a “buzzard” with a 10-foot wingspan (which was probably a California condor, an endangered species last seen in Oregon in 1913).

The National Park Service runs Ft. Clatsop today at a cost of $300,000 annually. The post is a precise replica of the original, a sort of living museum surrounded by tall pines and spirits of the past. Logs crackle in the fireplace; beef jerky dries on an overhead beam, and rangers dressed in 18th-Century buckskin make candles by hand, using beef fat. More than 175,000 travelers visit the fort each year, and the superintendent, Franklin Walker, reports that he has encountered not one line of graffiti or the theft of a single quill.

Fort Given to Indians

On March 23, 1806, Lewis and Clark gave the fort to the Clatsops as a hunting camp and, together with Sacajawea and Baptiste and the 29 men, left the Pacific coast for the six-month trip back to St. Louis--a trip cars can now make in 57 hours and jetliners in four. “We have lived as well as we had any right to expect,” Clark said. With them on the journey home went volumes of scientific notes on the unknown animals, plants and Indians of the West and the seeds of Manifest Destiny that would make the United States a world power.

EPILOGUE: After a hero’s welcome in St. Louis--the Corps of Discovery had long since been given up for dead--Lewis and Clark each were given 1,600 acres of public land, and each enlisted man received 320 acres. Everyone got double pay.

Capt. Meriwether Lewis, appointed governor of Louisiana, died three years after completing the expedition of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in a squalid Tennessee cabin. He is buried near Hohenwald, Tenn., and his tombstone bears an inscription written by Jefferson: “I died young; but thou, o good republic, live out my years for me with better fortune.”

Capt. William Clark was promoted to brigadier general and appointed superintendent of Indian affairs. He died at the age of 68 in 1838 and is buried in the family plot in St. Louis. York, the slave, was freed in 1811, failed in several businesses and was last reported to be living among the Crow Indians with four wives. The youngest member of the party, Pvt. George Shannon, who was 19 when the Corps wintered at Camp Wood, became a circuit judge in Missouri. George Drouillard, the chief hunter, returned to the wilderness and was killed by Indians near Three Forks in 1810. Sgt. Patrick Gass married at age 58, fathered seven children and died in 1870 at the age of 99. Sacajawea is believed to have died in North Dakota in 1812, when she was 23.

Her son, Baptiste, went to St. Louis, was educated by Clark, traveled in Europe and later returned to Missouri to become a well-known trapper and guide. The Clatsop Indians gradually disappeared as a distinct people. Lewis and Clark’s journals lay in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia for nearly a century before being published.