2 Explorers, Followed by Millions

FT. MANDAN, N.D. —  The food was, thank goodness, all wrong.

There was no roasted dog or sliced beaver tail. No buffalo gut stuffed with a goodly dab of excrement, then fried up brown in bear oil.

But if the menu was a bit off, the spirit was authentically gung-ho as two dozen history buffs gathered in icicles-on-the-mustache cold for a weekend camp-out. Their goal: re-create the experience of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who wintered here nearly 200 years ago.

“God, this is neat!” said Roger Wendlick, a retiree from Oregon who was decked out in fringed buckskin leggings and jacket, a combination tomahawk/pipe at his waist and a shaggy buffalo robe around his shoulders. In case the outfit didn’t make it quite clear, Wendlick explained:

“I’m a Lewis-and-Clarkie. You know, a nut. There’s a lot of us out there.”

That’s exactly what tourism officials across the West are hoping.

They’re counting on the upcoming bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition to bring millions of visitors from around the world to places decidedly off the beaten track. Ft. Mandan, for example, which is 40 miles north of Bismarck, N.D. Or Nebraska City, Neb., where a new $8-million museum will be dedicated to flora and fauna of the expedition.

Environmentalists worry that all these tourists will pound the quiet out of the few spots of genuine wilderness that remain along the Lewis and Clark trail. Some Native Americans, meanwhile, fear their contributions will be ignored amid the hoopla over the expedition’s “discoveries” of rivers, animals and plants that were, after all, new only to the white man.

But these alarms have not dimmed the hype.

At least 17 federal agencies, 15 states and a dozen Native American tribes are planning commemorative events along the expedition’s 8,000-mile route. Expectations are so high that Illinois is building a $7-million interpretive center--on the site where the expedition camped the winter before setting sail in May 1804.

“This is the bicentennial of the West,” explained David Borlaug, president of a nonprofit group coordinating celebrations nationwide. “The bicentennial of the real America.”

And the bicentennial of a whopping adventure.

When the 30-odd soldiers under the leadership of Capts. Lewis and Clark left Ft. Mandan in April 1805, they were venturing into the unknown.

The first leg of their expedition, up the Missouri River from St. Louis, had sizzled with Indian encounters and plant and animal research. But white men had paddled that stretch of river before, and the geography was fairly well mapped. Not so the land west of Ft. Mandan.

That was the wild. A vast tract no white man had ever traversed.

The explorers knew so little about the terrain that they expected to find a mountain of pure salt. They figured they would hunt woolly mammoth. And, based on the best science of the day--the principle of “symmetrical geography”--they counted on a single, gentle mountain range no higher than the Appalachians blocking their way to the Pacific. They found, instead, the Rockies.

Explorers’ Story Still Fascinates

Still--amazingly--they made it to the Pacific and back after wintering at Ft. Clatsop in what is now far northwestern Oregon.

President Jefferson had commissioned them to find the most direct route across the continent. He had ordered them to explore the land he had recently bought, sight unseen, from France in the Louisiana Purchase. He had instructed them to scout trade routes, identify natural resources and alert the Native Americans along the way that they now owed allegiance to the U.S. government.

The explorers did all that, and more. They discovered for modern science 178 plant species and 122 animals. They recorded the languages and cultures of more than 50 Native American tribes, including two dozen that had never before seen a white man.

They staked America’s claim to the continent.

And their story combines so many elements--military planning and dumb luck, danger and courage and arrogance, scientific finds and cross-cultural cooperation--that it resonates to this day, an appeal stoked by chronicles such as Stephen E. Ambrose’s best-selling book, “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.”

“The myth of it fulfills our sense of national purpose,” suggested Clay S. Jenkinson, a historian who has just published “The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Completely Metamorphosed in the American West,” the first in a 10-book series on the expedition. “But if you had to boil it down to one reason why Lewis and Clark have such appeal, I would say it’s the sheer, magnificent adventure of it.”

That’s certainly what drew two dozen men and women from as far as Illinois and Oregon to camp out in North Dakota in January.

“I wanted to get as close to the Lewis and Clark experience as possible,” explained Doug Johnson, 52, a middle school principal in Bismarck and a longtime expedition buff.

Oh, sure, the campers grumbled about waking up to find their eyeglasses--even those tucked in sleeping bags--glazed white with frost. They cursed--did they ever--the bitterly cold midnight stumbles to the outhouse. But (especially the morning after, when they warmed up by a space heater over eggs and coffee in the empty Ft. Mandan gift shop) they pronounced themselves glad to have done it.

‘This Is Getting Back to the Real’

They had heard the coyotes howl. Had watched the Big Dipper scroll across a sky of silky ink. They had shared a pipe with Mandan Indians. They had survived (albeit many of them in Gore-Tex and polypropylene) a taste of what Lewis and Clark endured during the expedition’s 146-day stay at Ft. Mandan.

“This is getting back to the real,” Merl Paaverud, superintendent of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, said with satisfaction.

To capitalize on that yearning for a taste of the roughhewn heroics of yore, North Dakota is spending $1.5 million to fix up historic Lewis and Clark sites and promote events such as the camp-out, which was sponsored by the state tourism department and which will be held annually through the bicentennial. Other states along the route are adding interpretive signs to miles of hiking paths, pointing out the expedition’s local adventures and discoveries.

The National Park Service is rolling out “Corps of Discovery II,” a convoy of three semitrailers filled with displays, artifacts and costumed docents that will retrace the expedition’s route during the bicentennial.

And all along the trail, Lewis and Clark buffs are planning their own reenactments. Among the most ambitious: A crew based in St. Charles, Mo., plans to travel the entire Missouri River in replica keelboats and canoes, wearing period costumes and camping on the riverbank. Although, truth be told, founder Glen Bishop is taking authenticity only so far: His men will paddle in and out of each camp site on pure muscle power, but “in between, when no one’s watching, we’ve got a motor,” he confided.

The sheer scale of the bicentennial--which will be celebrated from January 2003 through September 2006--has unsettled some environmentalists.

The federal agencies that manage the most delicate trails and rivers already are drafting permit systems to limit access if tourism booms out of control.

Still, some envision having to jostle aside camcorders for a view from the Lemhi Pass, where the expedition crossed the Continental Divide. Or having to step over soda cans on the fragile Lolo Trail, which winds along the ridge of Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains.

“Once [the wilderness] is discovered, it will not go back to what it was,” warned Russell Young, the owner of Canoe Montana, which offers guided tours along the Upper Missouri River.

Young plies one of the most rugged stretches of the river, through sandstone cliffs that time and wind have carved into what Lewis called “a thousand grotesque figures.” Still, he’s seen a sharp surge in river traffic over the last two years, and he often has to remove several grocery sacks full of trash and human waste before he can pitch his tents. Young hopes that renewed public interest in the river will stimulate improvements, such as restrictions on cattle grazing along the banks. Yet he also sees danger in heavy tourism.

That same uneasy mix of hope and alarm colors many Native Americans’ view of the bicentennial.

For them, the Lewis and Clark expedition is nothing to celebrate. It opened the West to pioneers and the U.S. military. It touched off America’s relentless westward expansion--and with it, Indian slaughter.

Even so, many tribes take pride in their contributions to the expedition. Although Lewis and Clark addressed Native Americans as “children” and referred to them as “savages,” they relied on Indian guides, food and know-how to get them across the continent. Explorers and Native Americans often mingled as equals, hunting and dancing together, swapping medicinal tips, sharing food and women (and venereal diseases).

The bicentennial offers a chance to tell this side of the story. To broaden public understanding of the Indian role in the expedition beyond the standard tribute to Sacagawea, the Shoshone teen who strapped her newborn to her back and helped lead the men over the Continental Divide.

It’s an opportunity as well for Native Americans to make clear that Lewis’ journals are not the definitive historical account of the expedition. Lewis may have taken great pride in distributing peace medallions and presenting himself as an emissary of the “great father.” But oral histories passed down among the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes of North Dakota, for instance, reveal that the natives were much more impressed with Clark’s slave, who was the first black man they had ever seen.

“This time around, the story of Native Americans is being heard from a Native American perspective,” said Amy Mossett, a tribal advisor to the national bicentennial coordinating group.

At the North Dakota camp-out, for example, Mandan and Hidatsa tribal members described the medicinal practices their ancestors might have shared with Lewis and Clark (to treat sniffles and snakebites they used a salve from the purple coneflower--popular today as the herbal cold remedy echinacea). They demonstrated how to sew moccasins and shared a tobacco ceremony, passing a pipe packed with red willow bark.

“If tourists are going to come [to Lewis and Clark commemorations], I’d prefer that they come with respect for the Mandan. I’d prefer that they acknowledge us as being alive,” said Lyle Gwinn, who shared legends of his warrior ancestors with the group.

A Few Tribes Hold Back

Despite the push for Native American involvement in the bicentennial, a few tribes have held back. The Lemhi Shoshone in Idaho, for instance, view the commemoration sourly--and from afar--although they are the tribe of Sacagawea. White settlers pushed them off their land a century ago. And, stuck on a hard-up reservation 200 miles to the south of their ancestral home, the Lemhi Shoshone see no reason to celebrate.

“We want to play a significant role in the bicentennial, but I don’t know how I can jump up and down about it when we’re basically homeless and exiled,” said Rod Ariwite, the tribal president.

Such tensions, however, have not dented enthusiasm for the bicentennial.

The explorers left behind journals crammed with thrilling adventure tales and astounding descriptions of natural wonders. Not to mention rambling odes to the glorious taste of buffalo intestine. So, the expedition of 200 years ago remains remarkably accessible today.

And, to many, still exciting.

As Wendlick, the buckskin-clad camper, put it: “What a story!”