Sunday, January 12, 2003
CUT BANK -- On Saturday, Glacier County Attorney Larry Epstein will join hundreds at President Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home to kick off a national, three-and-a-half-year 200th birthday party for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Epstein said it's pretty heady stuff for a kid who grew up in oil fields and wheat farms north of Cut Bank to be in such company.
As a boy, Epstein helped find two key Lewis and Clark sites with his enterprising Boy Scout troop.
Shortly after a grown Epstein returned to Cut Bank to practice law, his mentor and law partner Wilbur Werner prodded him to tag along on tours to the same northern Montana sites.
They are Camp Disappointment, where Capt. Meriwether Lewis' small party gave up on finding the northern-most area drained by the Missouri River, and the Fight Site, where an encounter with the Blackfeet turned sour and they killed two young warriors.
Still later, Werner, an early president of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, urged Epstein and his wife, Callie, to join the national group of Lewis and Clark aficionados and attend conventions. Before he got caught up in the excitement of learning, Epstein thought the group was "a bunch of old fogies."
Now 53, Epstein is national president of the foundation, which encourages historic research and preservation of the Lewis and Clark trail.
The foundation has doubled in size to 3,400 members in the past decade in part by developing programs for younger families. Of course, it hasn't hurt that the nation became fascinated with Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery after reading Stephen Ambrose's best-selling history book and watching Ken Burns' captivating public television miniseries.
Saturday's Monticello gathering kicks off the first of 15 national Signature Events held across the country during the next four years commemorating the 1803-06 expedition. Monticello was the home of President Jefferson, who negotiated the massive Louisiana Purchase and sent the 34-person military team to explore what was there.
Because President Bush had been scheduled to be at Monticello, Secret Service agents called Epstein's acquaintances to do a security check, and Epstein was sent a schedule requiring him to be at Monticello hours before the festivities and to carry any meals in see-through bags.
Bush will not be attending after all.
National president
Epstein became president of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation at the group's national convention in Louisville last July and will leave office at the Philadelphia convention this summer.
He said it's been handy being just 110 miles away from the foundation's headquarters in downtown Great Falls, since he travels to the office three or four times a month to work with the small staff.
To handle Lewis and Clark correspondence and phone calls, Epstein has stretched out his workday, already split between his part-time county attorney duties and his private practice.
"I usually show up at 5:30 a.m. and work through 6 p.m., plus Sundays," he said.
Epstein carefully tracks the hours he spends on Lewis and Clark business, since the foundation can use it to apply for matching grants. In November, he logged 89 hours and didn't even have an executive board meeting. But he gave several talks around the state.
"Believe me, I'm not complaining," the affable Epstein said. "I knew what it would be like presiding for a year when the bicentennial gets under way, and I'm enjoying it."
Epstein's fellow Montana Lewis and Clark buffs say he's been a breath of fresh air for the national organization.
"Larry was an excellent choice because he grew up with a love of the landscape and the history of Lewis and Clark in his blood," said Jane Weber, executive director of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. "Plus, Larry has a real down-to-earth management style. Sometimes a meeting can drift on when there are a lot of academicians in the room. Larry tries to keep things simple, stay on topic and bring things to a close."
Keeps things moving
Bob Doerk of Fort Benton, who served as foundation president for two terms in the late 1980s, agreed.
"With his personality and enthusiasm about Lewis and Clark, he's doing great," Doerk said. "As an attorney, he's used to mediating sticky issues. Larry has a quick wit, is fun to be around and keeps things moving."
Dale Gorman, a retired forest supervisor and Lewis and Clark buff, noted that Epstein "has been interested in the Fight Site for years and has taken a lot of people on a bunch of tours up there."
"In fact," Gorman quipped, "Larry is so enthused about the site that sometimes the people he's guiding have to fight to get away."
Epstein howled at the friendly poke and admitted he asks his wife to stand in the back and signal him when it's time to wind down.
The prosecutor pleads guilty to an enduring interest in the Corps of Discovery.
"Name another story where a group faces such adversity, has so many nerve-wracking events and comes out so successfully," he said. "It's a great yarn."
"It was truly democratic, involving white frontiersmen, a black slave, various Native American tribes, and a young Indian mother and her child," Epstein marveled. "And all of the members of the expedition except the baby got to vote on the Pacific Coast where they should make their camp. That was the first completely democratic election."
"Plus Lewis and Clark kept accurate and detailed journals about the people, plants and animals they encountered, so we can relive and debate the events."
Epstein readily admitted that his specific knowledge of the expedition, like those of most foundation members is "a mile wide and a foot deep." He has become keenly knowledgeable about Lewis' trek north into the Cut Bank Creek/Two Medicine River area, but enjoys learning more about other adventures along the trail at the annual conventions.
Boyhood adventures
Epstein and seven other boys attended the three-room Winkler country school north of Cut Bank and were part of a "neighborhood patrol," or small Boy Scout troop led by Bob Anderson and Epstein's father Ben.
The boys earned a 50-Mile Award, a leather patch, by floating the White Cliffs area of the Missouri in 1960. They saw Scouts with another leather patch, the Historic Trail Award, and wanted to try for that, too.
Anderson went to Helen West, a curator at the Museum of the Plains Indians in Browning and asked if there were any significant sites in the area for the boys to explore.
West, who had written a journal article about Lewis among the Blackfeet, told them about Camp Disappointment and the Fight Site, but said no one had ever tried to pinpoint either site.
It was a thrilling adventure.
Lewis and Clark had split up on their eastward return trip in 1806, with Clark exploring the Yellowstone River and Lewis hoping to find the upper stretches drained by the Missouri River.
With a party of just three other men, Lewis headed north on the Missouri from the Great Falls area, then went cross-country toward what is now Chester where they followed the Marias River to the northwest and then its northern fork, Cut Bank Creek.
Lewis was terribly disappointed when the creek dipped to the southwest and camped for a few days in a storm. The men were wary of being in Blackfeet country.
Their bellies tightened as they started back on the southeast-flowing Two Medicine River and saw 30 saddled horses in the distance. It turned out to be just eight Blackfeet warriors.
By sign language, the two groups agreed to camp together. They talked into the night, with Lewis talking about plans to supply other tribes, including Blackfeet enemies.
When Lewis awakened that morning, the Indians were sneaking away with weapons and horses. A fight ensued and one Indian was fatally stabbed and another presumed killed by Lewis' gunshot.
Lewis himself was nearly shot.
"Being bareheaded, I felt the wind of his bullet very distinctly," he wrote.
They high-tailed it back toward the safety of bigger numbers at the confluence of the Marias and Missouri rivers.
Anderson, a farmer and pilot keenly interested in maps and compasses, researched the journals with West and began to fly the area in 1961. He started tracing the trail on a Montana highway map.
In 1962 and 1963, Anderson had his Boy Scouts retrace much of Lewis' route, weekend after weekend.
"It was a great way to learn hands-on history and figure out how to use maps and compasses," Epstein said.
"We believe Bob Anderson located the actual sites of Camp Disappointment and the Fight Site," Epstein said, "and most Lewis and Clark scholars have agreed."
To Epstein, the river-bottom location with its large cottonwood trees exactly matches the journal's written description and mapping details of the Fight Site.
Always a debate
But there is still some dispute, with Montana Tech professor Bob Bergantino, a cartographer, opting for a point about a half mile upstream.
"One interesting thing about our Lewis and Clark group is there always seems to be a dialogue and some issues to be debate," Epstein said. "We're always searching and evaluating the journals to death."
Epstein has helped Eagle Scouts build and maintain a fence around the last remaining cottonwood at the site.
Scoutmaster Anderson, now retired in Lamoni, Iowa, is pretty certain the boys found the right site and even surer that Scouting helped developed some top-notch men.
"Gee whiz, that's something having a kid from the troop lead a national Lewis and Clark group," he said. "Larry is very bright and civic-minded, and I'm proud of him.
"Larry's father and I were just trying to teach boys from our little country school to be leaders. You should have seen those boys using math to triangulate measurements and mirrors to signal Morse Code messages across the plains. They were really something."