Tim Woodward
The Idaho Statesman
1/15/2003
When they began planning the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial that gets under way this week at Monticello in Charlottesville, Va., organizers faced an unusual dilemma: It was an anniversary without an obvious date.
How do you choose one day to begin commemorating an event that, from its inception, lasted almost three years?
Kat Imhoff, chief operating officer of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, laughs about their predicament.
“The best out I´ve heard,” she said, “is that the Lewis and Clark expedition began the day Thomas Jefferson was born.”
The intellectual force behind the expedition, Jefferson had dreamed of exploring the West since he was a boy. The day chosen to start the national bicentennial, however, was Saturday — the 200th anniversary of his secret letter asking Congress to fund the Lewis and Clark expedition. Saturday´s ceremony at his home in Monticello, the culmination of a six-day Lewis and Clark exposition, is the first of a series of bicentennial signature events that will continue until September 2006.
The letter that started it all requested $2,500 “for the purpose of extending the external commerce of the United States.”
Jefferson´s letter and the expedition it launched, according to Idaho State Historian Larry Jones, “created new vistas for the American imagination. … Before that, we were low man on the totem pole after the French, English and Spanish for claiming anything west of the Mississippi. It was the catalyst for the opening of the West.”
The differences between the United States referred to in Jefferson´s letter and the nation we know today are so great they defy imagination. In 1803, the U.S. ended at the Mississippi River. Two-thirds of all non-native Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. To them, the West and Midwest were unknown wildernesses. Nothing moved faster than a horse, roads were few and primitive, and most goods were shipped by river. Even Jefferson, one of the most brilliant men of his time, believed that the mountains of Virginia could be the highest on the continent and that it was possible to reach the Pacific by boat.
His goal of “extending the external commerce of the United States” was historic in its implications. The entire continent west of the Mississippi was up for grabs. The United States, Spain, France, Britain and Russia — to say nothing of its original inhabitants — all had designs on it.
Two centuries later, parts of Jefferson´s letter read like a land grab.
It was expedient, he wrote, to encourage the American Indian tribes “to abandon hunting, to apply to the raising stock, to agriculture and domestic manufacture, and thereby prove to themselves that less land and labor will maintain them in this, better than in their former mode of living. The extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become useless, and they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms, and of increasing their domestic comforts. … Experience and reflection will develop to them the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare and we want, for what we can spare and they want.”
The stakes were high. The nation first to lay a claim through exploration stood to gain the West´s lucrative fur trade, access to the markets of the Pacific, and, in Jefferson´s view, a land of liberty from sea to sea.
Three months after he wrote his letter to Congress seeking funding and two months after it was approved, France´s Napoleon immeasurably increased the new nation´s fortunes by selling the Louisiana Territory to the U.S. for $15 million. With a sweep of his pen, Jefferson doubled the size of the country, from the Mississippi River to what is now Montana.
“A lot of people even today think that the Lewis and Clark expedition happened because of the Louisiana Purchase, but it just isn´t true,” Jones said. “I think the Louisiana Purchase was a complete surprise to Jefferson. He had the expedition all planned out before it ever happened.”
“Jefferson was always wildly curious about the interior of the country,” Imhoff added. “He wanted to create an agrarian society, and you can´t have that without a land base. The expedition met his overall goals as far as commerce for the United States being well off, creating more room for an agrarian society and reaching out to the Indian tribes. The Louisiana Purchase was just a wonderfully fortuitous circumstance. It gave him a freer hand to do what he´d always wanted to do.”
Idaho wasn´t part of the Louisiana Purchase, but Lewis and Clark´s success in reaching the Pacific allowed the United States to claim the Oregon region, which included present-day Idaho, Oregon and Washington.
Idaho was the most difficult part of their journey. On Aug. 12, 1805, Lewis climbed to the summit of the Lemhi Pass, and where he expected to discover a river or plains extending to the Pacific, he became the first white man to see the daunting mountains of Idaho. It was there, near what is now the town of Tendoy, that Jefferson´s dream of an easy water route to the Pacific succumbed to the realities of geography.
“You can´t tell the story of Lewis and Clark without the incredible story of crossing the mountains,” Imhoff said. “You can´t tell it without including the moment when Lewis looked out expecting to see his route to the Pacific and instead he saw Idaho. … Idaho plays an incredible role on a lot of levels. It´s absolutely pivotal to the Lewis and Clark story.”
Idaho also will play a role in the bicentennial kickoff at Monticello. Celeste Becia of the Idaho Department of ommerce says the state will have “30 to 40 people there, representing the Commerce Department, the Historical Society, the governor´s Lewis and Clark committee, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management in Idaho, and local Lewis and Clark organizations from towns throughout the state.”
Two thousand Idaho-shaped Lewis and Clark pins will be distributed to visitors to Idaho´s booth, and the exposition´s largest exhibit will be from Idaho. Fashioned by Cottonwood artists Dennis Sullivan and Frances Conklin, it´s an 80-foot chain-saw carving of the expedition as experienced by “Seaman,” Meriwether Lewis´ dog.
Four governors, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, and Tex Hall, president of the National Congress of American Indians, will be among those attending Saturday´s kickoff. President Bush has been invited. A capacity crowd of 4,000 is expected for the ceremonies, which will be held on the lawn of Jefferson´s Monticello home.
“It´s interesting how much the Lewis and Clark story is striking a chord with Americans today,” Imhoff said. “The Chicago Tribune does a month-by-month countdown of the hip things to do in the world. In January of 2003, the hip place to be is Monticello.”