By RICK MONTGOMERY
The Kansas City Star
March 15, 2004
ST. LOUIS — A crowd of thousands gathered Sunday under the Gateway Arch to mark the bicentennial of a land deal that opened the nation's door to a cross-continental expedition.
The raising of three national flags on the west bank of the Mississippi River paid colorful tribute to the March 1804 transfer of the vast Upper Louisiana Territory from Spain to France to the United States.
The ceremony was the third of 15 “national signature events” to honor the Lewis and Clark expedition with a three-year, westward-blazing commemoration poised to pass through the Kansas City region this summer.
As planned, diversity reigned Sunday at St. Louis' Three Flags Festival. Below the American, French and Spanish flags snapped the smaller flags of more than 40 American Indian tribes, whose homelands made up much of the Louisiana Purchase two centuries ago.
The modern-day leaders of the Osage and other tribal nations were happy to attend the ceremonies, hoping to remind all Americans of the history and culture of the earliest inhabitants.
Wearing a feathered headdress, National Congress of American Indians President Tex G. Hall, also known as Red Tipped Arrow, gazed toward St. Louis' downtown skyline.
“My, have you grown, tremendously” since the days the Osage called the region home, he said.
The United States Mint used the occasion to introduce its new nickel commemorating the exploration of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who pushed upstream on the Missouri River from Illinois about 10 weeks after officials signed the transfer of lands in St. Louis.
The new nickels were brought to Sunday's festivities in a Brink's truck, and one million were sold or individually given away to children within three hours.
About 4,000 people – more than double the French and Creole populations of St Louis in 1804 – attended the flag-raising ceremony. It was the culmination of six days of festivities, seminars and art exhibits linked to the Lewis and Clark observance.
At Forest Park, visitors streamed through Corps of Discovery II, a traveling exhibit of the National Park Service. The tractor-trailer storybook of Lewis and Clark will match the explorers' pace all the way to the Oregon coast, stopping at Fort Osage in mid-June.
The exhibit will set up for several days at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers, in Kansas City's West Bottoms, beginning June 26.
Inside an octagonal tent, visitors Sunday to Corps of Discovery II held audio devices to their ears and listened to a 35-minute narrative of the expedition. Nearby, the “Tent of Many Voices” featured talks from experts in natural resources, history and American Indian culture.
“People see my mustache and say, ‘Are you with the Village People?'” joked Darrell Martin of the Gros Ventre Nation, wearing the full regalia of his native tribe.
Martin explained to a crowd how foods, alcohol and sugars brought by Europeans into Western lands triggered a rash of diabetes in Indians that continues today.
Under the Gateway Arch, exploration re-enactors from nearby St. Charles, Mo., yanked off their military hats and bowed their heads to an Osage prayer. The Spanish flag was unfurled after a moment of silence remembering the victims of last week's terrorist bomb blasts in Madrid.
“Today,” said Spanish Ambassador Francisco Viqueira, “we are all Americans.”
Historian Dayton Duncan, master of ceremonies for the flag-raising, noted that Spain had ceded the vast territory west of the Mississippi River back to France just prior to the Louisiana Purchase.
“At the time,” Duncan said, North America “was on its way to being carved up into a multitude of colonies and nations,” as happened to South America.
Without the Louisiana Purchase, “the United States could have remained a nation on the Atlantic shore – the Brazil of North America,” Duncan said.
The acquisition of Louisiana Territory – more than 820,000 square miles – doubled the size of the nation and ultimately formed all or parts of 15 states, including Missouri and Kansas. Historians have called the $15 million transaction – amounting to about 3 cents per acre – the biggest real estate bargain in American history.
Back then, however, the deal was hardly a popular slam-dunk for the United States. Jefferson later admitted he “stretched the Constitution until it cracked” to justify the purchase.
On top of that, nobody knew for sure the boundaries of the territory. There were scattered accounts of sprawling mountains of salt, 7-foot-tall natives and woolly mammoths with huge tusks.
In May 1804, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and a crew of about 40 set out on a military mission up the length of the Missouri River, to explore and report back to Jefferson what they found.
The journey took 28 months. They encountered nearly 50 native tribes. Peace medals handed out to tribal leaders bore the clasped-hand insignia now featured on the back of the new nickels.
“I think it's awesome,” said 9-year-old Jake Black as he gazed upon the newly minted commemorative coin in his palm. The boy and his family from Washington, Okla., stopped here as part of a spring vacation to Chicago.
“I see two hands,” he said of the tail side of the coin, “and a couple of things that look like little axes.”
No, Jake, they're peace pipes.
“Oh,” he said, looking closer. “Cooool!”