Historic Reality Check

When they pushed up the Missouri River into the wilds of America on a spring day in 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark commanded a keelboat groaning with supplies: gunpowder, muskets and brass kettles, beads and mirrors to trade with the Indians, compasses and chronometers to map a path into the unknown.

In 1997, as the bicentennial of that bold departure approached, historian Carolyn Gilman decided to find out what had happened to that inventory.

She had no idea what she was getting herself into.

It took Lewis and Clark 28 months to make their way from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back. It took Gilman seven years to track down the few dozen artifacts she can be certain accompanied them.

Thanks to the remarkable journals the explorers kept, scholars can recount each day of the expedition in intimate detail: what the men ate, where they hiked, what they saw, who suffered diarrhea, who pitched with insomnia, who stole whiskey from the commanders’ stash.

But the objects that the Corps of Discovery used, traded and collected during that epic trek have been subjected to far less scrutiny.

Dozens of museums from Massachusetts to Oregon display artifacts that have been billed, over the years, as expedition originals: an air gun that could fire 22 rounds, a buffalo-skin robe painted with fierce warriors, silver peace medals handed out to tribal chiefs.

Until Gilman started her project, however, no one had attempted a comprehensive catalog of Lewis and Clark memorabilia -- or tried to separate the authentic from the fraudulent. No one had tried to figure out, piece by piece, what happened to the scientific specimens, the supplies and the Native American curiosities the explorers brought back to this frontier town in September 1806.

“This was one huge detective story,” said Robert Archibald, who is directing three years of tributes to the expedition as president of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial.

Working mostly alone, sometimes with a researcher, Gilman finished her sleuthing just in time to mount a museum exhibition for this year’s commemorations. “Lewis & Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition” opened in January here at the Missouri History Museum and will tour over the next two years to Philadelphia, Denver, Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C.

Traveling to nearly 50 museums and five Native American reservations, Gilman stumbled across some great stories in her research:

There was the eccentric old woman, a descendant of Clark, who held a superb collection of his maps in a shuttered apartment and who refused, for some reason, to open any mail that arrived on a Wednesday. And there was the shady St. Louis shopkeeper who in 1842 hustled to Switzerland several stunning Indian robes that may well have been expedition originals.

Still, her research by its nature was often dry and technical. Gilman, 49, sometimes found herself wondering why she bothered.

Why did it matter if this iron battle ax was the precise one the explorers forged in the icy bleakness of what is now North Dakota to trade with the Mandan Indians for corn? Why was it important to know if this brass spyglass was the very one Lewis put to his eye in a sun-streaked valley, straining to see whether the approaching warriors were friend or foe?

Gilman answered her doubts with this: She had a duty to set the record straight.

“Museums deal in the authentic,” she said. “That’s what sets us apart from theme parks and those restaurants that put old-timey stuff on the walls.”

Or as James Ronda, a noted scholar of the expedition, put it: “We have a moral obligation to the past to get it right.”

The expedition’s story begins in 1803, when President Jefferson directed his personal secretary, Capt. Meriwether Lewis, to gather a military party and head west to find “the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce.” Along the way, the explorers were to map the terrain, study the language and customs of Indian tribes and collect samples of the West’s exotic plants, animals and minerals.

Lewis selected his former Army commander, Lt. William Clark, to join him at the helm of the expedition. Together, they recruited nearly three dozen adventurers for the trip.

Lewis and Clark ran 1,420% over budget. They had to dismiss a man for deserting and another for insubordination; they had to bury a young sergeant on the banks of an unnamed river. But on Nov. 7, 1805 -- 4,142 perilous miles from their first camp at the mouth of the Missouri -- Clark wrote in his journal: “Ocian in view! O! the joy!”

The Corps of Discovery had accomplished every goal the president had set for them.

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Historian’s quest

Gilman’s own journey of discovery began in the archives of the Missouri Historical Society, where she is on staff as a special projects historian. She studied more than 100 pieces in the society’s permanent collection, among them such treasures as the frayed letter of credit from Jefferson that Lewis took with him on the journey.

Working off tips from other curators and her own hunches, Gilman then traveled the country to inspect hundreds of items claimed as expedition souvenirs by museums and collectors.

She could tell at a glance that some were fakes, like the antler-handle knife with a curved blade; that style that didn’t come into vogue until a generation after the expedition. Other pieces, including many of Clark’s hand-drawn maps, she was quick to accept as authentic because they had been passed in an unbroken chain of custody from the explorers to their descendants.

And then there were moments of pure serendipity, such as the spring morning in 2001 when a woman in Austin, Texas, brought an elaborate scroll to be appraised on the PBS series “Antiques Roadshow.” It turned out to be the 1802 document commissioning Lewis as a captain in the U.S. infantry -- a scrap of history Gilman had been hunting down for years.

Most of the other objects she pursued required much more tedious research.

To determine whether an Indian baby carrier belonging to a Boston museum had been collected by Lewis and Clark, she rummaged through military records of the early 19th century. She discovered that several Army officers had retraced the explorers’ path up the Missouri River, trading with tribal chiefs along the way. Losing herself in a huge leather-bound museum ledger, Gilman found one of those officers listed as the donor of the baby carrier.

It was a magnificent piece of art, she concluded. It just wasn’t an expedition original.

To assess whether a majestic buffalo-skin robe was collected by Clark as a gift for Jefferson, Gilman spent days at the third president’s Virginia estate, reading 200-year-old descriptions of the garment. One writer mentioned rows of painted green warriors. The robe held out as Clark’s gift had not a single green figure. Again, she concluded -- with some sorrow -- that it had not come from the explorers.

In the end, Gilman identified just 50 artifacts she felt sure came from the expedition, including 12 from the Missouri Historical Society’s permanent collection.

In a parallel effort at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, associate curator Castle McLaughlin reviewed nearly 70 Native American artifacts linked to Lewis and Clark. She could authenticate only six. Earlier catalogs, she concluded, relied on “a lot of wishful thinking.”

Gilman understands the temptation. She hated to shatter the images she could see in her mind’s eye: Sacagawea, the expedition’s Indian guide, running her hands along the fine blue beads decorating the baby carrier. Jefferson studying the buffalo robe in wonder, then proudly hanging it in his front hall.

“It’s very difficult to give up a wonderful artifact just because it’s not authentic,” she said. “Sometimes, you feel like saying, ‘Damn the facts. Why do they always have to interfere?’ ”

In the final chapter of a book she wrote to accompany the exhibition, Gilman explains why it’s so hard to nail down the facts.

When the explorers made their triumphal return to St. Louis in September 1806, the public clamored to hear their adventures. But no one thought to preserve their cooking pots for posterity. Their supplies were auctioned off as Army surplus for $408.62. Only one verifiable piece of equipment survives, a pocket compass Clark gave a family friend, Gilman writes in “Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide.”

The captains were more careful with their scientific specimens and Native American souvenirs, sending them to the leading museums of the day for research. But over time, the institutions folded, merged, went up in flames; the artifacts were lost, mislabeled, sold.

Some expedition treasures ended up displayed in hokey halls of curiosities, next to wax models of Siamese twins and a chimpanzee known as Mademoiselle Fanny.

Even items that stayed within the explorers’ families often lacked the documentation that museum curators need to determine authenticity. With each generation, new myths sprang up. “It starts out as a family story of ‘This could be from the expedition.’ Two generations later, it’s ‘This is from the expedition,’ ” said Peyton C. Clark, a great-great-great-grandson of William Clark.

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Family tales

The family legend that most intrigued Gilman concerned a brass telescope wrapped in mahogany and leather.

The telescope belonged to Lewis; that was beyond dispute. His relatives, who had donated it to the Missouri Historical Society, swore it was the famed spyglass the explorer pulled out so often on his journey. Gilman hoped to prove it.

Inspired by the TV show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” she asked a restoration expert to take apart the telescope and swab every crevice for stray pollen or hair.

If he could find residue from a Ponderosa pine or a Pacific yew, if he could match DNA to a grizzly bear, a prairie dog or a mule deer -- if he could come up with some trace of a species that thrives only west of the Rockies -- it would prove the spyglass had made the trip with Lewis.

As it turned out, the only pollen was from East Coast sycamore and pine. But curled inside the eyepiece was a single, tantalizing hair. Gilman was beside herself with anticipation -- until the forensic tests came back:

The reddish hair came from a camel.

A camel, in the American West? Perhaps this wasn’t Lewis’ telescope after all? Gilman was stumped, until she thought of calling historians at Colonial Williamsburg. From them, she learned that at the turn of the 19th century, brushes made of bristled camel hair were commonly used to clean lenses. Mystery solved -- to no one’s satisfaction.

“Carolyn’s doing her job, and that’s fine, but no one in the family has any doubt that it’s the telescope” from the expedition, said Jane Lewis Sale Henley, a grandniece of the explorer. “We can’t imagine there would be any other.”

With a smile, Gilman admits she, too, is half-convinced.

“Negative evidence doesn’t prove anything,” she said. “Maybe we didn’t look in the right cranny to find pollen from a Ponderosa pine. Or maybe Lewis just cleaned his instruments well.”

The telescope sits front and center in Gilman’s bicentennial exhibition, which includes hundreds of period pieces along with the 50 authentic artifacts. A label explains that it may -- or may not -- be the spyglass Lewis pulled out so often as he pushed onward, into the unknown.

“As professional historians, we drive people crazy with our weasel words: ‘perhaps,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘we think,’ ” Gilman said apologetically. “But that’s what history’s all about.”

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On the Web

Several websites offer glimpses of artifacts from the Lewis and Clark expedition and information about the journey. Among them:

Missouri Historical Society:

www.lewisandclarkexhibit.org/

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology:

www.peabody.harvard.edu/LewisandClark/

Thomas Jefferson’s estate, Monticello:

www.monticello.org/jefferson/lewisandclark/

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Compiled by Times staff writer Stephanie Simon