Exhibition Will Explore Lewis and Clark’s Legacy

An exhibition commemorating the bicentennial of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s transcontinental journey will bring together almost all existing artifacts from that voyage for the first time since the explorers returned in 1806.

“The artifacts are extremely scattered,” said Carolyn Gilman, project director of the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, who came up with the idea for the exhibition. “When Lewis and Clark returned, there was no national museum, so their specimens, journals and personal items never went to a single place. They kind of went hither and yon.

“We realized that since the bicentennial was coming up, it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get those museums together for a single exhibition.”

A portion of the 6,000-square-foot exhibition, called “The National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibition,” will open in 2003 at the Library of Congress. The entire show will debut in 2004 at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis. It will travel to museums in Portland, Ore., Denver and Philadelphia, and close at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The exhibition will include the only surviving Native American artifacts presented to Lewis and Clark, which will be borrowed from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

The only known surviving zoological specimen, a woodpecker also owned by Harvard University, will also be on displayed. Other artifacts will include plant specimens and Lewis and Clark’s personal items, such as journals and scientific instruments.

Gilman’s labor of love is part of a three-year celebration organized by the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council.

In 1803, Congress approved $2,500 for President Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery to mount a small expedition to explore the West. Jefferson selected Lewis, a Virginia neighbor and his secretary, to lead the expedition, and Lewis picked his former Army comrade, Clark, to be co-leader. They started from St. Louis in May 1804, eventually reached the mouth of the Columbia River in what now is Washington state, and returned to St. Louis on Sept. 23, 1806.

The bicentennial celebration will include a re-creation of Jefferson’s “Indian Hall” at Monticello, his Virginia estate. Indian Hall displayed artifacts given to Jefferson by Lewis and Clark and Native Americans.

The re-creation of the Indian Hall artifacts will be done by Butch Thunder Hawk, a Hunkpapa Sioux artist who teaches at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, N.D. His students will assist him.

Thunder Hawk recently visited the Peabody Museum to examine the artifacts. They included pipes and shields and are made of eagle feathers, porcupine quills, dyed horsehair and other materials found in the wild. Thunder Hawk’s replicas will be as similar to the originals as possible.

“We’re trying to use the raw materials, which are sometimes hard to get. . . . We’re not going to cheat,” Thunder Hawk said. “We want all the traditional materials we can get, except for the eagle feathers. We have to check on the legality of that because they are protected by the U.S. government.”

Wayne Pruse, the chairman of the Art and Art Marketing Department at United Tribes Technical College, said the project has not been without controversy. Some Native Americans have argued that Lewis and Clark’s trip marked a low point in their culture, since they lost much of their land and their population to white men shortly afterward.

“It’s more of a ‘should this be celebrated?’ ” Pruse said. “It’s not really one tribe. It’s factions. But to them it’s the same question as, ‘Why celebrate Columbus Day?’ It was the beginning of the end.”

Thunder Hawk said he tried to address the issue head-on.

“We tried to contact some of the older people from each of the reservations to come in and give their blessing to us, and to offer thanks because they showed me how to do the work,” he said. “And they did.”