Robot May Prove Mettle in Search

When Meriwether Lewis pushed his “great experiment” into the Missouri River near present-day Great Falls in 1805, he surely beamed.

“She lay like a cork,” he wrote in his journal.

But the iron-framed boat that Lewis designed floated only for a moment before it leaked and sank, taking his high spirits with it.

“The circumstance mortified me not a little,” he wrote.

Lewis and expedition co-commander William Clark gave the boat a proper burial in a field near the river’s great falls. It was never mentioned again.

Now archeologist Ken Karsmizki intends to find it.

Karsmizki, of the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles, Ore., has enlisted the help of an Air Force robot equipped with a giant metal detector, and will set out this month to see if he can find the boat. Karsmizki believes it is still buried.

“What we would learn that nobody knows is exactly what that thing looked like, the engineering,” Karsmizki said.

The journals say Lewis designed the frame, which was fabricated by Harper’s Ferry arsenal in West Virginia. The expedition carried the 220-pound frame to the great falls, and assembled it at their White Bear Island camp.

The frame came in 10 sections, so it could be adjusted depending on the availability of materials for covering it. Fully assembled, the boat was 36 feet long, 2 1/2 feet deep and 4 1/2 feet wide.

The crew covered the frame with elk and buffalo hides and sealed it with a mixture of beeswax, animal fat and charcoal.

“But it didn’t work,” Karsmizki said. “It floated briefly.”

Lewis was determined that with more time, he could fix the boat. But pressured to get across the Rocky Mountains before winter, they buried it along with a cache of other items they intended to dig up on their return trip the following year. They wrote of returning to the cache, but never mentioned the boat frame again. Karsmizki believes it’s still there, but not everyone agrees.

Dick Boss of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center said he thinks the boat is long gone.

“We believe it would’ve made more sense to take that with them,” he said.

Karsmizki said there’s only one way to find out.

“If you never look . . . you’ll never know,” he said.

Based on Lewis and Clark’s maps and journals and data gathered from a hand-held metal detector, Karsmizki has narrowed the coverage area to 15 acres.

David Weston, of TechLink, a NASA-funded program at Montana State University that matched Karsmizki with the Air Force’s technology, said there’s probably other metal buried in the field.

“The magnetometer system will find whatever metal is buried up there,” he said. “It’s also the site of Lewis and Clark’s camp, so they should find that as well. There’s also an irrigation pipe, buried power lines, any junk left by two generations of farmers.”

Karsmizki said the research suggests the boat would be about 60% intact, and the robot will detect any rust. Its size and shape would help to differentiate it from other objects.

“What would have taken Karsmizki two years will take the robot a couple of days,” he said.

He said the Air Force is lending its robot and personnel rent-free. Paul Carpenter, technology transfer manager at Tyndall, said the project gives the Air Force a chance to prove the versatility of military technology.