Reinventing Empire, Celebrating Commerce: Two Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibitions

Lewis and Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition. Curated by Carolyn Gilman. Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, January to August 2004; Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, November 2004 to March 2005; Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, May to September 2005; Oregon Historical Society, Portland, November 11, 2005, to March 11, 2006; National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, May to September 2006. http://www.lewisandclarkexhibit.org/

Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis and Clark and the Revealing of America. Library of Congress, Northwest Galleries and Pavilion, Washington, D.C., July 24 to November 29, 2003; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, July 10 to October 3, 2004; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, November 14, 2004, to January 9, 2005; Museum of History and Industry, Seattle, Washington, April 12 to June 12, 2005. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/lewisandclark/lewisandclark.html

In 1804, with a mandate to discover the deeply coveted and highly imagined Northwest Passage, two U.S. soldiers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, led a troop of about four dozen men up the Missouri River and into what many perceived to be terra incognita. Motivated by intertwining purposes—imperial conquest, commercial prospects, geopolitical competition, and enlightenment science—Thomas Jefferson was the "author," as Lewis put it, of this expedition. Jefferson was passionately committed to "extending & strengthening the authority of reason & justice" through discovering, that is, naming, mapping, and claiming, parts of the North American continent yet to be seen by Euro-Americans.¹

Returning to St. Louis more than two years later, Lewis and Clark were cast as patriotic heroes of exciting and dangerous frontier narratives. Despite this fanfare, their mission did not qualify as a success. As James P. Ronda writes, the Corps of Discovery (Jefferson's name for the expedition) was considered "at best a disappointment and at worst an embarrassing failure."² It did not establish consistent diplomatic relations with the tribes of indigenous people encountered along the trail. It did not find a waterway connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific, which was always the primary "object," as Jefferson put it, of their "mission."³ A colossal and unforeseen opponent, the Rocky Mountains impeded a direct and profitable path between the east and the west. Once it was clear he could not claim the Northwest Passage as the expedition's triumphant result, Jefferson began stressing the importance of its scientific discoveries, but Lewis never wrote a word of his findings. A man who had served as Jefferson's secretary for two years, Lewis committed suicide in 1809 amid questions about his financial accounts. In subsequent years, Lewis and Clark's expedition became, for the most part, a story of grand adventure, but "without meaningful consequences."⁴ With the explorations of John Charles Frémont, John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, and F. V. Hayden emerging into prominence, Lewis and Clark faded from cultural memory.⁵

However, at the turn of the last century, they were "reborn" as American icons "to represent triumphant American nationalism."⁶ For example, the 1905 World's Fair in Portland, Oregon, was named "The Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair." Modeled after the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and its celebration of Columbus's "discovery," this centennial commemoration of Lewis and Clark was invented, according to historian William L. Lang, to "promote the city, the state, and the region, especially the commercial potential for the area's future."⁷ And now, across the country, exhibits, books, reenactments, television and radio programs, costume balls, guided tours, symposiums, stamp booklets, public sculptures, and advertisements are commemorating the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial with a conviction that belies the disappointments that pushed the expedition into its nineteenth-century obscurity. Together, these events and materials are doing far more than commemorating the histories Lewis and Clark have come to emblematize; they are reinscribing the invention of its importance.

Few of Lewis and Clark's contemporaries could see the...