The Significance of the National Lewis and Clark Commemoration

Abstract

The commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of transcontinental trek that began when Meriwether Lewis met up with William Clark near Clarksville, Indiana, occurs in October 2003 at the Falls of the Ohio. The event will run from October 14 to 26, exactly two hundred years after the explorers rendezvoused at the Falls, where they spent twelve days selecting members of the crew that became the Corps of Discovery. While this, like other events in the two-year-long national celebration of Lewis and Clark's expedition, will be an enjoyable occasion, in the end the important question will be whether or not it will leave any discernible legacy and, if so, what that legacy will be. To some extent the answer will depend upon how the com memoration affects the way future historians explain the expedition. Certainly in the past historians have always interpreted Lewis and Clark's adventure in ways that reflected their own times. For example, William Grimshaw wrote widely read national history in 1830, in the early years of the first industrial revolution, as steamboats replaced keelboats and sailing ships and locomotives supplanted wagons drawn by horses, mules, and oxen. From his vantage point, resources were unlimited, optimism was unbounded, and there still seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of what people then called frontier. Grimshaw's narrative placed little value on wilderness and none on Indian people. What was important about the Louisiana Purchase, he said, was that a new field of enterprise is opened, and new productions are added to the rich variety of their former catalogue. He viewed the expedition as commercial enterprise undertaken to render the purchase of utmost benefit... to explore the river Missouri and the contiguous countries, and discover the best communication with the Pacific Ocean. Grimshaw, who had no interest in the people who inhabited the lands described by Lewis and Clark, also had no interest in the flora and fauna. For him, Indian people and native