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Rediscovering Lewis
& Clark
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St. Charles
prepares for Bi-Centennial commemoration of 2004.
By Kevin Kipp
Over dessert one night last September, Ray Harmon agreed to the
last wish of his dying friend Glen Bishop. Harmon would assemble
a board to raise the better part of $3.2 million for a project Bishop,
76, knew he wouldn’t be around to see completed: the Lewis & Clark
Boat House & Nature Center.
Bishop spent the better part of the last two decades building replicas
of the boats that Lewis & Clark used to explore the Louisiana Territory
nearly 200 years ago: a 55-foot, seven-ton keelboat and two 40-foot,
three-ton pirogues.
He wanted a permanent home for the boats, a facility that would
also preserve the heritage of the expedition, and he wanted it in
time for the Lewis & Clark bicentennial commemoration.
“Glen was a gifted craftsman,” says Harmon, chairman of Growing
Family First Foto. “And while he had the foresight to establish
a 501(c)(3) [Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, Mo., Inc.], he
realized that running an organization and fundraising were not his
strengths.”
Harmon and Bishop, a retired carpenter, general contractor, electrical
contractor and stained-glass retailer, attended St. Charles High
School together. Apparently in St. Charles, founders of international
corporations with sales over $100 million hang out with owners of
small businesses. Their friendship deepened over the years.
“My immediate thought was to enlist the aid of Bill Weber,” Harmon
says. Weber, a go-to guy in St. Charles, headed up the successful
effort to build the Olympic-standard Rec-Plex in St. Peters. Weber
and Bishop had teamed up to build the YMCA in St. Charles in the
’60s. Weber enthusiastically agreed to co-chair the project, calling
it “fantastic for the St. Charles community and the whole metropolitan
area.”
Joanne Bishop says that when cancer took her husband a little more
than a month later, “he knew the boathouse was in capable hands.”
“It didn’t matter what Glen asked me to do, I would have done it”
Harmon says. “This project happens to be absolutely incredible.”
Robert Archibald, president of the Missouri Historical Society,
agrees: “They’ve done a stupendous job building the replicas. I
think they’ll be a major public attraction and ought to have a permanent
public display.
Above:
Glen Bishop, 1925–2001, founder of the Discovery Expedition of
St. Charles, Mo., Inc.
“The Lewis & Clark bicentennial is an opportunity to call the nation’s
attention to the really central role St. Louis played in the creation
of what we know as the United States,” he continues, “and to attract
people and dollars.”
Steve Powell, director of the Greater St. Charles Convention & Visitors
Bureau, echoes Archibald. “The Louisiana Purchase essentially doubled
the size of the country,” he says. “Exploring that new territory
was an incredible accomplishment, and has all the elements of heroism:
bravery, danger, adventure. The Boat House and Nature Center makes
that legacy permanent, and now is the time to do it so that it becomes
a part of the national commemoration.”
Powell estimates that half a million people will participate in
Lewis & Clark activities in St. Charles and throughout the St. Louis
area in May 2004...“not to mention all the people who will recreate
the journey for their own personal experiences for a couple years
after that.”
Archibald says “literally dozens of events are planned throughout
the metropolitan area” for the bicentennial, including his own organization’s
National Bicentennial Exhibition, the largest collection of expedition
artifacts ever assembled.
Of the Discovery Expedition reenactments Archibald says, “They give
the public an idea of how really arduous the expedition was. You
can’t imagine what it must have been like to take these boats up
the Missouri River.”
Above:
Discovery Expedition volunteers will reenact in 2003 to 2006
Lewis & Clark’s journey on the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers
using two 40-foot, 3-ton pirogues (shown here) and a 55-foot, 7-ton
keelboat.
Just look at that keelboat...
Stephen Ambrose, author of Undaunted Courage, did during
a visit to St. Charles in 1996. He said simply, “What a triumph.”
Two weeks later, Bishop and a dozen reenactors sailed for St. Joseph,
Mo., re-creating the first seven weeks of the 1804-1806 expedition.
Each year since, Discovery Expedition volunteers have spent four
to eight weeks re-creating a portion of the 18th century adventure
on the Ohio, Mississippi or Missouri Rivers. Like their predecessors,
they sail separated from swift waters and eternity only by thin-but-sturdy
layers of wood. Their buckskins and uniforms are the dress of 1804.
Their weapons are firelocks. They cook over campfires. They sleep
under canvas. They know their history. Hell, they live it.
And they teach it.
According to a Discovery Expedition brochure, “By bringing Lewis
& Clark to life on the banks of rivers—and in classrooms and gyms—Discovery
Expedition re-enactors have helped some 80,000 school children see
their teachers as storytellers and know that history is high adventure.”
What’s more, 300,000 visitors—some avid students of history, some
newly curious—have come to the riverbanks to inspect the boats,
experience the campsites, and enjoy demonstrations of technology
and events described in the Lewis & Clark journals.
Significant support for the facility has already materialized. Responding
to the exhortations of Powell and State Sen. Chuck Gross (R-23rd)
more than a year ago, Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) procured $500,000 in
federal funds for the project. Moreover, the city of St. Charles
will lease $200,000 worth of ground to Discovery Expedition in a
newly-named riverfront park—Bishop’s Landing—for $1 a year.
And now T.R. Hughes Commercial Division has agreed to build the
12,800-square-foot facility at cost. Weber is delighted. “Tom Hughes’
decision will save us six-figures. And I expect that if he’s that
committed to the project, he’ll persuade a good number of his subcontractors
to share his enthusiasm.”
Heretofore, the Discovery Expedition board had concerned itself
primarily with activities, like the third-weekend-of-every-May Lewis
& Clark Heritage Days in St. Charles’ Frontier Park and out-on-the-rivers
re-enactments.
Darold Jackson, a retired Monsanto executive, continues as president
of the reconstituted board that Harmon and Weber co-chair. He and
his wife Helen Marie “Mimi” Jackson have also headed the not-for-profit
Lewis & Clark Center on Historic Main Street in St. Charles for
17 years.
Their facility is roughly 2,000 square feet, and became a registered
trail site with the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation—to Lewis
& Clark devotees the foundation is somewhat like what the AICPA
is to accountants—13 years ago.
(Rounding out the board are Ambrose, Bert Walker of Stifel, Nicolaus;
attorneys Keith Hazelwood and Randy Weber of Hazelwood & Weber LLC;
businesswomen and former St. Charles City Council members Nancy
Matheny and Mary West; St. Peters Alderman Len Pagano; Jim Gladwin,
director of the Lindenwood’s University’s Boone Home; State Rep.
Carl Bearden (R-16th), a development officer for Lindenwood University;
James Denny, historian with the Department of Natural Resources;
Jim Wilson from the Missouri Department of Conservation; and St.
Charles business owners John Dengler, Jerry Garret, Peter Geery,
Julie Bishop Day and Joanne Bishop.)
The Jacksons and the Bishops worked closely to devise in the Lewis
& Clark Boat House & Nature Center a facility that would accommodate
their organizations’ merger. The first floor—a yet unnamed “demonstration
center”—will house the replicas. The second floor—a yet unnamed
“interpretive center”—will house exhibits being developed in partnership
with Conservation and DNR. They’ll deal with Missouri River heritage,
its ecosystem, and lessons of Lewis & Clark’s journey.
Either level can be named for a contribution of $250,000, Harmon
says. Plus, he’ll tell you about his friend Glen Bishop over dessert.
Napoleon’s
Folly
When the United States purchased the Louisiana
Territory from Napoleon in 1803, our then young country essentially
doubled in size. America suddenly stretched beyond the Mississippi
River, up the Missouri and out to the Continental Divide.
Foreign policy reverses in 1802 and 1803 persuaded Napoleon
to concentrate his resources and attention in Europe. Thus,
on April 11, 1803, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Charles
Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord offered the vast wilderness—850,000
square miles in all—to American diplomats James Monroe and
Robert Livingston. The price: $15 million.
When President Thomas Jefferson received news of his envoys’
purchase, he had already decided that the continent should
be explored, mapped and understood. He wanted to catalogue
its unknown resources, discover the Northwest Passage, and
establish relations with native peoples.
A year later, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
and some 45 stouthearts assembled on the banks of the Missouri
River in St. Charles, Mo., to launch the expedition that historian
Stephen Ambrose hails as “this nation’s Odyssey.”
Ambrose captures the distinction of the moment, 3:30 p.m.
on May 21, 1804, describing their departure from St. Charles:
As the keelboat turned her bow into the stream, Lewis and
his party cut themselves off from civilization. There would
be no more incoming letters, no orders, no commissions, no
fresh supplies, no reinforcements, nothing reaching them,
until they returned.
The captains expected to be gone for two years, perhaps more.
In all that time, in whatever lay ahead of them, whatever
decisions had to be made, they would receive no guidance from
their superiors. This was an independent command, such as
the U.S. Army had not previously seen and never would again.
Lewis and Clark were as free as Columbus, Magellan, or Cook
to make their mark on the sole basis of their own judgments
and abilities.
Their first afternoon together on the Missouri, they made
three and a quarter miles. They camped that night on the head
of an island on the starboard side. Spring storms continued
and a hard rain lasted through the night. At 6 a.m., May 22,
they were on their way.
Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, “Ready to Depart, April
— May 21, 1804”
The adventure began. The Discovery Expedition of St. Charles,
Mo., invites you to keep the adventure alive.
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Kevin Kipp runs Bubble Communications, a creative services and
community relations firm in St. Charles. |
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