Columnist Susan Snyder: Expedition’s story worth a second look

Friday, June 24, 2005 | 3:29 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursday and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

WEEKEND EDITION

June 25-26, 2005

I am on vacation.

Neener.

Actually, the journey started Friday from the Lewis & Clark State Historic Site visitor center in Hartford, Ill. The Other and I are spending the first half of our trip pedaling the first 550 miles of the Lewis & Clark Trail.

Yes, I know they traveled by water through Missouri, which we will cross on our way to Council Bluffs, Iowa. But one can't ride a bicycle in the Missouri River.

Besides, Americans have never allowed historic accuracy obscure capitalism's path.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark certainly didn't. And as we travel along the corridor made famous by the Corps of Discovery from 1803 to 1805, it's going to be hard to ignore the idea that after 200 years, the government is still selling us the vision.

In 1803 Lewis estimated the journey would cost $2,500.

To date, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities has spent $2.5 million for 28 projects relating to commemoration of the expedition's bicentennial. They began considering bicentennial projects and awarding grants in fiscal 1995, which started in October 1994.

This doesn't take into account the thousands of dollars in state and local grants and matching funds generated for projects, exhibits, workshops and re-enactments in the 11 states along the expedition's corridor.

The grants also include projects in a few states with no direct geographical connection to the route. There was $2,000 for a New Jersey Web site illustrating Philadelphia's connections to Lewis and Clark and $30,000 for an expedition exhibit at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello home in Virginia.

It's an amazingly big tourism campaign for a couple of guys who, if we will admit it, weren't the first to encounter, see or name all that they saw.

Those willing to look beyond the one, most-popular version of the story will undoubtedly see the anti-expedition Web sites and demonstrations it has elicited. We forget, or maybe we simply don't want to think about, the fact that our milestone was the beginning of the end for thousands of American Indians.

A group of Lakotas recently told a pair of Lewis and Clark re-enactors in South Dakota they were "re-enacting genocide" and gave the men a blanket as a "symbolic blanket of smallpox," the Indian Country Today newspaper reported May 17.

The words would sting less if they weren't true.

Millions of dollars and 200 years later, I hope to discover that we have broadened and updated our view of the Corps of Discovery.

I hope to see in the markers and musuems more than the grandstanding "Schoolhouse Rock" version of how our West was conquered.

I hope to learn something of the people whose cultures were obliterated by government's need to explore and conquer "for the purposes of commerce," as President Thomas Jefferson wrote in his June 20, 1803, instructions to Lewis.

The commerce of discovery is alive and well as we still make the journey through the maps, guidebooks, souvenirs, museums and re-enactments funded by our government's money.

What we choose to see, record and remember along the way is, as it was for Lewis and Clark, totally up to us.