Transcripts For CSPAN American History Tour Of Westward Expa

The programs youre watching. Tonight on cspans American History tour going west. First to st. Louis to visit the museum of westward expansion. Then a look at the expedition led by William Clark and mary lewis. And well speak with an author who wrote a book about the lewis and Clark Expedition. After that, first Transcontinental Railroad. After that journeys along the mormon trail, the pony express from the National Historic trails Interpretive Center in casper wyoming. Next a tour of the museum of westward expansion. Our tour guide is a historian with the National Park service. Were in the museum of westward expansion which is the main museum here at Jefferson National memorial. It tells the story of the settlement of the American West during the 19th century. Were actually underground directly below the 630foot stainless steel arch. Originally there were going to be surface buildings that would have housed museums and restaurant complexes and things like that but the National Parks service which runs the site and the architect both saw that the arch would be better served to stand alone, to be unrivaled by anything else. So they decided to put everything underground, all the infrastructure to run the arch, all of the Visitor Facilities would be beneath the ground. And so thats how this museum came to be located where it is, beneath where the arch is. In terms of what this museum has to offer our Current Museum, it basically holds a capsule story of westward expansion during the 19th century and its laid out with rings of time that are above our heads concentric rings that are almost like rip ples in a pond as if you dropped a stone into a pond and the ripples emanate outward and thats what happened here starting with our statue of Thomas Jefferson and extending through the 19th century so the first time ring is 1800 and the last one is 1900. Our Current Museum will not be here very much longer. In the next couple of years were going to be reconfiguring the museum so that it will probably tell a slightly different story than this one tells. Right now our museum tells a story that is pretty common to telling a general overview of westward expansion and the western part of the United States. What we want to do in our new exhibits is focus more on st. Louis role specifically in westward expansion so there will be a shift there. Another shift will be that when this museum was created back in 1976, it was more telling the story of kind of anglo white males going from the eastern part of the continent to the western part, which is a way that, in a sense, the way historians have looked at the westward expansion era, its been looked at in a different way and we start to see thats definitely telling part of the story. We want to tell the story of other cultural groups who went into the west, of native americans who were already living there of hispanic people who were already there and especially the story of st. Louis which already had existed for 40 years by the time the Louisiana Purchase was made when Thomas Jefferson authorized lewis and clark to go into the west. Immediately after the Louisiana Purchase, lewis and clark went on their famous journey of exploration out to the west coast and they opened a new era in American History where it was an idea that the government would have explorers, mostly people who were in the military, go into the west and try to identify the important things that were located in that area. It was something that the 18th century minds, that Thomas Jefferson felt was important. It became a legacy so even after jefferson was long gone, there were still groups of explorers who were officially going into the west. There was a whole section of the army, the topographical corps that was founded in the 1830s with the specific goal of trying to map and describe the entire geographical area of what the United States occurred to considered to be its territory and the exploration kept going on through the 1870s and 1880s, there were still explorers going out there trying to quantify and qualify everything that they were seeing. So whether that needed to happen before people went out to settle or before some of the exploitation of the west for commercial purposes took place i guess is an open question but it was the way that, as i say, the kind of the orderly scientific mind of the 18th century looked at things and they felt this is the logical first step, that we would send people out to explore. Unfortunately we dont have many items from these early explorers, none from lewis and clark. In our new museum we hope to show a number of artifacts that were used in the steven long expedition in 1818 and 1820 that are significant. But we do have a number of scientific instruments of the type that these explorers would have taken into the west with them, instruments like this transit that would have been used to help map the areas that they were seeing. We have other instruments that would help them to find their longitude, their place on the earth at any one time, and help them to actually draw the maps of where they were going, what they were seeing, that type of thing. But thats mostly what we have are the scientific instruments that would have been used by the explorers. In addition to actual government exploration, a lot of the west was actually explored by people who we call today mountain men people who went into the west to trap beaver fur, in particular to try to sell and try to make money for them. A lot of them were actually involved in large fur trading companies. They were employees but they stayed in the mountains, they lived out there year round. And they just by virtue of the fact that they were trying to find areas where beaver were located, went into areas that only native americans had seen before them. It just happened that by virtue of this commercial enterprise that these guys found probably more than the official voyages of exploration did that were funded by the government. This part of the museum tells the story of the overland pioneers who started to go west in large numbers in the early 1840s and continued right through the end of the 1860s, up until the time when the Transcontinental Railroad started to be built. The idea of going west during this time was an idea of trying to acquire free land, most of it in oregon, and then as time went on, of course, the finding of gold in california opened up a whole new chapter in the rush for people to get to the west. The idea in these early days was to get from an area like missouri all the way to the west coast. They were not really interested in settling in the areas in between. So they had to find first a way to get there and that ideal way was through south path in wyoming, and then the best conveyance to get them there, and that turned out to be a wagon like the one you can see over my shoulder. This type of wagon was usually built as a farm wagon but a lot of people either took the existing wagons they had on their farm or bought one like this one to go west in. Its really a lot smaller than a lot of people expect to see. A lot of people think of the famous conestoga wagons which are huge compared to this one but they were really too large to take over the terrain that the people were going to encounter. So it became kind of a system or a science going west. But you can kind of romanticize the trip because it was very dangerous. A lot of times in the hollywood movies we see them circling the wagons and the indians coming to pass. Very rarely, if ever did that happen. And there were very few deaths along the trail that had anything to do with the indians. The indians actually helped the pioneers more than hurting them. But the dangers came in first of all disease, which probably killed about 10 of the people who went west, mostly cholera and also things like drownings and accidental death by gunshot, being run over by a wagon. That happened to a lot of kids who were climbing on the wagon and fell off and the wheels would roll over them. So there was a real grim side to this mass migration. But it was really an unprecedented mass migration. Were talking about over 300,000 people during the period in question what kind of packed up everything and literally went west as forest greeley urged people to do. In our new exhibit we hope to take the covered wagon and tell the story more from the point of view of st. Louis because theres a lot of places in the west that tell the story of the overland pioneers with Visitors Centers and things like that on the oregon trail for you to learn about that. And we feel that people here should know how the overlanders got ready for their trip and a lot of them came through st. Louis and purchased things their wagons and their oxen and the food they were going to need and all their supplies. So thats what were going to dwell on a little more. Well still have the covered wagon on display and then well also have a lot of the items that they would take with them, real artifacts that people can look at, and talk about how they would pack a wagon and actually cram all these things in for this long journey that they take. By the 1850s, st. Louis was the third busiest port in the United States. And this levy which was just outside where the arch is today had hundreds of steamboats lined up side by side as a levy that were loading and unloading cargoes and passengers and taking goods to all different parts of the country. So its kind of an exciting part of the st. Louis story and one of the reasons why it was so central to the settlement of the west. The object that you see behind me is a pilots wheel. Its a real wheel. I guess you would call it a steering wheel, that was on a riverboat and a lot of people look at it and say its so huge, how did you steer . The way we have it displayed is a little it gives a false impression because where the hub of the wheel is would actually be where the floor was of the pilot. Only one half of the wheel stuck up above the level of the floor and it was still rather large. You were still grabbing on to the wheel pretty high up but you wouldnt see the entire wheel. Most of it was below the deck of the pilots house. Of course this recalls the days when mark twain was a riverboat pilot. He actually got his license here in st. Louis to be a pilot on the Mississippi River. Funny thing 1860s and 1870s the river transportation based here in st. Louis started to decline because railroads were taking up much of the slack of moving things from place to place. There were so many places in the American West that really were only accessible by railroad. The rivers were just too wild or went in the wrong direction. So there were some areas that could be still supplied by river but a lot was done by railroad after a certain point in time. St. Louis is still a port today, though. The difference is that its long series of barges that are taken up and down the river rather than dealing with the riverboats that they used to have, steam driven riverboats, and instead of having the port where it was which is in front of the arch on the levy, today the port of st. Louis stretches for 18 miles along the Mississippi River going on either side of the city center itself. So the port is kind of everywhere but where it was at the time and deals with a different type of boat and transport in the form of the barges than would have been dealt with back in the 19th century. The designer of the museum put the museum together in the early 1970s and he found when he created the layout that you see today, with the time rings up above and telling the chronological story, he sort of painted himself in a corner because where does it end . Of course it doesnt end anywhere. Time keeps marching on. Westward expansion era may have ended but United States history keeps going on and thats one reason why at the back of the museum theres pictures of things like the moonwalk and the atomic bomb going off and all those kinds of things, to show that history didnt stop. The main thing though, was what to do with the back wall, and it was his wife who actually came up with the solution to that problem, which was to they thought they could commemorate the lewis and clark trail and the idea that its still there today so if you want to go out and paddle or walk or drive the lewis and clark trail, you can still do that. So they sent a photographer out along the trail to take images during the same seasons that the explorers really would have been there and thats what resulted in these floortoceiling murals that you see here at the very back of the museum. So the lewis and clark trail itself and the west itself becomes kind of the alpha and the omega. Its what the explorers first saw when they went out there and its also what you can still see today. Tonights look at the people, places and events of westward expansion is part of cspans cities tour where we travel across the country highlighting the literary life and history of each city we visit. You can see more at cspan. Org. Click on the series tab, then click the link for cspan cities tour. Pompeys pillar is a sand stone rock formation in montana. Cspan took a tour of the Pompeys Pillar National Historic landmark. The natives have engraved on the face of this rock the figures of animals near which i marked my name and the day of the month and year. This morning, were going to walk up pompeys national monument, talk a little bit about the history of the site. Why is this place so important to the history not only of the United States but also the history of yellow stone county, montana, as well as the west in general. What i often tell students that come here, i want people to think about what was it like 200 years ago. Clark and his party are coming down the Yellow Stone River hoping to meet up with lewis and as theyre coming down the riv theyre having to stop at various intervals. What are they stopping for . Theyre stopping to hunt to gather food. Theyre stopping because. Immense herds of Buffalo Crossing the river and when i talk immense, im talking about herds of buffalo so large, they would stop for four to six hours for the buffalo to cross the river. Another reason they would stop is simply partly just curiosity and the natural intent of an explorer which is to look at the land and see the land. So as we think about all those things, and as we tell the story today, clark is coming down the yellow stone and that morning they had gotten up, they had hunted, they had seen immense herds of buffalo and he decides to get off the river and walk for a while and see this, this large sand stone outcrop here and i think its just naturally part of Human Interest to want to come to something large climb up on top of it and look around and thats exactly what he did. As part of an explorer, somebody looking to traverse the west, to create maps, to learn about things that the landscape the natural history, he ascends the pillar, goes up on top looks around triangulates his position, comes back and on his way down he leaves his mark, right over here, his signature thus leaving behind the only remaining onsite physical evidence of the entire lewis and Clark Expedition. This signature represents not just the visit of clark but i think of it as signifying the start of something a legacy that had actually in some ways been here before him. Clarks signature on july 25 1806, and then subsequently written about and chronicled in his journals led a lot of folks who traveled across the west to come to this rock, mark their names as well as drawings, inscriptions, all kinds of things, all over the rock. As you look from his signature directly to the left you can see all of these different signatures and marks and names and they cover the entire rock so throughout all along Pompeys Pillar are these signatures, hundreds of them starting off with the explorers and going on to the homesteaders traveling to the modern era, folks that tilled the land for agriculture. And im sure we would probably find some local High School Classes names on here from the 1960s to 1970s. Pompeys pillar tells a story that continues on today with this legacy of all these people had a have passed by so each time a visitor comes here, given that they can no longer write on the rock, they leave that legacy, too. But as i mentioned that legacy started before clark so if you look at the rock, you can see where there are markings on the rock in a reddish hue. Those are native american pictographs and petroglyphs. Ill explain why there was a significance to the site culturally as well as given the great and immense hunting available to the native americans that lived here and used the area. This rock i ascended and from its top had a most extensive view in every direction. After satisfying myself sufficiently in this delightful prospect of the extensive country around and the immense herds of elk and buffalo i ascended on. We are standing on the top of pom peas pillar national monument. We are able to tell a story over 200 years by standing in one spot. What is also remarkable is being able to stand here and see the landmarks and the landscape for what it was 200 years ago but also for what it is today. The first thing is the animals. When clark was here 200 years ago, this landscape was covered with buffalo elk antelope, all kind of different species who have been here and with them the same predators weve read of many times kouyate mountain lions and the wolf. You would ask why are those animals here . As you look at the cliff formation behind me, you see the natural break. This was a funnel. These rams run all the way to billings and quite a distance to the east so here we have a natural break where herds of buffalo, elk,th