STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
	One of many Lewis and Clark historic re-enactors, Lee Ebeling of Great Falls, Mont., sits at the base of Tower Rock near Great Falls, looking east over the Great Plains and the Missouri River. "When they came out here it was an outreach of that spirit that is in all Americans to explore, to journey," Ebeling says.

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — Standing atop Tower Rock, Capt. Meriwether Lewis looked back at the blue shine of the Missouri River and all that was safe and familiar. Ahead lay a vast and forbidding region that appeared on the primitive maps of the day simply as Unknown Country.

His men had gorged on meat across the Great Plains in the spring of 1805, but there would be no fat buffalo ahead as the Corps of Discovery tackled the snowy Rockies. And they had no map — and no idea what awaited them — as they pushed on, traversing the heart of the Northwest.

The impact of that journey almost 200 years ago was profound. Lewis and Capt. William Clark were the first whites to chronicle the Eden that was the Northwest before dams, before logging, agriculture and development. They opened the West to white settlement, at the expense of Indian tribes, and helped advance a young nation's claim to lands sought by Britain, Spain and others.

"They had to alert the nation not only to the possibilities of the Pacific Northwest but to the people, the plants, the animals. No one knew about the great salmon runs of the Columbia River, the mass of humanity that lived at The Dalles in Oregon, that great marketplace the Indians all came to. The languages, the culture and life ways. All of this was new. They were opening whole new realms."

As the bicentennial of the expedition approaches amid a cascade of books, documentaries, conferences and tourist attractions, from river cruises to catered buffalo dinners at RV parks, the enduring fascination with the Corps of Discovery's feat surprises even history buffs.

"It is a phenomenon. Nothing else even approaches it," said David Nicandri, director of the Washington State Historical Society.
 

	A mural on the wall of a Great Falls business depicts a grizzly-bear attack on a member of the Corps of Discovery. The attack occurred near what is now downtown Great Falls.

History's mark

At an annual encampment, Lewis and Clark re-enactors stitch moccasins, tan hides and stuff intestines for boudin blanc, a buffalo meat and kidney sausage.

The Corps of Discovery spent more time in Montana than anywhere else, and in no other place than Great Falls and its environs did more happen, from grizzly-bear attacks to a grueling portage around five waterfalls that Lewis had figured would take half a day. It took nearly a month.

Organizers of Explore The Big Sky, a Signature Event to be held in Great Falls from June 1-July 4, 2005, are using the same incident-response approach to plan the event as the U.S. Forest Service uses to respond to major forest fires, and just about as much energy.

Already every day of the Signature Event — one of 15 planned around the country — is penciled in, from buffalo roasts and chokecherry-pancake breakfasts to carved-canoe races.

The local RV parks already are taking bookings more than two years ahead of the event — some from as far away as Texas. Some motor inns and restaurants already are changing their names, menus and decor to echo the Lewis and Clark theme. And a national convention for planners of Lewis and Clark events drew about 375 to Great Falls last month for workshops such as "Branding Your Event," "Show and Sell" and "Moving the Hordes and Meeting Their Needs."

Montana expects an additional 1 million visitors each of the three years of celebration marking the bicentennial.

In Great Falls, they will find remnants of the Corps of Discovery's portage route around the Great Falls of the Missouri. But much of it is paved over or obscured by the effluvium of urban sprawl, from car dealerships to a driving range. Much of the route is also on private land, and off limits to visitors.

But elsewhere, the daunting landscape still looms as large as it did when Lewis and Clark confronted it. Vast, open plains cut with rugged ravines stretch for miles, fronting pitiless mountains heavy with snow.

"Astronauts were further in distance, but they were in constant communication with Houston," said Lee Ebeling, president of the local Lewis and Clark honor guard, which performs an annual re-enactment of the explorers' encampment in Great Falls. "Lewis and Clark had no communications. They had to figure it out for themselves or die.

"When they came out here it was an outreach of that spirit that is in all Americans to explore, to journey. It starts as an outward journey, but it becomes inward. It's not only an intellectual journey but an emotional one. The quest for the unknown is what makes life worth living. It's part of who we are, part of who I am as a person. This ground is part of us."
 

	STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
	Lee Ebeling, part of a Lewis and Clark honor guard, walks along a highway east of Great Falls, Mont., near where Lewis and Clark had their first views of the Rockies. The honor guard performs an annual re-enactment of the explorers' encampment in the area.

Novelties of nature noted

As they made their way West, members of the corps, faithful to President Jefferson's orders, made careful note of what they saw: 178 plant species and 122 animals new to science, including icons of the West, from cutthroat and steelhead trout to the grizzly bear and Western red cedar. Even prairie dog, which they called "barking squirrels," were a novelty.

On Sept. 7, 1804, the expedition spent a day flushing one unlucky prairie dog from its burrow to send back to Monticello, along with four magpies, a sharp-tailed grouse, buffalo robes and an ear of Indian corn — which Jefferson planted outdoors. The prairie dog and a magpie — sole survivors — first lived at the White House and later were sent to a natural-science museum at Philadelphia's Independence Hall.

By April 1805, the explorers were in present-day Montana — farther west than any white person had been known to go on the Missouri River.

They fought up-current as they headed to the Continental Divide, hauling their boats with ropes, walking on the river's rocky bottom in moccasins or barefoot.

But that was easier than the going in Great Falls, where on June 13, 1805, the corps encountered not the one waterfall they had been told by Indians to expect, but five. Expecting a half-day portage, the explorers instead made a total of eight trips of 18-1/4 miles each, dragging their gear over the prairie.

The corps hauled tons of gear in boats they pulled on hand-hewn carts, pausing to scrape the mud off the wooden wheels and pull the thorns of prickly pear cactus from their feet. The men wore out a pair of moccasins every other day — or walked barefoot, over mud churned by the hooves of buffalo and sun-baked to "hackle-like points," Lewis wrote.

Through it all, despite a plague of mosquitoes, cactus spines, gnats, grizzly bears, rattlesnakes, flash floods, hail balls 7 inches in circumference, potentially hostile Indians, and Lewis' 19th-century doctoring — heavy on bleeding his patients and feeding them mercury — only one member of the expedition died, probably of appendicitis.

"And at time when we're wrestling with war and economic problems, it's nice to have something in which everything went right," he said.
 

	STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
	Sacagawea, an Indian interpreter for Lewis and Clark, was revived from near death at these sulfur springs near Great Falls, Mont.

Help from many natives

While they are often seen as ever-competent heroes, the explorers were saved time and again by Indians as they made their way West, encountering more than 50 tribes. Indians fed the explorers when they were reduced to eating tallow candles, provided horses when they were walking in moccasins, and showed them not only the way but how to survive.

James Parker Shield, a member of the Little Shell Chippewa Tribe and a board member of the interpretive center in Great Falls, sees the bicentennial in part as a way for tribes to set the record straight about the expedition.

"We are led to believe they left St. Louis and went out into this vast hinterland, one big wilderness," Shield said of the Corps of Discovery. "Well, where's the first place they stay, it's practically the Howard Johnson's: the Mandan Hidatsa villages in North Dakota, complete with agriculture, engineers and architecture."

The expedition was the beginning of sustained white and tribal relations in the West, and the explorers were the first whites many tribes had ever seen. Some Northwest tribal members today still have the so-called Jefferson Peace Medals the expedition distributed to important chiefs.

The journey was not entirely peaceful: The explorers killed two Piegan Blackfeet Indians in July 1806 in Montana. As the beginning of westward expansion that would ultimately lead to destruction of tribal peoples, languages and cultures, the bicentennial is something to commemorate and explain, but not celebrate, Shield said.

Shield regards the upcoming droves of inquisitive tourists with a sense of opportunity and dread: "Every Indian is going to become a tour guide whether they like it or not. If they thought 'Dances With Wolves' was big, wait until people from Vermont start showing up with binoculars and video cameras.

"But it's an opportunity to come out and learn something beyond the movies. Maybe we will get beyond the thing where people think we live in tepees and think they will be taken captive if they go outside Great Falls."

For some, one of the most important legacies of the expedition is the explorers' journals, a first draft of our sense of place in the West, of things fresh, new and sublime.

The writings offer "a window onto the world at that time," said Clint Blackwood, executive director of the Montana Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission. "Imagine a landscape you don't even know. There are no highway signs. There is no atlas. Imagine, to wait an hour, two hours, as a herd of bison crosses the river. My God."

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com