# Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition (Northern Pacific Railway)/Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition

After the close of the War of the Revolution the United States took a part in Northwestern exploration and trade
Codex J, Lewis, page 131. Lewis’s pen-and-ink drawing of the white-fronted Goose, from original Journals of Lewis and Clark.
* Iron Screen over Captain Clark’s name, on Pompey’s Pillar in Yellowstone Valley on line of Northern Pactfic Railway.
he gave the name Columbia, after his vessel, and as such the stream will be known through all time. It will be noted that this discovery was just 300 years after Columbus had discovered America, and in naming the river the Columbia Gray was really honoring the great discoverer himself. The Spaniard Heceta had seen, as a matter of fact, the mouth of the Columbia in 1775, and he called the presumptive stream the Saint Roque; Meares had seen it in 1788 when he anchored there and named Cape Disappointment, and Vancouver, in 1792, also saw
* Bridge of Nations— Lewis and Clark Exposition
Gray’s discovery and naming of the Columbia—the Oregon of Carver and of Bryant—subsequently became a fact of the greatest consequence in the determination of the Northwestern boundary line between the United States and Great Britain. Important as this fact became, however, it was vastly enhanced by the exploration of Lewis and Clark which followed it so closely—with an interval of but thirteen years—and both were emphasized by the settlement of Astoria in 1812, while the whole matter was clinched by the treaty of 1819 between Spain and the United States, by which Spain transferred to the latter country all of her title, real or imaginary.
In “The Trail of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1904,” a two-volume work published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, the writer has recounted at length the story of this exploration and the changes wrought by a century of national expansion in the country traversed by these heroes, based upon his own travels over that trail. The story must be given here briefly.
During the late fall and early spring of 1803-4 those going up and down the Father of Waters in the primitive batteaux and periogues of the day would have seen, on the eastern bank and opposite the mouth of the tawny-colored Missouri, a large military encampment. Here, at the mouth of a small stream, the Du Bois or Wood river, ​the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition spent the winter making ready for the great work of the future.
Site of Fort Clatsop, on Lewis and Clark River near Astoria, Oregon.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—NOT Clarke— ​were Virginians, young, strong and healthful, brave and resourceful, intelligent, and warm and devoted friends. Each, in qualities that counted for much in such an enterprise, was the complement of the other. Lewis and Clark
It has taken a hundred years for the United States to come to something like a real conception of what Lewis and Clark, the leaders in the exploration of the West, did for their country.
From the mouth of the Missouri river, the expedition, starting on May 14, 1804, ascended that stream to Fort Mandan, a point about fifty miles above Bismarck, N. D., remaining during the winter of 1804-5 among the Mandan and Grosventre Indians.
Livingston, Montana, Baldy Peak, and Yellowstone River. Captain Clark first struck the Yellowstone River, here in July, 1806.
It will be noted at once that in this long, circuitous course the explorers pretty thoroughly covered the Northwest, and their discoveries stand to-day as monuments of their rarely conscientious discharge of duty. The number of miles traveled by the expedition was, undoubtedly, between 9,000 and 10,000 miles, excluding ordinary hunting trips.
Briefly, some of the objects of the exploration were to explore the Missouri and Columbia rivers and their principal branches; take the latitude and longitude of important points; make a study of the Indian tribes; observe closely the country explored and note its possibilities relative to the fur trade, etc., and study its fauna, flora, geology, and meteorology. Lewis was particularly enjoined to
Oriental Exhibits, Exposition Building, showing corner of Forestry Building.
All this was scrupulously done. At the mouths of large streams like the Osage, Kansas, Platte, Grand, and Yellowstone rivers, some of them the sites of future cities, they halted to make astronomical observations.
Important discoveries in natural history were made and councils of the utmost gravity were held with the Indian tribes encountered. All their experiences were set down in their journals with great fidelity, and their narrative gains in interest and value with advancing years even as wine improves with age.
The Lewis and Clark Exposition to be held at Portland, Oregon, June 1 to October 15, 1905, draws attention to the remarkable contrast between the West and the Northwest of 1804-6 and that of the present day. Then St. Louis was a mere village with but one or two French settlements lying above it on the Missouri river. No steamboat had ​yet stemmed the current of the Father of Waters, nor, indeed, of the Hudson; not a rod of railway had been laid in the United States nor had a telegraph pole been set up. The plains beyond St. Louis were in the keeping of the Indian and buffalo and the mountain region still beyond was almost a thing of the imagination. The great days of the mountain fur trade were to come—were, in truth, waiting for Lewis and Clark to open the way.
The Puget sound and the lower Columbia river regions were known only from the tales of the old sea-roving explorers and a few traders. There were then no Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Victoria, Everett, Astoria, nor Portland.
The vast empire of civilization, agriculture, mining, and commerce, as we know it, was then but a potentiality, and one, probably, largely unsuspected. In the mutations of time there has been evolved from the region explored by Lewis and Clark, in one century, a collection of States which, under the guidance of Providence, we hope will exert a benign and a controlling influence upon the
Northern Pacific Bridge, Bismarck, North Dakota. Lewis and Clark camped here both in 1804 and 1806.
Aside from the leaders there were some intrepid spirits in that exploring band. Among the more noted and worthy were Sergeant Gass, John Colter, George Drewye—or Drouillard more correctly—George Shannon, the Fields brothers, and Sacáigawea, the Shoshone Indian woman, who was both guide and interpreter at certain stages of the journey and who carried a boy papoose from Fort Mandan to the Coast and back again.
Sacáigawea, the Birdwoman, stands out in a peculiarly strong and striking way and invests the exploration with a tinge or flavor that would be sadly lacking were it not for her sturdy, wholesome, virtuous personality. Her white sisters of the Northwest purpose to honor her virtues and sacrifices by a statue at the exposition.
The route of the expedition coincided at many points with that of the Northern Pacific Railway, either on its ​main or branch lines. For more than 800 miles in North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, the railway and the old trail are either parallel—one on land, the other by water—or actually coincident.
Among the prominent places or landmarks common to both, more or less, are the raitway crossing of the Missouri river at Bismarck and Mandan, N. D.; Glendive, the Wolf, Bear, and Buffalo rapids of the Yellowstone river, Miles City, the mouth of the Big Horn river, Pompey’s Pillar, Clark’s Camp, where cottonwood-tree canoes were made at the base of certain “black bluffs” near Rapids siding, “Rivers Across” near Big Timber, Livingston and the Bozeman Pass, Bozeman, Logan, the Three Forks of the Missouri river, the Cañon of the Missouri, the Cañon of the Jefferson river, Missoula, Lolo peak, seen from Missoula and at the base of which the expedition passed when following the trail along Lolo—Travelers’-rest—creek, in
Down the Yellowstone River, on the Northern Pacific Railway, looking toward Sheridan Butte, between Buffalo and Wolf Rapids named by Captain Clark.
Yellowstone River near Hunter's Hot Springs, Montana, on the Northern Pacific Railway.
Visitors to the Lewis and Clark Exposition at Portland will find a wealth of scenic beauty in and about Portland and Astoria, made doubly interesting in connection with Lewis and Clark. The explorers’ notes are extremely full regarding the Columbia river and their experiences in navigating its rapids and tidal current. As a scenic proposition, no stream on the American continent, north of the Mexican Republic, certainly, will scarcely compare with the Columbia. It is a great and mighty river, bulwarked by mountains that form some of the grandest handiwork of the Almighty, and a never-ending source of ​wonder and admiration to him or her who is privileged to look upon their scarred, storm-beaten, forest-draped acclivities. Year after year I ride up and down the heaving, eddying stream and gaze with increasing love and admiration upon the matchless majesty and grandeur of the scene. It is a great poem of the centuries, expressed not in words
Looking south on the old Lewis and Clark Tratl at Lolo Hot Springs, a few miles south from Missoula, Montana.
of human origin, but impressing itself upon us in those great unspeakable thoughts and sentiments that surge through the human heart and brain, born of the immortal part of our natures that reaches out and grasps the meaning of the mighty works done here by the Master Architect ​of the Universe. Great geologic problems of vast import in world creation are unfolded here. Mountains have been uplifted and cafions have been gashed through them; streams of lava from mighty volcanic vents that now stand as white, glacial peaks, have burned their way across the mightier stream of water; landslides, leaving behind almost bewildering effects, have taken place; magnificent palisades 2,000 and 3,000 feet in height are found, and rivers plunge over them to lose themselves in the greater river below. And in all this there is no sameness nor conventionalism. Nature is found here in original and concrete forms.
Festival Hall—Lewis and Clark Exposition.
The Dalles, where the warfare between water and molten lava has been won by the former, is a place of wonderful interest, as are the Cascades, where the Columbia has been dammed by nature. Above the Cascades the currentless stream with its submerged trees is like a long mountain lake. Castle Rock, a stupendous pointed rock of lava, named by Lewis and Clark “Beacon Rock”; Lone and Pillar rocks, rising from midstream; Rooster Rock, a peculiar lava pillar, and Cape Horn, a grand lava cliff of monumental proportions, are all most attractive to the ​traveler and nature lover. Then there is cliff after cliff, palisade upon palisade, mountain piled on mountain, with side streams and villages and landings breaking in upon the vision and giving an endless variety to the feast of good things, scenically, that charm the mind and minister to the emotions. But that which, perhaps, most of all, forms a scenic diversion is the series of beautiful cascades that so gracefully fall from the overhanging mountains or cliffs to the stream below. Of these fairy, film-like creations,
Cascade Locks and steamer Dalles City entering locks, Columbia River.
This beautiful cluster of waterfalls partakes of both the angular, dancing cascade and the leaping cataract, and the combination of both captivates and enthralls our senses.
A short distance above the mouth of the Willamette river lies Fort Vancouver, a beautiful army post. It is the site of the old Vancouver of the Hudson’s Bay Company of which grand old Dr. McLoughlin was the chief factor, or superintendent, in the days when the Oregon question held the boards in congressional debates. At the mouth of the Columbia, nestled under the lea of Cape Disappointment, lies Fort Canby, another delightful army post, while on the opposite shore is Fort Stevens, and at Chinook Point, across from Astoria, is Fort Columbia.
On the lower river Mount Coffin, an old Indian burying-ground below the mouth of the ​Cowlitz river, attracts attention, and Saddle mountain, in the distance, is a prominent landmark.
Astoria, much of it built on piles, is almost quaint in its hilliness and peculiarities of situation, and within easy reach of it are the seacoast resorts.
| | Multnomah Fall. Columbia River Bluffs. |
| Copyright by Geo. M. Welster | |
These places can all be reached either by fine river steamers or railways, or by a combination of both, from Portland. The old Lewis and Clark camp, Fort Clatsop, ​
Evening on Puget Sound, from Point Wilson.
Besides the Columbia river region and the other Oregon points of interest contiguous to Portland, the visitor to the Lewis and Clark Exposition has the privilege of stopping at Puget sound and making acquaintance with some of the most charming ports of the United States. This balmy land, with its mountains, sound, bays, rivers, fishing, summer resting places, great forests, whirring mills, fine cities, and glorious climate, deserves attention at the hands of the traveler, for it is surely God’s country. None may pass it by without regret. Those resident in the East have little idea of what is to be found in the Puget sound region. How many, for example, know that Tacoma has close on to 75,000 population, that Seattle ​has 150,000 or thereabouts, that Everett claims nearly 25,000, and that Bellingham, well up toward the boundary line, has about 25,000 people who call it home? Yet all this is true, so rapidly has the coast country grown. Prosperity has not confined itself to one or two places, but has dealt its favors with an impartial hand, and the entire Puget sound country shows this. The assessed valuation of property in the four sound counties, of which
Mount Rainier from Puget Sound, 14,532 feet high.
Everett, besides a smelter and a paper mill, has nine ​saw mills, twelve shingle mills, and foundries, ship yards, planing mills, brick yards, etc., to approximate.
Tacoma is a great exporting point. It has coal bunkers, for loading vessels, having a capacity of 20,000 tons, and warehouses along its water front capable of holding 7,000,000 bushels of wheat. It has ninety miles of electric and cable railways. Its lumber shipments in 1903 aggregated 361,000,000 feet and its bank clearings were $100,000,000.
Seattle has 120 churches, a United States assay office, the Washington State University, and a public library that contains 50,000 volumes. It does an enormous export and import business and its storage capacity on its ​water front exceeds 800,000 tons. Its street railway system aggregates 120 miles and its bank clearances for 1903 exceeded $206,000,000.
Climatically, the Sound is wonderfully favored. It is never very cold nor very hot. The average high temperature in July is about 74, in August, 70; and in winter the thermometer rarely ever reaches the freezing point. There is no lightning or thunder, and tornadoes and wind storms are unknown.
Scenically and touristically the region is a paradise. The Cascade range on the east and the Olympics on the west side of the Sound provide the grandest mountain views in the world. Mount Rainier (Tacoma) and Mount Baker ​are, the one or the other, in view from all parts of the region. Tourist resorts are found at Lake Cushman in the Olympics, Paradise park on the southern slope of Mount Rainier, Green River Hot Springs in the Cascades—on the Northern Pacific, just east from Tacoma and Seattle— Port Townsend, Victoria, Port Angeles from which Lake Crescent in the upper Olympics is reached, and at the other cities heretofore named. There is no lack of appropriate places for those seeking new and healthful recreation spots anywhere in this beautiful country, and rates are invariably reasonable. Olympia, South Bend, Hoquiam, and other points in the Southern Olympics and on the sound and sea coast will be found desirable places for rest and recreation.
Tacoma Hotel and Totem Pole, Tacoma.
With the stop-over privileges allowed on coast tickets every tourist and traveler to the Northwest and the ​Exposition during the season of 1905 may be enabled to visit every point of importance and interest in the Pacific Northwest.
And what of the Lewis and Clark Exposition itself? Those who have become exposition wearied will not find their patience tried here by an over-elaborate display. And while there will be enough of world products to properly balance and cosmopolitanize the exposition, the West and Northwest will be particularly strong in their representation. And for even a reasonable stay, all of one’s time need not be taken up in exposition sight-seeing, but one may easily see the latter and also sandwich in, agreeably, the delightful trips to the points of interest here pointed out.
Hotel Washington, Seattle.
There are about 402 acres of land and water comprised in the exposition grounds and they are beautifully ​situated and slope gracefully. The grand forest-clad heights for which Portland is noted rise immediately back of them, and the Willamette river glistens in the near distance. The grounds lie only two miles away from the business center of the city and the electric cars reach them in eighteen minutes’ run. The water expanse is four times that of the World’s Fair grounds at Chicago, and, under the landscape architectural direction of the Olmstead Brothers of Brookline, Mass., sons of the late Frederick Law Olmstead, this feature of the fair will be one of most original beauty and design.
A Bit of Centennial Park, Lewis and Clark Exposition.
The buildings are grouped within convenient distances of each other and of the cars, so that long tramps from one to another are avoided.
A short walk by easy trail leads from the grounds into an adjoining Oregon forest, cool and restful, where are found a wild mountain stream and cañon, rich foliage, Madrona berries, and the Oregon grape.
On the summit of a hill, near at hand and reached by ​trail, is a nine boulevarded park crowned with a monument to Lewis and Clark. From this point the eye is regaled by a view rarely equaled anywhere and surpassed nowhere, except, perhaps, at Council Crest, lying some distance back of and above the city and reached by a most delightful drive, as the writer can attest by experience. Looking to the north, Mount Rainier, 14,532 feet high, peeps above the horizon, white and dazzling; a little to the right, but near at hand, rises the beautiful white cone of Mount St.
Astoria, Oregon, and Tongue Point.
Helens, 9,750 feet in height; farther away again and to the northeast rises in its great, white, monumental grandeur Mount Adams, 12,250 feet high; to the east, and sixty miles distant, but seemingly, in the clear atmosphere, nearer six miles away, stands Mount Hood, the peculiar joy and glory of Oregonians. Mount Hood, 11,225 feet high, and white, immaculately so, with its glaciers and snow fields, is one of the most fascinating sights in the world, and this alone is worth a journey across the continent to see. But farther south another white, snow-blanketed ​mountain is seen, Mount Jefferson, so named by Lewis and Clark, after President Jefferson. Five gigantic, glacial peaks, rising above the dark green forest that surrounds them! Think of it! ye who live on the Atlantic shores where such a sight the year around is unknown; ye who dwell in the prairie country where a hill 100 feet high is a mountain; and even ye who live among the Rockies can see no such spectacle as God here grants to His children. It is a wondrous vision, a dream, almost an unreality at first, but something once seen can be, is, never forgotten.
Agricultural Exposition Building, showing section of Sunken Gardens.
The total cost of the Lewis and Clark Exposition, including appropriations, etc., by the various States, the Government, and Commissions, aggregates about $5,000,000, and this is being most economically expended. All Portland, practically, is overseeing the job, and not in the grafting line either. The Portlandians are determined that those who journey across the continent to see their beautiful city, country, and exposition shall get their money’s worth ​untainted by anything savoring of graft or imposition. Hotel accommodations will be ample, and Portland has some fine hotels. The restaurants are also known for their excellence, and they prepare the peculiar delicacies of the Pacific Coast waters in most dainty manner.
Portland has a population of 130,000 and is a most beautiful city. It has a jobbing trade amounting to between $150,000,000 and $175,000,000 a year and also a heavy export trade. Its exports of wheat and lumber are very large. The buildings, churches, residences, and parks of Portland are thoroughly modern, and electricity, generated at Willamette Falls, plays an important part in all manufacturing, street car locomotion, building and street illumination, etc.
Cape Horn, Columbia River.
From photograph by Lee Moorbe
Site of the Bridge of the Gods, at the Cascades of the Columbia River.
The progress made in building construction, etc., is best shown in the following excerpt from the Lewis and Clark Journal for November, published at Portland:
“Several of the main exhibition palaces, including the ​building designed for foreign countries, are ready and shipment of exhibits to them has begun. A fifth building will be under roof by the first of the month. Altogether six exposition buildings are practically finished and are awaiting final touches. The Mines and Metallurgy, the Festival Hall and Auditorium, the Machinery, Electricity, and Transportation, and the Oregon building are rising from their foundations. The Agricultural building was ready for the storage of exhibits the first of November. The building is the largest on the grounds, next to the main exhibition building of the Government.
“Sufficient order may be discerned in the chaos of external arrangements to grasp the keynote of the Centennial. General admission gates will be through the long, semi-circular peristyle of a double row of Ionic columns, at Twenty-sixth and Upshur streets. This point is about eighteen minutes from the business section and leading down-town hotels. Four double-tracked car-line routes loop the loop before the gates. Entering through the
Forestry Building—Lewis and Clark Exposition.
New troops in camp at Fort Vancouver, 1902—Mount Hood in the distance.
“From these series of terraces, upon which the main group faces, almost any number of spectators can with ease, and without moving, massing, or crowding, see, hear, and enjoy the musical concerts and other outdoor features on the lake front, which will be nightly the playground of thousands of fun-makers and fun-seekers.
Union Station, Portland, Oregon, finest passenger station west of Rocky Mountains.
“The group of Government buildings are being rapidly rushed forward and will be ready in ample time.
“Superintendent Church of the mechanical construction department of the Government, proceeding upon instructions, will construct an entirely new plant for the working mint to be installed in the Government exhibition building at Portland. The improvement over that shown at the World’s Fair is at least 50 per cent. Two furnaces will be installed, in place of one as there, thereby showing a continuous operation instead of having to stop once every hour for replenishment. Constant demonstration will edify and instruct visitors, as the exhibit will show how money is manufactured—with this difference: That medals and souvenirs, similar to ever-popular coins of the realm, will be stamped.
“The Bridge of Nations, classic in outline and in imitation ​of solid masonry, will span a thousand feet of waterway, the largest ever included and utilized in an exposition site. It is an appropriate name for the bridge, because it will be the means of communicating with and seeing many nations that will be represented on the water.
“A definite proposition has been under consideration in reference to a village of real Filipinos. Three hundred natives will probably be brought over. They will be the real fresh article, and their trip to the States will be under Government sanction. No Filipinos that were at St. Louis will be here because the Igorrote and Moros have returned to their retreats in the island province. Northward from the Government reservation seven acres will be set aside for the dog-eating villagers and the peculiar Samal Moro fishermen, who build their thatched huts high on stilts along the edge of the water. And not alone will the life of a Filipino village be seen, but all manner of odd craft will be given abundant sea room on the lake, which will be a picturesque panorama of constantly shifting scenes,
Hotel Portland, Portland, Oregon.
Imperial Hotel, Portland, Oregon.