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In honor of the 200th anniversary of the first federally funded research project, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives opened a Lewis and Clark exhibit titled, "The Longer Road: Reporting the Lewis and Clark Expedition" Thursday.
In 1803, Jefferson planned the expedition to discover the northwestern United States. Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Capt. William Clark came to St. Louis with maps of their route and a $2,500 appropriation for expenses. In May of 1804, the expedition began. After 28 months, the expedition came to an end in September 1806.
"This expedition was considered important years later," Patterson said. "We have more sufficient accounts in the last five years than in the last 195 years."
The travelers encountered problems on the expedition, such as going around the falls of the Missouri River. They built wheels made out of wood, and it took the group nine days to get from the lower end to the upper end of the river, Mellor said.
Jeff Stumpo, the first recipient of the Mary and Mavis P. Kelsey fellowship and the exhibit's designer, has been planning this event for several months.
"You get a different sense of the journey when working behind the scenes of this exhibit," Stumpo said. "I came across a newspaper from 1803, and people made fun of (former President) Jefferson for planning this expedition, but without the Louisiana Purchase we would not have a country past the Mississippi river."
The Kelsey fellowship, which includes designing and compiling exhibits and working on special collections, is co-funded by the Mary and Mavis P. Kelsey Cushing Library Endowment and the English Department.
"There are elements from the journey that haven't been made available to the public until the last 20 years," Stumpo said. "There are rivers in the Rocky Mountain area that were named during the expedition, but now they have different names because those names were not recorded."
The design for the exhibit began in May and finished just in time for the opening. David B. Mellor and the John H. Hinton Endowment provided funding for the event.
The exhibit includes the first published account of the expedition from David B. Mellor's collection, "A Journal of the Voyage of the Corps of Discovery." Published in 1807, the account refers to the journals of Patrick Gass, the chief carpenter of the expedition.
The exhibit also includes a display of C.O. "Pat" Patterson's private collection of Lewis and Clark material such as contemporary newspaper accounts of the expedition and another important published account of the expedition, known as "Biddles Edition," published in 1814.
"If we were to put the journals together into a book, critics would laugh because the adventures are unbelievable," Patterson said.
Jefferson wanted to publish the journals when the expedition ended, so Lewis hired scientific experts but left out an editor. He was then appointed governor of the Louisiana territory, which included Spanish, French and American tribes that did not get along. Lewis governed the Louisiana territory until he committed suicide in 1809. Clark then hired Nicholas Biddle but by the time he was ready, the War of 1812 broke out, Stumpo said.
"It took longer to publish the journals than it took Lewis and Clark to go 3,000 miles and back," Stumpo said.
The exhibit will be open until February 2005. From Monday through Thursday it will be open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., on Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 pm, and on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
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