Big family-friendly Lewis & Clark exhibit to open

(Another in our Lewis&Clark series)

A giant Lewis & Clark National Bicentennial Exhibit opens here Wednesday, Jan. 14. There are lots of special features and hands-on activities for kids and families.

The exhibit will be at the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park until Sept. 6, 2004.

Then, the exhibit will move around the country for lengthy stays in Philadelphia, Denver and Portland, Ore., before ending at the Smithsonian Institution in 2006.

Tim Grove is the museum's exhibit educator. He's one of those responsible for making sure there's plenty of interest for kids. He came here two years ago from the Smithsonian to work on the exhibit.

The exhibit is so large that it's been divided up into theme areas. That way, you can easily find aspects of the Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery you like best.

The major themes are:

• Planning for the Trip
  
• Politics and Diplomacy
  
• Women
  
• Mapping
  
• Animals
  
• Language
  
• Warriors/Soldiers
  
• Trade and Property
  
• Plants

Grove said there will be a special printed "Family Guide" available at the museum and on the internet. That will identify the special stuff available for kids and families.

There are displays of animals and fish encountered by Lewis and Clark during the visit. They include a buffalo, a Rocky Mountain sheep, sage grouse, prairie dogs and salmon.

Also, in the Animals area, there are "touch tiles" where you can feel the animals' fur and see how large their feet were. The four animals with "touch tiles" dedicated to them are a grizzly bear, an antelope, a coyote and a sea otter.

There are also "touch boxes." For instance, the "buffalo box" is covered by fur. And it contains examples of useful products produced from buffalo parts. They include a spoon made from horn, buffalo teeth and a water jug made from the buffalo's bladder.

Another neat feature that will interest kids are the interactive exhibits.

In the Language area, there are recordings of four languages used during the journey westward from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean. They include English and French as well as Indian languages, Hidatsa and Shoshone.

The language exhibits let you try to figure out how the Discovery crew communicated with Indians they met. Of course, they had the Indian woman, Sacagawea, along to help.

There's also an interactive mapping exhibit, with three different maps of the area.

Grove said, "Remember, this area wasn't totally unknown." He said trappers worked the area before Lewis & Clark came, buying animal pelts and running trap lines themselves.

You'll be able to compare the maps of 200 years ago with those of the area today.

Another fun interactive exhibit is in the Trade and Property theme area. Your job is to try to buy a canoe from Indians. You have to figure out answers to three questions. The exhibit will tell you how good a negotiator you are and whether you would have purchased the canoe.

Grove said, "This is a good exercise in negotiating with people from a different culture."

There are also exhibits that tell you as much as is known about certain members of the crew. Among them were York, the slave of William Clark, and the Indian Sacagawea. "You've got to remember we don't really know a lot about these people," Grove said.

There's also a whole exhibit area that focuses on Lewis & Clark in Missouri and St. Louis.

For instance, after their return from the Discovery trip, both played important roles in development of Missouri as a state. Lewis was territorial governor until his death in 1809.

Clark lived a long time in St. Louis. He was general of the militia, territorial governor and finally a U.S. Indian agent for the Missouri River.

Clark died in 1938 and is buried in St. Louis' Bellefontaine Cemetery.

You can get information about the exhibit from the Missouri History Museum's website at www.lewisandclarkexhibit.org. That website will be enhanced Jan. 14 with addition of a "virtual journey," with sound and motion added to regular text and pictures.

 

Exhibition seven years in making

Carolyn Gillman of the Missouri History Museum staff has spend seven years assembling the Lewis & Clark exhibition, which opens here Jan. 14.

Many of the exhibit materials were borrowed from museums across the country. The Missouri museum itself has one of the best collections of Lewis & Clark memorabilia.

But, many other individual items were in the hands of private collectors. For instance, Meriwether Lewis unusual Tomahawk tobacco pipe is privately owned.

Curator Gillman has written a book about the exhibition, "Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide." That book was published in association with the Smithsonian. It is on sale at the Museum gift shop or online at www.lewisandclarkexhibit.org.