Montana Lewis and Clark event awaits financial tally

GREAT FALLS – Organizers of “Explore the Big Sky,” one of the nation’s 15 “Signature Events” commemorating the Lewis and Clark expedition’s bicentennial, say it will be two weeks before they know its financial outcome.

The Montana package of activities spanning a month ended last Monday.

The “Signature” series around the country began in 2003, with some events not scheduled to take place until 2006.

“Explore the Big Sky” had a budget topping $2 million. For the events in Great Falls and Fort Benton to break even, some 38,000 tickets had to sell.

“Attendance wasn’t as strong as we had hoped, and ticket sales weren’t as strong as we hoped for,” director Peggy Bourne said Friday. Expenses and ended up well below projections, she added.

Bourne said she hopes financial records will be reconciled by July 22.

Jane Weber, director of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, said it received 3,336 visitors over the Fourth of July weekend, 41 percent more than at the same time last year. Attendance at the July 1-3 powwow at Montana ExpoPark was about half what was hoped for, organizer Candace Hubbard said. Powwow tickets were $15.

Organizers of a commemorative ballet in Great Falls said it drew more than 1,000 people one night and 700-800 the next, at a theater seating 1,776. They wanted an audience of 1,100 per show.

Weber said a symposium in the “Signature” package drew only about 200 people for a keynote speech titled “American Indian Nations: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”

Organizer George Horse Capture said that “everyone was pretty well L and C’d out.” But he said the symposium was successful as an opportunity for American Indian leaders to meet and talk among themselves.

“This was a scholarly gathering, so that contributed to its low numbers,” Horse Capture said.

Dyani Bingham, executive director of the Montana Tribal Tourism Alliance, estimated the tribal villages at Montana ExpoPark drew fewer people than did tribal encampments of the past few years. Both were free to the public.

“We accomplished what we wanted to accomplish, sharing tribal stories and cultures and histories in our encampment,” Bingham said. “So that was very successful. But I think more people came to last year’s Lewis and Clark Festival.”

Bingham said so many activities were planned that they competed with one another.

The Corps of Discovery II, a free traveling exhibit by the National Park Service, drew about 9,000 visitors during the exhibit’s time in Great Falls, June 25-July 4.