May 8, 2005 in Idaho

Lewis and Clark exhibit has treasures

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BOISE – A guard hovers over four plant sprigs whenever they aren’t in their storage place at the Idaho State Historical Museum.

Their storage place is a vault.

Obviously, they aren’t just any plants. Meriwether Lewis picked them two centuries ago in what is now Idaho. Getting the historic specimens, which rarely leave Philadelphia, was a coup for the museum.

They’re the crown jewels of its new exhibit, “Lewis and Clark: The Journey in Idaho,” which opened Saturday. The plants are the exhibit’s feature attraction, but not its only attraction.

Other displays range from Indian artwork to a dugout canoe manned by wood carvings of Lewis and his dog to an authentic Lewis and Clark peace medal, one of a small number known to exist.

Getting the plants here evoked comparisons with Lewis and Clark’s epic struggle in Idaho. They’re on loan from Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, where they’ve been for most of the 199 years since Lewis and Clark completed their journey.

“They weren’t wild about sending them out here,” museum program manager Jody Ochoa said. “We had to work and work and work on them. It took over two years.”

Lewis had no idea of the security risk he was creating when he picked the specimens of Idaho fescue, silky lupine, Clarkia and bluebunch wheatgrass in the valley of the Clearwater River, where their descendants continue to grow today.

The museum had to send a 75-page report on its security, lighting, heating and other facilities before the academy would even consider loaning the plants.

Even then, it took help from U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, a friend of an academy board member, to make it happen.

“Our people worked on it a good six months to a year,” Crapo spokesman Lindsay Nothern said.

The plants are the first of five sets of Lewis plant specimens to be displayed at the exhibit, which will continue through 2006. Each framed set of four, all collected in Idaho, will be exhibited for four months.

Accompanying the plants are copies of Lewis’ journal entries about them, written in his flowing script with his always entertaining spelling: “A beautifull herbaceous plant from the Kooskooskee and Clark R.”

The sprigs Lewis routinely picked are “some of the most important things we’ve ever exhibited,” museum graphics designer Fred Fritchman said.

“They’re not shown just anywhere. And, as with anything that has a direct connection to a historical event, it makes it concrete. Right in front of you is something Meriwether Lewis touched and handled. That kind of connection always has the ability to make history more powerful.”

The plants will be displayed near the center of the exhibit in an enclosure museum employees only half jokingly refer to as “the shrine.”

The first thing visitors will see as they enter the exhibit will be a panel with a 7-foot image of a painting of Lewis, Clark, Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacajawea crossing an Idaho mountain range in a snowstorm. Accompanying the panel will be a relief model of the mountainous terrain with which Lewis and Clark were forced to contend in Idaho – a three-dimensional illustration of the claim that it was the most difficult part of their journey.

Interpretive panels will tell the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and displays will acquaint visitors with the type of clothing and equipment used. Children will see and feel samples of wool, linen and buckskin, the fabrics used most in making the explorers’ clothing.

Another interactive display will introduce kids to samples of animal pelts. Two Idaho Indian tribes will be prominently featured. The Lemhi Shoshoni, Sacajawea’s tribe, helped the Corps of Discovery by providing badly needed horses. The Nez Perce fed the explorers when they were close to starving, told them the rivers that would lead to the Pacific, helped them make dugout canoes and cared for their horses.

Displays will include examples of Shoshoni and Nez Perce clothing, craftwork, tools and historical photographs. The exhibit has liberated a Shoshoni buffalo-hide robe from years of storage.

“It’s so fragile that it was put away for safekeeping,” Ochoa said. “This is the first time it will have been displayed in 23 years.”

There’s even a stuffed Idaho mountain goat. The exhibit will give visitors a condensed but diverse look at the expedition that changed the nation, from the story of the journey itself to its scientific discoveries to its impact on Native Americans.

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