Curator Driven By Search For Lewis And Clark Camp Wants ‘To Touch A Fire And Know It Was A Fire Lewis And Clark Made’

Ken Karsmizki spends his life chasing ghosts.

Ten years ago, Karsmizki began searching for the spot where the Lewis and Clark expedition camped for 12 nights in 1805 while portaging tons of gear around the Great Falls of the Missouri River.

Now he has added another site, Fort Clatsop, Ore., where the explorers spent 126 days during the dreary winter of 1805-06.

For the next five years, he intends to keep digging, probing and analyzing tiny clues, in hopes of finding the exact location of the rough-hewn fort.

“I more than anybody want to touch a fire and know it was a fire Lewis and Clark made,” Karsmizki, 48, said in his basement office at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, where he is associate curator of historical archaeology.

“It’s like going to the moon. You know it’s there - how do you get there?”

If Karsmizki and his crews can find a campsite, they will have solved a riddle that has eluded countless searchers. Using maps and journals created by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, searchers can usually get within a mile or quarter mile of many of the 600 camps along the expedition’s 8,000-mile path.

But no one yet has been able to prove that one spot was the exact place the expedition camped.

“These are important historic sites and we have essentially lost them,” Karsmizki said.

At Great Falls, crews have found campfires that radiocarbon dating can determine were made in 1810, give or take 50 years. They’ve found a wooden stake driven into the ground that dates to 1810, give or take 45 years. By accumulating such clues, they hope to prove that this was the site of the portage camp.

In August, Karsmizki and company spent five days at Fort Clatsop, where a replica of the Lewis and Clark fort is open to the public. They used a magnetometer, which can find metal, fire sites and compacted soil.

They dug two holes in the ground and found a spot where someone once created a 90-degree angle, possibly by building a structure. But figuring out if that was made by Lewis and Clark, or by later settlers or timber cutters, will take more study.

Walking through the museum basement, Karsmizki is greeted by paleontologist Jack Horner, famous for finding dinosaur fossils in Montana. It seems strange that it’s easier to find 65 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bones than evidence of a 190-year-old expedition by America’s most famous explorers.