Chapter 3

Today was spent in the city of Saint Louis, Missouri where we were able to spend time in the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibition. It took all day from 10:00 a.m. CT until after 15:00 CT.

Inside the museum is everything you can imagine related to the expedition that they could find and document. The highlight for me was the air gun. Even though they never found the original mentioned in their journals they had a replica which looked way cool.

Apparently they didn’t use the air gun except to show the native people the exceptional technology of the US Government. Apparently it packed quite a whallup and left quite mark on the things they shot with it but they never used it for anything other than demonstration. Even then, the original was lost somewhere along the way.

I’m still perplexed on how they thought they could get all this stuff from Saint Louis all the way across the Rockies and on to the Pacific coast. Even if you were to take all these things by truck today you would still have a hell of a planning exercise and considerable expense. Forget feeding everyone on the way.

It’s clear that we must take steps and stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us but I realize there is one thing Lewis could really use: GPS. It turns out that Lewis and Jefferson where facinated with “technology” and were “leading edge” thinkers. Lewis, for example, wanted to take along all kinds of technology (Chronograph, etc.) that were vetoed by the current “thinkers” in Philadelphia as too “risky”. I can totally relate to Lewis in this regard since I have two packs dedicated to technology and only one to my “belongings”. If I turned my back on technology I could have brought many more of the comforts of home.

Tomorrow the destination is unclear. I am easy on where I lay my head so I’m going on the lead of my father and his friend, Richard, on where we end up. It’s either going to be Kansas City or north of Omaha. There is another of my dad’s friends out there somewhere that we are trying to pick up along the way who is perported to be going to the Oregon coast with us.

🙂 🙂

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— Main.JohnWesterman – Published 02 Aug 2004