Tuesday, December 23, 2003

By Marylynne Pitz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In a year when the 200-year-old explorations of Lewis and Clark were celebrated and copied by Americans across the country, Pittsburgh, where the expedition's keelboat was built and launched, grabbed its own share of the spotlight.

	CLOSE-UP 2003 / One of a series Tomorrow: It's been a long road back for Mt. Lebanon's Michael Lahoff, who was shot in the back during a robbery in a Downtown parking garage last January.

Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney and his son, Arthur Rooney II, organized a homegrown Corps of Discovery and led their families on a three-week summer vacation that included canoeing on the Missouri River and riding horseback over the Bitterroot Mountains on the Lolo Trail in Idaho.

The Rooneys' diaries, photos and samples they collected will remain on exhibit through 2004 at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center in the Strip District.

The history center also played host to a touch of controversy surrounding the anniversary of the official start of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

A replica of the 1803-built keelboat sat on display outside the center for months waiting for a planned re-launch on Aug. 31, 2003, 200 years to the day that Meriwether Lewis left Pittsburgh on the first leg of his grand journey west.

A group of re-enactors, led by Scott Mandrell, who has been portraying Lewis at official commemoration events since 1997, was supposed to board the boat and participate in the official send-off.

But at the last minute, he opted out of joining the large flotilla of power boats, kayaks and canoes that was to turn out and accompany the boat, because he was concerned about damaging the keelboat or another craft on the Monongahela River.

A crew of Iowa re-enactors -- and their keelboat -- came to the rescue, making an overnight trip to Pittsburgh to lead the water parade.

Afterward, as the Iowa crew returned home via interstate, Mandrell and the men of his St. Charles Expedition proceeded onward in the official keelboat, rowing and motoring on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, meeting townspeople and glimpsing what's left of the pristine wilderness that crew members described in their journals two centuries ago.

Just as U.S. Army co-captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did, they established a camp of log buildings at Wood River, Ill., near the spot where the original expedition spent the first winter. Come spring they will launch the keelboat on the Mississippi, ascend the Missouri and light out for the Pacific Ocean and back on a journey that will end in 2006.

Two of the re-enactors -- Peyton "Bud" Clark of Dearborn, Mich., and Charles Clark, of St. Louis -- are descendants of William Clark. Bob Anderson of Maryville, Ohio, and his grandson, Josh Loftis, are direct descendants of George Shannon, the youngest member of the original expedition.

Mandrell, who teaches theater arts to students at Wydon Middle School in Clayton, Mo., saw a stark contrast between the hilly Ohio River Valley and the Mississippi River, which cuts across a vast plain.

On the Mississippi, Mandrell said, "You start to see a sprawling wilderness . . . We could hear the coyotes howling at night. The sky opens up and you see an array of stars that was beyond anything we saw when we were hemmed in by the high hills of the Ohio."

This week, Mandrell relaxed at the Lewis and Clark Inn in St. Charles, Mo., enjoying a lunch that included an eggplant entree and chocolate mud pie.

Such meals are a treat for Mandrell, who suffered from a stomach ailment and had to leave the keelboat for treatment at a hospital emergency room in early November in Golconda, Ill.

"Lewis suffered from a stomach ailment at Fort Massac and took some of Dr. Benjamin Rush's pills. They gave me Prilosec," Mandrell said.

The re-enactors have had adventures of their own.

At Rocky Point, Ind., when the boat arrived for an overnight stay, they were greeted by a group of men competing in a bass fishing tournament.

"Their families were camped there. They were barbecuing. One guy handed me a $50 bill and said, 'Put this toward your fuel,' " Mandrell said.

A woman, whose husband is serving with American military forces in Iraq, insisted on making the men a breakfast of homemade biscuits and gravy aboard their keelboat the next morning.

"She felt that what we were doing was an important thing for our country," Mandrell said, adding that the woman told him people in Iraq had been kind to her husband.

The men saw Tower Rock, a geological phenomenon in the middle of the Mississippi River between Missouri and Illinois. Meriwether Lewis climbed the rock and measured its height at 95 feet.

On Nov. 25, two days before Thanksgiving, "Scott [Mandrell] and several other men went up and measured the rock," said Jim Sturm, the expedition's photographer.

Like Lewis, Mandrell used a rope to gauge the rock's height. He also measured its circumference at 740 feet, something Lewis did not attempt.

During the trip, Mandrell thought often of the late Glennon E. Bishop, a retired St. Charles contractor who decided to build a replica keelboat in the 1990s and devoted 13 years of his life to achieving that goal before he died on Oct. 26, 2001.

The replica burned in a warehouse fire in January 1997. Mandrell was in tears when he saw the smoldering ashes.

"I said, 'Glen, what are we going to do?' "

Bishop replied, "You know, I was never completely happy with that one, anyway. We'll build another one."

That, Mandrell said, "was the moment I understood undaunted courage."

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