Disquiet on an American trail

VERMILLION, S.D. -- On a sweltering day in August 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark clambered to the top of a 70-foot knoll north of the Missouri River. Local Yankton Sioux believed the landmark to be haunted, but instead of ghosts the explorers took in a vista that awed them with its majesty and potential.

''We beheld a most butifull landscape," Clark recorded in his journal, describing a realm of grassland extending ''without interruption as far as Can be Seen . . . the soil of those Plains are delightful."

The land has been tamed in the 200 years since then. The view from the rise called Spirit Mound today offers a bucolic version of the American dream that President Thomas Jefferson might have imagined when he dispatched the Corps of Discovery on its journey from St. Louis to the Pacific: tidy farms, busy shops, solid civic buildings, and church steeples protruding from cottonwood groves. Less charming, but still telling of prosperity, double-trailer truck rigs roar over wide highways while a crop-duster buzzes low over newly sown fields. The dome of a university sports stadium glints in the sun. In the hazy distance, a gigantic American flag floats languidly over a Phillips 66 gas station.

Yet to travel today the route taken by Lewis and Clark at the dawn of America is to encounter a nation that seems unsettled in its soul. Although an abiding faith in the future remains almost the national trademark, many people seem uneasy about the direction the country is taking.

''You've got to wonder where we're going as a nation and a people," said June Bosley Dabney-Gray, 69, a Missouri schoolteacher and former professional singer. Dabney-Gray graduated from the segregated St. Louis school system. Her father was the first black mail clerk on the old Wabash Railroad run from St. Louis to Omaha. Her nephew was the first black mayor of St. Louis.

She loves America, she said. And fears for it -- fears the fallout of a confusing war; fears for a society that, she believes, has strayed from religious values; fears for children lost to a world of ''hip-hop and street smarts" before they acquire basic learning skills. Her love of country but alarm about America comes close to summarizing the views of scores of people who spoke to a Globe reporter this spring in a journey across the broad arc of land that Lewis and Clark traveled -- territory that stretches from what is now St. Louis's Gateway Arch to land's end near Astoria, Ore.

''This is a country that makes you want to clap your hands and rejoice," she said. ''But also a country that makes you want to weep. There is a goodness in Americans, in our love of freedom, our quest for equality. But we are also people who are losing the light of the principles that have guided us. . . . People should sing the American anthem, should recite the pledge. We've got to be one nation indivisible, under God, or we're not going to stay together as a people at all."

The uneasiness found along this route, which starts in Missouri and ends in Oregon -- both politically up-for-grabs ''swing states" this election year -- is partly caused by the conflict in Iraq. Even in the largely conservative upper-Midwest and Mountain states, where support for President Bush remains strong, people seem hard-pressed to understand why US soldiers are dying long after Saddam Hussein has been overthrown and captured.

Signs reading ''Support Our Troops" are posted on front yards, in shop windows, and suspended across main streets. An astonishing number of trees, porch posts, and pickup truck bumpers bear yellow ribbons, that wistful symbol speaking both of patriotic ardor and yearning for a soldier's safe return. But those who back the Iraq war do so without much enthusiasm.

Daniel C. Burnett, one of the last tug captains still plying the Missouri, gave a big frown and rueful shake of the head. ''Bush is a straight talker and the kind of man I want in charge of the country," he said. ''And I do believe America is trying to do right [in Iraq]. But, Lord, those insurgents seem to have more guns and grit than anyone expected.

''I'd still want President Bush on my side in a bar fight. He's a scrapper and a bulldog," Burnett said. ''But maybe I'd want to scout out that saloon a little better before we push through the door."

Quite a few of the people interviewed accused American journalists of unfairly slanting war coverage, inflating the significance of the physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, for example, while understating the savagery of the foe.

''The news media is doing the very best it can to fan hysteria and create negative vibes across America -- it's become a big part of the problem," said Ralph Emmons, of Dearborn, Mich., an automobile company engineer who was bicycling with his wife, Janet, along a North Dakota portion of the trail.

If proponents of the war are a bit reflective these days, critics of the Bush administration are scathing.

Eugene Johnson spent 36 years in the military before retiring to the ranch country of Vaughn, Mont. He is a no-nonsense outdoorsman, whose grandfather was among the early settlers of a state whose history begins with Lewis and Clark.

''Bush and his henchmen are wrecking the environment, ruining our international reputation, and sending young men and women off to be killed or crippled for Iraqi oil," Johnson said. ''A lot of Americans, including us supposed right-wingers out West, are truly appalled at the direction the country is headed, both in terms of foreign policy and the environment."

In St. Louis, Sam Pergadia peered from the small window of a minivan-sized metal structure on the corner of 8th and Locust -- the last traditional newsstand in the river city's downtown. A chemist, Pergadia was laid off from his job at a sugar refinery. But he has no complaints. He makes a good living, he said, selling lottery tickets, newspapers, fried pork rinds, and cigarette lighters to customers ranging from somber-suited bankers to street folk.

Pergadia's main concern about America is that the spirit of protest seems to have dissipated. ''Almost worse than the war, I think, is the silence from ordinary people who think it is wrong," he said. ''What this country needs is a renewed sense of idealism -- plus a new president. The greatest American tradition is standing up to government. But easy living has made us too placid. Americans live in a haze of material contentment. We don't want to think too much about who we are [or] what we're doing in the world. . . . Better to just buy another lottery ticket and hope things will just sort out."

Yet there also are Americans who passionately believe that the nation must gird itself for an even broader war against terrorism, one that might last decades. America, they said, has always been a lucky place, somehow existing at the crossroads of the world -- in terms of immigration, trade, and influence -- yet physically isolated from the world's dangers. No more. Many spoke with bafflement and anger about the politics-as-usual slagging between Democrats and Republicans at a time when, many citizens believe, Americans should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder against a savage foe.

Jennie Anaya, having hiked to the top of South Dakota's Spirit Mound, was standing on tiptoe, straining for a glimpse of the Missouri River. The 29-year-old reservations supervisor from Portland, Ore. -- whose parents emigrated from Mexico -- was on vacation with her husband and 8-year-old daughter, using the Lewis and Clark bicentennial as a reason for exploring parts of the country they'd never seen.

She called herself ''instinctively a Democrat. My issues are education, social stuff, programs for kids," but she is adamant about casting her ballot for Bush come November.

''America is in mortal danger," she said. ''It amazes me how few people seem to understand that. . . . I'm not crazy about Bush. I think he's too aligned with the rich and corporations. But I think he will do everything in his power to defend the homeland, and that's all that matters now.

''Of course we're making blunders [in the war against terrorism], so what?" she said. ''Mistakes were made in World War II, terrible mistakes. Humans don't always, instinctively, know precisely the right response to everything. But I do believe you can never turn away from terrorists or tyrants. They will eat you alive, like wolves on a wounded animal. You can only show your strength -- or give up and die."

ON INDEPENDENCE Day, 1804, Lewis and Clark issued an extra ration of whisky to the small contingent of American soldiers, French-Canadian voyagers, mixed-race Indians, and a black slave known only as York, undertaking the most important expedition of discovery in US history. Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who eventually played a crucial role as interpreter and herb finder, would not join the party until November, hundreds of miles upriver.

The corps had started muscling up the muddy Missouri by pole and paddle only two months earlier. And Independence Day was in most respects just another day in the epic odyssey. A private was bitten by a snake and treated with a poultice of bark. Near present-day Atchison, Kan., the party chanced upon an uncharted stream flowing into the Missouri, and named it Independence Creek. Come sundown, encamped on the abandoned site of a Kansas Indian settlement -- the expedition was accomplished in the shadow of an older North American culture -- the men fired a cannon into the gathering darkness.

The boom and flash marked the first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi.

''The trip was about extravagant hope and an extravagant vision of what this country might become," said Howard Frank Mosher, a Vermont author whose 2003 novel, ''The True Account," is based very loosely on the expedition, and who has traveled the route of the explorers five times, partly for research, partly for love of the rugged countryside and its inhabitants.

''The land has changed dramatically, of course. But Americans themselves haven't changed much from Lewis and Clark's time," he said. ''We remain an exuberant, rather ruthless, and always optimistic people who rise every morning full of hope and bravado -- having failed, utterly, to absorb the lessons of the previous day."

And Americans remain a people full of quirks.

''A bit of Lewis and Clark is in all of us, especially the urge to roam -- no American likes to stay in place," asserted Yousef Waziri, a Pakistan-born taxi driver with a penchant for quoting the German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel, often at length.

Waziri, who arrived in the United States in 1979, works in Houston during the winter, in Alaska during summers, and in Missouri during spring and fall. He has prospered, seeing his three children through university or college, but refuses to buy a house, despite the urgings of his less-footloose wife. ''Americans need to be free as birds, tethered nowhere," he declared. ''Oh, the US has some problems, most certainly -- too much pursuit of cheap pleasures, too much baseball, far too much trash television. What would the Founding Fathers be thinking of 'American Idol?' "

But he added: ''In most countries of the world, one life is too long because life is so hard. But in America, one life is too short, even if you reach very old age. You need three lives -- three exactly! -- to understand this amazing country. And also to understand baseball."

WAZIRI, like many immigrants, finds it impossible to believe that anyone with pluck and energy can fail to forge ahead in America. But much of the unease found in the heartland reflects uncertainty about the economy. Faith in the future -- in a good life achieved by hard work -- has been hard to keep with factories closing, family farms going under, and storefronts shuttered. Some struggling communities, such as Marquette, Kan., have grown so desperate for businesses and new blood that they have begun offering free land to attract residents.

In South Dakota, Richard Kjerstad, 61, remembers when there were 35 Kjerstad families farming in the dusty community of Quinn, on the edge of the state's famous Badlands.

''Now all that's left are my family and two cousins. That's pretty high attrition," he said. ''The smaller farmers are going down because they can't get the credit or can't afford the technology that would keep them afloat."

Kjerstad, his four sons, and his father -- three generations -- successfully raise winter wheat, safflower for birdseed, sunflower for cooking oil, barley, alfalfa, and beef cows on nearly 25,000 acres. The family has flourished by borrowing big and investing in high-tech agricultural systems, including tractors guided by satellite and profit-loss computer programs that track operations on the farm almost to the sowing of each seed.

''There's tragedy in the loss of small family farms, but in many ways it's a typically American tragedy," he said. ''This country has always been about greater efficiency, squeezing more and more profit out of less and less labor. In the broad sense, it's for the better -- it's better that a son or daughter can go off and get an education or a decent job instead of forking manure or churning the butter by hand. But there's sadness, too, as the more traditional lifestyles disappear."

He paused, sighed, looked out the window toward grassy range that once sustained families but is now too marginal for profitable crops or cattle. ''Everyone mourns the passing of America as it was," he said. ''We wipe the tears from our eyes as we speed down the highway to the next giant super-duper store -- and the future."

Kjerstad plans to vote Republican because he trusts Bush and believes the American economy is strong.

Down in St. Joseph, Mo., union activist G. E. Pierce Jr. sees a different economy -- and a different America.

''For working men and women, the future looks bleak. The American dream hasn't disappeared, but is slipping out of reach for millions. It's just harder and harder to grab that brass ring," said Pierce, business manager of Local 579 of the Laborers' International Union, whose members are mostly in construction.

''Bush is presiding over the hemorrhaging of jobs to Mexico, Vietnam, and China, and presiding, too, over the inflow of cheap, imported workers who are snatching the paychecks from the pockets of blue-collar Americans."

Pierce, 45, comes from Denton, Kan., and speaks with an easy drawl and fiery anger about the way he believes working-class Americans have been sidetracked by ''irrelevant, noneconomic" morality issues pushed by conservatives, such as opposition to gay marriage, gun control, or abortion. ''Guys on the job worry that the Democrats are going to take their guns away," Pierce said. ''I tell them, hell, never mind the damn guns. If we have another four years [of Bush Republicans] you can kiss your health insurance and your job security goodbye. So what's it going to be?"

THE GREATEST American adventure started with packing stuff. Lewis and Clark didn't travel light. Among the things they carried: Springfield rifles, castile soap, quill pens, ''portable soup" (an early just-add-water convenience concoction of meat bouillon, , dried celery, rice, and spices congealed into thick paste); blacksmith tools, writing desks, and surveyors' chains; special gunpowder containers fashioned from lead so that -- when empty -- they could be melted down to make more bullets; needles, compasses, big hanks of tobacco, barrels of salt pork, and gift medals inscribed with clasped hands and peace pipes, meant to wow the Indians.

Plus, Lewis toted America's first credit card in the form of a note from President Jefferson promising that the US government would make good any charges racked up by the explorers.

''They were soldiers on a mission to open the country up for commerce," said Robert R. Archibald, president of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. ''They traveled as far from their own people and culture as it was possible to go. They experienced a world that is lost to present-day Americans. Our worries about the finite resources of the planet would have been as inconceivable to them as their world of seemingly endless wilderness . . . would seem to us."

Of course, Archibald stressed, the explorers were not venturing into an unpeopled Eden, but expanses dotted by human habitations and stitched by trails that were as well-known to their users as the Boston Post Road was to Americans of that time.

Native Americans today, much as they did 200 years ago, regard the Corps of Discovery with varying degrees of bemusement and resentment.

''We say the expedition marked the unsettling of the West," said Amy Mossett, with a laugh that was good-natured but still rang short of merry.

Mossett is director of tourism for the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes. Her ancestors helped provide shelter for Lewis and Clark in 1804-05 when the Corps of Discovery wintered over north of present-day Bismarck, N.D. The Mandan villages of the time, consisting of sturdy earth lodges on bluffs near the Missouri, then boasted a population greater than that of St. Louis.

''Indians aren't 'celebrating' the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark, although we recognize it as an event in the heritage we've come to share" with nonnative Americans, Mossett said. ''The West was not an untamed, unknown wilderness. It was the land of our ancestors. It was occupied by hundreds of cultures. It was already part of an empire of trade [between Indian tribes as far away as Mexico] and by settled agricultural communities. The coming of Lewis and Clark represented the start of our dispossession."

Yet direct anger is seldom expressed in Indian Country, the common name for the vast archipelago of reservations stretching across the Great Plains to the mountains beyond. The most common wish expressed by Native Americans interviewed in six states was that other Americans would come to realize that Lewis and Clark were not reconnoitering the ''unknown," but another culture's backyard.

''Between the arrival of Lewis and Clark and today, Indians have fallen off the map," said Roberta ''Bobbie" Conner, head of the Tamastsklit Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton, Ore.

''We want to be part of America's story, not invisible people," she said. ''Lewis and Clark passed through the homeland of a real, living, breathing society. But we've become just an exotic backdrop to someone else's story."

Indeed, without the generosity of many of the tribes they encountered, Lewis and Clark would not have completed their passage to the western sea, would have perished in the mountains or on the prairie, or retreated back down the Missouri. Their most celebrated Indian companion was a young Soshone woman named Sacagawea, who served as interpreter for the explorers through the most treacherous parts of the journey. In belated recognition, the likeness of Sacagawea appears on the new ''golden" US $1 coin, designed by sculptor Glenna Goodacre.

Randy'L He-dow Teton, a Shoshone-Bannock from Idaho's Fort Hall Indian Reservation, served as model for the Sacagawea coin while studying at the University of New Mexico.

''Some Indians actually regard Sacagawea as a sort of traitor [for helping the white interlopers], but she was just doing kindness for strangers, helping them through a land they didn't understand," Teton said of her forebear, who was about 15 when she set off with the explorers, carrying an infant on her back across the continent and back.

''These tough men had to rely so much on this quiet, gentle woman who could translate, who could find medicinal herbs, who could look for landmarks," said Teton, a 28-year-old art historian who speaks to schools and civic groups about Sacagawea.

''Americans today could probably use such a level-head guide," Teton said. ''We exist in uncertain times, times of change, times of danger. There is an apocalyptic feeling, with terror attacks, war raging, warnings that the ozone is disappearing, and the Earth might flood. Maybe our Native American culture will be needed again to help lost Americans survive when the television lights dim and the oil runs out. That is the Indian strength -- we know how to survive."

WHEN LEWIS AND CLARK shoved off from Camp River Dubois on what is now the Illinois shore, the continent west of the Mississippi was a question mark, in the words of New Hampshire author Dayton Duncan, writer and coproducer of the award-winning PBS documentary ''Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery." No one had any idea what the explorers might find. Jefferson and his contemporaries believed that woolly mammoths still roamed those unmapped plains, that volcanoes spewed lava, that soaring mountains of solid salt stood by the Missouri, and that a blue-eyed tribe of wandering Welsh inhabited the land.

The reality was far more spectacular, of course.

On a warm May day this year, Dale T. Chapman watched as a tugboat pushing barges bucked the currents where the Mississippi and Missouri swirl together, just above St. Louis. The president of Lewis and Clark Community College -- presiding over a day marking the 200th anniversary of the launch of the expedition -- was on the bank in Hartford, Ill., at almost exactly the spot where the explorers slid their keelboat and pirogues into history.

''In the end, Americans are like the confluence of rivers at the country's heart," said Chapman. ''The country is a confluence of cultures, always churning. That's what we are now, and that's what we've been since Lewis and Clark's day. When Lewis came to St. Louis, the place was a potpourri of Spaniards, French, Indians, blacks, Americans -- all these people, after different things. Two centuries later we're still trying to make this extraordinary multicultural society work. I tend to think we're doing a better job than we realize."