These historical replicas of Lewis & Clark's boats have amassed their own histories

Thirty years ago, a St. Charles man built the first one in his side yard. Now they've taken on different meanings for different people.

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For Ken Crawford, the boat was just a curiosity. He was walking his dog last October in Sioux Passage Park, which abuts the Missouri River in northernmost St. Louis County, when he saw it down near the ramp into the water: a full-size replica of the keelboat used by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who explored and mapped the American West for President Thomas Jefferson two centuries ago. “It was huge,” Crawford told me.

Built from dark cedar, it stretched 55 feet from stem to stern—longer than the standard trailers that truckers haul down the interstate. A crew was lowering the vessel down the ramp that weekend to film some shots for an educational series sponsored by one of Clark’s descendants, Carlota “Lotsie” Hermann Holton, and the National Park Service, among others. It wasn’t an ad hoc prop, though. It has its own backstory and has different meanings for different people. It lives at the Lewis & Clark Boat House and Museum, which sits upriver in historic St. Charles, near where the explorers and their Corps of Discovery spent a few days in 1803 preparing for their historic journey.

For the museum’s director, Bob Foster, the boat is a major attraction and marketing tool. Granted, there’s plenty else to see in the museum’s main gallery, where Foster leads me on a tour during a recent afternoon: dioramas, millenia-old projectile points, taxidermied wild critters. (The floor-to-ceiling windows afford a generous view of the river but have left some animals sun-bleached, such that a beaver now looks albino; they’re being replaced soon, thanks to a grant.) In a side room, there’s a bust of York, the enslaved man owned by Clark and brought on the journey; he earned respect as a hunter and fascinated the Western tribes with his skin color, only to return home and be denied his freedom for 10 years. Then there’s the bust of Sacagawea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman who married a member of the expedition; her knowledge proved indispensable to its survival. More and more these days, Foster tells me, visitors ask about the American Indians the explorers encountered. One woman recently came in and said, “I’m having some problems with Clark.” (Aside from being a slave owner, Clark also had a post-expedition career coordinating federal removal of American Indians from their land.) But as part of the NPS’s Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, this private museum draws visitors from all over the world—from Germans and Brits to Kenyans and Chinese—and many people are focused on the boat, which is usually stored on the ground level, below the museum.

For Glen Bishop, now deceased, a replica keelboat was a matter of pride. He opened a stained-glass shop on historic South Main Street in the 1980s, at a time when that area was in historic-preservation and heritage-touting mode. Bishop felt that the local Lewis and Clark Rendez-Vous event deserved a proper replica. Plus he and his wife, Joanne, hoped to spend their twilight years living on the water, so he had two good reasons to build one. He obtained the historical design plans from the Smithsonian and constructed the vessel in his side yard, with help from neighbors. (Some called him “Noah”; in his personal papers, he described himself as “strange,” which he equated to “rugged.”) They finished the boat in 1992, just in time for it to be a float in the Fourth of July parade in Washington, D.C. (The Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales pulled them along the parade route.) The boat was then stored in a warehouse and pulled out on special occasions, such as when Ken Burns asked to film it for his documentary on the expedition. But in 1997, a fire at the warehouse destroyed the boat. So Bishop and others decided to build a second one—that’s the one that exists today. It’s been at the museum since it opened in 2003, the same year that a group of reenactors began taking the boat upriver to celebrate the expedition’s bicentennial.

For Larry Boschen, one of the reenactors, the boat represents a different kind of life. “It was hard coming home,” says Boschen, a retired boilermaker who’s at the museum when I visit.  Over the three years of reenactment, sitting around campfires with the others, chatting into the night, he’d tasted what the expedition must’ve felt like. “You come home, and you feel claustrophobic being in the house.”

Boschen and Foster walk me downstairs to see the boat. There are actually three: two pirogues and the big keelboat. Most visitors behold the latter from a viewing platform, but they invite me up a ladder and onto the wooden deck. I ask what’s inside the roofed structure at the stern. Boschen opens the door and shows me. It would’ve been the captain’s quarters, he explains, but today it provides access to the MerCruiser engine. (That modification is required by the U.S. Coast Guard for safety reasons.) Boschen volunteers his time to maintain the boat and admires its sturdy construction. He points out with pride that, in terms of functional longevity, the replica boat has outlasted Lewis and Clark’s original.  “But of course,” he adds, “we got fiberglass.”

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