Lewis and Clark center celebrates 17th anniversary

Starting young might be a good way to develop a healthy hankering for history.

Just ask 17-year-old Austin Haney, who is going on his fourth year as a member of the mostly gray-haired Lewis and Clark Honor Guard.

He was telling fish tales and demonstrating the explorers' primitive but successful fishing techniques Sunday during the 17th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center.

Or you could ask Great Falls resident Beverly Wilcott, who has attended key activities at the Great Falls center with her husband Reggie for 17 years. They took their children every year, and Sunday she was taking her daughter and two grandkids.

"I grew up north of Havre and always loved the prairie, and love the idea that Lewis and Clark explored this whole big area some 210 years ago," Wilcott said. "Learning about them never gets old."

"I bring my boys out a few times a year, especially during free days when special activities are planned," said her daughter, Jennifer Hamrick. "It's cool to visit because Lewis and Clark spent so much time portaging around the water falls here. They're part of the town's special heritage."

Hamrick said her son Nathaniel still remembers their visit last year, even though he was only 18 months old. He fondly recalled visiting Smokey the Bear and getting ice cream, she said.

The fire-conscious bruin wasn't around Sunday, but Lewis and Clark Honor Guard members were present.

Buckskin clad Darian Cath and Ron Ukrainetz were using scrapers to flesh out a buffalo hide mounted near the front entry, while Dugan Colburn demonstrated how to make rope from native hemp crops.

Haney was holding forth inside, with a table of fishing gear replicating that used in the early 1800s.

"It was a watershed time in fishing history," he said. People were starting to put eyelets on bamboo rods attached to some early reels. Before then, they just tied lines to the ends of long poles and waited for fish to bite, with "no real — or reel — control," he quipped.

However the poles were too flimsy for the explorers to take on their epic trip, so they hand-baited instead, dropping a hook on a line into the water from a hand-held reel and letting the current take it.

It was not the best way to fish, he said, but they had some success, in part because fish in present-day Montana hadn't encountered too many hooks yet. Indian tribes around here didn't fish nearly as much as tribes west of the Continental Divide along the Columbia River and Pacific Coast, he added.

Most members of the Honor Guard, which does authentic reenactments of the explorers' day-to-day experiences, are in their 50s and 60s, Haney said, but encourage him as a fellow history buff.

The group meets once a month to practice and plan their next events, Haney said, and each spends a lot of individual time reading up on the Lewis and Clark team member he is portraying.

Haney said he's learned that Silas Goodrich, the character he portrays, was walking with Meriwether Lewis on the red-letter day the group's co-commander first spotted the Great Falls of the Missouri. While Lewis checked out the falls, estimated its size and jotted journal notes, Goodrich went about fishing for the crew's dinner.

At one point, Goodrich made the first recorded catch by a white man of a cutthroat trout, Haney said.

But reading text books and journals isn't enough, said Haney, who might like to teach history one day.

"You don't get a real appreciation for what it was like for the Lewis and Clark crew from just reading," he said. "You need to spend time in a rain storm with soggy moccasins and try to start a fire with flint."

To learn more

The Lewis and Clark Festival, with extensive reenactments by the Honor Guard over three days, will be in Gibson Park from June 19 to 21.