290225 Lewis & Clark: The Saving of Sacajawea (Part 2 of 3)

 

 

As stated in my previous post regarding Part 1 of the Lewis & Clark trilogy, no continuities of this episode have yet been located. However, we do know a few details about the broadcast that are noteworthy.

The February, 1929, issue of the Great Northern Goat magazine included this past-tense description of the broadcast of February 25^th:

… The program of February 25^th told of a later expedition in the Rocky Mountains and the locale was the headwater of the Marias, a river discovered by Lewis and Clark on their journey up the Missouri. This program was doubly interesting because it not only told of the Isaac I. Steven’s search for the fabled Marias Pass through the Rocky Mountains but the radio audience heard John F. Stevens, the actual discoverer of the pass, tell in his own words how he accomplished the feat in the winter of 1889. …

The Marias River and Marias Pass were named after a cousin of Meriwether Lewis, Maria Wood. It is presumed that a cartographer misread the name of the river on an early version of a map of that area of Montana, and simply dropped the apostrophe (“Maria’s River” versus “Marias River”).

John F. Stevens (1853-1943) was a living legend in 1929, and the Great Northern Railway was delighted to have another reason to draw favorable attention to the man, his deeds, and his association with the railway. By any measure, Stevens had a remarkable career in the field of engineering. He helped locate rail lines for many projects, and not just for the Great Northern. While Stevens was not the first person to discover Marias Pass (among fur traders and others, it was already generally known to be there), he did locate and assess it as a favorable pass for the Great Northern Railway to scale the mighty Rocky Mountains. This he did in 1889. Only a few years later, Stevens also located a favorable pass over the Cascade Mountains, which today honors him with the name “Stevens Pass.” There is also a “John F. Stevens Canyon” along the old line of the Great Northern Railway in Montana.

John F. Stevens statue being unveiled by John F. Stevens, III, grandson of the famed explorer, and an honor graduate of the Shattuck Military School.   Author's collection

On July 21, 1925, the Upper Missouri Historical Expedition – organized and sponsored by the Great Northern Railway – unveiled a larger-than-life statue of John F. Stevens, depicting him as he might have looked while up in the Rockies searching for Marias Pass in 1889. The bronze statue was sculpted by Gaetano Cecere. The statue stood for many years just a few yards from the GN’s mainline track through the pass, allowing sharp-eyed passengers to spy the statue as the trains rolled through the pass. It was lighted at night. Today, the statue has been moved to a location easily accessible to motorists who stop at the Marias Pass rest area. The statue of Stevens is erected very close to the Theodore Roosevelt monument at the same site.

This episode of Empire Builders provided a development that strained the relations between NBC and the Great Northern Railway. Ralph Budd, GN president, was a very knowledgeable historian of the Pacific Northwest. Evidence of his interest in the early history of the GN territory is clearly seen throughout much of his tenure as the railroad’s president. It was therefore of great irritation to him when NBC issued a press release for the February 25 broadcast that made it into print in some of the more widely-circulated papers. For example, here’s how that NBC press release appeared in the Washington Post:  “The hazardous return journey of Clark and Lewis by the overland route from San Francisco after missing their steamer there, will be depicted in the next chapter of the historic series on "The Empire Builders"…”

The historical purist in Budd bristled at the use of the names “Clark and Lewis.” He was appalled by the press writer’s comments about Lewis and Clark following the “overland route from San Francisco after missing their steamer there…” Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery never ventured further south than the Columbia River (which forms much of the border between the states of Washington and Oregon). As for the steamer nonsense – Robert Fulton constructed the first commercially viable steamboat in New York in 1807.