WEIPPE, Idaho – The re-enactment of the first meeting between frontier explorers Lewis and Clark and the Nez Perce tribe was played out in a northern Idaho meadow with a cast of some 600 spectators joining in the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the historic moment.
The re-enactment this week was part of the bicentennial trek of the Corps of Discovery through Idaho on its way west, retracing the steps taken two centuries ago by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. President Thomas Jefferson sent the explorers on the 1803-1806 journey to the just-acquired Louisiana Purchase to discover what the U.S. had bought, to learn about the inhabitants, to seek a water route to the Pacific Ocean and to catalog the plants, rocks, soils and animals they found.
Re-creating what history has recorded of the Sept. 20, 1805, event, the great-great-great-grandson of William Clark topped a grassy hill in a meadow several miles outside of Weippe. Hundreds of schoolchildren, local residents and history buffs had walked the route in advance of Bud Clark and sat around the meadow to watch.
Clark rode on horseback into the camp of the descendants of Watkuweis, the Nez Perce woman who urged the tribe to trust Lewis and Clark two centuries ago. Ralph and Gloria Johnson and their grandsons represented Watkuweis, an ancestor of Gloria’s.
The re-enactment had Clark carefully approaching the Indian children playing in the meadow, giving them ribbons and encouraging them to take word home that visitors had arrived. The Corps of Discovery members then gave the tribal members a flag and other trinkets in exchange for a map to the Columbia River, food and friendship.
The event was staged by the Discovery Expedition, a re-enactment group out of St. Charles, Mo., and the Bitterroot Corps, an Idaho re-enactment group.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Martin Aubuchon, 52, a civil engineer from St. Louis, told the Lewiston Tribune. He played the role of the corps’ civil engineer, Pvt. John B. Thompson. It was his first time visiting Idaho.
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