Tag: Sacajawea

One Last Look at the Missouri Capitol

When last, I left you, we had exited the House Lounge after appreciating the Thomas Hart Benton murals. Our next stop is the House Chamber.

The windows are exquisite. By playing around with the exposure, I was able to bring up the colors a bit.

This is the stained glass window above the speaker’s platform.

The ceiling has a beautiful piece of leaded glass in it. I’m not sure why it’s purple, but there you have it.

The sides of the chamber are decorated with words that I imagine are intended to inspire the legislators.

LIBERTY…EQUALITY…LAW…JUSTICE…

ENTERPRISE…PROGRESS…HONOR.

The window immediately above the word PROGRESS shows the world as it was unfolding. From what the guide said, I gathered that the artist was really forward-thinking in his depiction of the airplane. Progress, indeed.

I was captured by this decorative detail and decided to include it in this post.

At the back of the chamber is this mural dedicated to the War to End All Wars, now known as World War I. I borrowed this from someplace on the internet. I’d cite the source, but I lost it.

Here are the photos that I managed to snap.

From one side…

And as far away from it as I could get while still in the visitors’ gallery.

The last stop on this tour is the Hall of Famous Missourians. These busts are all privately funded and depict prominent Missourians honored for their achievements and contributions to the state. According to my Preferred Source, these busts were created by Missouri sculptors Sabra Tull Meyer, E. Spencer Schubert and William J. Williams. As of 2013, there were 44 inductees in the Hall.

You can relax. I am not going to present all of the honorees.

First we have Mark Twain, otherwise known as Samuel Langhorne Clements. Born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1835. He died in 1910. I visited his grave in Elmira, New York as well as his house in Hartford, Connecticut.

Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne, 1769-1852. She is recognized for being an American Frontier Educator. Born in Grenoble, France, she came to America in 1818 and open the first free school west of the Mississippi in a log cabin in St. Charles, Missouri.

She worked with the American Indians, who called her “Quah-kah-ka-num-ad” or “The Woman Who Prays Always.” She was beatified by Pope Pius XII in 1940 and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1988.

Tom Bass was born into slavery in Boone County in 1859. He lived most of his life in Mexico, Missouri. He became one of the most popular horse trainers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is credited with helping to start the American Royal Horse Show in Kansas City. He died in 1934 at the age of 75. He succumbed to a heart attack, which people attributed to his distress over the death of Belle Beach, one of his favorite horses.

Josephine Baker is also claimed as one of Missouri’s own. She was born in St. Louis in 1906 and her plaque honors her for being an international entertainer and human rights activist. She lead an interesting life. Not only as a singer and dancer, but as a movie star, a civil rights activist, and working with the French Resistance during World War II. After the war, she was awarded the Croix de guerre by the French military and named a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle. Although she had renounced her U.S. citizenship when she married French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937, Coretta Scott King offered her unofficial leadership in the Civil Rights Movement after Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Melton D. “Mel” Hancock is included in the Hall. He is the founder The Taxpayer’s Survival Association, which put forth “The Hancock Amendment.” This is Missouri’s Constitution Tax and Spending Limitation. His organization worked with other groups in the state and got it placed on the ballot through a petition drive and it was adopted by the voters in 1980. (Side note, if this were Michigan, the legislators would feel free to do something to thwart the will of the voters.) From 1989 – 1996, he represented the state’s 7th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives.

Astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, 1889-1953, is also one of the honorees. Hubble developed the theory and law proving that the universe is expanding, developed the theory that the universe extends beyond the Milky Way and a technique to measure the distance of those galaxies from our galaxy. Hubble Classification is still used today to measure and classify all galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The Hubble Space Telescope is named in his honor.

I always associated Marlin Perkins with Nebraska. I guess it was due to “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” But, no, this well-known zoologist and naturalist was born and raised in Carthage, Missouri. He was also director of the Saint Louis Zoo from 1962-1970. He hosted the television show 1963-1985, which was almost to the end of his life in 1986. I’d say he had a good, long run.

I did not know that Emmet Kelly Sr. was from Missouri, but it appears that they claim him as their own. While he was born in Kansas in 1898, his hometown was Houston, Missouri. His character, based on the hobos of the Depression Era, was known as Weary Willie. Our guide told us that the statue held a secret, if you took a flash photo of it.

One of the tour members managed to snap a photo with flash, and I took a photo of her photo. Amazing!

Next is a completely different sort of clown. Rush Limbaugh. The citation honors him for overcoming adversity while climbing the ladder to become the top radio talk show host in the country. I read over his Wikipedia entry. The only adversity I could find was that he dropped out of college. His mother said that, “He flunked everything,” and “he just didn’t seem interested in anything except radio.”

Virginia Louis Minor was born in Virginia in 1824 and moved to St. Louis in 1843. She founded the first woman’s suffrage organization in the United States. She attempted to register to vote in 1872 and she sued the registrar who refused to let her register. Her case, Minor v Happensett, went to the United State Supreme Court, which denied women the right to vote under the 14th Amendment.

She worked for women’s suffrage until her death in 1894.

I’m not sure why Ginger Rogers and Sacajawea are displayed so close together. Do you suppose they are running out of space?

Ginger Rogers was born in Independence, Missouri in 1911. She won a Best Actress Oscar for the 1940 film, “Kitty Foyle.” She danced with Fred Astaire in ten films. Her most famous quotes is “I do everything the man does, only backwards and in high heels.”

Sacajawea was born in 1788 Lemhi River Valley, near present day  Salmon, Idaho. On her plaque, she is recognized as being the Shosone interpreter for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. in 1800, when she was around 12 years old, she and several other girls were kidnapped by a group of Hidata after a battle that resulted in the deaths of several Shoshone. She was taken to the Hidatsa village, near present-day Washburn, North Dakota.

According to my Preferred Source, When she was about 13, she was sold into a “nonconsensual” marriage along with another young girl to Toussaint Charbonneau, a Quebecois trapper living in the village. She was pregnant with her first child when Lewis and Clark spent the first winter near there. Charbonneau professed to be able to speak Big Belley language, which is what the Hidatsa spoke. He told them that his wives spoke the Shoshone language. They hired him and told him to bring along one of his wives.

Sacajawea died in 1812. Or was it 1884? There is no definitive proof, although 1812 is the more accepted date.

This gentleman is George Caleb Bingham. He was a 19th century American painter of the American West, with a large selections of his works of at the St. Louis Museum of Art. Much of his best work generally relates to life and commerce along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and to the people of Missouri in and around St. Louis, Jefferson city and Kansas City, among other Missouri places. He became known as “The Missouri Artist” and is considered by some to be Missouri’s first artist.

In addition to being an artist. he also served in the Missouri House of Representatives and other various positions in government.

David Rice Atchison is another interesting politician. Although he was born near Lexington, Kentucky in 1807, he was the U.S. Senator from Missouri for 1843-1855, and there are those who claim that he was President for one day in 1849. That’s the President of the United States, mind you.

How did that happen?  The term of outgoing president, James K. Polk, ended at on noon March 4, which was as Sunday.  On March 2, outgoing vice president George M. Dallas relinquished his position as President of the Senate, at which time Atchison was elected President pro tempore of the Senate. According to the Presidential Succession Act of 1792, the Senate president pro tempore immediately followed the vice president in the presidential line of succession. As Dallas’s term also ended at noon on the 4th, and neither President-elect Zachary Taylor nor Vice President-elect Millard Fillmore had been sworn in to office on the day, it was claimed by some of Atchison’s friends and colleagues that on March 4-5, 1849, Atchison was Acting President of the United States.

It must be noted that Atchison himself never claimed to be Acting President and historians, constitutional scholars and biographers all dismiss the claim. tI is a fun little story, nevertheless.

Missouri does have one genuine native son who was President – Harry S Truman. According to the plaque, he was considered one of the Nation’s greatest presidents and most remarkable statesmen. Born in Lamar, Missouri in 1884, he lived out his post-presidential years in Independence, Missouri.

He was a Missouri Senator from 1935 – 1945, when he became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third vice president. He followed John Nance Garner, 1933-1941, and Henry A. Wallace, 1941-1945. One of these days, I am going to have to research just why FDR felt that he needed to switch vice presidents. In any event, Truman had been vice president for less than three months when FDR died from a cerebral hemorrhage in the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. Talk about on-the-job training! He had to take the reins and bring WW II to a close, which included making the decision to use the atomic bomb. I  have read in several sources, that when he took office he wasn’t even aware that there was an atom bomb being developed.

I am including this photo of his bust on the pedestal so that you can see the poppy on it. Truman served in WW I, which he only managed to get into because he secretly memorized the eye chart to compensate for his poor vision. My visit to the capitol was in 2018, which was the 100th anniversary of the end of WW I. The poppy is the symbol of remembrance. I believe it gained popularity because of the poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae.

And now, I really will move along. Thank you for bearing with me through this long series of posts about the Missouri State Capitol.

Heading to the Coast

Fort Clatsop was the destination I picked out for my second day of adventures in the Portland area.

Fort Clatsop? Why? What is that?

Well, Fort Clatsop is where Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1805 – 1806. After seeing all the signs for the route they traveled while tooling along down beautifully paved roads in BART, the Big Assed Red Truck, I couldn’t believe I was finally going to see where they ended up.

I set out on a beautiful sunny day, and I headed down the Columbia River toward the Pacific. My first stop was Astoria.

The Columbia River Maritime Museum was there, but there was an entry fee. I figured that I had probably seen every possible ship-related artifact in all the other museums I’ve visited, so I satisfied myself with a look around the outside

That is one big anchor! And while we’re on the topic of “big”, there was also this really large propeller.

The lightship Columbia was in at the dock.

This particular lightship was commissioned in 1951. It was the fourth and final lightship stationed at the mouth of the Columbia River. Interestingly enough, it was built in Boothbay, Maine, a town I passed through during my visit to Maine.

There had been lightships guiding vessels across the Columbia River Bar from 1892 until this final lightship was decommissioned in 1979. This area had the ominous name of the Graveyard of the Pacific. The lightships were eventually replaced by an automated navigational buoy, which has also since been retired.

Buoy.

Buoy – oh – buoy.

There was also an active duty Coast Guard vessel moored at the museum. In the background, you can see the Astoria-Megler bridge.

I was fascinated by the remnants of old pilings. It seems to me that it was easier or more cost effective to drive pilings and build on top of them than to build on the land that was available. According to my ultimate information resource (Wikipedia) the downtown was devastated by fires in 1883 and in 1922 due to the buildings being constructed on top of pilings. That might explain why these pilings are just sitting there moldering away.

The 1922 fire destroyed up to 30 blocks. Approximately 2,500 residents lost their homes and damages exceeded millions of dollars. Incidentally, this happened when the Astoria population was at its peak. A little more than 14,000 people lived there at the time. Population has declined since then. Now, around 9,000 folks live there.

Astoria was named after John Jacob Astor. An immigrant from German, he came to the United States after the Revolutionary War and was the first multi-millionaire businessman in the country. He was an investor from New York City, who, among other enterprises, founded the American Fur Company. This company established Fort Astoria here in 1811. Oddly enough, the Oregon Legislative Assembly didn’t get around to incorporating the city until 1876, which was thirteen years after Oregon attained statehood.

In addition to the maritime museum, the other point of interest in Astoria is the Astoria Column. It was built in 1926 with financial backing of the Great Northern Railway and Vincent Astor, the great-grandson of John Jacob Astor.

Astoria Column is a 125 foot tall tower built atop Coxcomb Hill above the town. Coxcomb Hill is already about 600 feet above the town, so if you climb the tower, you are really up there! Astoria itself is only about 22 feet above sea level.

I went up to the door and looked inside. I did not climb those narrow curving stairs! I had to satisfy myself with the view from the ground.

The column is decorated with patriotic images and propaganda. Embellishment is much in the tradition of John Jacob Astor, who hired Washington Irving to mythologize the three-year-reign of his Pacific Fur Company, a subsidiary of the American Fur Company. Yes, Washington Irving, the famed 19th century author responsible for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, among other works. While he was the guest of Astor, he wrote “Astoria: Or, Enterprise Beyond the Rockies,” The book became a best seller in 1836. At the time, it was required reading in some schools.

The column is quite amazing, but the real reason for visiting the top of Coxcomb Hill is the view.

Here’s another view of Astoria-Megler Bridge, crossing the Columbia River.

My notes say that this is a view of Saddle Mountain, which is the tallest mountains in Clatsop County. My ultimate source says that it is 3,288 feet tall.

According to the signs at the viewing platforms, this photo is of Fort Clatsop, which is sheltered by the hills. Lewis and Clark and their team spent the winter there, rather than on the other side of the river because the hills provided some shelter from the weather.

There were some commemorative plaques and time capsules on top of the hill, too.

Time capsules are nice. I guess. Since they are going to be opened at some point in the future, they aren’t much to look at. The plaque in the center caught my interest, though.

Cable TV was invented in Astoria, Oregon? Amazing! I do tend to go on about things that interest me. I have no idea it anyone else is interested. If you want to know how and why this happened in Astoria, click here. Incidentally, it’s a rather sweet tale of kindness and generosity, at least the way it’s described in this retelling.

One interesting fundraiser was gliders. You know, those lightweight gliders that used to cost ten cents back in my day. They sell them here and people walk to the top of the column and launch them. At least that is what I was told. Since I didn’t climb up, I can’t verify it. But, on my way out, I met a family ready to make the climb, gliders in hand.

The young man didn’t mind posing for a photo.

I wonder how the people that live down the hill feel about the gliders crash-landing on their property? I didn’t stop to ask, but I did see some gliders stuck in trees and bushes on my way back down.

I set out again.

“Lewis and Clark slept here” should be posted all over. I passed on spot that had a sign that claimed that this was one of their campsites.

I have no idea how they figured that out.

Across the river, in Station Point, is the official end point of Lewis and Clark’s journey west. There is a small park dedicated to the brief time they spent there.

It was rather wind-swept and desolate. In fact, the Clatsop Indians recommend that they more to the other side of the river to a site that was more protected from the weather.  I felt this root ball is a suitable photo to leave you with to represent this site.

On to Fort Clatsop!

Of course, there is really nothing left from the original Voyage of Discovery. They spent a winter there before heading back. On your way in to the recreation of the fort, there is a nice museum.

Of course, the focus is strongly on Lewis and Clark. Do you know which is which? A quick Google search leads me to believe that Lewis is on the left and Clark is on the right.

Thomas Jefferson also figures in the story, since he was president at the time.

This sculpture is entitled “Arrival” and was made by Stanley Wanlass. It was commissioned but the Fort Clatsop Historical Association in 1980 to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

The person standing with outstretched arms is Meriwether Lewis. Just below him is a Clatsop Indian and around his neck is a medal bearing Thomas Jefferson’s image. William Clark is signing something. Lewis’ Newfoundland dog, Seaman, is also included in the grouping.

Like many museums, they tend to be dark. I am including this photo of a diorama of a whale hunt because it was well-lit.

There was more light outside. I headed out to see the recreation of Fort Clatsop.

I passed a statute of Sacajawea along the way. Another  thing I learned about Sacajawea during my travels is that there were many versions of her name.

Sacajawea
Sacagawea
Sakakawea

It runs in my mind that I saw a few others, as well. I suppose how English speakers chose to record her name is not as important as the fact that they did record her name. She was not lost to history. If you want to read more about her, click here to get started.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to share my hat with her.

Growing nearby were some trilliums. This is one flower that was a favorite of my family. The forest floor around our cabin was covered with them in the spring.

I reached the fort. It was built around a courtyard. The exterior walls were built for protection.

There were seven rooms that met their needs.

Of course, no one really knows exactly what the rooms were like. I know they took good notes, but I doubt they left explicit descriptions of their winter habitation.

I am always looking down to see what I can see. I came across this marker.

It was the first time I’ve ever seen a “cadastral survey” marker. I had to look it up.

“Cadastral refers to a public record of the extent, value, and ownership of land. It is used as basis of taxation, surveying, and mapping.”

So now we all know.

My last stop for the day was the ocean. I’d always heard people raving about the Oregon coast.

En route, I passed this sign. I had to take a photo to honor my Norwegian ancestors.

I found a place to park and headed toward the beach. The sun was bright but the wind was vigorous. It wasn’t exactly the weather I prefer for the beach. But then, it was April.

The wind was whipping the sand around.

It was also good for flying kites.

As I walked closer to the ocean, I came upon groups of these amazing blue things. I was pretty sure they were some sort of life form, but I wasn’t sure what they might be.

Incredible! What could they be?

I approached these folks. They were walking the beach with the familiarity of locals. I asked them what these object were. Guess what they said?

Jellyfish!

If you want to get spooked, just Google “jellyfish on the beach”.

And with that, it was time to head back to the Flo the Airstream. Before I headed back to BART, I turned for one last look back at the ocean.