Please note that a new tribute to President Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery will be dedicated on Wednesday, June 4, 2008. Its official name will be the Lewis & Clark Trailhead Plaza. See photo summary( 5 photos) at end of second article.

Directions:
GPS (N38 34.708 W92 10.281)
Missouri State Capitol Grounds, Jefferson City, Missouri.
Cross Jefferson Street on East Capitol Avenue to view up close the new Lewis & Clark Trailhead Plaza. Heroic size bronze figures in a native stone and waterfall setting look out over the plaza to the Jefferson Landing and the Missouri River. Conceived by mid-Missouri sculptor Sabra Tull Meyer and funded by private commissions and contributions that also included Missouri school children’s donations—it remembers the heroes of the Corps of Discovery, and the part Missourians played in the Lewis & Clark bicentennial across America. Public transportation enhancement funds and city matching funds were used for the trailhead plaza setting.

Note in particular Lewis’s dog Seaman and the lesser known members of Lewis & Clark’s team who traveled with them in their Captain’s Mess . Also note the waterfalls and trailhead plaza design of internationally renowned landscape architect Austin Tao Associates of St. Louis. The plaza functions as a cyclists and hikers trailhead to eventually connect to the Katy Trail State Park Trail via a pedestrian bridge across the Missouri River. Check it out at dusk as the plaza and monument are bathed in light after dark .The plaza will be dedicated on June 4, 2008, exactly two hundred and four years after Lewis & Clark first traveled past the future site of Jefferson City.

My favorite is the statue of George Drouillard. I believe this is the first such work in bronze to capture his likeness, in the country. He was the nephew of the founder of Cape Girardeau, Missouri—Louis Lorimier. He was the valuable civilian guide and interpreter for the expedition with Shawnee and French Canadian bloodlines and hunting skills that also proved to be of great value.

York, William Clark’s body servant– a slave—looks out on the Missouri River with rifle in hand. He is seated and relaxed. Today’s viewer can’t deduce from his figure in bronze that he was a slave.  It is true that on the journey he proved his great value and had unusual freedoms, only to return to being William Clark’s slave when they returned to St Louis in September 1806.

See the sculptor’s web page : http://www.sabratullmeyer.com for sculpture details. If you want to read more about George Drouillard, I recommend Sign Talker by James Alexander Thom or Larry E. Morris’s book The Fate of the Corps: what became of the Lewis and Clark explorers after the expedition.

The Lewis & Clark Trailhead Plaza : location and style

We are so pleased with the location of the State of Missouri’s new Lewis & Clark Trailhead Plaza. It is strategically placed outdoors and very accessible to the public. The original Lewis & Clark statues by sculptor James Earle Fraser inside the Capitol building are impressive, but seem cold and distant today, as they stand in dimly lit alcoves on either side of the grand staircase. In 1927 his heroic statue of Thomas Jefferson was installed outside on the south capitol steps. It remains the icon for the city.

The trailhead plaza is on historic ground. It is near where my great grandfather and his brother fired ceremonial cannons at the turn of the century after the Civil War. It overlooks the Jefferson Landing State Historic Site, whose creation in 1976 saved Jefferson City’s original Missouri River steamboat era landing site buildings. In the fall of 2000 the President of the United States, the Vice-President and their wives, and other national leaders, walked past where the plaza site is now located in the state funeral procession for the late Governor Mel Carnahan.

The idea of a monument for the Corps of Discovery came in 2001 from a local task force committee member. He was aware of a huge statue designed by famed contemporary sculptor Eugene Daub for Kansas City’s Case Park overlook that was dedicated in April of 2000.  Lewis and Clark bicentennial leaders including Stephen E. Ambrose and Dayton Duncan were present that day.

The task force idea was to show a group of the Corps of Discovery members perched on a limestone outcropping and taking a break in the spring of 1804. They wanted the figures to appear much more relaxed and in a more natural setting than that depicted by sculptor Daub.

Enter the mid-Missouri sculptor Sabra Tull Meyer, who liked the idea and after a walking tour of possible locations picked the capitol grounds site. Her trained eye knew it was the perfect place to build a 21st century monument remembering the Corps of Discovery and Missouri’s participation in the bicentennial across the country in 2003-2006.

Missouri’s state quarter is the only state design to use the Corps of Discovery theme in remembering state history.  It thus seems appropriate that there are two monuments in the state with the same theme–one in Kansas City and the other in Jefferson City. We hope you’ll plan to see them both. In Kansas City note Daub’s exquisite Sacagawea, but here note Sabra’s George Drouillard.

See the Eugene Daub works including “Corps of Discovery” at:
http://www.artanddesignonline.com/Member_template/member_temp_innercircle.php?m=11818
See the Lewis & Clark Trailhead Plaza design comments at:
http://www.lewisandclarktrailwatch.blogspot.com and the sculptor Sabra Tull Meyer’s website: http://www.sabratullmeyer.com to see a slide show of her sculptures in bronze that will be unveiled here on June 4, 2008.

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