Navigating Narratives Gallery Talk

Friday, March 15, 2024

This evening, the CAIRNS director gave a public talk on the background research that led to the Navigating Narratives exhibition. There are only four persons who wrote about the events of September 23-30, 1804, when the Corps of Discovery traveled through Titonwan Territory on its way up the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Mandan villages and then, the next year, on to the Pacific Coast. The four journalist, William Clark, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse, kept daily journals. Their entries represent the only accounts of those eight days in September 1804. Carefully reading them suggests, at least to the CAIRNS director, that the mainstream narratives that appear in films and books of this portion of the Corps travels might not be accurate. A pleasant and unexpected surprise was that Hank and Marianne Fridell, musicians who composed a song for the exhibition, attended the talk and agreed to speak about their song and their exhibition experience. 

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