"The Vote" and Station Camp

Today is the 199^th anniversary of an incident occurring during the Lewis and Clark expedition that has been elevated to one of those “pivotal moments” of the entire journey. This is “The Vote” taken on the north side of the Columbia, at a site called Station Camp, to decide whether the expedition should go back upriver to find a winter campsite or should cross to the southern side of the river and check out the possibilities over there. The Vote is considered remarkable because all the members of the expedition had their say, including Sacagawea and York. Books, videos, reenactments—all make much of this “first time that a woman (Native American, no less) and a black man ever voted in America.”

Considering that back in the States, black men could not vote until 1870 (and that in 1805, most were slaves), women could not vote (nation-wide) until 1920, and Native Americans weren’t even citizens until 1924, the Vote was remarkable as an example of true (American) democracy. It’s also considered remarkable that even the enlisted men got to vote on what was still a military expedition.

New interpretive sign at Station Camp on the Washington side of the Columbia.

Discussion of The Vote at Station Camp. These sites are named, by the way, using phrases or place names from the journals.

But the interpretive hype pertaining to The Vote is a bit exaggerated. (While discussing his lengthy documentary, Ken Burns excitedly proclaims, “The Lewis and Clark expedition was about freedom!” Huh?) Sacagawea and York were not exercising any offical political franchise. The expedition was no longer in the “civilized” United States—indeed, they were not even in the Louisiana Territory, but in a region still up for grabs by Britain, Spain, Russia, and the U.S. To me, The Vote illustrates how the rules change when established social and political norms and “civilization” are left behind, and a group of people trying to survive become much more interdependent than they would be—or can admit to being—back in Society. I would suggest that after the first winter at Fort Mandan, the Lewis and Clark expedition began functioning much more like an egalitarian, small-scale tribal society!

Map (on interpretive sign) of the Station Camp and Cape Disappointment area, one of William Clark's most detailed and important maps.

Even this interpretation is probably too romantic. Historians and military people point out that extending a democratic voice to the expedition members at key moments was simply good leadership on the part of the captains, especially when they figured the people under their command would support decisions they'd already made.

The Columbia River at Station Camp, looking west. The highway is U.S. 101.

Next year, there will be an official bicentennial reenactment of The Vote at the Station Camp site. This year (today), there was a reenactment of sorts by 100 Washington school children, as reported on Oregon Public Radio a short while ago (as I write this). The school children voted to stay on the Washington side, but as we know, the expedition voted to cross the river and look for a good wintering location to the south. This resulted in their 2005-06 encampment at what they called Fort Clatsop.

Next: stuck in a "Dismal Nitch."

[All photos by K. Dahl, copyright 2005.]