The 630’ tall (and wide) Gateway Arch in St. Louis, MO marks the time and place from which a small band of men, the Corps of Discovery, ventured across the Missouri river into an unknown, unexplored, unmapped terrain… a vast landscape of never-before documented peoples, plants, and animals. When the Lewis and Clark Expedition crossed the Missouri River, a treacherous journey that lasted more than two years and over 8,000 miles stretched westward before them. This was an enormous human achievement which completely changed the size, shape, and future of our - until then - small, still-new nation. 

                   Interestingly, however, it seems the thousands of amazing discoveries catalogued during the Lewis and Clark expedition were so expansive, so significant, so utterly foreign … that it took nearly a half-century for the young nation to actually begin to grow westward with any real consistency. There were fur traders, of course, and occasional traders with Native American tribes, but it took time and a collective percolation of this new reality… for the effects of that exploration, to actually manifest itself in the young nation’s physical - and cultural - self-understanding. One gets the sense that our 19th century ancestors couldn’t quite assimilate all that was suddenly and wondrously opened to them… as if there was a communal questioning: “What does this mean?” “What do we do with all these amazing stories?” “What’s next?” “What now?”