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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
September 30, 1999
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1999 Plains Folk
The works of Ken Burns have set the bar and the template for historical documentary on American television. Viewers are comfortable with the format he established: period photos, original documents, beautiful landscapes, elegiac music, talking heads and over all a smooth narration in omniscient voice.
"Lewis and Clark at Fort Mandan," a new video documentary from the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Foundation, follows this format. The voice of narration is that of Darrell Dorgan, who also wrote and produced the piece. Familiar talking heads from the Ken Burns series (Stephen Ambrose and Dayton Duncan) appear, as does Burns himself. An addition to the roster, and a particularly effective one, is Gerard Baker.
The journals of Lewis and Clark are the key source of text, and the paintings of Karl Bodmer figure prominently as visuals. The production is generally sound as to historical fact. Doubts are raised when the narrator intones that "time has all but stopped" on the upper Missouri River, since both the river and its region have been profoundly transformed by the Corps of Engineers and modernization. Stephen Ambrose also gets by with some fairly silly speculation about historic animal migrations. Overall, though, the writer has remained close to the sources.
The meat of the production is detailed description of the activities of the explorers during the winter of 1804-5, the time spent at Fort Mandan, in the middle of present-day North Dakota. This material is closely based on the journals. Ambrose provides good treatment of the interaction of the explorers with natives. This is a subject, however, that might have benefitted from deeper investigation. The writings of James Ronda ("Lewis and Clark Among the Indians," along with his other essays) take up Indian-white perceptions with a sophistication that could have enriched "Lewis and Clark at Fort Mandan."
The discussion of the importance of Sacagawea to the Corps of Discover is particularly good and also illustrates the differences between Indian and white perceptions of the same events. The best moment in the production is when Gerard Baker observes of the young heroine, "She was doing what she was taught to do." The knowledge and skills that seem so remarkable in retrospect were just routine competence for young women of her people.
The documentary starts slow--do we really need to be drilled again on the facts of the Louisiana Purchase?--and it drifts a little after leaving Fort Mandan for the Pacific, but overall it serves well the purpose of introducing the general viewer to the specifics of the Corps of Discovery in North Dakota.
In the end I'm left thinking that more remarkable things might have been done. In the first place, you can't beat Ken Burns at his own game. If you adopt his format and try to pull it off with modest resources in a limited production time, the product is going to look pale.
More to the point, if we wish to draw attention to local specifics of the national epic that was the Lewis and Clark Expedition, then other approaches would serve better. The production needs more local voices--Indian historians, local historians, archeologists and expert amateurs--to bring home-grown perspectives to the screen.
Moreover, if we wish to focus the attention of travelers and visitors, which is a key purpose of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Foundation, then we have to get more specific as to place. History buffs on the road today want grid maps and coordinates from global positioning systems (GPS), not just generalities about life on the Upper Missouri.
"Lewis and Clark at Fort Mandan" is available from the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, P.O. Box 607, Washburn ND 58577.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable
for printing.
(isern.tif - 512KB b&w photo)
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable for printing.
(isern-h.tif - 426KB b&w photo)