The Last Voyageurs Read online

  But maybe there was a way to get people refocused on action and daring. The idea came to Lewis in the shower, of all places. Maybe the key to solving the problems of the future was to look into the country’s past, like some kind of reverse fortune-telling. What if he attempted something even bigger than the Jolliet-Marquette voyage, with more participants, and the whole nation watching? The crew could test themselves against the elements, study the environment of the rivers and lakes they traveled across, and talk with communities along their route. They’d prove that same spirit of adventure and determination on which America was founded was still thriving, and that it could be harnessed to confront all the problems the country faced.

  And there’d never been a better time for it—the entire country was gearing up for a celebration of the American Revolution bicentennial.

  “To recall [July 4, 1776] is not, I hope, to indulge in chauvinism,” wrote journalist Bill Moyers in Newsweek in July 1975.4 His fear wasn’t unreasonable. The anniversary had been on people’s minds since the late sixties, and no one could decide how best to commemorate the birth of the nation. On July 4, 1966, the federal government created the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission to oversee bicentennial festivities. Almost as soon as the commission was born, it began experiencing existential quandaries. What should the bicentennial be? A celebration or a somber remembrance of the past? A unified undertaking or a series of events spread across the country? Public figures and government officials weighed in with their opinions. John Rockefeller III announced, “If we allow the birthday-party concept to prevail, we will have missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to stimulate a sense of renewal and rededication, even an American renaissance.”5

  While communities around the country began planning pageants and writing songs, the bicentennial commission floundered under its identity crisis. When it submitted a first report to President Nixon in 1970, it came under attack for its ineptitude and for recruiting corporate businessmen who wanted to use the bicentennial to sell things. Some critics were beginning to label it the “buy-centennial” for all the kitschy memorabilia that were popping up—mugs in gas stations, red-white-and-blue toilet seats, children’s lunch boxes, buttons bearing George Washington’s face and Paul Revere’s silhouette.6 By 1973 the commission was replaced by a new board, the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA), and it was decided that there would be no one national celebration. The ARBA would coordinate with towns and cities around the country that wanted to host events.

  Preparations began well in advance of the two-hundredth anniversary, with some activities starting a year early. The American Freedom Train, a twenty-four-car museum on wheels carrying documents and artifacts, set off on its journey in 1975, with plans to stop at eighty cities around the country. The city of Chicago was organizing a massive bicentennial International Trade Exposition to be held at Navy Pier on Lake Michigan. Attendants would include representatives from Japan, Spain, Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, South Korea, West Germany, Pakistan, Morocco, and many others. The Watershed Heritage Project set about training thousands of students around the country to monitor water quality and other environmental factors in hopes of cleaning up the nation’s waterways. More than four thousand bicyclists had agreed to ride across the nation on a “bike-centennial” journey from Jamestown, Virginia, to Astoria, Oregon. New York City was gearing up to host some of the world’s most famous tall ships for an aquatic parade on the Fourth of July. And then there were the nearly twenty million elementary and junior high school students who sent letters to one another to replicate the colonial “Committees of Correspondence,” in which colonists protested British rule.7

  Ambitious individuals were just as eager to join the furor. Robert Cowles, Jr., a 23-year-old from Virginia and a fifth-generation direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, grew out his wavy red hair and created an hour-long live performance called “An Interview with Thomas Jefferson.” His profile, demeanor, and knowledge of his ancestor’s history made him undeniably appealing—it was like watching one of the Founding Fathers come back to life to see what the country had become. Dan Ambrose, another young man fascinated with his country’s history, walked six hundred miles across the Camino Real in a wool habit accompanied only by a donkey named Holley. His 1975 trip brought him in contact with twenty Jesuit and Franciscan missions along the dusty California route.

  Amid the plans happening around the country, Reid Lewis busied himself with the early stages of creating a reenactment that would outdo all other reenactments. First he needed to pick an explorer—a French one, since his expertise was in French language and history. Preferably an explorer whose journeys took him across the central part of the country, through the Midwestern states and Lewis’s home of Illinois. This was the regional history that was most often overlooked by those living along the coasts, Lewis thought. Finally, planning the voyage would be much easier, not to mention more historically accurate, if there were a lot of written records about this explorer.

  After some deliberation, Lewis settled on René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the first European to travel to the mouth of the Mississippi River. La Salle’s was a lengthy voyage that passed through the heart of the country and, despite some disagreements between historians on the smaller details, there were ample written records about La Salle’s life and successful expedition.

  Lewis decided to call his grand scheme La Salle: Expedition II. A simple, memorable name for what would be the most ambitious educational project he’d ever attempted: a 3,300-mile canoe journey across North America—from Montreal to the Gulf of Mexico—completed by twenty-three men all looking, sounding, and behaving like the French voyageurs who made the same journey almost three hundred years earlier. Those voyageurs were the men who paddled the canoes and carried furs during overland portages, the Europeans who peeled back the mysterious interior of North America and were among the first to have contact with native tribes. In Lewis’s version of events, the crew of voyageurs would be comprised mostly of recently graduated high school students. They’d use the journey to create educational material for their peers on subjects like hydrology, history, and ecology, all while giving performances for communities along their route. Would it require an epic amount of planning, paperwork, and fund-raising? Yes. Would there be unforeseen obstacles to contend with? Undoubtedly. But once he got the idea in his head, Lewis couldn’t let it go. He was an ambitious man, driven to succeed, the kind of person who’d become director of a summer school in France during his first year of teaching. He figured he was ready for this next great challenge, regardless of what other people might say.

  But before he could convince anyone that his plan wasn’t some half-baked bicentennial folly, he knew he’d need to explain why. Why go to all the trouble of dragging twenty-three men, sixteen of whom would still be teenagers, across two countries for eight months? Why the costumes, the canoes, the research projects?

  Lewis had several points to make when he gave his response, and his answers lay at the heart of what drove him to bring the trip to fruition. First, people had been lamenting “the youth of today” for as long as he’d been a teacher. Adults routinely deplored modern teenagers’ behavior, saying they were lazy or reckless or couldn’t be trusted with important tasks. Lewis believed that if he gave students the right instructions and had a little faith, they’d surprise him. Youth was not synonymous with bad behavior. Next, he liked to point out that most people were celebrating the bicentennial of the American Revolution with events featuring British history on the East Coast, but Frenchmen had been the ones to explore the continent long before American settlers in the British-controlled territories traveled west. All that history had been forgotten or relegated to a few short lines in history textbooks, Reid believed, and it deserved a prominent place in the national narrative.

  Finally, Lewis felt the country needed to be resuscitated from its stupor. The last two decades had induced a crisis of national identity. Lewis thought
the time had come to rejuvenate the nation’s zeitgeist. He wanted to inject it with the same spirit of discovery and curiosity that marked the European Age of Exploration. What better way to do that than to prove, with the entire nation watching, that modern man was just as capable of great feats as his forebears? Paddling down the major waterways of North America might not change anyone’s stance toward the Soviet Union or desegregation, but maybe it would motivate people to do more than sit idly by and wait for the world—and their own lives—to magically fix themselves.

  As for the costumes, well, they couldn’t very well interpret the 17th century dressed in bell-bottoms and T-shirts. If they were going to do the thing, they’d do it right.

  For all his charisma and confidence, Lewis knew he couldn’t achieve a voyage of this magnitude alone. He’d need other adults to help him, men who possessed skills he didn’t have, who could be counted on in life-or-death situations, and who would help him choose the teenage crew members. To start with, Lewis recruited his older brother, Ken. It was more than nepotism that spurred Lewis to call on his brother for assistance: Ken was smart, industrious, and one of Reid’s most trusted friends.

  When they were boys, Ken was always teaching Reid new things, though they were less than two years apart. One winter Ken had learned all about making cheese and used buckets of snow to teach Reid about cutting the curd and separating the whey. Later, when Ken started studying French, Reid decided he needed to learn the same language. Ken shared what he learned throughout his academic career and, later in life, from books he read for recreation. These lessons never felt patronizing. Reid looked up to his brother and enjoyed spending time with him, and the two had stayed close into adulthood.

  This closeness was probably aided by the fact that they had such different personalities and careers; it rarely felt as if they were competing with each other. Reid liked being in charge of things and enjoyed the spotlight. He had a gift for conjuring up grand schemes and believing so strongly in their achievability that everyone else felt compelled to share in the vision. Ken wasn’t the type to come up with a master plan. Instead, he thought of himself as the perfect follower. He’d proved just how well he could work with a team during the Jolliet-Marquette expedition, having supported Reid as leader of that voyage in 1973. He’d created an educational musical presentation for the last trip and planned to do so again for La Salle: Expedition II. He even offered to learn about accounting so that he could keep the books for the expedition. For his role, he chose the name Antoine Brossard from among a list of twenty-three known crew members of the original expedition.

  For the remainder of adult spots on the crew, Lewis hoped to recruit teachers from his current and former school districts. He’d begun his teaching career in Crown Point, Indiana, and since moving to Illinois taught exclusively in Elgin. Elgin had two high schools, Larkin High School, where Lewis taught, and Elgin High School. He planned to recruit teachers and students from both schools and circulated memos at the start of the 1974 school year. The memos for the teachers described the goals of the trip, some of the research projects he wanted to undertake, and what kind of involvement would be required of them over the next several years. As for the students, Lewis asked that a small subset (only boys currently in their junior year of high school) attend a presentation he gave in Elgin and Larkin high schools. If they were interested, they could submit a short application and come to a subsequent informational meeting.

  But Lewis wasn’t content to wait for applications to come to him from the teachers. They would be his main source of support before and during the expedition, leading research projects and helping the students properly prepare for the physical and mental trials ahead of them. In addition to sending announcements, Lewis reached out to several teachers he judged would be valuable assets on the expedition. The first was Dick Stillwagon, a biology teacher at Crown Point High School in Indiana.

  Lewis and Stillwagon had taught in the same school in the sixties. They became close friends outside of work, taking martial arts classes together and singing with a folk group. Lewis knew Stillwagon’s skills in canoeing and first aid would be invaluable along the route, and he’d asked Stillwagon to join the crew shortly after the idea first came to him. Despite being married and having four kids, Stillwagon agreed to play the role of 17th-century surgeon Jean Michel and lead the fitness and health projects. He was also charged with developing a workout regimen to prepare the crew members for the expedition. Stillwagon knew it would be hard to spend so long away from his wife, Rowena, and their sons and daughters, but he’d been looking for an escape from classroom teaching for years. This was the perfect chance.

  John Fialko was another teacher Lewis had worked with, this time at Larkin High School. He’d always admired Fialko and knew he could be counted on. Lewis liked to call him “General”—Fialko taught shop and metalworking and the sign on his classroom door said GENERAL METALS. Like Lewis, Fialko was slight in stature, had a deep respect for the people of the past, and was passionate about the outdoors. But the men also had one significant difference: Fialko was introverted and didn’t enjoy spending time in front of the public. That he felt more comfortable doing things with a few people or by himself was one of two concerns they discussed about Fialko’s joining the trip. The second concern was that he didn’t swim. Privately, he was apprehensive about the scope of the project and suspected Lewis might have bitten off more than he could chew. But all the same, he felt that he needed a change from work. And he’d always wondered: If you took a person from the 20th century and tossed him back in time a few hundred years, would he survive? The expedition Lewis proposed might be Fialko’s best opportunity to answer that question. Fialko was given the name of La Salle’s armorer, Pierre Prudhomme. He took charge of the musket building and canoe construction projects.

  The final two teachers to join Lewis’s crew were Ron Hobart and Terry Cox. Both were in their twenties, the youngest adult crew members. Cox taught history at a high school in Downers Grove, Illinois, where Lewis had given a presentation on the Jolliet-Marquette expedition. But Cox had actually heard of Lewis before then; Lewis had taught French at Crown Point High School during Cox’s own senior year there. Years later, after Lewis gave a presentation to Cox’s history class at Downers Grove, Lewis mentioned he was planning an even larger expedition and asked if Cox might be interested in joining as the leader of the history project. Cox told him he’d give it some serious consideration.

  Cox was intrigued by the physical challenge of the expedition. Could he force his body to provide the power needed to carry him across the country? It was the ultimate test of machismo. But the more he learned about La Salle, the more excited he became for the historical component. Across the country, people were pursuing a number of unusual projects to celebrate the bicentennial, from re-creating Paul Revere’s night ride to traveling west in covered wagons. La Salle: Expedition II was much larger in scope than anything else he’d heard about. It was something to take pride in. Although his wife, Pam, laughed when she first learned he was considering it—he’d just had two knee surgeries and this wasn’t going to be a summer hike through the woods—she supported him and the expedition wholeheartedly. Cox accepted the position and his new name, Andre Baboeuf. They couldn’t find anything written about Baboeuf, so Cox came up with his own backstory for the character. Pam found a bear claw for him to wear on a thong around his neck since he wouldn’t be allowed to wear a wedding band during the expedition, given that men of the period wouldn’t have worn them. The claw inspired his “Baboeuf and the Bear” tale, in which the French voyageur is attacked by an angry black bear and manages to wrestle the beast to the ground and bite one of its claws off before escaping unscathed. He was never able to finish the story without his audience exploding in laughter.

  Ron Hobart taught middle school science in Elgin, a combination of earth science, physics, and chemistry. He first learned about the expedition in a school memo all teachers received at the sta
rt of the day. Like the other adult crew members, Hobart had often wondered what it would have been like to grow up in a different era. After meeting with Lewis, Hobart was invited to a group meeting where interested students could ask questions about the expedition. At the meeting, Hobart was surprised to be announced as “the newest crew member.” Surprised, but not bothered. If Lewis wanted him for the trip, he was in. He took his place as head of the science project and the group’s navigator, as well as the name Louis Baron.

  Even with an efficient and motivated crew of adults, Lewis knew the expedition would need land support. They needed a liaison team that would work with communities in advance to schedule presentations and organize approved campsites for the men. The liaison team would have to start corresponding with these communities as soon as possible, sending hundreds of letters and making phone calls and getting towns excited to host the reenactors. They would follow the voyageurs in vans, carrying sound equipment, extra food for the men, and winter clothing. Lewis envisioned a leader or two to head the liaison team, plus a photojournalist who could take pictures and write about the journey for local newspapers, an alternate who would swap into the crew if someone fell ill or was injured, and a couple of teenagers who were willing to support the adult leaders. The group could start by operating out of the expedition’s headquarters, La Salle National Bank on La Salle Street in downtown Chicago. When Lewis had approached the head of the bank with his idea for the expedition, the bank offered to cover all the secretarial costs of the expedition and give them an office to operate out of. This would be the expedition’s base camp for the next year, and members of the liaison team would undoubtedly spend much of their time there—just as soon as Lewis found someone willing to lead the group.