History tv all day on cspan three. Our coverage will continue after this break. In keeping with the 150th anniversary of the civil war, 1854. R of coming up, eric kelman describes the sand creek massacre of indians in the colorado territory by u. S. Soldiers. Later this afternoon, beginning millerm. , ryan craig will speak on john bell hoods tennessee campaign. From 3 30 p. M. Four 40 5 p. M. , 45 p. M. , the 4 focus is the burning of chambersburg, pennsylvania. While we wait for the conference to reconvene, we will take another look at st. Louis, misery. Week we are highlighting st. Louis, missouri. All week we are highlighting the city. We are in the museum of westward expansion, which is the main museum here at Jefferson National expansion memorial. Story oflly tells the the settlement of the west. We are underground, directly below the st. Louis arch. Toginally, there were going be surface buildings that would have house museums, restaurant complexes and things like that, but the museum that runs the site and the architect both thought the arch would be better served to stand alone, to be unrivaled by anything else. They decided to put everything underground, all the infrastructure to run the arch, all the Visitor Facilities would be beneath the ground. That is how this museum came to be located where it is. Beneath where the arch is. In terms of what the museum has to offer, it tells a story of westward expansion during the 19th century. Concentric rings that are almost like ripples in a pond as though you have dropped a stone into the pond and the ripples emanate outward. Same thing here starting with our statue of Thomas Jefferson and extending through the 19th century. Ring is 1800. The last one is 1900. Our Current Museum is not going to be here much longer, and then , it willxt few years be replaced. Gives aw, our story pretty good overview of westward expansion. What we want to do is focus on st. Louiss role, specifically. Another shift will be that when this museum was created, it was more telling the story of anglo white males going from the continent toof the the western part, which is the way that historians have looked at westward expansion. It has been look that in a different way. And we have started to see that part of the telling story. Tell the story of native americans and hispanics, especially the story of st. Louis, which already had existed the0 years by the time Louisiana Purchase was made when Thomas Jefferson authorized lewis and clark to go into the west. The louisianater purchase, lewis and clark made a famous journey of exploration to the west coast. They opened a new era in American History where there was an idea that the government explorers, mostly people in the military, go into the west and tried to identify important things that were located in that area. It was something that the 18thcentury mind of Thomas Jefferson felt was important. It became a legacy, so even after jefferson was long gone, there were groups of explorers going into the west. There were whole sections of the withfounded in the 1830s a specific goal of trying to map and described the entire geographical area of what the United States considered to be its territory. The exploration kept going on through the 1870s and 1880s. There were explorers trying to qualify and quantify everything they were seeing. That needed to happen before people went out to settle or before some of the for commercial purposes took place, there was an exploration, as i say, the orderly mind of the century, and they felt this was the logical to send people out to explore. Unfortunately, we do not have many items from these early from lewis and clark. In our new museum, we hope to show items from the 1820s that we think are pretty significant. We hope people will show will enjoy seeing those. We do have a number of scientific instruments that the explorers would have taken with them, instruments that would theyhelped map the areas were seeing. We have other instruments that would help them find their longitude, their place on earth. T any one time this would help them draw maps of where they were going, what they were seeing, that type of thing. We of scientific instruments that wouldve been used by the explorers. In addition to government exploration, a lot of the west was explored by people we call today mountain men, people who went into the west to trap. Eaver fur in particular a lot of them are actually involved in large companies. They were employees. But they stayed in the mountains. They live there yearround. And just by virtue of the fact that they were trying to find areas where beavers were located, they went into areas that only native americans had seen before them. It just happened that by virtue enterprise,ercial these guys found probably more voyages official exploration did, that were funded by the government. This part of the museum tells the story of pioneers who started to grow west in large anders in the 1840s 1850s, up until the transcontinental railroads started to be built. The idea of going west to during this time was an idea of trying to acquire free land, most of it in oregon. As time went on, of course the finding of gold in california opened up a whole new chapter in the rush for people to get to the west. The idea in these early days was to get from an area like missouri all the way to the west coast. They were not really interested in settling in the areas in between. So, they had to find, first, a way to get there, and that ideal way was through self pass in in the best conveyance to get them there, and that turned out to be a wagon like the one you can see over my shoulder. Type of wagon was usually built as a farm wagon, but a lot wagonsle took existing one. Eir farms and bought a lot of people think of the famous wagons that are huge compared to this one. But they were really too large to take over the terrain that the people were going to encounter. It became kind of a system or a , going west. You can kind of romanticize the trip because it was very dangerous. A lot of times in the hollywood circling thee them wagons during an indian attack. Very rarely did that happen. Indians actually helped the pioneers more than hurting them, but the danger came in, first of all, disease, which probably killed about 10 of the people who went west, mostly colorado, and also things like drowning ,nd accidental death by gunshot ,eing run over by a wagon particularly kids. They would fall and have a well roll over them. There was that have a well roll over them. Dark side to this. We are talking about unprecedented migration, probably over 300,000 people who packed up everything in lederle went west. As for screen really had urged people to do. In our new exhibit as forest greeley had urged people to do. In our new exhibit, we hope to tell the story more from the point of view of st. Louis. We feel that people coming here should know how over landers got ready for their trip. A lot of them came through st. Purchasing their wagons, their oxen, the food they were going to need, all of their supplies. That is what we are going to dwell on a little more. We will still have the covered then we display, and will have the items they would take with them, real artifacts. And we will talk about how they would pack a wagon and cram these things in for the long journey they faced. Louis was the st. Third busiest port in the United States. Outside of where the arches today, had hundreds of steamboats lined up outside taking passengers and goods to all different parts of the country. It is kind of an exciting part of the st. Louis story and one it was so central to the settlement of the west. The object you see behind me is a pilots wheel. It is a riverboat. The way we have it displayed is a little it gives a false impression because where the hub of the wheel is would actually be where the floor was of the pilot house. Stuckne half of the wheel up above the level of the floor, and they were still large. They were still grabbing onto the wheel pretty high up, but it would not be the entire wheel. The of it was below deck of pilot house. Of course, this recalls the days when mark twain was a riverboat pilot. He actually got his license here in st. Louis to be a pilot on the mississippi river. And 1870s, river transportation in st. Louis started to decline because railroads were taking up so much lack of moving things place to place. Were so many places in the American West that really were only accessible by railroad. Or wentrs were too wild in the wrong direction. Some areas could still be supplied by riverboat. St. Louis is still a poor today. The difference is the large series of barges are taken up and down the river rather than dealing with the riverboats that they used to have. Instead of having the port where it was, which is in front of the arch on the levee, today, the port of st. Louis stretches for 18 miles along the mississippi river, going on either side of the city center itself. So the port is where everything was at the time and it deals with the different type of boat than wouldve been dealt with in the 19th century. Museum butr of the the museum together