Three cheers and a toast

by chuckofish

Well, as of yesterday it is officially fall. It is a little cooler and we have had a lot of much-needed rain and we are grateful.

Today we toast the 219th anniversary of the return of the exploring expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark back to St. Louis in 1806. The people of St. Louis, we are told, “gathered on the Shore and Hizzared three cheers” and rifles were fired in a welcoming volley as they landed their canoes on the levee.

Two years and four months earlier, the band had departed quietly from a gathering point at Wood River, Illinois, for their 8,000-mile expedition through the Northwest. The Corps of Discovery encountered a wide variety of natural landscapes on their trek to the Pacific coast, including rolling prairies, vast rivers, towering limestone bluffs, and rugged mountain ranges. They also encountered hardship, privation, extremes of temperature and climate, danger from Indians, grizzly bears, and a wide range of physical discomforts. Several times they were presumed lost.

The two captains were fetted that evening at a state dinner followed by a grand ball. The rest of the crew were eager to resume civilian life and quickly spent their accumulation of two years’ pay in the frontier village. One can only imagine their relief and joy upon returning.

By the way, the 22 foot tall bronze statue, The Captains’ Return (shown above), depicts the return of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis to St. Louis in 1806. It was commissioned by the Greater St. Louis Community Foundation to mark the bicentennial of the end of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. After its initial placement in 2006, flooding of the Mississippi River often led to the statue being partially submerged with the result that Clark looked as if he was waving his hat as in distress. In 2014, the statue was removed and restored to fix damage from the floods, and in 2016, the statue was returned to the riverfront to a location slightly south and about 17 feet higher than before.  The sculptor, Harry Weber, has thirty-one works displayed throughout the city.

And this is a good opinion piece by Albert Mohler, Jr. about the Charlie Kirk memorial service. As he says, “We will be thinking about this service for a long time.”

(Photo from Pinterest)

Information for this post mostly gleaned from St. Louis Day By Day by Frances Hurd Stadler.