The Montana Memorial

Fort Benton's Lewis and Clark Memorial, created as the town's contribution to the Nation's Bicentennial in 1976 and as Montana's official memorial to the Expedition, cost $175,000 and features a heroic-sized statue cast by the lost-wax process at the Modern Art Foundry in New York City. The bronze weighs 2 1/2 tons, stands 21 feet high, and was transported upright from New York on a semi-trailer, drawing attention along the way and encountering problems with interstate underpasses before the captains were recognized west of the Mississippi. Its 85-ton granite base, a gift from Tanner Brothers Quarry near Square Butte, Montana, was moved in mid-winter over frozen roads on a thirty-wheeled trailer to protect the roadway. Artist Bob Scriver spent a year researching before beginning a three-year effort to make the equipment, clothing, body features, and faces as historically accurate as possible, including Harpers Ferry rifles accurate to the name on the hammer plate, a telescope patterned on the one Lewis carried, and a compass modeled from the one Clark used. Scriver's knowledge of Plains Indian culture shaped his portrayal of Sacagawea as a Shoshone woman wearing a skinning knife, an awl, a strike-o-light, and much jewelry noted by Clark, while carrying Jean Baptiste in a blanket folded to free both hands because the pack board had been washed overboard a few days earlier; attached to the baby's blanket is a serpent's pouch for his umbilical cord, matching the custom for male children among plains people, while female pouches were shaped like a turtle. Art critics placed the memorial among the top ten major statuaries of Western art, and Scriver regarded it as the most outstanding work of his career.

Fort Benton, Montana · United States