westward expansion. what we wanted to do was focus more on the role of st. louis, particularly in westward expansion, so there will be a shift. another shift will be when this 1976, was created that in it was more telling the story of kind of anglo white males going from the eastern part of the continent to the western part, in the way historians have looked at the westward expansion era, it has been looked out -- looked at in a different way, and we see that is definitely telling part of the story. we want to see the story of other cultural groups who went into the west. native americans who were already living there, of hispanic people who were already there, and essentially, the story of st. louis, which already had existed for 40 years by the time the louisiana purchase was made when thomas

jefferson authorized louis and clark to go into the west. immediately after the louisiana wentase, lewis and clarke on their famous journey of exploration out to the west and they opened a new era in american history, where there was an idea that the government -- had explorers, mostly people who were in the military, go into the west and tried to identify important things that were located in that area. it was something that the 18th mind of thomas jefferson felt was important. it became a legacy so even after jefferson was long gone, there were still groups of explorers who were officially going into the west. there was a whole section of the army, the topographical core,

that was founded in the 1830's with the specific goal of trying describe the entire geographical area of what the united states considered to be its territory. the exploration just kept going on right up through the 1870's and 1880's. there were still explorers going out and trying to quantify and qualify everything that they were seeing. happen that needed to before people went out to settle or before some of the exploitation of the west for commercial purposes took place, i guess is an open question, but say,s the way that -- as i the orderly scientific mind of the 18th century looked at things, and they felt that this was a logical first step that we would send people out to explore. unfortunately, we do not have many items from these early

explorers. none from lewis and clarke. in our new museum, we hope to show a number of that were used on the stephen long exhibition in 1819 and 1820, which we think are pretty significant. we think visitors will really enjoy seeing those, but we do have a number of scientific instruments of the type that these explorers would have taken into the west with them. this that would have been used to help map the areas that they were seeing. we have other instruments that would help them to find their longitude, their place on the earth at any one time, and help them to actually draw the maps of where they were going, what they were seeing, that type of thing. that is mostly what we have, the scientific instruments that would have been used the explorers. in addition to actual government theoration, and a lot of west was actually explored by people who we call today mountain men, people who went

trap beaver for tofur in particular to try make money for themselves. a lot of them were involved in large fur trading companies and were employees, but they fade into the mountains. they lived out there year-round, and they -- just by virtue of the fact that they were trying to find areas where beaver were located, what they went into areas that only native americans had seen before them. it just happened that by virtue of this commercial enterprise, these guys found probably more voyages official exploration did that were funded by the government. this part of the museum tells the story of the pioneers who started to go west in large numbers in the early 1840's and continued right through the 1860's, up until the time when

the transcontinental railroad started to be built. the idea of going west during this time was an idea of trying to acquire free land. most of it in oregon. on, the time went 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 find,n, so they had to first, a way to get there, and that ideal way was through south in wyoming, and in the best conveyance to get them there, and that turned out to be a wagon like the one that you can see over my shoulder. this type of wagon was usually billed as a farm wagon, but a

lot of people either took the existing wagons they had on their farms or bought one like this one to go west in. it's really a lot smaller than a lot of people expect to see. a lot of people think of the famous conestoga wagons, which 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 science going west, but you can kind of romanticized the trip because it was very dangerous. hollywoodimes in movies, we see them circling the wagons and the indians come and attack. very rarely, if ever, did that happen. there were very few deaths along the trail that had anything to do with indians. the indians actually helped the pioneers more than hurting them, but the dangers came in, first of all, disease, which probably

killed about 10% of the people who went west. mostly call her. and also things like drowning and accidental death by gunshot, being run over by a wagon. that happened to a lot of kids who were climbing on the wagon and selloff in the wheels would roll over them. off and the wheels would roll over them. it was really kind of an unprecedented mass migration. we're talking about over 300,000 riod induring mthe pe question who passed up everything and went west. in our new exhibit, we hope to take the covered wagon and tell the story more from the point of view of st. louis. there's a lot of places in the west that tell the story of the over than pioneers, the visitor

centers and things like that on the oregon trail for you to learn about that. we feel that people coming here should know how the over landers got ready for their trip. a lot of them came through st. louis and purchased rings. they're wagons and oxen and their food they were going to need and all their supplies. that is what we are going to dwell on a little more. we will still have the covered display, and we will also have a lot of the items they would take with them, real artifact that people can look at and talked about how they would pack a wagon and how they would actually cram all these things in for this long journey they would take. louis was the st. third busiest port in the united states, and this levy, which was just outside where the arch is today, had hundreds of steamboats lined up side-by-side at the levy that were loading

and unloading cargoes and passengers and taking goods to all different parts of the country, so it is kind of an exciting part of the st. louis story, and one of the reasons why it was so central to the settlement of the west -- the object you see behind me is a pilot wheel. it is a real wheel -- i guess you would call it a steering wheel -- that was on a riverboat . a lot of people look at it and say that it is so huge and ask how you would see her -- dear, but the way we have it displayed gives a false impression because where the hub of the wheel is what actually be where the floor house, so onlyt one half of the wheel stuck up above the level of the floor, and it was a rather large. you were still grabbing onto the , but youtty high up would not see the entire wheel. most of it was below the deck of the pilot's house.

of course, this recalls the days when mark twain was a riverboat pilot. he actually got his license here .n st. louis by the 1860's and 1870's, the transportation based in st. louis started to decline because railroads were picking up so much of the slack of moving things from place to place. there were so many places in the american west that really were only accessible by railroad. the rivers were just too wild or went in the wrong direction, so there were some areas that could be still supplied by river, but a lot was done by railroad after a certain void in time. st. louis is still a port today, though. the difference is that long series of barges that are taken up and down the river rather than dealing with the riverboats

that they used to have, the steam-driven riverboats, and instead of having the port where it was, which is in front of the arch on the levy, today, the louis stretches for 18 miles along the mississippi river, going on either side of the city center itself, so the port is kind of everywhere but where it was at the time and deals with a different type of boat and transport in the form of the barges than would have been dealt with back in the 19th century. the designer of the museums at the museum together in the early 1970's and found when he created the layout that you see today with the time rings up above and telling the chronological story, he sort of painted himself into a corner because how do you end it? where does it end? of course, it does not end anywhere. time keeps marching on. of expansionort

era may have ended, but united states history keeps going on. that's one reason why at the back of the museum, this pictures of things like the moonwalk and the atomic bomb going off and all those kinds of things, to show that history did not stop. the main thing, though, was what to do with the back wall. it was his wife who actually came up with a solution to that -- they which was to thought that they could commemorate the louis and clark trail, and the idea that it is still there today, so if you want to go out and paddle or walk or drive the lewis and clark trail, you can still do that, so they sent a photographer out along the trail during the same season that the explorers would have been there, and that is what resulted in the floor to ceiling murals that you see here at the very back of the museum. the lewis and clark trail itself and the west itself he comes kind of the outside and omega.

it is what the explorers first saw when they went out there and it's also what you can still see today. >> throughout the weekend, american history tv is featuring st. louis, missouri. our local content vehicles team recently traveled there to learn about its rich history. learn more about st. louis and other stops on c-span's city store at www.c-span.org mind more about st. louis and other stops on c-span's cities tour. >> you can keep in touch with current events from the nation's capital using any phone any time . template call 20 2-626-8888 for coverage.essional listen to a recap of the days events at 5:00 p.m. eastern on washington today. you can also hear audio of the ' sunday affairs

programs. c-span radio on audio now. long-distance or phone charges may apply. hosted by the civil war institute at gettysburg address. speakers will focus on the civil war and 1864 and a leaders and campaigns that most impacted the course. each presentation is about one hour. this is american history tv on c-span 3. [applause] >> good morning. when we all get into this business writing books and we hope that our books have a lasting impact. history, wemarch of keep moving along, keeping pace with the scholarship as a