history tv. >> we are in the museum of westward expansion, which is the main museum here at jefferson national expansion memorial. it basically tells the story of the settlement of the west. we are underground, directly below the st. louis arch. originally, there were going to be surface buildings that would have house museums, restaurant competences -- 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. that is the same thing here starting with our statue of thomas jefferson and extending through the 19th century. the first ring is 1800. the last one is 1900. our current museum is not going to be here much longer, and then in the next few years, it will be replaced. right now, our story gives a

pretty good overview of westward expansion. what we want to do is focus on st. louis's 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 eastern part of the continent to 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 that is only telling part of the story. we want to tell the story of native americans and hispanics, especially the story of st.

louis, which already had existed by 40 years by the time the louisiana purchase was made when thomas jefferson authorized lewis and clark to go into the west. immediately after the louisiana 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 would have 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 18th-century 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 army founded in the 1830's with 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 1870's and 1880's. there were explorers trying to qualify and quantify everything they were seeing. whether that needed to happen before people went out to settle or before some of the exploitation 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 first step, to send people out to explore. unfortunately, we do not have many items from these early explorers, none from lewis and clark. in our new museum, we hope to show items from the 1820's 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 have helped map the areas they were seeing. we have other instruments that would help them find their longitude, their place on earth at 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 would've 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 beaver 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 year-round. 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 of this commercial enterprise, these guys found probably more than the official voyages of 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 numbers in the 1840's and 1850's, 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 wyoming, and 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. this type of wagon was usually built as a farm wagon, but a lot of people took existing wagons on their farms and bought one. 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 science, going west. you can kind of romanticize the trip because it was very dangerous. a lot of times in the hollywood movies, we see them circling the wagons during an indian attack. very rarely did that happen.

the indians actually helped the than hurting them. but the dangers came in first of all disease, which probably killed about 10% of the people cholera.west, mostly and also things like drownings death by gunshot, wagon.un over by a happened to a lot of kids who were climbing on the wagon and wheels wouldthe roll over them. so there's a real grim side to this mass migration. really is unprecedented mass migration, we're talking people during,000 the period in question who packed up everything and literally went west, as horace

urged people to do. in their new exhibit we hope to take the covered wagon and tell the story more from the point of view of st. louis, because there's a lot of places in the the story of the overland pioneers, the visitor centers and things like that on the oregon trail. and we feel that people coming should know how the theirnders got ready for trips. a lot of them came through st. wagonsnd purchased their and oxen and food and all their supplies. so that's where we're going to on a little more. we'll still have the covered wagon on display and we'll also of the items that they would take with them, real lookacts that people can at and talk about how they would they wouldn and how cram all these things in for this long journey that they would take. the 1850's, st. louis was the third busiest port in the united

states, and its levy, which was just outside where the arch is had hundreds of steam boats lined up, side by side at the levee, they were loading and unloading cargoes and passengers taking goods to all different parts of the country. exciting partf an of the st. louis story and one of the reasons why it was so central to the settlement of the west. the object that you see behind is a pilot's wheel. it's a real wheel, i guess you'd call it a steering wheel, that was on a riverboat. of people say, it's so huge, how did you steer? actually the way we have it displayed is a little, it gives a false impression, because the hub of the wheel is would actually be where the house.as of the pilot's so only one half of the wheel stuck up above the level of the

floor. still rather large. you were still grabbing onto the up.l pretty high entire wouldn't see the wheel, most of it was below the deck of the pilot's house. 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. by the 1860's and 70's, the based hereportation in st. louis started to decline because railroads were taking up of the slack of moving things from place to place. places in themany american west that really were railroad.sible by the rivers were just too wild or direction. wrong so there were some areas that could be still supplied by byer, but a lot was done railroad after a certain point in time.

st. louis is still a port today, though. the difference is that its long called towsrges that are taken up and down the than dealing with the riverboats that they used to have, steam driven riverboats. and instead of having the port was, which is in front of the arch on the levee, today stretchesf st. louis for 18 miles along the mississippi river, going on city centerof the itself. so the port is kind of everywhere but where it was at time. and deals with a different type of transport in the form of the barges than would have been dealt with back this the 19th century. the designer of the museum put museum together in the early 1970's, and he found when he layout that you see today with the time rings up

above and tell the chronological story, he sort painted himself into a corner, because how do you en it, where does it end. and of course it doesn't end anywhere. marching on, west water expansion era may have keeps but the us history going on and that's one reason why at the back of the museum things likeures of the moon walk and the atomic bomb going off and all those things, to show that history didn't stop. was whatthing though to do with the back wall. it was his wife who came up with that problem, which was to, the thought that they could comep rate the lewis and clark trail, the idea that today, so ifere you want to go out and paddle or and or drive the lewis clark trail, you can still do that. so they sent a photographer out take imagesail to during the same seasons that the

been there.uld have that's what the resulted in these floor to seal murals that here at the very back of the museum. so the lewis and clark trail itself and the west itself becomes kind of the alpha and theomega, it's what explorees first saw when they went out there and it's also what you can still see today. learn more about st. louis all weekend long on american history tv. in 2014, st. louis is celebrating 250 years of history. to commemorate the founding of missouri history museum has put togeth