when you see it from a distance, you think, oh, that's kind of interesting, kind of cool. then the closer you get to it, you realize how really massive it is. and getting up to the base of it and actually touching it, looking up 630 feet to the top, it really is very, very impressive. i think the closer you get to it, the more impressed you become. right now we're standing close to the famous gateway arch in st. louis. 630-foot tall stainless steel structure that was designed back in 1947 but now built until the mid-1960s, and completed in 1965. each year, we get about 2.5 million visitors who come to see the memorial and see the arch. so it's a very busy place, especially during the summer months. the arch was designed by a man named arrow saranin. he was born in finland and came

here to america when he was 10 years old with his father who was a very famous architect. he mainly had worked just with his father up to the point in time when an architectural competition was announced for what became the arch that you see behind me. the competition was for jefferson national expansion memorial. which was a national park service site founded by a presidential proclamation in 1935 to commemorate st. louis' role in the westward expansion of the united states. so 12 years after the founding of the park, an architectural competition was held to decide what the memorial itself would look like. and basically, they had about 90 acreoffs land to work with. 40 city blocks had been torn down, completely razed of all their original buildings to make

way for the memorial of the st. louis riverfront. each architec who submitted a design proposal could really do whatever he or she wanted. it could be a huge sculpture, it could be a series of museum buildings. they did want one central feature to be in each of these designs. some people put an obelisk in. some people put a big kind of monolithic rectangular block or something. saranin decided to go with the idea of an arch. it was only after he kind of designed the arch that he realized, it forms a gateway. so it's really appropriate for the idea of a memorial to st. louis' role in westward expansion. st. louis' role as a gateway to have a gigantic gateway right there on the river front. the arch is made out of stainless steel, one-quarter-inch stainless steel

on the outside. on the inside, it's made of thr three-quarter-inch carbon steel. so basically, you have a sandwich. in the lower portions of the sandwich, it's filled in with concrete. in the upper portions, there are tie rods that re-enforce -- steel re-enforcing rods that keep the sections apart. it's kind of a unique structure because it doesn't have any superstructure on the inside. there's pno gerders or things like that that form the shape of the arch. it's not just clad with stainless steel on the top. sometimes visitors are surprised because they haven't read about the arch to learn that they can actually go to the top of it. they think maybe it's just like a big piece of outdoor sculpture and you can just look at it. there's little barrel shaped capsules that fit five persons in each one, and on each leg of the arch, there's eight of those capsules that form a train that run on a track. when people get into the

capsule, it's hanging from the track. as they go to the top, by the time they get to the top, it's on top of the track. so in order to accommodate that and make sure people aren't going to be flipped upside down, it actually shifts and turns to keep the car level. it isn't a thrill ride. it doesn't go really fast like something at a county fair or at six flags or something, but it's a unique experience. a lot of people really prize the experience of riding in these strange little capsules up to the top and getting the nice view that they get from the top of the arch from that observation deck at the top. right now, we're in the midst of a multi-million dollar project funded by many different entities that are partners with the national park service to kind of revitalize the park itself and to make it more accessible to people. for many years, we have been kind of an island surrounded by

high-speed roads. and what is going to happen is kind of a lid is going to be placed over the highways so you can walk directly from the city where you probably would park your vehicle directly to the arch without having to cross any major streets. it's really just this iconographic symbol of st. louis. sort of like the space needle is to seattle or the empire state building or the statue of liberty is to new york. there's certain symbols that immediately identify a place on the map to people, and the arch is the one, the one for st. louis. >> 100 years ago today, president woodrow wilson signed legislation created the national park service. join american history tv tonight at 7:00 p.m. eastern time when we're live from arlington house, the robert e. lee memorial in

arlington national cemetery. it's the park service's most visited historic home. this is american history tv, only on c-span3. >> the natives have engraved on the face of this rock the figures of animals, near which i marked my name and the day of the month and year. this morning, we're going to walk up pompeys pillar national monument. why is this so important to the history not only of the united states but also to the history of yellowstone county, montana, as well as the west in general? so as we ascend the pillar, what i tell folks who come hire, i want people to think about what

it was like 200 years ago. think about this. clark and his party are heading down the yellowstone river, hoping and planning to meet up with lewis. and as they are coming down the river, they're having to stop at various intervals. and you might ask, what are they stopping for? to hunt, to gather food. they're stopping because of the immense herds of buffalo crossing the river. kwh i talk immense, i am talking about herds so large, there could be times they would have to stop for four, even six hours to wait for the buffalo to cross the river before they could continue on. another reason they would stop is simply, i think, partly curiosity and the natural intent of an explorer, to look at the land and see the land. as we think about all those things, and as we tell the story today, clark is coming down the