The Mind’s Eye

My family and I took a trip over the long Thanksgiving weekend to visit friends. Nothing unusual about that. As  often happens when we travel somewhere, I realized that we have a family connection to the area. The connection was made by a family that I seem to be following. We’ve visited them in Illinois, in Wisconsin, and in Minnesota. Now it was Missouri’s turn.

The Missouri River from the site of Fort Belle Fontaine
The Missouri River from the site of Fort Belle Fontaine, but it isn’t what it seems.

In 1819 a pair of my great-great-great-grandparents, Daniel and Catherine, spent a month near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers at Fort Belle Fontaine. They were part of the Yellowstone Expedition and the weeks that they spent at Belle Fontaine were filled with frustration as they waited to be able to retrace the route Lewis and Clark had taken a decade and a half earlier. To make matters worse, Catherine was nearing the end of her first pregnancy and the delay in their departure was due to the failure of their transports to arrive. At eight months pregnant, she would have to join the soldiers on the march, not floating on the river.

Given the chance to see the place where they had spent July of 1819, I had to see it. Yet I have to ask if I have seen it. I stood high on the bluff that overlooks the Missouri but the massive stone structures, which still stand on the spot, were built in the 1930s not the 1810s. Of course, I could look out over the river that they saw and that defined their route. Yet I couldn’t really do that either. A sign at the spot where the fort had once stood explained that the river had shifted over the last two centuries and had been much further away in the early 1800s. The bluff and the flood plain below were roughly what they had been but the river itself was not the sight they had once seen.

I love to go on pilgrimages to the places where my ancestors had once been. There is something moving about standing in those spots. In a very real way it can be helpful to see the places that they once saw. It helps in understanding them. Sometimes the best we can do is to imagine those places, but we get the chance to correct our mind’s eye with our actual eyes when we visit their places. Nevertheless, it strikes me over and over that though we can travel to the place, we can’t travel to the time without at least some help from our mind’s eye. While standing on that bluff, I had to imagine different buildings overlooking a different river. I had to imagine the noise and the smells of hundreds of soldiers, some of them “locals” in the garrison and some who had just traveled over a thousand miles and who had many hundred’s more to go. I had to remember what my research has told me about that place in their time. I had to be both there and somewhere else.

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