With thunderous volleys from cannons and hearty "Hip, hip, hoorays" from a welcoming throng along the Missouri River, the three 1800s-style boats came ashore to a hero's welcome on Saturday, 200 years to the day when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark met up before their adventure through the uncharted West.
The crowd of thousands wasn't exactly historically accurate, but the re-enactment of the landing was living history, right down to the replicated tent settlement, muskets, fifes, campfires and all the itchy, wooly garb.
"It was overwhelming coming in here, when we saw the crowd literally lining the banks as far as you could see," Peyton "Bud" Clark, a great-great-great grandson of William Clark, said after taking part in the keelboat ride to this St. Louis suburb.
"I had a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye," said Clark, decked out in garb that folks in his famed ancestor's day might have worn.
The keelboat and two canoelike pirogues had left Illinois a day earlier in the re-enactment -- part of a weeklong bicentennial party years in the making. It commemorated the infancy of what would become the explorers' 28-month, 12,870km trek through the Louisiana Territory.
Actors -- including Bud Clark, a retired Ford Motor Co. engineer from Michigan -- over the next week will twice recreate the expedition's formal departure from St. Charles.
Outside one actor's tent on Saturday, a buckskin was stretched out to dry. Mounds of wood stood ready to stoke smoky campfires being used as Dutch ovens. An artisan chipped away at a log being fashioned into a canoe.
Women, including the suburb's mayor, strode about in period dresses and bonnets, men in buckskins or colorful military uniforms of the day.
Yet despite all the nods to the past, the modern was unavoidable. A yacht shadowed the three replica boats, each powered by a motor. Video cameras of onlookers whirred. The port-a-potties -- amenities Lewis and Clark might have cherished -- were hard to miss.
"We've been fans of the Lewis and Clark expedition for quite a while," said 80-year-old retired chemical engineer Dave Miller. "Seeing all these people, all these children here is wonderful. It tells us it's something for more than just us old folks."
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of