The sun is hot on my neck as I stare down the expressway, determined to figure this out. I’ve crossed the Ohio River four times, ping-ponging between Indiana and Kentucky, before I admit to myself that I am lost. I am turned around, and if I hadn’t seen photos of the eight-foot-tall bronze statue of a Black man standing on the Louisville riverfront, I would think that I made him up.
I head for higher ground on foot until at last I spot him. Finally. The statue isn’t on the river, it is above it, on an elevated path called the Belvedere. Standing on a rock, his face turned toward Indiana, York seems unafraid; with a small axe and knife tucked in his belt, he looks like a man ready for action.
York was part of the Corps of Discovery, also known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition, a group commissioned in 1803 by President Thomas Jefferson for a 28-month, 8,000-mile journey led by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. The purpose was to explore the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase (“bought” from the French First Republic in that year) and the Pacific Northwest to map a direct route to the Pacific Ocean. While on the search, the group was to document all geographic, scientific, and cultural information about uncharted-by-the-English lands. York had no say about whether he would participate. He was enslaved, the property of William Clark.
Wrote Clark in his journal in October 1804: “[T]he Indians much astonished at my Black Servent and Call him the big medison [medicine], this nation never Saw a black man before.”
Lewis, August 1805: “[S]ome of the party had also told the Indians that we had a man with us who was black and had short curling hair, this had excited their curiossity very much. and they seemed quite as anxious to see this monster as they wer the merchandize which we had to barter for their horses.”
York’s contributions to the mission were vast, and included foraging, hunting, and assisting imperiled crew members.
Illustration by Mark Harris
Most people know that Shoshone guide Sacagawea was crucial to the expedition’s success, but far less have likely heard of York, who is named numerous times in the field notes. It is clear that his contributions to the mission were vast, and included foraging, hunting, and assisting imperiled crew members. His presence was so significant that there are two land features named after him: Yorks Islands near Townsend, Montana, and Yorks Dry Creek (now known as Custer Creek), a tributary of the Yellowstone River.
Fast-forward to the summer of 2025, and I am spending seven weeks driving 4,900 miles of trail from York’s Louisville dwelling all the way to the modern replica of Fort Clatsop in Oregon, where the Corps spent December 1805 to March 1806. Along the route I will stop at nature preserves, national parks, Lewis and Clark interpretive centers, and other places important to York’s story.
Though the official Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail begins close to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I decided to start here, on the bluffs above the Ohio River, an area that Clark and York called home for a time. It is also a place they returned to once the expedition was over. In 2003, 200 years after the expedition was organized, the city of Louisville commissioned the sculpture of York by artist Ed Hamilton to commemorate the explorer’s contributions.
In July 2026, the United States will celebrate the country’s 250th birthday. Now, standing in front of this statue, I wonder: What can York teach me about my country? I feel that to understand today’s United States, to get a better handle on its history—my history—I must see what is left of the places mentioned on the trail myself.
A few weeks later, I stop my car in front of a large tepee painted with phases of the moon. Located on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota, the Aktá Lakota Museum & Cultural Center was established 35 years ago as a record of a dark history. Once the denizens of the Western territories were surveyed, America laid the groundwork for legislation that would result in the Dawes Act of 1887, forcing Indigenous people into mainstream American agricultural society and sending children to boarding schools where they were required to speak English and to practice Christianity.
I get out of the car and watch kids playing nearby, wrestling a basketball from one another. Their squeals of delight pierce through the stagnant humidity of the day. Not far away the Missouri River meanders as if slowed by the heat, too. Once I am inside the museum, the docent introduces herself and tells me to travel the space clockwise. The flags of different Lakota nations hang from the ceiling, and a diorama of a successful buffalo hunt, complete with a life-size replica of the 2,000-pound animal, is situated against the back wall. I move through the museum slowly, taking in art and artifact: delicate oil paintings plus beads, clothing, hides, quills, and feathers from Northern Plains Indian tribes.
At the end of the museum space, I am invited to write a prayer on a piece of paper shaped like a cottonwood leaf and tuck the message in a slot on the Tree of Reconciliation. By this point, I am one-third of my way through the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, and so I put down a request for strength. I have driven thousands of miles and am overwhelmed by the scale of it all—by what was traveled, and by what was extracted and altered. I consider that the expedition allowed the United States to exist, because it gave a fledgling democracy capital and resources. It also took so much from Indigenous people.
Dignity of Earth and Sky is located just off I-90 near Chamberlain, South Dakota.
Illustration by Mark Harris
In the gift shop, I pick up a magnet with an image of a statue titled Dignity of Earth and Sky, which portrays an Indigenous woman holding a star quilt. Though I’d read about the 50-foot statue, which was installed in 2016 and designed by artist Dale Lamphere to honor the Lakota and Dakota people, I hadn’t realized how close I was to it now.
The museum docent points me in the right direction, and I navigate my way to the sculpture. Set against a cloudless sky, she is powerful, and the eight-pointed star on the quilt she carries shimmers in the sunlight. I look at her face, thinking about long-held narratives, and how the United States seized sacred lands and forced tribes to relocate. I see the nation’s contradictions, its failure to uphold foundational principles such as inalienable rights and equality under the law for Black citizens. I understand that the passage I’m on consists of miles of broken promises for many people and their descendants.
It feels like the existence of a formalized commemorative trail, as well as the country’s 250th celebrations, in some ways amplify the injustices. Who will get to tell America’s story? What—and whom—will they leave out? And yet I consider what a monument the museum is, and what this sculpture is. To make something beautiful of a moment that was designed to break a people. I feel admiration, and I wonder if I am capable of that kind of grace.
The following day, I find poetry in North Dakota’s open expanses, in the prairies and the buffalo grass popping up in former pastures. As I drive, sunflowers as tall as the top of my station wagon wave from fields, rotating with the sun, their shadows trailing behind me. When I step out of my car to take a photo of the sunset near the Missouri River, I hear the whine of mosquitoes and think of York: In Lewis and Clark’s journals, they write about there being six different types of mosquitoes, an insect they spell 19 different ways. By the time the sun has begun its descent, it feels like I have encountered every single one of them.
At twilight, I pull into the 1,000-acre Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park, an area that the Corps of Discovery visited in 1804. Once a 16th-century Mandan settlement of earth lodges known as On-A-Slant Village, the site was commandeered and converted into the 19th-century military post Fort McKeen, where Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his cavalry waged war against the Indigenous people of the Plains. In 1907 the area was designated Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park, making it the oldest state park in North Dakota.
With 19 miles of trails and places to kayak, fish, and camp, the park offers myriad ways to explore this site where the Heart and Missouri rivers meet. But I have come here for something else. I park in front of Custer’s house and begin to unpack my car, removing my hiking quilt, camp chair, binoculars, headlamp, and snacks: trail mix, Medjool dates, chickpea puffs. Tonight, I’m attending the state park’s monthly summer star party—their last celestial observation event of the season.
It is late August, and even though it is technically still summer, when the sun sets this far north an edge of autumn air pervades the balm. The leaves on the trees are just starting to change color. A group of about 60 of us, of all ages—from grandparents to toddlers—have gathered to mark the end of the season, hoping for an unobstructed sky that might allow us to see the Summer Triangle star pattern.
“My weather app assures me that the clouds will be gone in about 30 minutes,” a Bismarck Astronomy Club guide tells me. With the vanishing clouds, the night is rich and dark with texture, a luxurious sable black.
My grandmother thought of the night sky as a quilt with many pieces, an eclectic patchwork of stories, and her son, my father, made sure that we knew them all. I am from a family of farmers who plan our growing seasons by the stars, so understanding our place in this world and calibrating our sense of time by the sky is an element of my ancestral wisdom. With this knowledge, if my GPS ever failed, I could use the sun, moon, and stars for navigation.
The sky is clear now, and the stars, at least to my naked eye, are metallic winks of silver, blue, and green. Staring out at space, I rethink time. These constellations have carried the same names and the same stories for hundreds of years. I look for Polaris, the North Star, which is estimated to be somewhere between 430 to 446 light-years away. When that light started its journey to my eyes, the Mandan village was still here. America’s colonies weren’t British territory yet; the Corps of Discovery’s formation was generations away. When the Corps did pass this way, the night sky was its celestial compass, too, and measurements gleaned from the stars helped its members calculate latitude and longitude.
How often do I think about the past in my present? Is this part of the understanding that I’m missing, the lesson I am learning as I move further west? In some ways the group of us gathered in the night air is witnessing the same constellations, the same stars. And as I follow York, this is one of the few ways in which my contemporary world mirrors his. I just have to look up.
Several days later, it is 10 a.m. in Eastern Montana, and according to instructions printed on my tour ticket, I must be in Western Montana by 1:30 p.m. to catch a 2 p.m. boat. If I take I-15 I can make the time easily, but the Corps of Discovery rarely moved in a straight line, and so I won’t, either. I want to be at the Upper Missouri River Breaks Interpretive Center as soon as it opens. I also have plans to stop by Rainbow Falls, which Lewis called “one of the most beatifull objects in nature” in his journal, and the 424-foot Tower Rock, a sacred space for the Blackfeet Nation and today a state park. I have three and a half hours, 150 miles, and several stops. But I am determined to make it—the 2 p.m. boat is one of the last of the season.
Hours later, a little out of breath, I climb aboard the Canyon Voyager and take a seat. Here was another landscape I could see as York may have. This section of Montana is often called “The Last Best Place,” and boat tours through this canyon date to 1886. In 1964 Congress designated the 28,460 acres as Gates of the Mountains Wilderness, which means there are no motorized vehicles, timber companies, or mining operations.
This stretch of the Missouri River was a vital waterway for Native people for millennia, and Steve, our guide, mentions that researchers have counted more than 125 petroglyphs (rock carvings) and pictographs (rock paintings) in and on these 1,200-foot limestone cliffs. The slate-colored sky makes the pine- and fir-peppered walls seem ominous, and the slow-moving water is a deep, mossy green. As we cruise down this five-mile stretch of canyon, we search the treetops for bald eagle nests.
Surrounded by rock, the river appears to end, but we round a narrower bend and the cliffs grow wider, then spread apart, allowing us to access another segment of the waterway. This optical illusion is how the landscape got its moniker. (Though the Corps was not the first group of European explorers to navigate this place, Meriwether Lewis gave Gates of the Mountains its name.) Glacier National Park, located a couple hours north, is often called the “Crown Jewel of the Continent.” This makes Gates of the Mountains, with around 30,000 annual visitors, Montana’s diamond in the rough.
Despite all I have seen on my miles thus far, I am still struck by the river’s beauty and by the idea of novelty itself: what it means to step into an American landscape for the first time and how words can so often fail to describe it. How to put this to paper? How to tell other people about it? This experience is showing me that maybe the best telling is not really one at all: Go out and see.
This journey has better taught me the power of refracting, of using my light and lived experience to bend stubborn materials into stories that look more like the diverse, vibrant America I travel through.
After 50 days and nearly 5,000 miles, I am at the end of the trail: Astoria Column, a 125-foot-tall scalable pillar at the top of Coxcomb Hill, high above the city of Astoria, Oregon.
This has been a journey of numerous endings. I’ve traveled to Washington’s Cape Disappointment State Park where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean, checking off the goal Jefferson gave the group. I’ve visited Cannon Beach, Oregon, where several members of the Corps went to examine a beached whale and trade with tribes for blubber. I even saw York: Terra Incognita, a six-foot-tall brass sculpture created by Alison Saar, on the Lewis & Clark College campus in Portland. All those visits were important, but Astoria Column feels like my journey’s final stop, because this is the last point before I start my trip back East.
The column was dedicated in July 1926, and the outside of the monument is covered in artwork meant to tell the story of the region, from a verdant precontact Oregon replete with beavers and elk to the arrival of the railroad in 1893. The 525-foot-long mural that wraps around the pillar comprises 14 panels, and the Corps of Discovery is featured in three of them, making the group the most significant visual focal point of the artwork. Yet York is nowhere to be found.
It takes 164 steps to reach the top of the column, and a 360-degree view from the platform is well worth it. The afternoon sky is ultramarine. To my right, the Columbia River gleams green. To my left, the Pacific Ocean is a vivid blue, so deep it is almost purple. I pick out Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens; I hear another visitor point out Mount Adams for his son. I can see for miles in every direction, and I wonder if York ever got to see the world from a vantage point like this. What did he make of a chance to look forward, to where the country was headed, and to look back toward the East and its racism at the same time?
Though I’ve made it to the end of the trail, it does not feel like any end. Instead, I have so many more questions. But I am comforted when I think of what York living history actor Hasan Davis told me when I was doing research on the trail, before setting out: “Questions give us a space to start a conversation.” The act of seeking is where power is. York’s story is not finished because of the way that I—that we—engage with it.
For so much of the country’s history, it seemed the job of the traveler was to reflect the historical perspectives provided on placards. Instead, this journey has better taught me the power of refracting, of using my light and lived experience to bend stubborn materials into stories that look more like the diverse, vibrant America I travel through. If there’s anything to celebrate as the country turns 250, it is that. And so I climb down the staircase, get back into my car, and turn once again toward the road.
How to travel the trail
Officially beginning close to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and ending near the present-day city of Astoria, Oregon, the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail covers nearly 5,000 miles, crossing 16 states and the homelands of more than 60 tribal nations. (Meriwether Lewis launched a keelboat onto Pennsylvania’s Allegheny River; William Clark did not join until near St. Louis.) Originally undertaken by the Corps of Discovery from 1804 to 1806, the route was recognized by Congress in 1978 as part of the National Trails System.
Done in its entirety, the trail would take around four weeks to meaningfully complete by car. Travelers who have only a week to work with would be best served focusing on one or two states and building out their itineraries from there.
When to travel
Thanks to longer daylight hours and milder weather, May through September
are the best months to tackle the drive, though summer vacation can mean increased crowds at many of the parks along the way.
How to plan it
The comprehensive Travel Native America app, developed by the American Indigenous Tourism Association, allows travelers to book tours and cultural experiences with tribes and build itineraries; it also surfaces gatherings that are open to the public.
The National Park Service offers a free online guide replete with visitor centers, museums, and sites to visit in each state.
The Lewis & Clark Trail Experience app, launched in 2024, is a handy on-the-go tool for viewing upcoming events along the way; it even allows users to share their movements with friends and family.
Buy before you go
Purchase an America the Beautiful Pass for an annual fee of $80, which covers the pass-holder and all car passengers (or up to four adults at per-person sites) and grants access to 2,000 federally managed recreation areas across the United States, including forests, national parks, and wildlife refuges. To start using the pass immediately, buy it at one of the 1,100 participating federal recreation sites. Bonus: When you purchase the pass at a park, 80 percent of the revenue from the purchase goes directly to that park for its own use.
Other ways to follow the trail
American Cruise Lines offers a nine-day riverboat cruise inspired by the Lewis and Clark Expedition, traveling between Portland, Oregon, and Clarkston, Washington, following the Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean. Offshore excursions include visits to Hells Canyon—the country’s deepest river gorge—on the border of Idaho and Oregon, and Fort Clatsop, where the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1805–06 after reaching the ocean.
Amtrak’s 12-day “Lewis & Clark Trail by Rail” journey begins in St. Louis, Missouri, and ends in Portland, Oregon, with stops in Chicago and Glacier National Park, Montana, along the way.
