
DATE: Tuesday, November 4, 1997             TAG: 9711040060

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LARRY BONKO

        TELEVISION WRITER

                                            LENGTH:  128 lines

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF LEWIS & CLARK KEN BURNS SERIES REVELAS VIRGINIA ROOOTS OF FAMOUS TREK

KEN BURNS, who produced two miniseries that have been very, very good for Virginia, subtly sells the commonwealth one more time in his latest TV epic, ``Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery.''

The four-hour documentary, beginning at 8 tonight on PBS, is vintage Burns - a compelling history lesson presented by a master storyteller who puts pretty pictures on the TV screen.

``This work is a valentine to our country and its extraordinary landscape,'' Burns said when he previewed ``Lewis & Clark'' for the TV press.

Burns of late has saved his largest and prettiest valentines for Virginia, stimulating tourism in and around Charlottesville by 23 percent after ``Thomas Jefferson'' aired last February. In 1991, when Burns created a major buzz with ``The Civil War,'' the number of visitors to Virginia's battlefields and monuments rose by 336,000.

Burns makes the cash registers sing in Virginia. He's the best thing to happen to tourism in this state since the ``Virginia is for lovers'' bumper sticker.

``Ken Burns has clearly been a very good friend to Virginia,'' said Sue Bland of the Virginia Division of Tourism in Richmond. With ``Lewis & Clark,'' Burns gives Virginia another warm hug.

In the four hours without commercials, he shows the strength, vision, courage, resiliency and dedication of three men with deep roots in this state. Be proud, Virginia.

The men are Jefferson, who in 1801 squeezed $2,500 out of Congress to finance an expedition into the unknown spaces of the West, and William Clark and Meriwether Lewis.

``What Lewis and Clark did was more important in the history of our country than landing on the moon. They discovered a land of infinite variety and possibility west of the Mississippi,'' said Burns.

Commanded by President Jefferson to ``go west to the ocean, if nothing prevents,'' were Lewis, who grew up in Albemarle County, and Virginia-born Clark, who spent most of his life on the Kentucky and Ohio frontiers. The Lewis and Clark expedition was born in Jefferson's brain in Charlottesville, where he read fables about erupting volcanoes, blue-eyed Indians who spoke Welsh, and great mountains of salt in the unexplored West.

At Jefferson's urging, the United States purchased 820,000 square miles of the Louisiana Territory for 3 cents an acre. Jefferson wanted to know what was out there beyond the Mississippi River and sent a band of 33 led by Army captains Lewis and Clark to find out.

They carried gifts for the Indians (pocket mirrors, sewing needles and brass kettles), 500 flint rifles, 12 pounds of soap, a good supply of 15-star American flags and 600 doses of a cure-all called Rush's Thunderbolt - a powerful laxative.

Jefferson bid them godspeed on May, 14, 1804, ``with anxiety for your safety.'' There began a journey of 28 months that was recorded diligently in journals bound in elk hide - words written by quills dipped in ink made of gun powder.

``Facing them was an overwhelming wilderness,'' said Burns, who lately retraced the expedition's route in the comfort of a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

From that overwhelming wilderness, Lewis and Clark sent back to Jefferson in Virginia such remarkable things as a prairie dog, an antelope skeleton and a magpie. No white man had seen one before.

``It was the equivalent of bringing back a rock from the moon,'' said Dayton Duncan, the author with whom Burns worked closely.

Burns, in collaboration with Duncan and Stephen E. Ambrose, lays out that wilderness for the camera in ``Lewis & Clark,'' which concludes Wednesday night at 8. And it was not always an easy thing.

``There are power plants, fences and cattle in the fields where once roamed buffalo herds so large it took an hour for them to pass by,'' said Burns.

Re-creating the Louisiana Purchase for the camera in 1997 was a challenge almost as difficult as producing a four-hour script about the expedition. In making ``The Civil War,'' ``Baseball'' and ``Thomas Jefferson,'' Burns had much material - photographs, paintings, diaries, even film in the case of ``Baseball.''

``For this project, there was almost nothing in the archives,'' said Burns. ``There were a couple of paintings of Lewis and Clark, none of the crew. We had their journals, but there were gaps - no record of what was going on for days.''

With so little material, how did Burns create four hours of TV that are among the best he's done?

``We decided to put the TV audience in the explorers' shoes, to take viewers along on this adventure, and to see it through the eyes of the Corps of Discovery.''

And so it is. Burns' cameras carry you up the Missouri River ahead of the expedition's keelboat, sweep across the majestic plains, show the Great Falls of the Missouri and the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho, and finally the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, the voices of Adam Arkin, Sam Waterston, Matthew Broderick and others bring alive the words in the journals.

``Lewis wrote in his journal that the men with him were stout, healthy, young and unmarried. They were accustomed to the woods and were capable of bearing bodily fatigue.''

There was another dilemma in this project for Burns. The story of Lewis and Clark is familiar to almost everyone who ever cracked a history book. We know how it ends. The men did not find the Northwest Passage, because it does not exist, but they did a masterful job of mapping an unknown land and returning home safe and sound.

How do you forge four hours of TV out of familiar history?

``Our challenge was to place the viewer in the picture at every moment and somehow make the past come alive,'' said Burns. Mission accomplished.

For two nights Burns takes you far, far away from 1997, and he does so with a style and grace pioneered by him. It's TV as art.

Most interesting of the four hours is Part 2, the return of Lewis and Clark and what happened in their lives after they were acclaimed heroes. Upon arriving home, they were guests at grand balls in Virginia. Congress awarded the men 320 acres of land.

And what then?

It would be bad form to spoil the ending of ``Lewis & Clark'' for you, so I'll close with Burns' last words on the explorers, and let you discover their fate for yourselves:

``One of these brave men who had taken other brave men across a continent, and safely back again, did not find the happiness in later life that he deserved.''

Burns' next project is the history of American jazz. It would be great if he could slip a little of Virginia into that one, too. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]

Photo courtesy of General Motors

Re-enactors from the Lewis and Clark Honor Guard, above, were used

in the series. With little archival material to work from, the

filmmakers faced a challenge in re-creating the journey.

Ken Burns...

Thomas Jefferson...

Meriwether Lewis...

William Clark...

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