Exploring history is living life

“The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature experiences of his own.”

So wrote Emerson in his 1841 essay “History.”

If he had lived 100 years later, he might well have added that the student interprets the age of the Wild West by his own age of the Wild West, and the days of the pioneer adventures by quite parallel miniature experiences of his own.

Certainly, any child who grows up in Montana ought to experience the wonder of history as nothing more or less than what is outside his or her own window. As Emerson knew and passionately pleaded, we are living in historic times — and our understanding of history both informs our life and reflects it.

“The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. ... I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age... has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.”

That eternal truth was mirrored once again two weeks ago when the fourth-grade classes of Russell School in Kalispell participated in a two-day field trip not just to Helena and Great Falls, but also, and more importantly, to the glorious past.

As an increasingly graying representative from the 20th century, I was invited along as a chaperone to accompany my daughter Meredith and her classmates as they learned about the even more distant, roiling 19th century.

Among the several stops along the way — which included the State Capitol and the C.M. Russell Museum — perhaps the most significant to these young minds was the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, a first-rate museum and gateway to adventure. The Russell fourth-grade teachers, Mrs. Trost and Mrs. Migwi, had already primed the pump by teaching lessons about these great explorers and their famous expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase for President Jefferson. The docents who guided us on our tours added more knowledge to the mix, but it was ultimately the students themselves who had to take the lead in their education — and they were just as eager as Lewis & Clark to blaze ahead on the trail, sending scouts ahead to each new exhibit, and risking great peril (or at least reprimand!) if they got too far ahead. But nothing could stop these student adventurers from adding to their knowledge. After all, every child worthy of the name is a great explorer.

“The world exists for the education of each man,” says Emerson. “There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person.”

Indeed, setting out from Kalispell with our bags and provisions packed in the bottom of the buses, we were not unlike Lewis & Clark in their longboats. And when the lead bus broke down at Avon, it did not seem too different from the many logistical setbacks that plagued the Corps of Discovery. Portage or perish. Adjust, adapt, survive.

As friend Emerson tells us, “Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.”

Never was that better illustrated than at the Gates of the Mountains on the Missouri River, named by Meriwether Lewis in 1805 and still the portal to another world today. Here, the children and adults were both entranced by the interplay of nature and history in a way that would have delighted Emerson. Osprey and bald eagles soared overhead while more exotic creatures beckoned from the rocky cliffs — an alligator, elephant, rhinoceros with dangerous horn, and even a Canyon Monster. No, we were not transported on a safari to Africa, but we might as well have been — as foreign as these rocky formations appeared to us from the workaday world of school and office that we commonly inhabited.

“Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works; and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest, which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock.”

If Lewis or Sacajawea had seen these grand designs in the cliffs before us, they were nonetheless not our betters, nor our teachers. We each saw them for the first time when we opened our eyes and looked up with our better natures — and doing so, we became the equals of Lewis or Clark or Emerson.

That is true for any student of history as much as for a student of geology, and that is why it was monumentally lucky for those fourth-graders of Russell School to get out of the classroom and into the world. 

New places to see, old mountains to cross! Pay attention and you cannot help but learn.