Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
Charles Keck’s bronze group depicts the two captains of the Corps of Discovery accompanied by Sacagawea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman who joined the expedition at the Mandan villages in 1805. Lewis stands upright at the center, holding a long rifle and gazing forward; Clark stands slightly behind and to his right with his hand raised to shield his eyes, peering into the distance. Sacagawea crouches at their feet in a lower, recessed position, looking down or to the side. The bronze figures rest on a tall block of Snake River granite that elevates the composition well above pedestrian sightlines. The treatment is academic and naturalistic, with the captains rendered in early-nineteenth-century frontier dress—fringed hunting shirts, leggings, and moccasins—and equipped with rifles, powder horns, and bedrolls.
The sculpture was commissioned by Paul Goodloe McIntire, a Charlottesville philanthropist who funded several public monuments in the city during and just after the First World War. It was dedicated on November 21, 1919, at the intersection of West Main Street and Ridge-McIntire Road, a site chosen partly because Charlottesville lies near Lewis’s birthplace at Locust Hill in Albemarle County. The work belongs to a wave of Lewis and Clark commemoration that produced major monuments across the country in the early twentieth century, often emphasizing the captains as agents of national expansion. The crouched, subordinate placement of Sacagawea—standard in expedition monuments of this period—became a central point of criticism in later decades.
Charles Keck (1875–1951) trained at the National Academy of Design and the American Academy in Rome and worked for several years as a studio assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens. His career was built largely on public monuments and architectural sculpture, including statues of Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville, Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee, and Father Duffy in Times Square. The Lewis and Clark monument remained at its original Charlottesville intersection for a century. Following a 2019 review of the city’s public art and sustained objections to Sacagawea’s depiction, the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the sculpture; it was taken down in July 2021 and placed in storage pending decisions about future disposition.
