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Adventure Outings has coordinated two field studies so far: “Boots, Books, and the Battle of Little Bighorn” in 1997 and “On the Trail of Lewis and Clark” in 1999. The Little Bighorn trip was conceived on Rick Scott’s third day on campus, when he visited the office of anthropology professor P. Willey. A year later, Willey, Scott, and history professor Lisa Emmerich took eleven students on the road, from the spot where the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was signed to the final battleground. “For me, the most memorable moments of the trip came when we were actually on-site and they described history as it occurred, climaxing with P. telling us about the Battle of Little Bighorn while we walked the whole area,” recalls Kimberly Jensen, director of recreational sports at Chico State. “He has such an in-depth knowledge of that battle that he would point out where one of the soldiers went down with a hip injury and where the Native Americans came over the hill.” Whereas Willey’s interests lie primarily with the soldiers engaged in the historic battles, Emmerich provided the Native American perspective. “Lisa would explain the complexities of what happenedÑthat it wasn’t just a good/bad, white/red kind of thing,” notes Willey. During one of the commemoration days at the battle site, a shaman allowed non-Native Americans to touch a 500-year-old peace pipe for the first time as a gesture of goodwill. The students also helped serve a lunch attended by Lakota and Crow traditional people, former enemies who were sitting down at a meal together for the first time. In 1999, Emmerich, Scott, trip leaders Jensen and Nancy Nelson, and twelve students retraced segments of the Lewis and Clark Trail through Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. They learned what it might have been like to be those intrepid explorers—canoeing the Missouri River in a thunderstorm with sheets of rain cutting them off from everything and hiking to the top of the Lemhi Pass, knowing that this was where Lewis and Clark thought they would see the ocean and instead encountered miles of mountains. Then they followed the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, where the explorers finally found what they had been searching for those many months. Adventure Outings plans to provide more history field studies in the future.
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you ever wondered what it was like to fight in the Battle of Little Bighorn
or to travel with Lewis and Clark? Students of history field studies,
coordinated by Adventure Outings, shared a summer adventure visiting these
historical sites. As if launched on a time machine, the class toured U.S.
battlefields and explored the American West the way the early pioneers
did in the 19th century. They also learned basic survival skills such
as tying knots and cooking in the outdoors.
