On May 23, 2026 an account on X posted an AI-generated image of two enormous statues flanking a great river, with the caption: "We should build two statues of Lewis and Clark at the head of the Mississippi River akin to the Argonath." The post asked "Why?" and answered its own question with "Why not?" It has been viewed roughly 1.1 million times, with more than 21,000 likes and 2,500 reposts.
We should build two statues of Lewis and Clark at the head of the Mississippi River akin to the Argonath. "Why?" Why not? @buster_mega45, May 23, 2026. View on X · ~1.1M views
The same day, Daniel C. Green of The Eagle Eye quote-posted it with a refined design and a number attached to the idea:
I think we need to build this. I designed this below image, representing Lewis and Clark on the Mississippi in the style of Argonath. At $1 Billion or more, I think it can be done. @TheEagleyeNews, May 23, 2026. View on X · ~1.1M views
Green has since thanked the hundreds of thousands of people who backed the idea and asked openly how to make it happen. That is the right question, and it is the one this brief answers.
The thread then did something useful: it corrected its own geography. ThinkingWest pointed out that the men never went to the head of the Mississippi, and proposed a site that Lewis and Clark actually named:
The perfect place for this is actually "Gates of the Mountains" in Montana. Lewis and Clark named it while exploring the Missouri River. @thinkingwest, May 23, 2026. View on X
Green agreed and moved the whole proposal off the Mississippi: "I had created this image for the Mississippi River, however, perhaps this is an even better idea on the Missouri. This idea is taking off ... I will actually spearhead the idea." Daniel Ross Goodman replied that he would personally contribute toward building it, and another reply caught the spirit exactly: "Grew up floating this river, not a better place in the USA to stick Lewis and Clark." Within a day the thread had abandoned the wrong river on its own. The remaining question is where on the right one.
The most useful reply in the entire thread came from Danielle Franz on May 24. She did not argue against the monument. She named the actual obstacle:
We should build this. We should build a lot of things. The problem is that in 2026, we can't even permit a transmission line across three counties in under a decade. A serious country could build this. We are not a serious country. NEPA, twelve overlapping review processes, litigation as political strategy that stalls housing and reactors and monuments alike. Fix the permitting regime and we can build all of it. @DanielleBFranz, May 24, 2026. View on X
That is the whole brief. A million people want a great monument. One person pointed out that the country has forgotten how to build one. Burnham Civic exists to close exactly that gap.
The viral posts say "head of the Mississippi." The head of the Mississippi is Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, and Lewis and Clark never went there. The thread corrected itself to the Missouri within a day. ThinkingWest then named the right spot on it, and we agree: the Gates of the Mountains.
The Gates of the Mountains is a canyon on the Missouri River about twenty miles north of Helena, Montana, in the Big Belt range. The river runs for several miles between Madison limestone walls that rise roughly twelve hundred feet straight out of the water. Lewis came through it on July 19, 1805 and wrote in his journal that these were "the most remarkable clifts that we have yet seen," and that as the boats approached, the rock seemed to swing open like gates and close behind them. He named it the Gates of the Rocky Mountains. The name is his.
No other site comes close as an Argonath. The Argonath in the story is precisely this: a river forced through a narrow gorge between sheer rock walls, with a colossal figure standing on either side. The Gates of the Mountains already is that gorge. It needs only the two figures. A monument here is not a statue placed near a river; it is the canyon itself completed, with Lewis on one wall and Clark on the other and the Missouri running between them exactly as it ran under their boats. A traveler on the water passes between the two men at the same bend where Lewis looked up and named the place.
The drawback is honest and worth stating plainly. The site is remote, reachable mainly by boat, and the land east of the river is the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness, designated by Congress in 1964 and managed by the Helena National Forest. That makes it one of the hardest places in America to permit and build a billion-dollar structure. We treat that as the point, not the problem. If the country cannot build an uncontroversial monument to its founding expedition at the very gorge that expedition named, that tells you everything about the permitting regime, and it tells it in the most sympathetic possible test case.
July 19, 1805 Lewis named the Gates of the Rocky Mountains, "the most remarkable clifts that we have yet seen"
~1,200 ft Madison limestone walls rising straight from the Missouri
~20 miles north of Helena, Montana, in the Big Belt range
1964 the surrounding wilderness designated by Congress, the permitting wall
$1 billion+ the figure proposed for the monument
~1.1 million views on the originating post in 24 hours
The Argonath, the Pillars of the Kings, are two colossal statues in Tolkien's work that stand on either bank of the river Anduin at the northern frontier of Gondor. Each is a crowned king with one hand raised, palm outward, in warning, marking the edge of the realm. They are not a memorial to the dead. They are a statement of sovereignty: you are now entering a country that takes itself seriously, built by people who could move that much stone.
That is precisely the register a Lewis and Clark monument should occupy. Not a plaque. Not a tasteful bust in a visitor center. Two figures at river scale, sited so the river itself becomes the approach. The reference resonates with millions of people because they have seen what awe at that scale looks like, even if only on a screen, and they have noticed that their own country no longer builds it.
The United States has done this before, and not in fiction. The Statue of Liberty is 305 feet from base to torch and was raised by a republic with a fraction of today's wealth and machinery. Mount Rushmore put four sixty-foot heads into a granite cliff between 1927 and 1941. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Eero Saarinen's 630-foot stainless steel catenary, was finished in 1965 to mark the westward expansion this very expedition began, downriver from the canyon Lewis named. The country that built all three is the same country being told a billion-dollar monument is impossible. It is not impossible. It is unpermitted.
Danielle Franz is correct, and her point is the operational core of this brief. The monument is not blocked by engineering, by money, or by public will. A billion dollars is a rounding error against what the country spends, the engineering is a solved problem, and a million people endorsed the idea in a day. The monument is blocked by process.
A structure in the Gates of the Mountains touches nearly every federal review trigger at once, and the wilderness designation stacks the hardest one on top. The Wilderness Act of 1964 bars permanent structures and commercial development inside the designated area, so any build has to thread the river corridor and the Forest Service land at its edge with extraordinary care. On top of that sits the full federal stack. The Army Corps of Engineers governs the navigable river. NEPA requires an environmental impact statement, and the modern EIS routinely runs four to six years and several thousand pages. The Endangered Species Act adds consultation. The National Historic Preservation Act adds Section 106 review. The Helena National Forest, the State of Montana, and Lewis and Clark County all hold a piece of the approval. And in the current regime each of those reviews is also a venue, a place where an opponent can file suit and run the clock. Franz's example, a transmission line that cannot cross three counties in under a decade, is the rule, not the exception.
This is the same machine Burnham Civic documents in Seattle through our Permit Machine work. A country that has made it functionally illegal to build a monument has not run out of ambition. It has built a procedural state that converts ambition into litigation. The monument is worth pursuing precisely because it is a clean, sympathetic, nonpartisan test case: nobody is against Lewis and Clark, so when the project still cannot get built, the obstacle stands fully exposed.
The honest answer to "how do we make it happen" is that the federal vehicle already exists, the money is already appropriated, and the two men are already on the list. The work is to connect a viral idea to a program the United States government is running right now, and the person who runs it is the Secretary of the Interior.
On May 15, 2026, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the National Garden of American Heroes and released the design plan for its site in West Potomac Park in Washington. The garden is a federal commission for as many as 250 statues of great Americans. Congress appropriated $40 million to the Department of the Interior for it in Section 86001 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts committed a further $34 million, structured as grants of up to $200,000 per statue. The program's own rules require that every statue be classical, lifelike, and cut from marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass. No modernist or abstract work is allowed.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are both on the honoree list. So are Sacagawea and Daniel Boone. The United States has therefore already decided, in writing and with money behind it, to erect classical realistic statues of these exact two men. Our proposal does not ask the government to honor someone new. It asks the government to build the statues it has already chosen at the one scale and the one site that match the subject: colossal, in the canyon Lewis named, in the manner of the Argonath. By the program's own aesthetic standard, a classical figure in granite or bronze, the Gates of the Mountains monument is already compliant. It is the flagship version of a commission the country is funding anyway.
Doug Burgum is the right patron for three concrete reasons, not just because of his office.
First, he already owns the program. He announced the National Garden of American Heroes himself and his department holds the $40 million and the design authority. A monument to two honorees on his own list, built to his own program's aesthetic rules, is an extension of work he is already doing, not a new fight he has to pick.
Second, he is a builder governor, not a caretaker. As Governor of North Dakota he ran the state like a development project, and he has spent his federal tenure arguing that the country has forgotten how to build. A billion-dollar monument that doubles as a permitting test case is exactly the kind of thing he says the United States should be able to do.
Third, the expedition runs straight through his home state. The Corps of Discovery spent the pivotal winter of 1804 and 1805 at Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota, and it was there that they met Sacagawea, whose name North Dakota carries on its largest lake. The Secretary has a personal and political stake in the Lewis and Clark story that no other cabinet officer has. The ask writes itself: the man overseeing the National Garden of American Heroes should build its greatest single piece at the gateway the expedition named, and he should do it as the western anchor of the country's 250th anniversary.
This is where the Secretary's office stops being symbolic and becomes the actual mechanism. The obstacle named above, the NEPA environmental impact statement and the wilderness designation, has a documented federal workaround, and the current administration is already using it.
The Antiquities Act of 1906 lets the President declare a national monument on federal land by proclamation. A monument created this way does not require the NEPA environmental impact statement that consumes four to six years on an ordinary federal project, which is the single largest source of delay Danielle Franz was describing. The President has used proclamation power repeatedly in the current term. The Gates of the Mountains is federal land already. A proclamation establishing the Lewis and Clark National Monument at the canyon, recommended by the Secretary of the Interior, is the cleanest legal path from idea to groundbreaking that exists in American law.
The wilderness designation east of the river remains a real constraint, because the Wilderness Act bars permanent structures inside the line. That is a siting problem, not a wall. The monument can be placed on the canyon walls and Forest Service land at the river corridor outside the designated wilderness, or the proclamation and an interagency agreement between Interior and the Department of Agriculture can define a build envelope that leaves the wilderness intact. Coordinating Interior, the Forest Service, the State of Montana, and Lewis and Clark County is precisely the kind of work a cabinet secretary with a presidential proclamation behind him can force, and that a citizen petition cannot.
$40 million appropriated to Interior for the National Garden of American Heroes
$34 million more from NEH and NEA, at up to $200,000 per statue
Both honorees Lewis and Clark are already on the federal list
Antiquities Act presidential proclamation bypasses the NEPA EIS
America 250 the 250th anniversary is the deadline that forces the schedule
A billion dollars sounds like the obstacle and is actually the easiest part. The federal program supplies the anchor and the credibility: the Interior appropriation and the NEH grants do not cover a colossus on their own, but they establish that the United States is already paying to sculpt these men, which turns the conversation from "should this exist" into "how large." Everything above that line is private, and private money is how monuments at this scale have always been built.
The Statue of Liberty was funded by public subscription on two continents. Mount Rushmore mixed federal money with private donation over fourteen years. Daniel Burnham's entire Columbian Exposition, the founding act of American civic architecture, was raised in private subscriptions, five million dollars of it in a single day in 1890. The Gates of the Mountains monument follows the same pattern: a federal seed and a federal champion, then a national subscription. The viral thread already produced a volunteer donor in its first day, a writer who replied that he would personally contribute. A campaign tied to the 250th anniversary, with the Secretary of the Interior as its public face, is a fundraising instrument, not a budget hole.
The design brief is unusually constrained, and that is an advantage. The National Garden of American Heroes already dictates the aesthetic: classical, lifelike, no abstraction, cut from marble, granite, bronze, or copper. That is the correct instruction for an Argonath and it removes the argument that would otherwise consume a decade, the fight over what the thing should look like. Two standing figures, classically rendered, Lewis on one wall of the canyon and Clark on the other, at a scale read from the water and from the rim.
The country has the references. The Statue of Liberty stands 305 feet from base to torch. The faces at Mount Rushmore are sixty feet each, carved into a granite cliff between 1927 and 1941. Saarinen's Gateway Arch is 630 feet of stainless steel, finished in 1965 to mark the westward expansion this expedition began. The engineering for figures of this size in stone and bronze is a solved problem, demonstrated more than once on American soil. Burnham's method applies to the artistry as well: he did not design every building at the fair himself, he convened the best architects in the country and assigned them the work. The monument should be a national sculptor competition, judged to the program's classical standard, run on the 250th-anniversary calendar.
This is a Burnham project in the exact sense. Daniel Burnham built a white city of two hundred buildings on a Chicago swamp in twenty-six months, during a depression, with mostly private money, and the country walked through it and understood it was a serious place. The Gates of the Mountains is the same instinct pointed at the canyon where the West opened. It is the kind of thing a confident country builds without a committee deciding it cannot.
The viral moment proves the demand is already there. A million people did not stop to ask whether it was zoned. They saw two giants over a great river and recognized something their country used to do and stopped doing. The job now is to convert one million impressions into a buildable project, and the binding constraint is not the statue. It is the permitting regime that stands between the United States and everything Franz listed: housing, reactors, transmission lines, and monuments alike.
We are treating the Gates of the Mountains as a national companion to our Seattle permitting work. Four moves follow.
First, fix the proposal so it can survive contact with reality: the correct site at the Gates of the Mountains, the correct history at the July 19, 1805 naming, and a design language drawn from the Statue of Liberty, Rushmore, and the Gateway Arch rather than from a movie still. A monument built on a geographic mistake hands its opponents a free win, and the thread has already supplied the fix.
Second, route it to the program that already exists. The single highest-leverage action is to put this proposal in front of the Secretary of the Interior as an extension of the National Garden of American Heroes, with the argument made plainly: Lewis and Clark are already on your list, the statues are already funded in principle, build the flagship at the canyon Lewis named, anchor it to the 250th anniversary, and clear the path with an Antiquities Act proclamation. We are drafting that package.
Third, publish the permitting map. We are assembling the full federal and state review path this monument would actually face, the Wilderness Act constraints, the Forest Service approval, the Corps jurisdiction over the river, the NEPA EIS timeline, Section 106, and ESA consultation, alongside the Antiquities Act workaround, so that both the cost and the shortcut are visible before anyone breaks ground. This is the same accountability inventory we built for Seattle, applied to a project everyone claims to want.
Fourth, make the case that this is the test. If the United States cannot build an uncontroversial monument to its own founding expedition at the very canyon that expedition named, with the figures already federally approved and the money already appropriated, that is not a fact about statues. It is a fact about the country's capacity to build anything, and it is the argument for permitting reform stated in the one form a million people already cheered for.
Sculptors, engineers, Montana and Helena-area contacts, permitting counsel, or backers who want to see the Gates of the Mountains built? Tell us who you are.