What Has Happened To America Since the Hope of Lewis and Clark?

On a sweltering day in August 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark clambered to the top of a 70-foot knoll north of the Missouri River. Local Yankton Sioux believed the landmark to be haunted, but instead of ghosts the explorers took in a vista that awed them with its majesty and potential.

''We beheld a most butifull landscape," Clark recorded in his journal, describing a realm of grassland extending ''without interruption as far as Can be Seen . . . the soil of those Plains are delightful."

The land has been tamed in the 200 years since then. The view from the rise called Spirit Mound today offers a bucolic version of the American dream that President Thomas Jefferson might have imagined when he dispatched the Corps of Discovery on its journey from St. Louis to the Pacific: tidy farms, busy shops, solid civic buildings, and church steeples protruding from cottonwood groves. Less charming, but still telling of prosperity, double-trailer truck rigs roar over wide highways while a crop-duster buzzes low over newly sown fields. The dome of a university sports stadium glints in the sun. In the hazy distance, a gigantic American flag floats languidly over a Phillips 66 gas station.

Yet to travel today the route taken by Lewis and Clark at the dawn of America is to encounter a nation that seems unsettled in its soul. Although an abiding faith in the future remains almost the national trademark, many people seem uneasy about the direction the country is taking.

''You've got to wonder where we're going as a nation and a people," said June Bosley Dabney-Gray, 69, a Missouri schoolteacher and former professional singer. Dabney-Gray graduated from the segregated St. Louis school system. Her father was the first black mail clerk on the old Wabash Railroad run from St. Louis to Omaha. Her nephew was the first black mayor of St. Louis.

She loves America, she said. And fears for it -- fears the fallout of a confusing war; fears for a society that, she believes, has strayed from religious values; fears for children lost to a world of ''hip-hop and street smarts" before they acquire basic learning skills. Her love of country but alarm about America comes close to summarizing the views of scores of people who spoke to a Globe reporter this spring in a journey across the broad arc of land that Lewis and Clark traveled -- territory that stretches from what is now St. Louis's Gateway Arch to land's end near Astoria, Ore.

''This is a country that makes you want to clap your hands and rejoice," she said. ''But also a country that makes you want to weep. There is a goodness in Americans, in our love of freedom, our quest for equality. But we are also people who are losing the light of the principles that have guided us. . . . People should sing the American anthem, should recite the pledge. We've got to be one nation indivisible, under God, or we're not going to stay together as a people at all...."