Sunday marks the 205th anniversary of the day Meriwether Lewis launched his keeled boat from Pittsburgh, beginning a landmark journey that took him down the Ohio, up the Mississippi and Missouri and on to the Pacific. Yesterday morning, a state historical marker commemorating the event was unveiled near the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

"On Aug. 31, 1803, Capt. Meriwether Lewis launched a 50-foot 'keeled boat' from Fort Fayette, 100 yards downriver. This marked the beginning of the three-year expedition commissioned by President Jefferson, which opened America to westward expansion," the marker reads.

"I think this is a wonderful thing for Pittsburgh to be recognized officially as the launch of the expedition," said David Halaas, former head of the library and archives and publications divisions at the Senator John Heinz History Center. "People in Pittsburgh are understanding that now, and before, very few people thought about it. The name of Pittsburgh as the original gateway to the West, it really is true."

The marker has been installed at a place where many people will see it but far fewer will be able to read it. It's just east of the convention center along the 10th Street Bypass, on a small grassy triangle of city-owned land adjacent to the bike trail that connects the Strip District to Allegheny Riverfront Park and Downtown. Few pedestrians will pass by the marker and drivers go by too fast to read it; even if they wanted to stop, there's no safe way to do so. A better location would have been along Penn Avenue, as Fort Fayette straddled Penn between Ninth Street and Garrison Way.

But I'm not complaining too loudly. As one of the PG reporters who worked on Lewis and Clark stories five years ago, mostly I'm rather thrilled that it's there. The marker's location on the Allegheny River side of the city acknowledges the research William Brunot and I did, outlined in the PG story, "Who built the big boat?," in August 2003.

At the time, Halaas and others at the Heinz History Center had concluded the boat had been built at a commercial shipyard on the Monongahela, near where the Liberty Bridge stands today, and commissioned a painting from Robert Griffing showing how the launch might have looked.

But our research, conducted over the summer of 2003, convinced them that the boat had been built at Fort Fayette.

"It just seemed very compelling to me that this was a military expedition, authorized at the highest level and was secret," said Halaas, who retired in January and plans to return to his native Colorado.

"Knowing that Fort Fayette had a U.S. wharf and they were and had been building boats there" also was convincing, he said. "All of the supplies [for the expedition] wouldn't have gone to a public place. I just think it made all the sense in the world."

Brunot, a research engineer in Brisbane, Calif., is the great-great-great-grandson of Dr. Felix Brunot, who owned and lived on Brunot's Island, where Lewis and his crew stopped briefly after the launch. He also has researched Lewis' air gun, which was accidentally fired on the island, striking an unknown woman in the temple but not seriously injuring her. Brunot's research helped prove that an air gun exhibited at the Heinz History Center in 2003 was the type of gun Lewis took on the expedition.

"Bill has been on the cutting edge of so many things" related to the Lewis and Clark expedition, Halaas said.

With the question of where the big boat was built seemingly resolved, there remains another question: Who was the builder? Lawrence Myers, a retired government employee living in Virginia, thinks the answer could lie in a tangle of family relationships that may connect boat builders and public officials two centuries ago.

Myers is a descendant of early Pittsburgh riverboat families who's been looking into the topic for several years. One of his ancestors, Jacob Myers, built military barges for Gen. George Rogers Clark. Brunot thinks Jacob Myers could have been the principal builder of the Lewis and Clark boat; Myers, once convinced that was the case, now thinks the trail may be leading elsewhere. One thing they agree on: The quest is half the fun.