STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Eyes full of hope, Leonard Rowe looks at Brett Hyberger, expecting to get his reward for years of hard work on a young nation's most audacious adventure.

Rowe thought he would get his freedom.

"Don't trouble your head with thoughts, boy," Hyberger responds.

Rowe, of Mocksville, N.C., plays the title character in "York: The Voice of Freedom," a musical drama that opens today as part of Penn State University's conference on Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's Voyage of Discovery.

York was a slave owned by Clark -- played in the musical by Hyberger, of Iowa City, Iowa -- and the only black man on the famous voyage that opened a vast tract of the West to settlement by a young United States.

During the three-year trip, from St. Louis up the Missouri River, across the Rocky Mountains, to the Pacific Ocean and back, York was almost an equal to his white corpsmen. But when the expedition was completed in 1806 and the rest of the corps were rewarded with money and land, York returned to life as a slave on Clark's estate.

That was the story Bruce Trinkley, a Penn State music professor, wanted to tell.

'Disturbing picture'

"It's a truly disturbing picture," said Trinkley, who composed the music for the show. "York was continually really wanting his freedom -- he thought that was the least he deserved from being on that expedition. Clark was just not about to do that, and eventually York became so rebellious and intransigent that Clark did the worst you could do to a slave back then, he rented him out to another master."

Clark later relented and eventually granted York his freedom, Trinkley said.

The musical, written by Trinkley and Jason Charnesky, a graduate student in English, is the centerpiece for a conference that intends to focus on the less-known aspects of Lewis and Clark's voyage, which was ordered by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 as a way to establish trade with American Indians and find a water route to the Pacific Ocean.

After hearing about the musical, "we then started talking about how we really wanted to offer an opportunity for the story of Lewis and Clark to be offered through multiple viewpoints," said Melanie Doebler, who organized the conference through Penn State's Outreach and Cooperative Extension program.

"It's not only the story of the Corps of Discovery looking up from the river and seeing a Native American on the bluff," Doebler said. "It's the story of a Native American coming to the bluff, looking down and seeing the keelboat."