Chapter Twelve - Lewis and Clark Senior Style

Chapter Twelve – Lewis and Clark Senior Style

Columbia Gorge

 
At the end of their outbound journey the Corps was anxious to reach the Pacific Ocean and so were we.  We enjoyed every moment of the trip, but we had been traveling for a month with countless visits to Lewis and Clark Interpretive Centers.  I was pretty much done with the Lewis and Clark trek.  Russ—not so much.  We stayed in Lewiston, Idaho only one night and were ready to move fast through the last miles of our journey to the Pacific.

Two hundred years earlier, Lewis and Clark had left their horses with the Nez Perce at Weippe for safe keeping, and Clark had supervised a work crew to make new canoes to finish their journey to the ocean by river.  On October 6, 1805 the men of the Corps dipped their oars into the Clearwater River and began their downstream journey.  The Nez Perce assured Lewis and Clark that following the river would take them ultimately to the Pacific.  The men rowed with determination and speed.  Eventually, the Clearwater River would converge into the Snake River and finally the Columbia River, then the ocean.  There was a definite, “Let’s go boys” attitude in the speed of the men to get to their destination.

Russ and I had two days of driving to the ocean.  The first day we traveled alongside the Snake River toward Kennewick, Washington, where the Snake River converged with the Columbia River.  The topography was in constant change.  An hour into the drive we were traveling through endless rolling fields of wheat, later we passed groves of Sycamore trees being grown for paper and eventually apple orchards, then we saw grape vineyards on otherwise barren hills opposite the river.  The change in the look of the land was slow but dramatic; for we had begun the day in a pine forest and ended it amidst barren hills.  Clark wrote when he arrived at the end of the Snake River, “Worthy of remark that not one stick of timber on the river.”  Once Russ and I reached Kennewick, we visited the Sacajawea State Park and Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center.  (Yes, another Interpretive Center). 

 Beginning of Drive Near Lewiston, Idaho

 End of Drive Near Kennewick, Washington

The Interpretive Center at Kennewick sat in a park beside the Columbia River.  At the park, two canoes, similar to the ones made by Clark and his crew, were on display.  The most interesting thing that happened to us at the park was that we were approached by a uniformed Washington State Parks employee, while walking around park.  The Parks employee was very nice and asked us if we were from Texas.  When we said,” yes”, he explained that he was looking for us because he didn’t want to give us a parking ticket.  We hadn’t purchased a parking ticket, because we assumed we could buy it inside the center.  He said that if we intended to visit more sites in Washington, we would be smart to buy the annual pass for $30.  Otherwise, we could be given a $100 ticket.  We were grateful for his advice and quickly bought the annual pass-a bargain at twice the price.

Columbia River at Convergence with Snake River

Reproductions of Expedition Canoes

We left Kennewick a hot July 22^nd morning and drove west on the Interstate along the Oregon side of the Columbia.  Soon we were in the Columbia Gorge where the Columbia cuts a half mile swath between barren cliffs that reminded us of photographs of the moon’s surface.  The Gorge goes on for a hundred miles and ends at the Dalles Dam, where trees once again scatter across the landscape.  The views were spectacular at the Dalles Dam, and after lunch we    

Columbia Gorge Cliffs

Dalles Dam with Mt. Hood in the Background

 

Historic Oregon Route 30 near the Dalles

decided to take the Historic Oregon Route 30 Highway to enjoy more of the beautiful scenery.  In the 1 ½ days driving since leaving Lewiston the scenery had been the highlight of the trip.  We thought about the wonders that the Corps had been seeing, as the first European Americans to be rowing down the Columbia two centuries ago.  They were impatient to reach their destination, but they had to be overwhelmed by the beauty of everything they saw.  Once at the Dalles we saw nothing but tree covered hills until we reached Seaside, Oregon, the last stop of our odyssey across half the continent.

Chapter Eleven Lewis and Clark

Chapter Eleven – Lewis and Clark Senior Style
Lolo Pass – Missoula

We left Great Falls and the dramatic Portage to drive to Missoula and explore the site of the most difficult task the Corps accomplished – crossing the Rockies.  Missoula, like Great Falls, was an unexpected treat.  We thought it would be more “cowboyish” like our home state of Texas.  Instead it reminded us more of a Colorado ski resort.  The town is surrounded by scenic mountains and is built adjacent to the meeting of three rivers--one of them named after Clark.  There was a surprising variety of fine restaurants-better than we had seen anywhere on the trip, and Russ couldn’t wait for us to try them.  For our first night Russ chose the Blue Canyon at the Hilton hotel.  The hostess seated us at the only empty table in the crowded restaurant and took care to make certain we at least had water until a server could get to us.   She was all smiles and one of the people you remember, when you are on the road for a long time and dependent on others for every comfort or service.  The menu and food were outstanding, making it worth the wait.

We spent our first evening planning the next day, which would be the first of a two day exploration of the Lolo Pass, the route used by the Corps to cross the Rockies.  The Corps was no longer traveling by river when they reached the entrance to Lolo Pass.  They had purchased horses near Lemhi Pass from Sacajawea’s native tribe, the Shoshone, and used the horses to haul their supplies a little over a hundred miles up the valley north to Lolo.  The trip took a  total of ten days.  The captains had only been able to purchase thirty-three horses and three colts, a number sufficient to carry their supplies, but no riders.  The corps themselves, including officers were on foot.  In addition to horses, the Shoshone had provided them with an Indian guide to steer them across the Rockies.  The captains called their guide Old Toby.

(The Shoshone had made two suggestions to Lewis and Clark, and they rejected both.  The first suggestion was that the captains wait until spring to cross the Rockies, because they were getting a late start.  The Shoshone also recommended they take a pass further south, which the Indians said was an easier route with less snow.  The captains refused the first suggestion because they wanted to move forward, and the second because Jefferson’s instructions were to follow the Missouri to its source, then portage to the source of the Columbia River.  Jefferson’s hope was that they would find a water passage across the continent.  The captains believed they had to stay on their current latitude to intersect with the Columbia River.)

Old Toby guided the Corps to a camp site just below Lolo Pass.   Indians on both sides of the Rockies had been using the camp site and the Lolo Trail for hundreds of years.  Tribes on the eastern side of the Rockies used the trail to get to the salmon on the other side; whereas tribes on the western side used it to get to the buffalo on the prairie.  Lewis and Clark called their camp site Travelers’ Rest and stayed several days to hunt for meat and dry it for crossing the mountains.  It was early September and there was frost at night and snow on the surrounding mountains.

I had arranged from Austin to have my allergy shot at a local doctor’s office in Missoula the morning of July 18.  (It is amazing what you can accomplish with our modern day communication. Any ailments the men of the Corps experienced were generally treated with powerful laxatives nicknamed Thunderclappers.)  After my doctor appointment we drove twenty miles from Missoula to Travelers’ Rest State Park adjacent to Lewis and Clark’s original camp site.  As we entered the Visitor Center, we were fortunate to walk in on the presentation of a Park Department employee, who explained the archeological research that had been done at Travelers’ Rest to determine exactly where the Corps had pitched their tents, set up a position for melting lead to replenish their supply of bullets and even where they dug their latrines.

After visiting the museum we walked through the Travelers’ Rest camp site which had been privately owned land from the mid-19^th century until the Montana State Parks Department acquired the land a few years ago, preserving it as a historic site.  Fortunately, the land had been untouched by farming or construction, and the Montana Parks Department was able to preserve the site in a condition much like it looked when the corps camped there 200 years ago.

Travelers Rest Camp Site

                            

Leaving the Visitors Center and Travelers Rest camp site we drove up into Lolo Pass, which it turns out was the easy leg of the mountain crossing.  I happened to be talking on the phone with my niece when Russ drove into the throat of the pass, and I instantly lost the connection.  After the pass, the route turns from difficult to almost impassable. The Lolo Trail is an extremely rugged and beautiful route, where railroad companies have twice failed to build a track.  Even the two lane road we were using hadn’t been completed until 1962.  Soon into the drive we reached a sign marking the original Lolo Trail and stopped to walk a short distance up the narrow and heavily forested pathway.  We tried to visualize what it would be like to follow it covered with snow and laden with fallen logs and underbrush. ( Note from Russ – hard to get Sue on this trail because she didn’t have her bear whistle with her).

                                                         Lolo Pass Trail

On September 11, 1805 the Corps left Travelers’ Rest to follow Old Toby onto the Lolo Trail which climbed up one mountain ridge after another, descending between ridge tops to traverse saddles.  The Indians had cut the path atop the mountain ridges instead of the valley, because both sides of the Lochsa River, which flowed through the pass, were steep and rocky.  The perpendicular shores prevented Indians and railroad companies from cutting a path alongside the river.  The view of the Lochsa River drifting in and out of sight beyond steep rocky banks was spectacular.  When not looking at the river, we glanced above us to the mountain ridges over which the Corps led their horses for over a hundred miles through snow and fallen logs.

The Corps’ crossing of the Lolo Trail was a brutal, freezing crawl of a journey that took eleven days.  The men were cold, hungry, wet and miserable.  As a mother, it was amazing to me that Sacajawea kept her infant alive in such horrible conditions.  At one point of the journey Clark had been waiting about two hours for the rear to catch up, he wrote, “the rear of the party came up much fatigued and horses more so.  Several horses slipped and rolled down steep hills which hurt them very much.  The one which carried my desk and small trunk turned over and rolled down a mountain for 40 yards and lodged against a tree, broke the desk.  The horse escaped and appeared but little hurt.”  Camping that night they melted snow for water and ate the remainder of one of the three colts they had slaughtered as food through the trek.  They awoke in the morning to four inches of additional snow.  Three days later Clark wrote, “I have been wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life.” 

                        Expedition Campsite at Montana/Idaho Border

The Lolo Pass Visitors Center is located at the Montana/Idaho border, and behind it is the September 13, 1805 Lewis and Clark campsite.  While in the Visitors Center we spent a long time talking with an older Parks Department employee, who had been a physicist in his earlier life.  He told us that the Expedition occurred during a mini ice age that lasted from the mid 1500’s to the mid 1800’s, and that during those years the winters came earlier and were harsher than subsequent years.  I don’t know if his information was correct, but it was pretty interesting.

We took a brief walk around the September 13 Campsite behind the center.  The site was beautiful with lush wild flowers in a lovely plateau encased in tall fir trees.  For us it was perfect summer weather, and we tried to imagine the cold damp discomfort at the same site 200 years ago.   We took the long drive back to our comfortable room in Missoula to shower and go out to dinner, then went to a French restaurant called Pearl Cafe.  The food and service were wonderful.  We shared a pate’ appetizer, bottle of Bordeaux, and a main course of perfectly prepared Mixed Grilled Fish.  It was a dining experience far different than the Lewis and Clark Expedition, where the Corps had a dinner of melted snow and reheated horse meat .

After dinner we walked the downtown streets and crossed a bridge over the Clark Fork River to watch young people wading or floating down the current in inner tubes.  The weather was delightful and much cooler than Great Falls.  The following day we played golf at a nearby course and on our

                     Missoula Bridge Overlooking the Clark Fork River

last day drove the full distance through the one hundred mile Lolo Pass to the high plateau grass lands of the Weippe Prairie.

It was at Weippe that Clark, moving ahead with an advance party, met the Nez Perce Indians, two days prior to the Corps arrival behind him.  The Nez Perce had never seen white men, and were initially suspicious.  According to Nez Perce oral history, an old woman of the tribe, who had been kidnapped in her youth by another Indian tribe than sold to a white trapper, approached the chiefs of the tribe as they were deciding whether or not to kill the white visitors.  She had been treated kindly by white people, and pleaded for the lives of the Corps.  The chiefs were convinced by her 

                       Weippe Prairie where Clark First Met Nez Perce

arguments and provided the expedition with food while the exhausted men recovered from their trek through the mountains.  I didn’t know if the Nez Perce oral history was true, especially since the Indian tale ends with the old woman dying the very next day, but it made a good story.  If the tale was true, Lewis and Clark were totally unaware of the woman’s intervention on their behalf.

The drive up to the Weippe Prairie to see the site where Clark first encountered the Nez Perce was one of our major challenges.  We had to turn off the main highway and drive a curvy country road twenty miles to the tiny Idaho farming community of Weippe, where the road dead ends.  It was a Saturday, and the Visitor Center, which doubled as the community library, closed early.  In the parking lot was a huge sign stating that across the street was the location of the meeting of Clark and the Nez Perce.  We read the small print at the bottom of the sign, which informed us that the sign was moved from its original site four miles away twenty years ago.  (OK, now what do we do?)

 

We started driving up and down the streets of the small town that looked like one of those movies where only the buildings are left, because some kind of gas had killed all the inhabitants and melted their bodies.  There was not a person in sight.  We searched for signs indicating an Historical site, hoping one would lead us to the exact location of the Clark and the Nez Perce meeting.  We finally found a sign that pointed us to the meeting site and followed its instructions three miles down a dirt road into the country side.  We were determined Texans - well Russ was.  I was generally content to get reasonably close to the real site.  One prairie field looks pretty much like another to me.  With the exact prairie in the background of Clark’s meeting with the Nez Perce I took Russ’ picture, and we drove the twenty miles back down the country road until we reached the highway which took us to our destination for the night which was Lewiston, Idaho.