Chapter Eleven – Lewis
and Clark Senior Style
Lolo Pass – Missoula
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-19th 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
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.
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