Lewis and Clark in Salish Territory

By editor

Lolo, Missoula County, Montana — September 1805

To stand at the confluence of Lolo Creek and the Bitterroot River is to stand at the crossroads of a continent. Long before the first white men set foot in this valley, the Salish and Pend d'Oreille people knew this place as Tmsmli, the Place of No Salmon. It was a name born of their creation stories, a title given to a landscape that provided nearly everything else a people could need. For ten thousand years, the Séliš, the true name of the Bitterroot Salish, meaning simply "the people," had moved through these mountains in rhythm with the seasons. They hunted the great bison herds on the eastern plains, gathered the starchy, life-giving bitterroot from the valley floor in spring, and walked the ancient, sophisticated network of trails that bound the Pacific Northwest to the Great Plains.

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark arrived at this confluence on September 9, 1805, they were strangers in a vast and ancient garden. They were also exhausted, hungry, and entirely dependent on the grace of the people whose land they had entered.

Just days earlier, at Ross Hole in the upper Bitterroot Valley, the Corps of Discovery had encountered an encampment of over four hundred Salish. The explorers, steeped in the ignorance of their time, erroneously called them "Flatheads," a misnomer born of a superficial comparison to the Chinookan tribes of the coast who practiced cranial deformation. The Séliš practiced no such thing. What they did practice was a profound hospitality. They provided the struggling expedition with horses, a trade that would prove to be the salvation of the American enterprise. Without those horses, the Corps would never have survived the Bitterroot Mountains.

The captains named the camp at Lolo Creek "Travelers Rest," a title that spoke more to their desperate hope than to their actual experience. Lewis recorded the arrival in his journal with characteristic precision, noting the stream's clarity and the absence of the fish that gave the place its Salish name: "we called this Creek Travellers rest. it is about 20 yards wide a fine bould clear runing stream... the stream appears navigable, but from the circumstance of their being no sammon in it I believe that there must be a considerable fall in it below."

They rested the horses they had acquired from the Salish, but rest for the men was elusive. They scoured the surrounding woods and meadows, attempting to secure a supply of game for the westward push, but their hunts were largely unsuccessful. The mountains loomed above them, a formidable wall of granite and pine, and the air already carried the sharp, undeniable bite of early snow.

It was here that the Corps secured the guidance they desperately needed. On the evening of September 10, three Salish men rode into camp. Lewis noted their wealth in livestock, writing that "the Indians were mounted on very fine horses of which the Flatheads have a great abundance; that is, each man in the nation possesses from 20 to a hundred head." Though they shared no spoken language, the universal tongue of the plains bridged the gap. "our guide could not speake the language of these people," Lewis wrote, "but soon engaged them in conversation by signs or jesticulation, the common language of all the Aborigines of North America." One of the men agreed to lead them over the mountains to his relations on the Columbia River.

When they finally departed Travelers Rest to cross the Bitterroots via the Lolo Trail, a route known to the Nez Perce as naptnišaqs, they walked into an ordeal of ice and starvation. The September snows fell deep, accumulating to eight inches and burying the narrow, forested path. For eleven days, the men fought their way through downed timber and slick, treacherous slopes. They were reduced to eating portable soup, tallow candles, and eventually the very packhorses that carried their meager supplies. It was a brutal education in the realities of the western mountains, a lesson that the Salish and Nez Perce had mastered millennia before.

Yet, the memory of Travelers Rest remained a beacon for the expedition. It was here that they had confirmed the existence of the great Indian route up the Blackfoot River, an ancient highway that led straight to the buffalo grounds of the Great Plains. When the Corps finally turned their faces east the following summer, they made straight for the familiar confluence of Lolo Creek.

They arrived back at Travelers Rest on June 30, 1806. The valley, which had been a place of anxious preparation the previous autumn, was now a scene of abundance and relief. The summer sun warmed the meadows, and the hunters easily stocked the camp with deer meat. Lewis recorded the bounty on July 1, noting that "our hunters killed 13 deer in the course of this day of which 7 were fine bucks, deer are large and in fine order." The men, hardened by their journey to the Pacific and back, ran foot races with their Nez Perce guides, their laughter echoing through the pines.

It was here, in the shadow of the Bitterroots, that the captains finalized their boldest plan. They would divide the Corps. Lewis recorded the strategy in his journal: "from this place I determined to go with a small party by the most direct rout to the falls of the Missouri... and myself and six volunteers to ascend Maria's river with a view to explore the country." Clark would ride south through the Bitterroot Valley to find the Yellowstone. It was a decision born of hard-won confidence, built entirely on the knowledge they had gleaned from the indigenous people who had mapped this wilderness long before the Americans arrived.

Today, the earth at Travelers Rest still holds the physical memory of their passing. It is the only scientifically verified Lewis and Clark campsite in the nation, its location confirmed not just by the carbon dating of ancient fire hearths, but by the microscopic traces of mercury left behind in the soil, the chemical residue of the harsh medicines the explorers carried. But the true legacy of this place is not found in the soil. It is found in the enduring presence of the Séliš, the people who first named the Place of No Salmon, and whose ancient trails still trace the contours of the mountains they call home.

See also

• Lewis and Clark in Salish Territory at Lolo, Missoula County (Montana Department of Transportation)
• Lolo, the modern community at the site of Travelers Rest
• Missoula, the major city at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Bitterroot rivers