Road to the Buffalo

By editor

Lincoln, Lewis and Clark County, Montana

Bison sustained Plains and mountain peoples for thousands of years. In what is now Montana, an ancient network of trails led Salish, Pend d’Oreille, and related nations—whose territory once straddled the Continental Divide—onto the high plains where the herds concentrated. The Nez Perce called the route through traditional Salish-Pend d’Oreille country Qoq’aalx ’Iskit, the Buffalo Road.

The trail crossed the Divide at a low pass the Salish called Indian Fort Pass—stone structures where warriors watched for Blackfeet raiders. Today the same notch is Lewis and Clark Pass. Meriwether Lewis, on July 3, 1806, wrote that Nez Perce guides showed him a well-beaten track up the east branch of Clark’s river and the Cokahlarishkit, “the river of the road to buffaloe,” toward the falls of the Missouri.

Euro-American invasion destroyed the bison herds by about 1883, with devastating consequences for the nations that depended on them. The marker’s point is survival as much as loss: Indian people maintained relationships with these landscapes after the animals were gone. The road is still there, under different names, for anyone willing to read a pass as more than a highway notch.