The Journey Home

By editor

Lolo, Missoula County, Montana

When a man has spent two years walking across a continent with the same thirty people, he generally develops a strong opinion about them. By the time the Corps of Discovery returned to Traveler's Rest in July 1806, they had been frozen, starved, chased by grizzly bears, and forced to eat dog meat together. They had survived by sticking together. So naturally, the moment they got back to familiar territory, they decided to split up.

This was not a sudden fit of pique. It was a calculated piece of exploring business, hatched during the long, wet winter at Fort Clatsop.

President Jefferson had sent them out to find the most direct water route across the continent. They had found a route, but it involved a month of dragging canoes up the Missouri, a week of freezing in the Bitterroots, and a river that tried to drown them on a daily basis. They figured there had to be a better way, and they intended to find it.

On July 3, 1806, the expedition divided. "Capts. Lewis and Clark parted here with their parties & proceed on," Sergeant John Ordway recorded in his journal, with the kind of military brevity that completely ignores the drama of the situation.

Lewis took nine men and headed northeast, aiming to find a shortcut to the Great Falls of the Missouri and then explore the upper reaches of the Marias River. This was the northernmost limit of the Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis wanted to see exactly what Mr. Jefferson had bought.

Clark took the rest of the party and headed south, back to the cache of supplies they had left at Camp Fortunate the previous summer. From there, he planned to cross over to the Yellowstone River and follow it down to its junction with the Missouri.

It was a bold plan, bordering on the reckless. They were dividing a small, well-armed force into two smaller, vulnerable ones, in territory controlled by tribes who had not yet made up their minds about the Americans. They agreed to meet somewhere near the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri, a spot neither of them had seen in over a year, assuming they both survived.

The remarkable thing is not that they made this plan, but that it actually worked. They explored hundreds of miles of new territory, mapped two major river systems, and managed to find each other again on August 12, exactly where they said they would be.

It was a triumph of navigation, endurance, and sheer luck. And it all started here, at Traveler's Rest, when two men looked at a map of half a continent and decided to take the long way home.

See also

• A Shortcut, detailing Lewis's route east from Traveler's Rest
• Travellers Rest, the story of the campsite where the expedition rested and divided
• The Lolo Trail, the brutal mountain crossing that brought them to this point