The Lewis Minus Clark Expedition

By editor

Ovando, Powell County, Montana

If you are going to name a mountain pass after two men, it is generally considered polite if both of them have actually seen it. The United States government, however, has never let a small detail like physical presence stand in the way of a good name.

On July 1, 1806, the Corps of Discovery did something that sounds like a terrible idea in a wilderness: they split up. They were at Traveler's Rest, south of present-day Missoula, and they had a continent to cross before winter. Captain Clark took half the men south, back down the Bitterroot Valley, to recover the canoes they had sunk the year before. Captain Lewis took nine men, seventeen horses, and his Newfoundland dog, Seaman, and headed north up the Blackfoot River. They agreed to meet somewhere on the Missouri River in late August, assuming neither party was killed by Blackfeet, drowned in a river, or eaten by a grizzly bear. It was a very casual arrangement for a very large continent.

Lewis's route took him right through the valley where Ovando now sits. On July 5, he camped at the confluence of the Blackfoot River and a clear, cold creek. He looked at his dog, who had survived the entire journey and recently saved the camp from a charging buffalo bull, and named the water Seaman's Creek. The mapmakers later changed it to Monture Creek, because mapmakers prefer naming things after people who are dead rather than dogs who are alive.

The next day, July 6, Lewis rode east into a landscape that looked like a giant had been playing with mud pies. He called it the "prarie of the knobs." The valley floor was covered with strange, irregular mounds. Lewis, being a practical man, noted the mounds and the "great Number of the burrowing squirrls" that lived in them, and kept riding.

He did not know that he was riding through the debris of a melted glacier. Ten thousand years earlier, a river of ice had retreated north, dumping its cargo of rocks and gravel into piles as it melted. The mounds were the garbage left behind by the ice age. The Nez Perce, who had been using the trail for generations, called it Cokahlahishkit, or "The River of the Road to the Buffalo." They did not care about the glacier either; they cared about the buffalo.

Lewis followed the road to the buffalo east, past present-day Lincoln, up Alice Creek, and over the Continental Divide. He crossed the mountains at a wide, grassy saddle that offered a clear path to the plains.

Years later, when the mapmakers were filling in the blank spaces, they looked at that grassy saddle and named it Lewis and Clark Pass. It is a fine, patriotic name. It honors the two great captains of western exploration. There is only one problem with it.

William Clark was never there.

While Lewis was riding over the pass that bears both their names, Clark was hundreds of miles to the south, digging up canoes in the Beaverhead Valley. But "Lewis and Clark Pass" sounds like a grand national achievement, whereas "Lewis and Nine Guys and a Dog Pass" lacks a certain dignity. So the name stuck, and Clark got half the credit for a mountain he never climbed, which is about the standard rate of exchange in the exploring business.

See also

• Seaman, detailing the dog who earned a creek and lost it to a mapmaker
• The Blackfoot River Corridor, covering the route Lewis took through this valley
• Marias Pass Obelisk, another story of a mountain pass and the people who didn't find it