Which Way Did Lewis & Clark Go?

By editor

Sula, Ravalli County, Montana, September 1805

The wilderness of the northern Rocky Mountains, which had for ten thousand years been the undisputed domain of the native tribes and the beasts of the forest, presented to the American explorers of 1805 a labyrinth of terrifying proportions. Here, the grand enterprise of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, a voyage of discovery that had thus far proceeded with the steady, measured progress of a military campaign, was suddenly reduced to a desperate, chaotic scramble for survival. The landscape itself seemed to rise up in defiance of their maps, their instruments, and their ambitions.

On the third day of September, the Corps of Discovery found themselves entangled in some of the most rugged and unforgiving country on the continent. They had departed the Lemhi Shoshone villages with a guide, an elderly Shoshone man known to them as Old Toby, whose true name was Pi-keek queen-ah, or Swooping Eagle. He was a man well acquainted with the ancient, established trails that threaded the high passes, routes that had been traveled for centuries by his people and the Salish to the north. Yet, on this day, the expedition found itself not upon a beaten path, but struggling up the trackless, precipitous slopes above the North Fork of the Salmon River.

The mystery of why they chose this brutal ascent remains one of the great enigmas of the expedition. Did the captains, pressed by the advancing chill of early autumn, stubbornly insist upon the most direct route, ignoring the counsel of their Shoshone guide? Or did Old Toby himself become disoriented in the dense timber and falling snow? The historical record is silent on the matter, leaving modern scholars to debate the exact path taken over the divide. The compass readings recorded by Captain Clark are so contradictory that historians have proposed half a dozen different routes, none of which fully reconcile with the geography.

What is certain is the profound misery of the men and their animals. The mountains closed in upon the creek, forcing the party onto slopes so steep that the horses could scarcely maintain their footing. "Some places So Steep and rockey that Some of the horses fell backwards and roled to the bottom," wrote Sergeant John Ordway, his journal capturing the raw physical toll of the day. The men were obliged to hack their way through thickets of balsam fir, the trees towering a hundred and fifty feet above them, their trunks covered in resinous warts.

As dusk approached, the sky darkened and a cold rain began to fall, soon turning to snow. The expedition had exhausted its provisions; the men dined on the last of their salt pork and a few pheasants killed by the hunters. Some, driven by hunger, threatened to slaughter a colt, but were persuaded to wait another day in the hope of finding game. They camped in a high, gloomy cove, wet, hungry, and exhausted, having advanced a mere eleven miles after a day of ceaseless labor.

In the midst of this ordeal, a small but significant tragedy occurred: the expedition's last remaining thermometer was broken by accident. It was a fitting symbol of their predicament. The instruments of civilization, the tools by which they sought to measure and master the wilderness, were proving fragile and useless in the face of the Rocky Mountains. They were no longer scientific observers charting a new empire; they were simply men trying to survive the night.

High above them, rooted in the rocky soil of the Bitterroot National Forest, stood a Ponderosa pine that would later be known as the Alta Pine. In 1805, it was already a venerable sentinel, having stood for more than seven centuries. It had witnessed the slow, rhythmic passage of native peoples over Gibbons Pass, the primary travel route that lay just to the east of the Americans' chaotic struggle. The tree would stand for nearly two centuries more, finally dying in 1991 at the age of 905 years, a silent witness to the fleeting nature of human endeavors.

The Corps of Discovery would eventually find their way down into the Bitterroot Valley, their grand enterprise battered but unbroken. Yet the mystery of their route on that snowy September day has never been resolved. The wilderness, though now threaded by the tracks of commerce and the highways of a modern nation, still holds its secrets. There are places where history cannot be neatly mapped, and where the land itself has the final word.

See also

• Which Way Did Lewis & Clark Go? at Sula, Ravalli County (Erected by U.S. Forest Service)
• Lewis and Clark at Ross' Hole, the expedition's encampment the following day
• Sula, a small community near the historic crossing