In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

by Wallace G. Lewis

  One of the first initiatives for relating these and other new highways that spanned the West to the path of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was launched in 1929. Concerned about the nation’s failure to adequately commemorate the explorers’ 1804–1806 journey to the Pacific Ocean and back, delegates from more than twenty communities in the Pacific Northwest and Montana gathered at Lewiston, Idaho, to form the Lewis and Clark Memorial Association. “It seems almost incredible,” the group’s initial report stated, “that through all those years there has been no national monument erected in their [the explorers’] honor. . . . Perpetuated only in a few place names, they claim but scant present attention, except from close students of western history.” The 1905 Portland Exposition, the delegates pointed out, “created nothing permanent, was as much commercial as sentimental, and many of those connected with the movement have gone to their reward.” They referred to the nearly twenty years that had “intervened” since the centennial as a “vista of silent years.”54

  A committee appointed by the Lewiston Chamber met with Idaho congressman Burton L. French, who offered his “unqualified endorsement” of the association. Directors and officers were elected and articles of association drawn up. In its list of aims, the Lewis and Clark Memorial Association sought to commemorate the two captains. No other member of the expedition is mentioned. Second on the list, the group vowed to “expedite the completion of a highway following the route” that would “through its utility stand as a lasting memorial” to the explorers. Rescuing “important historical points along the route from oblivion” came next, followed by “a campaign of education” and erection along the route of “suitable monuments and markers” indicating the significance of events in various locations. Anyone could join the association, and other chambers of commerce along the Lewis and Clark route were invited to become members, with dues graduated according to the size of the community. Lewiston, Idaho, would remain the organization’s seat of business.55

  Although its inaugural report reflected a growing sense that the expedition’s exploits had been largely ignored in the twentieth century—despite the centennial celebrations—the Lewis and Clark Memorial Association failed to stir much enthusiasm for the approaching 125th anniversary of the trek, which occurred during the depths of the Depression. Nevertheless, it gave some thought to promoting local celebrations of the expedition’s 125th anniversary in appropriate states that would be “more fitting than” one planned for the spring of 1930 in Mandan, North Dakota, which would merely commemorate the date on which the explorers left Fort Mandan to head west. The report suggested the possibility of forming an automobile “caravan to follow as nearly as possible the route taken by the explorers. ”56 The idea of designating a commemorative highway was not completely ignored. In September 1933 a stretch of paved highway connecting Lewiston, Idaho, with Umatilla, Oregon, by way of the Wallula Gap on the Columbia River was dedicated as an “Important link of [the] Lewis-Clark Memorial Route,” indicating that sentiment behind the Lewis and Clark Memorial Association’s proposals established an important precedent.57

  The enshrinement of Sacagawea as a heroic figure, publication of the original journals, and celebrations of both the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark centennials occurred during a surge of U.S. imperialism that had already thrust the expedition and its chief figures into the public consciousness following a long period of neglect. Yet this was not enough recognition for some, as indicated by the 1929 lament that the nation had lost interest in the expedition. It was significant for the future that the promotion of a multistate Lewis and Clark highway route had been central to the association’s agenda. The association’s prediction that a “better understanding” of the expedition and those who conducted it would “inspire a higher conception of what is suitable to commemorate them” turned out to have been accurate. Highways and automobile tourism eventually became essential components in recreating the trail as a form of commemoration.58

  Even without an officially designated memorial highway, it would have been possible in the early 1930s to trace most of the Lewis and Clark trail by automobile if one knew which routes to follow. Major exceptions were the Missouri River downstream from Loma, Montana, to Fort Peck Reservoir and the crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho. The Bitterroot gap was partially closed during the Great Depression when U.S. Forest Service crews succeeded in constructing a crude road that connected Pierce, Idaho, with Lolo Pass. The Forest Service began building roads up to the ridges above the Lochsa River in 1931. These were only “low standard ‘truck trails’,” however, in accordance with an agreement made with the Bureau of Public Roads. The roads were needed for fire management and access for other Forest Service practices.59 Most of the construction of what became known as the Lolo Motorway took place between 1930 and 1935. Work proceeded on a “single track road with turnouts” each summer during those years to approximate portions of both the Lolo Trail and the route taken by Lewis and Clark.60

  Fig 3.1 Lolo Motorway, a forest road completed in 1935, follows portions of the Lolo and Lewis and Clark trails through northern Idaho. This vista is from a site on the motorway called “Smoke Place.” Photo by Peg Owens. Courtesy, Idaho Department of Commerce.

  By 1933 the Lolo road had been extended eastward as far as Sherman Saddle, along the 1806 portion of the route, north of the 1805 diversion down into Hungry Creek, and about ten miles from Weitas Meadows where Olin B. Wheeler had established his main camp in 1904.61 The Lolo Motorway was completed in late summer of 1935. Seventy-five men, working in two groups moving from opposite directions, met up at Indian Grave. On September 24 they celebrated connecting the first roadway across the Bitterroots with a chicken dinner and a day off.62 With the opening of the Lolo Motorway (Forest Road 500), automobilists who wanted to trace the trail as authentically as possible gained a significant addition to the route, including its most awesome and beautiful segment.63

  Experiencing the Lewis and Clark trail by highway and roadway has been the goal of many enthusiasts and has engendered a body of related writings. Ralph Gray, for example, who brought his family over most of the trail in 1953—including the Lolo Motorway—wrote an article for National Geographic Magazine that seems to have set the stage for the many subsequent accounts of automobile excursions along the Lewis and Clark route. In June 1953, Gray, his wife, and three children set out in a station wagon crammed with camping equipment and topped by their red canoe, Trout, to do a motoring tour of the Lewis and Clark route from east to west. As the guide, Gray brought along a set of the journals and other books about the expedition. They picked up the explorers’ trail at Wood River, Illinois, site of the first winter camp in 1803–1804. From there, Gray wrote, he and his family “logged 10,000 miles in three months,” a journey that included a major side trip to the Wind River Shoshone Reservation to see what some claim is the resting place of Sacagawea.64

  After Wood River, a first major stop was St. Charles, Missouri, “the only community on the westward Lewis and Clark Trail that existed when the explorers passed.” After visiting the Charles Floyd memorial near Sioux City, Iowa, Gray and his family continued to follow the Missouri River through South and North Dakota. They witnessed the work in progress to complete the Oahe and Garrison dam-reservoir projects and the construction of the Fort Randall and Gavins Point dams. Then, “over modern highways that would have astounded our predecessors,” Gray wrote, “we steered the Orange Crate [a nickname for the station wagon] toward Bismarck, capital of North Dakota.”65

  The canoe dubbed Trout enabled the Grays to follow portions of the route inaccessible to most tourists. They must have been among the last visitors to encounter areas of the Missouri River bank roughly as Lewis and Clark and their party had seen them before the massive Pick-Sloan dams inundated them in the late 1950s. “We entered Montana’s Lewis and Clark County and launched Trout . . . in the swift-flowing Missouri beside U.S. 91. We paddled about in the vicinity of the expedition’s July 17th ca
mp.” Shortly thereafter, they took a motorboat through the Gates of the Mountains and, near Helena, observed construction in progress on the 225-foot-high Canyon Ferry Dam being built by the Bureau of Reclamation. At the town of Three Forks, the Grays spent a night in the historic Sacajawea Inn and then drove six miles to the spot where the Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin rivers join to form the main stem of the Missouri.66

  After continuing south to the fork of the Jefferson River and seeing Beaverhead Rock, they drove south of Dillon to Armstead and the site of Camp Fortunate, now under the waters of Clark Canyon Reservoir. They might have continued south from there, staying on federal highways and skirting the central Idaho massif—which includes the all but impassable (at that time) Salmon River and Bitterroot mountain ranges—to pick up the Lewis and Clark trail in eastern Washington. But this was not a casual retracing of the route only on available paved highways. For the sake of National Geographic Magazine, as well as for the education and delight of his family, Ralph Gray was intent on experiencing as much of the original route as possible. After a lengthy side trip to Wyoming, the Grays returned to Armistead, Montana, and took a “narrowing” dirt road straight west through Horse Prairie Valley and up to the summit of Lemhi Pass on the Continental Divide. From there they dropped into the Lemhi River Valley and thence to Salmon, Idaho.67

  Once again, they could have struck south on U.S. 93 to southern Idaho’s lava plain and then followed a major east-west highway to the lower Snake River and rejoined the Lewis and Clark trail. Or they could have followed the historic route north to Missoula and crossed the mountains on U.S. 10, another east-west highway route, and then gone south to Lewiston, Idaho, at the point where the Clearwater River flows into the Snake. Until the Lewis-Clark Highway was completed along the Lochsa River, most automobile tourists following the trail would have taken one of these detours, perhaps after driving up to Lolo Pass on the Montana side. The Grays, however, were committed to traversing the Lolo Motorway, Forest Road 500. “This wild Idaho upland has seen little change since Lewis and Clark’s day,” Ralph Gray wrote. “We discovered that forcing passage through the stubbornly resisting forests and crags still was an adventure in the 20th century.” For 100 miles after turning onto the road they encountered no gas stations or buildings of any kind. Sometimes skirting “the brink of yawning chasms,” they “averaged 10 miles an hour.” To make the trip even more of an adventure, one of their tires blew out after only 5 miles. Amazingly, they persevered for the 95 miles to Pierce, Idaho, and the Weippe Prairie “without a spare.” The following day, after they had driven just 13 miles on pavement, a second tire blew. After that, the final phase of the trip to the Pacific Ocean and Ecola Point, Oregon, near Seaside was a snap by comparison.68

  Another family journey to trace the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s route became the subject of a book published in 1970. Gerald S. Snyder combined a narrative about the Corps of Discovery with an account of the trip he and his family made to retrace the route from east to west. By this time the Arikara villages site near Mobridge, South Dakota, had been covered by the reservoir behind Oahe Dam. But the family did its best to emulate portions of the water route, taking a twenty-foot open-deck barge on a five-day trip from Kipps State Park in Montana to Fort Benton on the Missouri River and a motor launch tour of the Gates of the Mountains north of Helena. Snyder hired horses to ride over Old Toby’s Trail across Lolo Pass, and the family later drove the lonely Lolo Motorway across the Bitterroots, as Ralph Gray had done before them.69

  Although the Lolo Motorway would be improved over the years, relatively few tourists accepted its challenges, even if they wanted to follow Lewis and Clark’s route. Not until an actual paved highway was constructed to follow the course of the Lochsa River between Lolo Pass on the Montana-Idaho line and Clearwater River Canyon—where the Corps of Discovery had once again taken to dugout canoes on its journey to the Pacific—was the dream of a designated Lewis and Clark Highway through the Bitterroot Wilderness realized. In the relationship between the Lewis and Clark trail and the highway system, the Lochsa segment had long been a missing link.70

  Designated by the Idaho State Highway Commission in 1916, the Lewis-Clark Highway remained little more than a line on a map for decades, the fate of many mountainous routes in areas where the tax base was too low to finance their construction. During the 1920s and 1930s the states of Idaho and Montana slowly built toward each other—Montana westward from Traveler’s Rest on the Bitterroot River and Idaho eastward from Kooskia on the Clearwater River—planning to meet at Lolo Pass. Although construction west of Traveler’s Rest was difficult, Montana had a much shorter distance to cover. The Idaho segment was nearly three times as long and even more rugged.

  From Kooskia, where on its return in the spring of 1806 the Lewis and Clark Expedition settled into Long Camp to prepare to cross the Bitterroots and to wait for snow to melt on the Lolo Trail, the Lewis-Clark Highway eventually proceeded (west to east) up the Clearwater middle fork to the confluence of the Selway and Lochsa rivers at present-day Lowell, Idaho. From Lowell the roadway followed the Lochsa River upstream to its headwaters, the fork of Colt-killed Creek and Crooked Fork, near the point where the Corps of Discovery had descended from Lolo Pass and—having determined that passage through the river canyon was impossible—elected to climb up to the Lolo Trail. Today, most of this nearly 110-mile stretch of highway passes between two major wilderness areas.

  The U.S. Forest Service took on the responsibility for completing the segment along the Lochsa, but construction was extremely slow, in some years consisting of little more than clearing timber from the right-of-way. During World War II, federal prisoners and Japanese internees were brought to the Lochsa to help blast a roadbed through the difficult Black Canyon section, but they made little progress. By 1949, thirty-six miles remained completely untouched. As the project dragged into the 1950s, hope faded that the missing highway link could be completed in time for the sesquicentennial celebration slated to begin in the summer of 1955. It was not. A year after the sesquicentennial ended, there was still a thirteen-mile “gap” halfway between Kooskia, Idaho, and Lolo, Montana.

  To some extent, the highway had fallen victim to the National Defense Highway program, created in 1956 to create an interstate superhighway system. Yet, while the Lewis-Clark Highway suddenly seemed much less important to the public at large, a group called the U.S. Highway 12 Association lobbied for a route that would be designated the “Lewis and Clark Highway” all the way from Mobridge, South Dakota, on the Missouri River to Hoquiam, Washington, on the Pacific Coast. The U.S. Highway 12 Association continued to call for the gap in Idaho to be filled, as did communities along Montana State Highway 200 (then 20), which ran eastward from Missoula to Great Falls and on to Lewistown, Jordan, and Sidney near the North Dakota line. With strong support from Senators Frank Church of Idaho and Albert Gore of Tennessee, funds were finally appropriated to complete the Idaho portion of the project. The route, later designated as a segment of U.S. Highway 12, officially opened in 1963. An article in the California Automobile Club publication Westways referred to it as “A New Northwest Passage.”71

  Fig 3.2 Lochsa River, a tributary of the Clearwater River in northern Idaho. The Lewis-Clark Highway (U.S. 12), which follows the bank to the left in the photo, took forty-four years to build. It connects Missoula, Montana, with Lewiston, Idaho, via Lolo Pass and the Lochsa River Canyon, running roughly parallel to the Lewis and Clark trail. Photo by Peg Owens. Courtesy, Idaho Department of Commerce.

  New interstate superhighways completed during the 1960s directed the flow of tourists away from much of the Lewis and Clark trail and discouraged travelers from stopping or even slowing down to examine individual sites. The two-lane highway system had initiated a new way of commemorating Lewis and Clark through automobile exploration of their path west. But despite making access more remote, the advent of the interstate superhighway era did not generally diminish interest in the Corps of Discover
y’s exploits. During the very years in which the U.S. Congress debated and authorized the interstate freeway system, observations of the Lewis and Clark sesquicentennial stimulated a wave of enthusiasm that continued to grow throughout the rest of the twentieth century.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The 1955 Sesquicentennial

  WHAT I HAVE TERMED THE “STANDARD MODEL” of understanding Lewis and Clark—glorifying the explorers as forerunners of civilization—informs the array of celebrations that marked the 150th anniversary of the expedition. Still, the commemorations covered a wide gamut of sophistication, running from “folk” to “literate elite” images.

  In the spring of 1955, Hollywood offered its contribution when Paramount Pictures released the film The Far Horizons, starring Charlton Heston as William Clark, Fred MacMurray as Meriwether Lewis, and Donna Reed as “Sacajawea.” The movie virtually ignored historical fact in favor of rather typical cinematic clichés about the West. Even traditional views of the explorers appear to have been ignored. Time Magazine complained that “the very qualities that made Meriwether Lewis and William Clark great explorers—coolheadedness, caution and iron self-discipline—are precisely the ones the moviemakers have thrown out the window.” While Clark and Lewis were depicted as “a pair of buffoons who would have trouble finding the mailbox,” Donna Reed played Sacajawea as “a high-fashion pulse-thumper turned out in beautifully tailored buckskin.” Conveniently for Clark and their romantic relationship, in the movie she was unmarried and had no child.1 Citing frequent Indian onslaughts and a “monosyllabic script” spiced up by an ongoing feud between Clark and Lewis, a critic for The New York Times concluded: “As for Paramount’s idea of what Lewis and Clark did, was this trip necessary? Shucks, no.”2 For most of the country, The Far Horizons was probably the final word in remembering the famous journey of exploration. But while most of the national audience appeared to accept Paramount’s version of the expedition, an increasing number of enthusiasts at the local and regional levels took a more serious view. Even at the folk level, residents of communities on or near the trail knew the Hollywood version failed to accord with commonly understood events in the Lewis and Clark narrative.