In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (15 page)

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, most of Lewis and Clark's path from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back follows, crosses, or closely parallels the highway system that developed during the 1920s and 1930s. Easy automobile access to the trail may help account for its growing popularity; by the mid-twentieth century it began to upstage the expedition personnel in the public's historical consciousness.

Reinvigorating the historical memory of a western trail was not new, nor was associating it with a designated highway route. The Oregon Trail, for example, had become celebrated by the 1920s, largely through the efforts of Ezra Meeker. Meeker, who had come over the Oregon Trail in 1852, devoted his later years to building public recognition of its historical significance. In 1906–1907 he drove a wagon back over the route all the way to Washington, D.C., where
he lobbied the government for funds to adequately mark the trail. He failed to get the funding, but his odyssey attracted attention in communities along the way, most of which were inspired to create historical markers.
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Lewis and Clark's trail eventually attracted attention for many of the same reasons and, as we shall see, inspired similar attempts to commemorate the route through designated highways in its name. The Corps of Discovery's 1803–1806 route and its many sites became the central “hero” of the exploration narrative. For many enthusiasts, the most inspiring and appropriate way to commemorate Lewis and Clark has been to follow in their footsteps, to personally trace as much of the route as possible while relating journal entries to segments of the countryside. Lewis and Clark aficionados go further than tourists by studying maps and attempting to pin down the locations of expedition campsites. In general, however, the practice of retracing the route is closely related to the development and effects of transportation in the West, particularly long-distance highways and automobile tourism. The Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, created during the 1970s, came into being in part because tourists in automobiles became, in a sense, the new explorers of the West.

The tradition of following in Lewis and Clark's footsteps dates back to the turn of the twentieth century and Olin D. Wheeler's two-volume book,
The Trail of Lewis and Clark
. In the late 1870s Wheeler served as a topographer for John Wesley Powell's survey of the Colorado Plateau. By 1892 he had become a publicist and was named chief advertising executive for the Northern Pacific Railway, where he apparently began to view history as a way to promote tourism. Wheeler researched and wrote about the economic development the railroad sparked in the West, as well as historical lore accessible to travelers along the Northern Pacific route from Minnesota to the Pacific Coast. For example, as the author of the Northern Pacific's annual travel magazine,
Wonderland
, Wheeler offered colorful narrative and descriptions of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which occurred not far south of the Northern Pacific line through southern Montana. He was next drawn to the story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition as a saga associated even more with the geography traversed by the company's tracks.
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To prepare a separate chapter on Lewis and Clark for the 1900 issue of
Wonderland
, Wheeler set out “to more particularly visit many places that were important and critical points in their exploration.” In his preface to
The Trail of Lewis and Clark
, Wheeler stated that one of his purposes was to show that tourists routinely failed to connect the areas through which they traveled with the explorations of Lewis and Clark. Closely relating sites and landmarks tourists visited to passages in the journals, Wheeler attempted to match them with the geographic features he encountered, the names of which had frequently changed from those the explorers assigned—in short, to connect “the exploration with the present time.” Armed with a print copy of the journals and accompanied by various photographers he engaged along the way, Wheeler spent at least four years traveling the route by train, steamboat, and horseback. Clearly, more than the promotion of tourism was at stake. Wheeler had turned into a hard-core buff, willing to take great pains to document the Corps of Discovery's trail. Now, however, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as individual makers of history—in what was long regarded as the “Great Man” view—were superseded by a re-experiencing of the historic journey.
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Wheeler collected so much data that he eventually expanded the feature article into a two-volume book, written to increase public understanding of the expedition for its centennial celebration. Locally hired photographers contributed 100 pictures showing locations along the trail a century after Lewis and Clark passed through. Wheeler walked, rode, and sailed the entire length of the trail but did not confine himself to the Corps of Discovery's exploits. His book offers background on the practices of various Indian peoples encountered along the route, as well as later nineteenth-century historical events. Wheeler also describes and extols evidence of changes in the land since the time of Lewis and Clark as a result of settlement and economic development. Later enthusiasts following the same path decried rather than extolled the changes, however, and an environmental ethic was behind the mid–twentieth-century push to establish a national trail. Still,
The Trail of Lewis and Clark
is a clear landmark in public thinking about the expedition, the beginning of a slow shift away from the focus on individual frontier “heroism” toward a focus
on the trail and its significant locations. Wheeler provides maps that feature particular segments of the route, as well as foldouts showing the trails in relation to railroad lines. Having originally intended to increase the historical awareness of travelers on the Northern Pacific, Wheeler eventually undertook an examination of portions of the trail far from the view of train tourists.
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Between 1898 and 1902, as one example, Wheeler set out to trace the expedition's September 1805 crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho and Montana, perhaps the most dangerous passage of the expedition. The Corps of Discovery followed the Lolo Trail, a pathway the Nez Perce Indians used for traveling to buffalo country in Montana. At the east end of the trail was Lolo Pass; to the west, the trail followed high mountain ridges and crossed deep side canyons to emerge onto a rolling prairie. Later, Captain John Mullan, who built a wagon road from Walla Walla in Washington Territory to Fort Benton on the Missouri River in the mid-1850s, rejected Lolo Pass in favor of one further north (Lookout Pass) for crossing the Bitterroot Range. “Of all the sections of the Bitter Root Mountain chain,” Mullan stated in an 1861 speech to the Historical Society of the Rocky Mountains, “there is no doubt in my own mind but that Lewis and Clark crossed by the most difficult section. The whole region for miles in every direction is one immense sea of rugged, frowning mts. & once in them your condition is well likened to that of the sea wrecked mariner tossed from one mt. to another.”
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In Mullan's opinion, the explorers had chosen this route at “the instigation” of Indians, who presumably wanted to impede their progress. For Wheeler, tracing Lewis and Clark's route by way of the Lolo Trail proved the most difficult and time-consuming task of those he undertook, in part because in 1898 it remained almost as close to being wilderness as it was nearly a century earlier.

As was the case with the White Cliffs portion of the Lewis and Clark route on the Missouri River upstream from Fort Benton, Montana, the crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains offered Wheeler no access by way of railroad lines. In addition, no roadway paralleled the Lolo passage before the 1930s. Various attempts had been made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to build track over this portion of the Bitterroot barrier, but nothing came
of them. In 1887 engineer C. C. Van Arsdol, who reconnoitered numerous railroad routes in Canada and the western United States, undertook a survey of a path over the Bitterroots between Lewiston and Missoula for a regional line apparently allied with the Oregon Railway and Navigation (OR&N) Company. This was a time, Van Arsdol's son wrote, “when there was considerable publicity about what appeared to be a struggle between the major railroads for control of the Mullan Pass and the Coeur d'Alene mining section” to the north. No construction resulted, but by the end of the century railway companies were once again squaring off over the region between Clearwater Canyon and western Montana. Tracks had been laid into the canyon about ten miles upstream from Lewiston in 1898, thereby tying Lewiston to the Northern Pacific system and to Spokane, Washington. Once again, the OR&N sent a survey group into the Bitterroots. Van Arsdol, now leading a Northern Pacific crew, followed. A Yakima, Washington, newspaper characterized the struggle as “one of the most bitter railroad wars ever waged in this country.”
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Although Olin Wheeler had closely read Elliott Coues's 1893 presentation of the journals many times so he could set the record straight concerning specific sites, the Lolo Trail presented particular difficulties. The Lolo passage, he wrote, was “a point where, metaphorically, [the expedition's trail] has been washed out. That is to say, hitherto the topography of the region has been so little known, and the maps have been so worthless, that no one has ever been able to do more than vaguely guess at their trail across this wild, craggy range.” Determined to change that state of affairs, Wheeler traveled portions of the Lolo Trail over portions of three summers.
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Wheeler first approached the Lolo in 1898, making what he called a “flying trip” to Boyle's Hot Springs (now Lolo Hot Springs), described in the journals as a welcome resting stop for the Corps of Discovery after it returned over the Lolo Trail in the spring of 1806. Boyle's Hot Springs was the end of the road, and Wheeler was still seven miles short of the pass. The following year he returned, accompanied by local guide and historian W. H. Wright.
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The occasionally rough and narrow passage of Lolo Creek on the Montana side was now much easier to negotiate. “The first time I made this
trip,” Wheeler wrote, “the road crossed the stream something like forty times, but recent improvements have cut out almost all of these crossings.” By 1903, Wheeler noted, stagecoaches were running daily from Missoula bringing excursionists to the hot springs. Along the “wild and rugged” canyon, the Indian trail followed by Lewis and Clark was “distinctly visible at several points on the sides of hills and ravines.” From Boyle's Hot Springs, the traveler would have to follow one of several trails on foot or horseback to the pass at the crest of the Bitterroot Range and on into Idaho.
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Wheeler quoted a U.S. Geological Survey report that described the region as “a vast mass of curving, winding, peak-crowned spurs, constituting the watersheds of the Clearwater basins,” and a “perfect maze of bewildering ridges” running out from the main crest of the Bitterroot Range, itself “a succession of sharp, craggy peaks and ‘hogbacks.' ”
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To penetrate such country, Wheeler depended heavily on Wright's knowledge of the trail the Nez Perce had used to cross eastward to hunt buffalo. Wright had spent years exploring “nearly every square mile of the Clearwater country,” the region encompassing the Lochsa and Clearwater river canyons and what is now the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.
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From Boyle's Hot Springs, Wright and Wheeler packed in to Glade Creek, where they set up camp. Demonstrating his desire to walk as closely as possible in the steps of Lewis and Clark, Wheeler wrote: “Mr. Wright and I camped at the forks of Glade Creek, where Lewis and Clark first came out upon it, in a bed of delicious strawberries.”
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The two men then hiked the rugged area around Lolo Pass in an effort to identify the route taken in 1805 and to locate the expedition's campsites. Wheeler noted that on the outward-bound journey, the expedition used only portions of the main Indian trail. The profusion of trails over the pass made it extremely difficult to locate the precise route Lewis and Clark had taken. Wheeler compared the Lolo to a trunk railroad line with numerous branches and parallel sidings. Yet all paths led to the wide meadow (now Packer Meadows) from which Lolo Pass was visible. West of Lolo Pass, it was essential to “determine and identify beyond doubt” the location of Colt-killed Creek, where the Corps of Discovery had camped before climbing back out of the non-traversable Lochsa Canyon.
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