In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (16 page)

From the campsite Wheeler and Wright followed a nearby trail over the mountain to Colt-killed Creek but soon discovered that it was one of those “parallel railway sidings” converging on the same point, not the trail used by the explorers.
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This was one example of the difficulties with which Wheeler and other trail locators since his time have struggled in their attempts to match certain sites and routes with the accounts left by members of the expedition. In some ways the new explorers faced problems finding the path similar to those Lewis and Clark experienced (without the same challenges to their survival). Wheeler and Wright had no Shoshone guide, but they did possess a rendering of the expedition journals. Juxtaposing the written record with the physical reality of the landscape posed difficulties of interpretation, however.

Wheeler and Wright did not attempt to trace the route west beyond Colt-killed Creek and the headwaters of the Lochsa River in 1899, but three years later they teamed up again and brought along landscape artist Ralph E. DeCamp to investigate the trail from its western end. DeCamp, later commissioned to paint murals for a law library addition to the Montana capitol, served as the photographer for this exploration of the western portion of the Lolo pathway across the Bitterroots.
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Wheeler was now seeking to locate the expedition's 1805 route in
reverse
order rather than pushing westward from where his party had halted in 1899. Thus, in his second attempt to study the Bitterroot Wilderness, Wheeler shortened the distance he would have to travel from established settlements and railheads. That, of course, was not an option for Lewis and Clark, who had to struggle over the entire length of the Lolo Trail both on their way out in 1805 and on their return in 1806.

After emerging from the canyon of the Lochsa River (which the journals refer to as the Koos koos kee), Lewis and Clark's party faced the most difficult hardships of their journey. On September 16, Clark reported, it “began to Snow about 3 hours before Day and Continued all day . . . and by night we found it from 6 to 8 inches deep.” Snow made locating the trail difficult, and the men had to trace it by looking at rubbings on trees made by Indian travelers over the Lolo Trail. [Moulton V, 209] On September 18 Clark and a small party of hunters went ahead to search for game, while Lewis and the remainder of
the drenched company ate portable soup reconstituted with melted snow. Clark's hunters, camped by a creek they appropriately named “Hungery Creek,” had nothing to eat. The following day they came upon a horse, which they killed. They ate some of the animal and left the rest for the main party. At last, on September 20, Clark and his men emerged from the mountains onto level country of grass and pine trees, where they encountered a village of Nez Perce. The Indians fed them camas root and dried salmon, and Clark sent Reuben Fields with provisions back to the main group, which by September 22 was eight miles from the village. [Moulton V, 228] The Corps of Discovery was reunited and saved from starvation on what today is called the Weippe Prairie, northeast of Clearwater River Canyon in Idaho.

Fortunately for Olin Wheeler nearly a century later, a rail line up the Clearwater River from Lewiston, Idaho, offered access to the western end of the Lolo Trail. From there, Wheeler and his entourage could reach such locations as Hungry Creek, Weitas Meadows, and Camp Choppunish without having to follow the treacherous (and unmarked) route over nearly 100 miles of mountainous terrain. In addition, their supply line would be considerably shorter. Near the present-day towns of Weippe and Pierce, Idaho, Wheeler, Wright, and DeCamp planned to pick up the Lewis and Clark trail and move eastward along the Lolo, identifying places related to the September 1805 trek and to the expedition's return path in 1806. Locating the Hungry and Collins creeks precisely was an essential goal.
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With a pack train, the three men set out northeastward from the town of Kamiah on the Clearwater River, which they had reached by means of Northern Pacific subsidiary branch lines from Lewiston. In their tent each night they studied a copy of Coues's book on Lewis and Clark, “a rough, unpublished reconnaissance map of the United States Geological Survey,” and a copy of C. C. Van Arsdol's surveys for the Northern Pacific Railway. In addition to Wright's expertise, the search for campsite locations benefited from the “criticism” of Nez Perce Indian James Stuart, “a graduate of Carlisle [the Indian industrial school in Pennsylvania],” who “is familiar with the old Indian trails in the Clearwater country.” Almost immediately, DeCamp was able to photograph what they believed was the site of the spring 1806
“Camp Choppunish” (Long Camp) on the bank of the Clearwater opposite the Kamiah town site, where the Corps of Discovery spent a month waiting for snow to melt on the Lolo Trail before retracing its steps across the mountains.
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From Clearwater Canyon they proceeded to the headwaters of Hungry Creek and Collins Creek, apparently along the route the Corps of Discovery took eastward in 1806, where they set up camp in Weitas Meadow. From that vantage point, they calculated the distances Clark and his advance group of hunters had traveled along both streams in September 1805, as well as the subsequent passage by the main party under Lewis during the period when it suffered the most from lack of food. Wheeler pointed out that game was virtually nonexistent, both in Lewis and Clark's time and when he was writing, at the elevations through which the Lolo Trail passed. It is unclear just how far eastward Wheeler and his companions trekked during their 1902 inspection of the Lolo Trail. Wheeler's book suggests that it was not far beyond the Weitas Meadows camp, probably only as far as the explorers had gone by June 17, 1806, before running into eight- to ten-foot snowbanks and losing the trail. Lewis and Clark had been forced to turn back, wait for more snow to melt, and engage the services of Nez Perce guides before continuing their homeward journey.
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West of the Bitterroots, the remainder of Wheeler's investigations could be carried out from the comfort of a train, with occasional short side trips by road. He took several trips along the Columbia looking for significant Lewis and Clark sites and having photographs taken for his book. In 1902, for example, Wheeler closely studied the area around The Dalles on the Columbia River. He and his local guide, S. L. Brooks, drove to the Narrows and “struggled across a part of the river bed which, at high water, is a rushing torrent, to the brink of the long narrow channel and chasm through which Lewis and Clark took their canoes, where I overlooked the swirling waters as they boiled and raged.”
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Wheeler was rowed to Memaloose Island and the Indian burial site described in the journals. Later, he visited what was assumed to be the location of Fort Clatsop, as well the Salt Cairn site near Seaside, Oregon, where some of Lewis and Clark's men had boiled seawater to obtain salt during the winter of 1805–1806.
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Wheeler's efforts to trace Lewis and Clark's route faintly echo at least one aspect of the original expedition in ways that apply to later, similar attempts. In response to instructions from President Thomas Jefferson, William Clark drew maps of the expedition's route, indicating the rivers, mountains, and as much of the surrounding areas as he could observe. He later used this cartographic record to produce a map of the entire region of the upper Missouri and the Pacific Northwest through which he had traveled. This was perhaps the most immediately practical product of the journey west. Intentionally or otherwise, Wheeler endeavored to carry out—nearly a century later—a mapping project that produced a secondary representation, or imitation, of Clark's original task. While Clark had mapped the topography, Wheeler mapped the expedition's path through that topography.

Publications demonstrating both the changes in the landscape that had occurred since 1806 and the pleasure of locating sites mentioned in the journals have followed Wheeler's lead over the years. In a series of black-and-white photographs—a graphic surrogate for the journals, one could say—Ingvard Eide and Albert and Jane Salisbury effectively depicted the look of the ground Lewis and Clark covered as it appeared in the mid-twentieth century, before a number of the sites had been inundated by reservoirs. Several enthusiasts and local historians—including Walter Sewell, John P. Harlan, Elers Koch, Ralph Space, and John J. Peebles—have attempted to plot routes and pin down the locations of campsites in northern and central Idaho.
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Sewell, a longtime resident of Orofino, worked to locate portions of the Lewis and Clark trail for the 1905–1906 centennial. He was aided by close friends in the Nez Perce Ahsaka band. In the 1920s local historian John Harlan, also from Orofino, became an authority on Lewis and Clark campsites in the area and participated in the first signing of the expedition's route on or adjacent to the Lolo Trail. In 1935 Harlan placed three historical plaques for the Daughters of the American Revolution on the Lolo Trail, including one at the top of Lolo Pass marking Lewis and Clark's “Squamish Glade Camp” of September 13, 1805.
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In 1970 Ralph Space wrote that he had “first crossed the Lolo Trail in 1924” and had “no idea how many times” he had traveled over
it since. Little had changed on the Nez Perces' “Road to the Buffalo,” he noted, since the gold mining boom of the mid-1860s, when a road-building expedition led by engineer Wellington Bird and surveyor Sewell Truax made alterations to portions of the trail. Congress had appropriated $50,000 in 1865 for a road connecting the gold camp of Pierce, located just east of the Weippe Prairie, with Missoula by way of the Lolo Trail and Lolo Pass. The funding was woefully inadequate for constructing a wagon road across the Bitterroots. By July 1866 the Bird-Truax party had been able to do no more than survey and mark a route and rebuild some of the Indians' trail. The remainder of the summer and fall was spent working on the trail and rerouting portions of it. In the process, the Bird-Truax party made a number of changes to the Lolo Trail as it had appeared to Lewis and Clark. The changes, Space noted, included rerouting a segment east of Sherman Saddle to avoid having to descend into, and climb out of, the Hungry Creek ravine. In general, the surveyors and their crew “graded from saddle to saddle, thus eliminating many steep sections and generally easing the grade.” The overall route as marked and altered by Bird and Truax would substantially remain the Lolo Trail thereafter, and Space believed they gave a number of locations along the trail their present names, including Snowy Summit, Sherman Peak, Noseeum Meadows, and Indian Post Office.
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In 1907 the recently formed Clearwater and Lolo national forests received funds to clear and open up the Lolo Trail, which had been choked by undergrowth and timber deadfall over the forty years since the Bird and Truax construction party made its improvements. According to Space, work began at both ends and was completed in August when the crews met at Indian Post Office, about thirty miles west of Lolo Pass. The U.S. Forest Service maintained the trail until a forest road, the Lolo Motorway, was constructed in the 1930s that approximated most of the Lolo Trail and much of the route taken by Lewis and Clark (discussed later in this chapter). From that point on, the Forest Service began to provide historical markers at points along the Lewis and Clark trail. Space credits Lolo National Forest supervisor Elers Koch with locating Lewis and Clark's campgrounds and, in 1939, having the first historical signs installed along the route. When Ralph Space became supervisor of the Clearwater National
Forest, he continued Koch's efforts. But many of the sign boards that were put up had to be placed “where turnouts could be installed for the safety of the people who stopped to read them” rather than at the precise location they described.
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John Peebles, who has also devoted considerable attention to the location of Lewis and Clark's campsites and routes, published two extensive articles on the subject in the mid-1960s. Peebles expressed gratitude to his predecessors in tracing the expedition's passages along the Lolo Trail, particularly Ralph Space, whom he described as “perhaps the foremost authority on locations of the trails and campsites of the Expedition in this region.”
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The Bitterroot portion of the route, Peebles noted, presents particular difficulties: “There probably is less detailed information available concerning [the route] through northern Idaho than for any other portion of the explorer's [
sic
] epic journey.” This, he pointed out, is a result of the complexity of the topography and the “sketchy descriptions” in the journals made by men who were “half-starved and in a desperate situation.” Only recently “have adequate topographic maps and air photographs been available for the use of investigators attempting to trace the route and plot it on maps.” As others had before him, Peebles “traversed most of the trail and visited all of the known campsites,” armed with the journals of Clark and Lewis and also those of Sergeants John Ordway and Patrick Gass and Private Joseph Whitehouse. He had Clark's maps and “compass traverse notes” from the Reuben Gold Thwaites edition of the journals. Particularly important for comparing the lay of the land in 1805–1806 with the geographic characteristics of the Lolo Trail region in the 1960s, Peebles was able to refer to “air photographs and several types of maps,” including township survey maps and various Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey topographical charts, as well as “Planning Survey maps published by the Idaho Department of Highways.”
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Before tackling the Lolo crossing, Peebles had gone over the expedition's route through western Montana, from the Three Forks up the Jefferson and Beaverhead rivers to Lemhi Pass, the location of present-day Salmon, Idaho, and over Lost Trail Pass to Traveler's Rest on the Bitterroot River, from which the Lewis and Clark party had approached the Lolo Trail. The first of his articles contains several
detailed survey maps that show the expedition's route superimposed on land sections, town sites, and other mid–twentieth-century signs of habitation. According to a map legend, solid lines indicate route locations “accurate to within a few hundred feet,” broken lines those portions “in error by as much as a half mile,” and dotted lines those “in error by as much as 1 or 2 miles.” Locations of campsites are partitioned into the same categories, with appropriate symbols.
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