On the Trail of Lewis and Clark and Sacajewea

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Leadore, Idaho

We left Idaho Falls on the Sacajewea Byway/Nez Perce Trail, a valley corridor between mountain ridges-- basalt columns tufted with sage on one side, mountain ranges on the other. Cattle now graze on this sage prairie where 10,000 years ago men hunted bison in forests and mountain sheep on the rocky volcanic plateau where caves bore into the patterned rock.

Almost out of gas, we made it down to Leadore by the skin of our teeth. A sign said $1.49 a liter which Jacques quickly calculated would be $6 a gallon and fumed. But the sign referred to Coca Cola. Black leather jacketed bikers browsed the souvenir shop with witty sayings about rednecks. In the back hung animal skins. The lady said "Fill it up and come tell me how much it is" but as soon as Jacques walked out the door she picked up a pair of binoculars and watched him closely. The Lemhi County Sheriff sat parked in his pickup by the road. A little girl with red hair and glasses wore a t-shirt that said, I heart Hollywood.

From the Lemhi Pass

We drove up a gravel road past a farm or two with many eager dogs and puppies, past an antlered moose below, sitting with its young placidly under a tree in full view, to the campsite where Lewis and Clark had pitched their tents after visiting the Lemhi pass, now a grassy crease between tawny hills. The terrain was sage studded and rolling, with pine forests alongside high desert.

Lewis' campsite

Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery was following the Missouri River to its headwaters. The team had been commissioned in 1803 by President Thomas Jefferson to find "the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce." They had departed from Wood River, IL in 1804 and would spend 105 days in Idaho where they encountered some of their greatest challenges. 

The Lemhi Pass is 7,373 feet above sea level, an ancient passageway in the Bitterroot Mountains the Shoshone had traveled for thousands of years. There Lewis and Clark entered what is today Idaho, but was at the time the Oregon Territory, contested by English, Spanish and even Russian sovereignties. And all the while it was home for Indian tribes.

Moose and young

It was cold and raining gently when we stood at the high Lemhi Pass with its view of dry and endless blue mountains to the west, and circular green patches on the eastern mountains, the Continental Divide where waters flow down to two different oceans. The name Lemhi comes from a king in the Book of Mormon.

Sacajewea, a Shosone who had been kidnapped from her homeland at the age of 14 and later sold to her trapper husband, led Lewis and Clark to her people, where they would seek horses in order to continue their journey. There she found her own brother--he was their Chief.

Striding the Missouri

Little is actually known of Sacajewea, nor did Lewis or Clark write much of her. But since the turn of the 20th c. she has been an icon for feminists. A memorial grove was established near a tributary of the Mighty Missouri, in 1932. "Though the pathfinders die, the paths remain open" weorw Laura Tolman Scott, a Daughter of the American Revolution who campaigned for this sacred grove for many years.  This was on "the road (that) took us to the most distant fountain of the waters of the mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many toilsome days and wristless nights," wrote Meriwether Lewis on Aug 12, 1805.

We drove back down among cattle and their young crossing the road, graceful hulks, the calves stepping delicately, staring at us implacably. A deer bounded away in the high desert. The terrain was alpine, young and burned forest land, along the cool Lemhi River, past interpretive sites that questioned which way Lewis & Clark had turned next. One described how Lewis had painted makeup on a few Shoshone women, a custom for pleasing them. We came to a hot spring, two neat pools maintained by the BLM where I floated in healing waters for a little while in the high desert.

And so, with horses and help from Sacajewea's people, Lewis and Clark started north, through the Bitterroot Valley, up to Lolo, Montana. Seventy years later the Nez Perce--still bearing, it is said, letters of friendship from Thomas Jefferson, would take this route, in flight from a US Army determined to force them onto a small reservation where they had once roamed free, a proud and successful people. So we followed, learning the stories of land that has not changed much since their day.