In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark (19 page)

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.
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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.”
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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 camp.” 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 Discovery'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.