An AI-assisted contemporary historical narrative by Clio Walker, based on the expedition journals and checked sources. It is not the captains' own text or a submission by either of them. This new episode follows on from the Salish camp of early September and covers the crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains (the present-day Lolo Trail), September 9–24, 1805.

On the evening of September 14, 1805, the party camped beside a swift, stony river.

They had no meat that day. Clark wrote that for want of it they "wer compelled to kill a Colt for our men & Selves to eat."

They named the nearby fork Colt Killed Creek.

It was only the first.

Travelers' Rest

Five days earlier, on September 9, they had stopped at a large creek and named it Travelers' Rest. The spot lies near present-day Lolo, Montana, and is the only archaeologically verified campsite on the whole Lewis and Clark trail.

Here, the guide said, they would leave the valley and head west over the mountains.

On September 10 the captains did not move. They sent out every hunter. Clark recorded why: the guide reported that "no game is to be found on our rout for a long ways."

That evening a hunter came back with three Salish men, whom the journals call Flatheads. They were chasing two men who had stolen their horses, and they rode fine horses of their own. Nobody shared a language, so they talked in signs. One of the three agreed to come along. His relatives, he said, lived on the plain beyond the mountains, where the water was good and could be navigated to the sea. Getting there would take "five sleeps," which Lewis took to mean six days of travel.

Six days. That was the distance they heard at the foot of the mountains.

The Peeled Pines

On the afternoon of September 11, delayed until three o'clock by the search for lost horses, they started up Travelers' Rest Creek. The Salish man grew restless and went on alone. The party was still led by the old Shoshone guide whom later accounts call Old Toby.

The next day the road turned bad: steep hills, deep hollows, fallen timber everywhere. Some of the men did not reach camp until ten at night.

Clark noticed that many pines along the creek had been peeled. He was told that the local people ate the inner bark at certain seasons, especially in spring.

This was a road people already used. According to the National Park Service, the Nez Perce had long crossed the Bitterroots on this trail to reach the buffalo country to the east and to trade with other nations. The expedition was traveling someone else's road, and, as the Park Service puts it, at the wrong time of year.

On September 13 they passed hot springs. Clark put a finger in the water and at first could not bear it. That same day the guide took a wrong turn that cost them three miles.

On September 14 snow fell on the summits while rain and hail fell in the valleys. They crossed a "verry high Steep mountain" and came to two salmon weirs that the Salish had only lately left. Clark saw no fish. The grass had been eaten bare by horses.

That evening they killed the first colt.

Snow

On September 15 the trail wound up a mountainside, around great stretches of timber brought down by fire and wind. Several horses slipped and rolled down the slopes. The one carrying Clark's desk and small trunk rolled forty yards before lodging against a tree. The desk broke; the horse was barely hurt.

At the top they found no water, so they melted snow to cook what was left of the colt. From that mountain, Clark wrote, he could see "high ruged mountains in every direction as far as I could See."

On September 16 snow began about three hours before daylight and fell all day.

Clark walked in front to keep the road. In many places the snow had filled the track completely and he had to search for minutes at a time. Sometimes the only guide was the trees, where the packs of earlier travelers had rubbed against the low-hanging limbs.

Eight kinds of pine were loaded with snow, and every pass beneath them dumped it on the men. "I have been wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life," Clark wrote. At one point he feared his feet would freeze in his thin moccasins.

Private Whitehouse added other details. They woke that morning covered in snow. They mended their moccasins; "Some of the men without Socks raped rags on their feet," and they set out with nothing to eat. Sergeant Gass called them "the most terrible mountains I ever beheld."

At dusk the party, cold and hungry, camped in a bottom barely large enough to lie level. They killed a second colt. Clark wrote that they all ate heartily "and thought it fine meat."

Soup, Bear Oil and Candles

On September 17 the horses had scattered, and it was one in the afternoon before they could move. A few grouse would not make a supper. "A coalt being the most useless part of our Stock," Clark wrote, "he fell a Prey to our appetites." That was the third.

On the morning of September 18 Lewis finished the last of the colt.

He took stock in his journal: a "skant proportion of portable soupe," a few canisters of it, a little bear's oil, and about twenty pounds of candles. Beyond that they had only their guns and their packhorses, and the guns were a poor hope in a country where there seemed to be nothing but themselves, a few small grouse, small gray squirrels and a blue bird.

Sergeant Ordway wrote that the mountains continued as far as their eyes could reach, "much further than we expeted."

The captains decided to split up. Clark would go ahead with six hunters, push on to the level country, and hunt for the rest. Lewis would bring on the main party and the horses.

Clark covered thirty-two miles that day. From a high point he saw a vast plain far off to the southwest. That night he camped on a creek he named Hungery Creek, "as at that place we had nothing to eate."

The Horse Below the Cliff

On September 19 Lewis's party reached the end of the ridge and saw the plain too. The men felt "inexpressable joy," he wrote. The guide promised they would reach its edge the next day.

Lewis judged it still sixty miles away.

The afternoon brought the worst road yet, a narrow rocky path along the face of a precipice. Frazer's horse fell from it with its load and rolled nearly a hundred yards into the creek. Everyone thought it was dead. When the load was taken off, the horse got to its feet, and twenty minutes later it was carrying its pack again. Lewis called it the most wonderful escape he had ever seen.

That night they had a little portable soup. Several men had dysentery, and skin eruptions had been common for some time.

The same day, up ahead, Clark found a stray horse in a small glade. He had it killed, took breakfast from it, and hung the rest in a tree for the party behind.

On September 20 Lewis found the meat, and at one o'clock the whole party made a hearty meal. Then came bad news. A packhorse was missing with its load: trade goods, and all of Lewis's winter clothing.

Three Boys in the Grass

Also on September 20, Clark came down the last mountain into a small plain, today's Weippe Prairie in Idaho.

A mile from the lodges he met three boys. They saw him, ran and hid. Clark found them, gave them small pieces of ribbon and sent them ahead to the village.

A man came out to meet him "with great Caution" and led him to a large, spacious lodge. By signs he explained that it belonged to the great chief, who had left three days earlier with the nation's warriors.

The men left in the village were old. Many women gathered around Clark with what he saw as signs of fear.

They gave the strangers a small piece of buffalo meat, dried salmon, berries, and a round root like an onion, which Clark wrote down as quamash, camas, along with bread made from it. The men ate heartily. By evening Clark felt very unwell, from eating the fish and roots, he wrote, too freely.

The people called themselves Cho pun-nish; the journals also call them Pierced Noses. They were the Nez Perce. Across the plain, dug camas lay in piles.

The Nez Perce remember another side of this meeting. According to Nez Perce oral tradition, recorded later, some men considered killing these exhausted, starving strangers, who carried plenty of guns and goods. An old woman named Watkuweis talked them out of it. Taken captive as a young woman, she had lived among white people who treated her kindly, and after finding her way home she told her people to be kind to them. This account comes from the Nez Perce; it does not appear in the captains' journals.

Fish and Roots

On September 21 Clark stayed on in the village, partly to avoid arousing suspicion and partly to learn about the river ahead. A chief drew him a chart of it. The hunters all came back empty-handed. With the few small things in his pockets Clark bought salmon, root bread and berries, and sent Reubin Field back with a local man to find Lewis.

That night, still in the mountains, Lewis's party ate the rest of the horse meat, a prairie wolf and some crawfish from the creek. "I find myself growing weak for the want of food," Lewis wrote. Most of the men felt the same and had grown very thin.

On September 22 someone had again failed to hobble his horse, and they did not start until half past eleven. Two and a half miles on, they met Field.

Lewis halted the party and divided the fish, roots and berries. This time, he wrote, there was "a sufficiency to satisfy compleatly all our appetites."

At five that afternoon they walked into the village. Lewis wrote the happiest line of the whole crossing: he had "tryumphed over the rocky Mountains" and come down again into level, fertile country where they could reasonably hope to eat.

He also wrote that as they approached, most of the women fled into the woods on horseback with their children. He had not expected it, since Clark had already been there and explained that they came in peace.

Clark arrived at dark and warned the starving men about eating too much. Two days later he recorded eight or nine men sick, and Lewis sick too, all complaining of looseness and heaviness in the stomach.

Epilogue

The road of "five sleeps" had taken them eleven days.

Three colts, a stray horse and a few canisters of soup kept them alive in the mountains. What caught them at the bottom was camas piled high on the prairie, dried salmon, and the choice a frightened village made anyway.

On September 22 the Nez Perce leader Twisted Hair drew the country beyond for Clark on a white elk skin: the river running down from his camp, the larger rivers it joined, and the great falls downstream.

The mountains were behind them. Next they would build canoes.

Sources, Editions and Boundaries

1. Read directly in Project Gutenberg 8419, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804–1806: Lewis, September 10, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22, 1805; Clark, September 9–24, 1805 (two entries each for September 21 and 22). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8419/pg8419.txt . The electronic transcription keeps original spellings and omits some survey material; its weekday labels occasionally disagree with the dates, and this story follows the dates. 2. Checked against the UNL Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition entries for September 16, 18, 20 and 22, including the same-day accounts of Ordway, Gass and Whitehouse: https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-09-16 ; https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-09-18 ; https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-09-20 ; https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-09-22 . Gass's text survives in an early edited published form. 3. National Park Service: Travelers' Rest State Park (campsite of September 9–11, 1805; only archaeologically verified campsite), https://www.nps.gov/places/travelers-rest-state-park.htm (updated September 9, 2026); Nez Perce National Historical Park, Lolo Trail and Pass (Nez Perce trail; a journey thought to take five days took eleven; storms of September 16–17; Clark's advance party reached the Nez Perce on September 20), https://www.nps.gov/nepe/learn/historyculture/lolo-trail-and-pass.htm (updated December 30, 2022); Weippe Prairie, https://www.nps.gov/nepe/learn/historyculture/weippe-prairie.htm (updated February 13, 2024); Weippe-Watkuweis, https://www.nps.gov/places/weippe-watkuweis.htm (updated November 28, 2023); also "Watkuweis and the Lewis and Clark Expedition" and "Wetxuwiis," the latter citing the account of Peo-Peo Tholekt. 4. Boundaries: Watkuweis's intervention is Nez Perce oral tradition recorded later and is not in the journals; the text labels it as such. Clark on September 21 mentions a woman who had once been taken by the Minitaris of the north and had seen white men; this story does not identify her with Watkuweis. One Park Service page dates the start to September 12; the journals show the party leaving Travelers' Rest on the afternoon of September 11, and the story follows the journals. "Five days" and "eleven days" come from the Park Service summary; "five sleeps … six days" is Lewis's. Modern locations of the hot springs, Colt Killed Creek and Hungery Creek are not mapped. No dialogue, inner thoughts or weather have been invented. Indigenous fear and choices reach us mostly through outsiders' records. 5. The journals are in the public domain. Both language versions are original adaptations; modern research and annotation are not copied at length. Map points are regional references supported by the sources.