THE ZOOT CHRONICLES

PART THREE ▷ Navigable Waters

I'm sitting in one of two easy chairs in front of a picture window that faces east from a house on the side of the rolling hills that drop down into the Snake River Canyon. I just transferred onto the computer the pictures that I took when we first arrived, of the amazing sunset from this spot. But now it's night, so I'd have to turn off this reading light next to me in order to see beyond my own reflection. If I press my face against the glass, I can still see the river, about five hundred feet down there-- its seemingly still surface now reflecting the dark shadows of the hills and cloudy skies. The moon came up awhile ago-- two days past full-- and now illuminates the tops of the stormclouds we just outran over the Bitterroots. We only got a little rain for awhile this afternoon from them today-- but had they dumped their contents in the form of snow up at Lolo Summit before we passed it could have been a different story. The Lewis & Clark nickel is still in my pocket, and so far it's proved itself to bring-- or at least not prevent-- good fortune.

We made good time today-- it took pretty close to the six hours that the wife of the retired couple who run this bed and breakfast inn out of their home here told me it would over the phone yesterday. We're the only guests here tonight, so we have the run of the downstairs part of the house. It's built into the hillside, so that its western wall is underground, while it's north and east sides project out over a bend in the Snake River Canyon. The river makes a turn to the north, while Highway 12 continues due west; the road that leads up to the houses on this hillside forks off from that intersection, where there used to be a native village. It would produce Chief Timothy, who sided with the whites enough when it came time to run the Nez Perce off their land in the late 1800's to earn him the designation of a "progressive" leader in a government brochure I read earlier that I found here in the Chief Timothy Suite of this inn. The low lying island down there to the right, on the south shore of the river bend, is now the property of the State of Washington, but it's called Chief Timothy State Park.



We're about eight miles west of Clarkston, Washington-- which is where the Snake River comes down from the deepest river gorge in North America just south of there, and is fed by the Clearwater River from the east, whose origins are up in the Bitterroot Mountains just west of the Continental Divide. The Snake River defines central Idaho's western border with Oregon and Washington, just as the Continental Divide marks parts of it's eastern one with Montana-- Idaho being a state more defined by its geography than most. Lewiston, Idaho is just across the river confluence from Clarkston, so our route today took us directly across the present State of Idaho. And as could be expected from the names, of course Lewis and Clark came through these parts two hundred years ago. In fact, on the night of October 10th, 1805, the expedition camped about seven miles back upriver, on the north bank-- about a mile past the present Clarkston city limits. We had dinner near there earlier, at a restaurant built next to a marina on the south bank of the Snake. It's the first time we've seen a marina with inboard power and sailboats-- the first time the river's been truly navigable west of the Continental Divide. In spite of how down-river dams built in the 20th century have swollen the river through here, pacifying rapids that made navigation challenging two hundred years ago, just a few miles back up the Clearwater it's pretty much the same as it's been for millennia. It was just three days travel by river to here, from where the Corps of Discovery had first been able to put into the Clearwater in canoes. While camped down there on the night of October 10th, 1805, William Clark observed in his journal,

"...I think Lewis's River [Snake River] is about 250 yard wide, the Koos kooske River [Clearwater River] about 150 yards wide and the river below the forks about 300 yards wide...our diet extremely bad haveing nothing but roots and dried fish to eate, all the Party have greatly the advantage of me, in as much as they all relish the flesh of the dogs, several of which we purchased of the nativs for to add to our Store of fish and roots &c."

While they had just survived starvation in the mountains by contacting the Nez Perce tribe and receiving food from them in the form of the potato like camas roots and dried salmon that they subsisted on, the new diet hadn't immediately agreed with the explorers' gastrointestinal systems. On October 5, 1805, Clark had written, "Nothing to eate except dried fish & roots. Capt Lewis & myself eate a Supper of roots boiled, which Swelled us in Such a manner that we were scercely able to breath for Several hours--" Compounding the symptoms was the treatment that Lewis-- the highest medical authority on the expedition-- freely dispensed to the men. Having been trained by Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, he had been supplied with a remedy known as "Rush's Thunderbolts"-- pills whose name approximated their effect as strong laxatives. He also had emetics to induce vomiting-- the medicines he carried were nearly all purgatives, and almost never the right treatment for whatever the condition was. On one day at their encampment near present town of Orofino, Idaho-- where they stayed for two weeks recovering and building canoes, the only journal entry reads, "3/4 of the party Sick."

But the explorers would never themselves know how close they really had come to losing their lives after all when they first stumbled, starving, into the Nez Perce village. From the Nez Perce oral tradition comes the story of their first contact with white men. After initially welcoming and feeding them, once they were incapacitated by illness the natives realized something. It would have at that point been a relatively easy matter to cut the explorers' throats, and take possession of their material goods. This included priceless iron kettles, trade goods amounting to more wealth than they would ever see in their lifetimes, and most importantly, their guns. From having only a few inferior rifles, they would suddenly possess an arsenal of the most advanced weaponry in the world, enough gunpowder to last decades, and become the most powerful tribe not just west of the Rockies, but west of the Mississippi. It was one of those once in a lifetime opportunities that, if it could be justified and carried out, would change the course of history. There was a tribal council where they actually put it to a vote, and it was decided they would go ahead and kill them. And then an old woman spoke up-- Watkuweis-- whose name meant, "returned from a far country". She had been captured by another tribe and sold to some white traders; she'd been treated well by the whites, even assisted in returning to her home, and she said they had to show the same respect for their guests. So at her insistence, the plan was aborted. For the second time in the space of a month, the explorers owed their survival to a native woman.

And they got along well with the Nez Perce-- in spite of the problem adjusting to the food. They would stay with them longer than with any other tribe except for at a winter encampment, when they waited for the snow to melt in the Bitterroots enough to allow their return passage back across the Rockies in the spring of 1806. And after attempting it once without guides and being turned back by their inability to navigate through the snow-- the first and only time they ever had to backtrack during the expedition-- they relied on Nez Perce guides to get them across successfully several days later. The explorers owed their survival to many tribes, but none so much as the Nez Perce. It was from them that they learned a new technique of making dugout canoes-- using fire to burn out the trunks instead of carving them by hand. This saved a lot of labor, so those well enough to work on the canoes were able to get them finished rapidly. Then on October 7th, 1805, the expedition said goodbye to the Nez Perce, and set off into the river.

It was the first time they were traveling on a river whose waters would reach the Pacific, and for the first time in a year and a half of traveling through the wilderness, they finally had the current in their favor. Rather than having to fight against the river going upstream, they now had it pushing them from behind, propelling them downstream as fast as a horse could run-- all they had to do was steer. How exhaulting that must have felt-- to have survived crossing the mountains, all the physical struggles they'd been through, the illness, and then to suddenly be flying past the land at such a speed. And had they valued the red meat of the salmon, they could have pretty much just reached out and grabbed all the fresh fish they could have eaten, since tens of thousands of spawning salmon could be counted in single stretches of river later on. Unfortunately, they blamed the salmon for their gastrointestinal problems, and only ate it if they had nothing else. While there may have been some bacteria on some of the dried salmon they'd been eating, the roots and pills were the more likely causes of their problems. But the men would beg to be able to kill and barbeque a pack horse while they were at Canoe Camp; and now that they were on the water again, it was dogs. They would buy them from the natives, to be killed and eaten for dinner. Clark is the only member of the expedition specifically identified as not liking to eat dog meat-- even Lewis, the dog owner, didn't object on record. His huge black Newfoundland must've been the object of more than one discussion amongst the men when they had been down to eating candles and bear oil in the Bitterroots. Now, hopefully at least Seaman and his temporary companions were enjoying some of all that fresh salmon that leapt into the canoes.

Which is all that any of us can hope for-- to enjoy whatever time we have here and whatever it can offer in the way of experience-- as we ride out that balance between serving our own needs for survival, and serving the greater whole. As I was looking at a timeline earlier that was among some stuff I downloaded the last time we had an internet connection, the date "October 10th" jumped out at me-- the same date the expedition camped near here-- but October 10th, 1809: four years later, to the day. It was on that night that Meriwether Lewis died, in a room at an inn on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. He took his own life, leaving behind the bloodied body of a thirty five year old man.

Whatever specific circumstances were discouraging him at that time-- not the least of which must have been his failure to deliver the captains' journals of the expedition to a publisher (he was carrying them with him in a trunk-- apparently unable to finish editing them, or maybe to admit to himself that the great adventure was over)-- he resorted to killing himself at one of the many low points in the life of a manic depressive. He was known for periods of dark introspection, as well as driven accomplishment. Knowing how debilitating manic depression can be, it's amazing that he was able to keep functioning consistently during the expedition-- the only outward sign was that he didn't write in his journal when he was experiencing a dark phase. But then again, having the mission to accomplish-- and the men's lives to be responsible for-- may have provided enough buoyancy to keep it together. And if Jefferson had given him some post in Washington where he would've been closer to friends and family, and some assistants to help in preparing the journals for publication, instead of a frontier appointment as Governor of the Louisianna Territory where he was frustrated with the bureaucracy, betrayed by his secretary, isolated and alone, maybe he would have been able to cope. He tried to escape into alcoholism and opium addiction, adding to his burden. He longed to be rescued from his situation by a relationship, by the normalcy of marriage-- but frightened women away with the disturbing outbursts of his bad temper. He may have actually been homosexual, which given the time and place where he lived would have provided an additional challenge to accepting himself. He speculated on land and sank deeper into debt. He became delusional. And by October 10th, 1809, he couldn't bear the pain any longer.

Knowing that the cycles of bipolar disorder can follow a pattern-- wavelengths that repeat themselves regularly, whether rapidly or slowly-- and that sometimes these patterns are tied to an annual, or seasonal, cycle, I wondered how Lewis was doing back on October 10th, 1805. The earth was at the same place in space that it would be in four years, on Lewis' darkest night. Was he struggling with the darkness then, intuiting the premonitious echos of his own self destruction? In the abridgment of the journals that I bought at Lolo Pass, Lewis isn't quoted during the entire time they were among the Nez Perce that autumn. He apparently didn't make any narrative entries between September 22nd, 1805-- the day before they made it out of the mountains alive-- and November 29th, 1805-- when they had been at the coast for a few weeks already. If lapses in journal entries are indeed a sign of Lewis' periods of depression, the fall of '05-- and maybe fall in general-- was indeed a bad time for him.

Jefferson's orders were for the two captains to keep daily journals of the expedition, and for some of the enlisted men to transcribe their entries so that multiple copies existed to guard against loss. The transcription orders were never enforced, but the three sergeants were ordered early on to keep journals of their own, and at least one private also had enough literacy and sense of historical importance to keep a journal as well. In his report to Jefferson from Fort Mandan, Lewis wrote that there were seven men keeping individual journals-- indicating that at least one other unknown expedition member wrote down their daily experiences each night. How interesting it would be to find that document in a chest in some descendant's attic-- especially if it contained candid observations of the captains and other expedition members which are lacking in the other accounts. If it did, that could explain why it was never shown to the officers, and effectively disappeared.

Without Lewis's own account of the events of early October-- 1805 or 1809-- what really happened has to be pieced together from the others' accounts. I looked to the chapter of Undaunted Courage entitled, "Last Voyage", in which a description of Lewis's final days is gleaned from letters and interviews of those who directly observed his behavior. He was on his way to Washington, where he was to finally deliver the journals of the expedition to a publisher, and also to appeal to the federal government for the money he had authorized as governor be spent on printing the laws of the territory in French, and returning an Indian chief to his tribe past some hostile nations. The latter venture was especially controversial, as in order to return the Chief-- ironically named Big White-- to his people as Lewis had promised to do, he enlisted the help of the Missouri River Fur Company. Unlike today, when the federal government subcontracts some aspects of military operations to corporations such as Haliburton-- whose ability to be the lowest bidder overshadows their obvious ulterior commercial motives-- the fact that they would be trapping and extending their own commercial authority with federal funds was seen as a grave impropriety. In spite of his humanitarian objectives-- or perhaps in part because of them, as neither Indians nor French speakers were seen as obviously worthy recipients of federal funds in Washington-- Lewis would be personally liable to pay those bills if the government wouldn't reverse it's decision not to. Already in personal debt over his head, this would mean Lewis's financial ruin.

With so much riding on the success of his voyage to Washington, Lewis's formerly undaunted courage was failing him. On the boat bound for New Orleans down the Mississippi, Lewis twice had to be restrained by the crew from killing himself-- whether by using his pistol or jumping overboard isn't known. He may have been having a malaria attack-- for which he was taking large amounts of opium-- and was certainly deeply depressed. He was drinking heavily, and using a lot of snuff as well. On September 11th, he wrote out a will, along with a letter to Clark whose contents remain unknown. When he arrived at Chickasaw Bluffs-- then the site of Fort Pickering, and today where the city of Memphis has been built-- the commander of the fort, Captain Gilbert Russell, took possession of Lewis and put him on a suicide watch. Not allowed any alcohol, Lewis eventually became less delusional, and pledged to not drink again. He wrote some letters, with a new resolve to straighten out his personal affairs. He rationally changed his plans to continue to New Orleans and on to Washington via sailboat-- since the British Navy was then intercepting American ships on the Atlantic and impressing American seamen into British service, and letting the journals fall into British possession would be catastrophic. Instead he would continue to Washington by land, accompanied, at Russell's insistence, by Major James Neelly, the U.S. agent to the Chickasaw nation. They set off on horseback along with two servants, on September 29th.

Traveling thusly on the Natchez Trace-- the most heavily travelled road of the Old Southwest-- Lewis once again began drinking. His thinking became delusional again as well-- complaining incessantly about his situation, and saying that Clark would be catching up to them at any moment, to set things right again. Then at their campsite on October 9th, two horses strayed during the night. Neelly stayed behind to look for them, while Lewis and the servants continued on to the next inn they came to, where they were to all meet up. This turned out to be Grinder's Inn, seventy two miles short of Nashville. Mr. Grinder was away, but his wife took the travelers in for the night. Lewis continued acting erratically-- pacing about and having sudden violent outbursts. At the evening meal, he didn't eat much before storming off to the porch, where he lit his pipe and had a few moments of calm, casting his eyes "wishfully towards the west", and remarking what a "sweet evening" it was.

As darkness fell over the land on October 10th, Ambrose describes the final sequence of events:

"Mrs. Grinder began to prepare a bed for him, but he stopped her and said that he would sleep on the floor, explaining that since his journey to the Pacific he could no longer sleep on a feather bed. He had Pernier [his servant, a free black man] bring in his bear skins and buffalo robe and spread them on the floor. While Pernier was getting the bedding, Lewis found some [gun]powder [--that the servants had presumably been instructed to keep away from him].
Mrs. Grinder went to the kitchen to sleep, and the servants went to the barn, some two hundred yards distant.
Lewis began pacing in his room. This went on for several hours. Mrs. Grinder, who was frightened and could not sleep, heard him talking aloud, 'like a lawyer.'
Lewis got out his pistols. He loaded them and at some time during the early hours of October 11 shot himself in the head. The ball only grazed his skull [and probably caused quite a bit of bleeding, as head wounds will].
He fell heavily to the floor. Mrs. Grinder heard him exclaim, 'O Lord!'
Lewis rose, took up his other pistol, and shot himself in his breast. The ball entered and passed downward through his body, to emerge low on his backbone.
He survived the second shot, staggered to the door of his room, and called out, 'O madam! Give me some water and heal my wounds.'
Lewis staggered outside, fell, crawled for some distance, raised himself by the side of a tree, then staggered back to his room. He scraped the bucket with a gourd for water, but the bucket was empty. He collapsed on his robes.
At first light, the terrified Mrs. Grinder sent her children to fetch the servants. When they got to Lewis's room, they found him 'busily engaged in cutting himself from head to foot' with his razor."

When I read that detail, a chill shot down my spine. To slash his skin like that-- it was so similar to the incident he witnessed at the campfire back on October 8th, 1805, the native woman who freaked out and cut her arms up. Was Lewis thinking of her on his last night? Could he be realizing a shared humanity, there in the depths of his pain? We'll never know that, we can only surmise. One thing that's a little more certain is that he was undoubtedly thinking about his Masonic principles. His Masonic apron, donated to the Smithsonian by a descendant, had been with Lewis when he died. The bloodstains on it were placed in such a way as to indicate it had been spread out flat, not folded up.



Lewis was in that period of metaphorical freefall between the bridge railing and the water. He had to know that what he'd done made his death certain-- there was no turning back. Did he think of the indian boy he had shot dead-- as far as we know the only person Lewis ever killed, and the only time the expedition fought with natives. It was on the return, when some Blackfeet had been trying to steal some of the expedition's guns and horses, and resulted in two dead indians. However unavoidable or justifiable it may have been, it's possible that guilt over the incident was part of the burden he had been carrying, something that he would think of as his life slowly flickered before his eyes. Did he feel relief at the prospect of his immanent death, or regret? Or some alternation of those penultimate emotions? Whatever his solitary thoughts had been, they were interrupted by the entrance of the servants into the room. Ambrose continues:

"Lewis saw Pernier and said to him, 'I have done the business my good Servant give me some water.' Pernier did.
Lewis uncovered his side and showed them the second wound. He said, 'I am no coward; but I am so strong, [it is] so hard to die.' He said he had tried to kill himself to deprive his enemies of the pleasure and honor of doing it.
He begged the servants to take his rifle and blow out his brains, telling them not to be afraid, for he would not hurt them, and they could have all the money in his trunk.
Shortly after sunrise, his great heart stopped beating."

I read somewhere that when someone decides to take their own life, it isn't a conscious choice as much as it's a reaction to being in the situation where ones pain outweighs ones resources for coping with the pain. Without either reducing the pain or increasing the coping resources, suicide becomes the path of least resistance. If that's so, then we all have a point where suicide would appear to be our best option. It's like seasickness-- no one can honestly say, "I don't get seasick". Some people may be able to compensate better than others-- but given enough motion, over a long enough period, with enough contributing factors such as stomach content and degree of hydration, and everyone has a point where they would inevitably turn green and head for the rail. No one is immune from suicide either, and to consider it is just a part of the human experience. In fact, being able to allow the consideration of that option without believing there's something wrong with oneself for doing so could be the additional coping resource that actually restores enough balance to be able to go on living. I remember when an acupuncturist I was seeing told me about going to China for his training, and how difficult it was for him there; the fact that he had in his possession a plane ticket that he could use at any time to return home gave him enough strength to be able to stick it out.

But for Meriwether Lewis, his pain had far outweighed his coping resources by October 10th, 1809. And 193 years later in 2003 (the most recent year for which national statistics are available), 31,484 people reached their breaking point and succeeded in killing themselves in the United States. That's 86 suicides per day, or one every 17 minutes, which also translates to an annual suicide rate of 10.8 per 100,000 people-- a rate that's been pretty stable over the last few decades. Males complete suicide at a rate four times that of females, although females attempt suicide three times more often than males-- due probably to the male tendency to use firearms rather than poison. And that leads to another fact, that it's estimated there are 25 attempted suicides for each one that's completed; that would have been 787,100 incidents in 2003. It's also estimated that for every completed suicide, there are six "survivors of suicide"-- consisting of family members and friends who are deeply impacted by the death. So 2003 saw 188,904 people join the ranks of the several million people in this country who are living with the pain of losing a loved one in this way.

Upon reflection, I realize that I belong to an even larger group of people, affected less directly. I was too young to appreciate the significance of my mother's younger brother's suicide when it happened, but I grew up without an uncle who was from what I've been told a great person to know. My parents and grandparents were pretty resilient, never really revealing the pain that the empty space ripped from their hearts must have caused. I'll never know the depths of their private agonies, as outwardly they were the type of people who pick up the pieces and go on. But whether their positivity was the result of having adequately processed what had happened to them, or a means of avoiding facing those negative emotions, is not clear. What is certain is that my uncle Martin's death left more questions than answers for the survivors, and growing up under the shadow of that tragedy engraved a permanent "What if?" in my mind. However much my mother may have forgiven him, blaming instead his ex-wife who never showed up at the motel where he took an overdose, or just circumstances themselves, I remember her referring to suicide as, "the most selfish thing a person could do." Remembering that whatever cessation of emotional pain suicide may afford is actually paid for with increased pain for ones loved ones can serve to bring one back from the edge of despair-- unless the pain outweighs even that.

Thankfully I've never gotten to that point in my own life. In my deepest despair, I've never been completely alone. However self pity may have tried to convince me otherwise, I've always been able to think of family and friends who would suffer over my death-- and realizing that there are people in the world who do care about me provides a path back. Martin has been with me in those moments, along with all the other people I admire who in taking their own lives have robbed the world of the contribution they otherwise could have made. It's now up to those of us still surviving in this world to bring into manifestation what they no longer can. Because when you're dead you may still be able to inspire the living-- but to actually put words down on a page or sound notes in the air, to create something of beauty that brings light into this world from beyond, that requires being alive. And living is always a temporary thing, after all. In time, opposites alternate in this world of duality-- good fortune turns bad before returning, just as the sun sets before it can rise again. Our emotions may be flying high now, but that only means there will be low points to balance it all out, and vice-versa. Just like an electrocardiogram's positive and negative deflection from baseline that signifies the heartbeat, that one is alive-- a flat line means not balance, but death. It's easy to lose sight of that fact in the depths of an emotional trough though, and fall prey to the illusion that the pain and darkness will continue forever unless one stops living-- making suicide a tragically permanent solution to a temporary problem. As dark as it may get outside that window, it's just a matter of time until the sun rises again.



It occurs to me that the only time any of the member of the Corps of Discovery could have written anything down in their journals was at night, in their encampments. The mode of travel, whether it was on foot, horseback, or canoe, was much more demanding then, and they had to keep moving. So after physically, mentally, and frequently emotionally draining days, they had to summon the energy to write things down before going to sleep. Without any camera lenses available, our only view of the land, the plants, animals and native peoples of turn of the nineteenth century western North America, comes to us through the eyes of the members of the Corps of Discovery, and what they were able to write down at night around their campfires is probably more accurate than whatever specifics they would have remembered to tell others after two and a half years in the wilderness. But as was probably the case frequently with them, there is so much more I want to describe about the past day-- and so much more route planning before we hit the road tomorrow-- but I know that whatever tomorrow's path contains, it will be that much easier with each additional hour of sleep I'm able to get. So like the explorers encamped down by the river 200 years ago, I've reached the point where I need to hit the sack.



Friday, March 17th, 2006, 23:22 PST
The Cliff House Bed & Breakfast Inn, Chief Timothy Suite
West of Clarkston, Washington
46° 25' 05" North Latitude
117° 12' 39" West Longitude
988' Elevation

(this version ✍ 083106)

THE ZOOT CHRONICLES

PART TWO ✌ Bitterroot Routes



We're under way now, westbound down the smooth and dry two lane blacktop of Idaho's Highway 12, as it follows the course of the Lochsa River through the Clearwater National Forest. The river's to our left-- snow on its banks, but flowing now. It was frozen solid for a few miles when it first formed from the creeks that dropped down from Packer Meadows east of Lolo Pass, up at the ridgeline of the Bitterroot Range whose severe eastern divide provides the borderline between Montana and Idaho--Mountain and Pacific time zones. After a 2000' climb up to Lolo Pass's mile-high elevation from the Bitterroot Valley in the space of 45 miles, we've been descending this steep sided alpine canyon with its raw granite outcroppings and dense forest of pine and fir trees for 13 miles since the summit, following the curves of the river now in a southwesterly direction. I figure we have about 172 miles to go today from this point. The heights of the Bitterroots are behind us now, and I can see on the map that we'll continue to descend into the Clearwater Mountains as the afternoon progresses. The Lochsa is designated "Middle Fork Clearwater Wild and Scenic River"-- as is the Selway River, which comes down in a northwesterly direction from the roadless Selway-bitterroot Wilderness southeast of here. Both rivers will join in about fifty miles, officially becoming the Middle Fork Clearwater that continues west into the Nez Perce Indian Reservation. It's joined by the South Fork Clearwater at the town of Kooskia, and the Clearwater River proper arcs to the north and is joined by the North Fork Clearwater just past Orofino, Idaho.

That's near the spot where the Corps of Discovery felled five Ponderosa Pines to make the canoes for their final push to the sea, in the first week of October, 1805. They'd nearly starved during their eleven day ordeal crossing these mountains with horses and a Shoshone guide-- only completing the forced march by resorting to eating some of the horses when they couldn't find any game and ran out of provisions. If any more of a snowstorm than what they did get had caught them struggling through the barely passable underbrush of the steep ridges and around the fallen snags from a recent forest fire, "Lewis & Clark" would probably have a completely different connotation in American history today.

Our travel time following their route from the Bitterroot Valley east of the divide, to the Weippe Prairie on the western side where they contacted the Nez Perce, should be about three and a half hours on this modern scenic byway. We finally departed from Missoula just past noon, so with a total estimated travel time of about six hours today, we should be arriving at The Cliff House Bed & Breakfast Inn-- on the Snake River a few miles past were it's fed by the Clearwater-- just before sunset.

Actually, I forgot about the time zone change back at the border on Lolo Pass-- we just gained an extra hour of traveling time. And I must say, it sure is nice to have Cristina on board again. She's doing the piloting now, so I can sit here in the passenger seat and work on this laptop computer, giving the role of navigator more attention than I was able to on the drive out. I have the topo maps of the area on here, with our route traced, elevation profile graphed, and waypoints marked. While I could use the GPS to navigate-- could even have it integrated with the computer so that a little "you are here" Jeep icon made it's way across the map under its own power-- I'm just clicking on the route however many miles the trip meter reads, in order to find our place on the map. But the landscape is easy to recognize from the most detailed topos-- and the street names can be overlaid to figure out directions, too. It's not quite as good as Google Maps-- where you can overlay an aerial photo as well-- but we're not online here, anyway.

No cell phone signal in these parts, either. And the handheld VHF I brought along from the gear I salvaged from my sailboat to get the NOAA weather reports isn't picking up anything intelligible-- so the radioman can take a break. This expedition didn't merit getting a HAM radio transceiver that could access short radio waves bounced off the ionosphere to maintain contact with the outside world-- nor a satellite phone-- as it could have in this day and age. We're strictly line-of-sight here as far as our transmitting capability goes. But given a good signal-- which includes wireless high-speed internet if we park within range of an open access point-- we can be in contact with the outside world without any visible connection. Seemingly by magic, using those smoking mirrors of external technology. The engineer has it pretty dang easy today as well-- Zoot's purring along nicely, burning B20 that he blended from one gerry can of B100 from home and the rest of the tank Missoula dinosaur-diesel. The DJ's been content to keep listening to the Booker T. & the MG's CD he picked up yesterday after hearing the eight minute fifteen second version of the song "Melting Pot" on the jukebox at the Raven Cafe, and so far the pilot hasn't complained. The quartermaster's got things under control in the back-- water and snacks within reach, medicine onboard-- so the journalist can feel free to write. Or photograph, or record, for that matter. I haven't made any videos yet. Or posted any audioblogs as I'd wanted to-- reports from the road.

There's always more to do than time or energy allows, but it's certainly easier to do more with the piloting handled by someone else. Having to singlehand a vessel means doing the minimum-- just getting there. It's actually a whole lot easier to singlehand a 28,000 pound sailboat than this 4,000 pound Jeep-- motoring with the autopilot. Pavement is convenient and all, but automotive technology hasn't evolved to the point where cruise control does the steering for you, like on a ship. Part of me hopes it never does-- but even if it makes sense on an interstate highway, there would always be scenic byways like this one, and dirt forestry roads, and jeep trails, and navigable earth itself, beyond the reach of the grid. And as fond as I am of Hal-- the autopilot on my sailboat-- I'll take Cristina's hand on the wheel any day. How else could I be photographing this beautiful river now whose starboard bank we're now descending? But we can't capture it all. Just to look up from the screen once in awhile is enough for now-- to look up through the sunroof at the trees on the slope above us, to take it in through my eyes and feel something about it, so that I might remember.





We just left the Lolo Pass Visitor Center about half an hour ago, and although there were ten foot deep snowdrifts there around the parking lot-- and clouds continue to build from the southwest-- the weather in our path has fortunately remained dry thus far. I think I may have over-reacted to the threat posed to us by a storm catching us in the higher elevations of the Bitterroots in this day and age. Anything our four wheel drive, locking differentials, chains, winch, land anchor, and two shovels couldn't handle would be plowed in at most a matter of a few hours. We've got a week's worth of food and water in here, so we'd actually be quite comfortable. Not to mention all the reading material I just picked up-- I've got enough Lewis & Clark bicentennial brochures alone to last a couple of days. I've been too long in the mindset of the Corps of Discovery, when they came up through the Bitterroot Valley dreading the passage over the "most terrible mountains" they saw to the west. When I was asking the young ranger at the Visitor Center about the weather outlook, it became apparent that he was actually looking forward to getting more snow-- so much the better to cross-country ski and snowmobile around in, there in the meadows of the summit.

We spent a little time at the Lewis & Clark museum there, and I picked up some books-- Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, which the ranger recommended as the most readable account of the expedition; and also what he said was currently considered to be the definitive abridgement of the journals, published three years ago and edited by Gary Moulton, who also edited the unabridged University of Nebraska Edition that came out in stages over the past twenty years. It includes not only the captains journals, but also those of the enlisted men that are known to exist, annotated with all that's now known at the time of the expedition's bicentennial. I had a chance to see a copy of the actual Nebraska Edition this morning, at the library of the University of Montana. The thing practically takes up a whole shelf by itself-- nearly three feet across. While an abridgment is the only practical way to read the journals unless you're a scholar or have an obsession or something, if I'm going to be able to speak with any kind of authority about the expedition, there are times when I need to know all the available perspectives, in their own words. Having a history department with some renown for Lewis & Clark studies, the University library was the natural place to look. I only wish I'd gotten started down that trail earlier in the week-- the campus was right across from my hotel room, on the other bank of the river. I could have just gone out my back door, stepped on the rocks to cross where Rattlesnake Creek trickled into the Clark Fork River just east of the hotel-- and gone up the bank to the black iron footbridge that crosses the river, walking there in probably fifteen minutes. But I hadn't done that yet by the time the sun came up this morning.

The sun both rises and sets at eighteen minutes past six today, the vernal equinox just three days away. Spring near the Continental Divide is considerably colder than on the Pacific Coast, though, and getting the roof rack loaded with the heavy fuel gerry cans and equipment was difficult in the finger achingly cold temperatures at dawn. We dropped Zoot off at AEV for one last bit of automotive surgery, to try to correct a problem the Bull Bar created: being so heavy it lowered the front ride height so that the larger than stock tires barely cleared the wheelwells. Making any custom modifications to a vehicle inevitably creates side effects-- things that factory engineers discover through building prototypes and testing them, long before mass production starts. When you're blazing a new trail-- trying to build the perfect beast through experimentation-- encountering obstructions like this is par for the course. But I only had a couple days left in Missoula when the problem appeared.

Luckily Dave Harriton-- the founder of American Expedition Vehicles-- is both sharp enough to see how a spacer could be designed to raise the front end another inch or so, capable enough to be able to fabricate one with this fancy machine he had hooked up to his computer, and conscientious enough to take time from his busy schedule getting vehicles ready for the annual industry convention and off-road community gathering at Moab in a few weeks, to make a pair yesterday. His own Jeep was down to a bare frame and 2.8 liter CRD diesel engine just like Zoot's, that he had just harvested from a white European Cherokee sitting out in back of the workshop. It was cool to be able to see both the engine out in the open, and the empty engine compartment of the donor, to know what Zoot's innards look like. The rest of his Jeep is a doubletake-inducing righthand drive Wrangler Unlimited-- the long wheelbase design of his that gave AEV its start when he was a college student here in Missoula ten years ago, which Chrysler now mass produces. He was excited about being able to use biodiesel when he gets it running-- which in Missouola means only B20 in the summer and B5 currently as far as commercial availability goes. I told him of some of the experiences I've had running B100 in the engine, so he could avoid some of the problems I've had to find out about the hard way. He'll be a great resource if I need help troubleshooting any fuel issues in the future-- running the same engine, and having an appreciation of the benefits of biodiesel, tempered with an understanding of how it could affect things, and the ability to call up the Chrysler engineers who designed and built it in the first place at any hour of the day or night. But with the design files on his computer, he could probably figure out just about anything on his own-- he only had something like two weeks to get his own Jeep put back together to take it on the Moab caravan-- but I'm sure he'll not only get it done in that laid back style of his, but it'll be awesome.

He showed me two new vehicles that they're planning on taking to Iceland for a whitewater kayaking trip in a few months, with a cable TV crew in tow to record it all. One was the first modified Jeep Commander I've seen-- a tasteful job as always from AEV, looking supremely capable. The other was a Wrangler with a new fender design of his that would allow the use of 38" tires with a suspension lift of only 3" instead the 5" that the factory fenders would have required. "Less wind resistance, for the harsh weather of Iceland," he explained. Both vehicles had huge Hemi engines-- which Dave said was pretty much expected of him when building a show car. And what the heck-- it wasn't his money. Those sponsors whose logos emblazoned the side cladding of the vehicles wanted something impressive under the hood. It took me awhile to figure it out, but I eventually realized that he'd figured out an angle on how to get a free ride to the headwaters of this remote river in Iceland-- where there are hot springs no less--retracing the route of a National Geographic expedition from 1980-- for the purpose of kayaking down the river. It was brilliant-- everyone came out ahead. The Chrysler Corporation has their brand elevated when these vehicles appear at the SEMA show, their new Commander modified for the first time to inspire thousands of replications, for the price of a couple blanks and some expenses. The cable TV people get the footage they want for a production. AEV gets a trial for their conversions-- taking on terrain traversed 26 years ago only with the help of tracked vehicles-- and a well documented promotion opportunity at the same time, putting a legitimate expedition in the American Expedition Vehicles legacy. And some lucky expedition members get to go for a once-in-a-lifetime ride. Beautiful. And possibly presaging a new phenomenon: recreational exploration. As if it wasn't that all along for everyone who's ever ventured into the wilderness. There's always some serious reason to go, some grown-up objective to justify it all-- and of course some very real and hard won obstacles to getting to remote spots on the surface of the Earth-- but getting there is also where half the fun's at. Enjoying the ride. It's just a matter of getting some sponsors to fund the whole undertaking for some reason or other. There's always an angle, though.

It's refreshing to see someone who's found their bliss, and developed their talent at it enough to be making a good living-- breaking new ground for all of us in the process-- and enjoying the ride of well-deserved success. I only wish that the American public, or the Chrysler Corporation, or whoever controls these chicken-vs-egg things, would rather see a show car with one of the new highly efficient state-of-the-art pollution controlled 6 cylinder Mercedes CRD diesel engines like they're putting in Jeep Commanders in Europe right now-- that gets over 40 miles per gallon-- than with the dominatingly powerful 5.7 liter gasoline gulping beast that the American market "demands"-- that only gets 20 miles per gallon in spite of shutting off 4 of its 8 cylinders when they're not needed. Wouldn't it be nice to have that option available in North America? I'm not saying it should replace the Hemi-- only complement it-- diversifying the transportation options available to the American public. In Europe-- where biodiesel is cheaper than petroleum based fuel now that the infrastructure is built up-- there's a different demand, which Chrysler has proven able to supply. But the line between supply and demand can blur when the media gets involved in creating demand, through advertizing and selective promotion. It's not in the interests of the corporations to promote conservation, or sustainability-- they make more immediate profit from excessive consumption and waste. It just seems like there's something inherently wrong with the economic system itself, when success in its own terms leads to its eventual self-destruction. It's just a matter of figuring out how to make it a win-win situation for everybody, though, to be able to make better choices. I love cars, and am the first to admit the allure of the powerful gasoline powered engine. Hopefully the exhilaration of driving vehicles with them will always be available, in the way we can ride a horse if we want these days, for recreation. But as far as mass transportation goes, burning petroleum as fuel is kind of crazy when you think about it. Maybe someday, the fumes of burnt petroleum on the street will be as out of place as a huge pile of horse shit on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, we can keep searching for that angle that will make it work for everyone.

The loaner we got at the Jeep dealer's service department-- where AEV contracted to have the spacers installed-- was a brand new Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon Edition-- silver like Dave's when I saw the body last summer (it's white now), but only as built up at they get from the factory-- and left hand drive of course. With a spark ignition engine. Another shame, that Jeep's flagship Wrangler model-- the vehicle that defined it's own classification sixty years ago, and still retains more genuine off-road functionality than any other American factory product-- isn't offered with a diesel engine anywhere. However one feels about the British automotive industry, it's clear that Land Rover has us beat in terms of appropriate fuel choices-- having always offered their utilitarian line with diesels abroad (The Defender being the Land Rover equivalent of the Wrangler). While that might have been more because of fuel choices in the areas of the world where the British empire had spread-- or the relative safety of transporting diesel fuel compared with gasoline (all military vehicles that are transported overseas by navies are necessarily diesels for that reason)-- the fact that diesels can go twice as far-- or get twice as much power from the same volume of fuel these days-- doesn't hurt either. But given the choices that are available from the North American factory, I couldn't complain about our loaner. It's build date was last month, and it exuded a healthy amount of new car smell as we drove up to the Raven Cafe in the old Masonic Lodge building on Broadway for one last breakfast there. The lattes had been made in such a way as to create perfect leaf patterns in the foam, and we checked our email on their wireless connection, basking as long as we could in that other bastion of collegiate culture-- the hip and happening cafe-- before heading back into the cold, and driving over to the campus to find the library.





We finally found a spot on the roof level of the parking structure behind Mansfield Library, and before long we were in the stacks. I found myself standing there before more books than I'd ever seen on Lewis & Clark collected in one place. As I scanned their spines, I felt like it was a dream from which I'd wake up any minute-- unable to take any of them with me. I gathered an armful of blue cloth bound volumes of the Nebraska Edition and dumped them onto a nearby table. Looking up the relevant dates on my list, and cross referencing the accounts of the two captains, two sergeants, and one private whose journals survived, it became apparent that the enlisted men sometimes describe events in even better detail than the captains. Lewis has his great descriptions of the flora and fauna, but when he describes the Native Americans it's with the detached gaze of an anthropologist. The enlisted men were not infrequently getting to know the natives in a far more intimate way-- so it's a shame more of them didn't keep journals, and that parts of journals that were kept have disappeared-- even an entire account of an unidentified mystery journalist among the privates whose story was never published or included with the notebooks that Lewis held onto. Maybe it was more candid-- which could explain why it would have then remained private and hidden. Wouldn't that be a great find in some descendant's attic! Clark has his lists of Courses & Distances along the route, the geographical information going into his map, and it's interesting to see the strategy in the captains' thinking-- but what seemed to matter most was whether or not someone was an eyewitness to an event, or was just repeating what they had heard. With the passion afforded by personal experience, the descriptions sometimes really do seem to convey the feelings the author was experiencing at the time, along with the information.

The first date I looked up in the blue volumes of the Nebraska Edition was July 4th, 1806. Everything I knew about Lewis's party's passage through Missoula had thus far come from the internet. Skipping the bookstore, I had gone straight to as close to a primary source as I could imagine. And sure enough, there were many more details than the excerpts and abridgments ever give. In a table of Courses & Distances from the day before, Lewis wrote that they had traveled,

"...through a hansom leve plain to the point at which the
East branch enters the mountains or where the hills set in
near it on eather side. we halted and encamped on a small
creek 5 miles short of the extremity of this course. a Creek
15 yds. wide falls into the E. branch on it's N. side one mile
short of the mountain."

The footnote confirmed that the last creek mentioned is none other than Rattlesnake Creek-- considerably smaller than 15 yards wide today-- but then again the Clark Fork isn't exactly filling it's banks either, with a lot of exposed smooth-worn river rocks. In the photo I saw of the Doubletree Edgewater Hotel online, it looked like water extended right up to within a few feet of the patio railings-- as it would by July when all that snow up there has been melted in the summer heat. Thankfully, the mosquito population is smaller now too-- although by July it could still get as bad as it was two hundred years ago, when Lewis wrote at their camp on Grant Creek just four miles west of where the Edgewater would be built,

"...the musquetoes were so excessively troublesome this evening that we were obliged to kindle large fires for our horses these insects tortured them in such a manner untill they placed themselves in the smoke of the fires that I realy thought they would become frantic. about an hour after dark the air become so coald that the musquetoes disappeared."

From the complete entry that had been excerpted online from the journal of Sergeant Patrick Gass, I found out that they did spend all morning of the 4th at their camp on Grant Creek-- the hunters having gone out early to try to bring back some more deer meat for the Nez Perce guides who were departing. They came back empty handed, but there were still two and a half deer from yesterday's hunt they could give them. While that was being worked out, Lewis and Clark were smoking with the guides, trying to gather as much information as possible about the geography in the time they had there. You can imagine the comfortable ritual of passing a pipe around-- one of the first things they would do with the chiefs upon making contact, and one of the last upon parting with natives. But these were fellow expert woodsmen-- the local pilots who did what the captains couldn't do on their own: get across the Bitterroots that early in the year, with deep snowdrifts obscuring the trail. There was a great deal of mutual respect, appreciation, and fondness between the men-- from the expedition having spent so much time among the Nez Perce. They had saved their lives when they emerged starving from the mountains. They offered up their trees and showed them a better way of making canoes. They watched their horses until Lewis & Clark returned in the spring, and hosted the Corps for a month while they waited for enough of the snow to melt so they could cross the Rockies. And now they once more got the white men through their crisis, and were waving them on. It was a parting that must have contained all sorts of optimistic promises to meet again-- not just on a political or economic level like the diplomatic speech they gave the chiefs, but on a personal one as well. As Peers. Friends. But they were all intelligent enough to realize that would probably never happen in their lifetimes-- and sensitive enough to feel the poignancy of the situation they found themselves in. Lewis seems sort of surprised that the guides are so worried for the safety of the expedition, as they continue on into hostile enemy territory. The nomadic tribes of the west only ventured through the pass Lewis's party was taking over the Continental Divide with large groups, for safety's sake-- lest they meet a war party coming up from the plains to conduct a raid. It's like Lewis's mind has expanded during his time among the Nez Perce enough to admit the possibility that the natives are human, too, that they have feelings-- but he still finds it remarkable. So I would imagine that the social ritual of passing a pipe-- which may have originally served more of a sacred function for the natives than it would have for the son of a Virginia tobacco planter such as Lewis-- became in this instance a moment of shared brotherhood that transcended old identities.

The enlisted men's journals tended to focus more on matters of importance to them-- food being hard to top. What's for dinner-- which depended entirely on what the hunters managed to shoot that day-- takes the place of the naturalistic descriptions and the navigation logs of the captains. In some places it kind of stands out how much killing the Corps actually did, seemingly shooting at every animal that moved. Not just deer, but pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, elk, moose, black bears, mountain lions, cougars, lynx, beavers, coyotes, wolves, prairie dogs, of course bison on the plains, and all manner of grouse, waterfowl and raptor-- including a Condor that got away. They were mostly men in their twenties, who had grown up hunting barefoot for fun in their local woods, and now they were heavily armed U.S. Army soldiers, without an actual enemy to fight. There was always the potential of Indian attack, but the only enemy they ever actually engaged in battle was hunger. And the occasional monster. They encountered numerous grizzly bears in central Montana, which they initially deliberately provoked in order to test their mettle. But after discovering how marginally effective their guns were at killing them in time to prevent a counterattack, Lewis wrote, “I find the curiosity of our party is pretty well satisfied with respect to this animal." They may not have found any surviving wooly mammoths-- which they were told to expect by the leading naturalists of the day-- but a monster is in the eye of the beholder, after all, and food that's necessary for survival is all anyone's really after. The men were doing hard physical labor, on an all meat diet-- optimally about eight pounds per person per day. That's 264 pounds for the entire Corps, each and every day that they could find and kill it-- times 864 days on the trail-- which means the expedition consumed well over 200,000 pounds of flesh from the bounty of animal life populating the west between the years of 1804 through 1806. Clark wrote that it took 4 deer, or an elk and a deer, or one buffalo, to supply them with food for 24 hours. Fish just didn't seem to satisfy their appetites-- and without red meat they literally began to feel like their bodies were withering away. On August 28th, 1805 Clark complained, "Those Sammon which I live on at present are pleasant eateing, not with standing they weaken me verry fast and my flesh I find is declining." On October 9th, 1805-- the night before the date the expedition camped on the Snake River near where we'll be staying tonight-- Patrick Gass wrote, "We have some Frenchmen, who prefer dog-flesh to fish; and they here got two or three dogs from the Indians."

It wouldn't be but a couple days before "some Frenchmen" became pretty much all the enlisted men, and they bought something like thirty dogs from the natives just down the river from there. They were encamped near a village, the banks of the river relatively heavily populated by the Nez Perce-- the most important tribe between the Cascades and the Rockies. The cabins lining the banks in places were the first wooden houses they'd seen since leaving St. Louis. Building materials are something else the enlisted men focused on more than the officers-- being tradesmen. Timber that would make good shingles, other trees good for milling boards, the more pragmatic aspects of how to go about beginning to develop the land of the American West-- to domesticate it-- settle it. Gold would come later-- the Corps was pretty much oblivious to any minerals that didn't have an application to the establishment of frontier settlements and farms. Places to stop roaming, and put down roots. From ROUTES to ROOTS. Some of them may have dreamed of trapping beaver, alone with the wilderness; and the captains thought in larger terms, of commercial development. But for the common man of the times, The American Dream was then of a family farm instead of a house in the suburbs-- so they envisioned development by settlers in those terms. That, and trade. Settlement, farming, and trade were inextricably linked in their minds. Ironically, when this area was settled in the late nineteenth century, it was because of gold mining. Lewis & Clark didn't care about gold-- that was a Spanish concern, along with converting natives to Christianity-- but that didn't stop Spain from suspecting the Americans of having designs on their gold mines in New Mexico. There were actually four heavily armed Spanish military contingents dispatched at different times over the two and a half years of the expedition, to try and intercept the Corps. Their orders were to turn back the expedition, or arrest them if they refused to abandon their mission-- like that wouldn't have resulted in a firefight. But the West was so vast back then, they never even came close to finding them.

The expedition spent the nights of October 8th and 9th, 1805 there at that camp on the Clearwater-- repairing a canoe that a rock had staved in and drying out the cargo they managed to save from the current-- so they would have gotten to know the Nez Perce locals a bit more there. Old Toby (their Shoshone guide) and his son took off during the first night-- probably freaked out by the reckless running of the many rapids in the headlong rush to the Columbia. He took two horses in lieu of pay, and rode back off the pages of history into the prehistoric world whose days had been numbered by the expedition's passage. The second night was another one of those times when Cruzatte's fiddle came out of its case, and there was singing and dancing around the campfire. I've never seen anything about the actual music they played-- what it was like. What their multicultural jam sessions were like. The white boys actually brought two fiddles, the other played by Private George Gibson; Lewis also had a Philadelphia tinsmith make him four "sounding horns", which were something like a straight bugle-- at least they usually served that purpose, that of signaling. I don't know if they were different pitches or not, but they were all played together at special campfires, such on New Year's Eve. Then somewhere they picked up a tambourine-- and you can imagine that those not dancing probably participated in the percussion section in some capacity. It was clear, though, that the evening of October 9th didn't go as usual, when there occurred a rather awkward and disturbing event. While they all mention it, Private Joseph Whitehouse-- the expedition's tailor-- gives the most comprehensive account:

"...in the evening we purchased a considerable quantity of Sammon, a little bears oil or greese, Some root bread 2 dogs &c. after dark we played the fiddle and danced a little. the natives were pleased to see us. one of their women was taken with the crazy fit by our fire. She Set to Singing Indian and gave all around hir Some roots, and all She offered had to take from hir. one of our men refused to take them from hir. She then was angry and hove them in the fire, and took a Sharp flint from hir husband and cut hir arms in Sundry places So that the blood gushed out. She wiped up the blood and eat it. then tore off Some beeds and peaces of copper &c which hung about hir and gave out to them that were round hir a little to each one. Still kept hir Singing and makeing a hishing noise. She then ran around went to the water Some of her kindred went after hir and brought hir back She then fell in to a fit and continued Stiff and Speechless Some time they pored water on hir face untill She came too. Capt. clark gave hir Some Small things which pleased hir--"

In spite of the misspellings and inconsistent punctuation, the original comes across so much more immediately than any paraphrasing ever could. In fact, in a paraphrased version printed next to the Whitehouse entries, the editor has the natives giving the woman the "small things which pleased hir--" instead of Clark-- maybe trying to avoid the suggestion of some impropriety on the captain's part. Cleaning it up for the general public, who would never venture far from the printed page. When the captains' journals were finally first published in 1814, they had been paraphrased by the editor, Nicholas Biddle. In a story that's been around since biblical times, he changed passages to reflect his ideas of what was important, and what wasn't-- robbing the readers of the ability to make up their own minds. And he pretty much left all the scientific information to the experts-- none of whom picked the journals up until the 1890's-- and then they were damaged and defaced by an ornithologist who cut them up and rearranged them into what he thought was a more sensible order. The library actually had some recently printed facsimile copies of a few of the original Codices-- the notebooks the men actually wrote in-- and you can see their handwriting, the ink stains and watermarks-- and the red line of Biddle's pen, crossing things out and editorializing. The journals themselves were pretty much forgotten for the rest of the nineteenth century-- until they were finally published in the 1905 Thwaites Edition, the only unabridgement before the Nebraska Edition came out at the end of the twentieth century. It didn't include the great footnotes-- or the parts that weren't "rediscovered" until later in the twentieth century-- but the Thwaites Edition had one thing going for it that made it one step closer to being a primary document: The Atlas. Actually, the Nebraska Edition is supposed to have one too, but it was checked out this morning.

The Thwaites Edition Atlas looked like a book on the shelf, but when I pulled it down it had no pages, more of a box. I carefully opened it to find it contained a stack of folded papers, each of them numbered. Unfolding the first one, my jaw dropped. It was a facsimile print of one of Clark's maps, that he had sketched in the field. You could see where he had pasted pieces of paper together to make it big enough, all the folds and water marks clearly visible. The Atlas contained reproductions of all the maps drawn by Clark during the expedition-- everything from tracings of the animal skins they gave the natives to draw local maps on, to Clark's masterpiece, done during the winter at Fort Clatsop on the Pacific Coast. Most of them were sketch maps, probably drawn from Clark's log of Courses & Distances. In the index I found the Lolo Trail, where our path would join theirs today. It had apparently been copied by Clark from the sketch maps he did in the elkskin bound notebook he started on the trail during this leg-- being different from the photos of those maps reproduced in the relevant section of the Nebraska edition. Maybe Clark had started them at Fort Clatsop, but there were the spring campsites and the path of their eastbound return trip marked as well-- so it had at least been updated later on. I had just located the map where the Clearwater joined the Snake, and traced the river that they followed the natives example in calling the Kooskooskia-- supposedly the native term meaning "clear water"-- back to the campsite where the incident I'd just read about occurred-- when my cell phone vibrated. Zoot was ready.

It seemed like such a find, to have Clark's hand sketched map of our route today, I couldn't bring myself to put it back in the box. There was no way I was going to figure out a way to establish Montana residency and get a library card in the time I had, so I hurried off in search of a Xerox machine. After walking around and around through the library without ever finding one, I was agonizing over the ethical aspects of stealing the maps with the intention to mail them back once we got home-- more concerned with the possibility that they might get damaged than anything else-- when I returned to where Cristina was sitting at a table, with Lewis's Herbarium and some other botanical books spread out in front of her. As usual, my desperation had blinded me to a solution as simple as it was brilliant, which she plainly saw. I explained the situation to her, and after a short pause she said, "You've got your camera, right? Why don't you just photograph them?" What a partner. So the pen and ink sketch maps, inscribed in the wilderness exactly two hundred years ago, photographed and published a hundred and one years ago, printed just three years shy of fifty years ago, were laid out on the table and digitalized within the memory chip of my camera. I passed slowly over them like a spy plane flying over the ridges of the Bitterroots, capturing details, trying to keep them in focus.





It was 12:45 by the time we finally picked up their trail, a few miles south of Missoula at an intersection in the town of Lolo, Montana. Now-- almost three hours later-- we're coming up on the confluence with the Selway River in just a few miles-- the end of the Lochsa River, which we've been following since its inception. The time is 15:38, so we're a few minutes ahead of schedule. I want to be able to take in all the scenery, but I'm multitasking between checking our location on the topo map to know what's around us now, and going over the bicentennial brochures and books I just picked up to fill in the blanks in my knowledge of the events leading up to the expedition's arrival at Lolo Creek. Then there's the temptation to trace back on the topos from there to figure out the route they took to get up into the Rocky Mountains in the first place, and at the same time try to get my mind around the geography of the Continental Divide in Montana. So my attention is divided, between here and the land behind us, and between the present moment and the month of August, 1805. We just passed the mouth of the Selway at the junction town of Lowell, and it felt like I was catching a glimpse up some sacred orifice into the roadless Wilderness.

But of course others have already explored it and mapped it, named all its features and defined it in the terms of our tribe. It used to have roads in some places, they've just been decomissioned. It isn't like it was for Meriwether Lewis on August 12th, 1805-- when he led an advance overland party up a steepening valley to became the first U.S. citizen to reach the headwaters of the Missouri River. The river they'd been traveling up for fifteen months. He would write that night in his journal,

"after refreshing ourselves we proceeded on to the top of the dividing ridge from which I discovered immence ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow."

In this one statement of fact, Lewis has just pronounced the death of the dream of a Northwest Passage-- the hope that had been around for three hundred years since Columbus ran into the American continents, of a water route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It was also the primary objective of the expedition to find one. Or lack thereof, as it turned out. But the next objective-- of getting to the Pacific before winter set in-- meant they had to cross those immense ranges of mountains-- and they already had winter conditions on them. So he doesn't linger to reflect on the implications of his discovery, but goes on to describe descending 3/4 of a mile to a creek on the western face-- to become the first U.S. citizen to taste the headwaters of the Columbia River, too-- and continue trying to make contact with the Shoshone. Because the only way they were going to survive a trek across those mountains was with a guide and horses that they needed to obtain from them.

It had actually been four months since the expedition had any contact with natives-- since leaving their winter encampment among the Mandan. They'd seen seasonally used trails and campsites, but no people. Sacagawea had begun to recognize the landmarks of her homeland as they entered the Rocky Mountains, though, and at the Forks of the Missouri she pointed out the spot where she had been captured by the Hidatsa war party five years earlier, describing the incident. She was now going home-- but she had no idea what remained of her people. It could have occurred to her that she might be one of the only survivors-- like the astronaut in the movie, Planet of the Apes-- going home to find home was no more.

After Lewis made a very tentative contact with the Shoshone at a village west of the divide, Clark finally arrived with the main party and Sacagawea-- who recognized that the chief, Cameahwait, was her brother. As Ambrose says, "No novelist would dare invent such a scene." But thanks to truth being stranger than fiction, it really did happen. So, the good fortune of returning the chief's kidnapped sister to her people-- along with the promise that Lewis made for the U.S. to provide the Shoshone with firearms in the future so they could be on a more equal stance with their enemies-- pretty much assured them the immediate support they needed.

Clark led a small party to confirm the impassibility of the river west of there that the Shoshone quite literally called the River of No Return-- now known as the Salmon-- before they traded for horses and hired a guide, Old Toby, who knew of a route across the mountains north of there that some other tribes used to cross to the west. He had some Salish relatives who had taught him the way they travelled to the land of the Nez Perce to the west, where they would trade and catch salmon in the rivers that connect with the Pacific; the Nez Perce also crossed over it in the summer, to get to the plains of eastern Montana to hunt buffalo. It was only passable for a couple months out of the year, and they were rapidly approaching the end of that window for 1805. Old Toby said that the trail was arduous, and there wasn't much game-- but it was their only viable option. So they set out north along the Continental Divide through the very steep and difficult terrain. Sergeant Ordway wrote on August 26th, 1805, "we Set out at Sunrise and proceeded on with our big coats on and our fingers ackd with Cold." Private Whitehouse called September 2nd, "horrid bad going."

While the place they first crossed the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass is almost due south of Missoula, the Divide itself meanders about sixty miles east through there, traveling north. The Bitterroot Range-- while a relatively lower tier of the Rockies west of the actual Divide-- still has peaks above eleven thousand feet tall, and is actually much more impenetrable than the Continental Divide itself in those latitudes. Between the Bitterroots to the west and the Saphire Mountains to the east towards the Divide, has formed the Bitterroot Valley. By September 6th, 1805, the Corps were camping on a fork of the Bitterroot River, at the southern end of the valley. At the time, Lewis named the river the Clark after his friend William Clark-- the first white man to view the most significant river they'd yet found west of the Divide. While the branch of the river that passes through present day Missoula is still called the Clark Fork, it was once the East Fork of the Clark; at some point in the historical era someone decided that having a mountain range, valley, and national forest named after the Bitterroot plant wasn't enough. Lewis would probably turn over in his grave if he knew what they'd done-- he couldn't stand the taste of the roots of that plant, no matter how he tried to prepare them. He gave those he'd bought back to the natives, and they immediately devoured them. The one consolation might be that he gave the plant its name as well.

As they followed the Bitterroot River north, Lewis figured that while it would eventually reach the Columbia, the absence of salmon meant it probably had a big falls on it, making it ultimately unnavigable. Old Toby didn't know where it ended up, but did describe what he knew of the river downstream:

"he informed us that it continues it's course along the mountains to the N. as far as he knew it and that not very distant from where we then were it formed a junction with a stream nearly as large as itself which took it's rise in the mountains near the Missouri to the East of us and passed through an extensive valley generally open prairie which forms an excellent pass to the Missouri. the point of the Missouri where this Indian pass intersects it, is about 30 miles above the gates of the rocky mountain, or the place where the valley of the Missouri first widens into an extensive plain after entering the rockey mountains. the guide informed us that a man might pass to the Missouri from hence by that rout in four days."

This describes the route Lewis would take on the return trip back across the Continental Divide the following summer, that took them through Missoula. It also meant that if they'd taken that shortcut on the westbound trip they could've gotten where they were at in four easy days-- instead of four hard weeks. But their objective had been to follow the Missouri to it's source, and contact the Shoshone-- and that was all in the south. On September 9th, 1805, they reached where Old Toby told them the trail turned west to finally ascend up the bank of Lolo Creek into the intimidating Bitterroot Range, and they decided to camp at a spot that they called Traveler's Rest for two nights-- to rest the horses, make or repair mocassins, and allow Lewis to take some astronomical observations to determine the latitude and longitude of the spot. Speaking of such things, we just crossed the 115°46'00" West Longitude Meridian-- which delineates the border between the Clearwater National Forest and the Nez Perce Indian Reservation. So far, I can't tell any difference in how the land's been managed.

Determining latitude has always been pretty easy in the Northern Hemisphere-- ancient navigators used knotted ropes to measure the distance of the north star, Polaris, off the horizon. At the equator it would be touching the horizon (or 0°) and at the North Pole directly overhead (90°). Knowing the latitude of your home port meant you could sail north or south until you were at that same latitude, then "sail the latitude" straight home again. Of course, not knowing your longitude when out of sight of land meant that you might have a disastrous homecoming if it was foggy when you reached its offshore rocks. Lewis used the same method of looking to celestial bodies whose relative motion with the earth was known, recorded in tables. Using a sextant and an octant to get accurate measurements of the elevation off the horizon of the sun, moon, and many stars visible from the Northern Hemisphere, he then used tables he carried with him to convert those numbers to a latitude in the form of degrees, minutes and seconds of arc. Geography has retained the convention of using the base 12 system, instead of the base 10 metric or decimal system adopted in some other human endeavors. If the circumference of the earth bisecting both north and south poles is divided into 360°, where each degree has 60 minutes, and each minute sixty seconds, one minute of latitude equals exactly one nautical mile. It's a measurement that's tied to the size of the planet and its geometry, and hasn't been altered over the years for political reasons-- as the statute mile has. So knowing one's latitude meant one knew exactly where one was between the equator and the pole, with an accuracy of up to about 40 miles. Lewis usually took a noon sighting of the sun-- actually at least two sightings-- before and after the sun's maximum upwards travel, from which local noon could be determined, and their latitude deduced from the tables.

Longitude was much more difficult to obtain. The accepted method was to use a chronometer to determine local time in relation to the local time at a fixed meridian at Greenwich, England, that was designated 0°-- that same circumference of the earth bisecting both poles, but now serving as a sort of vertical equator dividing east and west as the equator does north and south. Cook had as early as 1780 used an accurate chronometer on his third voyage, when he explored the Pacific Northwest. But overland travel had so far been too rough on the delicate clocks-- they didn't maintain their accuracy, or outright broke. When Lewis was getting outfitted in Philadelphia with navigation equipment, he spent $250 on a chronometer that was the current state of the art-- hoping it was good enough to keep working until they reached the Pacific. This was 10% of the entire expedition budget-- the single most expensive item after trade goods. More expensive than the biggest arsenal west of the Mississippi. It was that important to be able to document longitude as well as latitude, to be able to substantiate land claims the United States was hoping to be able to make from the expedition's documentation.

In 1793 when Alexander Mackenzie led an expedition financed by the British Northwest Company overland across Canada in search of a northwest passage, he found an easy portage across the Continental Divide-- only to discover that the rivers were unnavigable to the west. After thirteen difficult overland days, they finally reached saltwater at the northern reaches of the Straight of Georgia. He spent the night of July 22nd, 1793 on a rocky outcropping where he painted his name on the face of the stone. Ambrose writes,

"Mackenzie picked out Jupiter with his telescope and noted the time when the moons Io and Ganymede disappeared behind the planet. From tables showing the times of the same events from Greenwich, Mackenzie computed a longitude of 128.2 degrees west, which was almost a degree, or forty miles, off. He realized he had been 'most fortunate... a few cloudy days would have prevented me from ascertaining the final longitude of it.'"

The British thereby had a claim on the land in the north all the way to the Pacific. Rather than rely on the telescope for fixing longitude, Lewis used the more precise measurements of the sextant and the chronometer together, staying up late at night taking sightings at what he considered to be significant geographical locations. The tables would have been too cumbersome to carry-- and having the actual number of the longitude wouldn't have given them anything of much use in the field anyway. So they just wrote down the altitudes of this or that star, for a period of a couple hours in the middle of the night while the tired men slept; Lewis taking sightings with the sextant and calling out numbers, Clark writing them down. If the clouds didn't put an end to the whole tedious process before they were finished.

On the night of September 9th, 1805, Lewis documented the time and distance of the Moon's western limb from the star Aquila with the sextant, between 21:52 and 22:13 at night-- managing ten sightings before the clouds closed in. He noted, however,

"☛ this set of observations cannot be much depended on as through mistake I brought the Moons Western limb in contact in stead of her Eastern limb she having passed into her third quarter and of course her Western limb somewhat imperfect."

But the next night they didn't take any more sightings-- maybe it was cloudy all night, or they were distracted by the arrival of the three natives who had just crossed the mountains eastbound on horses in pursuit of some horse thieves who had stolen 23 horses from them. They were Salish, and thought the thieves had been Shoshone, Old Toby translated using the universal Native American sign language. They said that they had crossed the mountains in "five sleeps", which would be six days. Two of them took off on the trail of the thieves after having some boiled venison, and the third offered to accompany the expedition back to the west, and introduce them to his relatives there. He got spooked, though, and disappeared during the night. If Old Toby did that to them before they completed the crossing, that could be very bad. Getting over the mountains and to the Pacific was the priority-- they could try again to determine the longitude of Traveler's Rest when they came back through there on the return. Back to the present, we're now at approximately the same longitude as the Weippe Prairie, where the forced march through the Bitterroots finally ended.

The practical navigation information that Lewis & Clark used is seen in their log of Courses & Distances that accompanies the narrative of their main journals--listings of compass courses and distances travelled with concise descriptions of the trail features that mirror the longer descriptions in the narrative. That was their trail of bread crumbs to get back home, and the raw data that would go into Clark's map. Using a compass and a few other miscellaneous tools for determining speed over ground or through water, Clark was able to map from the mouth of the Missouri on the Mississippi, to the mouth of the Columbia on the Pacific, and he was just as accurate as Mackenzie had been: about 40 miles off-- or 40 minutes of latitude.

Forty miles is the distance from where we picked up the trail earlier this afternoon where Lolo creek empties into the Bitterroot River, up to Lolo Hot Springs, five miles shy of the summit of the ridge. On September 13th, 1805 , Clark stuck his finger in the waters of the springs, and some men coolled down and drank the sulfurous water, but no one took the time to soak except Old Toby and his son. It was excused, since it was a spiritual thing for him-- as was stopping in certain places for a reverent smoke. I gotta give the point to the Pagans on this one-- they certainly seem to have been historically better at inhabiting their bodies both physically as well as spiritually, than Christians. But on June 30th, 1806, almost everyone would enjoy the sulfurous 111° waters-- the Nez Perce guides running down to the ice cold waters of Lolo Creek's snowmelt, back and forth, in exaltation at their successful passage. It reminds me of a youth hostel I stayed at on the Icefields Parkway in the Canadian Rockies fifteen years ago on my circumcontinental motorcycle trip-- where they had a sauna, outdoor clawfoot bathtub, and ice cold creek racing past that came directly from a glacier a few miles away-- and I availed myself of the opportunity as the guides had. I wonder if the members of the Iceland expedition will be able to physically enjoy the hot springs at the put-in spot for the kayaks. It would seem a shame not to, if people only go there once every 26 years.





I'm embarrassed to admit how easy it was for me to obtain our latitude and longitude after reading about Lewis & Clark's struggles. I feel like I haven't earned it. All I did was turn on this little yellow box the size of my palm, and after taking a couple minutes to find the signals from the satellites through the open sunroof, it reads out the numbers on it's display, as if by magic. I discovered another trick it can do on the drive out last weekend-- there's a display setting that has a compass rose, over a box that reads actual speed over ground, that updates every second or so from the satellites, accurate to within about 90 feet as I understand it. The cool part is wedging the little GPS unit between the speedometer and tachometer sweeps in the dashboard-- watching the LCD compass rose dance, knowing that's the most accurate measurement of our true direction-- not our magnetic direction as a compass shows-- and Speed Over Ground that I could possibly obtain. I could even attach it to the center of the steering wheel with velcro or something, if that wasn't too distracting for the pilot. No worse than having a digital LED readout up above the rear view mirror as we do, telling us the closest direction we're approximating, using an onboard electronic compass. It gives us all sorts of other detailed data as well-- outside temperature, average miles per gallon, miles until empty, elapsed time, trip mileage, even tire pressure.

The thing is, we may be more capable of obtaining and managing information-- but only thanks to the good graces of the computers we entrust with our very lives. We can determine our latitude and longitude by just pushing a couple buttons-- but only when the satellites smile back at us, the infrastructure itself owned and controlled by transnational corporations that basically have more legal sovereignty than national governments at this point. Self reliance is the price we pay-- beholden to the man in the sky to feed us the information-- like priests in a religion insisting on being the intermediary between the individual and their God, their information. What happens when it gets shut down? I don't have a sextant-- but I would if I were crossing an ocean. I learned how to use one on a ship, which is constantly in motion over the earth's surface, however slowly. The instructor of the weekend Celestial Navigation course I took aboard the Liberty Ship Jerimiah O'Brien-- docked at Pier 32 on the San Francisco waterfront-- told of navigating with a sextant on the crew of a B17 bomber in World War II as a nineteen year old kid, having to take sextant sightings through the top turret Plexiglass bubble as they flew along at 200 miles per hour, 25,000 feet over the ground, everyone depending on him to get them back to their base nearly 1,000 miles away. The early manned spaceflights of the Gemini program used a specialized kind of sextant for navigation from orbit-- but by the time the Apollo program came around, electronics had replaced manual navigation for everything except emergencies. I do have a hand bearing compass-- but all the maps it would do any good with are on the computer-- once more dependent on electronic computer technology. It is an amazing machine though-- this laptop computer-- it can take us to the ends of the information about the earth right here on its screen-- just as Zoot can take us to the actual physically remote corners of the earth-- in safety, comfort, style, and minimal eco-cide-effects. But what if the computer chips in the circuitry of either of these magnificent machines stop working properly-- what then? I hope to never have to find out-- but if I do, I have the feeling that my sense of humor will probably be the most useful tool that I could have with me at the time.

A couple of the brochures I picked up at Lolo Pass seem to be taylor made for our drive today-- for instance this one published by the Clearwater National Forest called, "Lewis & Clark on the Lolo Trail"-- which describes the history of the trail corridor. The modern highway that follows the river canyon wasn't completed until 1964-- a route that was too dense with underbrush for Lewis & Clark to pass this way two hundred years ago. The expedition instead followed the old trail along the ridge line up above us to the north-- and the brochure even correlates journal entries with campsite locations. They headed up Lolo Creek to begin the dreaded crossing on September 11th, 1805. No game, nearly impenetrable underbrush along the steep ridges, fallen timber and snags across the trail, horses falling down ravines, colts getting killed and eaten for lack of game or provision. The mare whose colt had been roasted ran away the next day, and led four other horses back to the site of the campfire. When they thought it couldn't possibly get any worse-- going to bed hungry, cold and wet-- they woke up with eight inches of snow on top of them, the trail nearly invisible. I'm sure they hoped they were still asleep and it was just a nightmare. But they had to keep pushing on.

The route remained essentially no more than a horse trail until it was widened to a single lane dirt road by the Civilian Conservation Corps to accommodate motorized wildland firefighting vehicles in the 1930s. The road remains in that form today as the Lolo Motorway-- aka Forest Road 500-- which the Lochsa Ranger District of the Clearwater National Forest describes on the cover of their brochure, "Driving the Lolo Motorway", as "not for the faint of heart." Sounds like my kind of road. There's a webpage I found with a detailed map showing the coincidence of the trail the Corps of Discovery followed, and the existing roads between Lolo Pass and Weippe Prairie. I can see the red lines of the Lolo motorway and other dirt forestry roads snaking along the contour lines of the ridges to the north of us on the topo. It would be possible to spend weeks driving through the backcountry of these National Forests-- the Clearwater on the Idaho side of the divide, and the Lolo over on the Montana side, going from one amazing campsite, fishing hole, river run, and amazing trail vista to another.

In fact, the Up Up Lookout tower-- where we stayed that first night after taking delivery of Zoot last summer-- is about sixty miles as the crow flies northwest from Lolo Pass-- pretty much directly up the Bitterroot Divide, but on the Montana side, high above Highway 90 as it ascends the floor of the valley towards another pass over the Divide. It's probably just as well that hardly anyone seems to know that there are so many old fire lookouts and cabins in the National Forests that are rented out on a nightly basis. They invariably have either unbelievable views or otherwise unique locations, although they're usually quite primitive-- no electricity of running water. But what a great way to be able to spend the night at amazing-- even sacred-- locations, for less than the price of a cheap motel room. From high above, the forest and mountains can be taken in on a grand scale-- lookouts are more than treehouses, really, they're more like a house that seems to be flying. I remember at the Up Up Tower how in spite of our remote location, we had a great cellular phone signal. I even posted an audioblog from there, before we headed back down, on June 30th, 2005.





There are 6 lookout rentals along the Lolo Motorway-- 17 in the Lolo and Clearwater National Forests-- and in all 12 National Forests in the Northern Region of Montana and Idaho I counted 124 separate lookout or cabin rentals. For those of us with vehicles capable of getting to these remote locations-- and they're usually pretty mild dirt roads, depending on season and weather conditions-- getting there is half the fun. Besides four-wheeling jeep trails, one can go hiking, backpacking, mountain biking, horsepacking, cross-country skiing, fishing, hunting, shooting (cameras or guns), kayaking, canoeing, rafting, climbing, paragliding, hang gliding, or just hanging out getting something, or nothing done-- for up to two weeks with a permit. But for those with less time or ground clearance, Highway 12 is probably a better bet to follow the Lewis & Clark route through Idaho. The Clearwater National Forest actually has a web page to help drivers decide which road is more appropriate for them; and we could even stop in at an Idaho Chamber of Commerce and pick up a self guided audio tour cassette of Lewis & Clark information along Highways 12 & 13. Except we no longer have the means of playing a cassette tape-- having made the evolutionary leap to all digital media.

While the changes brought about by the commercial development of the American west have been immense-- being torn from its prehistoric past of millions of years, after 100,000 some odd years of human habitation in relative sustainability, by a mere 200 very destructive and ultimately self-destructive ones-- there do remain a few places where things still haven't changed all that much. Or where the silver lining shows through the clouds of the negative changes-- as it does in the forests of Idaho and Montana. There human development in the low lands has forced big game to seek refuge in the mountains, so that in an area Lewis & Clark found almost devoid of game-- nearly starving as a result-- hunters now pay big bucks for big bucks, for the permits to track moose, bear and other large mammals in the lands managed by the Forest Circus. Just like the animals, The Shoshone sought refuge from their enemies in the mountains due to their inaccessibility-- and yet there were still depths that they never penetrated. Thanks to the extremely rugged character of these ranges of grantite-- shaped by eons of tectonic and glacial forces and densely populated with conifers and their forest's attendant creatures-- there are still extensive areas where humans only rarely if ever go. One of them has a northern border right across the Lochsa River from where we were driving earlier this afternoon.

Selway-Bitterroot is the third largest Wilderness in the lower 48 (with 1.1 million acres)-- surpassed in size only by California's Death Valley Wilderness (3.3 million acres) and Idaho's Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness (2.4 million acres). But only the 600-foot-wide Magruder Corridor-- an unimproved dirt road-- separates the Selway-Bitterroot from the Frank Church-River of No Return. Together with the Gospel Hump Wilderness, that complex of nearly contiguous protected Wilderness in Idaho totals almost 3.7 million acres-- land where no mechanized transportation of any kind is allowed-- not even kayak portage wheels. With the exception of wheelchairs (which makes me wonder if all-terrain wheelchairs-- ATW's?-- even exist; I'm picturing a quad rugby team on a morale building adventure). Despite an extensive trail system stretching well over 3,000 miles through those Wildernesses, over 1.5 million acres remain trail-free. To put that in perspective, there are three other states besides Alaska that have more protected Wilderness acreage than Idaho's 4 million total acres-- Washington (4.3 million acres), Arizona (4.5 million acres), and California (14 million acres). But to put THAT in perspective, Alaska's 57.5 million acres of Wilderness account for an enormous 54% of all the land designated as Wilderness within the United States, which in total comprises an area slightly larger than California (the third largest state). Once Alaska's contribution is removed, though, the protected Wilderness of just the continental U.S. shrinks to only 2.58% of it's total size-- an area slightly smaller than Idaho (the fourteenth largest state).

So for those who seek an experience of the wild land as it was in the day of Lewis & Clark-- and for millennia before that-- there's still some territory left where one can find that sort of thing. There even exist a few landing strips in remote places that were allowed to remain after the area was designated as protected Wilderness; so it's even possible to get inserted, resupplied, or extracted from the backcountry via a small plane. That brings the possibility of a significant experience of the wilderness for those of us with busy lives and some money to spend that much closer. Actually, with a big enough group it might not be that expensive an expedition, per person. It's ironic really, that most of the skills required of the members of the Corps of Discovery for transportation and survival are now recreational activities for Americans-- and some lucky people have even been able to make a living outfitting and leading groups of clients into the backcountry to practice them. The probability that the people on the expedition did indeed have some extremely fun times amidst all the hardships is apparent, when you think about that.

But their passage west over the Bitterroots wasn't one of those fun times. On the ninth day of the ordeal, when the timber had gone the way of the game on the barren snow covered ridges they traversed, Sergeant Patrick Gass wrote,

"We have, however, some hopes of getting soon out of this horrible mountainous desert, as we have discovered the appearance of a valley or level part of the country about forty miles ahead. When this discovery was made there was as much joy and rejoicing among the corps, as happens among passengers at sea, who have experienced a dangerous and protracted voyage, when they first discover land on the long looked for coast."

The main party led by Lewis finally broke out of the mountains on September 22nd-- eleven days after departing from Traveler's Rest. Though they couldn't know it consciously then, it would be exactly a year and a day-- on September 23rd, 1806-- that they would finally make it back to St. Louis. Someone wrote somewhere that it was when they saw a cow in a pasture beside the Missouri River for the first time in two and a half years, that the fact that they were finally getting back home to the civilized world again really sank in. Could it be that the emotional waves of energy at having survived the forced march through the mountains they sent out at that point of the solar cycle created some kind of echo at that same point the following year?

Earlier when I was flipping through the pages of Undaunted Courage, the date September 24th, 1795-- ten years earlier-- jumped off the page at me. It was on that date that a 21 year old Ensign Meriwether Lewis drunkenly barged into a Lieutenant Eliot's house, where a group of other officers had been invited to a meeting. He insisted on arguing politics, and was thrown out on the street, whereupon he challenged Eliot to a duel. Most U.S. officers were conservative Federalists, but Lewis was a more liberal Jefersonian. This would be the equivalent of being a Democrat in the Republican dominated officer corps of today's army. So he was emboldened not only by whiskey and some sort of mania, but also by his personal aquaintance with Jefferson. Dueling was illegal, though, so instead of accepting, Eliot brought Lewis up on charges. The court-marshall was held on November 6th, and Lewis was found not guilty by General Wayne-- the commanding officer-- primarily because he preferred that his subordinate officers settle their differences amongst themselves rather than waste the Army's time with court marshall hearings. Lewis couldn't remain under Eliot's command, though, so he was at that point transferred to the Chosen Rifle Company of elite rifle-sharpshooters under the command of 25 year old William Clark. It wasn't exactly a demotion-- but General Wayne must have realized that Lewis needed some good role models as well as separation from the other officer in the incident-- and Clark was who he chose. It was in these circumstances that they became good friends during the half year they spent together in the same outfit.

Lewis did seem to rein it in a bit after the incident-- no longer addressing everyone as "citizen" in provocative solidarity with the socialist French Revolution, which the Federalists opposed. I wonder if this would have been as bad as calling others, "comrade" in U.S. Army of the mid-twentienth century-- or if the High Federalists were as bad as the Neo Cons of today. Probably not-- but they served the same function-- it's just a matter of scale. It wouldn't much matter for Lewis himself-- he was appointed Jefferson's private secretary six years later, and was asked by the president-elect-- who had no military experience of his own-- to rate every single officer in the U.S. Army according to his competence and politics. Cuts were then made based on his assessments. He accordingly had the last laugh all over again, during that period of time when he and Jefferson lived together at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as two bachelors. To have been a fly on the wall of the White House kitchen in those days-- the conversations the two of them must have had over leftover French food in the wee hours of the morning.

When news of Mackenzie's success reaching the Pacific first reached Jefferson back in 1793, he had taken up a subscription from members of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia to fund an American expedition to the Pacific. He didn't choose eighteen year old Meriwether Lewis to lead it then-- although he had volunteered-- instead picking a French botanist who turned out to be a double agent and had to be recalled, putting an end to the mission. Ironically, the account of the Mackenzie Expedition of 1793 wasn't published until 1801-- and when Jefferson finally received a copy of it during the summer of 1802 when he an Lewis were hanging out at Monticello, it's all they spoke of , day and night.

They took Mackenzie's easy portage over the Continental Divide in the far north as evidence that there could be a similar Northwest Passage farther south, to a navigable river that they could easily portage to and go straight to the Columbia, and the sea. From that point on, Jefferson had already decided to send an expedition again-- and this time Lewis was in the perfect positition to receive the commission to lead it. In the fall of 1802, Jefferson tutored Lewis several hours each day in various topics, scientific as well as of the humanities. He taught him how to classify plants using Latin, how to understand and appreciate them, to be able to describe them. Beyond any specific knowledge, he taught Lewis how to write. Not that he wasn't literate-- but Jefferson wisely realized that honing his powers of description would result in a clearer vision of the West. Journalism was just as important as the other objectives of the expedition's mission. Ambrose writes of Lewis that,

" His sense of pace, his timing, his word choice, his rhythm, his similies and analogies all improved. He sharpened his descriptive powers. He learned how to catch a reader up in his own response to events and places, to express his emotions naturally and effectively."

Without cameras, our only glimpse into the world the Corps of Discovery found in western North America was through their eyes-- transferable to others only inasmuch as they could express it in words. Words on a page, describing what they found. That was Lewis's ultimate mission--to tell the story of what was out there-- and Jefferson is who taught him how to weave a good narrative. Lewis also read extensively from Jefferson's library throughout his time at the White House and at Monticello, so he was exposed to a lot of great writers. He found a way in his own writing to not merely describe events, but also juxtapose with them his own personal observations and reactions. There have been many explorers, and every one kept some form of journal-- but Lewis's is exceptional. It helped to have a mission as grand as he did, but it's what he brought to it as well. And how he had been shaped by Jefferson, who in a way tried to create a copy of himself to send beyond where he could himself go-- an extension of his own mind, to gather information, and spread influence. Like the Norse god Odin, sending out his ravens into the world, who were named Awareness & Memory.

Clark's job was easier, it seems to me. He only had to work with numbers and geographic features, gathering minute bits of data that would go into his map. He stayed in the realm of the left brain, the quantitative measuring of the earth. The features of geology, of relative permanence to humans. Not like the living and feeling creatures changing before their eyes, trying to capture and make sense of all that. He used words just as Lewis did to retain information, but they were a means to a different end. Lewis was the storyteller, the narrator. Clark's product would be graphic-- the most accurate picture ever drawn of the American West.

Clark would be impressed with the state of our understanding of the geography of the earth two hundred years after the expedition-- more so with our ability to represent it in fluid maps on our computer screens, where all the measurable data is embedded in the map itself. The entire topographical surface of the earth can fit easily inside a laptop computer. Incredibly detailed aerial photographs can be overlaid precisely on the maps as well. Incredible representations, that can be reduced down to the level of just numbers: ones and zeros.

Here are the current numbers, as we approach Orofino, Idaho. It's 17:03 PST, which leaves us exactly an hour and a quarter before the sun sets today. Our Elapsed Time since leaving Lolo, Montana is 3:41; since clearing Lolo Pass, 3:03. Our ETA to the Cliff House is about an hour, give or take a few minutes for traffic through Lewiston and Clarkston at the Snake River junction. We're traveling at exactly 60 Miles Per Hour according to our speedometer-- which we know to actually be 60.6 MPH, our true Speed Over Ground via the GPS.

The odometer reads 14,737.8. The total trip miles today will be 218.3-- so having already travelled 163.8, we have just 54.5 miles to go. According to the vehicle's onboard computer, we have a current range of 276 Miles Till Empty; since the last reset in Lolo, we've gotten an average of 21.7 Miles Per Gallon. The fuel gauge reads 5/8 full--12.5 gallons of B20 left in the tank; the reserve is 15 gallons of B100 in 3 gerry cans on the roof rack. My strategy is to burn off the rest of the B20, then dump the B100 into the tank (with a range of about 325 miles from that point). That should get us to the biodiesel pump in Portland tomorrow afternoon, where we can top off with a full 40 gallons of B100 (giving us a range then of 868 miles at our current MPG). And that should get us to Ukiah for one more fill-up before getting back home. Temperatures won't be below freezing from here on out, so Zoot can get back on her vegetarian diet of neat biodiesel.

The temperature's currently 47°F, overcast but clearing, and we've gotten some occasional light rain throughout the afternoon. We're currently heading west, turning south with a bend in the road as it follows the river's course through these hills. It's still pine country, but there's much less timber here, and it's not so steep. The hills are rounder, more grassy, with more cottonwood trees near the river.

The left brain is satisfied-- everything is under control-- we are secure. The right brain can feel free to look about, open the sunroof, smell the air, notice the wildflowers, give the pilot a squeeze, groove to the sounds of Booker T. Jones's Hammond B3 organ, Steve Cropper's Fender Telecaster guitar, Donald Dunn's Fender Precision Bass, Al Jackson's snare drum and high-hat cymbal, as their Melting Pot shuffles along, the organ pushing on towards some sort of epiphany, building up to a change of state at exactly 2:33 in-- at the bridge-- becoming liquid, and flowing on, as we keep rolling along through this beautiful river valley. Coming up now to the intersection with the bridge that crosses the Clearwater over to the north bank, where the town of Orofino sits at the mouth of a narrow side valley. The pilot has decided to stop here for a stretch, and slows down to round the corner to the right onto the bridge, as I mark a waypoint on the GPS.



Friday, March 17th, 2006, 17:03 PST
Highway 12 & Highway 7
Orofino, Idaho
46° 28' 39" North Latitude
116° 15' 30" West Longitude
1,049' Elevation

(this version ✍ 070406 {⊕lynx})

THE ZOOT CHRONICLES

PART ONE ☝ Montana Return

It's getting down to the line here. I've been staying in this room at the Doubletree Edgewater Hotel in Missoula, Montana-- whose sliding glass door opens onto a patio beside the rocky bank of the Clark Fork River-- since I arrived after midnight Sunday night. Ninety some odd hours of solitude used to seem like plenty of time to get a lot of stuff done-- all the things I've been putting off doing while the seemingly more urgent tasks of everyday life have taken precedence. Things like writing, for instance. But the time has largely been taken up with recovery from my solo drive out here from the San Francisco Bay. I took fifty six hours to cover twelve hundred miles, spending two nights in cheap motels in Redding, and The Dalles. The necessities of paying off the sleep debt and detoxifying from the fast food I had to settle for on the road, while keeping blood sugar levels in the acceptable range without ordering room service too much, as well as getting the gear organized, provisions acquired, weather monitored, and route planned for the return to the west coast, didn't leave much extra time. So now, I have just four hours before I need to be at the airport to pick up Cristina. And the stress I feel over this phase of the journey coming to an end before I feel ready to move on, is far outweighed by my eager anticipation of seeing my beloved partner again, and of embarking on an adventure that will take us from the Continental Divide back down to the coast, and through the Spring Equinox-- our second anniversary-- back to the home we share in Santa Cruz.



Outside the window, the Clark Fork River descends from a pass between the snow covered mountains, at the front of which is Mount Sentinel, whose pyramid-like treeless western face has been decorated with a giant "M" by the University whose campus sits at its foot. I read that during the last ice age, Mount Sentinel was a tiny island in a two thousand foot deep glacial lake that filled the Bitterroot Valley. An ice dam burst, and cataclysmic floods drained the lake in just forty eight hours-- floodwaters racing west across sixteen hundred square miles at sixty five miles per hour, changing the landscape of the northwest forever. Until it happened again-- which it did about a hundred times in the last ice age. When I arrived, I put a plastic bottle of drinking water out on the patio, as a crude thermometer. Twice I've found it frozen solid. The night it snowed, it didn't freeze, though--and the snow didn't really stick to the rocks of the riverbank, either. Although it's liquid now, it still feels pretty cold out there, under cloudy skies.

In this rather luxurious hotel room, heated to a comfortable seventy degrees, off road equipment is set about the floor, in somewhat organized groupings. There are four olive drab plastic five gallon gerry cans which currently contain 15 gallons of B100 biodiesel fuel. A blue metal gerry can contains five gallons of drinking water, and the vehicle recovery equipment from the roof rack is laid out on a tarp: shovel, Hi-Lift jack, Pull-Pall land anchor, etc. When the hotel worker who brought in the breakfast tray saw it all the first morning, he said, "Looks like you're digging a hole." I thought of joking about robbing a bank-- but realized he might think I was a terrorist or something, and went with the truth-- "No, I'm just hoping to not get stuck in a hole. This is all four-wheeling equipment-- I'm having my Jeep worked on at AEV." No recognition. College age kid, hefty, white bred, small town look. "Well, I used to have to inventory Humvees, so I know what a pain that can be," he said. "Yeah I bet," I replied, " I guess it's not quite so bad when it's your own stuff instead of the Army's." I wasn't able to take the conversation in the military direction any more than I would've been able to talk sports if he'd brought up how the University basketball team just took the title for the first time in something like thirty years the day before; that from the front page headline of the thin local paper that arrived a few minutes before breakfast. But get me going about vehicles, and you might be there for awhile.

The reason that the apex of this road trip is in Montana is because of a particular vehicle, the diesel Jeep Liberty I've had for the past eight months, or fifteen thousand miles, that I just decided on this road trip to name, "Zoot". It was while crossing from California into Oregon on Interstate 5, listening to the Studio One reggae song, "Small Garden" by Zoot Sims, that I thought I remembered a character from Monty Python & The Holy Grail who introduced herself as "Zoot". But what clinched it was when I looked up Zoot Allures, the 1976 Frank Zappa album, on the internet. It said, "The title is a pun on the French expression 'Zut alors!' which, though it has no direct translation, conveys mild surprise and may be approximated by 'Darn it!' or by the British use of 'Blimey!'," which is approximately the reaction people have when they realize that this Jeep runs on vegetable oil. I would hasten to add that it's a positive exclamation, as one might overhear, "Damn!" escape from the lips of people at a car show as they consider the awe-inspiring machines on display.

When Rudolph Diesel fired up one of his first compression ignition engines at the Paris expo in 1900, it ran on peanut oil. As the story goes, people were drawn into the tent where it was operating by the smell, thinking it was a food pavillion. In fact, the engine would operate on just about any oil for fuel-- whether derived from vegetable, animal, or petroleum sources. Diesel chose peanut oil because a farmer friend of his had a crop that had gone rancid, so he got it at a good price. But ever since the 1920's, oil companies have produced the cheapest fuel in the form of petroleum diesel, and the diesel engine has become synonymous with the dirty, carcinogenic soot that then comes from its exhaust pipe. Being the most efficient internal combustion engine humans have yet come up with-- in terms of the ratio of fuel economy to power output-- the twentieth century saw the world's transportation industry become as dependent on the diesel engine for its ships and trains and trucks, as the petroleum that's fueled it. But as we've become increasingly aware in the past thirty years or so, not only are we killing the planet-- and ourselves-- with the pollution from burning fossil fuels, but they're fast running out. Health concerns are easy to deny-- their effects aren't usually apparent for years-- and environmental concerns even more so, usually taking generations to manifest. Things are increasing exponentially now, but the pace of self-destruction isn't what's traditionally motivated people to demand change-- especially in America. It's the ever increasing price of petroleum that's caused a more immediate interest in alternative fuels. And lo and behold-- the same diesel engine that has become so important in keeping the wheels of our civilization turning, will actually still run on vegetable oil for fuel-- either from virgin crops or recycled cooking oil. Not only is it a renewable fuel, able to be produced domestically in a way that supports farmers, it pollutes far less than petroleum, is better for the engine itself, and unlike any other type of fuel, it can be made in one's home, independent of any corporation.

Since engine manufacturers have designed their products-- specifically the fuel injectors-- to use the less viscous petroleum diesel fuel, to run a modern diesel engine on vegetable oil requires modifying either the engine or the fuel. For the engine, it's a simple preheater to thin out the oil; and for the fuel, it's the processing of the oil by adding methanol or ethanol, and potassium or sodium hydroxide, which catalyzes a reaction that causes the glycerin to drop out of suspension, effectively thinning the oil. The catalysts are then removed, and the finished product is known as "biodiesel". B100 is 100% processed vegetable oil, but since biodiesel can be blended in any proportion with petroleum diesel, B20 (which contains 80% petroleum diesel) is a popular blend. Blended biodiesel minimizes some of the predictable drawbacks of "neat" biodiesel, as straight B100 is also known. They include thickening at a higher temperature than petroleum (gelling usually starts around 30°F, which is aout 20° higher than pure petrioluem diesel, B50 falling somewhere in between); and since it's such a good solvent, B100 will dissolve petroleum deposits in the tank and fuel lines, as well as paint and natural rubber. But those seemed like such small things, given the big picture, when it came time last year to get a new vehicle. I wanted one that would run just as happily the day after the planet is depleated of fossil fuels, as the day before-- when prices are really crazy.

While Chrysler has put their version of the new generation of highly efficient small diesel engines-- which they call "CRD"s for "Common Rail Diesel"s, in their line in Europe and on other continents since the turn of the twenty-first century, last year was the first that they were offered to the North American market. Europe has been much more proactive in transitioning from gasoline to diesel fueled vehicles-- due to a more evolved environmental consciousness, as well as higher fuel prices (which are due in part to taxes that have gone towards pollution controls and the development of an alternative renewable fuels industry). Germany-- Diesel's birthplace-- still leads the way, with VW selling many more TDI engines (which stands for "Turbo Direct Injection", a design similar to the CRD) in Eurpoe than gasoline versions. Besides pickup trucks which have larger engines, the most likely newer passenger vehicles to be seen on American roads powered by diesels are from VW and Mercedes. The Japanese produce a significant proportion of their line with diesels domestically as well, and export them to Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa and South America. We just don't get them here in North America.

The demand here was stunted by some poorly designed diesel engines made by U.S. automakers in response to the oil crisis in the 1970's, and the way diesels have traditionally produced more of the noxious particulate emissions that are obvious to our senses. The California Air resources board went so far as to have new diesel passenger vehicles banned in California in 2002 (leaving trucks and used vehicles unaffected). But these new engines are different-- injecting highly pressurized fuel from a common fuel rail directly into the cylinders (instead of outside the valves as in the traditional diesel engine design), so that it burns much more efficiently for better mileage as well as fewer emissions. In Europe they're now adding a particulate filter to remove the soot, and a catalytic converter to remove nitrogen oxides (the only classifications of pollutants that diesels produce more of than gasoline engines). The fact that the U.S. will be mandating the use of low-sulfer diesel fuel this year (as they've long since done in Europe), means that catalytic converters can be installed or retrofitted on American diesels to remove the NOX gasses now-- whose catalysts would have previously been destroyed by the sulfer in the fuel. So hopefully the more advanced technology being produced over in Europe will begin reaching our shores here in America in greater prevalence in the coming years.

For now, there's only one choice of a small diesel powered sport utility vehicle in the U.S., in the form of the Jeep Liberty CRD-- a descendant of the Cherokee, as it's still known in Europe. Not as bare bones as the classic Jeep Wrangler, but also not as excessive as the Grand Cheroke, the interior of the Liberty proved to be the most comfortable vehicle I'd test driven-- especially as the upright driving position affected my bad hip. It was the most genuinely capable off road vehicle in it's stock form of any I had considered, and the opportunity to run it on biodiesel made it the best of all worlds. At the same time dealers in North America started taking orders for the Liberty CRD's, I found out about American Expedition Vehicles in Missoula, a company that modifies Jeeps to make them more capable off road. Their logo is a buffalo, winding up for a charge. While they mainly worked with the standard Wrangler platform, adding larger wheels and tires, suspension lifts, air locking differentials, armor and recovery equipment-- and in the case of the Brute, a huge Hemi engine and full size OEM looking pickup truck bed-- they had never experimented with the Liberty before. They were, however, at least partially as excited to get a paid-for prototype to work with, as I was to get a professionally done conversion that wouldn't void the factory warranty.

So after being built in Toledo, Ohio almost exactly a year ago, Zoot was shipped via rail and truck to AEV's workshop in Missoula, where a 2.5 inch suspension lift for increased ground and tire clearance, custom wheels and larger all terrain tires, air locking differentials (whose compressor would also be able to refill tire pressure reduced for traversing sand or mud), rock rails, skidplates, and a few other miscelaneous Mopar accessories were installed. But as much as I've enjoyed every mile-- and as good as I feel about ten thousand of them being driven without burning any petroleum-- something has been missing. The Bull Bar-- a heavy duty powdercoated steel front bumper that includes a winch, off road driving lights, recovery and jacking points, and has been referred to as a "beautiful battering ram"-- was not available for the 2005 Liberty when we flew up to Missoula to take delivery of Zoot last summer. The company that makes them in Australia, ARB, finally got one out to AEV in Montana this past January. So as soon as enough of the winter had passed to give a better chance for Missoula not being TOO ridiculously cold, and some vacation time came around, it was time to get on the road again.




But while that may explain the reason behind the eastbound trip, the return west is another story altogether. After she flies in tonight, Cristina and I will spend one last night at the Edgewater, and tomorrow morning we'll get Zoot loaded up, have one last adjustment done by AEV, and head west over Highway 12. We'll be crossing the Montana/Idaho border at Lolo Pass, and on across the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho to a bed and breakfast inn on the cliffs above the Snake River, just across the Washington state line. I wanted to take this route, because as a secondary highway I figured 12 would be more interesting than Interstate 90 that connects Missoula with Coeur d'Alene, Idaho-- which I'd already seen both going and coming. But when I crossed the relatively lower pass over the Bitterroots on Interstate 90 Sunday night, the Thermometer got as low as 14 degrees. I was running pure dinosaur-diesel at that point, due to lack of availability of biodiesel in the areas I was passing through-- instead of B50 as I'd planned to for the sake of the temperature. But even petroleum diesel gels at some point uncomfortably close to there. Luckily it wasn't snowing-- I was very lucky with weather the whole eastbound trip. I had to stick to the Interstate due to huge storms passing through the region and uncertain road conditions in the Sierras and Cascades, but basically drove up the slot of clear weather between systems. That luck isn't guaranteed to continue, though, and as I've monitored the NOAA weather report it's evolved into a situation where we'll be trying to get over the high pass up at the border before a storm dumps a couple feet of snow on the Bitterroots. While the Interstate might seem like a better choice in a storm, there's one factor that makes it very difficult to not take Highway 12. I found out this morning that it was the route that Lewis & Clark took to cross westbound from the Continental Divide in September of 1805, and again on their return east in June of 1806.

I admit to not knowing too much about Lewis & Clark prior to this week. Maybe it would've been different if I'd grown up in Pacific Northwest schools instead of those in former Spanish territory down in Southern California, but when I caught sight of a shiny new 2005 nickel in my change at the Raven Cafe where I went for breakfast the other morning, with a modernized closeup profile of Thomas Jefferson on the front with the cursive word "Liberty", and a view down the Oregon coastline on the back, with the quote, "Ocean in view! O! the joy!", and "Lewis & Clark 1805", I didn't remember what the connection was between Lewis and Clark and Jefferson. But if the bicentennial of their expedition reaching the Pacific occurred last year, I figured there was bound to be some information on the internet about them. I wasn't disappointed in the amount of websites that a simple Googling yielded, and by comparing a few of them, the holes began to get filled in.

Meriwether Lewis had been a lifelong acquaintance of Thomas Jefferson, having been born near Monticello (Jefferson's Virginia estate) in 1774. He entered a career in military service, and rose to the rank of captain by the time he was twenty six. Within a year, the newly elected President Jefferson asked Lewis to be his personal secretary, and when he needed an Army officer to lead an expedition to the Pacific, Lewis was chosen. He had actually been dreaming of exploring beyond the western frontier for years. Initially planned as a scientific expedition beyond the United States' western border, the route would pass through the largely uncharted Louisiana Territory claimed by the French, between Spanish claims to the south, and British to the north. It's primary objective was to find a "Northwest Passage" between the headwaters of the Missouri River east of the Continental Divide, and the Columbia River to the west, thereby opening up a water route for commerce between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean-- and hence Europe and the Far East. Establishing diplomatic and trade relationships with the Native American nations was a secondary objective, and the success of the mission-- even their very survival-- would depend on receiving assistance from the tribes whose land they would pass through.

Jefferson's interest in acquiring knowledge of the resources and native peoples of the west as well as the geography led to Lewis being sent to Philadelphia, where he received training as a naturalist and ethnographer. He studied botany, zoology, mineralogy, astronomy, anatomy and medicine, as well as how to use celestial navigation to determine latitude and longitude. Lewis was given funding to recruit and equip a unit to be known as the "Corps of Discovery", and he chose William Clark-- a former commanding officer and friend, four years his senior, to help him lead the expedition. Clark's expertise lay in more pracical matters than the academic ones Lewis was being trained in; he had experience negotiating with Indians-- as well as fighting with them. And he was more of an expert in geography and navigation-- which were important skills both to get the Corps across an uncharted continent and back home again, and also to record data and observations that would allow the creation of the most accurate map yet of the west. The bulk of the expedition was comprised of U.S. army soldiers, along with some French boatmen and interpreters. Clark brought along his lifelong companion York, an African American slave he had inherited, and at some point Lewis acquired a dog, a large black Newfoundland named Seaman.

Then in the spring of 1803, the Louisiana Purchase occurred, and the United States now "owned" the vast area of North America the French used to claim, and had a clear path to the as yet undefined borders of the Pacific coastline in the Oregon Country. But except for some British and American ships that had explored and charted the area where the Columbia River enters the Pacific in the early 1790's, nearly all the land between the Mississippi and the Pacific in those middle latitudes of North America was off the map. In one of the original-- and certainly the most epic-- American off-road adventures, the Corps of Discovery set out in keelboats from Camp DuBois, where St. Louis now sits on the Mississippi River, on May 14th, 1804. They entered the waters of the Missouri River, rowing upstream beyond the edge of the known world, past the point where they wouldn't return for two and a half years.

By October 25th, 1804, the expedition had traveled sixteen hundred miles up the Missouri, into the middle of the present state of North Dakota, when the river began to freeze. They built a winter encampment among the Mandan tribe, which is where they hired another interpreter, the French Canadian trader Toussant Charbonneau, who had two wives from the Shoshone tribe of the northern Rockies. One of them, Sacagawea, had been captured from her people three years earlier when she would have been thirteen, by a Hidatsa war party; she had been enslaved, taken as a wife by a Hidatsa warrior, and then lost in a bet to Charbonneau. The captains decided to hire her as well, to interpret and act as intermediary with the tribes of the Rockies, whose assistance they would need if they were going to survive the trek across the Rocky Mountains and back, if there was no easy portage. The fact that she was pregnant that winter-- and gave birth on February 11th, 1805, at Fort Mandan with the assistance of the captains, to a baby boy they named Jean Baptiste Charbonneau-- might have been seen as a hindrance to a transcontinental expedition. But not only would Sacagawea's connection to the people and diplomatic skills help the mission greatly, the mere fact that they were traveling with a woman and baby removed the perception that they were a war party. Having an African American-- a race never before seen by even the natives who had encountered European trappers and traders before-- as well as a boatman who played the fiddle named Pierre Cruzatte, the son of a French Canadian father and an Omaha mother-- must have also helped in breaking the ice.

When the ice on the Missouri River had finally broken up enough to allow the expedition to continue, on April 7th, 1805, the thirty three people who would actually make it to the Pacific and back set out. There were the two captains, three sergeants, twenty three privates, three interpreters including Sacagawea, the baby that Clark nicknamed Pomp, York the slave, Seaman the dog, and whatever other pack animals they had at that point. The prairie dog they had spent a whole day capturing, along with four magpies, a grouse, their maps and journals up to that point, and all the expedition members designated to return after the first winter-- or court marshaled and dishonorably discharged for stealing whiskey, desertion, or in one case, making "mutinous expressions"-- headed back down the Missouri to St. Louis in one of the boats. One deserter, a Frenchman named "La Liberté", was never caught. And everyone else headed upriver. It would be one hundred and fifty six days later, after both the acknowledgment of some harsh realities and some incredibly good luck, that they would be arriving in the Bitterroot Valley.

By comparing the map of Lewis & Clark's route to my modern map of Missoula, I realized that they had entered the Bitterroot Valley from the south, so our path won't join theirs until we reach the town of Lolo, Montana-- about ten miles south of Missoula. That's where they camped at a place they called Traveler's Rest on September 9th and 10th, 1805, before heading up Lolo Creek on September 11th, towards a pass at the ridgeline that would take them deeper into the mountains, into what would be the most difficult part of the journey they had yet encountered. But when they returned over Lolo Pass on June 30th, 1806, the trail was known to them-- no longer uncharted territory. The mystery had been defined, the land forever transformed in their eyes.

It was at this point that they split into two groups to cover more ground on their return, Clark to explore the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to the south, and Lewis to explore the northern boundaries of the Louisiana Territory, coming down the Missouri River and meeting up with Clark's party where the Yellowstone joins it. Clark and the main party headed south, retracing the path they'd taken up the Bitterroot Valley the previous September, and Lewis took a smaller party north along the Bitterroot River, to find the shortcut over the Continental Divide to the Falls of the Missouri that they'd heard about from the natives. After heading up the west bank of the Bitterroot River (which he called the Clark), Lewis decided to attempt a crossing to the north bank of the Clark Fork (or East Fork Clark per Lewis) after the Bitterroot joined it. It didn't go well, but except for a mile detour to retreive a raft that had drifted that far-- and some wet equipment-- it also could have been much worse. This was just northwest of modern day Missoula, and on that night-- July 3rd, 1806-- they camped on Grant Creek near where it empties into the Clark Fork. By the night of July 4th, 1806, they were camped on the north side of the Blackfoot River about eight miles from its junction with the Clark Fork. Looking at the map, I realized that Lewis' party would have passed the location where the Doubletree Edgewater Hotel had been built, on the north bank of the Clark Fork right next to the pass where the river comes out of the snowcapped hills of the east, only a few miles downstream from its confluence with the Blackfoot. Lewis himself could have walked right across the spot where I'm sitting here writing this. This could have been where the group parted ways with their Nez Perce guides, before heading up the pass.



It seems odd to me that they would be marching on Independence Day, seeing how much they'd partied in years past. In 1803, news of the Louisianna Purchase had just reached the citizens-- the U.S. suddenly twice as big. In 1804 they'd fired off a cannon and allowed themselves extra rations of whiskey (in addition to the four ounces that was their daily ration) to celebrate the U.S.'s twenty eighth birthday, and the following year they used up the last of the rum (their backup liquor, apparently) on that occasion. So by July 4th, 1806 they would have been sober for exactly a year, come to think of it. No longer on the white man's medicine, the world may have appeared different. Perhaps it wasn't just that the land had changed in their eyes, but that they had been changed by the land, and the people they found living there. Their uniforms were all gone prior to their return over the mountains-- given away to natives or just worn out, replaced with buckskin clothing that they made for themselves, moccasins on their feet. Their priorities had changed. Or maybe their vision of who the Americans were, or what it meant to be free had changed. There's no mention I can find in the journal passages posted online about the United States on that day, but Sergeant Patrick Gass did write in his journal on the night of July 4th, 1806, referring to the Nez Perce guides who had just gotten them back across the Bitterroots,

"...it is but justice to say, that the whole nation to which they belong, are the most friendly, honest and ingenuous people that we have seen in the course of our voyage and travels. After taking our farewell of these good hearted, hospitable and obliging sons of the west, we proceeded on."



Thursday, March 16th, 2006, 18:06 MST
The Doubletree Edgewater Hotel, Room 122
Missoula, Montana
46° 52' 03" North Latitude
113° 59' 11" West Longitude
3,185' Elevation


(this version ✍ 070406)

THE ZOOT CHRONICLES

INTRODUCTION

It all started as an intention to post a blog from the road when we went to Montana last month. I've been wanting to say something about the biodiesel experiment our household has been conducting for the past several months, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to juxtapose some dry facts and numbers with a story. Then, as inevitably happens when on the road, our own story coincided with the greater story-- first the geographic, and then the historic.

It was while I was having breakfast at the Raven Cafe in downtown Missoula one morning, that I happened to run into Lewis & Clark. Starting from almost total ignorance about who they were and what their expedition did, it became increasingly clear that there was a continuity between their story and our own. I discovered that our paths would coincide, separated as they were by two centuries.

When that company of thirty three people crossed western North America in the first few years of the 19th Century, it was a land of seemingly unlimited possibilities. It was The Garden-- where all life came from-- and it would always provide. It may have been feast or famine, but the idea of humans depleting nature's stores was inconceivable to them. Now, as the 21st Century unfolds, the frontier has withdrawn up to Alaska, the atmosphere is shrinking, the polluted waters are rising, and humans living here are being forced to confront some very real limits. The explorers of today aren't discovering any new land out there, but rather, new ways of living sustainably on the land that's right here. The modern pioneers are the first ones to actually adopt the new ways in their daily lives.

So-- whether your interests lie in the history of the American West through the eyes of the Lewis & Clark expedition, it's future through the ongoing saga of our conversion from petroleum use to a renewable biofuel for transportation, or merely keeping up with the McSpencers-- I hope you all can find something to enjoy in reading The Zoot Chronicles.

Dave Earpson
Santa Cruz, California
April 28, 2006

{This is a work in progress. Any comments, questions, constructive criticism, relevant links, &tc. can be sent to: corvid33@yahoo.com }

(this version ✍ 050806)

Diablo Foothills

2006

Diablo Oaks

2006

Mt. Diablo Snowfall

2006