It is March 6th. Welcome to Episode 65 of History in a Year. Today, the Corps of Discovery achieves the impossible. To reach the Pacific Ocean, Lewis and Clark must drag their men across the Bitterroot Mountains on the infamous Lolo Trail. We follow the expedition through an 11-day, freezing, starving nightmare where they are forced to eat their own horses just to survive. We meet the Nez Perce tribe—and the lone elderly woman who saves the Americans from being massacred—before finally standing with William Clark as he writes the most famous journal entry in American history.
STEPHEN:
Welcome to History in a Year: America’s First 250 Years.
LEAH:
Join us every single day as we journey from the Revolution of 1776 to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode and join the discussion at PointedWords.com. I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
It is March 6th. Welcome to Episode 65. Yesterday, the Corps of Discovery stood at the Continental Divide and watched the dream of the Northwest Passage die.
LEAH:
There was no easy water route to the Pacific Ocean. Just hundreds of miles of jagged, snow-capped mountains.
STEPHEN:
Thanks to an unbelievable coincidence, Sacagawea had reunited with her long-lost brother, the Chief of the Shoshone. The Shoshone sold the Americans the horses they desperately needed and provided an old guide to show them a path over the Bitterroot Mountains.
LEAH:
That path is called the Lolo Trail. And crossing it was the darkest, most agonizing chapter of the entire expedition.
STEPHEN:
It is early September 1805. You would think the weather would be manageable, but at that elevation, it was a frozen hellscape.
LEAH:
A massive blizzard hit them. The snow was so deep the horses were slipping off the icy cliffs and rolling down the mountainsides, smashing the expedition’s wooden desks and breaking their scientific equipment.
STEPHEN:
They were completely lost. The trail was buried under the snow, and their Shoshone guide admitted he didn’t know which way to go.
LEAH:
And then, the food ran out.
STEPHEN:
There was no game to hunt. No deer, no elk, no birds. The men were pushed to the absolute brink of starvation. They had to break into their emergency rations—a gelatinous, disgusting block of dehydrated cow hooves and cartilage called “portable soup.”
LEAH:
When that ran out, they had to start killing and eating their own pack horses just to stay alive. They were so hungry, some of the men actually started eating the expedition’s bear-tallow candles.
STEPHEN:
The crossing of the Lolo Trail took 11 agonizing days. Finally, on September 22, 1805, William Clark hiked ahead of the main group and looked down into a valley.
LEAH:
He saw a massive, flat prairie. The mountains were finally behind them.
STEPHEN:
But when the starving, freezing Americans stumbled down out of the mountains, they walked right into a massive encampment of the Nez Perce tribe.
LEAH:
The Nez Perce were a powerful, wealthy tribe who bred magnificent Appaloosa horses. And when they saw these exhausted, half-dead white men stumble into their camp, the Nez Perce warriors had a very practical thought.
STEPHEN:
They looked at the Americans’ cutting-edge rifles, and they thought, “We should just kill them and take their guns.”
LEAH:
It would have been incredibly easy. The Americans were too weak to fight back. The entire Corps of Discovery was minutes away from being wiped off the map.
STEPHEN:
But they were saved by a single, elderly Nez Perce woman named Watkuweis.
LEAH:
Years earlier, Watkuweis had been kidnapped by another tribe and sold to white traders in Canada, who had treated her with kindness before she eventually escaped and made her way back home.
STEPHEN:
When the Nez Perce warriors were debating whether to kill Lewis and Clark, Watkuweis stepped forward. She pointed at the Americans and told her people: “Do them no harm. These are the people who helped me.”
LEAH:
The Nez Perce listened to her. Instead of killing the expedition, they fed them. They gave them massive amounts of dried salmon and camas roots.
STEPHEN:
(Which actually made all the Americans violently ill for a week because their starving stomachs couldn’t handle the sudden influx of rich food, but it kept them alive!)
LEAH:
The Nez Perce showed them how to burn out the trunks of massive Ponderosa pine trees to make dugout canoes.
STEPHEN:
The Americans left their horses with the Nez Perce, loaded their supplies into their new canoes, and hit the water. They floated down the Clearwater River, into the Snake River, and finally, into the massive, roaring current of the Columbia River.
LEAH:
They were on the home stretch. The Columbia River was the highway to the Pacific.
STEPHEN:
They navigated treacherous rapids, trading with the Chinookan tribes along the riverbanks. The weather turned absolutely miserable. It rained constantly. Their leather clothes were rotting off their bodies.
LEAH:
But on November 7, 1805, the fog finally lifted.
STEPHEN:
William Clark looked out past the front of his canoe, and he grabbed his journal. He scribbled down the most famous words of the entire expedition:
LEAH:
“Ocian in view! O! the joy.”
STEPHEN:
Now, technically, he was looking at the massive estuary of the Columbia River, and they were still about 20 miles from the actual open ocean. But he could hear the crashing waves, and he could taste the salt in the water.
LEAH:
They had done it. They had crossed the North American continent.
STEPHEN:
But the celebration didn’t last long, because they immediately realized they had to survive another winter before they could go home.
LEAH:
And it was raining. It rained for exactly 12 days straight. They were completely soaked, shivering on the beach, trying to decide where to build their winter fort.
STEPHEN:
And to make that decision, the commanding officers did something completely unprecedented in American military history.
LEAH:
Lewis and Clark called the entire expedition together, and they held a vote.
STEPHEN:
Every single member of the Corps of Discovery got an equal say in where they would spend the winter. They voted to cross to the south side of the river and build Fort Clatsop in present-day Oregon.
LEAH:
But look at who cast a ballot that day.
STEPHEN:
Sacagawea, a teenage Native American woman, cast a vote. And York, an enslaved Black man, cast a vote.
LEAH:
It would take the United States government another 115 years to legally grant women and Black Americans the right to vote. But on a rainy beach in the Pacific Northwest in 1805, the Corps of Discovery operated as a true democracy.
STEPHEN:
They spent a miserable, rain-soaked winter at Fort Clatsop, boiling ocean water to make salt and repairing their clothes.
LEAH:
In March 1806, they packed up their canoes, handed the keys to Fort Clatsop over to the local Clatsop chief, and began the agonizing 4,000-mile journey back home.
STEPHEN:
The return trip was much faster. They split up to map more territory, had a brief, deadly skirmish with the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, and eventually reunited.
LEAH:
They dropped Sacagawea and Charbonneau off at the Mandan villages, paying Charbonneau $500 for his services. Sacagawea, arguably the most valuable member of the team, received absolutely nothing.
STEPHEN:
On September 23, 1806, the residents of St. Louis looked out at the Mississippi River and saw a ragged, sun-baked group of men rowing toward the docks.
LEAH:
The Corps of Discovery had been gone for two and a half years. Most of the country assumed they were dead.
STEPHEN:
But they had returned. They brought back maps that transformed the American understanding of the continent. They documented over 300 new species of plants and animals. And they solidified the United States’ claim to the Pacific Northwest.
LEAH:
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark became national heroes overnight. Thomas Jefferson’s great gamble had paid off.
STEPHEN:
But while Jefferson was expanding the empire of liberty in the West, he was fighting a very different kind of war in the East. A war on the open ocean.
LEAH:
Join us tomorrow for Episode 66. The Shores of Tripoli. We leave the Rocky Mountains behind and head to the Mediterranean Sea. Thomas Jefferson decides he is absolutely done paying bribes to pirates. We watch the United States Navy go to war against the Barbary States in the first foreign conflict in American history.
STEPHEN:
I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode at PointedWords.com. And this… is our story.