Adjacent to an East Broadway bridge spanning Rattlesnake Creek, right in front of a McDonald’s Restaurant, sits a small historical marker proclaiming the site to be a Lewis and Clark camping spot. With a little imagination, the rippling waters and creekside cottonwoods set the mood and the modern visitor is taken back to a scene from centuries ago. But there is a problem with this: Lewis and Clark didn’t really camp there.

But they came close. On their return trip from the Pacific Ocean, Meriwether Lewis led a small party eastward into the Missoula Valley where they spent the evening of July 3, 1806, in the vicinity of Grant Creek only a few miles to the west of downtown Missoula. Clark, meanwhile, led a separate party to the north. The next morning, Lewis and his party said their goodbyes to a group of Nez Perce and Flathead Indians who had traveled with them to the Grant Creek campsite. From there he wrote about their trek toward present-day Missoula, “the first 5 miles of our rout was through a part of the extensive plain in which we were encamped, we then entered the mountains with the East fork of Clark’s river through a narrow confined pass on it’s N. side.”This “narrow confined pass” followed the north bank of the Clark Fork River on a well-traveled Indian trail. The route then enters Hell Gate Canyon, a place that took its name from Blackfeet Indians ambushing other Indian tribes as they passed that way.

When Lewis’s party reached the mouth of the Blackfoot River, it followed that drainage 8 miles up canyon where it camped on the evening of July 4, 1806. The expedition’s path through the Missoula Valley took the same general route that became the Mullan Road and it remains a major travel corridor today. Historian Stephen Ambrose, author of Undaunted Courage, described the route in modern terms, “They passed through present-day Missoula, up today’s Broadway Street across the river from the University of Montana."

Credits and Sources:

Ambrose, Stephen. Undaunted Courage. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996.

Fritz, Harry W. “Core Discovery,”Montanan, Winter 2002.

Moulton, Gary E. Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. 8. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Photographs courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, The University of Montana, Missoula, Montana.