“Whoa!
In So Many Ways: View from the Wagon Seat” is Chapter 7 in Barefoot
Hearted, the story of my journey by covered wagon through
western Montana along segments of the route Meriwether Lewis
and
William Clark traversed with the Corps of Discovery in 1805. Setting
out from Bannack, the ghost town that was once Montana's old
territorial capital, I traveled
up Horse Prairie Valley, where Lewis first encountered the Lemhi
Shoshone, the tribe who would supply him horses to reach the Bitterroot
Valley.
In my continuing on to the Big Hole Valley, then over the Continental
Divide on old Gibbon Pass road to the Bitterroot Valley, I followed
reversely along part of Clark's 1806 return route.
A mild intermountain
micro-climate, the
Bitterroot Valley was, for 12,000 years, the home territory of
the Salish Nation. In what we
look
back upon nowadays as a prophetic meeting, the indigenous Salish,
in a band 400-strong, warmly welcomed the Corps of Discovery (purportedly, the
first white men and one black man to arrive in the region) and
assisted the expedition in its quest to travel to the Pacific and
back. I now reside in this valley, and it is, in large part, the setting for
Barefoot Hearted.
Gibbon Pass is named after Colonel John Gibbon who led the 7th
U.S. Infantry over the wagon road into the Big Hole Valley in
1877,
launching a surprise attack on the sleeping family encamp-ment
of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce. The battlefield will forever
be
a memorial and mourning place for the Nez Perce. In 1963, it became
part of the National Park Service, designated as the Big Hole
National
Battlefield. The visitors center is open daily, except on Thanksgiving,
Christmas, and New Year's Day. For more information, go to
nps.gov/biho
|
The Big Hole, Valley of Ten Thousand Haystacks
|
For a sysnopsis of Barefoot
Hearted,
go to About the Books (below). |
|
