Looking for Lewis and Clark

Story #4, by Forrest Fenn

West Yellowstone News

In the summer of 1946, when I was sixteen years old, I read a book titled Journal of a Trapper, by Osborne Russell, who in 1835 traveled along the Madison River where Hebgen Lake is now. Russell, along with a few of Jim Bridger's trappers, was attacked by eighty Blackfeet Indians near where Hebgen dam would be built eighty years later. After a brief fight, Russell escaped west toward Stinking Creek. About thirty years earlier Lewis and Clark on their wonderful Corp of Discovery had passed through Montana not too many miles to the north. I was thrilled and wished I could have been part of those adventures. It was a primeval thought. Sixteen-year-old kids are like that.

After telling my parents that my elbow needed some space I told my friend, Donnie Joe Heath, that I was going out to look for Lewis and Clark. He quickly informed me that he would just ride along and help me keep the mountains company. So we rented a couple of low octane horses from a friend near Parade Rest Ranch and started up Red Canyon.
It was important that we be honest with the situation, and making plans is antagonistic to freedom, so we limited ourselves to three candy bars each, bedrolls, a shotgun, fly rods, a camera, knives and matches. Oh, and we had a Forest Service map of the Gallatin National Forest.

The first afternoon we found ourselves way up on top of a beautiful mountain under a lapis lazuli sky, and I asked Donnie to take my picture (I was proud of the coon skin cap my mother had made for me) as I surveyed the land that had not changed in a million years. We were thrilled and figured the world was ours. Surely the rippling brooks would be grateful for our company and the grizzlies were only mean to people who didn't fully understand what the wilderness was all about, as we did.
Well, that night we couldn't get the dumb fire started and we had used most of our matches so we very wisely wadded the map and hoped that we would be forgiven that one small foible. It worked and as the fire crackled and our horses wandered off, we ate our three candy bars and talked long into the night. Osborne Russell had been in the mountains for nine years and suddenly we knew exactly what it was like.

We spent the next day looking for the horses and finally found them down by a rivulet where the grass was tall and abundant. There were no fish around anywhere and prudence whispered that we should not shoot two magpies. Later we wished we had, when we discovered that hunger is punitive by nature and just gets worse over time.

The next day we rode the mountains, the hills, the valleys, the hollows, the dales and the depressions, looking for something to catch or shoot. There wasn't't much. We did shoot one animal but I promised not to tell. So on the fourth, fifth, or sixth day we decided that we had had enough of this breathtaking nonsense and wanted to go home. Donnie looked like an untipped waiter and became cranky. When he leaned forward in his saddle and just stared at me, I knew enough to sit there, be quiet, and try to appear useful.

I could have tolerated his displeasures more easily if my saddle sores had not become such an issue. I found that riding behind the saddle on the warm, soft, furry, rump helped some but my narrow-minded horse didn't like it and kept doing some funny dance step that I didn't trust completely, so I put my handkerchief over the hardest part of the saddle and just tried to smile.
Donnie wouldn't speak to me because he said this unfortunate adventure was ill-conceived, dumb thought out, and I was over rated. He said that he had important things to do in West and insisted that we go out. I quickly agreed but the problem was that neither of us knew where out was.

So I applied some mountain man logic. The sun comes up in the east and we thought out was south so that made it easy, except that south was over the highest mountain we had ever seen. Some arrogant birds kept flying by, yawking at us, always out of range. So we decided to follow a streamlet down hill. At least we could have water and eventually we would come to a road or a forest service man-trail. Finally, the little stream we were following narrowed and narrowed into a vertical canyon until nothing could get through it but water. I think Donnie became delirious because he kept saying, If we don't change course soon we'll end up where we're going. He wasn't smiling. Then one of his stirrup straps broke and he had to ride on one leg. The crisis had arrived so we turned back for half a day until we found another stream to follow. Bad luck can always be trusted.
I won't go on with this story because the years have been kind to my memory, except to say that finally, we loosened our grip on the reins and the horses took us to a dirt road, fifty miles from where we started. At last, Donnie was in good spirits and wore an inflated smile.

A few days later, I made some notes that I thought might be helpful to any future sixteen-year-old geniuses who think looking for Lewis and Clark might be fun:

Hunger is both unrelenting and unreasonable.
You can't hide from thunderstorms.
Porcupine meat tastes like kerosene.
Coffee made from boiling pine needles might bring on cardiac arrest.
There is nothing worse than a wet bedroll on a cold night.
Mountains can instantly change their personality.
Tired horses will lie down with you in the saddle.
The older you get the smarter your parents become.
Movies lie to you.
You can never catch fish when you are hungry.
God looks down fondly at foolish teenagers.

Over the years I have read Journal of a Trapper a dozen times, and always with a deeper appreciation for who Osborn Russell was. The mountains continue to beacon me. They will always do that.

Forrest Fenn