A Note on the Source Record
The two journal entries provided for this synthesis (dated September 4 and September 16, 1805) do not mention Old Toby by name. They describe the context in which he served as guide — the meeting with the Flathead Salish at Ross’s Hole and the brutal crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains along the Lolo Trail — but the excerpts themselves focus on the Salish encounter and on the suffering of the Corps in the snowbound highlands. This synthesis is therefore necessarily limited: it can place Old Toby within the documented events of those days, but cannot quote the journals’ direct characterizations of him from the material supplied.
Context: The Shoshone Connection
Old Toby was the Shoshone man whom Meriwether Lewis and William Clark engaged at the Shoshone camps in late August 1805 to guide the expedition northward and westward over the mountains toward navigable waters of the Columbia drainage. By the dates of the entries provided here, he was already with the Corps, leading them down the Bitterroot Valley and then up onto the Lolo Trail.
September 4, 1805 — Ross’s Hole and the Salish
The first entry in the supplied record places the expedition in the Bitterroot Valley at Ross’s Hole, where they met the Flathead Salish. Old Toby would have been present at this council, though he is not named in the excerpt. The narrator describes a friendly reception:
Those people received us friendly, threw white robes over our Shoulders and smoked in the pipes of peace.
The Salish traded horses to the expedition — a transaction critical to the coming mountain crossing — and shared route information. Private Joseph Whitehouse, one of the narrators of this entry, recorded his impression of the Salish language:
as if they had an Impediment in their Speech or a brogue on their Tongue.
Old Toby’s role at this council, while undocumented in the excerpt, would have been logistical: he was the man expected to lead them onward from this point, and the Salish information about the trail ahead would have been measured against his own knowledge.
September 16, 1805 — Crossing the Bitterroots
The second entry plunges the expedition into the disaster of the Lolo Trail. The narrator’s voice — terse, suffering, exposed — captures the conditions Old Toby was navigating:
I have been wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life. Indeed I was at one time fearfull my feet would freeze in the thin Mockersons which I wore.
The entry continues with a catalogue of privation: deep snow, fallen timber, exhausted horses, men too sick to travel, and a diet that had collapsed to candles, portable soup, and slaughtered pack stock. The summary describes this as "the closest the expedition came to complete failure."
It is in precisely this stretch of the journey that Old Toby’s reputation in the broader expedition record is made and unmade. He was the one leading them through this maze of ridges. Yet the supplied excerpt does not quote any journal-keeper’s assessment of his guidance on this date — whether praising his skill in finding the trail at all under deep snow, or noting the moments when the route became uncertain. Readers seeking those judgments will not find them in the two entries provided here.
What the Provided Record Does Not Tell Us
The journals of Lewis, Clark, Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse contain numerous direct mentions of Old Toby across the late August and September 1805 entries — his hiring, his sons traveling with him, moments when the party briefly lost the trail, and his eventual departure on the Clearwater after the mountains were crossed. None of those direct passages appear in the two entries supplied for this synthesis. As a result:
- His name does not appear in the quoted material above.
- His specific decisions, route choices, and interactions with the captains on these two dates are not documented in the excerpts.
- His personal history before joining the expedition is not addressed in the provided record and will not be speculated upon here.
Old Toby’s Place in These Two Days
What the record does establish, by inference from the surrounding events, is the following. On September 4 at Ross’s Hole, Old Toby was the expedition’s link to a continent of mountain knowledge — the man whose route they were following when they happened upon the Salish. On September 16, deep in the Bitterroots, he was the man whose path they were still following, even as that path nearly killed them. The Corps did not turn back. They did not lose themselves entirely. They emerged onto the Weippe Prairie among the Nez Perce within days of the September 16 entry. That outcome — survival, however narrow — is the silent testimony to Old Toby’s work in this stretch of the journals, even where his name does not appear.
A Sparse Record, Honestly Acknowledged
This synthesis is constrained by what was provided. With only two entries, neither naming Old Toby directly, a full biographical portrait is not possible from this material alone. The richer record of his service — his hiring at the Shoshone camps, the moments of uncertainty on the Lolo, his quiet departure after the mountains — lies in journal entries not included in the sample above. What can be said with confidence is that on September 4 and September 16, 1805, the events described in these excerpts were unfolding under his guidance, and that the expedition’s passage from the Bitterroot Valley to the Clearwater drainage was, in significant measure, his accomplishment.
