The scene depicts the late June 1805 phase of the expedition, when Meriwether Lewis first encountered the Great Falls on June 13 and the party then undertook the arduous portage around the series of five cascades over roughly the next month. The journals describe the falls in detail and record that Sacagawea, recovering from severe illness, was with the party as they reconnoitered the terrain. By placing her prominently in the composition, Seltzer reflected the early twentieth-century reframing of Sacagawea as a central expedition figure, a popular cultural shift driven by Eva Emery Dye’s 1902 novel and by suffrage-era monuments and pageants.

Olaf Carl Seltzer (1877–1957) was a Danish-born painter who emigrated to Great Falls, Montana, in 1892 and became a close friend and studio associate of Charles M. Russell. After Russell’s death in 1926, Seltzer increasingly took on historical commissions, and in the late 1920s he began a long association with Tulsa oilman Thomas Gilcrease, for whom he eventually produced a large series of small historical paintings documenting events of the American West. This 1927 canvas dates from the start of that productive late phase. The painting is held in the Gilcrease Museum collection in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Seltzer’s expedition and frontier subjects form one of the strongest concentrations of his work. Among Lewis and Clark imagery, Seltzer’s contributions are valued for their geographic accuracy, owing to his long residence in Great Falls within sight of the very landscape depicted.

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Painted in 1999, the work falls within Fritz’s sustained engagement with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, a project that occupied much of his studio practice in the years leading up to the bicentennial commemorations of 2003–2006. Although “Prairie Moonrise” does not illustrate a specific dated journal entry, it evokes the kind of evening encampments Meriwether Lewis and William Clark described repeatedly along the Missouri River in present-day Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana during the summer and autumn of 1804 and again in 1806. The journals frequently note the moon, the silence of the plains, and the abundance of game—observations Fritz translates into a quieter pictorial register.

Fritz, based in Billings, Montana, is among the contemporary painters most closely identified with the visual interpretation of the expedition. His one hundred–painting series chronicling the Corps of Discovery, developed over more than a decade, was published as “Charles Fritz: An Artist with the Corps of Discovery” (2007) and exhibited at venues including the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, with which this painting’s provenance is associated. “Prairie Moonrise” is held in the collection of Timothy Peterson, a private collector whose holdings of Fritz’s expedition-related work have contributed to the ongoing documentation of the artist’s output. Small studies of this kind often functioned as preparatory observations for Fritz’s larger narrative canvases, though they stand on their own as finished works within his broader landscape practice.

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The scene refers to the expedition’s crossing of the Bitterroots along the Lolo Trail in September 1805, the most physically punishing stretch of the westbound journey. Guided by Old Toby, the Shoshone they had engaged at Camp Fortunate, Lewis and Clark led the Corps over a high, snow-dusted ridge route used by the Nez Perce to reach the buffalo country. The men ran short of game, killed and ate several colts, and arrived at the Weippe Prairie on September 22 in a weakened condition. Fritz painted this work in 2004, during the bicentennial commemoration years of 2003–2006, when he was completing a long cycle of expedition paintings intended to follow the route in sequence.

Fritz, a Montana-based painter born in 1955, has built much of his career around historical landscape and the Lewis and Clark subject in particular. His bicentennial-era series of roughly one hundred expedition paintings was exhibited and published as Charles Fritz: An Artist with the Corps of Discovery, and individual works from the cycle were shown at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which has handled provenance for several pieces in the series. We Proceeded On is held in the collection of Timothy Peterson. The painting shares its title with the quarterly journal of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, a phrase that has become shorthand within the historical-memory tradition for the expedition’s daily grind of forward movement.

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On January 8, 1806, Clark traveled south from the expedition’s winter quarters at Fort Clatsop to the site of a beached whale near present-day Cannon Beach, hoping to obtain blubber and oil for the party. Crossing Tillamook Head, he paused at its summit and recorded in his journal that the prospect was the grandest he had ever beheld, describing the ocean breaking against the rocks below and the coastline extending southward toward what is now Ecola State Park. The viewpoint Fritz paints corresponds to that journal entry, one of the few moments in the expedition record when Clark allowed himself an extended aesthetic response to landscape.

Fritz, based in Billings, Montana, has spent much of his career retracing the Lewis and Clark route and painting its sites from direct observation. His 2004–2005 series of roughly one hundred paintings marking the expedition’s bicentennial was exhibited at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, and subsequently toured; this 2009 canvas belongs to the continued body of work that grew out of that project. The painting is held in the collection of Timothy Peterson. Fritz’s expedition paintings have become a reference point in contemporary Lewis and Clark visual scholarship, valued for their topographic accuracy and their close correspondence to specific journal passages, and this view of the Pacific from Clark’s lookout is among the more frequently reproduced images from the Oregon segment of his series.

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The expedition reached the Three Forks on July 25, 1805, a navigational turning point in the journey west. Lewis named the three streams for President Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State James Madison, and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. The party camped here for several days, resting and recording observations while Sacagawea recognized the country as the territory of her Shoshone people, from whom she had been taken years earlier — information that would shortly help the Corps secure the horses needed to cross the Bitterroots. Paxson painted the canvas in 1912, three years after completing his best-known work, the mural Custer’s Last Stand, and during a period when he was producing a sustained body of paintings devoted to the Lewis and Clark Expedition for Montana civic and commercial patrons.

Edgar Samuel Paxson (1852–1919) moved from New York to Montana in 1877 and spent decades interviewing surviving participants of frontier events, collecting Indigenous and military artifacts, and building a reputation as the state’s foremost narrative painter. His Lewis and Clark series, executed in the years surrounding the expedition’s centennial, remains the most ambitious pictorial treatment of the journey by a Montana-based artist. The painting is held by the Montana Historical Society in Helena and is associated with the Three Forks community, where the confluence is preserved as Missouri Headwaters State Park. The work is frequently reproduced in scholarship and interpretive material concerning the expedition’s passage through Montana.

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The painting dates from 1907, a productive period in Russell’s career when he had moved beyond his earliest cowboy-life subjects and was increasingly devoting canvases to Plains Indian life as he understood it from his time among the Blood (Kainai) in Alberta in 1888–1889 and from continued contact with Blackfeet and other tribes in Montana. By 1907 Russell had relocated to Great Falls, was married to Nancy Cooper Russell (who managed his career and prices), and was beginning to command serious eastern attention. Works depicting Native spiritual practice—dances, ceremonies, prayer to the sun—formed a recurring strand in his output during these years, reflecting both his sympathy for Plains peoples and a wider Euro-American interest in recording what was assumed to be a vanishing way of life.

Russell (1864–1926) had come to Montana from St. Louis as a teenager and built his reputation as the self-taught cowboy artist of the northern plains, in counterpoint to Frederic Remington’s more cosmopolitan production. Sun Worship in Montana is held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of the Amon G. Carter Collection, the foundational gift of Western art that established the museum in 1961. While not a Lewis and Clark subject, the painting belongs to the broader visual record of the upper Missouri country the expedition traversed a century before Russell painted it, and it documents the Indigenous religious life that Lewis and Clark observed but rarely described with sympathy.

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The painting dates to 1890, early in Russell’s professional career. He had come to Montana as a teenager in 1880, worked as a wrangler and night herder through the 1880s, and lived for several months during the winter of 1888–1889 with Blood (Kainai) people in Alberta. That experience sharpened his attention to the material culture and daily work of Plains tribes and shaped a series of camp-life pictures he produced around 1890, of which The Silk Robe is among the most carefully observed. By focusing on women’s labor in hide preparation rather than on combat or the hunt, the painting documents an aspect of Plains economy then being eroded by the collapse of the buffalo herds and the confinement of tribes to reservations.

Russell (1864–1926) would go on to become the foremost painter of the northern plains and Rocky Mountain frontier, eventually producing the large mural Lewis and Clark Meeting the Indians at Ross’ Hole for the Montana State Capitol in 1912. The Silk Robe belongs to the Amon G. Carter Collection at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, an institution built around Carter’s holdings of Russell and Frederic Remington and central to the scholarly study of both artists.

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The painting dates to 1888, when Russell was twenty-four and still working as a wrangler and night herder in the Judith Basin of central Montana. He had come west from St. Louis in 1880 and spent the 1880s absorbing the country, its weather, and its people firsthand, including a winter of 1888–89 spent among the Blood (Kainai) in present-day Alberta. The picture reflects that direct experience: the moment turns on the plains protocol by which strangers met in open country, where misidentification in poor visibility could mean a fight and the sign for peace had to come first and unmistakably. It is not a Lewis and Clark subject, but it belongs to the same northern plains world the expedition had crossed eighty years earlier, and Russell’s reconstructions of that landscape have shaped how later viewers picture the Corps of Discovery’s encounters.

Lost in a Snowstorm — We Are Friends is among the earliest of Russell’s ambitious narrative oils and is often cited as the first work in which he handled a multi-figure cross-cultural meeting with full confidence. It is held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, part of the Amon G. Carter Collection, the founding gift that established the museum’s holdings of Russell and Frederic Remington. The painting is regularly reproduced in studies of Russell’s development and of plains sign language.

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By 1919 Russell was sixty-five and had been painting full-time for roughly two decades, having transitioned from cowboy and wrangler in the 1880s to one of the most commercially successful Western artists in the country. The buffalo hunt was a recurring subject for him from the 1890s onward, painted repeatedly in oil and watercolor. He treated it as historical reconstruction: by the time Russell arrived in Montana in 1880, the northern bison herds were already collapsing, and the mounted Indian hunt he depicted was a scene from living memory rather than current observation. Works like this one were part of a broader postwar market for nostalgic Western imagery, sold to collectors and railroad-era patrons who wanted images of a frontier they understood to be gone.

Russell spent most of his adult life in and around Great Falls, Montana, where his log-cabin studio still stands. His sympathy for and knowledge of Plains tribes—particularly the Blackfeet, among whom he had lived briefly in 1888—distinguished his Indian subjects from those of many of his contemporaries. The painting is now held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, entering that collection through Amon G. Carter, the Texas newspaper publisher who assembled one of the largest holdings of Russell and Frederic Remington works in existence. The museum, which opened in 1961, built its early identity on these two artists, and Russell’s buffalo-hunt canvases have remained among its most reproduced holdings.

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Catlin visited the Mandan villages in the summer of 1832, traveling upriver on the American Fur Company steamboat Yellow Stone. The view records the larger of the two principal Mandan towns near the mouth of the Knife River, the same complex of villages where Lewis and Clark had wintered in 1804–1805 at nearby Fort Mandan. Catlin returned east with hundreds of sketches and studies, and worked them up into finished canvases between 1837 and 1839 for exhibition in his traveling Indian Gallery. The timing was consequential: a smallpox epidemic in 1837 destroyed the Mandan population Catlin had documented only five years earlier, giving his Mandan paintings a sudden documentary weight he had not anticipated.

Catlin (1796–1872) built his career on the premise that Plains Indian life was vanishing and required pictorial recording, and the Mandan series—portraits of Mato-Tope, scenes of the Okipa, and overviews like this one—remains the most cited portion of his output. The Indian Gallery toured American and European cities through the 1840s before financial collapse forced its sale. Joseph Harrison, Jr., a Philadelphia industrialist, purchased the collection in 1852; his widow’s gift transferred it to what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The bird’s-eye view has been reproduced repeatedly in studies of Mandan architecture, in Lewis and Clark scholarship concerned with the expedition’s winter quarters, and in the ethnohistorical literature on the pre-epidemic upper Missouri.

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