Lewis and Clark at Travelers Rest

Paxson’s large canvas shows the Corps of Discovery encamped at Travelers Rest, the meadow at the mouth of Lolo Creek where it joins the Bitterroot River in present-day western Montana. The composition arranges the expedition members across a foreground campsite: figures tend horses, examine gear, and confer in small groups, while Meriwether Lewis and William Clark occupy the central middle ground. Sacagawea, her infant son Jean Baptiste, and the interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau are placed among the party, and York, Clark’s enslaved manservant, appears in the group as well. The Bitterroot Mountains rise behind the camp under a clouded sky. Paxson worked in a tightly drawn, illustrational manner with naturalistic color, attentive to costume detail, weaponry, and the appearance of the horses traded from the Salish people the expedition had recently encountered at Ross’s Hole.

The scene depicts events of September 9–11, 1805, when the westbound expedition rested at the site before attempting the crossing of the Lolo Trail over the Bitterroots, and again of June 30–July 3, 1806, when the returning party camped there before dividing into two groups for separate explorations. Paxson completed the painting in 1903, in the run-up to the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition held in Portland in 1905. The centennial generated sustained public interest in expedition imagery, and Paxson, already established in Montana as a painter of frontier and Indigenous subjects, undertook a sequence of expedition scenes during this period that culminated in his murals for the Missoula County Courthouse (1912–1914).

Paxson (1852–1919) had come west from New York in 1877, worked as a scout and stagecoach guard, and settled in Butte and later Missoula. He is best known today for his enormous canvas Custer’s Last Stand (1899) and for the Missoula courthouse murals, several of which return to Lewis and Clark subjects. Lewis and Clark at Travelers Rest belongs to the Missoula County Art Collection and remains in the Lolo Creek vicinity it portrays. The painting is among the earliest substantial visual treatments of the Travelers Rest encampment, a site confirmed by archaeological investigation in 2002 and now preserved as a Montana state park.