Lewis Party Crossing the Clark Fork
Paxson’s mural depicts the Lewis party fording the Clark Fork River in western Montana during the return journey of July 1806. After the expedition split at Travelers’ Rest near present-day Lolo, Meriwether Lewis led a small contingent north and east to explore the Marias River, crossing the Clark Fork (then called the Hellgate or Clark’s River) in the vicinity of what is now Missoula. The canvas shows mounted men and pack horses entering the river, with figures arranged in a frieze-like procession across the broad horizontal format. Paxson modeled the surrounding country on the actual landscape of the Missoula valley, with the wooded river bottom, open benchland, and mountain backdrop rendered in the clear, high-keyed palette he favored for outdoor scenes. The five-and-a-half by ten-foot scale is consistent with his approach to public commissions, in which he treated the canvas almost as a topographic record.
The painting dates to 1914, a productive late period in Paxson’s career when he was working primarily on historical subjects and civic commissions in Montana. By this point he had completed his most ambitious work, the eight murals for the Missoula County Courthouse (1912–1914) depicting episodes from Montana history, including two Lewis and Clark subjects. The Clark Fork crossing belongs to the same wave of Lewis and Clark imagery he produced in the years surrounding the expedition’s centennial, when public interest in the Corps of Discovery had been renewed by anniversary observances and by Olin D. Wheeler’s published research retracing the route.
Edgar Samuel Paxson (1852–1919) settled in Montana in 1877 and worked as a scout, sign painter, and eventually a full-time artist based in Butte and later Missoula. He is best known for Custer’s Last Stand (1899), a densely populated battle scene that established his reputation, and for the courthouse murals. The Clark Fork crossing painting is held in Missoula and associated with the Missoula County art holdings, placing it among the regional civic works through which Paxson shaped the visual memory of the expedition in Montana. His Lewis and Clark canvases remain among the most frequently reproduced images of the Corps’ passage through the northern Rockies.
