Up the Jefferson
Clymer’s painting depicts the Corps of Discovery laboring upstream on the Jefferson River in southwestern Montana. The composition shows the expedition’s dugout canoes being moved against the current by a combination of paddling, poling, and towing from the bank, with men in buckskins straining at cordelles—the long towropes used when the water grew too shallow or swift for paddling. The Jefferson valley opens around them, with cottonwood-lined banks giving way to sage flats and the blue ridges of the Tobacco Root or Beaverhead mountains in the distance. Clymer renders the scene with his characteristic attention to gear, weathered clothing, and the specific quality of late-summer Rocky Mountain light, painting the figures small enough that the landscape dominates the canvas.
The episode shown belongs to August 1805, after the Corps had ascended the Missouri to its Three Forks (July 25–27) and continued up the southernmost branch, which Meriwether Lewis named for President Jefferson. From late July through mid-August the men dragged their heavily loaded canoes up an increasingly rocky and braided channel while Lewis ranged ahead on foot in search of the Shoshone, whose horses would be essential to crossing the Continental Divide. The cordelling work depicted was exhausting; the journals record sore feet, torn moccasins, and frequent upsets in cold water. The phase ended only when the canoes were cached near present-day Dillon, Montana, and the expedition continued overland with Cameahwait’s Shoshone band.
John Ford Clymer (1907–1989) came to Western historical painting late, after a long career as a commercial illustrator producing more than eighty covers for The Saturday Evening Post. Beginning in the mid-1960s he devoted himself to researched scenes of the fur trade, Plains tribes, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, producing roughly a dozen Lewis and Clark subjects that became among the most reproduced images of the Corps’ journey. Up the Jefferson dates from this mature Western period and is held in a private collection. Clymer’s expedition paintings are anchored by the collections of the Clymer Museum of Art in Ely, Washington, and have been regularly reproduced in popular histories and bicentennial-era publications commemorating the 1804–1806 journey.
