The scene depicts events of late July 1805. The expedition reached the Three Forks on July 25, and Lewis named the three branches for President Thomas Jefferson and Secretaries James Madison and Albert Gallatin. Sacagawea identified the area as the place where, roughly five years earlier, a Hidatsa raiding party had captured her—information that helped the captains decide to follow the Jefferson River westward in search of her Shoshone relatives, whose horses they needed to cross the Continental Divide. Paxson painted the mural in 1912, during a period when western states were commissioning historical art for new public buildings and when the centennial of the expedition (1804–1806) had renewed national interest in its narrative.

Edgar Samuel Paxson (1852–1919) moved from New York to Montana Territory in 1877 and spent the rest of his life painting the northern Plains and Rocky Mountain West. He is best known for Custer’s Last Stand (1899), a meticulously researched battle scene, and for the six murals he produced for the Montana State Capitol between 1912 and 1914, of which Lewis and Clark at Three Forks is among the most reproduced. The mural remains installed in the Capitol in Helena, where it hangs with the other Paxson panels depicting Montana history. It has been a fixture of Lewis and Clark visual memory in the state for more than a century and is regularly cited in scholarship on Sacagawea’s role in the expedition.

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The expedition reached Three Forks on July 25, 1805, during the upstream push toward the Continental Divide. Lewis and Clark depended on Sacagawea’s geographic memory to guide them toward her Shoshone relatives, whose horses they needed to cross the Bitterroots. The work was completed in 1912, the same year Paxson finished his cycle of murals for the Montana State Capitol. This commission came at the height of a national fascination with the centennial-era memory of the expedition and amid Montana’s effort to define a state historical identity rooted in frontier subjects.

Edgar Samuel Paxson (1852–1919) moved to Montana in 1877 and built his reputation painting Plains Indian subjects, frontier scenes, and military history, most famously the large 1899 canvas Custer’s Last Stand. His Capitol murals, including Lewis and Clark at Three Forks and Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flatheads at Ross’s Hole, remain among the most reproduced visualizations of the expedition’s Montana passage. Paxson knew the terrain firsthand and consulted survivors and Indigenous informants for details of dress and material culture, though his compositions follow the heroic conventions of his era. The murals remain installed in the House of Representatives chamber and adjoining corridors of the Montana State Capitol in Helena, where they have shaped public imagery of Sacagawea for more than a century, particularly in the regional historical-memory tradition that centers her as guide and interpreter rather than captive or passenger.

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