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 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.

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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.

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The work dates to roughly 1905, the centennial period of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, when public interest in the journey produced a wave of commemorative paintings, monuments, and publications. The 1805 crossing of the Bitterroots was among the expedition’s most punishing episodes: the Corps moved south through the Bitterroot Valley, met the Salish at Ross’s Hole, and then turned west over Lolo Pass into present-day Idaho, where hunger and cold nearly broke the party. Sacagawea, traveling with her infant son Jean Baptiste, was in her home region during this phase, and her recognition of landmarks and her Shoshone connections proved essential to securing horses from her brother Cameahwait’s band shortly before the mountain crossing.

Edgar Samuel Paxson (1852–1919) settled in Montana in 1877 and built his career on Western historical subjects, drawing on direct knowledge of the landscape and surviving Indigenous and military informants. He is best known for the large canvas Custer’s Last Stand (1899) and for the six murals he completed for the Missoula County Courthouse in 1912–1914, which include scenes from the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Sacagawea was a recurring subject in his work during the centennial years, and his images helped fix her visual identity in twentieth-century popular memory, particularly within Montana. Sacagawea at the Bitterroot is held by the Montana Historical Society in Helena, the principal repository of Paxson’s expedition-related paintings and a central institution in the state’s Lewis and Clark commemorative tradition.

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The scene corresponds to Lewis’s reconnaissance of the Great Falls in mid-June 1805. Having pushed ahead of the main party, Lewis reached the principal falls on June 13 and over the following days walked upriver to document the full series of five cascades. Black Eagle Falls, the last he encountered on June 14, took its name from an eagle nesting in a cottonwood on an island at the brink—a detail Lewis recorded in his journal and that Paxson reproduces directly. The discovery confirmed that the expedition had taken the correct fork of the Missouri but also forced the month-long portage that became one of the hardest episodes of the journey west.

Edgar Samuel Paxson (1852–1919) settled in Montana in 1877 and spent his career painting frontier and Native subjects from a base in Missoula. He is best known for “Custer’s Last Stand” (1899), completed after some twenty years of research. In 1912 he received the commission for six murals depicting Lewis and Clark and Montana history for the House and Senate chambers and corridors of the Montana State Capitol in Helena, where this canvas remains installed. The Capitol cycle is the largest and most public body of Paxson’s work, and his Lewis and Clark scenes—painted in the centennial decade following the expedition’s national rediscovery—helped fix the visual iconography of the Corps of Discovery in Montana through the twentieth century.

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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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