“I sliped behind a rock and spoke to the effect that I would shoot them if they did not give back my horse.”

In the ensuing fight, Reubin Field stabbed one warrior and Lewis shot another. This was the only violent death caused by the expedition during its entire journey. Lewis’s party then rode over 100 miles in 24 hours to escape potential Blackfeet retaliation — one of the most harrowing episodes of the return journey.

This encounter had lasting consequences for American relations with the Blackfeet, who remained hostile to American traders and trappers for decades.

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“Thus far I had accomplished one of those great objects on which my mind has been unalterably fixed for many years. Judge then of the pleasure I felt in allying my thirst with this pure and ice-cold water.”

But the view from the summit shattered any remaining hopes for an easy portage to Pacific waters. Instead of a gentle slope to a navigable river, Lewis saw range after range of snow-capped mountains stretching to the horizon. Jefferson’s dream of a short portage between the Missouri and the Columbia was an illusion.

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The picture dates to around 1850, roughly four decades after the expedition’s return in 1806 and a generation after the deaths of Clark (1838) and the earlier loss of Lewis (1809). By midcentury the journey had passed out of living memory for most Americans and into the realm of national myth, fueled by Nicholas Biddle’s 1814 edition of the journals and by the broader public appetite for western imagery that accompanied the era of Manifest Destiny, the Mexican Cession, and the California Gold Rush. Painters working east of the Mississippi increasingly produced retrospective expedition scenes for audiences who associated the Corps of Discovery with the territorial expansion then underway.

Thomas Mickell Burnham (1818–1866) was a Boston-based painter best known for genre scenes and political subjects, including his 1844 painting of an election day in front of the Massachusetts State House. He worked at some remove from the western frontier and almost certainly never saw the landscapes he depicted here, relying instead on published accounts and the visual conventions of contemporary landscape painting. The work now resides in the collection of the Tacoma Art Museum, which holds significant western American material, and has been reproduced in Lewis and Clark scholarship as one of the earliest oil paintings to attempt a group portrait of the expedition members, predating by half a century the more familiar treatments by Charles M. Russell and Edgar S. Paxson.

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