The expedition reached the Eagle Creek vicinity in late May 1805, during the ascent of the Upper Missouri between the mouths of the Musselshell and the Marias. This stretch of the river drew some of the most lyrical entries in the journals, particularly Lewis’s descriptions of the white sandstone formations he likened to ancient ruined cities. Burnham, working around 1850, was painting roughly four and a half decades after the events themselves, at a moment when the expedition was beginning to enter American popular consciousness as a subject for retrospective historical art alongside the more familiar themes of colonial and Revolutionary history. The 1840s and 1850s saw rising public interest in the trans-Mississippi West, fueled by the Oregon migration, the Mexican War, and the California gold rush, which created an audience for paintings that located the western enterprise in a heroic national past.

Thomas Mickell Burnham (1818–1866) was a Boston-based painter best known for genre scenes and political subjects, including his often-reproduced election-day pictures. His western subjects are comparatively rare, and he worked without firsthand knowledge of the upper Missouri country, relying on published accounts and his own pictorial imagination rather than on field study of the kind George Catlin or Karl Bodmer had undertaken in the 1830s. The painting is held in a private collection, and its earlier ownership history is not documented in the public record. It remains one of the earlier easel paintings to take a specific Lewis and Clark episode as its subject.

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Source: Thwaites, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1904–05). Public domain. Clark wrote this on 12 August 1806, when the captains reunited, from Lewis’s account of the fight of 27 July on the Two Medicine.

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Source: Thwaites, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1904–05). Public domain.

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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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