The scene refers to the expedition’s crossing of the Bitterroots along the Lolo Trail in September 1805, the most physically punishing stretch of the westbound journey. Guided by Old Toby, the Shoshone they had engaged at Camp Fortunate, Lewis and Clark led the Corps over a high, snow-dusted ridge route used by the Nez Perce to reach the buffalo country. The men ran short of game, killed and ate several colts, and arrived at the Weippe Prairie on September 22 in a weakened condition. Fritz painted this work in 2004, during the bicentennial commemoration years of 2003–2006, when he was completing a long cycle of expedition paintings intended to follow the route in sequence.

Fritz, a Montana-based painter born in 1955, has built much of his career around historical landscape and the Lewis and Clark subject in particular. His bicentennial-era series of roughly one hundred expedition paintings was exhibited and published as Charles Fritz: An Artist with the Corps of Discovery, and individual works from the cycle were shown at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which has handled provenance for several pieces in the series. We Proceeded On is held in the collection of Timothy Peterson. The painting shares its title with the quarterly journal of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, a phrase that has become shorthand within the historical-memory tradition for the expedition’s daily grind of forward movement.

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