Idaho Commission for Libraries

Across the Snowy Ranges: The Lewis and Clark Expedition in Idaho and Western Montana by James R. Fazio and Mike Venso (2001)

The author paraphrases diary entries during the short but dramatic portion of the expedition in Idaho and western Montana. Nearly each page features a beautiful photograph. Fazio locates Lewis's party and Clark's party on each date, and includes insets that specify camp sites, show peace medals, or present other pertinent sideline stories. Excellent maps chart the journey.

Fazio begins the story at Camp Fortunate (western Montana) where Sacagawea rejoined her people and discovered that Chief Cameawait was her brother. The expedition proceeded to the Shoshoni camp where they purchased enough horses and received a guide for the journey north through Montana's Bitterroot Valley. As they went west over the Lolo Trail, crossing the Bitterroot Mountains in September 1805, unseasonable cold gripped the party. They found little game. Hunger invited sickness. At Weippe Prairie, the debilitated group found Nez Perce people, who gave them camas roots and dried salmon, a diet that made them ill. The weakened corps, however, managed to hew canoes from cottonwoods along the Clearwater River, brand their horses and arrange to leave them with the Nez Perce, departing down river October 7, 1805.

The story picks up again after the expedition returned to Nez Perce country on its homeward journey. Finding the Bitterroots impassable because of snow, they remained on the Clearwater River at "Long Camp" about a month in May and June of 1806 before retracing their steps to Traveler's Rest, where the party split into several groups to return to the United States.

Also on this page: Discussion Questions | Web Sites

Biographical information about James R. Fazio and Mike Venso

Founder of the Idaho chapter of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation in 1988 and president of that national organization from 1992 to 1995, Jim Fazio has promoted the preservation of the trail as a national treasure for several decades. He has traveled along it from Monticello, Virginia, to Seaside, Oregon. Yet it's no secret that his favorite segment of it is the Lolo Trail in Idaho, a portion he wishes to preserve. Early in his career, Fazio worked in western Montana for the U. S. Forest Service on the historic trail. Now he is a professor of resource recreation and tourism at the University of Idaho.

For this book, Mike Venso contributed beautiful photographs of the Lolo Trail area and Steve Russell produced excellent maps. Venso's work has received accolades from the National Press Photographers Association and the William Randolph Hearst National Photojournalism Championship. In 1998 he and a companion retraced the entire route of the expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean by canoe, horseback and on foot, videoing and photographing their experience. Venso has worked at the Lewiston Morning Tribune and at the Salt Lake Tribune. Steve Russell provided maps of the wilderness area he has researched on foot for two decades. A professor of electrical engineering at Iowa State University, Russell returns each summer to his native Idaho to study journals, maps and ruts of trails to analyze various threads of the Lewis and Clark trail, the Nez Perce trail, the Bird and Truax trail --all part of the general "Lolo Trail."

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Discussion questions for Across the Snowy Ranges

1. What part does ecology of the trail play in Fazio's retelling of Lewis and Clark's journey across what is now Idaho?
2. Explain the role of weather in the fate of adventurers in 1805 and 1806 in western Montana and Idaho.
3. How did expedition members split apart for special missions and rejoin each other?
4. How did diet and nutrition affect the young men of the Corps of Discovery as they crossed the Lolo Trail and met the Nez Perce Tribe?
5. Explain how Venso's photographs and Russell's maps clarify Fazio's story.

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Web Sites

• http://www.bookpeople.net/archives/sbw.htm
  This review is brief but descriptive; it highlights the beautiful photographs and maps that are a major part of the book.

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