Lewis and Clark and a Guide Named Toby

As Highway Ninety-Three climbs the switchbacks toward the Montana line, it traces some of the hardest miles the Lewis and Clark Expedition ever walked. In the late summer of eighteen oh five, the party had crossed the Continental Divide and come down into the Salmon River country, hoping to float to the Pacific. The Salmon proved impassable, a churning canyon later nicknamed the River of No Return.

So they turned north through this rugged ground, where no clear trail led the way. Their Shoshone guide, an older man the captains called Toby, threaded them over ridgetops more than a thousand feet above this road, past peaks and timber, toward Lolo Pass. Without him they might not have made it through.

This monument marks the country where an Indian guide carried two captains and their corps across some of the loneliest mountains in the West.