History

Lewis and Clark straggled off Lost Trail Pass in September 1805 after being foiled on their way to the Columbia by the chasms of the Salmon River. They crept back into Montana via the Bitterroot and almost immediately met a lodge of Flathead Indians. At present-day Sula, the Corps of Discovery found 400 Flathead and 500 horses encamped and quickly made friends. Remember the landscape; the enormous painting in the Montana House of Representatives in Helena depicts this meeting.

The valley at the junction of the East Fork and Camp Creek later became known as Ross’s Hole. Alexander Ross was a Canadian trapper who nearly died of cold here with his family in 1824.

The Nez Percé [1] passed through Ross’s Hole in 1877 on their way to the Battle of the Big Hole [2], just over the Continental Divide. While the tribal leaders felt they had escaped the pursuing army, others, with “medicine powers,” began to foresee the coming ambush. By this time, the army force, under the command of General Gibbon, had caught up with the fleeing Indians, who unwisely had taken a break from their flight from Idaho once they had reached Montana.