p. xi DeVoto was not a cloistered scholar. He got out on the trail, by canoe, by foot, on horseback. He traveled where the captains did, saw what they saw, and argued for the conservation of their world. One of his favorite sites was on the Lolo Trail in Idaho, just over the Continental Divide at Lolo Pass, along today's U.S. Highway 12, in a magnificent grove of giant cedars beside the fast-flowing Lochsa River. There he liked to pitch his tent and think about the captains. There, on an early spring day in 1956, his ashes were scattered. The site today is marked by the state of Idaho as the Bernard DeVoto Grove and is maintained as it was when Lewis and Clark came through.
p. liii ...and nearly all of it was in country foreign to the wilderness experience of Americans and requiring radically different techniques. Not only the Rocky Mountains, their rivers, and the Cascade Mountains were unprecedented and unimaginable; so were the high plains, the high plateaus, the overwhelming waters of the Columbia, the tremendous forest of the Northwest, and the sodden winter climate there. It added up to a strangeness for which nothing in the previous frontier culture was a preparation.
p. 426 THURSDAY JULY 17TH 1806. I arrose this morning and made a drawing of the falls, after which we took breakfast and departed. it being my design to strike Maria's river about the place at which I left it on my return to it's mouth in the beginning of June 1805. I steered my course through the wide and level plains which have somewhat the appearance of an ocean, not a tree nor a shrub to be seen.
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