In 1914, Frank Warner—a Shoshone Mormon convert who had survived the 1863 Bear River Massacre—undertook a mission to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Montana State University assistant professor Dr. Amanda Hendrix-Komoto uses Warner’s mission as a lens for understanding Mormon missionary work among Native Americans and the response of reservation dwellers to Christian missionary work in the early twentieth century.

In 1846, Jesuit priest Nicolas Point began an eight-month journey among various bands of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Today, Point’s paintings depicting the hunting camps he encountered provide an unparalleled visual record of traditional Blackfoot life. anthropologist Dr. Sally Thompson reports on her collaborative project with a group of Blackfeet who have been exploring these images from the perspective of cultural insiders.

Great Falls historian Ken Robison tells the story behind a Christmas 1861 address given by Captain John Mullan to the “Historical and Geographical Society” assembled at Fort Owen. Like his titular subjects, Mullan had contributed directly to the dream of a water and overland “Northwest Passage” by constructing a 624-mile Military Wagon Road from Fort Walla Walla, Washington, to Fort Benton in 1860.

MHS Museum technician Vic Reiman recounts the experiences of “Major” John Owen, who settled in the Bitterroot Valley in 1850 and, for the next twenty years, kept journals detailing his daily life. Owen made numerous trading trips throughout the region, and today his accounts of those travels provide an unparalleled source of information about western Montana’s residents and events during the 1850s.

Speaker Larry Strate shares Smith’s story, offering a glimpse into the “evening industry” during the 1890s—Hamilton’s heyday—when Marcus Daly built his empire in Montana and his mansion in Hamilton.

Travelers’ Rest State Park interpreter Bruce Mihelish tells how, having left the headwaters of the Missouri River behind, the Corps of Discovery was in desperate need of mounts by early fall. The Shoshone and Salish came to the rescue with the Spanish Barb horses that enabled the corps to conquer three major mountain passes through the Bitterroot Valley and reach waters to the Pacific before the onset of winter and potential starvation.

Engineer and author Ted S. Hall talks about the Corps of Discovery’s Lost Trail Descent into Darby from Idaho on September 3, 1805. For many years, the specific route that the explorers followed was unknown until James West Gallogly, an assayer and later forest ranger, discovered the exact path in the late nineteenth century. Hall—who correlates Clark’s hand-drawn map to today’s USG’s quad maps—is assisted by Gallogly’s great-niece, Elisabeth Gallogly Bacon, and fellow engineer Tim Lee connects Gallogly’s finding and Clark’s maps to Google Earth.

Jim Hardee—historian with the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, Wyoming—explores the experiences of Wyeth, a Boston ice merchant turned fur trader who, in the spring of 1833 while traveling with a Hudson’s Bay Company brigade, kept meticulous notes of the time he spent in the Bitterroot. In his journal, Wyeth recorded details of daily Salish life, and he was the first known Euro-American to witness their First Roots Ceremony.

Ted Antonioli of the Granite County Historical Society explores the 1825–1826 Snake River Country trapping expedition of the Hudson’s Bay Company led by Peter Skene Ogden, which traversed the Bitterroot Valley and circled the Flint Range. The latter part of the era encompassed exploration between the two valleys by Bitterroot-based mountain men like John Owen, Fred Burr, and William Graham, as well as a party from the Stevens railroad survey led by Frederick Lander.

Salish Culture Committee department head Tony Incashola provides insight into such things as the custom of scarring trees and other traditional plant use by the Bitterroot Valley’s original inhabitants.