Compiled by Theodore Hughes 

Edgar S. Paxson: Artist-Historian

The Missoula County Courthouse was completed on July 18, 1910, but many Missoulians were immediately unhappy with the original decoration scheme, desiring instead artworks portraying "truly typical Montana pioneer life" painted by a local artist who understood Montana's history.

The Missoula Women's Club rallied public support for the commission to be given to Edgar Samuel Paxson and in 1912 the county commissioners engaged the famous Missoula artist to paint eight murals for the South Foyer of the courthouse. Paxson was uniquely qualified to paint these historical murals. He was, according to Joseph Mussulman, "An expert hunter and tracker, and a crack shot; he could jerk meat, dress hides, and make buckskin shirts complete with the fringes." Paxson was one of the most admired of the Western artists because, as Mussulman states, "His works were the most truthful to the appearance of the land and the people in the northern Rockies where he spent most of his life. . . . Paxson captured the essence of the fast-disappearing Old West as he personally experienced it."

Paxson's series was completed and installed on June 25, 1914 to local acclaim. A public reception with 1,000 guests honoring Paxson was held on November 9, 1914, and the murals became the pride of Missoula.  

Read more about the Missoula County Courthouse murals in an essay by H. Rafael Chacon. 

A closer look at the two paintings depicting the Corps of Discovery meeting with the Salish and Nimipu (Nez Perce) tribes offers new insights for today's viewers into the Expedition, the murals, and this region's shared histories.

Lewis and Clark's Camp at Traveler's Rest, Lolo Creek Sept. 10, 1805  

Led by Old Toby, a guide provided by the Shoshone people, the Corps of Discovery crossed north over the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass, until freezing and hungry, they entered the south end of the Bitterroot Valley. This lush valley was not a virgin wilderness, but the ancestral lands of the Salish people who had lived and prospered in western Montana for 10,000 years. In fact, the Salish peoples' lives had already been altered permanently by the European incursion into the continent through decimating disease and the introduction of the horse and the gun.

The Corps encountered a band of the Salish in an area just south of today's Darby called the Big Clear Area, today named Ross's Hole. There are many oral accounts of this encounter provided by the Salish. Julie Cajune relates one such account related by the widow of Many Horses, or Chief Victor. The band's chief, Three Eagles, was scouting outside of the camp when he saw a party of about 20 men approaching the camp. "Chief Three Eagles was puzzled by the appearance of the strangers, for never before had he seen men not wearing blankets. . . . Well, perhaps they had been robbed, he thought." Of particular interest was what appeared to be a man painted black, Lewis's slave York. Among the Salish it was the custom during war dances for the warriors to paint themselves with red, yellow, and black. "This black man," thought Chief Three Eagles, "must have painted himself black as a sign of war. The party must have fought with their enemies, and they escaped losing only their blankets." Thus, the Chief decided that the approaching men had no intention of fighting. When the Corps arrived, they shook hands all around, and the band provided the shivering Expedition with buffalo robes.

Lewis and Clark noticed that the Indians were smoking a strange plant and asked for some to fill their pipes, but they did not like it. In turn, they shared some of their own tobacco with the Salish, but the Salish didn't like it. "Then the two leaders making signs asked for some of the kinniknik and they mixed the leaves with their own tobacco, and they gave that mixture to the Indians. And the Indians liked it and so the people smoke together."

The Salish provided the Corps with horses and food and showed them the way to the Lolo Trail, the best means of crossing the mountains to the Nez Perce country. The Expedition followed the Bitterroot River north from Ross's Hole and encamped on a large creek they named Traveler's Rest--an area called "No Salmon" by the Salish and today, Lolo Creek--some ten miles southwest of Missoula. Here they prepared for the mountain crossing. It took the Expedition a rough and freezing twelve days to make the journey until finally, soaked and starving, they exited the mountains near a Nimipu encampment at Weippe Prairie. Warned by scouts of the Corps' advance, the Nimipu held a council to decide how to respond to the approaching white men.  

The tribe was not totally caught off guard by the approach of the Corps, for recently three men returning from a mission to the Dakota country to secure guns had learned that a group of white men was staying with the Mandan people and heading west.

Also, the Nimipu had a prophesy that foretold the coming of the Europeans. Lucy Armstrong Isaac relates,

"An old man in Lapwai, I forget his name, used to see the future in his dreams. He would see white-faced animals a little bigger than a deer coming over the hill. They would come down a hill between Lapwai and the Clearwater River. Behind the white-faced deer was a white-faced man. 'Another kind of human being is going to be here soon,' the old man would tell his people. Other men laughed at him. 'We are going to have some writing given to us,' he told them. 'We must have our ears open so we can understand it. A white-faced man will explain it. We will have seven sleeps, and the seventh day will be a holy day. The earth will be plowed up. There will be many ways of going fast to other places. People will go fast on the land and fast in the air, like big birds.' People laughed at the old man's dreams, laughed at what he said would happen. But everything he prophesied came true. This is a story, not a myth or a legend."

An elderly woman named Wet-khoo-weis, or "Lost and Was Found," persuaded the leaders to not attack the Corps. Captured by Blackfeet as a young woman, she was taken to Canada and sold from tribe to tribe until finally she was sold to a white family far to the east, who treated her kindly. Eventually they released her and she returned to her people. Convinced by Wet-khoo-weis's experience that the white men could be of benefit, the Nimipu welcomed the Corps, fed them, provided them with a map of the best route to the Pacific Ocean, and even accompanied the whites to the Columbia River to ensure that other tribes provided a friendly reception. 

Read more about the Nimipu perspective in an essay by Nez Perce ethnographer Josiah Blackeagle Pinkham.

Lewis Crosses Clark's River, July 3, 1806

On the return journey, the Corps again linked up with the Nimipu people, who welcomed them warmly, providing food, horses and guides. The next day, after assuring Lewis that the road would be easy to follow, the Nimipu guides returned home, probably fearing that the party was not strong enough to survive a hostile encounter with the Blackfeet people.  

Read more about the Lewis & Clark murals in Joseph Mussulman's detailed commentary.

The Nostalgic Interpretation of the Old West

To Paxson, Lewis and Clark symbolized the bygone days of the heroic west, but to the Salish and Nez Perce the legacy of the explorers was the loss of their language, traditional lands, and culture. Paxson lived in Montana during a time that Dan Flores calls, "The heyday of the nostalgic interpretation of a vanished west" when entertainers such as Buffalo Bill Cody, writers such as Zane Grey, and artists such as Charlie Russell worked to celebrate the heroism of the Old West. During this time the frontier had vanished under industrialization and the native peoples forced onto reservations.

Today, the Salish have only sixty-five speakers of the Salish language, at least forty of whom are over fifty years old. Julie Cajune asks, "What would have happened if Indian people hadn't been generous, hospitable, if they hadn't assisted them, or what if they had killed them for invading their homelands? Would the westward movement have been impeded by 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? I can only imagine what it would be like for me today, if my culture and language hadn't been attacked for one generation longer."

Today, Montanans have a different take on history that respects cultural diversity and ecological restoration. Paxson would be amazed and heartened that Native American populations are recovering from the terrible diseases and displacement that decimated their cultures, that there are more buffalo than at any time since the 1880s, wolves and grizzly bears deliberately brought back, and that his state is home to large tracts of land set aside as Wilderness Areas, protected from the impacts of industrial exploitation.  Paxson, who compiled his own dictionary of Indian words, would appreciate the gaining efforts of the Salish and Nimipu to revitalize their languages that encode their ancient ways of life. Paxson mourned the "passing of the Indian" along with the demise of the pioneer and the taming of the wilderness, and may have felt he was preserving this heroic era with his art. Paxson loved the beauty and majesty of Montana and admired its pioneer past, and in his grand, romantic paintings, labored to create not an elite art but a folk art that served the ends of the community and fashioned a shared history that helped Montanans feel connected to their new home.