Battle-Tested in the Rockies

Finding shelter to protect against a Rocky Mountain winter on the frontier required fortitude, as portrayed in John Clymer’s The Trapper’s Tree. Snow began to fall after the Corps of Explorers descended what Patrick Gass called the “most terrible mountains I ever beheld,” Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains. By the time the trailblazers had traveled roughly 4,100 miles from the mouth of the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, t