Annual history trip retraces Montana's past

Somers Middle School's 8th grade history trip has long held a reputation for delivering some of the most exciting and historically significant stops mapped out by any school in the state.

However, Somers teachers Tom Gillespie and Luke Johnson, who coordinate the trip each year, have made it a point to help their students get the most out of those stops through a series of related readings, activities, critical analysis and written responses that are completed on the bus before each stop.

One of these readings and activities was done prior to the bus's stop in Virginia City and focused on the life and crimes of Henry Plummer, as well as the execution of Joseph Albert Slade and the eye-witness account of Mollie Sheehan, who saw Slade hanged from a gallows. Two months earlier, Sheehan had also witnessed the lifeless forms of five of the Plummer's "Road Agents," hanging in an unfinished building that she came to while walking home from school on January 14, 1864.

These and similar readings related to their many stops at historic sites, reinforced the year's curriculum with respect to prominent highlights of Montana's history. However, the readings and activities merely laid the groundwork for the stops themselves, where Gillespie, Johnson and knowledgeable guides introduced the Somers students to the places where that history actually occurred.

In addition to the legacy of Montana's most famous gold strikes and boom towns, which seemed to grow up overnight and became ghost towns just as quickly, the 8th graders were able to retrace part of the route taken by Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Capt. William Clark and their famous journey with the Corps of Discovery.

At the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, they gained new insight into the role of the explorers' Shoshone guide, Sacagawea - spelled as it was in the Lewis and Clark's own journals to convey her Shoshone name, "Bird Woman."

Fate seemed to almost to have arranged Sacagawea's meeting with the Corps of Discovery in 1804, after having been kidnapped by a Hidatsa war party four years earlier.

The two captains, believed that Sacagawea would be a valuable asset in the expedition's effort to acquire horses from the Shoshone before reaching the western (Bitterroot) mountains. Because her husband spoke both Hidatsa and French, he and Sacagawea became the Corps' official interpreters. Upon meeting the Shoshone, Sacagawea would translate their words for her husband, who in turn would translate them into French for the Corps' Francois Labiche, who spoke both French and English.

While journeying through Montana, Sacagawea was the only member of the expedition who had previous experience and familiarity with the territory through which the Corps traveled. She and her son, who had earned the nickname Little Pomp for his frolic proved to be a symbol of peace to other Indians who may have otherwise seen the Corps as a war party. Sacagawea and Pomp could be identified from a distance, thereby signaling to local tribes that the Corps was a peaceful party, since war parties did not travel with women or children.

On June 13, 1805, Lewis spotted the Great Falls of the Missouri - the Somers students' first stop - with four more waterfalls beyond them, requiring a difficult portage. On July 19,1805 the Corps entered a passage through the mountains over which 1,200-foot-high rock cliffs towered. The imposing rock walls appeared, first to block the passage and then to actually open wide as they approached, prompting Lewis to christen the passage "Gates of the Mountains," a name it bears to this day. Here, the Somers students passed by boat, enabling them to watch the very sight that Lewis and Clark must have beheld, the apparent opening and closing of the cliffs as the boat passed from one side of the passage to the other.

The history trip continued on to Helena and then to Lewis and Clark Caverns, which is so named because the caverns lay along the route taken by Corps of Discovery and would have been within sight of the explorers as they passed, even though the caverns themselves were not discovered until 1895. The intrepid student explorers were able to probe the depths of the caverns and learn their unique history before moving on to a later history in Virginia City, which was once home to a number of notorious figures and outlaws, like Martha Canary - better known as Calamity Jane.

After trying their hand at panning for gold in nearby Bannack, where Henry Plummer served as sheriff and was later hanged for his role as ringleader of the murderous Road Agents, the intrepid history students headed to the Big Hole National Battlefield to experience one of the more emotional scenes of the West, where 90 Nez Perce Indians - mostly women and children - and 28 soldiers were killed in the effort to stop the Nez Perce flight and force them onto a reservation.

The trip took the young explorers to the very border of Idaho and Montana, over which Lewis and Clark eventually crossed, after finally making contact with the Shoshone. On August 17, 1805 Capt. Lewis discovered a Shoshone village, about 20 miles south of present-day Dillon, where the Clark Canyon Reservoir now exists, with whom he would negotiate for horses. Sacagawea again proved her worth to the expedition when it was discovered that the Shoshone chief was none other than her own brother, Cameahwait. On August 31 the expedition set out to cross the Bitterroot with 29 newly acquired horses, a mule and a Shoshone guide named Old Toby.

Although they did not actually visit Camp Fortunate, the Somers eighth-graders all agreed: you can't fit much more history into a three-day trip across Montana or provide a more enjoyable and educational adventure with which to highlight a year's worth of studies.