Bozeman Pass

The panel's guide is Clark's own word. At the Three Forks on July 13, 1806, he saw Indian and buffalo roads crossing the mountains to the northeast, but wrote that the Indian woman, of great service to him as a pilot through this country, recommended a gap farther south, and he took it. It was one of the few times Sacagawea guided the way legend says she did. His roll that day also listed Charbonneau, their infant son and York, the man Clark held in slavery, with 49 horses and a colt, many too footsore to go on.

What the plaque says

Bozeman Pass Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who guided the Lewis and Clark Expedition, led Captain William Clark and his party of ten men over an old buffalo road through this pass on July 15, 1806. They were eastward bound and planned to explore the Yellowstone River to its mouth where they were to rejoin Captain Lewis and party who were returning via the Missouri River. In the 1860s John M. Bozeman, an adventurous young Georgian, opened a trail from Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to Virginia City, Montana, across the hostile Indian country east of here. He brought his first party through in 1863 and the next year guided a large wagon train of emigrants and gold seekers over this pass, racing with an outfit in the charge of Jim Bridger. Bridger used a pass north of here. These pioneer speed demons made as much as fifteen to twenty miles a day some days. The outfits reached Virginia City within a few hours of each other. In December 1883, the Northern Pacific Railway completed a 3,610 foot tunnel under the pass. By World War II, the old tunnel was badly deteriorated and couldn't handle the bigger railroad cars of the time. The railroad began boring a new wider tunnel under the pass in February 1944, completing it during the summer of 1945. The new tunnel, which is still in use, is 3,015 feet in length.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bozeman Trail at Bozeman Pass — steps away
  The pass at the end of a gold-rush shortcut through other nations' hunting ground, the one road a Native war closed.
• Museum of the Rockies — 12 mi
  The bronze T. rex on the lawn is a cast of the one that went to Washington.
• Chico Hot Springs — 23 mi
  A miners' wash pool turned hotel, turned hospital, turned the valley's favorite place to soak.

More markers nearby

• The Bozeman Trail — 8.1 mi
• Emigrant Gulch — 23 mi
• Shields River Valley — 24 mi