The Great Clearing

Pichette measured the camp from the Medicine Tree, a ponderosa pine beside the old trail in the narrows north of here. In the Salish story Coyote dared a ram that had been terrorizing people to charge the tree, and its horn stuck fast. Alexander Ross saw the horn in the trunk in 1824; someone cut it off in the late 1800s. Sacred to the Salish and decorated by those who passed, the tree declined beside the highway and broke in a windstorm in 2001. The tribes own the site and visit each spring and fall.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Big Hole National Battlefield — 21 mi
  The government marked this ground for its soldiers in 1883 and left the Nimiipuu camp outside the line until the 1960s.

More markers nearby

• Survival — steps away
• First Impressions — steps away
• Mountains on the Move — steps away
• Ross' Hole — steps away