Joseph Mussulman
Marc A. Hefty photo.
Photo by Bill Bevis.
Left to right: Two concerned dugout canoe owners, one concerned expert paddler, and Joe grinning with delight
Joseph A. Mussulman (1928–2017) was the founding producer, editor and writer for Discovering Lewis & Clark. After five years of preparation and experimentation the website went online in 1998, under the auspices of a non-profit entity called VIAs Inc., and funded by grants from various sources, especially–throughout the bicentennial observance from 2003 to 2006–the Challenge Cost Share Program of the National Park Service. In 2009 the site was taken over by the Lewis & Clark Fort Mandan Foundation of Washburn, North Dakota.
Dr. Mussulman earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music history and literature at Northwestern University in 1950 and 1951. As a Danforth Scholar he earned a doctorate in humanities from Syracuse University in 1967.
He has written and produced a number of interpretive programs in collaboration with audio specialist Richard H. Kuschel, also of Missoula Montana. In 1986, he wrote, narrated, and co-produced a multimedia presentation for the Blaine County Museum (MT) titled Forty Miles from Freedom, about the Non-Treaty Nez Perce Indians’ final battle with the U.S. Army, at the Bear Paw Mountains in 1877. In 2012-13 Mussulman and Kuschel revised the 20-minute onsite production and updated it in High Definition video. In 1994 their interactive self-guided audio-CD tour of Yellowstone National Park, a five-hour program produced for Tour Technologies, Inc., received first prize in the category of media productions from the National Association for Interpretation. Their Two Days to Destiny, an audio interpretive tour of the Little Bighorn Battlefield, won first place from the NAI in 1995.
Mussulman is the author of five articles on Lewis and Clark that appeared in We Proceeded On, the official journal of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc.: “My Boy Pomp’: About That Name,” Vol. 21, No. 2 (May 1995); “Soundscapes: The Sonic Dimensions of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” Vol. 21, No. 4 (November 1995); “Men in High Spirits: Humor on the Lewis and Clark Trail,” Vol.22, No. 2 (May 1996); “‘In Greatest Harmoney’: ‘Meddicine Songs’ on the Lewis and Clark Trail,” Vol. 23, No. 4 (November 1997); and “Pomp’s bier was a bar,” Vol. 27, No. 1 (February 2001).
Dr. Mussulman has designed and produced maps for various books, brochures and study guides about Lewis and Clark, including 58 full-color maps illustrating the expedition’s entire route from coast to coast for the travelers’ guide, Along the Trail with Lewis and Clark, by Barbara Fifer and Vicky Soderberg (2nd ed., Helena: Montana Magazine, 2001). Those maps also appeared in the same publisher’s annual Lewis and Clark Travel Planner and Guide. They may be seen in Discovering Lewis & Clark at Discovering Lewis & Clark from the Air. In 1998, he created a poster illustrating the trail from Washington, D.C. to the Pacific, for Farcountry Press.
His other publications include a biography, Dear People . . . Robert Shaw (Indiana University Press,1979; reprint, Chapel Hill, NC: Hinshaw Music, 1996), and Music in the Cultured Generation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). From 1987 through 1998 he was the interpretive writer and designer of Montana Afloat, a series of sixteen maps of Montana’s major floatable rivers.
Dr. Mussulman was a 1999 recipient of a Montana Governor’s Arts Award. Several years later he received an award of meritorious achievement from the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation “for outstanding contributions in bring to this nation a greater awareness and appreciation of the Lewis and Clark expedition.” In 2005, he received the Montana Governor’s Humanities Award.
Contributions to this Site
Early American Hunting
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Governor William Bradford of the Massachusetts Bay Colony hired the local Indians to hunt for the colony. Early Americans later learned several hunting methods from Indians such as relaying, driving, and still hunting.
Square Butte
Lewis's Fort Mountain
by Joseph A. Mussulman
“This mountain has a singular appearance. it is situated in a level plain, it’s sides stand nearly at right angles with each other and are each about a mile in extent … from it’s figure we gave it the name of fort mountain.”
Jefferson the Violinist
by Joseph A. Mussulman
One of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite compositions was the Sonata for Violin and Continuo, Opus 5, written by Corelli. Using a violin such as Jefferson owned, violinist Samuel Taylor plays the theme and two of the variations.
The Salmon River by Air
"Gloomey Picture"
by Joseph A. Mussulman
In the four days between 21 and 24 August 1805, Clark explored fifty-two miles down the Salmon River (he named it Lewis’s River) from today’s North Fork, Idaho. All he saw was a continuous series of rapids.
Dietary Salt
Lewis's singular thirst
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The formula is simple. One molecule of sodium, a reactive metal, plus one molecule of chlorine, a poisonous gas, equals a harmless mineral that once was deemed “the fifth element,” along with earth, air, fire, and water.
Miller Island
River of the falls
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Near the west end of the island, they passed a sizeable tributary local Indians called To war ne hi ooks. The journalists left us no hint that the word they heard as Towarnehiooks was a Chinookan expression meaning “enemies.”
Sgt. Floyd’s Memorials
Much Remembered
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Floyd’s grave became a conspicuous point and a historic shrine on the Lewis and Clark trail almost immediately after the expedition was over. The American artist George Catlin painted Floyd’s Bluff in 1832, with the original cedar marker still in place.
Camp Disappointment by Air
by Joseph A. Mussulman
On 19 July 1806 Lewis intersected the Marias River six miles above the point where he had ended his exploration of its lower reaches the previous spring. He and his party now continued northwest along the Marias reaching its most northern point.
Fort Clatsop Elk
Cervus canadensis roosevelti
by Greg Tollefson, Joseph A. Mussulman
Fort Clatsop’s location was chosen in part because, as some Clatsop Indians had advised the captains, there were more elk on the south side of the river than on the north. The subspecies found there was named in 1898 to honor Theodore Roosevelt.
The Blackfoot River by Air
Prairie of the knobs
by Joseph A. Mussulman
On 6 July 1806, Lewis’s eleven-man party had broken camp at the mouth of a Blackfoot River tributary they named Seamans Creek, after, and headed on up the river along the “road” that Indians living in the Rocky Mountains called the Cokahlahrishkit—the Road to the Buffalo.
Eldorado Creek
Full Stomachs to Pheasant Camp
by Joseph A. Mussulman
“we killed a few Pheasants, and I killd a prarie woolf [coyote] which together with the ballance of our horse beef and some crawfish which we obtained in the creek enabled us to make one more hearty meal.
Lolos in the Fur Trade
Thompson, Ashley, and Work
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The first written record of a man named Lolo appeared in the field notes of David Thompson while at today’s Kettle Falls on the Columbia River. Fifteen years later, trader John Ashley mentions a “Mr. Lolo.”
Up the Columbia
Heading home
by Barbara Fifer, Joseph A. Mussulman
Homeward bound in April 1806, the Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled through the Columbia Gorge and pitched camps on its north side. Their passage was tense and unpleasant, with Indians taking small goods regularly.
Malta Bend
"butifull prarie"
by Joseph A. Mussulman
On 16 June 1804, Clark took a long walk through a “butifull extensive Prarie” to look for an old fort on Evans’s map, built by the French thereabouts more than eighty years earlier. The party spent three days here making new oars and ropes, and hunting.
Common and Fallow Deer
Common meanings and tangled names
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Lewis and Clark used the word fallow mainly in reference to the color of the Virginia whitetail. Few, probably, had ever seen a picture of a European fallow deer, and may have been unaware that this species’ distinctive antlers were not round like those of indigenous North American deer.
Decision Point
Marias River decision
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The two captains “strolled out to the top of the hights in the fork of these rivers,” from which they had “an extensive and most inchanting view.”
Wild Horses
by Joseph A. Mussulman
On 14 August 1805, Meriwether Lewis commented on the Shoshones’ herds: “Most of them are fine horses…. I saw several with Spanish brands on them, and some mules which they informed me that they had also obtained from the Spaniards.”
The Dearborn River Crossing
Along the Old North Trail
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Shortly after crossing the Dearborn River, Lewis saw that the Indian road “continued along the foot of the mountain to the West of north” so he and his men cut northeast across the “tolerably level” plain toward the Sun River.
Climbing Wendover Ridge
Leaving the Lochsa
by Joseph A. Mussulman
“Several horses Sliped and roled down Steep hills which hurt them verry much The one which Carried my desk & Small trunk Turned over & roled down a mountain for 40 yards & lodged against a tree, broke the Desk…”
Fort Yates
Hunting party
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The Corps observed an Indian strategy for hunting game. As men on horseback herded pronghorns—”goats or Antelope,” Clark called them—into the river, boys swam among them and killed some with sticks, while others on shore shot them with bows and arrows.
Indigenous Forestry
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Archaeological evidence indicates that deliberate burning of forests and fields has been occurring on the North American continent for at least the past 10,000 to 20,000 years.
Oxbow Bend
Land and water
by Joseph A. Mussulman
On 19 July 1805, Lewis ‘doubled’ around Oxbow Bend, then 30 feet lower and maybe one-fourth as wide as it is today. Behind the river’s curve, an ancient landmark on the Indian Old North Trail, still stands out.
La Véndrye’s Golden Sands
His visit to Spirit Mound
by Joseph A. Mussulman, Kristopher K. Townsend
La Vérendrye’s 1728 name for Spirit Mound contains several puzzling statements. Pako’s reference to that “very fine gold-coloured sand,” suggests the “little mountain” was located in a fabulous land, an Eldorado, of precious natural riches.
The Salmon and Snake Villages
Side trip
by Joseph A. Mussulman
When the captains saw Nez Perces with several fresh chinook salmon, “fat and fine,” which the Indians said came from “Lewis’s River,” known today as the Salmon River, they dispatched Sgt. John Ordway and two privates to buy some.
Pierre by Air
Standoff
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Lewis and Clark first met the Teton Sioux on 25 September 1804. One of Jefferson’s primary political objectives for the expedition was to create a peace treaty and trade agreement them, the most potent military and economic force on the lower Missouri.
Colter’s Creek
Today's Potlatch River
by Joseph A. Mussulman
At 3 p.m. on 7 October 1805, the Corps loaded their five new dugout canoes–four large ones plus a small one “to look ahead”–and set out down the Clearwater River toward the Columbia and the Pacific beyond.
Carl Linnaeus
God created, Linnaeus arranged
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Even in Lewis and Clark’s day, new species were being classified using a system developed by naturalist Carl Linnaeus.
Into the Breaks
Fred Robinson Bridge to Judith Landing
by Joseph A. Mussulman
In 1804-5-6 Lewis and Clark called all rough or relatively precipitous elevations, wherever they saw them, “broken” lands; the topography along this 149-mile stretch of the Wild and Scenic Missouri River was clearly the worst they had ever seen.
Guard Duty
by Joseph A. Mussulman
During their journey up the Missouri to the Mandan villages, security procedures were outlined in the detachment orders of 26 May 1804. The detachment orders setting forth procedures for the security of Fort Clatsop, were issued on 1 January 1806.
Lewis’s Three Wishes
Pencil, pen, and camera obscura
by Joseph A. Mussulman
“I wished for the pencil of Salvator Rosa, or the pen of Thompson, that I might be enabled to give to the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnifficent and sublimely grand object, which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man”
Clarkia
Clarkia pulchella
by James L. Reveal, Joseph A. Mussulman, Kristopher K. Townsend
The plant’s common names include elkhorn, ragged robin, pink fairy, and deerhorn. In the spring of 1807 Lewis turned over his plant specimens to Frederick Pursh, who gave this flower the scientific name Clarkia pulchella
Boudin Blanc
Charbonneau's chef d'ouvre
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Meriwether Lewis’s recitation of Charbonneau’s recipe for buffalo sausage, known as “white pudding,” serves not only as documentation of a unique frontier cuisine, but also as an example of the captain’s own brand of satire.
Gold Mines on the Trail
by Joseph A. Mussulman
In 1862, a prospector named John White and his partners arrived at a creek previously named for Alexander Willard of the Corps of Discovery. White hit pay dirt on one of the sandbars in the creek. Plenty of other gold-hungry pilgrims were near enough to respond within weeks.
Blowflies
Calliphora sp.
by Joseph A. Mussulman
On 20 May 1805, the captains named a certain watercourse Blowing Fly Creek, “from the immence quantities of those insects found in this neighbourhood.” As Lewis explained, “they infest our meat while roasting or boiling, and we are obliged to brush them off our provision as we eat.”
Travelers’ Rest
Hub of the west
by Joseph A. Mussulman
In the afternoon of 9 September 1805 they turned westward at a creek they dubbed Travelers’ Rest, today known as Lolo Creek. They stopped at a gathering place that Indians had been using for that same purpose for thousands of years.
The Milk River by Air
Milky blend
by Joseph A. Mussulman
“from the colour of it’s water we called it Milk river.” He wondered whether this might be the river the Hidatsas had called “the river which scoalds at all others.”
Travelers’ Rest Creek
Today's Lolo Creek in Montana
by Joseph A. Mussulman
At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, 11 September 1805, Toby led the Corps of Discovery out of Travelers’ Rest camp toward the Bitterroot Mountain barrier.
Sulphur Springs
A cure for Sacagawea?
by David J. Peck, Joseph A. Mussulman
On his return to the mouth of the Marias, Lewis found Sacagawea gravely ill. He had his men cross the river “to procure the water of the Sulpher spring,” “the virtues of which,” Lewis asserted, “I now resolved to try on the Indian woman.”
Fort Mandan by Air
"most perfect harmony"
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Lewis attested that his men were “in excellent health and sperits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed; not a whisper of murmur or discontent to be heard among them, but all act in unison, and with the most perfect harmony.”
An Offer to Raise Jean Baptiste
Clark's promises
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Clark’s affection for Sacagawea’s little boy, Jean Baptiste, becomes evident while canoeing down the Yellowstone River. This article analyzes Clark’s offer to his father, Toussaint Charbonneau, to raise the child.
Bull Boats
Sgt. Pryor's Yellowstone voyage
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Indians stole all the horses, so Sgt. Pryor and his three privates constructed two bull boats and floated down the Yellowstone River in hopes of catching up with Clark or Lewis.
Courts Martial on the Trail
Military trials during the expedition
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The first court martial took place on 29 March 1804, when John Colter, Robert Frazer, and John Shields were called before the court. Discreetly, Clark committed no details of this one to his journal, and no record of it was entered in the Orderly Book.
Station Camp
"the extent of our journey"
by Joseph A. Mussulman
“…this I could plainly See would be the extent of our journey by water, as the waves were too high at any Stage for our Canoes to proceed any further down ….”
Fort Clatsop
Looking for a winter camp
by Joseph A. Mussulman
They had sketched out a plan for their fort, but it seemed that finding a level spot at least fifty feet square would be next to impossible.
End of the Enlightenment
Anti calomel and the "genteel tradition"
by Joseph A. Mussulman
No more calomel! Not just an anthem, a reflection on the transition from the “Age of Enlightenment” to the “genteel tradition.”
The Lewis and Clark River
Coast Range winter
by Joseph A. Mussulman
During their time at the coast, the Corps saw only six sunny days; the rest brought clouds, fog, rain, and a little snow. Fifty-three were partly clear. That’s a normal winter on the west slopes of the Coast Range.
Mountain Beavers
Aplodontia rufa (Sewelel)
by Joseph A. Mussulman
This secretive, primitive little rodent, which somewhat resembles the woodchuck and the muskrat, belongs to the same mammalian order, Rodentia, as the beaver, Castor canadensis, but otherwise they have nothing in common.
Fort Clatsop Today
Reconstructing the fort
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Today’s Fort Clatsop stands at or near the site of the Corps’ winter encampment of 1805-06 was built on the same floor plan that Clark drew on the cover of the Elkskin-covered Journal. The rest of the present structure resembles the original only in a remote sense.
Illnesses at Fort Clatsop
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The rainy weather, monotonous diet, and crisis over the lack of basic materials to carry out a routine tanning of hides for clothes must have eroded their mental and physical health.
Beaverhead Rock
Sacagawea's landmark?
by Joseph A. Mussulman
“The Indian woman recognized the point of a high plain to our right . . . . This hill she says her nation calls the beaver’s head from a conceived resemblance of its figure to the head of that animal.”
Experience the Lewis and Clark Trail
The Lewis and Clark Trail Experience—our sister site at lewisandclark.travel—connects the world to people and places on the Lewis and Clark Trail.
Discover More
- The Lewis and Clark Expedition: Day by Day by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). The story in prose, 14 May 1804–23 September 1806.
- The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery (abridged) by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Selected journal excerpts, 14 May 1804–23 September 1806.
- The Lewis and Clark Journals. by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001). The complete story in 13 volumes.
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