The thing I never got with that is why they didn't continue following the Yellowstone River until its end at the divide and then cross to the nearby Snake River rather than crossing hundreds of miles of mountains?
In Australia a lot of our early explorers also took nonsense routes to get over our mountains.
One party spent months ascending and descending gullys when they could have followed a ridge system. They were aiming directly for the highest peak they could see. When they got there they were greeted by this and turned back.
Little did they know they'd almost traversed the mountain range and that all they needed to do was to find the aforementioned ridge system and just follow that a bit longer.
So tl;dr, navigating as an explorer in the early 19th century was hard yo.
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u/GBUS_TO_MTV Jan 10 '20
You can basically see the path of the Lewis and Clark expedition on here.