About this work
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*Crossing the Bitterroot Mountains* — titled in Sohon's own hand "Crossing the Bitter Roots, Nov. 1855" — depicts his journey with the Stevens party through the Bitterroot Mountains, showing two men and several horses or mules following a steep trail through a snow-covered landscape.
The work was rendered in pencil, ink, and paint , a combination Sohon deployed with the precision of a trained topographical eye and the instinct of a born witness. There is no romanticism here in the conventional Western sense — no heroic scale, no golden hour theatrics. Instead, the viewer encounters a scene of quiet, grinding necessity: figures small against white terrain, the trail barely distinguishable from the mountain itself, the cold almost tactile in the spare marks of the composition.
Dated to 1855, the original is held in the collection of the Washington State Historical Society. Sohon made it as a member of the Governor Isaac Stevens party crossing the Bitterroot Mountains — a party he accompanied as artist, interpreter, and observer during the 1855 treaty expedition.
That spring and summer, Stevens, in his role as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, had been completing treaties with the Western Washington tribes and was preparing to negotiate with the Columbia Plateau and Rocky Mountain tribes. Sohon was not merely documenting a landscape; he was recording the physical reality of one of the most consequential diplomatic undertakings in the history of the Pacific Northwest — a crossing made in November, in snow, with the treaty councils barely behind them and an uncertain peace ahead. In 1862, Sohon was called to Washington, D.C. to assist in completing the official report of the Stevens survey, and his hand-tinted lithographs of Western scenes became an important basis for popular perceptions of the Far West.
This is a painting for rooms that earn their quiet — a study, a reading nook, a hallway where considered things are placed. Its palette of muted whites, slate grays, and earth tones works with natural light and against it equally, the snowy field in the composition brightening in sun, deepening to silver on overcast afternoons. Sohon's surviving pencil sketches and watercolors comprise valuable eyewitness records of a crucial transitional period in Inland Northwest history — and that documentary gravity is palpable. The viewer it speaks to isn't looking for decoration; they're looking for something with a story locked inside it, a piece that rewards a second look and a third. *Crossing the Bitterroot Mountains* delivers both the austere beauty of the mountain West and the weight of what that crossing meant.
