Dear TIME-Reader:

THE boys will be at Three Forks in a couple of days. I'd better get out to meet them."

Whenever Bradley Smith checked the pins on his map and made this sort of announcement, his family knew it was time for him to shoulder his camera and set off on another expedition into the Northwest.

For "the boys" were Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. And Brad Smith had been assigned by TIME to retrace their journey, photographing each landmark just as they first saw it, at the same time of year and the same time of day, from the same vantage point of mountain peak or river bed that they had described in their journals.

The result, as you will see from the special color section in this week's issue, is the most precise and probably the most complete pictorial color record of the Lewis and Clark trail ever published.

Photographer Smith, who has long been fascinated by their story, signed his telegrams to TIME "Meriwether Smith." And just as they did, he encountered hardships, for the territory is still largely uninhabited and many sites were accessible only by foot, horseback or canoe.

From the outset, Smith's own trek was marked by mishap. At Minneapolis, his plane made a forced landing. At Mandan, N. Dak., the wind at the top of a cliff caught the bellows of his camera and tumbled him 4 ft. over the edge to a shelf with a view 700 ft. straight down. His great 8 by 10 studio camera--basically unchanged in construction from the days of Daguerre, Morse and Mathew Brady, but still, in Smith's opinion, the best for scenic photography--was smashed beyond repair. A second of these cameras, tripod and all, went to its doom from the top of Rainbow Falls. But the third more than proved its worth in the Bitterroot Mountains, where the 40DEG below temperature would have played hob with roll film.

Smith is used to living with excitement. A native of New Orleans, he broke into photo-journalism in 1936 with a dynamite-loaded story, "The Unions Enter the Cotton Fields." Today he lives on a farm in Connecticut.

He also lives with legend. Says Smith: "We are still close to the pioneers in this country, and have distinct memories of origins. I think of historical figures as alive--and see places as if I were looking over the shoulders of the men who explored them."

I think that's the impression you will get from Bradley Smith's photographs, too.

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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