Lewis and Clark Pass and the Alice Creek area long served as a travel corridor and settlement area shaped by harsh mountain conditions. In 1806, Meriwether Lewis and his men crossed the pass, and in the 1840s Jesuit missionary Father Nicolas Point became the first EuroAmerican known to pass this way since then, traveling with Salish hunting parties along the Road to the Buffalo and writing of a mountain summit with a vast view that was almost certainly Lewis and Clark Pass. Between 1853 and 1855, military parties ordered west by Isaac Stevens, governor of Washington Territory, searched along the Blackfoot River and the ancient Indian trail for routes for a military road and a transcontinental railroad, and Stevens preferred a line through the Blackfoot Valley, up Alice Creek, and over the pass, though the railroad was later built over Mullan Pass 25 miles south where snowfall was lighter. Permanent settlement followed when John Patterson established the earliest homestead here in 1898; the Road to the Buffalo ran through the Patterson ranch yard, their barn straddled it, and family members often saw Indian people traveling the trail. Range life here was grueling, with early snows, long winters, and short summers, and an account from 1900 recalls Alberta Patterson as a twenty-one-month-old child being placed in a wooden apple box used as a portable crib while her mother worked building fences in the field. In the early 1900s, the Forest Service built the Alice Creek Guard Station near the head of Alice Creek, where the Helena National Forest used it in winter for game surveys and in summer for range riders and fire guards, and today only its foundation remains.