Chapter 13
The Great Falls
The Great Falls of the Missouri, present-day Great Falls, Montana
The Great Falls of the Missouri turned out to be five waterfalls spread over ten miles of river. From late June to early July 1805 the Corps carried their canoes and baggage about eighteen miles overland on wheels cut from a cottonwood tree, through cactus, hail and a flash flood.
13 June 1805
Two days out from the Marias, Lewis is walking across the plain when his “ears were saluted with the agreeable sound of a fall of water and advancing a little further I saw the spray arrise above the plain like a collumn of smoke.”
He runs towards it and finds the river pouring over a cliff eighty feet high. Part of it is “a smoth even sheet of water,” and the rest is broken into foam and spray: “the grandest sight I ever beheld.” He tries to describe it in his journal, gives up, and starts again. “I wished for the pencil of Salvator Rosa or the pen of Thompson,” he writes, naming a famous painter and a famous poet, so that he could make the rest of the world see what he saw.
It is the proof they needed. This is the Missouri. The captains were right.
14 June 1805
The next day Lewis walks upriver and finds that the Great Falls are not one waterfall but five, spread over about ten miles of river. It is a far bigger obstacle than anyone imagined.
It is also a very strange day. Lewis shoots a buffalo, and while he is watching it fall, a grizzly creeps up behind him. His rifle is empty. He runs, and the bear runs faster: “I ran about 80 yards and found he gained on me fast, I then run into the water.” He stands in the river up to his waist, facing the bear with his spear-tipped walking stick. The bear stops at the edge of the water, turns, and runs off.
On the way back he is growled at by a “tyger cat” and charged by “three bull buffaloe.” He writes that “all the beasts of the neighbourhood had made a league to distroy me.”
21–29 June 1805
The only way past the falls is overland. Clark marks a route of about eighteen miles. The men cut down a cottonwood tree, one of the very few big trees for miles around, saw it into rough round wheels, use the white pirogue’s mast for axles, and build two little wagons. Then they load the canoes onto them and drag them across the plain.
It is brutal work. The ground is covered with prickly pear cactus whose spines go straight through their moccasins. The wind is so strong that on one day they hoist a sail on a canoe and let it help pull. Lewis writes that the men are “limping from the soreness of their feet, some become fant for a few moments, but no man complains all go chearfully on.”
On 29 June a violent storm hits. Huge hailstones knock men to the ground and draw blood. Clark, Sacagawea with her baby, and Charbonneau shelter from the rain in a dry ravine. Suddenly a wall of water comes roaring down it. Clark pushes Sacagawea and the baby up the bank ahead of him, and they scramble out just before the water in the ravine is fifteen feet deep.
Clark writes: “I lost at the river in the torrent the large compas … & the woman lost her childs Bear & Clothes.” The “bear” is Pomp’s cradleboard, the carrier his mother wore on her back. It is gone for good.
30 June 1805
The next day the men are stiff and bruised, and complain “of the bruises and wounds which they had received yesterday from the hail.” Two men go back to the ravine and come back with a surprise. They have found Clark’s compass “in the mud & stones near the mouth of the reveen.” Nothing else is ever found.
9 July 1805
Above the falls, Lewis finally assembles his secret weapon: an iron-framed boat he designed himself and has carried all the way from Virginia. The men sew elk and buffalo skins over the frame, and at first, Lewis writes, “she lay like a perfect cork on the water.”
Then the seams start to leak. To make them watertight, Lewis needs pine tar, and there are no pine trees here. Joseph Whitehouse writes that “the iron boat will not answer our purpose as we cannot git tar nor pitch.” Lewis is heartbroken. He writes that he “relinquished all further hope of my favorite boat and ordered her to be sunk in the water.”
The men cut two new canoes out of cottonwood trees instead. On 15 July, a month after Lewis first saw the falls, the Corps is back on the river.