Lewis and Clark Caverns: A National Monument the Government Gave Away
Montana
The caves in the limestone bluffs above the Jefferson River were known locally for years before anyone bothered to develop them. Two hunters named Tom Williams and Bert Pannell explored them in eighteen ninety-eight, and within a few years a local miner named Dan Morrison was running informal tours through the caverns he called Limespur Cave. The name would not stick.
President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the site Lewis and Clark Cavern National Monument in nineteen oh eight, naming it for the expedition that had traveled along the Jefferson River corridor below in eighteen oh five, though the Corps of Discovery never actually entered the caves. For nearly three decades the National Park Service owned the property but could not fund its development. The caverns sat largely unimproved, a monument that existed on paper more than in practice.
The transformation came in nineteen thirty-five, when the Civilian Conservation Corps established Company Five Seventy-Four at a camp near Whitehall and went to work. Over the next six years more than two hundred young men, working alongside a geologist, an architect, and a team of engineers, remade the entire site. They repaired stairways and improved passages, installed electric lighting throughout the cave system, blasted a five hundred thirty-eight-foot exit tunnel so visitors would not have to retrace their route, and mapped the cavern in detail. Outside, they built a winding three-point-two-mile access road, a granite bridge, maintenance buildings in the rustic national-park style, overlook decks, and hiking trails.
In nineteen thirty-seven, Congress abolished the national monument designation and transferred the property to the state of Montana, and in nineteen thirty-eight it became Montana's first state park. The CCC's work became the foundation of what visitors experience today: a two-mile tour through marble and limestone chambers holding stalactites, stalagmites, helictites, and cave coral deposited over millions of years in what was once a shallow inland sea.
