Lewis and Clark's Great Falls Portage: Eighteen Days Around Five Waterfalls
Near Great Falls, Montana
On June thirteenth, eighteen oh five, Meriwether Lewis heard the sound of falling water before he saw it. He walked ahead of the main party and followed the sound until he stood at the top of a waterfall he described in his journal as the grandest spectacle I ever beheld. The Great Falls of the Missouri, he wrote, was truly magnificent. He spent the rest of that day's journal entry trying to capture it in words and concluding that he lacked the language.
His joy lasted about twenty-four hours. The Corps of Discovery then spent the next eighteen days hauling their entire outfit, dugout canoes, barrels, tools, and all the gear for a two-year overland expedition, around five successive waterfalls on the Missouri River. They did not have wheels. They cut cottonwood trees, shaped them into rough discs, and built improvised carts. They dragged the canoes overland through prickly pear cactus, baking heat, and sudden violent hailstorms. The portage route covered approximately eighteen miles of ground that they crossed multiple times each direction. Lewis described it as the most laborious we have had on the whole voyage.
The Great Falls of the Missouri no longer look exactly as Lewis saw them. Five dams built between eighteen ninety and nineteen fifty altered the falls' appearance and height. What the landscape preserves is the scale of what the Corps of Discovery accomplished here. The Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center in Great Falls, operated in partnership with the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, sits near the portage route and reconstructs the engineering problem those eighteen days represented.
It is worth the stop.
