The Gallatin River: Lewis and Clark Named It Here
Near Big Sky, Montana
The river at the center of Big Sky country is the Gallatin, and it has been carrying names for a long time. In the summer of eighteen oh five, on the outbound journey of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Captain Meriwether Lewis reached the Three Forks of the Missouri, the point where three rivers join to form the beginning of the Missouri. Lewis and Clark named them for the president and two of his cabinet secretaries.
The largest, flowing in from the southwest, he named for President Jefferson himself. The middle fork he named for Secretary of State James Madison. The eastern fork, which drains the Gallatin Canyon and the country around Big Sky, he named for Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury.
The Gallatin in the canyon above Big Sky is a classic freestone trout stream, running cold and fast over a gravel bed between stands of cottonwood and conifer. It holds brown trout and rainbow trout, and its reputation for fly fishing has drawn anglers for generations. The Gallatin Canyon gained a wider cultural moment in nineteen ninety two, when Norman Maclean's novella A River Runs Through It was adapted into a film directed by Robert Redford.
The story was set on the Blackfoot River, but significant portions of the film were shot in the Gallatin Canyon. Many people who have never read the book associate the canyon with that story of fly fishing and family and the way rivers outlast the people who love them. Conservation groups have worked for years to protect the Gallatin's water quality and streamside habitat from the pressure of increased development and Yellowstone traffic on the highway beside it.
