The Grandest Sight: Lewis and Clark at the Great Falls
Near Great Falls, Montana
On June thirteenth, eighteen oh five, Meriwether Lewis walked alone ahead of the main party and heard the Missouri River before he saw it. A tremendous roaring filled the air. He climbed a rise and looked down on what he later recorded as the grandest sight he ever beheld: a curtain of white water dropping eighty-seven feet over a broad limestone ledge, the mist catching the afternoon light. He named it the Great Falls.
What he discovered over the following day changed the expedition's timeline entirely. The falls he had found was only one of five. Over a stretch of ten miles, the Missouri dropped a combined six hundred and twelve feet through five separate cascades. Black Eagle Falls, Colter Falls, Rainbow Falls, Crooked Falls, and the Great Falls itself. No one in Washington had told them. No map showed it. The portage they had hoped might take a day would take nearly a month.
The Corps of Discovery spent that month in June and July of eighteen oh five hauling their dugout canoes and eight tons of equipment eighteen miles overland through prickly pear cactus that pierced the men's moccasins with every step. They built crude wooden wheels from cottonwood trees and dragged the heavy boats across shortgrass prairie. A violent hailstorm battered them so hard that several men were knocked to the ground. Grizzly bears shadowed the camps along the river.
Sacagawea fell gravely ill during those weeks, running a high fever near the upper camp. Lewis treated her with mineral water drawn from the springs just upstream. She recovered.
Only Crooked Falls remains in anything close to its original form today. The other four are drowned behind dams. But stand at the overlook on a spring morning when the river runs high, and you can still hear what Lewis heard first: the roar arriving before the water comes into view.
