51. Fort Peck Lake

Musselshell River

y mid-day on May 19 Clark noticed that he was making better time on shore with two companions than the "Perogues" — did he mean the red and white ones, or the dugout canoes, or both? — which were struggling against the current, so he climbed the highest hill he could see, and from it studied "the meanderings of the Missouri for a long distance," noting especially the mouth of the "M. Shell R" and "a high mountain in a westerley direction, bearing S. S R. about 40 or 50 miles distant" — the Highwood Mountains.

The next day they continued advancing by means of the "toe rope," and when ashore steping gingerly through punishing carpets of prickly pear cactus, and vied for their meat with swarms of blow flies. At 11:00 a.m. they "arrived at the entrance of a handsome bold river which discharges itself into the Missouri on the Lard [larboard, left side of the river facing upstream] ."
this stream we take to be that called by the Minnetares the . . . Muscleshell River;² If it be the same, of which I entertain but little doubt, it takes it's rise, by their information in the 1st Chain of the Rocky Mountains at no great distance from the Yellow stone river, from whence in it's course to this place it passes through a high and broken country pretty well timbered, particularly on it's borders, and intersperced with handsome fertile plains and medows.

The Musselshell River doesn't originate in the "1st Chain of the Rocky Mountains," but about 100 miles north of the Middle Yellowstone on the north slope of the Crazy Mountains. But Lewis couldn't have known that; he and Clark were yet to learn of the supposed four chains of the Rockies that John Evans had sketched from Indian information. However, Lewis expressed some legitimate doubts about what the Indians around Fort Mandan had told him about the river. Instead of "well timbered country" around the river's confluence with the Missouri, Lewis saw nothing more than "a few scattered small scrubby pine and dwarf cedar on the summits of some of the highest hills. Nine-tenths of the country was "wholly destitute of timber of any kind, covered with a short grass, sagebrush, and prickly pear cactus. He explored the lower eight miles of the Musselshell, finding "Cottonwood timber of tollerable size, & lands of excellent quality."

The Muscle Shell river falls into the Missouri 2270 miles³ above it's mouth, and is 110 yards in width, it affords much more water than streams of it's width generally do below, it's courant is by no means rappid, and from the appearances it might be navigated with canoes a considerable distance; it's bed is coarse sand and gravel principally with an occasions mixture of black mud; it's banks abbrupt and about 12 feet high yet never appear to overflow; the waters of this river is of a greenish yellow cast, much more transparent than the Missouri, which last is also much moretransparent than below but still retains its whiteish hue and a proportion of it's sedement. . . .

The hunters returned this evening and informed us that the country continued much the same in appearance as that we saw where we were or broken, and that about five miles [above] the mouth of shell river a handsome river of about fifty yards in width discharged itself into the shell river on the Stard. or upper side; this stream we called Sâh-câ-gar me-âh or bird woman's River, after our interpreter the Snake woman.

Although the expedition occurred during a relatively wet period in climatological history, Lewis may have overestimated the average width of the river — or he may have been measuring its flood plain. Today, except during the brief spring runoff, the breadth of its water seldom exceeds thirty feet throughout most of the river's 365 sluggish miles. Its headwaters merge at the confluence of its North and South Forks in a valley north of the Crazy Mountains; the source of the Yellowstone River is 100 miles away at the southern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. The Musselshell's mainstem flows at a leisurely pace through wide-open, relatively unpopulated prairies for 360 miles to join the Missouri at the center of the so-called UL Bend, clearly visible near the horizon in this photo.

im Wark shot these views of the Musselshell and the big bend almost exactly 201 years after Lewis and Clark saw them from ground-level for the first time, and they probably have changed very little in the interim. The land encompassed by the photos on this page has a population density averaging one person for every three to four square miles. Sacagawea's River, which enters the Musselshell from the west (photo left) is difficult to point out in this photo. Long known simply as Crooked Creek, the name Lewis and Clark gave it was officially restored during the Bicentennial.