36. Fort Randall Dam

View southeast, downstream

Wolf Tricks

he Corps' camp on the night of 7 September 1804 was perhaps near the river's bend at the horizon in the photograph. On the eighth they sailed before a "gentle Breese" past an abandoned trading post built nine years earlier by a French Canadian, jean Baptiste Truteau. His house stood on the plain at left of the dam's spillway.

Sergeant Gass reviewed a curious little farce that had played out on nature's stage. That morning he went out with one of the hunters to retrieve the meat and hide of a buffalo the man had killed the night before. The hunter had left his hat on the carcass "to keep off the vermin and beasts of prey," apparently believing the scent of a human would scare them away. "But when we came to the place, we found the wolves had devoured the carcase and carried off the hat. Here we found a white wolf, supposed to have been killed in a contest for the buffaloe."

The reservoir above the dam (bottom of photo) is Lake Frances Case, which reaches almost all the way to Big Bend Dam, 109 river miles upstream. The next dam below is Gavins Point Dam, only 60 river miles southeast, which holds back Lewis and Clark Lake. The nearest community to Fort Randall Dam is Pickstown, South Dakota, population 182.

From Discovering Lewis & Clark from the Air
Photography by Jim Wark
Text by Joseph Mussulman
Reproduced by permission of Mountain Press.