Big Bend of the Missouri by Air

The huge riverine oxbow called Big Bend, or Grand Detour, was already a well-known Missouri River landmark when the Corps of Discovery reached it on 20 September 1805. They paced off the distance across “the gouge,” wrote Clark, and found it to be about a mile and a quarter; he estimated the distance around the oxbow to be thirty miles. This part of the Missouri is now Lake Sharpe, the reservoir created by Big Ben Dan at Fort Thompson, a few miles below the bend.

The light-colored circles on the peninsula are newly planted fields, plowed in circles around center-pivot irrigation systems. The darker circles are fallow fields. The land is part of the Lower Brule Indian Reservation, home of the 1,095 members of the Sicangu, or Lower Brule Sioux tribe, whose ancestors Lewis and Clark had encountered downriver from here in August 1804. On the left side of the river is the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation.

The river was shallow here and the sandbars very thick. About 1:30 A.M. on 21 September 1804, awakened by a strange sound, the men of the Corps discovered that the bar they were camped on was washing out from under them. Within minutes, they fled to the boats and moved to safety at the river’s edge, watching the bank where the barge (called the ‘boat’ or ‘barge’ but never the ‘keelboat’) and pirogues had been moored dissolve into the inky water.

For a more in-depth version of this article, see Big Bend of the Missouri.

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