The “Deserts of America”

The explorers’ grasp of the geography of the interior of the Northwest continued to evolve. At water level they estimated the distances between riverside landmarks and recorded their compass bearings, which were logged in daily lists of “courses and distances.” On 26 May 1805, for instance, they traveled 22¾ miles in twenty-one courses pausing briefly at the end of the eleventh course. For no known reason, they dubbed a creek meandering into the Missouri River (in the far right of the above photo), “Windsor’s Creek.” Since steamboat days, this creek has been known as Cow Creek.

Looking around, the Corps absorbed the shapes and colors of the river’s borderlands. Here they noticed that the black rock in yesterday’s bluffs had given way to soft, light sandstone overlaid by “a hard freestone of a brownish yellow colour.” They were passing through a flicker of geological time, the ancestry of the mighty river, the ebbs and flows of glaciers. In practical terms, Clark judged that “this Countrey may with propriety . . . be termed the Deserts of America, as I do not Conceive any part can ever be Settled, as it is deficient in water, Timer & too steep to be tilled.”

From the summits of riverside hills such as these, they studied the horizons. On this day, from one of the hills near the center of this photo, Lewis though he glimpsed the sun-glinted Rocky Mountains for the first time. His first thought was of “the difficulties which this snowey barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific,” though he was willing to expect “a good comfortable road untill I am compelled to beleive differently.” His sentiments were prmature. What he saw (seen here in the distance) was an outlying range known today as the Highwoods, nearly a hundred miles east of the Rocky Mountain front.

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