Portaging the Falls

They commonly called themselves saokí•tap•ksi meaning ‘prairie people.’ The meaning ‘people with black feet’ comes from exonymns—the names given by other, external tribes. Historically, several related groups comprise the Blackfoot or Blackfeet people.

The explorers assembled the iron-framed boat in the early summer of 1805 at the Upper Portage Camp, upstream of the Great Falls. There Lewis and the men put together the frame. “We called her the Experiment,” wrote Sergeant Patrick Gass.

The captains were worried. The expedition was quickly running out of time and space: time to cross the Rockies before winter, and space to find the Shoshones, with their horses and guides. Another month of increasingly toilsome river travel would ensue.

“I wished for the pencil of Salvator Rosa, or the pen of Thompson, that I might be enabled to give to the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnifficent and sublimely grand object, which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man”

From Indian information the previous winter, the captains knew they would encounter a great falls in the Missouri River. What they found was a 14-mile-long series of waterfalls and rapids that drops 473 feet.

The day’s “succession of curious adventures wore the impression on my mind of inchantment,” he mused. “It now seemed to me that all the beasts of the neighbourhood had made a league to distroy me.”

The falls of the Missouri comprised the most remarkable of all the “remarkeable points” that Clark described and mapped in conscientious obedience to an order from Thomas Jefferson to take observations “with great pains & accuracy.”

By the evening of 15 June 1805, Clark had gotten the canoes and the white perogue as close to the Great Falls as possible, and the next afternoon Lewis joined him at the “lower portage camp,” a mile below the mouth of Belt Creek.

On his return to the mouth of the Marias, Lewis found Sacagawea gravely ill. He had his men cross the river “to procure the water of the Sulpher spring,” “the virtues of which,” Lewis asserted, “I now resolved to try on the Indian woman.”

On 17 June 1805, Clark and five men set out to determine the best portage route around the Great Falls of the Missouri. On the way up the river, he stopped to also measure the fall of the river and to map the falls.

Clark and his five men “proceeded on up the river a little more than a mile to the largest fountain or Spring I ever Saw, and doubt if it is not the largest in American Known.”

The shuttling of all the baggage and six canoes across the prairie to the upper portage camp opposite White Bear Islands began on 21 June 1805 and was completed on 2 July 1805. All in all, it was one of the most grueling undertakings on the entire expedition.

Of all the near-calamities the Corps of Discovery experienced, none was more dire than the one that occurred on 29 June 1805 in a normally dry ravine a short distance above the Great Fall. The principals were Charbonneau, Sacagawea, Jean Baptiste, York, and William Clark.

Near the Great Falls, Lewis describes loud noises “resembling precisely the discharge of a piece of ordinance of 6 pounds at the distance of three miles.” Thunder didn’t seem likely as “It was perfectly calm, clear, and not a cloud to be seen.”

“This mountain has a singular appearance. it is situated in a level plain, it’s sides stand nearly at right angles with each other and are each about a mile in extent … from it’s figure we gave it the name of fort mountain.”

After Lewis’s preliminary sketch, later artists and photographers contributed to the visual documentation of the “sublimely grand” waterfall including Barralet, Gustavus Sohon, A. E. Mathews, and F. Jay Haynes.