Chapter 10

Chapter Ten – Lewis and Clark Senior Style
Great Falls – The Portage

Great Falls was an unexpected treat.  Our room was lovely overlooking the Missouri, which was almost blue instead of its normal mud color.  The hotel was across the river from the downtown area, and we decided to walk across the bridge to scout the town on foot.  As we hiked the bridge, a large brick building with a tower dominated the landscape on the other side.  We approached it and read the sign stating it was a restored railroad station.  The doors were locked so we peeked through the windows and determined that the vintage structure was currently being used as an office building.   Russ wanted to ignore the No Trespassing sign at the railroad tracks and walk across them toward town.  I refused and insisted we use the under pass.  As we walked under the tracks, local artists were painting a mural depicting the city’s history on the concrete walls of the underpass.  When we spoke to them, they explained that they were volunteers.  They were painting colorful scenes of buffalo and Native Americans followed by the railroad, the plow and then commerce.  Russ said it must be a metaphor of some sort.

 Downtown Great Falls had the abandoned look of most downtown streets on a Sunday afternoon, plus it was hot.  We walked in one direction through the town to the busy commercial highway where most of the fast food restaurants and small businesses were located, then turned back toward the river through an older neighborhood adjacent to the downtown.  At the river we followed a pedestrian path alongside it and then discovered a lovely park where geese and ducks kept cool in the summer heat.  We passed tables with large families of picnickers enjoying a Sunday afternoon in the shade of aging cottonwood trees.  Everywhere we walked we sensed a tradition of civic pride.  The residents were eating in a downtown park, the artists were enhancing the beauty of their town, and, instead of being leveled, the old railroad station had become a landmark that was in current use.  It was a very pleasant place to visit.

The significance of Great Falls for the Lewis and Clark expedition was that the Corps was forced to spend nearly a month (June 16-July 14, 1805) at the location because five waterfalls impeded their progress by boat.  The Mandan Indians had told the captains about the falls and Lewis and Clark expected to portage one waterfall in a single day.  When Lewis scouted ahead of the Corps, as was his habit, he discovered five waterfalls extending over a distance of ten miles.  He described the first two waterfalls in his journal: 

I continued my rout across the point of a hill a few hundred yards further and was again presented by one of the most beautiful objects in nature, a cascade of about fifty feet perpendicular stretching at right angles across the river . . . to the distance of at least a quarter of a mile.  Here the river pitches over a shelving rock, with an edge as regular and as straight as if formed by art, without a niche or brake in it; the water descends in one even and uninterrupted sheet to the bottom where dashing against the rocky bottom rises into foaming billows of great high and rapidly glides away,   hissing flashing and sparkling as it departs the spray rises from one extremity to the other to 50 f.  I now thought that if a skillful painter had been asked to make a beautiful cascade that he would most probably have presented the precise image of this one; nor could I for some time determine on which of those two great cataracts to bestow the palm, on this or that which I had discovered yesterday; at length I determined between these two great rivals for glory that this was pleasingly beautiful, while the other was sublimely grand.
The task of bypassing the waterfalls was enormous for the Corps.

In addition to the mammoth task of conceiving a plan for portaging the falls, Lewis and Clark were acting as Sacajawea’s physicians.  She had become deathly ill in the days prior to the portage, and while Lewis explored the falls, Clark was treating her symptoms, including bleeding her.  (The Corps hadn’t reached the Shoshone tribe yet, and she was essential to their negotiations for horses.)  She refused to take any medicines, and Clark suspected it was due to her husband’s instructions that she rejected treatment.  When Lewis returned from his exploration of the waterfalls, Clark went forward to survey the falls and surrounding area to devise a portage route.  Lewis took over caring for Sacajawea. 

The first challenge facing Clark was to find a location to exit the river that was barricaded by high cliffs on each shore.  He chose a creek as an outlet, which they named Portage Creek, and the men paddled and pulled the boats two miles up the creek, where they dragged them ashore to dry out.  While the boats dried, the men set up Lower Portage Camp and cached some of the equipment.  Next they chopped and hauled in cottonwood logs, using the wood to construct wheeled platforms (i.e. wagons) on which to carry their supplies and six boats.  Clark surveyed and marked an eighteen mile route across the prairie-the easiest and shortest distance he could devise.  The first two miles were up a steep ascension to the plateaus, then sixteen miles across the cactus ridden prairie to the destination camp site they called, obviously, Upper Portage Camp.

As Clark developed the route, Lewis remained with the main body of men and continued to doctor Sacajawea.  He remembered seeing a sulphur springs a short distance from camp and sent several men to fetch the waters for Sacajawea.  After taking the waters Sacajawea felt well enough the next day to get up.  (Possibly the fact that Clark wasn’t bleeding her anymore helped.)  She went out onto the prairie, ate too much of the local roots and became ill again.  Lewis was furious at her husband for not making certain she followed his instructions to avoid eating anything beyond broth.  Lewis repeated the sulphur water treatment and her health once again improved. 

While Sacajawea recovered, the Corps began the ordeal of hauling six boats and their remaining equipment to Upper Portage Camp.  It required four round trips and eleven days to complete the task.  The men were plagued with bad weather including rain squalls, hail and even gale-force winds, not to mention the heat.  (We were in Great Falls at the same time of year, and we can verify the heat they endured).  The men used the high winds to their advantage by putting up sails and catching the breeze to sail the wheeled boats across the prairie.  The heat was so intense that they stripped off their clothing, but were pelleted by a hail storm that left them battered, bleeding and bruised.  The trek was horrendous and the worst experience yet of the journey.  On the last trip from Lower Portage Camp Sacajawea was recovered enough to walk the eighteen mile portage with Jean Baptiste on her back.  Miraculously, the seventeen year old girl had kept the five month old infant alive throughout her illness.

At Upper Portage Camp the Corps spent two weeks repairing the boats and re-constructing the elements of an iron boat (called the experiment).  The experiment was conceived by Lewis and hauled nearly two thousand miles by the Corps.  After the men pieced together the iron boat’s framework, they covered it with elk skins caulked with a homemade water repellent concocted by Lewis, then they put the experiment in the water.  It sank.  Lewis was embarrassed and Clark set off with a small party of men to find logs suitable for the construction of two additional dugout canoes they needed to replace the pirogue they were leaving behind.

Russ and I know all the above facts about the portage because on Monday morning, July 15, we went to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Giant Springs.  Clark called Giant Springs, “The largest fountain or spring I ever saw”.  Giant Springs was a beautiful spot of flowing water over granite rocks.  Next to it was a fish hatchery with some giant rainbow trout in a display pond.  It was

Giant Springs

 

a lovely hike after which we returned to the center to tour the exhibits, and decided that the Center was the best we had seen up to this point of the trip.  The exhibits traced the expedition from its

beginning to conclusion and did not focus on just the events in Great Falls.  There was also an amazing two story sculpture depicting the men of the Corps dragging one of the boats from the creek to the plateau. 

                                                                 Portage Sculpture

We watched a film on the portage and by the end of our visit were fully educated on all facets of the feat.  Of course, now we had to visit every site in person that played a part in the portage.  Not an easy task when many of the areas are on private land or at the end of long isolated dirt roads over a span of eighteen miles.  We did it though, and it took two days.  We saw all five dammed waterfalls, both ends of Portage Creek, the sulphur springs (sort of), and both lower and upper portage camps. 

Rainbow Falls

View Down River from Rainbow Falls

 

The Great Falls

Lower Portage Camp on Portage Creek

After visiting the center’s exhibits, seeing the movie and driving to and viewing most of the major sites of the portage, we had intense admiration for the fortitude and resourcefulness of Lewis and Clark and the men of the Corps.  The completion of the task was unbelievably Herculean, and they had done it in only a month.  The problem was that the portage had cost them time, which they dearly needed in order to cross the Rockies before the onset of winter.