Day three. Tang and oatmeal bars for breakfast, and some salty words to Lewis, our
cook, about his expansive cuisine. Lewis wants an early departure, he says, because we
will stop tonight at the Judith, a long 25 miles downriver. On the 29th of May, after a
hectic night during which a bull buffalo ran full tilt through camp ("within 18
inches of the heads of some of the men who lay sleeping"), Lewis and Clark came upon
a small but significant stream flowing into the Missouri from the south, and Clark called
it the "Judieths" after his intended, Julia (Judy) Hancock of Virginia. They
found the campfires of 126 Indian lodges belonging to the Atsina, allies of the
Blackfoot--or so said "the Indian woman with us" (Sacagawea) after she examined
their "mockerson" tracks in the sand.
Ten miles upriver they came upon a
pishkin, a place where the Indians of the upper Missouri, before they had wide access to
the horse and the rifle, used to drive great herds of buffalo over a precipice. The most
active and fleet young man of the tribe would put on a skin with the head and horns still
intact and position himself so that when the hunters appeared he could pop up and run like
mad toward a chosen cliff. The startled buffalo would blindly follow, the decoy would try
to time his arrival at the edge precisely, drop into a pre-scouted crevasse just below the
lip, and let the herd thunder over. Voilˆ. The most active and fleet young man became
the toast of the teepee, the life of the evening party--unless, as sometimes happened, he
turned out not to be fleet enough and the thundering herd made a rug out of him.
Lewis remarks that the rotting carcasses they discovered "created a most horrid
stench," and that the great many wolves they saw skulking around the neighborhood
"were fat and extreemly gentle." Clark killed one of them with a short pike
called an espontoon, though Lewis does not say why. Probably for the same reason mountain
men killed everything--sometimes because they wanted to eat it, often just because it
moved. The expedition leaders, in consolation for their unappetizing find at the pishkin,
apparently thought it proper to open the bar. Lewis reports that "notwithstanding the
allowance of sperits we issued did not exceed 1/2 (jill) pr. man, several of them were
considerably effected by it; such is the effects of abstaining for some time from the uce
of sperituous liquors; they were all very merry."
The upper Missouri below Great Falls is strictly a Class I river. We look hopefully at
markings on our map like Pablo's Rapid and Dead Man Rapid, but they prove to be little
more than riffles and a slight acceleration in the current. Just below the Slaughter River
at the end of the White Cliffs we drift down on a flock of white pelicans bobbing in the
water, much larger than the coastal variety I am used to, and possessing the greatest
wingspan of any bird in this part of the country.
We hold our paddles quiet and they watch
us until we are within 20 or 30 yards, then lift laboriously off the surface and begin
slowly to circle, gaining altitude an inch at a time like some jumbo jet corkscrewing its
way out of a high- altitude airport ringed by mountains. They are snow white with a fringe
of black aileron on the underside of their enormous wings, and the conical helix of their
upward spiral against the flat blue sky is completely hypnotic. Around and around they
wheel, now catching a thermal and rising faster, higher, higher, higher, a speck of cosmic
dust in a glinting bank around the sun, still higher--until magically they vanish,
absorbed into the atmosphere.
I hear children swimming. The sound of their splashing carries a mile up the river,
destroying the midday quiet, the contemplative float through the post-luncheon nods, the
illusion that we are alone in this wilderness and protected from the babble of other
anthropoids. Somebody is swimming in our river. But nothing appears. The noise grows
louder. We float down, almost abreast. Still nothing. I stand cautiously and peer over a
low bar of cobble that forms the bank to my right, and beyond it into a brackish-looking
pond created by summer's recession in the flow of the river. What I see are the glistening
backs of a dozen giant carp, their dorsal fins and the scaly upper half of their goldfish
bodies cutting through the shallow water in a slow, almost meditative glide, punctuated
every now and then by a violent convulsion that churns the water and produces the sound we
heard away upriver.
We beach the canoes and watch them for over an hour, understanding
finally the obvious pattern to their ritual. Behind each female (they appear to be about
three feet long) swims a smaller male, and it is he who thrashes the water with his tail
to excite the releasing of the eggs. The whole scene is so primeval that we would stand
gaping all afternoon if the westering arc of the sun didn't jog us on our way.
We camp at the Judith as planned. There is an old ferry here, and a broad grassy bank
along the river shaded by cottonwoods. A dirt road runs north for 44 miles to the town of
Big Sandy on Route 89, and south from the other side of the river about 49 miles to Hilger
on Route 191 out of Lewistown, but neither is a road that anybody travels for pleasure, or
indeed for any reason except to get back to the ranch. A sign by the ferry says
"Judith Landing Recreation Area," but I don't see anybody recreating except two
fishermen setting trotlines for catfish and periodically emerging from their pickup to
check on their luck.
It is hard to imagine this empty stretch of river ever changing, ever becoming a
"recreation area." It is exceedingly remote to begin with. It is not the kind of
country that stimulates most backpackers, has no whitewater to lure river runners, has
limited access and primitive facilities at only a few places. Fishing is pretty much
limited to goldeye, sauger, and catfish, and in a state full of blue-ribbon trout streams,
who cares for that? The Bureau of Land Management was charged with developing a
river-management plan, always a little worrisome, particularly when one considers what
happened to 93 percent of the Missouri under the direction of the Army Corps of Engineers
and the Bureau of Reclamation.
In the 1940s they came up with two plans for development:
The Corps stressed flood control and navigation, and the Bureau stressed irrigation and
hydroelectric power. They decided to cooperate and build all the dams proposed by
everybody, and that was the end of the Missouri River. The economic benefits from the dams
went mainly east, and the social costs were borne by the people of the regions through
which the river flows--like, for instance, the Mandans, who lost much of their cultural
history beneath the waters backed up by the Garrison Dam.
Others who have written about this river have found the badlands along this eastern
stretch below Judith more teeming with wildlife than the White Cliffs section. Bighorn
sheep and elk have been reintroduced in the area. There should be whitetail and mule deer
in abundance, and this is the most likely place to spot a golden eagle. But we see, in
fact, fewer birds, more signs of human habitation, and, apart from a small herd of
pronghorn antelope and a few beaver, not much along the banks. Captain William Clark
suffered no such disappointment.
He remarks in his journal entry for the 23rd of May,
1805, "I walked on shore and killed 4 deer & an Elk, & a beaver in the
evening we killed a large fat Bear, which we unfortunately lost in the river . . . The
after part of this day was worm & the Musquetors troublesome. Saw but five Buffalow a
number of Elk & Deer & 5 bear & 2 antilopes to day." The following
morning, just to get his blood circulating, Clark "walked on shore and killed a
female Ibi or big horn animal . . . in my absence Drewyer & Bratten killed two
others." A kill count from the Lewis and Clark journals might help explain our
diminished sightings.
The weather begins to turn foul, with high winds and blustering rainsqualls, and
because we laid over a day at the Judith to swim and loaf we begin to feel pressed to make
time. We aren't, but that doesn't seem to occur to anybody. Nabokov suggests we lash the
canoes together and rig a sail out of a ground cloth and two paddles, and he and my son
sit in the bow holding this contraption before the wind. No wonder we don't see any
wildlife. We look like the last days of the Kon Tiki, veering and yawing down the river,
flapping like wash day at the asylum, but it works, and we rocket through 35 miles of
twisting channel before we finally collapse at a place called Bullwhacker Coulee.
Meriwether Lewis climbed out of the river here on the 26th day of May, a little over a
year and 2,000 miles from the day he and Clark and 43 men began their trek to the Pacific,
and he caught his first glimpse of what he thought were the Rocky Mountains, "covered
with snow and the sun shone on it in such a manner as to give me the most plain and
satisfactory view." His reaction to this discovery is all the more touching because
he was actually looking at the Little Rockies of northern Montana rather than the great
mountains he thought them to be. "I feel a secret pleasure in finding myself so near
the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri; but when I reflected on the
difficulties which this snowey barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific,
and the sufferings and hardships of myself and party in them, it in some measure
counterballanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them; but as
I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable
road untill I am compelled to believe differently."
I wonder what he would think of that road now? Take Interstate 15 to Helena and over
the Continental Divide to Butte. Pick up Interstate 90 to Missoula, and then Highway 12
across Idaho and into Washington. You'll hit the Columbia just past Walla Walla and from
there it's interstate again all the way to the ocean. Six months, you say? Now it's a
two-day drive.
Rain continues to fall in wind-blown sheets, and we turn in at the first hint of dusk.
In the morning we load the canoes and shove off in a gusting storm that turns the river to
chop. Cow Island, where Chief Joseph and his band of Nez Perces crossed in September of
1877 (General Oliver Howard in hot pursuit) slips by to our left. The channel is much
wider along here than it was above the Judith, the cliffs far back from the muddy banks.
There are numerous side channels and grassy, treeless islands. We see little in the way of
animal life except cows and an occasional band of horses, and few birds except a crippled
pelican, obviously the recipient of some idiot's shotgun blast, dragging itself along the
beach at Tea Island, just before our pullout point at the Fred Robinson Bridge.
Civilization. After the wildness of the upper river, the solitude, the illusion of
being sequestered from humanity, returning to a world even as sparsely inhabited as
northeastern Montana suddenly begins to seem like a bum idea. We begin to regret out loud
that 35-mile day when we did little but hunker behind an improvised sail. We should have
spent more time off the river, hiking, poking around. We start to question one another
about the infernal compulsion to log miles, check maps, figure out where we are and how
far we have to go. Go where? To a steel and concrete bridge with cars zipping overhead,
overflowing refuse cans, chemical johns, wounded birds? Pretty soon we aren't even
speaking.
But it is only by contrast that this feels like civilization, and it seems extremely
unlikely that this piece of the world is going to be much changed by an influx of
tourists, developers, immigrants, speculators, retirement communities, second-home owners,
utility companies, or resort operators. There just isn't anything up here to make a buck
on. Space and the wind in your ears. No thrills. For most people it is too hot in the
summer, too cold in the winter, too austere in its emptiness, too far from port, too tough
on the spirit. It will remain, one feels, the preserve of those who can accept it on its
own terms.
Page Stegner is the author of numerous works on the American West. A fuller version of
this story was first published by Sierra Club Books in Outposts of Eden: A Curmudgeon
at Large in the American West (1989).
