"...a handsome little river..."

By editor

Twin Bridges, Madison County, Montana, August 1805

The gazebo at the Madison County Fairgrounds in Twin Bridges is not the sort of place where you expect to find the beginning of a river's biography. It is a modest structure, the kind of thing that gets built for county fairs and outdoor weddings and the occasional graduation party. But the marker inside it, erected by the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, tells the story of a morning in August 1805 when a man walked fifteen miles up a river he had never seen before, decided it was not the right river, named it after a virtue, and walked back.

The marker reads: "When Captain Meriwether Lewis and his men arrived in the Jefferson River Valley in August 1805, they explored the tributaries of the Jefferson River (today's Beaverhead River), which was named after President Thomas Jefferson. They named its tributaries Philanthropy and Wisdom, in homage of the President's character. These rivers are now referred to as the Ruby and Big Hole respectively. During exploration, Captain Lewis made a broad loop south of present day Twin Bridges, observing the Ruby and Beaverhead Rivers. He walked about 15 miles up the Big Hole River before returning to his men. After this journey, he was convinced that the Jefferson River was the route to travel."

The marker title comes from Lewis's own journal, written on the morning of August 4, 1805, when he was scouting ahead of the main party and came upon the river he would later name Philanthropy. "At the distance of 3 miles," he wrote, "we passed a handsome little river which meanders through this valley; it is about 30 yards wide, affords a considerable quantity of water and appears as if it might be navigated some miles. The current is not rapid nor the water very clear; the banks are low and the bed formed of stone and gravel."

That river is now called the Ruby. Lewis named it Philanthropy two days later, on August 6, when he and Clark sat down at the forks of the Jefferson and worked out which branch was which. The naming was deliberate and systematic. They had already named the main river after President Jefferson. Now they named its tributaries after the qualities that Jefferson exemplified. The bold, rapid, clear stream that came from the northwest they called Wisdom. The mild, placid one from the southeast they called Philanthropy. Both names were chosen "in commemoration of two of those cardinal virtues," Lewis wrote, "which have so eminently marked that deservedly celebrated character through life."

Jefferson was alive when Lewis wrote those words. He was sixty-two years old, serving his second term as president, and the expedition he had organized and funded was in the mountains of what is now Montana, trying to find a water route to the Pacific. The naming of rivers after his virtues was not flattery. It was a form of cartographic tribute, the kind of thing that explorers do when they are far from home and grateful for the man who sent them.

The names did not last. Philanthropy became the Ruby, named for the garnets that miners found in its gravel bars in the 1860s. Wisdom became the Big Hole, named for the broad valley it drains. The Jefferson itself became the Beaverhead above the confluence, named for the rock formation that Sacagawea recognized as a landmark of her childhood home. The names Lewis gave are preserved in the scholarly literature and on the historical markers, but they are not the names that appear on the road signs.

This is the common fate of explorers' names. Lewis and Clark named rivers, mountains, and landmarks across the West, and most of those names were replaced within a generation by the names that miners, ranchers, and settlers found more useful. The explorers named things for presidents and virtues. The settlers named things for what they found there.

Twin Bridges itself sits at the confluence of three rivers: the Big Hole, the Ruby, and the Beaverhead, which join here to form the Jefferson. Lewis stood at this confluence on August 4, 1805, and spent the day walking up and down the various branches, trying to determine which one the expedition should follow. He left a note for Clark on a pole at the forks, recommending the middle fork, which was the Beaverhead. A beaver cut down the pole and carried off the note before Clark arrived, which caused a certain amount of confusion and resulted in Clark's party ascending the wrong fork before Drouillard caught up with them and set them right.

Lewis walked about fifteen miles up the Big Hole that day before turning back. He found it too rapid and too shallow for the canoes, its bed broken by gravel bars and islands. He returned to the forks convinced that the Beaverhead was the right route, and he was correct. The expedition followed the Beaverhead south and west to its headwaters, crossed the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass on August 12, and descended into the Columbia drainage.

The Big Hole River that Lewis dismissed as unnavigable is today one of the finest trout streams in Montana. Fly fishermen come from considerable distances to wade its riffles and cast to the rising fish. The river that Lewis called Wisdom and then abandoned in favor of the Beaverhead has been doing very well without him.

The Ruby River, the handsome little river that Lewis noticed on his way to the forks, runs through a valley that is now given over to ranching and hay production. It is not a famous river. It does not appear in many fishing guides. But it has a better claim than most rivers to a place in the history of American exploration, because it was the first tributary of the Jefferson that Lewis described in his journal, and he described it with the eye of a man who noticed things.

"A handsome little river." That is not the language of a government report. It is the language of a man who has been walking all morning through a dry valley and comes upon moving water and is glad to see it. Lewis was a precise observer and a capable writer, and when he wrote those words he was not composing literature. He was making notes for a report to the president. But the phrase stuck, and the marker at the Madison County Fairgrounds in Twin Bridges took it for its title, and now it is the name by which the Ruby River is remembered in the historical record of this particular corner of Montana.

Jefferson's virtues have been renamed. The rivers flow on.

See also

• "...a handsome little river..." at Twin Bridges, Madison County (Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, erected 2022)
• Twin Bridges, Montana -- the town at the confluence of the Big Hole, Ruby, and Beaverhead rivers