Danger Ahead!

By editor

Missoula, Missoula County, Montana, July 1806

There is a profound difference between the courage of ignorance and the courage of knowledge. When Captain Meriwether Lewis stood at the edge of the Missoula Valley in the summer of 1806, preparing to march eastward toward the great falls of the Missouri River, he possessed the former. The six Niimíipuu men who had guided him safely across the Bitterroot Mountains possessed the latter. They knew the land, and more importantly, they knew the blood that watered it.

The geography of the northern Rocky Mountains dictates the movements of men as surely as it dictates the flow of rivers. For the Salish, the Nez Perce, the Pend d'Oreilles, and the Kootenai, the buffalo grounds of the eastern plains were a vital source of sustenance, providing meat, hides, and bone essential for winter survival. Yet to reach those plains, the western tribes had to pass through a narrow, confining river canyon east of the Missoula Valley. It was a natural funnel, a geographical necessity that forced all travelers into a predictable path.

The Blackfoot Confederacy, comprising the Siksika, Kainai, and Piikani, understood this geography perfectly. Having acquired horses and firearms earlier than their western neighbors, the Blackfeet had established themselves as the preeminent power on the northwestern plains. They did not view the canyon as a thoroughfare; they viewed it as a hunting ground, and the prey was not always buffalo. The narrow defile became a place of ambush, a gauntlet where western hunting parties were routinely attacked, their horses taken, and their numbers diminished.

On the fourth of July, 1806, the six Nez Perce guides halted. They had brought the American expedition through the deep snows of the Lolo Trail, fulfilling their promise of safe passage. But they would go no further. To enter the canyon was to invite death, and they had no intention of throwing their lives away on an expedition that was not their own.

Lewis recorded their departure in his journal with a mixture of gratitude and naive confidence. "These affectionate people our guides betrayed every emmotion of unfeigned regret at seperating from us," he wrote. "They said that they were confidint that the Pahkees, (the appellation they give the Minnetares) would cut us off."

The guides were not speaking from superstition or vague apprehension. They were speaking from generations of hard-won experience. They knew that the Blackfeet controlled the eastern plains and that the canyon was the door to their domain. Lewis, however, saw only a route on a map. He noted the strategic reality of the canyon, observing that "all the nations also on the west side of the mountain with whom we are acquainted inhabiting the waters of Lewis's river & who visit the plains of the Missouri pass by this rout." Yet he failed to grasp the immediate, mortal peril that this reality entailed.

The Americans proceeded eastward, passing safely through the canyon that would later earn a fearsome reputation among French-Canadian trappers. By the 1820s, those trappers would name the passage Porte d'Enfer, the Gates of Hell. The river that flowed through it became the Hell Gate River, and the first trading post established in the valley in 1860 bore the same ominous name. Even today, long after the town moved and adopted the more civilized name of Missoula, the echo of that danger persists in the names of local schools and businesses.

Lewis and his men survived the Hell Gate, but the Nez Perce warning was not unfounded; it was merely premature. Three weeks later, on the banks of the Marias River, Lewis's detachment encountered a party of Piikani warriors. The meeting began in tense diplomacy and ended in sudden violence. In the early morning hours, a struggle over rifles and horses left two Blackfeet men dead: one stabbed by Reuben Fields, the other shot by Lewis himself. It was the only fatal encounter between the Corps of Discovery and the indigenous peoples of the West.

Fearing immediate retaliation from a larger Blackfeet camp, the Americans fled, riding nearly a hundred miles in a single day. As they pushed their exhausted horses across the plains, looking constantly over their shoulders, Lewis must have finally understood what his Nez Perce guides had known all along. The land was not an empty wilderness waiting to be discovered. It was a fully inhabited world, governed by ancient rivalries and sovereign powers, where a narrow canyon could be a gate to hell, and where the failure to heed a warning could cost a man his life.

See also

• Danger Ahead! at Missoula, Missoula County (National Park Service, erected 2010)
• Missoula, the city that grew at the mouth of the Hell Gate canyon