Grasshoppers in the River?

By editor

Fort Benton, Chouteau County, Montana

In the quarter century following the first glittering gold discoveries in western Montana, before the iron rails finally snaked their way to Fort Benton in 1887, the Missouri River was the highway of hope and hardship. Hundreds of steamboats made the journey from St. Louis to the headwaters of navigation here, carrying prospectors, traders, and sometimes a foolhardy soul or two chasing dreams that often proved as slippery as the river itself. The Missouri, they said, was a wild and treacherous beast. One world traveler of the day declared the voyage upstream more harrowing than sailing the high seas in a tempest, and after hearing the tale of those boats, I can well believe it.

The primary trouble was not the river’s length or its unpredictable current alone. It was the sandbars scattered like hidden reefs in its shallow, swift waters, especially above the Marias River. These bars were the bane of every pilot’s existence. The moment a steamboat struck one of these underwater ridges, it was as if some invisible hand had seized the hull and planted it firmly, refusing to budge. This happened often enough to be a common hazard, and when it did, the crew resorted to a peculiar and exhausting method of rescue that earned these boats the nickname "grasshoppers."

These "grasshoppers" were not the insects themselves, but the long wooden poles--spars, they called them--that crews hammered into the riverbed to lever the boat off the sandbar. The process involved ropes, pulleys, the noisy whine of the engine reversed in protest, and the brute strength of men who would rather be anywhere else. The spars, thrust into the silt and sand, gave the ship the appearance of a giant insect awkwardly stepping forward across the water. The boatmen, with their dry humor, adopted the image and name without hesitation.

One passenger, May Flanagan, chronicled the ordeal in 1887, a vivid account preserved in John Lepley’s collection Packets to Paradise. She described a particular incident on the Shonkin Bar with a detail that brings the slow agony of the moment to life: "We found the boat hard-fast on the Shonkin Bar. The boat backed and shoved forward in efforts to free itself but only came more firmly wedged on the bar. The spars were lowered into the river bed, the engine started and the wheel reversed in an attempt to pry the boat off the bar. First one spar broke, then the second one. The crew was ordered overboard with picks, shovels and crow bars. After thirty hours of ceaseless toil, the hard bar under the boat parted into clods of sand and gravel and we floated clear."

Thirty hours of labor to nudge a boat a few feet downstream. That is the sort of patience and stubbornness the Missouri demanded. The men who ran these steamboats were less like slick river navigators and more like river wrestlers, fighting with a foe that would not be tamed by steam power alone.

One might ask why such a perilous and painstaking method was tolerated for so long. The answer lies in the economics of the time. Before the railroad pushed its way westward, Fort Benton was the terminus of the Missouri River navigation and the gateway to the Montana gold fields. Steamboats were the only way to haul heavy machinery, supplies, and eager miners into the remote mining towns scattered across the Rocky Mountain front. The journey from St. Louis to Fort Benton was about 2,300 river miles, a voyage that could take from six weeks to two months depending on conditions. The cost of freight was high, often several hundred dollars per ton, but without these boats, the gold rush might have sputtered out before it truly began.

The riverboat operators, including notable figures like Captain Grant Marsh, who later earned fame piloting steamboats on the Yellowstone and Mississippi, knew the Missouri’s temperament well. Marsh once remarked, "The Missouri is a river that asks to be respected and feared in equal measure. One false move and she will hold you fast as a mother with a newborn." His words capture the uneasy relationship between man and river--one that required skill, courage, and a certain acceptance of delay and disaster.

Steamboat travel was not merely an exercise in navigation; it was a business fraught with financial risk. Many boats sank or were wrecked on the Missouri’s rocks and snags, and insurance was costly if available at all. The arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1887 marked the beginning of the end for Missouri steamboats, as railroads could move freight faster, more reliably, and in greater volume. Yet, during those two and a half decades, the steamboats shaped the economic and social landscape of Montana’s early settlement. They moved not just miners and goods, but banknotes, land speculators, and the hopes of entrepreneurs eager to carve fortunes from the wilderness.

The Missouri’s sandbars were not just natural obstacles--they were economic bottlenecks. Each delay meant lost time and rising costs. The crews’ use of spars--the grasshoppers--was a laborious workaround that kept the flow of goods moving, inch by inch. The labor was intense, the noise of the engine reversing to power the capstan that hauled the ropes relentless. At Fort Benton’s Missouri Breaks Interpretive Center, visitors can see a patio shaped like a steamboat deck, complete with a wooden spar extending from the side, to give a tangible sense of this struggle. The capstan, powered by a noisy engine, would have been the heart of these efforts, winding the ropes that raised the bow inch by inch.

The Missouri River steamboats, with their grasshopper poles and patient crews, tell a story not just of transportation but of human tenacity in the face of natural obstacles. It was a story of men who wrestled with sandbars, engines, and time itself to keep the wheels of Montana’s gold rush grinding forward. They did this not with the speed of railroads or the safety of highways but with sweat, wood, and iron, inching their way up a river that refused to be conquered.

See also

• Grasshoppers in the River? at Fort Benton, Chouteau County
• Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail at Loma, Chouteau County
• Priming the Pump at Fort Benton, Chouteau County