Jefferson River

Twin Bridges, Madison County, Montana, August 1805

The river gave them nothing for free.

Captain William Clark had been fighting the Jefferson for two weeks by the time he reached the three-pronged fork at the place that would one day become Twin Bridges. The river was shallow, swift, and treacherous, divided into braided channels that scattered through thickets of willow and cottonwood so dense a man could not see twenty yards ahead. The canoes scraped bottom constantly. The men waded in the cold current, hauling the boats by hand over gravel bars that shifted underfoot. Their feet were bruised and bleeding from the stones. Their moccasins rotted off. Sergeant Gass wrote that the river was "not navigable for our canoes" much further up, and that was the charitable assessment.

What they were looking for was the passage to the Pacific. What they found, on August 4, 1805, was a puzzle.

The Jefferson forked. Then it forked again. Three rivers converged in a tangle of willow and beaver-chewed cottonwood, and the captains had to decide which branch to follow into the mountains. Lewis had gone ahead on foot to scout the forks, and he left a letter for Clark on a green pole at the confluence, describing what he had found and which way to go. When Clark arrived, the pole was there. The letter was gone. A beaver had chewed the pole down and carried the message off into the current.

Clark wrote it up with the flat patience of a man who has learned not to be surprised by anything the wilderness can devise: "Capt. Lewis had left a Letter on a pole in the forks informing me what he had discovered & th(e) course of the river &c. this letter was cut down by the (beaver) as it was on a green pole & Carried off."

So Clark had to figure it out for himself.

The Three Forks of the Jefferson

The three rivers converging at Twin Bridges were not, strictly speaking, the Three Forks of the Missouri -- that famous confluence was fifty miles to the east, where Lewis and Clark had already been. These were the three tributaries of the Jefferson itself: the river that came in from the southeast (which Lewis would name the Philanthropy, for one of President Jefferson's cardinal virtues), the river that came in from the west (which he named the Wisdom, for another), and the main stem of the Jefferson running north. The captains had been instructed by Jefferson himself to name the rivers they found after the President's virtues, and Lewis took the assignment seriously. The Philanthropy became the Ruby River. The Wisdom became the Big Hole River. The names Lewis gave them did not survive the mining era, which had its own ideas about what rivers ought to be called.

Clark spent August 4 and 5 exploring the forks, cutting through the willow thickets, camping on a wet island that had recently been overflowed. He wrote: "we passed a part of the river above the forks which was divided and Scattered thro' the willows in such a manner as to render it difficuelt to pass through for a 1/4 of a mile, we were oblige to Cut our way thro' the willows." The beaver had been at work here too, felling willows and cottonwoods across the channels until the water spread through the debris in a dozen shallow braids that no canoe could navigate.

Sergeant Gass, who kept his own journal and often noticed things the captains were too busy to record, described the reconnaissance from a high knob: "...went about 6 miles when we came to a fork of the river; crossed the south branch and from a high knob discovered that the river had forked below us, as we could see the timber on the north branch about 6 or 7 miles from the south and west branches. We therefore crossed to the north branch, and finding it not navigable for our canoes, went down to the confluence and left a note for Capt. Clarke directing him to take the left hand branch."

That note, unlike Lewis's, apparently survived the beaver.

The Decision

On August 6, Drouillard came to Clark from Lewis with the intelligence they needed. Lewis had explored both forks for thirty or forty miles and found that the one they had been ascending turned immediately to the north and was impractical for further travel. Clark wrote the decision down in his characteristically compressed way: "this report deturmind me to take the middle fork, accordingly Droped down to the forks where I met with Capt. Lewin & party."

The middle fork -- the one running to the southwest -- was the Beaverhead River, which would lead them to the Continental Divide and the headwaters of the Columbia drainage. It was the right choice. It was, in fact, the only choice that would get them to the Pacific and back. But Clark did not know that when he made it. He made it on the basis of thirty miles of foot reconnaissance in the mountains and the judgment of a man who had been reading rivers for two months.

Ordway, who kept the most methodical of the enlisted men's journals, noted the decision with characteristic brevity on August 8: "passed the left hand or North fork has 2 mouths empties in at 2 places but is not as large as the middle fork which we take."

They took the middle fork. They left one of the canoes behind -- the stores were running low and the river was getting too shallow for the full fleet -- and Clark directed that the nails be pulled from the abandoned canoe and paddles made from its sides. Nothing was wasted. Nothing could be.

The Return

Clark came back through this same country on July 11, 1806, heading east on the return journey. He had split from Lewis at Traveler's Rest and was pushing hard for the Yellowstone. The Wisdom River -- the Big Hole -- was running high and fast with snowmelt. The wind came off the mountains with violence. Clark wrote: "the wind rose and blew with great violence from the SW imediately off Some high mountains covered with Snow, the violence of this wind retarded our progress very much and the river being emencely crooked we had it imediately in our face nearly every bend."

He reached the mouth of the Wisdom at seven in the evening and camped in the same spot where he had camped the previous August. The bayonet they had left behind was still there. The canoe they had abandoned was still sound. He directed that its nails be pulled and paddles made from its planks, and the next morning he was moving again.

The Philanthropy -- the Ruby River -- was very low. Clark noted it in passing: "at 6 P.M. I passed Phalanhrophy river which I proceved was very low." He had named it for one of Jefferson's virtues. He had spent two days fighting through its willow thickets. Now it was low and he passed it in an afternoon. The river did not care what it had been named.

What the Marker Shows

The marker at the Madison County Fairgrounds in Twin Bridges is a cartographic reconstruction -- a large map produced by cartographer W. Plamondon from the journals of Lewis, Clark, Gass, Ordway, and Whitehouse, tracing the actual route of the expedition through this tangle of rivers and channels. It is not a simple thing to read. The rivers have moved since 1805. The beaver dams are gone. The willow thickets have been cleared for hay meadows. The channels that Clark cut through with an axe are now dry ground.

Plamondon spent considerable effort trying to determine exactly where the expedition camped and which fork they actually took, and he found that the modern confluence of the Jefferson and the Big Hole rivers may not be the same place Lewis and Clark reached. The old course of the Wisdom River, he concluded, was probably what is now called Owlsey Slough -- a backwater that no longer carries the main current. The rivers have rearranged themselves in two hundred years, as rivers do, and the exact spot where Clark stood reading the stump of the pole from which a beaver had stolen Lewis's letter is now somewhere under a hay meadow or a gravel bar.

The marker does not resolve this. It presents the evidence and lets the reader decide. That is, in its way, the most honest thing a historical marker can do.

The river gave them nothing for free. It moved the letter. It moved itself. It is still moving.

See also

• Lewis and Clark Journals, University of Nebraska Press digital edition: August 4-8, 1805 (Clark) and July 11, 1806 (Clark); also Gass journal August 4, 1805 and Ordway journal August 8, 1805
• Cartographic Reconstruction of the Lewis and Clark Trail, W. Plamondon / Washington State University Press
• Madison County Fairgrounds Gazebo, Twin Bridges, Montana (marker location)
• "...a handsome little river..." (adjacent marker at same location, describing the Ruby/Philanthropy River)