Name That River

By editor

Long before highways, rivers were the maps. Lewis and Clark named hundreds of them as they worked west. Camped about ten miles south of present Missoula in September 1805, Captain Lewis sent men to investigate a rumored shortcut and wrote of an “Eastern fork” he determined to call the Valley plain river—the first known written reference to the confluence of today’s Clark Fork and Bitterroot.

The captains first called the Bitterroot the Flathead River, then corrected themselves to Clark’s River. The eastern fork collected other names over the next century: Arrow Stone, Hell Gate, Missoula. Today it is the Clark Fork of the Columbia, running more than 1,300 miles from the Continental Divide to the Pacific. On February 6, 1812, David Thompson recorded the valley name Nemissoolatako; strip a few letters and Missoula appears.

The marker is a lesson in how power writes on water. Expedition journals, fur-trade maps, and settler newspapers each tried to fix a name. The river kept moving. Downtown Missoula still sits where those forks argue, and the Clark Fork still carries the argument to the sea.