Seaman

By editor

Ovando, Powell County, Montana

He was a Newfoundland, built for the freezing Atlantic surf, but he found himself in the middle of a continent, walking through the dark. He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. He had a coat thick enough to turn a wolf's teeth and paws broad enough to swim against a Missouri River current. His name was Seaman.

On the night of May 29, 1805, the Corps of Discovery was camped on the upper Missouri. The men were exhausted. They had spent the day dragging the heavy white pirogue against the current by the cordelle, their shoulders raw from the ropes. When they slept, they slept like dead men.

Out in the dark river, a buffalo bull was swimming. He was two thousand pounds of muscle and panic, blind in the night, thrashing toward the only light he could see: the campfires.

He hit the bank where the white pirogue was tied. He did not go around it. He climbed over it, his hooves smashing into the gear, bending a rifle barrel and shattering the stock of a blunderbuss. Then he charged up the bank, moving at full speed directly toward the sleeping men.

He passed between four fires. He was eighteen inches from the heads of the men in the first row. He was moving straight for the captain's tent. The sentinel yelled, but a two-thousand-pound animal in a blind panic does not listen to yelling.

Seaman did not yell. He flew out of the dark and hit the bull.

He did not try to kill it. A dog cannot kill a buffalo. He simply threw his hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and teeth at the animal's head, forcing it to turn. The bull veered to the right, crashing away into the night, leaving the camp in an uproar of men grabbing for their rifles.

"My dog saved us," Meriwether Lewis wrote the next morning. It was a simple statement of fact. If the bull had not turned, it would have crushed the sleeping men into the mud.

Fourteen months later, on July 5, 1806, Lewis was riding east through the Blackfoot River valley, hurrying toward the Marias River. The expedition was splitting up, the men tired, the horses footsore. They crossed a beautiful, clear creek, twenty yards wide, flowing down from the high snows of the mountains to the north.

Lewis looked at the water and thought of the dog trotting beside his horse. He opened his journal and wrote: "to the entrance of a large creek 20 yds. wide Called Seamans' Creek."

It was the only geographic feature on the entire continent named for an animal.

The name did not last. The mapmakers who came later erased it. They renamed the water Monture Creek, after George Monteur, a Hudson's Bay Company interpreter who died near its banks in 1877. Monteur was a skilled frontiersman, a man who guided settlers through the valleys and earned his place on the map.

But the water still comes down from the snows, cold and clear, just as it did when a hundred-and-fifty-pound Newfoundland drank from it in the summer of 1806. The map says Monture Creek. The river stones know better.

See also

• Seaman at Ovando, Powell County (Erected by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks)
• The Blackfoot River Corridor, detailing the route Lewis and Seaman traveled through this valley
• The Lewis Minus Clark Expedition, covering Lewis's separate return journey through the Blackfoot country