The Beginning of the "Endless Missouri"

By editor

Grant, Beaverhead County, Montana, August 1805

There are two ways to look at a river. You can look at it like a poet, or you can look at it like a man who has spent the last fifteen months dragging a heavy wooden boat up it against the current.

Captain Meriwether Lewis looked at the Missouri River like a poet. When he reached the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass on August 12, 1805, and found the little spring that gave birth to the river, he wrote a very solemn and beautiful sentence in his journal about "the most distant fountain of the waters of the mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many toilsome days and wristless nights." He was thinking about geography, and destiny, and the grand sweep of the continent.

Private Hugh McNeal, on the other hand, looked at the river like a man who had been fighting it hand-to-hand for three thousand miles.

McNeal was part of the small advance party that Lewis had taken ahead of the main expedition to find the Shoshone Indians. He had been there at the mouth of the Missouri, where it was a mile wide and thick with mud and snags. He had been there in the Dakotas, where the wind blew the sand into their eyes and the river seemed determined to push them all the way back to St. Louis. He had been there at the Great Falls, where they had to drag the canoes overland for eighteen miles through prickly pear cactus that tore through their moccasins.

To McNeal, the Missouri River was not a geographical abstraction. It was a personal enemy. It was a bully that had been kicking sand in his face and stealing his lunch money for over a year.

So, when the advance party reached Trail Creek, about two miles below the spring that Lewis was getting so poetic about, McNeal saw his opportunity for revenge.

The creek here was just a little rivulet, a narrow ribbon of water tumbling down the mountain. It was the same water that would eventually become the roaring, boat-smashing monster they had been fighting, but up here, it was small. It was manageable. It was, finally, something a man could put in its place.

McNeal walked up to the creek. He planted one moccasined foot on the east bank. He planted the other moccasined foot on the west bank. And then, as Lewis recorded in his journal, McNeal "exultingly stood with a foot of each side of this little rivulet and thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri."

It was a magnificent gesture. It was the ultimate triumph of the common soldier over the forces of nature. For fifteen months, the river had been too wide to cross, too deep to wade, and too fast to row against. But here, at the top of the world, Hugh McNeal had it pinned beneath his boots. He had straddled the monster.

Of course, the triumph was short-lived. The next day, they would look west from the pass and see the Bitterroot Mountains, a terrifying ocean of stone that made the Missouri River look like a pleasant afternoon stroll. They would soon be freezing, starving, and eating their own horses just to survive.

But for one brief, shining moment on the twelfth of August, Private McNeal was the undisputed king of the continent. He had beaten the endless Missouri, and he had the wet moccasins to prove it.

Today, visitors to the Sacajawea Memorial Area near Lemhi Pass can walk down to Trail Creek and perform the exact same ceremony. The Forest Service has even put up a sign inviting you to "bestride" the river, though they politely ask that you stay on the rocks and avoid trampling the vegetation. It is a fine thing to do. There are very few places in the world where you can stand with one foot on either side of a three-thousand-mile river, and even fewer where you can do it without drowning.

See also

• The Beginning of the "Endless Missouri" at Grant, Beaverhead County (Erected by Beaverhead-Deerlodge & Salmon-Chaillis National Forest)
• "Most Distant Fountain" of the Mighty Missouri, detailing Lewis's arrival at the actual spring
• Crossing the Great Divide, the story of the expedition's passage over Lemhi Pass