The Blackfoot River Corridor

By editor

Ovando, Powell County, Montana

The river was a road long before the Americans arrived to name it.

To the Nez Perce, who crossed the great divide each summer to hunt on the eastern plains, it was Cokahlarishkit, the "river of the road to the buffalo." It was not merely a geographical feature, but a vital artery of survival. The Salish, the Nez Perce, and the Shoshone all knew the deep trails etched into its banks. They knew where the camas roots grew thickest, ready to be dried and pounded into flour for the long winter. They knew where the high-quality chert could be found to fashion the tools that would butcher the buffalo they sought. The river was a living calendar, dictating the rhythm of the seasons and the movement of the people.

When Captain Meriwether Lewis and his detachment of nine men entered this corridor in July of 1806, they were traveling on borrowed knowledge. They were guided by Nez Perce men who knew every bend of the Cokahlarishkit. But the guides also knew what lay ahead.

On the fourth of July, the Nez Perce guides halted. They informed Lewis that they would go no further. They were returning to their own people, unwilling to risk an encounter with the "Pahkees," the Blackfeet and Minnetarees who controlled the plains beyond the mountains. The guides cut the meat Lewis gave them into thin strips, leaving it to dry in the sun for their homeward journey. They parted with what Lewis called "unfeigned regret," warning the Americans that the enemy tribes would surely cut them off.

Lewis was now alone with his men in a landscape that belonged entirely to others. The anxiety of the Americans is palpable in the journals. They were no longer explorers charting the unknown; they were trespassers on a heavily used war road.

As they rode up the corridor, the signs of the people who owned the land were everywhere. Lewis noted the "buffaloe road river" running through a timbered country of high, rocky mountains. Two days later, the tension heightened. They found the trail of a returning war party, the tracks of their horses growing fresher by the hour. They passed the remains of thirty-two brush lodges, which Lewis presumed belonged to the Minnetarees.

"We expect to meet with the Minnetares," Lewis wrote on July 6, "and are therefore much on our guard both day and night."

Driven by this fear, the Americans did not linger to admire the scenery. They pushed their horses hard, logging thirty-one miles in a single day through the corridor, anxious to put the mountains behind them and reach the plains. They saw the land only as a gauntlet to be survived.

Today, the Blackfoot River corridor is managed for recreation. The great buffalo herds are gone, and the deep trails of the Cokahlarishkit have been replaced by highways and access roads. The land has been altered by logging, by the suppression of the natural fires that once kept the camas glades open, and by the fierce wildfires that occasionally reclaim the hillsides, like the blaze of 1991 that swept through the area.

The state now plants conifer seedlings and sprays chemicals to control the noxious weeds that follow the fires. They manage the elk and the deer for the hunters who come in the fall. It is a managed landscape, carefully regulated by agencies and landowners.

But the river still meanders its 132 miles from the Continental Divide to the Clark Fork. If you stand on its banks and look past the recreation signs and the property lines, you can still see the shape of the Cokahlarishkit. It remains what it has always been: a road cut through the mountains by water and time, waiting for the people who know how to read it.

See also

• The Blackfoot River Corridor at Ovando, Powell County (Erected by The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the Bureau of Land Management)
• Journey Through the Blackfoot, detailing Lewis's decision to split the Corps at Traveler's Rest
• Early Ovando Years, covering the later settlement of the valley