The Lewis and Clark Expedition

By editor

Big Timber, Sweet Grass County, Montana, July 1806

In 1804-06, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led approximately forty soldiers and boatmen on a journey commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson. The Corps of Discovery was charged with finding a route to the Pacific Ocean through the newly acquired Louisiana Territory, mapping the land, recording its resources, and making contact with its native inhabitants. They were also charged with something harder to define: they were charged with seeing what was there.

Clark's party traveled down the Yellowstone Valley in July 1806, on their return journey from the Pacific. The valley was then an unbroken grassland teeming with bison, elk, grizzly bears, and wolves. Clark noted the abundance of game with wonder. On July 16, 1806, near present Big Timber, he wrote in his journal: "observe the Silkgrass, Sunflower & Wild indigo all in blume." Three words for three flowers, and the spelling is his own, and the observation is precise. Clark was not a naturalist by training, but he had been looking at the natural world with attention for two years, and the attention shows.

The Yellowstone River, which Clark's party descended from its headwaters near present-day Livingston to its confluence with the Missouri, is the longest undammed river in the contiguous United States. In 1806, it was also one of the most productive wildlife corridors on the continent. Clark counted 8,000 bison in a single day's travel. He counted grizzly bears in numbers that astonished him. He counted elk and deer and antelope in herds that covered the valley floor from rim to rim.

On July 15, 1806, Clark wrote: "I observe great quantities of the Prickley Pear of two kinds on the plains and bottoms, also two kinds of Clover, wild Timothy, Sunflower, Flax, and many other plants. The Country in every direction for as far as I can see is one continued Plain." He was writing about the country around present-day Big Timber, where the Yellowstone emerges from its canyon and spreads into the broad valley that the Crow people called their homeland.

The Crow, whose name for themselves is Apsáalooke, had lived in the Yellowstone Valley for generations before Clark arrived. Clark's party encountered them on July 26, 1806, near present-day Billings, where a group of Crow warriors took twenty-four horses from the expedition's camp during the night. Clark was irritated but not surprised. He had been warned that the Crow were skilled horse thieves, and the warning had proven accurate.

The landscape has changed since Clark traveled through it. The Yellowstone Valley has been farmed, ranched, and irrigated. The bison are gone. The grizzly bears are gone from the valley floor, though they persist in the mountains to the south and west. The elk and deer remain, in numbers reduced from what Clark saw but still substantial. The river itself is largely unchanged: it still runs free from its headwaters to the Missouri, still carries the same silt and gravel, still floods in spring and runs low in August.

The marker near Big Timber stands at the edge of the valley that Clark described on July 16, 1806. The Silkgrass and Sunflower and Wild indigo are still there in summer, blooming in the same places they bloomed when Clark observed them. The observation cost him three words and perhaps thirty seconds of attention. The record of it has lasted two centuries.

Lewis, on the same day, was traveling a different route, returning east through the Blackfoot River valley and over the Continental Divide. The two captains had separated at Traveler's Rest in present-day Lolo, Montana, on July 3, 1806, to explore different routes simultaneously. They reunited at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri on August 12, 1806. Lewis had been shot in the buttock by one of his own men, who had mistaken him for an elk, and was traveling in considerable discomfort. Clark had been traveling in relative comfort, watching the flowers bloom.

See also

• The Lewis and Clark Expedition at Big Timber, Sweet Grass County
• Along the Yellowstone River at Billings, Yellowstone County
• Crossing the Yellowstone at Custer, Yellowstone County