Traveler's Crossroads for Centuries

By editor

Twin Bridges, Madison County

There is a limestone outcrop near Twin Bridges, in Madison County, that has been watching travelers go by for longer than any written record can account for. It sits above the valley floor with the patient authority of a landmark that knows its own importance, and the people who passed beneath it, generation after generation, knew it too. The Shoshone called it Beaverhead, for the resemblance of its profile to the head of that animal. The Corps of Discovery called it salvation.

Sacagawea recognized it on August 8, 1805. She had been taken from this country as a child, and she had not seen it in years, but she knew it the moment it came into view. Meriwether Lewis recorded the moment in his journal: "the Indian woman recognized the point of a high plain to our right which she informed us was not very distant from the summer retreat of her nation on a river beyond the mountains which runs to the west. this hill she says her nation calls the beaver's head from a conceived remblance of it's figure to the head of that animal. she assures us that we shall either find her people on this river or on the river immediately west of it's source." The expedition had been searching for the Shoshone for weeks. Without their horses, there was no crossing the Rockies before winter. The limestone rock, read by a woman who had grown up in its shadow, told them they were close.

They found the Shoshone. By a turn of fortune that Lewis himself could barely credit, the chief of the band was Sacagawea's brother, Cameahwait. The horses were procured. The mountains were crossed.

Fifty years later, the same ground was serving a different kind of traveler. By 1856, the old Shoshone trail had become a cattle road, and the valley was filling with ranchers who had come for grass and water. The discovery of gold in the early 1860s brought a rougher crowd, and the Montana-Utah Road cut through the valley carrying freight wagons loaded with supplies for the mining camps. In 1863, the Beaver Gateway Ranch became the site of the Point of Rocks Stage Station, a substantial establishment that offered a hotel, a saloon, and a post office to anyone making the long haul between Helena, Virginia City, and Bannack. For twenty-two years, nearly every traveler bound for the territorial capital passed through this spot. The stage station closed in 1885, made obsolete by the railroads, and the valley settled into the quieter rhythms of ranching country.

What Irving would have made of this place is not hard to imagine. He had a particular affection for the spots where history had layered itself, where the same ground had served the Indian, the explorer, the prospector, and the homesteader in succession. The limestone outcrop above Twin Bridges is exactly such a place. It has been a landmark, a rendezvous, a stage stop, and a ranching landmark, and through all of it, the Beaverhead River has run past its base, indifferent to the names men have given it and the purposes they have assigned to the ground beside it.

The rock is still there. It still looks like a beaver's head. Sacagawea would recognize it.