River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Farther, we stopped again to look at the site of Fort McKenzie, now a cultivated flat under a big center-pivot irrigator, but in 1833 it was here that Prince Maximilian and Karl Bodmer gave up their ascent of the Missouri because of Indian hostility on westward. The German ethnographer described their arrival in a place we saw only as an empty field:

  The Missouri, Virgelle to Three Forks, 289 river miles

  We approached the landing-place and at length set foot on shore amidst a [welcoming] cloud of smoke caused by the firing of the Indians and of the engagés of the fort, who were drawn up in a line on the bank. Here we were received by the whole population with the Indian chiefs at their head, with whom we all shook hands. The Chief of the Bears was quite an original: his countenance, which was not very handsome, with a large crooked nose, was partly hid by his long hair. On his head he had a round felt hat with a brass rim, and a silver medal on his breast. We were led through a long double-line of the red men, the expression of whose countenances and their various dresses greatly amused us. When we arrived at the fort there was no end of the shaking of hands, after which we longed for repose, and distributed our baggage in the rooms. We had happily accomplished the voyage from Fort Union in thirty-four days and lost none of our people and subsisted during the whole time by the produce of the chase.

  The riverbanks began to rise until they were considerable steeps of light-colored clays and shales utterly unrelieved by vegetation of any sort. On came rain and behind it a drying wind to wither the clouds enough for bolts of sun to reach us, and by the time we hove up in Fort Benton, we’d pulled off our wet gear. We tied to a small public dock just below the remains of the old fort itself and climbed the terrace to Front Street and an ice cream stand where we bought hotdogs and milkshakes, and once again river travel was easy, and that, we knew, was a bad sign.

  About four thousand miles above the mouth of the Mississippi, Fort Benton was once the head of navigation on the Missouri and the most inland port in the nation, some say the world. On the river today between Hermann, Missouri, and Fort Benton, there are no longer any towns that really front the Big Muddy because those other places have moved to higher ground, or the river has moved, or up has gone a levee or floodwall, or a spread of industry has come in. Except in books, the historical link between the river and its towns has nearly vanished. But Fort Benton, a bit bedraggled yet genuine, still embraces the river, and one can walk out of a café or shop and take a few steps straight to the water. The landing is now a park, and at its south end, just a few feet from the Missouri, stands the fortress-like Union Hotel of 1882, closed but—as it has been for some years—reportedly undergoing restoration. How fine it would be to take a third-floor room and lie abed and watch the river below! Northwest of town, behind the grid of streets, the big hills rise barrenly as they do in nineteenth-century photographs of the landing lined with paddlewheelers and stacked with cargo. Across the river, though, the scene is different: the broad flat is again full of trees as it was before the coming of the steamboats and their fireboxes. But the motto chiseled into the old grammar school is even now more hope than fulfillment: INDUSTRY IS USELESS WITHOUT CULTURE.

  Recent rains were turning the Missouri into nasty currents and eddies, a downrush too powerful for our canoe to take on, and the rapids above Fort Benton precluded launching Nikawa. I asked our tired but true-hearted helmsman to take us another sixteen miles up to Carter Ferry, if he thought the motor would hold out. Someone said, “After Carter, then what? Why don’t we stay here till we solve it?” But I had pledged long ago to accept even a single mile if that were all that was offered—in short, to proceed as the way opened. “But tomorrow, then what?” With almost four hundred miles of Montana yet before us, I had no idea. Months earlier, I made plans based on how the Missouri had run for the past decade, a period of low water; once again the Big Contrariness revealed the ineptitude of planning for anything less than everything.

  The bluffs were even higher beyond Fort Benton, dark awesome things which only the afternoon sun kept from looking like promises of doom, the kind of terrain people die in. But farther on they became almost kindly, covered by hundreds upon hundreds of nests of swallows that unconcernedly glided over the awesome flush of water thumping our boat as if the waves were fists swung by someone in high conniption. Should the motor fail, we would have a quick ride back to Fort Benton either in the boat or in our life vests.

  But the engine kept plugging. The unruly water had shut down the Carter ferry, although the TOOT FOR OPERATOR sign was still out. We pulled up on a gravel slope, fifty-six miles above Virgelle and only fifteen below the grand cascade section of the Missouri near Great Falls. How we would ascend those next miles of bad river to reach the base of the first of five dams built atop the big ledges, I didn’t know. I could only hope for luck multiplying like mice in an attic.

  Over the Ebullition

  IN THE CAFÉ on Front Street in Fort Benton where we’d returned for the night, the sour waitress brought our breakfast eggs and hash browns with a side of caveats: “That river’s more likely to kill you than an old grizzly bear. The water hasn’t been this high in years. The ferry’s shut down, so that ought to give you a clue. Just go on home and take a nice rest because ain’t no damn canoe going to get through up there because when that river don’t want nobody on it, nobody gets on it except people like you easterners—or some damn Californian.”

  Our boatman of the last two days had neither the time nor inclination to take us up to Morony Dam, the first of the five barriers built close to one another. The advice of everyone was to portage: after all, it would add only fifteen miles more to what we’d have to do around the dams anyway. I refused. Lewis and Clark made it to Belt Creek—they called it “Portage Creck”—before leaving the water, and although we were but a crew of three, we had a major compensation called the internal combustion engine. Somewhere we could find someone with a boat capable of ascending—surely, someplace there was somebody. We went looking and eventually met Jack Lepley, a retired high school teacher, a tall and friendly man who called the sheriff, persuaded him, and then told us the volunteer search-and-rescue team might take us those few miles in its small boat with a water-jet motor; perhaps we could make a contribution to the maintenance fund.

  At six o’clock that evening we met Kurt Buskirk—a name we had to work at to get it right—a hefty young fellow glad to have the chance to log a few official hard-water miles. We hauled up to Carter Ferry and with some uneasiness set out in a drizzle that soon ceased. I didn’t say it aloud, of course, but I whispered to Pilotis, Every time we look this river in the eye and call its bluff, it smiles on us. Pilotis: “Tell me that two hundred miles from now.”

  Sun shafts came and went, and when they appeared they deepened the green slopes against a blackly rolling eastern sky. The Missouri was wide—for Montana—and turned progressively rougher as we neared the area of rocks and rapids downstream from the five great ledges forming the series of cascades where, over just twelve miles, the river drops more than four hundred feet to create what was once one of the most stunning fluvial sights in America, a spectacle dams have nearly obliterated. Meriwether Lewis, awestruck by what he saw, set down a long entry in his logbook but then concluded with a wish for better expression unique in the journals:

  After wrighting this imperfect discription I again viewed the falls and was so much disgusted with the imperfect idea which it conveyed of the scene that I determined to draw my pen across it and begin agin, but then reflected that I could not perhaps succeed better than penning the first impression of the mind; I wished for the pencil of Salvator Rosa or the pen of [James] Thompson, that I might be enabled to give the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnifficent and sublimely grand object, which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man; but this was fruitless and vain. I most sincerely regreted that I had not brought a [camera] obscura with me by the assistance of which even I could have
hoped to have done better but alas this was also out of my reach; I therefore with the assistance of my pen only indeavoured to trace some of the stronger features of this seen by the assistance of which and my recollection aided by some able pencil I hope still to give to the world some faint idea of an object which at the moment fills me with such pleasure and astonishment, and which of its kind I will venture to ascert is second to but one in the known world.

  The water changed from boils to riffles to rapids, and the metal boat began taking a beating. Pilotis said, “This Missouri is nothing but goddamn scary,” a sentence I liked since it let me know I wasn’t alone in wondering what would happen should we, should it, should whatever—et cetera. Mule deer stared at us from the scrub as if incredulous that anybody would be on the river, then in lovely arcs they bounced away, and I thought what good stuff ground is—for one thing, you can jump on it. We stirred an immense flock of pelicans into a low echelon that stretched ahead from shore to shore to form what seemed a fragile chain of gleaming white links, a heavenly lifeline. Could we overtake the big birds, I might reach up, catch hold of one, and let it carry me over, as Lewis has it, the “ebullition” and on beyond the dams.

  At Belt Creek, the river turned the turbulence up a notch, and Kurt said, “It’s sixty feet deep here with a current about twelve miles an hour. I’m not certified to go into water like this, but the dam’s just around the bend. This is where Lewis and Clark took out.” They had no motor, I said. “In these conditions, I really can’t go that last mile.” So we turned back for Carter Ferry.

  By hitchhiking, we’d made it through what was likely the most tumultuous stretch of the Missouri we’d face. Relief swept over me, although I felt like the man who survived being hit by a steamroller and said, “Okay, boys, bring on the dump truck.”

  Ex Aqua Lux et Vis

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER woke on Friday to find a blood blister on the tip of his middle finger and spent some time trying to recall how he might have pinched it. When he put on his glasses to read the breakfast menu, he discovered the blister was in fact a well-attached tick. Another diner, a beautician who happened by and saw our examination, looked at it and called across the café, “We’ve got a tick on a funny-finger over here!” Then she said quietly to my friend, “Where have you been with that digit, sonny? Didn’t Mama tell you about sheep?” For everyone to hear, she added, “This looks baaaaad. We’re going to have to play doctor.” She went to the kitchen for a dollop of shortening and returned to spread it thickly over the finger. Her treatment drew to us more diners who began defining their own sure-fire methods of tick removal while scoffing at others, the whole time our Photographer sitting silently, holding his greasy finger aloft. One man, who had spent perhaps too much time on the range, gave his technique: “Put a tablespoon of cayenne pepper in a glass of grain alcohol—whiskey will work too if you double the dose—drink it down except for the last swallow, then eat three jalapeños, then take the last sip and rinse it around in your mouth and get the tick between your teeth and pull real slow.” I asked, What’s the booze do? “It keeps you from caring you’re biting a bug’s ass.”

  Thirty minutes later the tick was still locked on, so, lacking jalapeños, I put a lighted match to the critter and out it came. Said the beautician, an inveigling woman, “That shortening loosened him up. I could write a book on what you can do with lard—and I’m not talking cooking.” I said, Let us know if you need help with any of the, of the, uh, recipes. She leaned close and said, “Ohh, are we a naughty boy?” then smiled out the door. Her perfume fell over us like a veil, and I suddenly realized how far away I was from another life, how distant from cologne and evening gowns, shined shoes and Sunday matinees, easy chairs, a good book by the fireside. For a few moments I was close to believing I was ready to go home.

  What the people told us about the next miles of river did not make continuance easier: the current would be too much for our canoe and motor. “Wait it out” was the consensus, a choice I couldn’t risk because, although the Continental Divide was only days away, we would still need a week of good water on the western slope. I have not spoken of one final time constraint facing us: I intended to follow three mountain streams to the Salmon River in Idaho and take it through the deepest part of the western mountains to the Snake and hence to the head of navigable water. Because the Salmon is a popular wilderness run for rafters, the U.S. Forest Service controls the number of boats going down it in the summer to keep it from being overrun. Four hundred miles of white-water rapids, it requires in high water boats and skills we did not possess. To get us through, months earlier I engaged an outfitter and had to choose a departure date because regulations stipulated that hire-boats must leave on a preassigned day or wait until autumn. So our crossing from the beginning was compelled not simply by the opening of the Erie Canal and the spring rise but also by government edict, one I did not disagree with, but several days of waiting in Montana was not only bad for morale, it also set the calendar further against us.

  That morning I telephoned a man we’d learned of, a car dealer in Great Falls, a generous fellow who might consent to take us up a few miles of the Missouri in his jet boat. I described our voyage, and after due consideration he said, “I can’t go out this weekend. Not a chance.” Our luck seemed at last to have snagged. He said, “I’m sorry to disappoint you. Too bad you can’t go later today.” But we can! “Okay,” he said, “although I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know how far we can go. Do you still want to give it a shot?” That’s exactly our modus, I said.

  We hauled our boats around the five dams near Great Falls, a portage of eighteen miles for Lewis and Clark that took them two weeks, where a welter of things from gnats to grizzlies pestered them. Wrote Clark, “To State the fatigues of this party would take up more of the journal than other notes which I find Scarcely time to Set down.”

  The chasm the Missouri has cut through the dark and renitent sandstone just above Belt Creek is mostly easy bends and continuous rapids between and below the five big cascades, all within only a dozen miles of each other, and lying like steps, ledges which for years have been either inundated or topped with hydroelectric dams. Small by Missouri River standards, the first was completed in 1890 and the last in 1958; it’s hard to believe a power company could persuade the public today to allow, for the sake of a few megawatts, so massive an impairment of one of the most magnificent riverscapes in America. Indeed, some people are finally starting to talk about the eventual removal of the dams and arguing that the value of tourism to such a series of cataracts could overwhelm the income from selling electricity and, what’s more, put money not in the already full pockets of a few electro-magnates but spread it more democratically across the area. (To megawattmen, the motto on the old electric company building in Helena has a special meaning: ex aqua lux et vis, From water, light and power.) Now, having complained, I’ll admit the dams could be worse. Three of them sit several yards back from the ledges of the falls, so a visitor can yet see something of those cascades when the river is high enough to let a great volume of water top the spillways. Still, Meriwether Lewis’s description of “this sublimely grand specticle [as] the grandest sight I ever beheld” points up what Americans have lost through an unregulated pursuit of wealth by a powerful few. There are many places and ways to generate electricity, but the Great Falls of the Missouri are unique, and they cannot be moved.

  One of those early hydro-barons, so I heard, did decree that Rainbow Dam (1912) be built only to a height that would not flood another remarkable feature in the chasm, a fountainhead at the edge of the Missouri. The cold and tremendous outpouring of Giant Spring comes from the Little Belt Mountains about forty miles away, a journey lasting eons. I bought several bottles of it, the labels claiming that carbon dating proved the water fell as rain and snow three thousand years ago. Until the moment of my first swig from that source, the oldest beverage I’d ever drunk was fifteen-year-old bourbon, a notable spirit, but that ancient spring
water was a sweet draft from an antediluvian world, a quencher from the time of Odysseus. (Incidentally, the streamlet flowing out of the spring into the Missouri runs only a couple hundred feet and, so says the Guinness Book of Records, is the shortest river in the world.)

  About four that afternoon we met our new boatman at Broadwater Bay in downtown Great Falls, not far upstream from Black Eagle Dam. Jim Pierce, about ready to enter middle age, was a rangy, slender fellow relieved to get away from the automobile dealership and happy to put into the river his new nineteen-foot boat driven by a motor with three times the power of the twin engines on Nikawa and three hundred times more than our pisspot. His craft was the kind that turns rivers into highways and—if it avoided sucking up sand—could cross the continent over our route in a couple of weeks. But such an effort would be like flying nonstop around the world: except to set a record, what’s the point of it?

  Although Pierce’s machine was small compared to those insanities called “cigarette boats,” I must admit I’m not fond of such tremendously powered vessels and had mixed feelings about taking to his even for one afternoon, but the alternatives were to wait for the current to subside and perhaps miss passable water farther on or to portage the next miles. Such choices made my decision easy. To get washed out now after more than four thousand miles was not tolerable. It helped also that Pierce was a man of consideration: “If trout fishermen are out in the little drift boats on up the river, I’ll turn around. It wouldn’t be fair to zip past them.”