River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  I went outside to find my mates, not a hard thing to do in Townsend, but I first ran into a river outfitter we’d met the night before, and I asked him what the Missouri was going to do in the next few days. “The fields are wet, so nobody’s taking water out for irrigation. Whatever’s coming down the river is going to keep on going.” When I gathered the crew, we bought a gasket for the motor, then took the canoe down to Indian Road and slipped it into the water, and Pilotis and I struck out onto the braidings, then turned toward a wider section where the Missouri flowed swiftly over riffle after riffle. The current ran so hard we could cross from bank to bank in order to follow the best chutes only by ferrying—that is, running a diagonal course to set the downstream thrust of the river against the angle of the hull to push it forward, something like tacking upwind in a sailboat. The chutes took us right against the shoreline, but the rush of water let us make barely a couple of miles an hour, and we literally had time to smell the wild roses overhanging the low banks.

  It was a cool morning of hovering ospreys dropping to trawl their claws across the river, of magpies descending from the sage hills, mergansers taking off in their distinct tippy-toe, killdeer running along the few dry shoals and refusing flight until they had no more rocks beneath them, sandpipers seeming to vibrate their wings rather than flap them, and also cormorants, blackbirds, doves, great blue herons. It was a birdy morning, not with the abundance apparent in nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts, but nevertheless one we treasured because of our disappointment in the amount of wildlife we’d seen since the beginning, a paucity that gave us concern about the health of the countryside. The river widened yet again, deepened, and we bounced over boils but had less current to fight. To measure our speed, I held up an empty produce bag, a flimsy plastic one, as a kind of windsock, but we moved so imperceptibly it simply hung limp. Slower than a walker, slower than ever, we ascended the valley, the distant mountains still in snow, that lovely stuff that was making it possible for us to ascend at all.

  At a place where the Missouri rubs almost against the shoulder of U.S.287, we unexpectedly came upon the Photographer smiling down on us. We stopped to consider our position, and I told him all the river asked for that day was patience, then off we went again. Between the riffles lay pools providing some ease, but just below Long Ripple the weather began its afternoon performance with a sky blown to darkness and crackling with lightning, and I realized too late I’d defined what the river asked for well within the range of its Great Ears. At sorry little Toston, population even less than you might guess unless you guess fifty, we pulled ashore below the old highway bridge, the first or last functioning one on the Missouri and went up to a roadhouse making the same claim, both of them referring to location, not history. Over something passing for lunch, we fell into a competitive reminiscing about the worst meals we’d ever found. Pilotis won with “The Wet Patty Melt—the Sandwich You Eat with a Spoon.”

  We spread out charts on the pool table and figured our last miles on the Missouri, and to no one’s pleasure I determined we needed to reach Toston Dam before nightfall. “What about the weather?” the Photographer said. I offered that it seemed to be easing, even if not by much.

  Above the Toston bridge, the gradient of the Missouri increases as it nears its apex, and it poured down fast enough to make us consider responses should we overturn. Although only five miles from the dam, we knew the route would no longer test just our patience but now also our persistence, a word Pilotis claimed I used instead of recklessness. Our “run” would be a slow ascent made slower by apprehension, but the only way of knowing what we were getting into was, as always, to get into it—that’s the nature of river travel, especially in remote places, and you either like or hate it for that. Pilotis shouted, “This rascal is really cooking!” Indeed, it looked like the impossible—some great pot of icy water in a fierce parboil.

  After the first mile, we came among boulders the size of casks and puncheons that put voice into the river and made it speak threats. The motor stem and hull clanked against smaller stones, some of them rocking us in every sense of the word. We did our best to stay in the chutes, but they were running as fast as log flumes, and each successive one seemed more likely to stall the canoe. If we went dead in the water, the current would have us, turn us sideways, send us sprawling. Between the chutes was a more accommodating water of only rolling waves where Pilotis would call out, “What do you think?” Trying to mask my uneasiness, I would signal forward to the next pounding. I was both concerned and glad there were few places to get the canoe off the river, so we had to continue, and fear offered one less alternative. Then we arrived in a nightmare alley.

  Partway up a strikingly vigorous chute, the canoe began to shudder, seemingly unable to advance. We bent over to lessen wind resistance and lower our center of gravity, but the little motor had finally met its match; thrust and resistance equal, it could not push us forward. In such circumstances you don’t turn around—you wait to get turned over. Both of us on other trips had been dumped, but neither of us in water like that, the kind where authorities pull out corpses wearing good life vests. The motor screamed and still the river checked us. Pilotis yelled, “Get ready to abandon ship!” Keep her cranking! I shouted, and leaned out slowly to a pendant branch, grasped it, pulled steadily, pulled hard, and we inched forward, creeping, creeping on to the top of the chute. Pilotis called, “And what if that willow hadn’t been there?” But there was no time to answer before we entered another sluice, this one shallow enough I could get my paddle against the bottom to pole a few difficult yards. As we reached calmer water I turned to discover Pilotis in almost a Hell Gate Grin. I guessed tension had taken its toll. I yelled, I don’t know about this! My friend pointed ahead to a long line of seething turbulence across the entire river, a wall of white chaos.

  I started then I realized it was Toston Dam, an old diversion structure and by far the smallest one on the Missouri, yet roaring enough to drown out the sound of our engine. We were almost there! We went on toward the spillways, made invisible by the cataract pouring over them, until the ferociously churning tailwaters threatened to roll the canoe, and we looked for a friendly eddy to turn us quietly back downstream, and there we pulled out at a path through the overgrown west bank. With a struggle we got the boat up the slippery slope so the Photographer could reach us. Pilotis, exaggerating, told him, “This man’s not happy unless we bang the bow into the spillway,” yet the words were full of vigor and victory at having survived one more day.

  At last, one more day on the Missouri was all it could set before us, but we weren’t up to talking about it until supper when Pilotis mentioned our reaching the place where the current and our power were going to be equal much of the time and said, “I still think you fail to respect the power in water, but I know, no matter how you hide it because you like to look lucky, you’re always calculating the odds. But tomorrow the odds are lousy.” Don’t ask me to wait two weeks or to portage around the last miles of the Missouri, I said. “Okay, but unless somewhere in this emptiness we can find a properly powered boat, that leaves just one other choice—downstream.” We sat in a long silence, then I said, If we do it, it’ll be the only time we do it.

  No Huzzahs in the Heart

  I ASSUME THAT a certain peculiar and knotted conjoining of three mountain streams flowing north from the Yellowstone Park country looked different in 1805 because Meriwether Lewis, almost three thousand miles up the old unengineered Missouri, decided it should have a change of name. What we saw as two tributaries flowing closely together into a main stream, the Corps of Discovery deemed three almost equal rivers; thinking politically, they named them the Gallatin, Madison, and Jefferson. For the last one, we thought a more accurate name would be, if not the Missouri, then at least the Jefferson Fork of the Missouri, and we considered that juncture of streams no more a headwaters than, say, the mingling of the three rivers just north of St. Louis is the fount of the Mississippi. The true Missou
ri riverhead, its farthest source, its vertex, lies ninety-eight miles—more than two hundred by water—due south of the mouths of those three mountain streams.

  I had been to the so-called Headwaters, near Three Forks, Montana, several times before, and following the footsteps of Lewis, I’d climbed the limestone bluff to discover the view of the famous complexus of tributaries. Once, during low water, as I was trying to wade across at the place the captains incorrectly deemed the top of the Missouri, I nearly ended up being swept toward Toston Dam, sans boat, life vest, or even swim trunks. Partly because the area was not new to me, I acceded to Pilotis’s wish to play it safe and descend the last twenty-one miles of the Missouri, a decision I was soon to question.

  The morning was gray, chill, and windy, not the kind I’d hoped to have for our farewell float on the great river. Before setting out, I put down two small stones I’d taken from that shoreline a year earlier and kept on my desk as I planned the voyage: one in thanks for a safe return, the other to honor my late father who taught me to read not rivers but books and maps. Near the ghost town of Gallatin City, we launched at the mouth of the Madison and let the high water pull us into the Missouri where the swift downrush immediately began to shove the stern ahead of the bow, and we had to paddle hard to steer. Going with the current is not always easier than going against it, especially when it’s kicking as it was that day, and Pilotis seemed unusually tense.

  Ten minutes out, we got pulled in dangerously close to a deadhead, and my friend, despite considerable canoeing experience, overreacted and thrashed the paddle wildly, throwing cold water over me. On a hot day such a flub is a relief, but on a sunless morning with a wind-chill of forty degrees, I failed to avoid irritation and barked out something about tension making danger worse, so please relax. There were a few moments of injured feelings before the river turned us into a nasty angle of wind that nullified the shove of the current as air and water fought for control of the canoe. Over the next half hour we worked the paddles hard. Stroking, thinking of the 4,220 miles behind us, I finally said, What the deuce—this is no weekend float. I started the motor for a more fitting farewell-and-hallelujah downstream cruise. I called out, How are you doing? Thumbs up.

  Immediately below the nominal Headwaters is Trident, not a village but a mine, and the first we’d seen along the river; the operations had destroyed much of a big spread of bluffs near Headwaters Park. Pilotis, considerably disturbed, yelled, “Of all places to tear into the mountains! Doesn’t the importance of the geography or what happened here mean anything to these people?” Some hundred miles northeast of Trident, I’d seen the North Moccasin Mountains with an eastern side blasted away by a mining company searching for gold ore of such low grade it has to be extracted by a cyanide leaching process that adds poison to the colossal defacement. The 1872 law that governs mining in this country may have made a degree of sense six generations ago, but today it’s so obsolete it actually requires taxpayers to underwrite the pillaging of some of the finest lands in America. As with the out-ofdate grazing law, Congress, stumbling along under its usual opiate of venality, still listens to mining moguls rather than the citizenry, per haps because too many people are yet ill informed about the robbery of our tax till and natural inheritance.

  About eight miles below the mouth of the Madison, hills reach right down into the Missouri, and the intertwining of chutes and islands simplifies into a single broad channel deep enough to flush up big boils, but the pisspot pushed us smoothly through the swirls. We paused at a forgotten log cabin of a homesteader or long-gone cowhand, a pitiful little thing overgrown and turning green with decay, then set off again. Paralleling the water is an abandoned railroad grade that, given the beauty and the historic and geographic significance of those first official miles of the longest American river, should be converted into a trail, a path for walkers to enter the headstream country. Americans need and would use that slender strip of our history far more than a couple of dozen hamburgers-on-the-hoof defecating it into foulness.

  We passed a pother of cormorants in a cluster of dead trees, their dark shapes doing nothing to alleviate the gloom but instead only adding a foreboding to it that came to fruition about two hours out as we approached an enormous outcrop of gray rock slanting into the river, a remarkable exposure of geology unlike anything we’d seen. We reached for cameras. As the water drew us toward the slab, Pilotis, keeping watch in the bow, suddenly yelled out, “Gun it!” Blindly, without questioning, I answered the alarm and twisted the throttle all the way, and we lurched forward, then dropped as if over a low ledge, the canoe rocking gunwale to gunwale, yawing, shipping in water, a chaos preliminary to capsizing. The Missouri finally had us. Trying to stay loose and move with the canoe, a serious challenge when one is not expecting such violence, I knew we’d escaped an upset far too long. The time had come. All the way up the Missouri, we’d heard people talk of whirlpools, a word more common than the actualities of boils and eddies, yet we had not seen a single one wider than a few inches. But that vortex, a havoc created by the river deflecting off the face of the huge slanted rock, was fifteen feet across and turning fast.

  We had no time to pick up paddles. The canoe tossed, shook horribly, then stabilized just enough to ride forward and bounce up over the far edge, taking on more water. I started to call out something, I don’t remember what, when Pilotis yelled again just before we dropped into another whirlpool, smaller but nastier. The motor kept driving forcefully enough to give us headway, and we banged up and out. When we were safely beyond, I throttled back. Pilotis turned slowly and said, “Well played. Now, how many more of those little gifts do you think there are?” I said, Only Mini-sho-she knows. “Do you remember the Assiniboin who refused to tell us how to escape a whirlpool?” I nodded. “Do you think if he’d known of our encounter, he would’ve given us the secret?”

  We proceeded on. My fear subsided, but for some days it did not leave me completely, and Pilotis never again mentioned my alleged lack of respect for moving water. I said, We should have known the Missouri would say goodbye in a way we’d never forget. Pilotis: “I would’ve been disappointed had it done otherwise,” pausing, then, “Well, maybe not that disappointed.”

  Not far into Red Rock Canyon, we stopped at an old mine with small, collapsing smelters and ovens—or so we took them to be—of well-laid native stone, one of the most picturesque ruins we’d seen along the river. Said Pilotis, “To corrupt a cliché, in country like this, the only beautiful mine is a dead mine,” and off we went again.

  The Missouri, naturally, had one more surprise: as we rounded the horseshoe bend above Toston Dam, we came under a clearing sky of a deep blue the river reflected splendidly, and we saw ahead three dozen pelicans, brilliant in the sun like seraphim, take wing to lead us right down our final Missouri mile. We had climbed its back, all 2,290 miles by my measure, and it had lifted us 3,400 feet—about three stacked-up Empire State Buildings—above its mouth. I can hardly believe it, I said, and my friend finished the sentence, “but we did it.”

  Out of the river came the canoe and onto the top of our vehicle, then we headed toward Three Forks for the night. Beyond, to the southwest, we could see far into the higher Rockies still topped in snow, a forbidding horizon, and Pilotis said, “That’s where we’re going to cross?” Yes, I said, after we tend to the little business of getting up the Jefferson and Beaverhead. “You mean the streams Lewis and Clark dragged up?” Those are the ones, I said.

  That nippy evening, as I sat in a rocking chair alone on the big porch of the Sacajawea Inn, a place carefully restored, I thought how the Missouri at last—at last—was behind us. Of course, it did give one final unforeseen turn: something about our ascent was missing in me. I had a sweet sense of relief, but where was the jubilance of doing what so few people have ever done—go against the Missouri all the way? There was no hallelujah in my heart, not even a huzzah. Then I knew why. We hadn’t quite gone against it all the way. We had turned downstream for th
ose last several miles. By agreeing to descend for just a few hours, the final hours, I had fouled my sense of arriving at the traditional top of the long river. When we should have been toasting a dram in Headwaters State Park, we were instead standing numbly twenty miles away at Toston Dam. Toston! Goddamn!

  Was it right to give caution precedence over an unwritten rule of the voyage? We were, after all, still alive to continue tomorrow. But as I sat rocking on the porch in what should have been a golden hour, in hand a tired glass of spirits meant for celebration, I thought, whatever else, I’d made an emotional miscalculation, and I vowed I’d not again turn away from westering.

  IX

  THE MOUNTAIN STREAMS

  JUST WEST OF THREE FORKS, MONTANA

  Iconogram IX

  August 4th, Sunday, 1805

  Proceeded on verry early and Brackfast at the Camp Capt Lewis left yesterday morning; at this Camp he left a note informing that he discovered no fresh Sign of Indians &c. The river continued to be crouded with Islands, Sholey rapid & clear; I could not walk on Shore to day as my ankle was Sore from a tumer on that part. The method we are compelled to take to get on is fatigueing & laborious in the extreen, haul the Canoes over the rapids, which Suckceed each other every two or three hundred yards and between the water rapid oblige [us] to towe & walke on stones the whole day except when we have poleing; men wet all day, Sore feet, &c., &c.

  William Clark

  Monday August 5th 1805

  The river today [Capt. Clark] found streighter and more rapid even than yesterday, and the labour and difficulty of the navigation was proportionably increased; they therefore proceeded but slowly and with great pain as the men had become very languid from working in the water and many of their feet swolen and so painfull that they could scarcely walk. At 4 P.M. they arrived at the confluence of the two rivers where I had left [another] note. This note had unfortunately been placed on a green pole which the beaver had cut and carried off together with the note; the possibility of such an occurrence never onc occurred to me when I placed it on the green pole. This accedent deprived Capt. Clark of any information with ripect to the country, and supposing that the rapid fork was most in the direction which it was proper we should pursue, or West, he took that [wrong] stream and asscended it with much difficulty about a mile and encamped on an island that had been lately overflown and was yet damp; they were therefore compelled to make beds of brush to keep themselves out of the mud. In ascending this stream for about a quarter of a mile, it scattered in such a manner that they were obliged to cut a passage through the willow brush which leant over the little channels and united their tops.