River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  We had other maps, the best available, including nine adjoining charts that when laid out were ten feet long and seven wide, all for a river only forty-six beeline miles, head to mouth, and about seventy-two by water. I say “about” because it’s impossible to be accurate with something as uncommitted to going anywhere as the Beaverhead usually is.

  The difficulties are more than simply meanders or the narrow channels Lewis called bayous or the dead-end sloughs and old irrigation ditches, for the Beaverhead, possessed of all the impediments of the Jefferson, adds roots extending from the shore, undercut banks, irrigation pipes, sudden water releases from Clark Canyon Reservoir, and a controlling agency called the Bureau of Reclamation. As a result, people don’t go up the Beaverhead—they wait for the water to reach a certain level then go down a portion of it, sometimes carrying wire cutters for illegal fences. The Corps of Discovery required almost three weeks to ascend the 150 miles from the mouth of the Jefferson to the start of the Beaverhead, a trip they accomplished on their downstream return in less than three days.

  All of those obstacles, of course, do not include seriously high water. Confronting us on the morning we hoped to ascend was a river, like a teenager, determined to get nowhere in particular as long as it did it fast. Once again, we could not find an experienced boatman willing to face such currents, especially to buck them. Rule of the River Road: When veteran pilots blink, head for dry ground. But walking along the brush-encumbered banks was also out of the question, an age-old circumstance that explains the several well-worn Indian “roads” Lewis and Clark came across in the Beaverhead country. So, without other recourse, we also took to a road and drove up the valley past a ridgeline that pushes against the river to form what many historians believe is Beaverhead Rock, the landmark Sacagawea recognized as proof she had arrived again in her home territory. Another outcrop some miles on south has always looked far more like a beaver to me, and some residents say it is the true landmark, explaining the lower ridge as a swimming beaver, the upper a walking one. Other people shuffle off the debate by noting there are formations all over the area that look like beavers walking, swimming, copulating.

  We followed the valley. To the west lay the heavily mined Ironrod Hills and on the east the Ruby Range, dug up for garnets and talc. The road, rarely more than a mile from the river, led us into Dillon, a small college town of four thousand, then onto Interstate 15 and a twelve-mile run through the canyon of the upper Beaverhead, a place of umber-colored rock walls and an aridness even the swift water couldn’t relieve. On we went toward Clark Canyon Reservoir, an impoundment that buried the campground Meriwether Lewis named Fortunate at the union of the Red Rock River and Horse Prairie Creek, the latter leading westward to Lemhi Pass where we intended to cross the Continental Divide.

  Our failure to move by water had suddenly gained us time. Since the date set for our start down the Salmon was still some days away, I proposed we take a few hours to visit the true headwaters of the Missouri, its farthest source, the one the Corps of Discovery missed. We were singularly unprepared for such an off-the-elbow expedition, even to the point of not knowing with certainty where that headstream was; I had read only that it rose someplace in the mountains beyond Upper Red Rock Lake. Our maps were insufficient, and we could not come up with proper ones on such short notice, but we headed off anyway for the road that parallels the Red Rock River, stopping along the way to ask questions in hopes of finding an oral map, but the veritable source of the Missouri was there terra incognita. Everyone kept trying to direct us back to Three Forks or toward a spring at Lemhi Pass which Lewis considered the farthest water, and a half-dozen times we heard variations on, “What? You think the Missouri actually begins where? Who says so? When did you hear that? Why do you want to go there?” Who, what, when, where, why.

  We proceeded on, following the Red Rock around its turn eastward into the long, wide, wet meadow of Centennial Valley, a prehistoric lake bottom still spongy enough to hold a rather new reservoir and two ancient pools, today heavily silted up by just 120 years of Euro-American activity. Once about twenty-five feet deep, neither Upper nor Lower Red Rock Lake will now cover a short man’s head, and they are well on the way toward eutrophication and the attendant demise of the last indigenous population of grayling in the forty-eight states, as well as a colony of trumpeter swans. Although much of it is a national wildlife refuge, the valley still holds many cattle, and we had to look hard to see any creature not intended for an abattoir: a few antelope, a mule deer, a curlew, three Swainson’s hawks, a pair of swans. At the Red Rocks, federal regulations still effectively permit the extirpation of uncommon wildlife in order to protect grazing rights; that is to say, 120 years of humans cancel the prerogatives of any other life, no matter that those other rights of tenancy are twenty thousand years older. Coincidentally, in the lonely valley (so we heard) is a vacation home of the richest man in America, and with good cause: the place is markedly beautiful.

  From the road, we followed the flow of the Red Rock River through the two marshy lakes and its turn to the south again at the point it becomes Hell Roaring Creek, an accurate name on that day, and passes under a gravel road and disappears into a narrow and forested canyon. We were in the shadow of Nemesis Mountain, a name confirming that we were on the right track of the Missouri. Unable to follow the creek, we tried to flank it by taking the road on up to Red Rock Pass where we stopped to make a short climb into the aspens and conifers to get to some patches of winter snow. I reached down and packed a handful into a ball, tossed it to Pilotis, and said, Have a little Rocky Mountain Imperative. My friend: “So this is what has compelled and impelled you since Elizabeth, New Jersey.” But not propelled, I said and bent to palm up more, brushed away the top inch, and put the rest into my mouth. It isn’t often you can eat the force that drives your life. Pilotis watched and said, “There’s one scoop of precipitation that won’t make it to the Atlantic.” Rethink that, I said. Pilotis considered, then, “Yes, I guess it still will—unless we cross the Divide tonight.”

  As we sipped what the Photographer called “Imperative Stout,” a young hiker happened along and told of his trek down the Divide from Missoula to Loveland Pass in Colorado. Although he had not yet reached the portion above the farthest source of the Missouri, he had read that to get there we would do best to go around the Centennial Mountains and try to approach from the south. At an elevation of nine thousand feet, the alleged trail was still snowbound, a tramp three river travelers were improperly equipped for, but I knew then I would return someday to see the true source of the longest river in America.

  An Ark from God or a Miracle of Shoshones

  WE TOOK A DAY of respite at the Red Rock Inn, the nicely refurbished old railroad hotel in Dell, a one-street settlement with a population often less than what’s passing by on the four-lane just to the west. We went out into the territory again, wandering, looking, and returned to the inn for supper and then a nightcap in front of the fireplace. Our companions were a couple of cowhands working for a wealthy Boston physician who held several grazing permits. Said one of the fellows, a former paramedic, “Doc doesn’t know much about ranching—he’s in it for the investment and tax breaks—but he’s better than what my friend’s got up north. His boss is Japanese or Taiwanese or some kind of Ese. That’s the Great American Ranch Legend for you today.”

  The next morning we set out for that place we’d so long anticipated, the Great Divide, and our first look into the far western mountains lying between us and the Pacific. From the high waters of Clark Canyon Reservoir, we drove through rising grasslands drained by Horse Prairie Creek and up the foothills of the Beaverhead Mountains in the Bitterroot Range. The country, not so beautiful as Centennial Valley, was pleasing enough with stands of conifers, splots of sage, volcanic outcrops, and history: we were more or less on the Indian trail Meriwether Lewis followed to reach Lemhi Pass. The way changed from asphalt to gravel to a dirt track with a sign: road closed. A far better cro
ssing lay about fifteen direct miles south, the route the Photographer took when he hauled Nikawa over the Divide, but I was bent on staying with history, so we continued on to see for ourselves whether the way was open. The deeply rutted track did its best to keep close to Trail Creek, a narrow downrush of clear water marked all across the open foothills by a bordering serpentine of small willows. Hanging on in the lurching tow wagon, we could ascend at only a walking pace, and we hoped we wouldn’t come around a tight bend and find our passage blocked, because above us somewhere was the tiny spring Lewis believed to be the farthest water of the Missouri.

  Then, beyond the last hairpin turn, we saw a long and lightly forested ridge sloping down to a saddle, the gentle dip that was the crest of Lemhi Pass. We followed on to just below it and another track leading south a few hundred yards; we stopped and began walking, past a small campground, through a stand of firs and pines, on to a hilly meadow of sage and blossoming lupines, bluebells, strawberries. We stood, I sniffed the air, listened. When the sough in the trees, a sound like gurgles from a brook, paused, I heard real water. We started again until we came to a rillet only ten inches across, its margins thick with watercress, and we pursued it up the slope a short way to a bubbling circle of clarity no larger than a platter for a Christmas turkey, no deeper than my immersed hand, and cold enough to make knuckles ache in a few seconds.

  We had read the famous passage Lewis wrote about that spring, knew it by heart and felt it the same way. Among the thousands of significant moments in American history, we have few records of what a participant thought at the time: as Lincoln stood reading at Gettysburg, what did he feel? or Dorothea Dix the first time she stepped inside an asylum? or George Washington Carver when that sweet-potato glue actually stuck a postage stamp to an envelope? At the springlet below Lemhi Pass, Lewis, after nearly a year and a half of struggling to reach that spot, gave account of his response:

  The road took us to the most distant fountain of the waters of the mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many toilsome days and wristless nights. Thus far I had accomplished one of those great objects on which my mind has been unalterably fixed for many years; judge then of the pleasure I felt in allying my thirst with this pure and ice cold water. . . . McNeal exultingly stood with a foot on each side of this little rivulet and thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri.

  I kneeled to drink. The Photographer, ever the man of concerns, said, “Do you think it’s safe?” As a long-time sampler of American waters, sometimes only tasting where drinking would be harebrained, I said, I know that water pollution is widespread in this country, but I’m going to trust it’s not so bad it’s reached a spring a hundred yards below the Divide—I mean, how much closer to the top of a stream can you get? The only water above here is rain. Leaning to the spring, I said to myself, Even if I’m wrong, this, of all places, is worth the risk.

  The taste was like melted snow. Then I took a few steps down the rivulet, and I too straddled it and watched the rush between my legs and realized it would reach my home country before I would. I looked up, thinking I should say something appropriate, but nature did it for me: from a high dead branch came down a rasping khraaaa, a Clark’s nutcracker, one of the fifty-some birds the Corps of Discovery first brought into American ornithology and the only one named for the captain, and I answered, Indeed, William.

  We went on up to the pass and stopped again to walk across the line between Montana and Idaho, to step over the very ridgepole of America and into the world of Pacific gravity. From the Atlantic at the Verrazano-Narrows we had come 4,432 miles, and we were almost a mile and a half above it. Now, stretching out before us through range after range of gray mountains—mountains set athwart our course—was the deepest horizon I’ve ever beheld, and somewhere among it all lay waiting eight hundred more miles of river. Looking at the ten-thousand-foot-high ridges of deep and successive forest, a view unchanged since Lewis took it in, Pilotis said, “Only a madman could believe he could reach the Pacific through those things.” Or a guy with a good map, I said. “One of us qualifies on both counts, and I don’t have the maps.”

  Of the several Divide passes Lewis and Clark used in their explorations, the Lemhi is the only one both crossed, and for them it marked the boundary of the Louisiana Territory and the end of the United States. I went down the western side to look for the spring that Lewis, assuming it was the source of the Columbia River, also drank from; although he missed the true headstream of the Missouri by only ninety miles, the farthest water of the Columbia actually lies north almost four hundred miles. The forest was heavier on the Pacific slope, the valley more pinched and steep, and I wandered some time before I gave up on finding that other spring and climbed back to join my mates, and we started down the old stagecoach road, a narrow and much twisted track scarcely improved in six generations. We followed Agency Creek through a declivitous terrain of weird volcanic formations that on a foggy night could surely change into phantasms and chimeras, a haunting if not haunted place. Sky darkening, the wind poured down from the continental summit, rattled the trees hard, and pushed us along as gravity pulled us. Pilotis said, “From here on, if we have a mechanical malfunction, at least we’ll get washed along in the right direction.” And the Photographer: “Going downstream only means different problems, not fewer ones.” Pilotis: “That’s a difference I can live with.”

  At the foot of the Beaverheads we came into the valley of the Lemhi where it passes in front of the Tendoy store, a general merchandise sandbagged against the rising river. Pilotis looked at the bags and said to me, “Well, Mister Flood, here we go again. You really overdid it last winter with that damn rainstick.” We stopped to walk to the edge of the narrow torrent smashing against rocks and rolling over a small irrigation dam and shaking the hell out of overhanging trees. Above the noisy Lemhi, Pilotis said loudly, “Won’t be any canoes going down this little ripsnorter!” We’ve got only twenty miles of it! “Twenty miles of near-death experiences!”

  In the glooming evening we headed on north alongside the river toward rooms we’d arranged for at the place where Nikawa waited. It was in the Lemhi Valley that Lewis stepped into one of the remarkable and almost incredible events of the Expedition, one so stunning it blurs the line between coincidence and miracle. Having seen virtually no Indians since leaving their winter camp at Fort Mandan four months earlier, the captain was desperate to trade for horses, an immediate and absolute necessity to carry their stores over the mountains to the next navigable water. Going down into the valley, he caught sight of three terrified women whom he managed to approach and calm by rolling up his sleeve to reveal his white arm and show he was not an enemy from the Plains. The women belonged to a small band of Northern Shoshones, Sacagawea’s very people, and their chief was no other than her brother. As for horses, they had many.

  The valley takes its name from Limhi, who (so purports Joseph Smith in The Book of Mormon) was a son of Noah, the old master of flood. The way I figured things that gloomy night, to get down the little roaring river we would need an ark from God or a miracle from the Shoshones. Pilotis said, “Along here, you’ve got a better chance of coming across Limhi himself than you have either of the others.”

  A Shameless Festal Board

  OF THE problems we would have in trying to get down the little Lemhi, one of them would not be Mary Turner, once rejected in love and thereafter at war with the world—especially where it was male—her disappointment enough to name her ranch the Broken Heart and proclaim it with a painted wooden sign at the gate. A woman of the valley, she especially had it in for those on the river, snatching fishing rods and snapping them over her knee or shooting holes in boats. What sort of weapon she used I don’t know, but I hope it wasn’t the Thompson submachine gun in the county historical museum, her “Chicago typewriter” engraved with names of gangsters she claimed to have known Back East: John Dillinger, Ma Barker, Baby Face Nelson, and, at the m
uzzle, hers too. Other than taking neighbors’ apples or trying to bullwhip a woman who gave some offense, I didn’t hear of any other crimes attributed to Mary, known to valley people as Old Blister.

  Three winters previous, a few days before Christmas, the eighty-two-year-old fell on the ice near her isolated house, the one with secret compartments, and froze to death, a demise some residents found fitting for a woman who had long considered the outside world a cold and heartless place, even believing the power company daily shut off the electricity to chill her. Linemen, ironically, were the ones to find Mary a few days later. When the sheriff arrived and went inside, he discovered a house heated to eighty-four degrees, three starving Dobermans, a room full of insane chickens, a cocked bear trap, and in a drawer a plastic snake on a coil ready to spring. All the “secret” compartments were empty, but in her purse, next to the food stamps, was forty thousand dollars. People now speculate that Mary, always contemptuous of governmental programs, did not consider relief stamps a violation of her efforts, as she said, “to live free in an unfree world,” since she more or less returned the money through a hundred-thousand-dollar bequest to the University of Idaho.

  Her Lemhi was the smallest river, in breadth and length, we would face, of such size Missourians would call it a creek, but the heavy and fast-melting winter snowpack was driving it into such confounding impetuosity, no one in the county would entertain even a notion of setting out on it until it dropped considerably. To the dangers of the Jefferson and Beaverhead, it added a treacherous narrowness and dozens of blind bends that can bring a boat suddenly upon a decapitating bridge or barbed-wire fence or, lying bank to bank, a downed tree as deadly as any cheval-de-frise. Because the Lemhi is the major source of irrigation for the otherwise arid yet fertile valley, ranchers did what they could to discourage people from putting on the river, even using as evidence one of their own who drowned fixing a fence just before our arrival. The law provides for open access to such waterways, and all we wanted was to descend a mere twenty miles without harassment, but once again a swollen river made our passage moot because it was the Lemhi itself that was keeping us off.