by Tim Cahill
A vigilante sting operation sent out a decoy drunk one night, and it turned out that Hinson himself was the thief. The next day, the citizens told Marshal Hinson they knew who’d been stealing them blind, told him they were going to hang the fellow in half an hour, and asked him to bring a rope. And thus Hinson’s last official act was supplying the noose for his own execution. The hanging site is right next to the present-day Episcopal church, and most citizens, I imagine, would be happy to point it out to you. I don’t know. I didn’t get to stay in Fort Benton very long because I was late. So was everyone else.
Bobbie Gilmore, a kayak guide, had come from Whitefish, Montana, hauling a trailer full of sea kayaks. My old pal photographer Joel Rogers came from Seattle with two of his friends, David Fox and Scott Wellsandt. Linnea Larson and I were driving in from the other direction, and we all got to Fort Benton at about the same time, which was several hours later than we’d planned. It was a graceful little town of shady neighborhoods and old brick buildings fronting the river. The Grand Union Hotel, once the finest accommodation between Minneapolis and Seattle, had been refurbished and looked inviting, especially since the sunset was eminent.
Wise travelers might have checked into the hotel and gotten a leisurely start in the morning. We packed up the kayaks in a frenzy of sweat and started having fun right away. We paddled forty-five minutes into the night then set up our tents, prepared dinner—I don’t recall what, it may have been Joel’s quesadillas—and sat around the fire, catching our breath. There were no artificial lights anywhere and the stars were bright enough to cast shadows. It was a time for thoughtful comments on the day that had been.
“You know,” I said, settling back with a drink in the starlight, “it takes a real moron to forget his sleeping bag.”
“You forgot your sleeping bag?” Joel asked.
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
The nights were mild, and the others were fools to carry bulky sleeping bags, or so I told myself, paddling the next day. There were a few pelicans downriver, and they rose as we approached. I love the idea of pelicans eight hundred miles away from any ocean, and, quoting from a bird book, told everyone that the birds had a wingspan of eight feet.
“I don’t think that one does,” David Fox said.
“Probably a juvenile,” I said.
“Those two don’t,” David continued, “or that one either.” When David was last in Montana, he’d testified in a Billings courtroom. He’d been working for CNN, covering the Freeman militia standoff outside of Jordan. The Freemen had “confiscated” his video cameras, probably for being too literal about eyewitness evidence, like the wingspan of certain birds.
We passed through Black Bluff Rapids, which is marked at river mile twenty on the BLM Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River map. The water was smooth as a mirror—a muddy mirror—and the rapids didn’t actually exist.
In point of fact, most of the “rapids” marked on the map are from the steamboat days of the late 1800s. They are gravel bars, or areas that are tricky to navigate upriver in a steamboat. The Missouri trucks along at an easy average of 3.5 miles an hour and there is no whitewater whatsoever. It is a lazy float, appropriate for beginning canoeists or kayakers or rafters. I suppose you could get in trouble on the river, but you’d have to work at it in a fairly assiduous manner.
Bobbie, apparently attempting to raise the adrenaline quotient, said, “Well, in a couple of days we’ll hit Deadman Rapid.” She let the name sink in. “Women,” she added solemnly, “can go through there.” At mile twenty-two, we passed the mouth of the Marias River on our left, where Lewis and Clark spent nearly ten days on their upriver trip: June 2 through 10, 1805. They were stuck there in the throes of a navigational quandary. Their mandate from President Thomas Jefferson was to ascend the Missouri, cross the mountains, and descend the Columbia to the Pacific. At this fork in the river, each stream seemed about the same size. Which was the Missouri? (These days, there is little doubt. The Marias, confined by the Tiber Dam, seventy miles upstream, is now little more than a creek at its confluence with the Missouri.)
Most of the men in the Lewis and Clark party thought the north fork, the Marias, was the Missouri; both Lewis and Clark were skeptical. They measured the width of each stream, explored up the banks of each, and inquired locally, always a wise move for any traveler. Bolstered by what the Indians said, they concluded, correctly, that the south fork was the Missouri, and would take them into the mountains.
The river carried us past the Marias. Bobbie was giving Linnea some paddling advice. I was eavesdropping because I can use all the help I can get. “I tell my clients that a woman’s center of gravity is lower, so women are more stable in kayaks than men,” Bobbie said. “Women are probably more stable in life altogether.”
“You mean,” I interjected, in all innocence, “because they got fat butts?”
“Said the moron who forgot his sleeping bag.”
The character of the Missouri changes abruptly about forty miles into the float. At first it’s just as one might expect: a big, slow-moving river, lazing through meanders in a high plain with mountains shining in the far distance. But at the ferry-crossing town of Virgelle, the river changes direction, sweeping almost 90 degrees from northeast to southeast. The Missouri straightens out and floaters find themselves, for the entire rest of the trip, in a canyon several hundred feet deep. It is a relatively new thing, this canyon. The Missouri used to flow north, toward Hudson Bay, but glaciers grinding down from Canada during the ice age blocked the northward run and formed a dam that turned the river south and east. The Missouri spun about in a rage and shot through soft rock to the south, tearing up the land in a fury of frustration. The rocks were and are soft because this area of Montana was once a vast inland sea. Dinosaurs frolicked on its banks, especially to the east, near the final stretch of what is now the classic Wild and Scenic float. When the sea finally receded, 65 million years ago, it left a legacy of sedimentary rocks—clays, sands, silts: a dried-out sea bottom, essentially—and the Missouri, diverted by glaciers, cut through this soft stone like a hot knife through butter.
Meanwhile, tributary streams flowing into the Missouri from either side formed their own small canyons, which cut into the main channel of the river. It is a strange, crumpled landscape, odd and alien and vaguely disturbing. The land seems not at all as it should be; it looks somehow shattered, broken; and anyone who sees it will know immediately why the area is known as the Missouri Breaks.
Ten miles into the canyon, sandstone parapets rose on the riverbanks, and the vertically striated columns stood out like eroded statues in Egyptian temples. The canyon walls—all battlements and spires, resembling broken teeth—enclosed us as we floated farther downriver, eventually camping for the night near Eagle Creek, at the Lewis and Clark campsite of May 31, 1805. “The hills and river Clifts which passed today exhibit a most romantic appearance,” Lewis wrote in his journal that day, almost two centuries ago. “The bluffs of the river rise to the hight of from 2 to 300 feet and in most places nearly perpendicular; they are formed of remarkable white sandstone.”
I was reading aloud from the journal now, and what we saw in the dusk directly across the river was the exact sandstone wall described by Lewis. “The water in the course of time in decending … had trickled down the soft sand clifts and woarn it into a thousand grotesque figures.…”
“Exactly,” said Scott Wellsandt.
Lewis, with “the help of a little imagination and an oblique view,” saw “eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having the parapets well stocked with statuary.” He saw “collumns standing almost entire with their pedestals and capitals.” He saw stone “in the form of vast pyramids of conic structure bearing a serees of other pyramids on their tops.”
“What do you see?” I asked Scott.
“That one, over there, looks like the skinny Laurel and Hardy guy. Stan Laurel.”
We declined the opportunity to make fun of
Scott’s vision. Not only was he a great big huge powerful guy, he was the best cook on the float. This evening he’d made pad Thai on a camp stove and it was delicious. “Stan Laurel,” I said, hoping Scott’d cook for the rest of the trip. “Anyone can see it.”
“Did the cops question you about it?” I asked Bobbie late the next day.
We were standing just across the river from our campsite, on top of the cliffs, staring numbly at the remains of a formation that was once a familiar landmark to Indians and fur trappers and steamboat captains. What we saw was a pair of inward-curving arms, each about ten feet high, stretched upward, to the sky, as in supplication. The arms had once held and balanced capstones so that the formation was a graceful natural arch, eleven feet high, a national landmark called the Eye of the Needle.
“We talked to the BLM and the local cops. We were the last people to see it before …”
Sometime between May 25 and May 26, 1997, vandals pried the capstones off the top of the arch, then pushed them over the cliff.
“I was guiding a group,” Bobbie said. “We were the last people to see it intact. Climbed up here on the Memorial Day weekend. It was rainy and slick and it poured rain all the next few days.” The steep climb winds its way up through a narrow chute, and it is necessary to move carefully, three points on rock at all times. Bobbie carries a climbing rope because a sudden rain can turn the chute into a water slide. “The next group to come through reported it down. Some folks think it may have collapsed on its own, but the cops told me they found the marks of a metal bar on the rocks that had been kicked over the cliff.”
The FBI was called in, Bobbie and her group submitted their snapshots—the last photographs ever taken of the intact formation—and then the years began to gently drift along, no arrests were ever made, and the remains of the Eye stand sentinel over the river, testament to a certain virulent variety of human disfigurement.
Late that afternoon, we climbed back into the cliffs behind our campsite. The rock walls closed in around us, forming a water-carved, keyhole-shaped passage of the sort found in caves. Several fallen boulders the size of trucks or houses blocked the way, but Bobbie led us scrambling up over them, insisting that she had something to show us. And, indeed, when we topped out, we immediately saw another Eye of the Needle—an arch of about the same size, wind-scoured and smooth as gritty marble. I climbed up to get slightly above this peculiar eye, and when I looked through it, there, below, stretching out for over a mile, was a maze of canyon and tortured rock, perfectly framed: an invitation to commit poetry or philosophy or any number of the higher aesthetic or contemplative crimes. I imagined there were other Eyes, in other drainages, none of them actually on the river, but all probably worth a climb—isolated instances of beauty and in no urgent need of beholders.
We floated through the White Cliffs, past Citadel Rock, a distinctive crag leaning out over the river and, at a guess, about two hundred feet high. The citadel is an igneous intrusion, which is a pleasantly onomatopoetic way of saying that hot magma rose up into the cracks of the White Cliff sandstone in hard, vertical blades called dikes. As the softer sandstone falls away, the dikes remain: towers of odd and idiosyncratic rock.
In 1805, Lewis and Clark took note of this particular rock, and on August 16, 1833, a Swiss artist named Karl Bodmer sketched the most famous depiction of the Citadel. Bodmer was traveling with Prince Maximillian of Wied, a German aristocrat with an interest in indigenous American peoples. He’d hired Bodmer to document the journey. The artist’s work was accurate and evocative. His drawings and watercolors underscore, I think, one of the few faults of the Lewis and Clark expedition: their failure to bring along an artist like Bodmer to record their trip.
Somewhat farther down the river is another igneous intrusion, a relatively thin blade of rock standing at right angles to the course of the river. From upriver, we could see—at the summit of that rock—a large roundish hole through which blue sky was visible. This was the Hole in the Wall.
We saw two canoes on the bank, and there were two older gentlemen sitting in lawn chairs and fishing for Missouri River sturgeon where we pulled over to climb up. “Uh, our wives are up there,” one of the fishermen said, pointing toward the canyons and gullies that led up to the Hole. He held out a mobile phone. “They said they’re stuck.”
“Probably not so bad,” the other fellow said.
“You might give them a hand on your way up,” the first man said in a paroxysm of chivalry.
One of the women was frozen at a tricky down-climb and her friend wouldn’t leave her. Bobbie climbed up to their position, deployed the rope, and sent the women back to their husbands, who were talking about sturgeon on the riverbank far below.
The Hole in the Wall is about three hundred feet above the river, standing above a ridge that drops to a sloping grassy hillside. We moved through the grass, wary of snakes. Prairie rattlers, up to six feet long, make their homes along the Missouri. We’d seen no rattlers, but the campsites were full of bull snakes slithering along on their reptilian business. They are bigger than rattlers and essentially harmless to humans. It is a tenant of Montana folk wisdom that when the bull snakes are plentiful, rattlers are scarce. Still, it is disconcerting to nearly step on a seven-foot-long snake. Bulls will hiss, and they can bite, but are not venomous.
As we moved through the grass, Scott hissed, snakelike. Linnea froze with a foot in the air, and we all laughed—ha, ha, ha—about how funny our best chef was today, and nobody snuck up from behind to bean him with a rock.
The view was 320 degrees of palaces and turrets and spires. We could hear the wind whistling and booming through the Hole as we crawled up the backside of the formation, past initials and names and dates carved into the rock. None of them said: “Meriwether Lewis, 1805.”
And then we were back on the river, paddling past piles of columned rocks standing alone on the sage-littered hillsides that looked like Greek temples.
“That one,” I said, paddling beside Scott, “looks like the Acropolis.”
“I see a Buddha,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said, staring at the Acropolis. “Spitting image of the Buddha.”
We camped near a place called Steamboat Rock, because it looks like a steamboat, though it is likely Scott saw other images. No one asked him. I climbed a dry drainage and found a big-game trail leading up to the summit of a ridge overlooking a hillside that dropped down to the river. The slope was crowded with closely spaced but individual pillars that looked, to me, like the rows upon rows of terra-cotta soldiers at Xi’an, in China.
Back at camp, as Scott cooked, Joel and I argued a bit about cows. Very occasionally, we saw a few of the animals on a distant hillside. Once we found a dozen standing in the water. Joel is one of those folks who would like to see the federal government deny grazing leases and buy up—or merely confiscate—millions of acres to save the land from the depredations of ranchers. I, on the other hand, live in Montana, know many ranchers, and believe that they are often conscientious stewards of the land.
The BLM manages the Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River with the stated purpose of ensuring “that the river will retain its essentially wild and pristine nature.” The BLM asks floaters to do their part in protecting this vision, which Joel translated as “destroy all cows.”
“Actually,” Linnea said, “I floated this stretch fifteen years ago, and there were cows everywhere.” Now it was a jolt to see just one, even from a distance.
I thought about that while floating the next day. There was no one else on the river at all, and when I blasted out ahead of the others, paddling like a bastard, it was easy to imagine that I was the first person on the river, the first to see this stretch.
There is a bridge over the Missouri where the Judith River empties into it from the south, and a BLM campsite at what is called Judith Landing. It was a weekend and there was a dirt bike competition on a track just up from the river. The bikes roared over various jumps in p
halanxes of four and five.
“Nice place,” I said to Joel, shouting over the howl of dirt machines. “No cows.”
About a half mile down, we lost the sound of the dirt bikes and set up camp on the grassy banks of the river. There weren’t a lot of trees, not as many as one would expect, anyway, and that is partially the legacy of steamboats that brought trappers and traders and pioneers up the river for the entire last half of the nineteenth century. A steamboat burned about thirty cords of wood a day, and, in the years between 1860 and 1888, there were four hundred steamboats operating on the Missouri in Montana. Wood was purchased from enterprising businessmen called woodhawks, who, naturally, cut down the most convenient trees available, the cottonwoods on the riverbank. The cottonwoods have not come back in force. They need an occasional flood to propagate properly, and a dam above the Wild and Scenic stretch of the river moderates the yearly flood.
“And even if a few do get a start, there are always cows to trample them and such,” Joel said.
“You see any cows?” I asked.
“They used to be here.”
“How do you know?”
“Because there’re no cottonwoods.”
And so it went, bickering on about cows all the next day, until, once again, I paddled out far ahead, then drifted down the river in splendid solitude. The White Cliffs had given way to layers of sand and clay called Claggett Shale, the Judith River Formation, and Bearpaw Shale.
Shale means badlands: those areas of tortured, eroded hills and cliffs unsuitable for ranching or farming. Badlands are seldom inhabited by humans (or cows), which is why they are generally alive with wildlife of almost every description. We saw golden eagles, bald eagles, osprey, mule deer, antelope, foxes.
