To get from Yellowstone to Glacier, you pass through the territory where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark brought their party over the Continental Divide. Eric wanted to see some of the places they had gone.
As most Americans know, Lewis and Clark were assigned by Thomas Jefferson to explore the recently-purchased Louisiana Territory and the western part of North America. Jefferson had spent a rather large sum of money and wanted to know exactly what he had gotten for it. The purchase agreement had specified that the US had purchased all of the drainage of the Missouri River, and Jefferson wanted to know exactly how much territory he had bought. He hoped that the territory extended to the 50th parallel. (Lewis and Clark discovered that it unfortunately only extended to somewhere around the 49th.)
US territory before the Louisiana purchase had extended from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi River, and Jefferson knew well that the Missouri River came from mountains to the west and drained into the Mississippi at St. Louis. Jefferson had also read of explorers finding the mouth of the Columbia River on the west coast of North America, at what we now know as the border between Oregon and Washington. Journals of western explorers led Jefferson to believe that the Missouri and Columbia Rivers nearly met at the top of the Continental Divide, and that the Lewis and Clark expedition, named the Corps of Discovery, would have a fairly short portage over the Rocky Mountains from one river to the other.
Little did they know.
But that part comes later. Lewis and Clark had learned from the natives that, before they got to the source of the Missouri, they would have to portage past a waterfall. They were surprised to find, however, that they had to portage past not one but four waterfalls. The area now known as Great Falls, MT, was a source of great frustration for Lewis and Clark. Our route would take us right through Great Falls, so we decided to spend the night there and see the places the Corps of Discovery had traveled.
As the Interpretive Center is administered partially by the US Forest Service, the national parks pass I had bought got us in. The counter clerk said, "Someone's organized!" I said I was a legal secretary.
The museum is organized so that you walk through following Lewis and Clark along their journey from St. Louis to the Pacific coast. One side of the hallway tells you about the adventures of the Corps of Discovery, and the other side tells about the more than 50 native tribes that Lewis and Clark met along the way. It was quite well done.
The undertaking of the Corps of Discovery was enormous. Lewis and Clark had to be not only explorers and trip leaders, but navigators, naturalists, cartographers, boat repairmen, and diplomats for the natives. Their mission, as important as it would be to Jefferson and the new nation, would be quite difficult and dangerous.
Lewis and Clark would struggle mightily with the portage over the waterfalls, and spent several weeks trying to make it. An experimental iron boat, very dear to Lewis, was lost in the portage. Sacagawea suffered from some miserable girl problem that naturally got worse after Lewis bled her. In the middle of all this misery, the party drank the last of the whisky in a celebration of the infant nation's 29th birthday. Eventually, however, the Corps of Discovery overcame this part of the Missouri and headed on up into the mountains. The story of Lewis and Clark is a great tale of adventure and survival of which all Americans should be proud.
I wish I could say that our visit to this pretty place had been a better experience, but, in addition to the disappointment about the dam, we had a bitter fight about how much time to spend geocaching, which ended with a lot of wasted time on a cache that we couldn't even find, in a much uglier area, and me crying with a miserable splinter buried in my right hand. Our patience had been tried the night before by arriving too late in Great Falls only to discover that Eric had left a bag behind at a Subway several hundred miles back closer to the Wyoming border. The most valuable thing the bag contained had been a pair of fairly cheap binoculars, so it wasn't a terrible loss, but I had had to spend time that morning out shopping in an unfamiliar place to replace the sundries that had been lost along with the bag. Our departure from the motel had been very late, so we hadn't had the time we really needed to see this fascinating historic site.
On to St. Mary Lake.