The Blackfoot River

On 6 July 1806, Clark and his contingent were, with Sacagawea‘s help, threading their way through a maze of Indian roads in the Big Hole Valley, en route back to Fortunate Camp. Meanwhile, 120 miles to the north, Lewis’s eleven-man party had broken camp at the mouth of a Blackfoot River tributary they named Seaman’s Creek, after Lewis’s dog, and headed on up the river along the “road” that Indians living in the Rocky Mountains called the Cokahlahrishkit—the Road to the Buffalo.

The road led Lewis and his men to the north of an “extensive high prarie rendered very uneven by a vast number of little hillucks and sinkholes.” Lewis noted: “These plains I called the prarie of the knobs from a number of knobs being irregularly scattered through it.” Those “knobs” are mounds of debris deposited by piedmont glaciers during the last ice age, which ended about ten thousand years ago. Interspersed among them are numerous ponds or glacial tarns of various sizes and shapes, many long since reduced to moist, grassy little depressions.

The warning that their Nez Perce guides had given them on the morning of the fourth was always on their minds. Lewis and his nine men were becoming more aware by the hour that they were in hostile territory. At the western border of this “beautifull plain”—a short distance out of the photo, at left—they counted the remains of 32 Indian lodges. They were dogging the tracks of what they surmised to be a war-party of “the Minnetares of Fort de prarie,” and the tracks were looking fresher by the hour. Nevertheless, they proceeded on, prepared for the worst. “We expect to meet with the Minnetares and are therefore much on our guard both day and night.”

Even though they knew their guns would alert any potential foe within earshot, the hunters worked hard and bagged five deer and a beaver. The party had plenty to eat that night, and was well provisioned for the next few days. There was “much sign of beaver in this extensive bottom,” and they’re still fairly plentiful today.

Heading east early the next morning they saw some signs of bison in the valley not far from their camp, which showed that those herds sometimes penetrated the mountains at least a few miles. Sometime that morning Reubin Field wounded a moose near camp. Lewis remarked, “my dog much worried.”