The Rattlesnake Cliffs

The Rock She Meant?

Three days after stopping at his “Lookout” to get his bearings, Clark and his party, in six dugout canoes, “halted on the river under an immencely high perpendicular clift of rocks where it entered the mountain. . . . from the number of rattle snakes about the Clifts . . . we called them the rattle snake clifts.” This, however, is the landmark that white settlers believed Sacagawea really meant to identify as “Beaverhead Rock.”

Did Sacagawea misspeak? Or was she simply mistaken? Ever since the area was first settled in the 1860s, local opinion has held that either she did or she was. Moreover, it may not be much of a stretch to say that at least a small proportion of all the rocks in the west may have a “conceived resemblance” to the shape of a beaver, depending on the time of day, the angle of view, the background, and the viewer’s predisposition to anthropomorphize inanimate nature. (Notice the little “beaver shrub” at bottom-center of the last picture, above.)

“The Indian woman,” Lewis reported on Thursday, 8 August 1805, “recognized the point of a high plain to our right which she informed us was not very distant from the summer retreat of her nation on a river beyond the mountains which runs to the west. this hill she says her nation calls the beaver’s head from a conceived re[s]emblance of it’s figure to the head of that animal.” Although many of the journalists’ entries were obviously written in haste, with little concern for precise meanings, Lewis often appears to have chosen his words carefully. In this instance, for example, he chose “conceived”—a synonym for “imagined,” “supposed,” or “fancied.” It sounds as if he himself was somewhat skeptical.