Gone in a cloud of mist
Jefferson's dream of a Northwest Passage
“This morning we set out about sunrise after taking breakfast off our venison and fish,” Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal for June 13, 1805. “We again ascended the hills of the river and gained the level country.” The Corps of Discovery, which Lewis and William Clark headed, had been struggling up the Missouri River for months. They had finally reached the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The Indians told of a great waterfall in the river; Lewis was eager to see it. Yet he didn’t know what to expect. He was familiar with the Great Falls of the Ohio River, which really wasn’t so great, being rather a rapid that in fact disappeared at high water. That falls was hardly a hindrance to transport, requiring a portage—the unloading of boats and carrying them and cargo around the falls—of but several hundred yards. He had hoped the Great Falls of the Missouri would be no worse.
And he knew that his boss, Thomas Jefferson, shared his hope, and then some. A principal purpose of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to discover whether a feasible mostly-water route existed from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific. Jefferson was a parttime geographer, fascinated by the search for the Northwest Passage, the long-hoped-for water route from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. Much of the appeal of the Louisiana territory, purchased by Jefferson from France two years earlier, was the possibility that it might contain the eastern approach to the fabled passage.
Lewis and his comrades began to have doubts as they realized how big the Rockies were. Nothing on the Ohio River came even close. Lewis wanted to resolve the matter as soon as possible. He and an aide left the boats and cut across a bend in the Missouri toward where the falls might lie. “I had proceeded on this course about two miles with Goodrich at some distance behind me when my ears were saluted with the agreeable sound of a fall of water,” he wrote. The falls were at hand. He picked up his pace. “Advancing a little further I saw the spray arise above the plain like a column of smoke.”
This wasn’t good. The falls of the Ohio didn’t send spray high into the air. The falls of the Missouri must be something bigger.
Much bigger, as Lewis soon discovered. The agreeable sound of the falling water became a daunting roar. The sight was equally daunting, indeed breathtaking. Lewis called it a “sublimely grand spectacle.” He clambered down to the edge of the chasm through which the river boiled. “I took my position on the top of some rocks about 20 feet high opposite the center of the falls. This chain of rocks appear once to have formed a part of those over which the waters tumbled, but in the course of time has been separated from it to the distance of 150 yards, lying parallel to it and forming an abutment against which the water after falling over the precipice beats with great fury.”
The regular channel of the river near this spot was 300 yards wide, but the falls compressed it to hardly a tenth of that. “Here the water in very high tides appears to pass in a channel of 40 yards next to the higher part of the ledge of rocks,” Lewis wrote. The largest single drop of the falls was about 80 feet. “The irregular and somewhat projecting rocks below receives the water in its passage down and breaks it into a perfect white foam which assumes a thousand forms, in a moment sometimes flying up in jets of sparkling foam to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and are scarcely formed before large roiling bodies of the same beaten and foaming water is thrown over and conceals them.”
Lewis couldn’t conceal his amazement. The falls, he said, constituted “the grandest sight I ever beheld.” Words couldn’t do justice to the scene, yet he must try. “I hope still to give to the world some faint idea of an object which at this moment fills me with such pleasure and astonishment, and which of its kind I will venture to assert is second to but one in the known world.” Lewis seems to have been referring to Niagara Falls.
Which was telling, in that Niagara defied circumvention by economical portage. The falls of the Missouri quite obviously would too. “I retired to the shade of a tree where I determined to fix my camp for the present and dispatch a man in the morning to inform Capt. Clark and the party of my success in finding the falls and settle in their minds all further doubts as to the Missouri.” There would be no Northwest Passage in upper Louisiana.
Jefferson wouldn’t find out until much later. Before he did he almost gave up Lewis and Clark and their company for dead, so long were they beyond communication. His disappointment at the lack of a water route to the Pacific was offset by his relief that they were still alive. And they had much to tell of the wonders of the West, water route or no.