We heard the clink clink of steel on stone, a sound as unmistakable as it was unexpected. We scanned the flat, empty river and the rock walls above its banks, searching for a source. The sun was bright, the air windless and hot. The sound didn’t so much echo as fill the space, for want of competition.
Soon enough, we saw a man on the right-hand shore. We paddled over, a canoe and a kayak, and nosed onto the mud. He wore a blue T-shirt with the words “Grounded in Beauty” on it, and carried a geologist’s hammer. “You want to see something cool?” he asked.
Of course we did.
He hefted a block of sandstone he’d just split open. On its surface was an imprint that resembled the shell of a chambered nautilus. “Ammonite,” he said. “It’s from the Cretaceous, about 100 million years old.” He looked at it longingly. “You’re actually allowed to keep fossils like this. Just no vertebrates.”
We thanked him for the diversion and backed out into the river. One hundred million years ago: It seemed a reasonable place to start five days in the Missouri Breaks of Montana.
It’s a cliche to say that trips through the canyonlands of the West are “journeys through time,” but it’s true. What’s less obvious is that if you pick the right place, you don’t just confront epochs like the Cretaceous, but also more recent and troubling ones. The 149-mile-long Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument is such a place. It teaches not only geology, but also the part of American history once called “the settling of the West” — a time of heroism and enterprise, as well as perfidy and cultural annihilation.
I went on a five-day trip in the Missouri Breaks last July with a companion, Virginia, and an old friend, Larry, who now lives in Missoula, Mont. The trip was unguided and as placid as one could ask for. The stretch we did — Judith Landing to the James Kipp Recreation Area — falls about 2½ feet per mile, undetectable until one has reason to paddle upstream. It was beastly hot and the river was empty, the sky smudged with fires from points west. That may be part of the reason we encountered only one other boat in five days, and it was piloted by a ranger from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees the monument.
The most famous travelers on this watercourse were Lewis and Clark, who went upstream on their way west in 1805, with Lewis returning the next year whenClark, his fellow captain, took a different route. More recently, William Least Heat-Moon recounted his passage in “River-Horse,” a 1999 book about a coast-to-coast trip by motorboat (with an occasional assist from a boat trailer). Stephen E. Ambrose praised the Missouri Breaks in “Undaunted Courage,” his 1996 bestseller about the Lewis and Clark expedition: “It is today as Lewis saw it. … Of all the historic and/or scenic sights we have visited in the world, this is number one. We have made the trip ten times.”
We warmed up with a 20-mile paddle south from Fort Benton in the inaugural “Boats in the Breaks,” a fundraiser run by a local environmental organization. In hindsight, we should have just continued our way downstream at the end of the event and commenced the camping trip there. However, we’d already contracted with a shuttle service to take us 88 miles downriver from Fort Benton the next day to a jumping-off point we had chosen to avoid the crowd that never was.
What this gave us was another night in Fort Benton, a place (like the Missouri River itself) whose importance in U.S. history has been largely forgotten.
One of the purposes of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to determine whether the Missouri River was the best shot at a water route to the Pacific. While it proved imperfect and incomplete, the route did provide useful access to the deep interior of the West. Goods could cross the Atlantic, go up the Mississippi, then on the Missouri to Fort Benton, which, for a time, was the continent’s most inland port. The city (population about 1,500) makes the most of this history, with several museums, well-preserved buildings and a 12-block walk along the river with interpretive signs.
Soon enough, though, we were far from such evidence of civilization. The river that runs through the Breaks is part of the one-third of the Missouri’s 2,341-mile length that’s neither impounded by dams nor resculpted by channelizing. It hasn’t changed much in millennia.
The imprint of humanity
As with many national parks and monuments, there are excellent guidebooks to the Missouri Breaks. We carried three.
The most useful was a booklet published by the BLM that has mile-by-mile maps of the river on the right-hand pages and descriptions of what to notice on the left. A second, bigger-format book expanded on that information, quoting the Lewis and Clark journals, letters and diaries of settlers, and other historical documents. The third was a guide to the geology. At times, all three were spread out amidships in the canoe, ready to instruct.
The Missouri Breaks is not slickrock like the canyons of Southern Utah and Arizona. Its walls are more crumbly and geologically diverse, created by sediments laid down when a shallow sea migrated back and forth. When the region was the shoreline, sand was deposited. When it was open water, fine-grain silt settled on the bottom. When it was marsh, peat from vegetation accumulated. Today, that history is written in the sandstone, shale and coal in the Breaks’s riverside formations.
You can read the landscape (and read a book about it) without getting off the water. However, to see what people have left behind, you have to go ashore. Nine miles into our first day, we stopped at the Hagadone Homestead on the flood plain of the right bank, 20 feet above the river. A two-room, tar-papered house and three log outbuildings stood in seed-heavy grass.
In Missoula, we had visited an old homestead (the Moon-Randolph) that was littered with rusting farm implements and whose buildings had century-old objects that visitors were welcome to pick up and examine. The approach was called “curated decay,” and Montana appears to specialize in it. The Hagadone cabin had a bed frame, table, coal stove and pots, and a crumbling leather harness sitting unmolested. On the roof of one shed were three ancient coils of barbed wire. In a building across a gully was a wooden rowboat, its blue paint peeling and prickly pear cactus growing in the bilge.
In all, it seemed not much to amass in a lifetime of work. But as one of the interpretive signs told us, Frank Hagadone, who got the homestead in 1917, separated from his wife in 1923 “due to marital problems” and moved to this outpost. He died there in 1954. Not every settler’s story was “Little House on the Prairie.”
As we sought out the channel in the meanders, it occurred to us how difficult it must have been to navigate a steamboat upstream (and occasionally up rapids) 150 years ago. But low water wasn’t the only hazard back then. At one point, we passed the Iron City Islands, named for a vessel that went aground in July 1866. It was attacked by Lakota Sioux while the crew worked the boat off the shoal. The mate was killed; the captain, in a steel-plated pilot house, was unharmed.
We paddled on, stopping in late afternoon at a spot suggested by the outfitter who rented us the canoe. After tethering the boats, we lathered up and went for a swim. The water was turbid with algae and aquatic weed. You wouldn’t want to drink it, but it was good enough to wash and swim in.
We pitched the tents under a huge cottonwood tree, got out the chairs and wine, and made dinner on two stoves. (Alas, open fires were temporarily prohibited because of the dry conditions.) Swifts dipped and dove overhead as the setting sun silhouetted an escarpment on the other side of the river.
We decided to spend another night there because we had the time — our itinerary was untaxing — and wanted to explore (not just look at) the Breaks.
It wasn’t hard to pick our first outing the next day. Soon after we got up, we heard a distant rumble and saw a plume of dust rising from the plateau behind us. We walked up a dirt track and were soon at the edge of a wheat field. A harvester was making slow loops around it.
A 42-year-old farmer and mechanic, Bob Knox, was in the shade of a huge truck waiting to be filled with grain. He patiently answered questions about himself, the crop, the times.
He’s descended from Norwegian homesteaders. The year’s yield of wheat is poor, but drought raises the protein content, which makes it somewhat more valuable per bushel. A sawfly infestation caused many stalks to spill their kernels before harvest, so cattle will be put onto the field to do the gleaning and to fatten up. Pandemic-related issues caused the price of urea fertilizer to go way up, but luckily he and his father had pre-bought it.
“Hope we pull through it,” he said of the troubles. “I know we will.”
That afternoon, I watched the work proceed from a ridge high above the field, the river and our camp. I climbed there to get a look at the Breaks up close, even though the ridge was grassy and peppered with sagebrush and pines, not solid rock. But it turned out the walk could have been recommended by the geology guide.
I saw a “hoodoo,” a sandstone pinnacle with an erosion-resistant cap. I ran my hand across a formation where round “concretions” had fallen out, leaving what looked like an empty egg carton on its side. Perhaps most interesting were sections of the dirt slope where water and wind had carved bulges and furrows eerily similar to those on the rock walls of the Breaks. It was the same process at work, creating geological bonsai.
As we headed down the river the next day — for the rest of the trip, actually — it was references to history and art, not geology and physics, that broke the long silences.
The base of that formation looks like the clawed forepaws of the Great Sphinx, don’t you think? Don’t those arches and pillars remind you of a Gothic cathedral? A collapsed cliff front reminded us of the destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan. The vertical veil stains below a cliff top could have been painted by Morris Louis on a day he could find only brown paint. The drapes of sandstone with the round tops — monks, viewed from behind.
Communing with Lewis and Clark
There are no traces left of Lewis and Clark. However, thanks to their meticulous journal-keeping, we know where they stopped most nights. On our 61 miles, we passed five Corps of Discovery campsites, including one that was on the south bank in 1805 but, thanks to meanders, is now on the north.
What we shared with the captains and the corps was the landscape, a direct form of historical communion.
They saw the two black stripes of coal come and go from the river walls. They saw single trees (different ones, of course) standing sentry at the tops of cliffs. They saw patches of sandstone that had turned pink when wildfires oxidized iron compounds in them. They saw bald eagles, and golden eagles, and red-winged blackbirds mobbing osprey.
Clark walked by but “failed to note what is arguably the most profound geologic feature in the Missouri Breaks,” the geology guidebook noted ungenerously. (Without it, we would have done the same.) Rising up like a magenta castle over Bullwhacker Coulee, it’s a diatreme — rock from the Earth’s mantle blown to the surface from 50 miles deep in the last volcanic period, 50 million years ago.
They didn’t see riverbanks overgrown with salt cedar, an invasive kind of tamarisk. They didn’t see cows. Our route went through the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, about which Least Heat-Moon writes in his account: “In what way cattle, those Jaws That Ate the West, qualified as wildlife was beyond me, and I execrated the refuge managers for allowing such an abuse.” (Agreed!)
Most of all, what Lewis and Clark didn’t see were the consequences of their journey — the “opening” of the West to White settlers, and the conquest, dispossession and near-extermination of its Indigenous inhabitants.
On our next-to-last day, we passed a cottonwood-covered delta where a creek came in from the left. On the right was Cow Island, now part of the south bank. At this spot, on Sept. 23, 1877, a band of Nimiipuu Indians (also known as Nez Percé) crossed the Missouri on a futile, five-month, 1,170-mile flight to avoid impoundment on a reservation. By the time they were stopped, a few weeks later and 45 miles from the Canadian border, 300 of the 750 people who had started the trek were dead. Chief Joseph’s “I will fight no more forever” speech at the surrender is one of our history’s saddest — and most eloquent.
Who was the pursuer? Maj. Gen. O.O. Howard, who lost an arm in the Civil War, headed the Freedmen’s Bureau after the war and founded Howard University. Who was his commander? Gen. William T. Sherman, whose “Special Field Orders, No. 15” provided land to approximately 40,000 formerly enslaved people on the Georgia and Carolina coast. (It was later revoked by President Andrew Johnson.)
Howard and Sherman, who had once been advocates for the enslaved and oppressed, found their next assignment was the harassment of America’s natives. As we glided by in the noontime heat, I was reminded that irony and tragedy are as much a part of the American story as idealism and courage.
It’s part of what the Missouri Breaks teaches if you keep quiet and pay attention.
Brown is a writer based in Baltimore. His website is aweewalk.com.
correction
An earlier version of this story stated that it was William Clark who returned eastward on the Missouri Breaks in 1806. In fact, it was Meriwether Lewis. The story has been updated.
More from Travel
If You Go
What to do
Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument
920 NE Main St., Lewistown, Mont.
406-538-1900
This national monument in Montana encompasses 377,660 acres, starting in Fort Benton and running downstream for 149 miles. In some places, it consists only of the riverbed, and in others it includes islands, riverbank and upland. That section of the Missouri is also designated “wild and scenic,” with restrictions on motorized craft. Camping is allowed on government property; fires, if permitted, must be confined to established fire rings. Potable water isn’t available for most of the distance, so visitors must carry what they need. They must also carry portable toilets and remove human waste. River-use fees are $4 per adult for multiday use, $5 per adult, per day for day use. Free entry.
Missouri River Outfitters
1856 State Hwy. 387, Fort Benton, Mont.
406-622-3295
This outfitter rents canoes and kayaks and provides shuttle services to and from put-ins on the river. It also offers guided trips. Our trip was 61 miles, but we could have easily gone twice as far in our five days. We also started downstream from the famous White Cliffs section, because we feared it would be too crowded. Paddlers should consider doing the entire 149 miles. Open daily 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Rentals from $35 per boat, per day.
Information
PLEASE NOTE
Potential travelers should take local and national public health directives regarding the pandemic into consideration before planning any trips. Travel health notice information can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s interactive map showing travel recommendations by destination and the CDC’s travel health notice webpage.
