On This Day - June 13, 1805 - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had set out on their expedition
to the Pacific the previous year. They spent the winter of 1804 with the Mandan Indians in present-day North Dakota. The Hidatsa Indians, who lived nearby, had traveled far to the West, and they proved an important source of information for Lewis and Clark. The Hidatsa told Lewis and Clark they would come to a large impassable waterfall in the Missouri when they neared the Rocky Mountains, but they assured the captains that portage around the falls was less than half a mile.
On June 3, they came to a fork at which 2 equally large rivers converged. “Which of these rivers was the Missouri?” Lewis asked in his journal. If the explorers chose the wrong river, they would not be able to find the Shoshone Indians from whom they planned to obtain horses for the portage over the Rockies. Lewis and Clark agreed and decided to follow the path that led to the south and on this day in 1805, Lewis was overjoyed to hear “the agreeable sound of a fall of water.” Soon after he “saw the spray arise above the plain like a column of smoke…"
By noon, Lewis had reached the falls, where he stared in awe at “a sublimely grand specticle (sic), the grandest sight I had ever held.” Lewis and Clark had been correct–the south fork was the Missouri River.
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