The Roche Jaune

ix hundred and seventy miles of free-flowing river, the Yellowstone or Roche Jaune (row-sh zjohne), as early French explorers named it, stretches from its headwaters in the high country at the southern boundary of Yellowstone National Park to its confluence with the mighty Missouri, on the Montana-North Dakota border.

When Captain Lewis arrived at the mouth of the great river in late April 1805, he saw a "rich, delightful land, broken into valleys and meadows, and well supplied with wood and water.…" He noted vast herds of buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope, and remarked on the stands of cottonwoods in that vicinity, together with dense undergrowth of elm, ash, box-elder, willow, and wild rose.

And when, in July of the following year, Captain Clark explored the Yellowstone from Livingston to the Missouri in July of the following year, he admired the "bold, rapid, and deep stream," and judged from his pre-steamboat perspective that it was navigable throughout its entire lengthas far as he knew it. He commented on the abundance of furbearing animals--"the Yellowstone and its tributaries...abound in beaver and otter."

This abundant environment had been home to Native Americans for millennia, and as Adrian Heidenreich has written, its resources had always "provided more than sustenance."¹ Arapooish, Chief of the Absalooka (Crow) Indians who had moved to the area about 1750, once said of their homeland, "The Great Spirit put it in exactly the right place....It has snowy mountains and sunny plains, all kinds of climates and good things for every season."

Clark had already learned much about the Yellowstone in conversations with the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians during the winter of 1804–05 at Fort Mandan. Big White, chief of the lower Mandan village, told him the Mandans called this river Meé,-ah'-zah Wakpa--Elk River.² Since he didn't meet any of the Absalookas face to face during the expedition, he never learned their name for the Yellowstone, Iichiilika ashaashe (roughly pronounced ee-JEE-lee-gah-sha ah-zha), which similarly means Elk River.³

--Rick Newby

1. C. Adrian Heidenreich, "The Native Americans' Yellowstone," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 35 (Autumn 1985), 2–17.

2. "Big White Chief of the Lower Mandan Village, Dined with us, and gave me a scetch of the Countrey as far as the high mountains,...he Says that the river Roche Jaune recves 6 Small rivers on the S. Side, & that the Countrey is verry hilley and the greater part Covered with timber, Great numbers of beaver &c." Clark, January 7, 1805.

3. In May of 1806 the captains would learn the Nez Perce Indian name for the river--Wah-wo-ko ye-o-cose, as Lewis spelled it; wewúkiye kú•s, as the Nez Perce word sounds--which means "elk water." Moulton, Journals, 7:343n.