54. White Cliffs

Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River
25 miles south of Big Sandy, Montana
(view west, upstream)

The Missouri "breaks" extend, river distance (and the river was then and is still the only way they can be traversed), for about four hundred miles. They were christened mauvaises terres by the Métis, but the English word is better because much of the area is timbered [see photo No. 52] and — though the 130-mile-long reservoir of Fort Peck Dam [see photo No's. 50 and 51] has flooded some of the best land — there still are thousands of acres of rich grass. But there are badlands, too — mile after mile of sandstone towers, knobs, ridges; gullies gray and white and red; rock platforms stark against the sky, looking as if they had been erected for sacrifices to the ancient gods. As the sun descends the hot wind dies and then comes the miracle of color, purple and yellow and flame and unnamed mutations, merging at last in a golden haze over the muddy Missouri, suddenly transformed into a ribbon of silver.¹

— Joseph Kinsey Howard

White Cliffs

nder cloudy skies on the morning of 31 May 1805, the expedition "proceeded at an early hour," and roped their flotilla of six cottonwood dugout canoes and two big pirogues into one of the most famous riverscapes on the Missouri. they came upon it by surprise, and Lewis was enchanted by the seeming unreality of its "most romantic appearance."

His pen followed the passions of his mind from Providential architecture and Masonic symbolism, through objective geological analysis, to natural history. He reasoned, correctly, that water had "woarn" — hear him pronounce it wo-arn — "it into a thousand groteasque" — again, listen to him! — "figures, which with the help of a little imagination and an oblique view at a distance, are made to represent elegant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary." He took note of cliff swallows, bighorn sheep, limber pine, and "the most beautifull fox that I ever beheld." Both he and Clark expressed their sympathies for their men who, barefoot and wearing only breechcloths, waded all day in the cold water and the heavy, sucking mud that often hid sharp rocks, which had washed down from above. One such spot can be seen clearly from the air. Notice the dark shallow spot at the outlet of the little gully that snakes down from the cliffs at lower right.

Artist Karl Bodmer's Water-Level Views (1833)

"The White Castles on the upper Missouri"

rince Maximilian von Wied-Neuwied, who conducted a private scientific exploration of the upper Missouri in 1833-34, thought of them as "white mountain castles with brownish roofs. . . . As soon as one comes closer, the resemblance naturally vanishes; but from Mr. Bodmer's sketches one will easily see that from a distance a great resemblance exists." Bodmer drew the following 29 closeups of details among what are today known as the White Cliffs, which were reworked into aquatints for the atlas that was published in the 1840s.²

"Remarkable Hills on the upper Missouri"

he White Cliffs still challenge the imagination to match a Lewis's pen or a Bodmer's brush. In River-Horse, William Least Heat-Moon, soaring through the scene with his senses white-hot, calls it "a welter of rocks worn into oddities, grotesqueries, wierdities, nature gone whimsical if not deranged, a realm created by a fevered dreamer. . . . a madscape hanging on the drop edge of a yonder." But viewed from a quarter of a mile up in the sky, the chalky white line in the green-and-tan landscape relieves the imagination of all responsibility for participation. The welter is calmed, the magic dispelled. Those are just rocks.

From Discovering Lewis & Clark from the Air
Photography by Jim Wark
Text by Joseph Mussulman
Reproduced by permission of Mountain Press.

1. Joseph Kinsey Howard, Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest (New York: William Morrow, 1952), 339.

2. Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Amérique du Nord, exécuté pendant les années 1832, 1833 et 1834, par le prince Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied (Paris: A Bertrand, 1840-43), Plates 37, 34, 35.