Mercury Monarch
Lewis and Clark Expedition Route :: 1804–1806
Great Falls of the Missouri River :: Photographer–Unknown
Missouri River Bluffs Night View
The songs Dream Weaver and Love is Alive by Gary Wright and Baby Come Back by Player were frequently played on AM radio during my high school years. Music influenced a lot of experiences—like Thursday night Key Club meetings, Friday night football games, choir festivals, and hiking in the mountains. Music accompanied the view over the Missouri River gorge towards the Rocky Mountain Front and Canada too — exactly where my friend and I were parked.
It was dark and the moon had set, so it felt like an endless, unexplored void through the car windows, with just enough ambient light to define the dim edges of things. Earlier that week while I was sitting in my history class waiting for it to begin. J. walked over to my desk, squatted next to me, and quietly asked if I’d like to go out sometime. My jaw must have dropped. Then I assumed she was messing with me because it was so random, but I looked at her and she seemed serious. “Um… sure” I said. “How about Saturday night. Are you free?” she asked. “Yeh. I think so… sure… I think… I’ll have to… yeh… Yes.” I said. “Great! Maybe let’s talk on Friday and figure something out”. “OK” I said. She smiled and went back to her desk. I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know me, but we had mutual friends and some common interests, so we had things to talk about. I’d noticed her in this class, in the hall by our lockers because they were near each other, and sometimes in the lobby of the performing arts building. I was still skeptical.
The following Friday we figured out the plan and eventually found ourselves parked in my parent’s brown, four-door, Mercury Monarch way outside of town after we saw a 9:30pm movie. I don’t recall what the movie was, but I remember sitting next to her in the theater. After the movie let out two hours later, we drove awhile and eventually found a good spot high above the coulees facing the falls on the Missouri River. We had all the windows open, so the thick smell of damp sage outside the car, from an earlier rain, drifted inside. We sat in the front seat for hours, listening to the radio, smoking, drinking, laughing, and talking about everything for the very first time. We connected easily and became friends quickly, before we sank into the beige vinyl seats. I took a lot of risks driving my parent’s cars into places like this, rugged river bluffs and two-track mountain roads were all best suited for four-wheel drives, not the family sedan, but I didn’t own a four-wheel drive, or a car of my own at the time.
Besides our own energy, that spot was embedded with lots of historic energy, because in June 1805, the Corps of Discovery spent a lot of time in this area. They had to portage four giant boats and all of their gear around the ‘falls’ on this part of the Missouri River. Ours was the same dimly lit horizon that the Lewis and Clark expedition saw at night. They may have even experienced this exact view. All of them may have hiked through this location looking for firewood, foraging for edible plants, hunting, and keeping a watchful eye on their new, unpredictable surroundings. They’d been trespassing into occupied territory during their entire journey, including this place. Every tribe from the Midwest to the northwest knew they were there. Fortunately for them, the indigenous people were mostly helpful and tolerant. Sacajawea was an integral part of the Corps too and was frequently responsible for their survival. Some have even written that she had saved their lives on more than one occasion. She may have walked where we were parked too, hauling her baby and all her other gear across the wild prairie.
It felt a little wild that night with my friend too. It wasn’t 1805 wild, but It was a Saturday night in 1977 wild. We’d just seen our first movie together, we had Coors, Black Velvet, cigarettes, the rumble of the falls close by, and we were riding an ‘astral plane’.
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“Fly me high through the starry skies
Maybe to an astral plane
Cross the highways of fantasy
Help me to forget today's pain” Gary Wright
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June 13, 1805 – Lewis and Clark Expedition Journal
Anxious to prove he’s right, Lewis scouts ahead of the rest of the ‘Corps’ and is overjoyed (at first) to find the Great Falls, describing them as a “truly magnificent and sublimely grand object, which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of ‘civilized man’*.
But it soon becomes clear that the portage (carrying canoes over land) around the Great Falls is going to be far more difficult and will require more than the one day he planned. To help with the challenge, the men fashion crude wagons from felled trees and drag the canoes and equipment across miles of unforgiving, cactus-strewn terrain.
“It takes them almost a month and a half to take all of their gear 18 miles,” says Buckley. “It’s probably one of the slowest parts of the whole trip.”
*Unsettling
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Songs :: Dream Weaver and Love Is Alive by Gary Wright, I’m Not in Love by 10cc, Hello It’s Me by Todd Rundgren, Baby Come Back by Player, Dust In the Wind by Kansas, Venus and Mars by Paul McCartney, and Lowdown by Boz Scaggs
© C. Davidson