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This is a view of the "wide Missouri" at sunset as I climbed down from the gumbo muddy mountain bluffs after bowhunting elk to our riverboat base camp. The river here is quite a bit "wider" than when Lewis and Clark used it as their highway to the interior on their exploration of this land speculation bargain known as the Louisiana Purchase. They encountered vast herds of buffalo and lots of grizzlies (and they tried to shoot every one of them) and a wild river that had flooded the prairies below this area of northeast Montana for eons. What they did not encounter was the Fort Peck Dam (the name later relates to an old Army Fort for guarding against frontier Indians) which impounds the Missouri at this point with several others further downstream. But the several million acres of the wilderness adjacent to this lake does not look too different today than it would have to Lewis and Clark.
In this impounded Missouri are remnants of another geologic era in time. Huge ancient fish called "paddlefish" because of their long bottom roiling snout, were here when Lewis and Clark were, and also the newcomers crossing the Aleutian land bridge, and with the cycling of several ice ages. They seem unaware of progress around them, although the bighorn ram I carefully stalked to the pinnacle of the bluffs behind this river bend was aware that men could enter this wilderness, and although they were not worth much as mountain climbers, they could do some damage at a distance. I spent a full day trying to get close to him and admired his perspective of the surrounding scene. I shot all but one exposure on the film I had with me of his surveillance of his domain, and then took this last shot on my return back to the same Missouri that had brought Lewis and Clark, countless Indians, French fur-trading "Engage'" and me into the wilderness along this river which antecedents of that bighorn ram, and the selfsame paddlefish, had guarded.