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Naming The Five Falls of the Missouri

By: LewisAndClark200 Staff

The day after Lewis’ discovered the great falls of the Missouri, he went exploring further upriver. To his surprise about five miles up the river he encountered a series of three more falls within about a mile of each other. The first one he described as crooked so he appropriately named it Crooked Falls. That name is still used today. A few hundred yards upriver Lewis set his eyes upon a “cascade of about fifty feet.” He glowingly described and called it a Handsome Falls. The third one was quite small with only about a six foot drop. Lewis commented that compared to the others it was pretty insignificant, so he “passed by it with but little attention.” He did not give it a name. By now Lewis was anxious to see what else lie in store, so he eagerly continued his journey up the river.

After he had traveled another two and one half miles he encountered yet another modest falls of about nineteen feet. Once he had determined it was the last falls in the area he called this one the Upper Pitch. Lewis wrote in his letter from the falls to Clark who was coming up the river with the boats that this Upper Pitch answered the description of the falls the Indians had described to them at Mandan. They had told the Captains about the black eagle with a nest in a tree below the falls. Thus Lewis knew absolutely they were on the Missouri River.

When Lewis discovered the great falls of the Missouri on June 13, he was at the largest one, but also the one that is the farthest downstream. The Indians had only talked about one waterfall so he naturally assumed that he had found the “great falls”. Only after his trip to the Medicine River on the 14th did he realize that the Upper Pitch was the one waterfall the Indians knew and were talking about.

In the summer of 1872 Thomas Roberts led a survey crew for the Great Northern Railroad down the Missouri River from Helena into the Great Falls area. They had been surveying railroad routes in the western part of the state and were now trying to determine if steamboat connections could be made with the railroad routes they had surveyed. This would be primarily for passenger traffic, but freight was becoming an important consideration also.

As they were examining the first falls them came to, Roberts saw a large black eagle fly out of a cottonwood tree that was growing on an island just below the falls. He remembered having read a report written by General Reynolds that related the same sighting in 1860. The report also mentioned a Jesuit missionary had seen an eagle’s nest in the same place in 1830. Captain Lewis had remarked in June of 1805 about the same young cottonwood tree and eagle’s nest. Roberts declared the most fitting name for Captain Lewis’ “Upper Pitch” to be “Black Eagle Falls”. That name is used today.

In a book titled “Great Falls Yesterday” written by Edith Maxwell, the daughter of Thomas Roberts credited founder of Great Falls, Paris Gibson, with naming Colter Falls and renaming Lewis’ Handsome Falls. He called it Rainbow Falls.

So, of the five waterfalls, Captain Lewis’ names for the Great Falls and Crooked Falls are still used today (although crooked falls is sometimes referred to as horseshoe falls). In addition the uppermost one was named Black Eagle Falls in 1872 by Roberts based first on Lewis’ journal entry about the eagle with the nest below the falls and subsequent sighting of the same eagle nest in later years. The other two falls are called Colter Falls and Rainbow Falls as named by Paris Gibson.

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