On this day in Lewis & Clark history...
Clark takes the canoes and Pryor leads the horses down the Beaverhead River. They camp just before Beaverhead Rock. Lewis is slowed by slippery mud and a Grizzly bear as he travels by horse along the Sun River west of the Great Falls.
From the journals...
July 10th 1806.
the latter part of this course for 7 miles there is no timber in the river bottom, the other parts of the river possesses bottoms of the wide leafed cottonwood.
Floweree Coulee (Sun River)
July 10th 1806.
great quantities of prickly pear of two kinds on the plains. both species of the prickly pears just in blume.—
Plains prickly pear, Opuntia polyacantha
July 10th 1806.
goosberries are very abundant of the common red kind and are begining to ripen.
Whitestem gooseberry, Ribes inerme
July 10th 1806.
24 m. to our encampment in a grove of cottonwood timber.
Sun River
Thursday July 10th 1806
proceeded on Down Jeffersons river on the East Side through Sarviss Vally and rattle snake mountain and into that butifull and extensive Vally open and fertile which we Call the beaver head Vally which is the Indian name in their language Har na Hap pap Chah.
Beaverhead River valley from Clark's Viewpoint
Thursday July 10th 1806
I saw also on the Sides of the rock in rattle snake mountain 15 big horn animals, those animals feed on the grass which grow on the Sides of the mountn. and in the narrow bottoms on the Water courses near the Steep Sides of the mountains on which they can make their escape from the pursute of wolves Bear &c.
Bighorn sheep, Ovis canadensis
Thursday July 10th 1806
we killed two young gees this evening. I saw several large rattle Snakes in passing the rattle Snake Mountain they were fierce.
Rattlesnake Cliffs
