Navigating rapids on the Upper Missouri River

Are There Rapids on the Upper Missouri River?

Navigating rapids on the Upper Missouri River

The Short Answer is NO there are no rapids on the Upper Missouri River Breaks

When one thinks of rapids on a western river, especially one designated as “wild and scenic” like the Upper Missouri, images of foaming whitewater and careening rubber rafts speeding through perilous narrow canyons probably come to mind. However, that is not the case on today’s Missouri River. In the Missouri Breaks, the river is primarily wide, and the mile-by-mile drop as it undulates lazily eastward is practically negligible. In the 88-mile stretch between Fort Benton and Judith Landing, the river drops only 200 feet in elevation, less than three feet per mile.

Despite this gentle descent, the latest BLM floaters’ guides mark numerous areas of the river as ‘rapids,’ including Fawn, Bird, Little Dog, Dauphin, McKeever, Deadman/Drowned Man’s, Pablo, and Kipp Rapids.. But common advice these days is, “Don’t blink, or you’ll miss them.”

Rapids That Lewis and Clark encountered

When Lewis and Clark first journeyed up the river in the spring and summer of 1805, they encountered numerous ‘rapids’ and ‘riffles.’ These proved challenging to traverse in their unwieldy cottonwood dugout canoes and two plank-bottom pirogues. Most problematic for them was what would later become Pablo Rapids, just upstream of the present-day Slaughter River campground. In late May, the Corps of Discovery spent most of a day struggling mightily to traverse them.

As Lewis noted in his May 30 entry, “This day we proceeded with more labour and difficulty than we have yet experienced; in addition to the imbarrasments of the rappid courant, riffles, & rockey point which were as bad if not worse than yesterday,” slowed the party nearly to a crawl. Clark added, “Those rapids or shoaley points are numerous and difficuelt, one being at the mouth of every drean (drain).” They made all of six miles that day.

Rapids During Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri

By the 1860s, shallow-draft steamboats began penetrating the deep interior of North America. They journeyed from St. Louis or other upriver points to Fort Benton, as far north as the Missouri was navigable. The timing of the upriver trip almost universally had to occur during the spring runoff, from May through early July.Travel later in the season often resulted in vessels foundering on sand and gravel bars. Sometimes, they had to offload cargo downstream at Cow Island on the lower section of the river. They would then transport the freight up Cow Creek and overland for more than a hundred grueling, rugged miles to Fort Benton.

The worst point on any steamboat journey was at Dauphin Rapids, just below the present-day McClelland Stafford ferry. The rapids, named for an expert hunter, Louis Dauphin, are situated in a wide, shallow stretch of the river. Several faults underneath the river uplifted the area, fracturing the underlying rock and scattering large boulders through the channel. Steamboats, unable to navigate through the shallow water—less than thirty inches deep in many spots—would offload their cargo onshore. Oxen-driven freight wagons would then transport the cargo either back to the Cow Island Landing downriver or directly to Fort Benton, adding considerable expense.

On several occasions in the late 1870s, Army engineers spent months dynamiting, removing boulders, and constructing a wing dam angling from the shore into the river to channelize it and assist steamboat navigation. However, ice jams, periodic flooding, and the passage of time have erased any remnant of their work today.

Rapids on the Missouri River After Dams

By the early 20th century, the Anaconda Company and its corporate twin, the Montana Power Company, began constructing a series of dams in the Great Falls area to generate cheap electricity for their smelting operations. Those dams—Morony, Ryan, Rainbow, and Black Eagle, along with the smaller Holter and Hauser dams upriver north of Helena—permanently altered the streamflow of the Missouri River below. Shallow areas that once formed the “rapids” of the pre-dam era were completely inundated. Combined with the massive New Deal-era Fort Peck Dam, some 250 miles downstream, the northern section of the Missouri River is now mostly sedate and a completely managed, controlled watershed.

Anyone looking to “shoot the rapids” on the Missouri will be sorely disappointed. They will only have to imagine what it must’ve been like for those early explorers and travelers.