On my way by automobile to Vail, Colorado last week, I drove the entire course of the Little Missouri River. The Little Missouri is sacred to me. I’ve hiked its length twice and plan to walk it again in the next 12 months.
You know how you come to regard some place or landscape as central to your happiness, and you let yourself believe that it is somehow “yours” to love and protect? It’s entirely irrational, of course, but we feel it nevertheless. Ever since my mentor took me to its upper reaches 50 years ago, I have a special claim on the Little Missouri — or rather it has had a special claim on me. If I had to spend eternity in a single landscape, it would be about 10 miles north of Marmarth, North Dakota, where the Little Missouri just begins to carve up the viewshed.
The Little Missouri empties into the Missouri River proper at Twin Buttes, North Dakota, though the confluence has long since disappeared under the waters of Lake Sakakawea behind Garrison Dam. Alas for that.
The Little Missouri River starts near Oshoto, Wyoming, with feeder rivulets in the Flatiron Buttes, and the Missouri Buttes, which are geological cousins to Devils Tower.
Most of the roads I took yesterday are gravel, from Medora, North Dakota, to Marmarth, N.D., then down the Camp Crook road south of Marmarth, then remote gravel roads to Albion and Alzada, Montana, and finally to Oshoto, Wyoming (population: a handful). Oshoto is regarded in official circles as the source of the Little Missouri River.
The Little Missouri is a nondescript Great Plains stream from its source to about Bullion Butte in southwestern North Dakota. Then it begins to cut badlands, some of them very dramatic, three parcels of which comprise Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
But if you had no previous knowledge of the course of the Little Missouri and you happened upon it anywhere between Oshoto and Amidon, N.D., you might mistake it for the Moreau River or the Grand or the Cannonball. All typical modest Great Plains rivers.
The Little Missouri is exceedingly important to me for a wide range of reasons, including that my daughter was baptized in the river, much to the consternation of her mother. (I held on tight!)
Something about sources of rivers fascinates me in a big way. I have been to the source of the Thames, the source of the Columbia, the source of the Colorado, the source of the Hudson, the source of the Arkansas, the source of the Missouri, and just two weeks ago, the source of the Mississippi.
Yesterday, I took the photo you see here at Oshoto. You can see the Missouri Buttes with their conical shapes, but over to the right, partly obscured by the horizon, you see Devils Tower, which was born geologically in the same manner.
A perfect day.
