Day 3-Geraldine to Fort Benton-31.33 miles

It’s a hot day in Montana, close to 90 degrees but I am sitting under a cluster of quaking aspen with a breeze that is making the heat quite bearable…one might even say pleasant. Yet a couple of hours ago as we were biking into Fort Benton, that very same breeze was making our ride torturous. It was a short ride today. We got caught by the wind yesterday which was substantially stronger. We stopped at Geraldine mostly because of the strong winds. Today was the about the same situation. We had a choice of going to Fort Benton just 27 miles or so or going on to Great Falls about 68 miles. The wind gave us the answer, loud and clear. It took us over 3 hours to fight the wind for the 26 miles and it pretty well exhausted us. There is nothing between Fort Benton and Great Falls, so Fort Benton seemed the obvious choice. Anyhow I wanted to look around a bit in Fort Benton. It is the site that originally piqued my interest in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. This occurred when I was a fifth grader. There was a story in the fifth grade reader called “Which is the Missouri” It told about how the Corps came to a fork in the Missouri River. One fork went northerly and the other more in a southerly direction. Both Lewis and Clark felt the south fork was correct but the men thought the north fork was the one to follow. They only thing they knew from the Native Americans was that the real Missouri had a huge set of falls further up the river. The story tells about how they explored a short way up both forks but no falls. Finally Lewis and Clark proposed to explore further down and the south fork with part of the provisions until they found (or didn’t find) the falls. As we know, after several days of exploring, they did find the falls of the Missouri (now the present day site of, appropriately, Great Falls, MT). We basically had the afternoon to explore so we found 2 museums. Both were very well done, especially the second one. It was a sort of a history of this town with many, many artifacts and much information. We spent a couple of hours exploring these museums.

Student question: I just told the story of the fork in the Missouri River. Since the south fork was the actual Missouri, what is the present day name of the other river, the north fork?

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