History unspools like film rolling slowly backward in the Missouri Breaks, a 149-mile corridor of stark cliffs and tawny bluffs along the Upper Missouri River in central Montana. On the eve of the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s bicentennial, this is the last undeveloped stretch of the 2,700-mile waterway that carried the explorers west to fulfill President Jefferson’s charge of finding the Missouri’s source and to track a water route to the Pacific. In the spring of 1805, when the explorers became the first American citizens to penetrate the Breaks, this was one of the most remote areas in the vast new Louisiana Purchase. Still one of the nation’s most isolated regions, it remains the best place to see the West as Lewis and Clark did. In fact, the river corridor today looks more as it did to Lewis and Clark than it did a century ago.

The Corps of Discovery that Meriwether Lewis assembled in 1803 and 1804 did eventually find the Missouri’s source in south western Montana. But the headwaters rose several mountain ranges east of the Continental Divide, dashing hopes of a Northwest Passage. From a geopolitical standpoint, though, the expedition achieved something far more important: It sparked the expansion that would underpin American claims to the present-day northwestern United States. After Lewis and Clark visited it, the Upper Missouri became a major westward thoroughfare for fur traders, steamboaters, gold seekers, stockmen, and homesteaders. As they streamed in, they displaced the native peoples. Most famously, the Nez Perces beat their final, heartbreaking retreat through the Missouri Breaks while fleeing the U.S. Army. Nowadays, fading visual remnants reveal a historical palimpsest all along the river corridor, which was designated a National Wild and Scenic River in 1976 and as of 2001 has been further protected as the centerpiece of the new 377,346-acre Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument.

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