The Rock She Meant

Whitetail Ranch’s history runs deep. Sacagawea and Lewis & Clark made camp at Rattlesnake Cliffs and fished for food along the Beaverhead River that runs through Whitetail Ranch today.

Three days after stopping at his “Lookout” to get his bearings, Clark and his party, in six dugout canoes, “halted on the river under an immencely high perpendicular clift of rocks where it entered the mountain. . . . from the number of rattle snakes about the Clifts . . . we called them the rattle snake clifts.” This, however, is the landmark that white settlers believed Sacagawea really meant to identify as “Beaverhead Rock.” – lewis-clark.org, The Rattlesnake Cliffs.