By foot and by boat, John Gneiseu Neihardt followed the Missouri River from Great Falls to Sioux City, Iowa, in 1908, describing the river as “the eternal Fighting Man.” MICHAEL  GALLACHER

Writer Neihardt chronicled Missouri River

“I love all things that yearn toward the far seas.”
– John Neihardt

By KIM BRIGGEMAN

Here’s how John Neihardt described his visit to the highest of the Great Falls of the Missouri in late July 1908:

“I caught myself tightly gripping the ledge and shrinking with a shuddering instinctive fear.

Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle all memory of sound – and left only the silent universe with myself and this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness.

“And I loved it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself so magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a mountain, or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadowlark, or an ocean, or a thunderstorm has to do in this world.”

***

When Capt. Meriwether Lewis first beheld those same cascades 103 years earlier, he was awestruck if not dumbstruck. He sat on rocks below the falls and tried to describe them in his journal. After 700 words, Lewis looked up, surveyed the massive plunge once more – and threw in the towel.

“I wished for the pencil of Salvator Rosa or the pen of Thompson,” he wrote, “that I might be enabled to give to the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object, which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man.”

Rosa was a 17th-century Italian painter and printmaker, James Thompson a Scottish poet of the early 18th century. Who Lewis really needed was John Neihardt of Nebraska.

***

John Gneiseu Neihardt, who died in 1973 at age 92, is best known for “Black Elk Speaks,” a study of the life of a Sioux Indian mystic. That’s the context in which I came to know him, scant years after his death, on a syllabus of a Native American studies class at the University of Montana. I later learned his “A Cycle of the West” was a critically successful poetic epic of America’s expansion. But before he wrote either, he floated the Missouri and told the story that became “The River and I.”

It remains, if you can find it, a poignant rendering of the Missouri River, of Montana, of the West before dams altered the landscape. Neihardt made unadulterated literary love to the river.

“To me,” he wrote, “the Amazon is a basking alligator; the Tiber is a dream of dead glory; the Rhine is a fantastic fairy tale; the Nile a mummy, periodically resurrected; the Mississippi, a convenient geographical boundary line; the Hudson, an epicurean philosopher.

“But the Missouri – my brother – is the eternal Fighting Man!”

***

He walked, when the floods of 1908 subsided, from Great Falls to Fort Benton and continued his journey by handmade skiff to Sioux City, Iowa. Neihardt started his travels with two companions he identified as the Kid and the “little Cornishman.” Others joined downstream; only the Kid was with him at the end. The characters played parts secondary, even tertiary, to the river and Neihardt’s musings.

He was at once chronicler, philosopher, historian and poet. Early on, Neihardt remarked on the “mammoth springs” now called Giant Springs at the foot of Black Eagle Dam at Great Falls. It seems, he wrote, such a phenomenon “would deserve a little exploitation.”

“Down East they would have a great white sprawling hotel built close by it wherein one could drink spring water (at a quarter the quart), with half a pathology pasted on the bottle as a label.”

“Down East.” I like that – don’t you?

***

In 1908, Black Eagle Dam was the only manmade barrier to the upper Missouri. Neihardt prepared himself to sound off on the obscenity of it, but “when I looked again, I could half imagine the old turbulent fellow” (the river) “winking slyly at me and saying in that undertone you hear when you forget the thunders for a moment: ‘Don’t you worry about me, little man. It’s all a joke and I don’t mind. Only tomorrow and then another tomorrow, and there won’t be any smelters or trolley cars or ginger ale or peanuts or sentimentalizing outers like yourself. But I’ll be here howling under sun and
stars.’ ”

At the next drop, Rainbow Falls, Neihardt was rhapsodic. “This was much more to my liking – a million horsepower or so busy making rainbows! Bully! ... I wished to get acquainted with this weaver of iridescent nothings who knew so well the divine art of doing nothing at all and doing it good and hard! After all, it isn’t so easy to do nothing and make it count!”

***

Fort Benton, the head of navigation on the Missouri, was the stuff of his dreams when Neihardt grew up far downstream.

“What a clarion cry that name had been to me,” he said.

When he got there, reality shouldered in. He asked where he might find the fort itself. “Over there,” instructed a native, who “stiffened a horny practical thumb in the general direction of the ruins.”

“I caught myself wondering if a modern Athenian would thus carelessly direct you to the Acropolis. Is the comparison faulty?”

The crew assembled the Atom I on a gravel bar on the far side of the river. “No sooner had we screwed up the bolts in the keel, than our shipyard became a sort of free information bureau,” he wrote. “Every evening the cable ferry brought over a contingent of well-wishers.”

Alas, he added, “the salient weakness of the genus homo, it has always seemed to me, is an overwhelming desire to give advice.” The advice seemed mostly to consist of the truism that “those frail ribs and that impossible planking would go to pieces on the first rock – like an eggshell,” Neihardt reported.

“Shamefacedly we continued to drive nails into the impossible hull, knowing full well – poor misguided heroes – that we were only fashioning a death trap! There could be no doubt about it. The free information bureau was unanimous. It was all very pathetic.”

***

As they worked, a government snag-boat docked in Benton. It was the first steamboat to arrive that far upriver in 16 years. Neihardt met the “stiff and very proud” captain.

“Said I to myself: The personage before me is more than a snag-boat captain. This is none other than the gentleman who invented the Missouri River. No doubt even now he carries the patent in his pocket!”

The captain had learned of Neihardt & Company’s plan to conquer the river in a makeshift power boat.

“You’ll never get down!” he croaked.

“Why?” ventured I timidly, almost pleadingly. “Isn’t there – uh – isn’t there – uh – water enough?”

“Water enough – yes!” growled the captain. “Plenty of water – but you won’t find it.”

Sixty-five days later, Neihardt reported proudly, the Atom I was fighting headwinds at the mouth of the Cheyenne River in North Dakota, 1,600 miles downstream. The same steamer was creeping upstream, sounding every foot to get over the gravel boards and snags.

Neihardt called for the captain of the steamer, who eventually appeared on deck.

“Captain,” cried Neihardt, “I talked to you at Benton.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, I have found the water!”

***

Neihardt’s literary plunge is fraught with headwinds, disillusionment, frightening rapids, dispiriting still waters and, always, the unparalleled grandeur of the Missouri. He interprets “the bigness of the empty silent spaces about you”; the freedom – “there’s a lot of fun in merely being able to move about and do things”; and the absurd reliance on manmade contraptions – “This being a very invigorating morning ... the engine decided to take a constitutional. It ran.”

“Bad Lands?” he questioned. “Rather the Land of Awe.”

There, above the mouth of the Judith River, the crew pitched camp one night. They had hunted and feasted on a prime buck that Neihardt shot in a nearby coulee.

“It is good to sit with a glad-hearted company flinging words of joyful banter across very tall steins,” he wrote. “It is good to draw up to a country table at Christmastime with turkey and pumpkin pies and old-fashioned puddings before you, and the ones you love about you. I have been deeply happy with apples and cider before an open fireplace. I have been present when the brilliant sword-play of wit flashed across the banquet table – and it thrilled me. But –

“There is no feast like the feast in the open – the feast in the flaring light of a night fire – the feast of your own kill, with the tang of the wild and the tang of the smoke in it!”

***

And who among us has not lain in the open by a waning campfire but can’t identify with Neihardt this night?

“Drowsing and dreaming under the drifting smoke-wrack, I felt the sense of time and self drop away from me,” he reported. “No now, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no I! Only eternity, one vast whole – sun-shot, star-spent, love-filled, changeless. And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than other spots; and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that now felt the inward-flung glory of it all; the swooning, half-voluptuous sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering universal joy.”

“And then suddenly and without shock – like the shifting of the wood smoke – the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. Space and eternity were I – vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shaft of paradoxic day; through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being.

“The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star jewelling the summit of a cliff was only an ecstasy within me; the murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart; and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my soul.”

***

Sioux City or not, I’m home. How about you?

Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .