Drewyers River

The board calls Drouillard's ancestry French Canadian and Indian. His mother was Shawnee and his father a French Canadian interpreter, and Lewis called him a man of much merit. The river kept neither his name nor his story. It became the Palouse, for the Palus people whose principal village the expedition noted at its mouth on October 13, 1805, a mouth drowned since 1969 by the pool behind Lower Monumental Dam. Drouillard went back west with Manuel Lisa's traders and was killed by Blackfeet in early May 1810 while trapping on the Jefferson River.

What the plaque says

Drewyers River The Palouse River was first named Drewyers River by Lewis and Clark in honor of George Drouillard a civilian member of the expedition which arrived in this area on Oct. 13, 1805. Throughout the Lewis and Clark journals "Drewyer", as his name was spelled by Lewis, was praised for his valuable services as a tracker, hunter, scout and interpreter. He became a boon companion to Lewis and was considered one of the two or three most valuable men on the expedition. Drouillard's French Canadian and Indian ancestors had rendered similar services to the French in the settlement of French Canada. Two years later Drouillard returned to the west with fur traders and, in 1810 lost his life in a fight with Indians at Three Forks, Montana. Cooperating Agencies

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palouse Falls — 4.7 mi
  The falls a Palouse storyteller said a giant beaver's tail made, and that a school of Washtucna children wrote into state law in 2014.

More markers nearby

• Mullan Road — 10 mi