Old Trail to the Gold Diggin's

The cliffs the board mentions were named over lunch. Lewis, travelling ahead of the canoes with George Drouillard, John Shields and Hugh McNeal, halted under them on August 10, 1805, while Drouillard brought in a deer, and wrote that from the number of rattlesnakes about the rocks they called them the rattle snake clifts. Clark's canoes passed five days later, and a journal for that day records a snake getting between his legs as he stood fishing; he killed it. In 1963 the Clark Canyon project built a diversion dam in the river at the cliffs.

What the plaque says

Old Trail to the Gold Diggin's Interstate 15 is the latest in a series of roads that have traversed this area since prehistory. Although used for generations by Native Americans, the first recorded use of this route was by the Lewis and Clark Expedition on August 10, 1805. They named cliffs to the north of here after the scores of rattlesnakes they encountered on their trip upriver. With the discovery of gold at nearby Grasshopper Creek and Alder Gulch in the early 1860s, thousands of people came to southwest Montana to mine gold and to"mine the miners." The road originated in Corinne, Utah and traversed a series of high plateaus and narrow canyons on its way north to southwestern Montana. The road was the best route into the territory for the freighters who supplied the mining camps. Drawn by teams of mules or oxen, each wagon carried up to 12,000 pounds of freight. The trip from Utah typically took three weeks and a freighting outfit could usually make three or four round trips each year. South of here near Dell, the Montana - Utah Road branched into three seperate trails that lead to Bannack / Deer Lodge, Virginia City and Helena. This section of the road terminated at Helena. With the arrival of the Utah & Northern Railroad in 1880, the Montana - Utah Road became obsolete. In the 1920s, however, it again became an important travel corridor as U.S. Highway 91 and, in the early 1960s, as interstate 15.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bannack State Park — 12 mi
  The first capital's second life: a county seat lost to the railroad, a courthouse turned hotel, a town that emptied slowly.
• Beaverhead Rock — 23 mi
  The hill Sacagawea recognized in August 1805, the first sure sign that her people were close.

More markers nearby

• Bannack — steps away
• Beaverhead Rock — 21 mi