On the morning of June 7, 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition worked its keelboat and pirogues past the limestone bluffs just west of what’s now Rocheport, and William Clark wrote down what he saw. It’s one of the more overlooked stops on the whole journey — no fort, no famous council, just a rock face and a creek mouth — but it’s ours, and the description in the journals still matches the ground today.
What Clark actually wrote
The expedition had set out that morning at five o’clock with a fair wind, according to Sergeant John Ordway’s journal, and by mid-morning they’d reached the mouth of a stream Clark’s men called “big monitu” — Moniteau Creek, which still empties into the Missouri River right at Rocheport, on the Howard-Boone county line. Clark’s entry for June 7, 1804, in the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (University of Nebraska–Lincoln), reads: “a Short distance above the mouth of this Creek, is Several Courious Paintings and Carveing in the projecting rock of Limestone inlade with white red & blue flint, of a verry good quallity, the Indians have taken of this flint great quantities.” Sergeants Ordway and Charles Floyd both described the same rock art in their own journals as “the picture of the Devil” — their own read on imagery that wasn’t theirs to interpret. The men also killed three rattlesnakes sunning in the rock’s crevices before moving on; that evening, hunter George Drouillard brought three bears, a sow and two cubs, into camp a few miles upriver.
“Moniteau,” sometimes written “Manitou,” comes from the Algonquian word for the Great Spirit. The name stuck to both the creek and the bluffs.
What happened to what Clark saw
Here’s the honest part: the paintings and carvings Clark described are gone. According to the National Park Service, construction of a tunnel for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad through this same bluff in 1892 obliterated a large stretch of the rock face where the pictographs stood — the same tunnel Katy Trail riders now pass through on bikes. Other pictographs from the wider Manitou Bluffs complex do survive, about four miles downstream near Torbett Spring, documented by archaeologists since the 1950s. They’re worth knowing about, but they aren’t the rock Clark stood in front of that June morning.
Where to stand today
You can’t see what the expedition saw, but you can stand close to where they saw it. The Katy Trail runs along the base of the bluffs here, through the same 243-foot tunnel that took the pictographs with it, and out the far side into the river valley Clark was describing — see our guide to the Rocheport trailhead and tunnel for the practical details. For the wider view, the overlook at the A-Frame, up on the bluff above town, looks out over the same river bend — not the identical rock face, but the same stretch of water and stone the expedition moved through that morning. A fuller history of the tunnel and the bluffs is in the works; we’ll link it here once it’s up.
Two hundred and twenty years on, the creek still runs into the river in the same spot, the bluffs still rise the same way, and the only real change is the hole in the rock — first blasted for a railroad, now a bike trail through the middle of it. Next time you ride through the tunnel, you’re passing through the exact ground Clark stopped to write about.