Officially, the Missouri River begins its circuitous journey to the Mississippi, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico, at the confluence of the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers. Three miles north of I-90, halfway between Bozeman and Butte, and maintained as the
Missouri Headwaters State Park
($3 per vehicle; camping $5), these marshy grasslands beneath a shallow bluff were identified by Lewis and Clark in July 1805. Three years later,
John Colter
, a veteran of that expedition who was the first to describe Yellowstone, was captured here by a party of Blackfoot, who, after killing his companion, stripped him and made him run for his life. Colter killed the one pursuer who kept up with him, hid under a snag on the river, and reached safety on the Bighorn River eleven days later. Fur trappers who followed in the wake of Lewis and Clark included Kit Carson; traces remain of the nineteenth-century town they created.
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