One pillar not like the others

Pompey's Pillar

William Clark’s log entry for Aug. 5, 1806, might speak of a site further up the Yellowstone River where it meets the Missouri, but it could have easily applied to Pompey’s Pillar. 

 Clark wrote of attempting to kill game to feed the Corps of Discovery, only to have his aim thrown off by the armies of mosquitoes swarming around him. 

I could sympathize. Pompey’s Pillar receives a fair amount of traffic, even if most people don’t venture beyond the visitors center or the quick walk up the pillar. They definitely don’t take the trails or more complaints would follow. 

 The pillar lies adjacent to the Yellowstone with a thick grove of cottonwoods and healthy fields of swamp plants. With them comes stagnant water, breeding legions of mosquitoes. Slap one and three takes its place. So go with the bug spray in summer. At first, I didn’t, and ran back to the car where I knew I had relief. Otherwise, it would have been a short visit. In a few minutes, I had killed several dozen and another dozen took blood from my legs and arms. 

My only stop at the pillar came in 2010, when the visitors center was closed and access was free. In April, winter still reigned across Montana. 

When I entered the monument, I looked down and laughed hard. Not thinking that morning, I picked my El Morro shirt. El Morro’s rock walls bear the marks of a millennia of petroglyphs and Spanish signatures back to 1605. Apparently 2022 was my year of carved signatures and petroglyphs. 

Pompey’s Pillar has a number of faded petroglyphs and just one signature of great importance. In geology, Pompey’s Pillar is hardly unique. There are many small mesas and hills along the Yellowstone River through eastern Montana. 

Only at Pompey’s Pillar can visitors see physical evidence of the Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery expedition. William Clark had the foresight to carve his name into the rock in July 1806. 

He named the pillar for Pompey, aka Pomp, son of Sacajawea, who joined the Corps on their journey to the Pacific and back. Clark carved his name at a time when the Corps were split in two, with one group following the Missouri River out of Three Forks and the other taking the Yellowstone, which meets the Missouri just inside what is now North Dakota. 

Sites across the country mark places the Corps of Discovery visits, one of my favorites being the historic park on Oregon’s Pacific Coast, where the Corps built cabins, grew healthy eating hunted elk and bartered with local Natives for whale blubber. I have spent many days around and at the site along the Natchez Trace where Merriweather Lewis died and is buried, where an inn once stood. 

Clark's signature

But Pompey’s Pillar is different. It has a separate importance, a place not merely reconstructing history. Here you can experience history where a pioneering explorer had the foresight to carve some graffiti. The historic displays explain how President Thomas Jefferson made Lewis & Clark joint captains of the expedition across the newly purchased Louisiana Territory and how he ordered them to mark pockets of natural resources and other features. 

Aside from the insects, the most notable continuous tresidents of Pompey's Pillar were the red-bellied marmots, several of which inhabited a den under some boulders outside the visitor centers.  Its distance from the sidewalks gave them the confidence to sit freely and watch people come and go. 

Photogenic marmots

That Col. George Custer camped her with his cavalry gets significantly less attention, and rightly so. Everything about him should. But he did. 

A series of boardwalks along the pillar takes visitors to the signature, or as close as they can get - the rock has degraded since Clark signed it, and the spot where he stood no longer exists. A second boardwalk and staircase go to the top of the pillar. Here one has commanding views of the Yellowstone, its imposing bluffs and the farmland that now surrounds the pillar. 

I stopped at a little scenic lookout north of the pillar and just observed for a few minutes. Despite the farmlands, the roads, bridges and the electric wires, it was not hard to peel back a few centuries or longer and imagine the pillar all alone. 

I could imagine not just the Corps, but the generations of Native peoples that camped, floated past, walked the banks or hunted for game. They were all gone but for the signature and the petroglyphs, but the pillar would go on.

Less famous signatures

Bales in nearby fields