July 18, 1805

June 13 became the day that Lewis was the first white man to see the Great Falls of the Missouri River. He discovered that there are actually 5 Great Falls, instead of the 1 the Mandans' spoke of earlier in the journey. The Falls stretched for about 12 miles along the Missouri River. Going around the Falls was going to take much longer than Lewis had planned. Sometime around June 16, Lewis and Clark and the rest of the expedition crew met up again we all discovered that it would take about a month before we could get around the Falls and get back to easily-navigatable water. Beyond the Great Falls was where the Rocky Mountains are.
On June 15, I was scared out of my mind when a Prairie Rattlesnake slithered out of the bushes beside where I was walking. This was near the Great Falls, in Cascade County, Montana. The Swift Fox caught me off guard one night when I heard it rustling in the forest along the edge of the water at the Great Falls in Cascade County in Montana on July 6. The Mountain Lady's Slipper is a very unusual plant indeed; I noted it down in this journal on June 30, at Lolo Hot Springs, Montana. It looks just like a lady's shoe!! I find it VERY strange indeed...

This shall be the last entry I will be able to write. I have finally run out of pages in this journal, and there are none left on our boats. It's sad to leave like this, but Lewis and Clark have been documenting much more than I have, and they already have enough journals to finish the journey.
Keep Well from now on,
George Gibson


http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lewisandclark/record_species_232_9_9.html
The Mountain Lady's Slipper; I still find this flower to be quite intriguing...