Traveling ahead with three men, Meriwether Lewis reached this spot two days before William Clark and the main party. After exploring the river courses, Lewis left a note telling Clark to stay on the Jefferson River, but Clark never found it and started up the Big Hole instead. The men pulled the boats upstream about nine miles before meeting one of Lewis’ men, and their return trip nearly killed a man. The expedition reunited and camped near here on August 7th, spent a day drying their baggage, then repacked and decided to leave one dugout hidden in a thicket. Lewis later wrote that the note had been placed on a green pole that a beaver cut and carried off, that Clark had ascended the Big Hole with much difficulty, and that Whitehouse had been thrown from a canoe, valuable stores had been soaked and damaged, the medicine box was lost, and a shot pouch, horn, and the implements for one rifle were lost and never recovered. On August 8th, Lewis wrote that the Indian woman recognized a nearby high plain and said it was not far from the summer retreat of her nation on a river beyond the mountains running west, which her nation called the beaver’s head.