Plains Folk

NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

April 29, 1999

Plains Folk: The `X-Files' of Discovery

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

However heroic the exploits of the Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806, there are quite a few aspects of the enterprise that are odd, mysterious or just plain weird. I call these the "X-Files" of the Corps of Discovery. For instance, there's that story of the Salt Mountain.

You have to understand that when the United States bought the Louisiana Territory in 1803, it was a pig in a poke. The most knowledgeable people in the East spoke of wooly mammoths roaming the plains, pursued by descendants of a lost tribe of Israel, along with the so-called blonde Indians, descendants of a band of Welsh colonists who came over centuries ago.

So when Jefferson went to Congress to fund the Corps of Discovery, he told some whoppers. "One extraordinary fact, relative to salt, must not be omitted," he remarked. (Salt in those times was a particularly valuable commodity essential for preservation of meat.) "There exists, about one thousand miles up the Missouri, and not far from that river, a salt mountain."

As I do the distances, that would place this shining landmark in the middle of North Dakota.

"This mountain," Jefferson went on, "is said to be one hundred and eighty miles long, and forty-five in width, composed of solid rock salt. Salt springs are very numerous beneath the surface of this mountain, and they flow through the fissures and cavities of it."

All right, I've solved this particular "X-Files" conundrum. What confused Jefferson and other Americans in this case was the garbled translation of reports from Indians about a place on the plains where they visited each summer to gather salt, to hunt buffalo and wild horses also attracted by the resource, and to wage war on one another. This is what is today known as the Big Salt Plain on the Cimarron River near Freedom, Okla.

"Big Salt Plain"—that name doesn't sound like a mountain. This is where the translation issue comes in. Reports about the site would have come to Americans in either French or Spanish. In either language it was not possible to render the phrase "salt mountain" without saying "mountain of salt," and there is an important difference between those phrases.

The Big Salt Plain is a plain in the river bottom, but it is bounded on the south by a high escarpment of red shale capped by white gypsum. From its base flow brine springs perfectly saturated with salt. In summer evaporation causes accumulation of great masses of salt around the brine springs. Brine also seeps to the surface across the entire surface of the plain and forms a brilliant crust over its expanse.

The Salt Mountain, you see, was not a "mountain of salt." It was a mountain at the base of which Indians obtained salt. The fellow who sorted all this out was George C. Sibley, an explorer who crisscrossed Kansas and Nebraska on a diplomatic mission among the Indians in 1811, then looped south to satisfy his scientific curiosity about the well-known legend of the Salt Mountain. At this time his superior officer in St. Louis was William Clark, to whom he sent some shining chunks of crystalline salt.

A greater irony: I suspect that Jefferson himself once held in his hands similar samples of salt from his much-maligned Salt Mountain without realizing what he had. En route west in 1804, Meriwether Lewis talked with members of the illustrious frontier trading family, the Choteaus, who gave him specimens of salt from the Big Salt Plain. Lewis sent these to Jefferson, who donated them to the American Philosophical Society. So far I haven't been able to locate those particular pieces of Oklahoma in the society collections in Philadelphia—but I do have some chunks of salt that I gathered for myself from Jefferson's Salt Mountain.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136