Traveler's Crossroads for Centuries

Traveler's Crossroads for Centuries. "Beaverhead" and Point of Rocks Stage Station. Both before and since the passage of Lewis and Clark, the limestone outcrop in front of you served as an important landmark and meeting area. The Shoshone tribe, from whom Sacagawea had been kidnapped as a child, came to this area every summer. By the time members of the Corps of Discovery caught sight of the rock on August 5, 1805, they had been watching for it for days. and were growing desperate. They needed to find it in order to meet up with the Shoshone, from whom they hoped to obtain horses-the only way they could cross the Rockies before winter. A few days later, they did indeed come upon the Shoshone, whose chief-by an amazing coincidence-was Sacagawea's own brother. , By 1856, one of the ancient trails here had become the primary travel route used by the region's first ranchers for cattle drives. Once gold was discovered in the early 1860s, freight wagons used the Montana-Utah Road to bring supplies to prospectors and the settlers who followed them. In 1863, the present-day Beaver Gateway Ranch became the site of the Point of Rocks Stage Station, which included a hotel, saloon, and post office that operate until 1885. Roads to the Big Hole Valley and to Helena also converged here. Railroads built in the early 1880s made the stage route obsolete, but for at least 22 years nearly everyone traveling to of from Helena, Virginia City or Bannack passed through here. , (side-bar on left:) , the Indian woman recognized the point of a high plain to our right which she informed us was not very distant from the summer retreat of her nation on a river beyond the mountains which runs to the west. this hill she says her nation calls the beaver's head from a conceived remblance of it's figure to the head of that animal. she assures us that we shall either find her people on this river or on the river immediately west of it's source; which from it's present size cannot be very distant. - Meriwether Lewis, August 8, 1805 . This historical marker was erected by Undaunted Stewardship. It is in Twin Bridges in Madison County Montana