Big Hole River

About

Big Hole River, Montana — 1805 Lewis Clark, 1877 Nez Perce Battle, 1988 Big Hole National Battlefield. The Shoshone, Bannock, and Nez Perce peoples used the Big Hole Valley as summer hunting and gathering territory long before the river acquired a European name. The valley is one of the highest in the United States, averaging roughly 6,000 feet in elevation — high enough to produce the short, productive summers that shaped the seasonal rounds of all three nations. On August 9–10, 1877, that territory became a killing ground. The U.S. Army under Colonel John Gibbon attacked the Nez Perce camp of Chief Looking Glass along the river, in an engagement variously called the Battle of the Big Hole, the Battle of the Clearwater, and the Big Hole Massacre. Approximately 90 people were killed, including women and children, according to the National Park Service. In 1988 the federal government established Big Hole National Battlefield to memorialize the event.

Seven decades before that morning, Lewis and Clark had mapped the river and recorded it as the Wisdom River. The Big Hole drains 2,800 square miles across Beaverhead, Deer Lodge, Silver Bow, Madison, and Jefferson Counties, running 153 miles to its confluence with the Beaverhead River. It moves through three distinct reaches: an upper section from Wisdom to Divide across high mountain meadow, rated Class I; a Class I–II canyon transition in the middle from Divide to Melrose; and a Class I lower stretch through wide valley down to the Jefferson. The 1860s–1890s brought gold mining to the region around Bannack and Virginia City, and the river today still supports the Wisdom, Jackson, and Glen economies as a blue-ribbon trout fishery.

The industrial era reached the watershed through timber. The Big Hole was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s, feeding a regional timber industry that ran from the 1850s into the 1910s and the railroad expansion of the 1860s through the 1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives that floated timber downstream, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. Large-scale logging wound down through a combination of forces: the exhaustion of the old-growth stands by 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s.

The river's hydrological record began with USGS surveys in the 1870s through the 1890s, followed by the establishment of gauging stations between the 1880s and 1910s and state geological streamflow assessments from the 1910s into the 1930s. Later study turned to what a century of extraction had cost: state water pollution control studies in the 1950s through 1970s and Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 to 2000 addressed more than a hundred years of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts, work that continues today through restoration and Total Maximum Daily Load programs. The river is now monitored at USGS gauge 06024540, where flows average around 680 cubic feet per second and the optimal float window runs from 500 to 3,000 cfs.

Two designations frame the Big Hole's present condition: Montana Blue-Ribbon Trout Stream and Arctic Grayling Recovery Area. The grayling designation reflects a biological reality with no parallel in the lower 48 — this is the only river in the contiguous United States that supports a fluvial Arctic grayling population, and the multi-agency effort to hold that population steady is inseparable from the river's cold, clean water. On November 7, 2010, the Big Hole diversion dam replacement project was completed, an upgrade engineered to ensure safe passage for both fish and boaters along the channel — one piece of the longer restoration work the river's grayling still depend on.