The _Great Falls of the Missouri_ are the grandest in all North America, those of Niagara excepted, and though inferior to these in volume of water, depth of descent, and awful grandeur, yet they are far more diversified and beautiful. These Falls are within sixty geographical miles of the easternmost range of the Rocky Mountains. Here the river, two hundred and eighty yards, or eight hundred and forty feet wide, is pressed in by a perpendicular cliff on the left, one hundred feet high, and extending for a mile up the river; on the right, the bluff, or high steep bank, is also perpendicular for three hundred yards above the falls. For ninety or one hundred yards from the left cliff, the water falls in one smooth even sheet over a precipice of eighty-seven feet eight inches, according to Captain Lewis; but ninety-eight feet, according to Cass, and Captain Clarke. The remaining part of the river precipitates itself with a more rapid current; but being received as it falls by the irregular and projecting rocks below, forms a splendid prospect of perfectly white foam, two hundred yards in length, and eighty in perpendicular elevation. This spray is dissipated into a thousand different shapes; sometimes flying up in columns of fifteen or twenty feet, which are then oppressed by larger masses of the white foam, on all which the sun impresses the brightest colors of the rainbow. As it rises from the fall, it beats with fury against a ledge of rocks extending across the river, at one hundred and fifty yards from the precipice. From the perpendicular cliff on the north, to the distance of one hundred and twenty yards, the rocks rise only a few feet above the surface of the water; and when the river is high, the stream finds a passage across them; but between the southern extremity of this ledge and the perpendicular cliff on the south, the whole body of water runs with great rapidity. At the distance of three hundred yards is a second abutment of solid perpendicular rock, sixty feet high, projecting at right angles from the small plain on the north for one hundred and thirty-four yards into the river. Below this, the Missouri regains its usual breadth of three hundred yards, but there is a continued succession of rapids and cascades. At the second grand fall, the river, four hundred yards wide, precipitates itself, for the space of three hundred yards, to a depth of nineteen feet perpendicular, and so irregularly, that Captain Lewis termed it the _Crooked Fall_.