Artillery Sounds Heard By Lewis and Clark

A silhouette of a man appearing to hold up a large question mark, superimposed over the top of a color photo of the golden grasslands around Great Falls, Montana.  The sky has sunshine with cumulous clouds and a small mountain peak can be seen in the far distance.   

Silhouette image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.  Background image from Visit Great Falls Montana. 

There are a great many mysteries throughout the Lewis and Clark story, but one that still causes people to scratch their heads took place in the area around the Great Falls of the Missouri in early July 1805.

Lewis wrote: “since our arrival at the falls we have repeatedly witnessed a nois which proceeds from a direction a little to the N. of West as loud and resembling precisely the discharge of a piece of ordinance of 6 pounds at the distance of three miles.” And Clark, added in his notes, “…a rumbling like Cannon at a great distance is heard to the west of us; the Cause we Can’t account.” Trappers and settlers in later years would confirm hearing a similar sound in the area.

Lewis first thought it was water-related – perhaps large pools emptying into a cavern somewhere in the nearby mountains. But there were times when the sound was heard in quick succession.

Some scientists have attempted to explain the phenomenon as coronal mass ejections from the sun striking our atmosphere, or gas erupting from inside the earth. And other ideas have included large bubbles of bio-gas billowing from lake bottoms, rumblings from seismic tremors, or perhaps Bigfoot sending communications via Morse-code-like sounds.

The Great Falls area isn’t the only spot that has reported these types of sounds. Seneca Lake, New York, has the “Seneca guns.” Native peoples reported hearing similar noises in the Black Hills of South Dakota. And several locations in New Hampshire and Connecticut have heard the same sounds.

Have you ever heard these types of sounds? What do you think is the cause?

To read more about these unique sounds, read this article from Joseph Musselman, as presented in “We Proceeded On” in November 1995:

https://lewisandclark.org/wpo/pdf/vol21no4.pdf#page=13.

Image: Silhouette image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay. Background image from Visit Great Falls Montana.

Image Description: A silhouette of a man appearing to hold up a large question mark, superimposed over the top of a color photo of the golden grasslands around Great Falls, Montana. The sky has sunshine with cumulous clouds and a small mountain peak can be seen in the far distance.