Expedition place · September 3, 1803
Fort McIntosh, Beaver
1 journal entry · Recorded by Meriwether Lewis
NPS High Potential Historic Site: Fort McIntosh (opens in a new tab) · National Register of Historic Places
Terrain360 · the place today
Fort McIntosh, Beaver in 360°
10 frames across 0.1 mi of the route around this location
What happened here
Fog held the boat until nine. While it lifted, a fur trader, Guy Bryan (Lewis writes Gui Briant), came up with two boats of furs and told him that if he could get over the bar at Georgetown, twenty-four miles on, he could keep going. Lewis called it some consolation. They passed Atkins’s riffle with ease and the mouth of Big Beaver Creek, today’s Beaver River.
Two and a half miles from camp they came to anchor off “Mackintosh,” the site of Fort McIntosh at present Beaver, and Lewis discharged one of his hands. About three miles on they stuck on what he thought the worst riffle yet and had to unload and drag the boat over with horses. They stayed the night about three miles below Beaver, having made only six miles.
The National Park Service lists the Fort McIntosh site, in Beaver Borough, as a high potential historic site of the trail.
In the journal
if I can reach, and get over the George-town barr 24 miles I can get on; this is some consolation
passed the mouth of big bever creek and came to ancor off Mackintosh
Read the full research
- Pittsburgh to Wheeling, 1803: Lewis’s First Ten Days on the Ohio August 31 to September 9, 1803: Lewis’s descent of the upper Ohio, riffle by riffle, from his own journal, with the places, the people he met, and what the record leaves open.
Sources
- Meriwether Lewis, journal, September 3, 1803, in Milo M. Quaife, ed., The Journals of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Sergeant John Ordway (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1916), 34-35. (opens in a new tab)
- Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. 2 (University of Nebraska Press), editor’s notes to the entry of September 3, 1803. (opens in a new tab)
- National Park Service, Pittsburgh to the Pacific: High Potential Historic Sites of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail (2022). (opens in a new tab)
Updated October 13, 2026
The journal entries written here
September 1803
Nights the Corps camped here
- Sep 2, 1803 opposite Freedom, PA (Lewis’s party) Entries for Sep 2, 1803
- Sep 3, 1803 mouth Poorhouse Run, PA (Lewis’s party) Entries for Sep 3, 1803
NPS campsite reconstruction (Bergantino; Harlan where he is the only source). Source: National Park Service, Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Park Atlas.
