Eagle Creek enters the Missouri in present-day Chouteau County, Montana, in the stretch of the White Cliffs that Lewis described on May 31, 1805, as scenes of “visionary enchantment.” The Corps passed this section while ascending the Missouri toward the Great Falls, working the boats upstream against the current—the labor Benton emphasizes here. The painting was made in 1967, when Benton was 78 and increasingly drawn to American frontier subjects he had treated throughout his career. It belongs to a group of Lewis and Clark images he produced in his last decade, parallel to his larger mural and easel work on westward expansion.

Benton (1889–1975), the Missouri-born leader of American Regionalism, had treated the Lewis and Clark theme since at least his 1927 mural studies and returned to it repeatedly, most prominently in the 1962 mural for the Truman Library and in related easel paintings. By the 1960s he had outlived the Regionalist movement’s mid-century prominence but retained a steady audience for Missouri River subjects, which he knew firsthand from boat trips along the upper river. The panel is held by the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, founded by Harrison Eiteljorg in 1989, whose collection concentrates on Western American and Native art. Works from Benton’s late Lewis and Clark series have circulated regularly in exhibitions marking expedition anniversaries, including the bicentennial observances of 2003–2006.

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