Lewis and Clark Lake
— the river, taught to wait.
Not only on a wall.
Lewis and Clark Lake, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The last reservoir on the Missouri before the river runs free again. Gavins Point Dam holds it back just upstream of Yankton, and the chalkstone bluffs along the north shore are some of the only ones left that look the way Lewis and Clark would have seen them. Sailboats on summer weekends. Walleye and paddlefish below the dam. The Niobrara comes in from the south through a delta of cottonwoods that has been quietly growing all century.
The place, in three passes.
Lewis and Clark Lake is the reservoir formed by Gavins Point Dam on the Missouri River, four miles west of Yankton, South Dakota. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the dam in 1955 and the lake filled by 1957. It stretches about 25 miles upstream along the South Dakota–Nebraska border, with roughly 90 miles of shoreline at full pool. The dam is the smallest and furthest downstream of the six mainstem Missouri dams, and below it the river enters the 59-mile Missouri National Recreational River, one of the last free-flowing reaches of the Missouri.
The north shore is held up by the Niobrara Chalk, a soft cream-coloured Cretaceous limestone that the river has carved into the bluffs around Lewis and Clark Recreation Area. The chalk weathers into rounded benches and the occasional small cave, and at sunset the whole north wall reads pale gold above the water. Calumet Bluff, just east of the dam, is where Lewis and Clark camped in August 1804 and held council with the Yankton Sioux — a moment recorded in their journals and marked today by an overlook above the powerhouse.
The reservoir is shallow and warm, which makes it a sailing lake — Yankton's club holds regattas on summer weekends, and the marinas at Lewis and Clark Recreation Area fill quickly through July. Below the dam, the tailwater fishery is famous for paddlefish, sturgeon, and walleye. The Niobrara River comes in from the Nebraska side about 35 miles upstream, depositing sediment that has built a slow-growing delta of cottonwoods and sandbars visible from the bluff road. Bald eagles winter along the tailwater in numbers that draw birders from across the plains.
