I can only imagine what it looked like before the Dam, so I'll let Captain Lewis tell you: "On June 14, 1805, as Lewis explored the Great Falls of the Missouri River, he encountered “one of the most beatifull objects in nature, a cascade of about fifty feet perpendicular streching at right angles across the river from side to side to the distance of at least a quarter of a mile. ... I now thought that if a skillfull painter had been asked to make a beautifull cascade that he would most probably have pesented the precise immage of this one.”

Accord­ingly, Lewis and Clark named this landmark waterfall “Handsome Falls.”

Now called Rainbow Falls, the feature is located directly upstream from Crooked Falls and about a mile downstream from Giant Springs. The height of the falls is crested by Rainbow Dam, which was constructed in 1910.