With their sensitive eye for natural beauties, the Indians called their river The Moonshell. When the French explorers first poled up its waters, taking note of its sandbars and shallowness, they renamed it, quite aptly but unexcitingly, The Platte ('flat' in French). Since that time, hundreds of thousands of pioneers have boated, tracked, traversed and cursed the Platte en route to their destinations or fates in the Rockies and the Far West.