by Daniel B. Botkin, originally published by Perigee Books, a division of Penguin/Putnam, 1999.

I have decided to share this book with the readers of my website, and I am going to present the entire book here, one chapter at a time, with a new chapter appearing each week.  There are more than 40 chapters.  If you follow along and read all of them, you will learn about the entire Missouri River as seen by Lewis and Clark at the beginning of the 19th century, and as I visited it during the 1990s to see what they had seen, and to learn how the countryside had changed.  Here is the introduction to the book, which explains how to use it.  I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.

- Daniel B. Botkin

More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.

Introduction (Part 1)

How to Use This Book

This is a different kind of travel book.  It is intended for two types of travelers, actual  and vicarious, to find out about Lewis and Clark, nature and ourselves.  It has two brief introductory chapters, 42 main entries about places to visit, and a list of more than 80 other travel destinations.  Each main entry tells some of the things that happened to Lewis and Clark and relates a unique story about nature, natural history and the environment.  As a set, all the entries paint a picture of the entire Missouri River and its landscape at the time of Lewis and Clark and as they have changed and are today.

There are hundreds of interesting locations to visit along the Missouri River and its surrounding countryside related to the Lewis and Clark expedition.  So that you can design your travel plans to visit the places whose topics interest you, the list of additional entries is cross-referenced to the main ones.  Each entry provides travel directions.

Travelers can use the book in several ways.  For those who have picked  destinations, they can refer directly to the main entries.  Each is about one aspect of the natural history of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the changes that have occurred since the expedition.  Each includes relevant experiences from the Lewis and Clark journals: What they did and what happened to them at the location.  These are augmented by modern experiences of myself and others to suggest what you can discover and do there.

A second way to use the book is to select a general route and then refer to the main and short entries on that route to make a list of places to visit.  Take the book with you and read each main entry at its location.  A third way to use this book is to read it from beginning to end.  Taken together, the introductory chapters and major entries form a whole story of nature, Lewis and Clark, and us.

Lewis, Clark, Nature and Us

In preparation for the Lewis and Clark expedition, President Jefferson wrote to Meriwether Lewis that he should “record the mineral productions of every kind . . .  Volcanic appearances . . .  Climate, as characterized by the thermometer, by the proportion of rainy, cloudy, and clear days, by lightning, hail, snow, ice; by the access and recess of frost; by the winds prevailing at different seasons; the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flower or leaf; times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles, or insects.”  Through their historic journey, Lewis and Clark faithfully followed President Jefferson’s instructions; recording the condition of rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, and wildlife, without romanticism, without ideology.

Lewis and Clark were careful and accurate observers, skills learned as outdoorsmen, as military men on horseback, and as young men full of curiosity.   To these abilities, President Jefferson added modern scientific training.  He sent Lewis to Philadelphia, then the center for learning about Nature Philosophy — the term of that day for all natural sciences together, not yet divided into the narrow disciplines they are today.  There, within the city of Benjamin Franklin, one of the young nation’s centers for rational thought,  Lewis took crash courses in botany, zoology and geology. This study reinforced and deepened the knowledge that he and Clark shared of wildlife and countryside.

It is common knowledge that the journey of Lewis and Clark was a fascinating epic, incredibly successful, full of adventures, near disasters, amazing coincidences,  replete with tales of courage and bravery.  But it was more than that.  It was a journey to discover the natural history of an unrecorded continent.  As a result, it can be modern society’s window on a nature we know little about but discuss often, believing that we do know it.   On their way west, Lewis and Clark measured the distance they traveled; paced off the feet between river meanders; shot the sun with a sextant; looked at, touched and tasted minerals; collected, described, and pressed new species of plants.  They ate, wore, and wrote about wildlife.  Their records tell us what nature was like before modern technology changed it; they have become a yardstick against which we can measure what we have done to the rivers and landscapes of midwestern and western North America.

Seeking to find the right route across the continent and to survive in the process, Lewis and Clark were not just keen observers, but also willing participants in an attempt to generalize successfully  from a series of observations.  It is a skill we are seldom taught and few of us learn: How to make reliable inferences from a selection of facts.  More typically, we cannot believe that an event that we see in detail once may not be true in general.  We fall into the unscientific trap of indefensible generalizations from too few observations.   Lewis and Clark traveled up the river, but when they could, they strode on shore and climbed hills, bluffs, and mountains to get a view, to see a broader perspective.  They measured and counted, they mapped and  studied.  In my experience, three decades of trying to piece together an understanding of the process we call nature, I have found a great irony of our times.  In this information age, we rarely obtain the information we most need about ourselves, our civilization, and our surroundings.  Over and over again I have discovered that Lewis and Clark, two centuries ago, put a yardstick or sextant to things that we no longer seek to pace or measure.

And so by experience, necessity and Jefferson’s plan, Lewis and Clark are our best external window on the reality of nature in the American West before it was altered by modern technological civilization.  Their journey epitomizes our struggle to understand our effects on nature and nature’s effect on us. Their journals provide clear and vivid insights into the past.

What is remarkable, and I believe unique, to the expedition of Lewis and Clark is that these two men took on the role of naturalist-recorders as seriously as they did their tasks of finding a route to help open up the West and making contact with and learning about Native Americans along the way.  Human beings have long altered nature, but our knowledge of this is obscured by failed memories, confusion between myths and realities, and a loss of written historical accounts.

The Missouri River and its landscape exist for us at two levels: internal and external.  The first level is that of external knowledge: knowledge of natural resources, environmental issues, the names of animals, plants and minerals; and understanding  rational inferences about how the landscape and its life came to be and how it might be in the future.  It is the level of detailed observation and records of natural history.  The second level is that of feelings: how the countryside affects us, and how we feel we fit into that countryside. Like Lewis and Clark, we begin with the first, external level; these experiences lead us to the second.

So I invite you to come with me on this journey with this guide in hand to see, touch, smell, and feel the countryside of Lewis and Clark and the landscape of today, and to find a path to a connection between oneself and nature.