A recent Sunday New York Times article features an interview with Nobel Laureate physicist Freeman Dyson, who expresses concerns about global warming and mentions tipping points. This makes a good companion piece to my post, Tipping Points, Global Warming and the Balance of Nature.
Tipping points are in the news these days because some of the well-known scientists who are concerned about global warming keep telling us that the Earth — the Earth’s global environment, that is — is nearing a tipping point. The idea is that the environment may undergo changes from which there will be no return; the Earth’s environment will figuratively fall off a cliff.
Underlying this belief that our environment has tipping points and we might be nearing one is a deeper belief: that the Earth’s environment is stable, that undisturbed by human influences it would be constant, or close to it. Allied with this is the belief that our own actions are pushing the Earth toward the edge of a tipping point in ways that have never happened before.
The idea that our environment — nature, as it used to be called — is pretty much unchanging except for what we do is an ancient belief. It goes back to the Greek and Roman philosophers, who expressed it as the great Balance of Nature: that nature undisturbed achieves a permanence of form and structure, and that even when disturbed by us, if we then leave it alone, it will return to its harmonious constancy.
That idea has followed Western civilization down the ages, and in the 20th century was a fundamental belief even among ecologists — scientists who study the relationship between living things and their environment. But as I’ve shown in my book Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century, nature has always changed. All the climate reconstructions show that change is its only constant property. To be more technical about this, modern science tells us that natural ecological systems and their environment are non-steady-state systems. The old idea about nature being constant and able to return to its constant state after disturbance is based on a classical idea of stability — the stability of a machine, like the pendulum of an antique grandfather clock. Once set in motion, the pendulum goes back and forth, but gradually friction slows it down and it comes to rest exactly where it started.
One of the things that makes it hard to accept the view of environment and ecosystems as out-of-steady-state and part of non-steady-state systems is that we haven’t had ways to think about how such systems change over time. To make that possible, years ago I and my colleague Matthew Sobel — an applied mathematician, economist, and William E. Umstattd Professor at Operations Research at Case Western Reserve University — wrote a paper called “Stability in Time-Varying Ecosystems.” (The paper was originally published as Botkin, D.B. and M.J. Sobel, 1975, “Stability in time-varying ecosystems” in American Naturalist 109: 625 – 646.)
Briefly, we coined and defined two new terms for ecological systems that insist on changing all the time: persistence and recurrence. Instead of expecting an ecosystem, say of tundra near Barrow Alaska, or a population, say of polar bears, to remain constant, we expect instead that their numbers will vary, but within a certain range. This means the bear population will persist within certain limits, an upper and a lower number. We call this persistence within bounds. If we take actions that we think might harm the polar bear populations, we can check if there is an effect by comparing its past persistence with current ranges of variation. (That is, of course, if we have the data to do this. If we don’t, we’re out of luck as scientists and our management of polar bears lacks an important scientific base, but that’s another story.)
Recurrence is similar. If an ecosystem or population is recurrent, then the condition it is in now will occur again in the future. If a population is declining and on its way to extinction, its current population size is nonrecurrent. Here’s another example. In 1938 there were only 18 whooping cranes, and there was concern that this species would go extinct, and steps were taken to protect their habitat — their wintering grounds at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, Texas and their summering grounds at Ramsar Wetlands in northern Canada. This helped their population to increase greatly, and by 2007 scientists counted 237 at Aransas. We who admire these cranes hope a population low of 18 never recurs — the population never gets that low again, but that 400 or even more could.
Tipping points don’t work for non-steady-state ecological systems, because they are always changing, kind of sloshing around from one condition to another, and they don’t really have cliffs to fall off of. Life has persisted on Earth for about 3.5 billion years, during which it has evolved, changed, and adapted to changes many times. Indeed, many of the changes life has adapted to were brought about by life itself, which has altered the environment locally and globally, adding to that sloshing among system states. Living things and their ecological systems do change a lot. We can talk about changes that we like and those we don’t like, changes we consider natural or unnatural, but speaking of these as tipping points gets us off the track, away from how these things really work, and interferes with understanding what we could do, want to do, and even should do.
These are the general ideas. If you want to get into the details, please read Matt Sobel’s and my paper. Meanwhile, realize that tipping points only happen to steady-state systems, and our environment and ecosystems are not that kind. There are many helpful ways to consider and discuss the possible effects of global warming. Tipping points is not one of them.
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. I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.
- Daniel B. Botkin
All of the chapters published thus far can be found in the Passage of Discovery category. Please note that they are listed in reverse order of date posted.
More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.
To reach a view of Overton Bottoms and Diana Bend, and the Interstate 70 bridge over the Missouri River, drive to Columbia, Missouri. From Columbia, take Interstate 70 west about 12 miles to Exit 115, then drive west on Route BB to Les Bourgeois Wine Garden and Bistro (on your left, on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River). From there you can see Overton Bottoms and Diana Bend, which are part of the Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, the Interstate 70 bridge over the Missouri, and the effects of the 1993 and 1995 floods.
To see the bottomlands closeup, go to the small towns of Booneville (another tourist destination), Overton, the Katy Trail and the old river town of Rocheport, a few miles from the winery.
[The Missouri River] makes farming as fascinating as gambling. You never know whether you are going to harvest corn or catfish.
— Fitch, 1907
One of the best ways to understand the lower Missouri River Valley is to see it from the top of one of the nearby limestone bluffs. Lewis and Clark often climbed these bluffs on their way up the river, especially between the locations of modern day Jefferson City, the state capital, and Columbia, Missouri. From these heights they could read the countryside to see what its natural resources might be and judge its potential for farming, settlement, and defense.
One of the most spectacular views of the river valley is from the Les Bourgeois Winery near Rocheport, Missouri, just west of Columbia. We stood on the top of the limestone bluff with J. C. Bryant, manager of the newly developing Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, and Jim Milligan, Project Leader of the Columbia Fishery Resources Office. Far below us we saw the wide river valley and the narrow, engineered main channel maintained at a minimum of 9 feet deep and 300 feet wide, cut deep enough for barge navigation. Alongside the main channel were rows of cottonwoods and willows highlighting the levees built to protect farmland on the bottomlands beyond the channel.
“I like to bring people up here and show them the view of Overton Bottom and tell them that the Missouri River drains one-sixth of the United States, and all that water has to flow right there, under that bridge on Interstate 70,” J. C. Bryant said as we looked down at the beautiful landscape. From the top of the Overton bluff, all appeared placid, almost gardenlike, a mosaic of bottomlands: dark soils of the few remaining active farmlands, grays of last year’s weeds in abandoned farmland, stands of cottonwoods and willows greening the sands and silts.
The Missouri River Valley provides people with many benefits, and Lewis and Clark took advantage of many of these as they passed along the limestone bluffs between the modern locations of Jefferson City and Columbia, Missouri. On June 5, 1804, York “Swam to the Sand bar to geather greens for our Dinner and returnd with a Sufficient quantity wild Creases or Tend grass,” Clark wrote. Wild cresse remains a common plant along the Missouri floodplain. On June 10, 1804, Clark wrote that the country was “roleing open & rich, with plenty of water” and an abundance of plumbs “Verry full, about double the Sise of the wild plumb Called the Osage Plumb & am told they are finely favored,” Clark wrote. They harvested these fruits and in this way, participated in the harvest of crops on the floodplain. Clark also saw “great quts of Deer” that provided much of their food.
Near the modern location of Columbia, Clark described a salt creek about 30 yards wide which had “so many Licks & Salt springs on its banks that the Water of the Creek is Brackish” and the water in one spring was so Strong that “one bushel of the water is said to make 7 lb. of good salt. “ Salt was an important and limited commodity, and this site later was used by the sons of Daniel Boone to produce salt as a commercial product.
They enjoyed the sounds and sights as travelers along this part of the river do today. Repeatedly they referred to “butiful” prairies approaching the river and extending back from it. Near Overton, Clark wrote that there was “delghtfull land.” Near Jefferson, where the expedition camped on June 4, 1804, Clark named a small stream “Nightingale Creek” because of the beautiful sounds of the birds calling all night — probably the whip-poor-will, which you can still hear echoing in this region on a spring evening. They saw goslings on the river, and large cottonwoods on the sandbars.
But in this reach of the river the expedition continued to struggle against the dangerous river. On June 9, 1804, as they passed Arrow Creek just across the valley from Overton, “The Sturn of the boat Struck a log which was not proceiveable,” Clark wrote. The current quickly turned the boat “against Some drift and Snags” which it hit with “great force.” They handled the situation when some of the men “leaped into the water Swam ashore with a roap, and fixed themselves in Such Situation, that the boat was off in a fiew minits.”
The power of the Missouri’s water was made clear to me later that afternoon when we drove down to the floodplain, through the remnants of the tiny hamlet of Lisbon and out onto Lisbon Bottoms and Jameson Island, two sections of the new fish and wildlife refuge, and crossed the river and the floodplain on a bridge near a railroad bridge that had to be reconstructed after the 1993 flood. The descending bank of a levee broke west of Glasgow with flood waters taking out about 1 mile of levee, 1 mile of Highway 240, 1 mile of the GM&O railroad bed, created a scour hole of 100-300 acres and flooded thousands of acres of farmland. Flood flows returned to the river above Lisbon and cut the pilot channel for a new chute at Lisbon Bottoms.
We saw a line of rock that Jim Milligan said “follows the path of the river before the ‘93 flood. There is 100 or 200 acres that is now riverine habitat behind that line that was dry ground before the flood. The corps had put riprap – big rocks – there. When that flood came across Lisbon Bottoms, it came with such force that it knocked the whole nose off Jameson Island. And what helped this happened was that there was a levee completely around Lisbon Bottoms. When the upstream levee broke, Lisbon Bottoms filled up with water and then the water blew the levee out on the lower side getting back in the river.” J.C. said that “the water came out with such a force that it was like a fire hose.” Jim noted that “Local observers reported that there were 100 dump trucks running 24 hrs a day for two – three months” — that’s close to 100 days — to bring in enough rock to rebuild the levee, Highway 240 and GM&O railroad crossing across the scour hole. “About three million dollars worth of rock reportedly went into that hole,” he said.
“Why won’t it just blow out again,” I asked.
“The idea is that it will hold next time because there is no fill between the rocks; the whole structure is pervious to the water. When floodwaters come they can pass through it now. About eight feet down is another highway – the one that was flooded and silted over.” However, Rob noted “because of local landowner complaints about water coming through the permeable dike, there are plans to seal it up.”
When the twentieth century opened, about three quarters of the floodplain vegetation was in forests, and prior to European settlement there were 160 species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals that lived on the floodplain or used it during migration. There were 156 native species of fish. But most of this complexity is gone. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of the floodplain wetlands, forests and prairies have been converted to agriculture or made no longer functional as a result of channelization of the river.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, the pendulum of use swung to navigation and agriculture, leaving little habitat for fish and wildlife. Now the pendulum was swinging back slightly the other way, and the development of the Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge was an indication of the shift. The Army Corps of Engineers is participating in a series of mitigation projects to restore fish and wildlife habitat to compensate for losses that had occurred. Some of the mitigation projects are the combined effort of the Corps and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, along with state agencies. I had come here to learn about these projects and the reasons behind the establishment of the Big Muddy Refuge.
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s major effort between Kansas City and St. Louis is the Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. It is a different idea than what we are used to thinking about as a national park or nature preserve, which have almost always been a single, contiguous piece of land. The Big Muddy Refuge will be a series of floodplain units spread across the lower Missouri in the state of Missouri like beads on a necklace of river.
At present, the Big Muddy consists of seven identified areas that occupy 16,000 acres, of which approximately 7,000 acres are currently public lands. The plan is to purchase more land from willing sellers and to establish eventually 25 to 30 areas covering 60,000 acres. From Arrow Rock State Park, we could see two areas already established: Jameson Island and Lisbon Bottom.
Some bends or units of the Big Muddy Refuge will have restored or newly created side channels, called chutes, cut through it to allow some of the river’s water to flow away from the main channel and form quieter side-channel backwaters, wetlands and other pieces of the complex set of habitats that used to be there.
The idea for such a refuge had been discussed for many years, but the great flood of 1993 revived interest in it, in part because after the flood there were some willing sellers among the landowners — those who had suffered from the flood where the Missouri deposited coarse sandy soil, impossible for the farmers to use, on many acres of land. The primary purposes of the refuge are to restore natural river floodplain structure and function and to allow better management and conservation of fish and wildlife habitats, with public use, where it is compatible with these primary uses, as a secondary goal.
Only portions of the land needed to be returned to the original complex and dynamic habitats – to provide enough spawning, nesting, feeding, and migratory habitat for a large abundance of fish and wildlife. A lot of bottomland is magnificent, rich farmland; it is not necessary, useful or in the greater public interest to return it to these kinds of complex habitats. According to Jim, the “most desirable refuge lands are those containing some remnant floodplain habitats and/or are subject to periodic flooding or drainage problems – rendering them less valuable to agriculture.”
The idea is to let the river manage itself — for people to manage with a light touch. The river remains the landscape painter; we provide only a little nudge, a little color, a little material here and there, perhaps a line drawn through a bottom to start a new path for the water that the river will then mold and continue molding as it weaves and wanders its way across the valley.
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. I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.
- Daniel B. Botkin
All of the chapters published thus far can be found in the Passage of Discovery category. Please note that they are listed in reverse order of date posted.
More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.
St. Charles is just across the Missouri from St. Louis, and the historic Main Street is easily reached from an exit off Interstate 70.
There is only one river with a personality, habits, dissipations, and a sense of humor. . . a river that goes traveling sidewise, that interferes in politics, that rearranges geography, and dabbles in real estate; a river that plays hide and seek with you today and tomorrow follows you around like a pet dog with a dynamite cracker tied to its tail. . . It cuts corners, runs around at night, lunches on levees, and swallows islands and small villages for dessert.
— G. Fitch in the American Magazine, 1907.
Clark set out with most of the men of the expedition from their winter camp at the mouth of the Dubois River on May 14, 1804 and noted in his journal that the mouth of the River Dubois should be considered as the Corps of Discovery’s point of departure, although citizens of St. Charles claim their town as the starting point for the expedition as a whole. “I determined to go as far as St. Charles a french Village 7 leags Up the Missourie, and wait at that place untill Capt. Lewis Could finish the business in which he was obliged to attend to at St. Louis and join me by Land,” Clark wrote.
On May 16, the boats arrived at St. Charles, and Clark noted that “a number of Spectators french & Indians flocked to the bank to See the party.” On May 20, Lewis joined them from St. Louis and on Monday, May 21st, the party set up on the boats “at half passed three oClock under three Cheers from the gentlemen on the bank,” wrote Clark. The entire expedition, with its two leaders, was underway.
Gary Moulton, editor of the definitive edition of the journals of Lewis and Clark, notes that “St. Charles was the earliest white settlement west of the Mississippi and north of the Missouri,” having been surveyed in 1787 and settled soon after.
The location of St. Charles had been selected with care. “The plain on which it stands,” wrote Lewis, was “sufficiently elivated to secure it against the annual inundations of the river, which usually happen in the month of June.” The town had one main street, parallel to the Missouri with about 100 houses and 450 inhabitants, according to Clark.
This main street has become the location of a private historical restoration and is a series of lovely old houses now used as stores and bed and breakfast hotels, catering to tourists. We arrived there in early spring and went first to the Lewis and Clark Center, a small but excellent museum. Mimi Jackson, one of the curators of the museum, told us that, as originally planned by its surveyor, Auguste Chousteau, the town had been sufficiently above the river to never suffer a flood for more than two hundred years. But then, in 1993, the year of the great floods on the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the Red Rivers, water began to move up toward the museum building. The curators went out to watch the water rise, expecting the worst, that the exhibits would soon be destroyed by the flood waters. But just before the water reached the edge of the museum building, they heard a whoosh like the flushing of a toilet, and the flood waters quickly abated.
They soon found out that a levee had given way in Chesterfield, about 10 miles downstream, and this allowed the flood waters to move into the countryside there and away from St. Charles. With the release of the waters into the floodplain, across the levee, the water level dropped fast and no longer threatened the museum or the historic main street of St. Charles. This was a clear example of how an alteration of one part of the river – the nearby levees — had effects on another — the waterfront of St. Charles.
Over the 50 years prior to the 1993 floods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, along with state and private efforts, had spent $25 billion on a system of levees, walls, and other flood control measures on the Missouri-Mississippi River system. Ironically, the vision these actions created of a calm and peaceful river led to some complacency: the greater the apparent control over the Missouri, the greater the faith people had in their own effectiveness and the less alert they were to possible dangers.
Chesterfield responded to the break and failure of its levees by building bigger, higher ones which are supposed to be resistant to a flood so great that it is likely to occur only once in 500 years. Some of the St. Charles businesses and some of the government agencies near St. Charles propose to do the same, so that there can be more development on the floodplain.
The more the river is crowded in by taller levees, the faster it flows and the more erosive and dangerous it becomes. The result is a war of levees. A town or house with no levees or lower levees suffers the flooding that is being avoided by the places with levees. The alternative is to create sections of the floodplain that are allowed to flood naturally. Columbia Bottom, a large wetland being developed into a nature preserve from farmland (discussed in the next entry), could be one of these areas. At Columbia Bottom there are more than 4,000 acres to absorb flood waters. Similar projects are found at other locations along the Missouri.
There is no better place than St. Charles to become directly acquainted with the dilemmas raised by a river that continuously changes its depth and is affected over its 2300 plus miles by changes in seasons, changes in snowfall and rainfall – a dynamic and variable array of climate and geology. We walked along the waterfront park, just slightly below the elevation of the Lewis and Clark Museum, and thought about the choices that confronted the citizens of Missouri: To resist and fight against the forces of the river, or to develop a regional design that allows for nature’s continuous changes, providing some locations where flood waters could spread out and, in a natural way, protect the towns along the river. This is a natural approach because the bottom lands have always been wetlands that flooded now and again, and they contain plants and animals adapted to these variations and able to recover from them.
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. I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.
- Daniel B. Botkin
All of the chapters published thus far can be found in the Passage of Discovery category. Please note that they are listed in reverse order of date posted.
More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.
From St. Louis take Interstate 55/70 east to the exit for Route 111. Go south on 111 about one-quarter mile and turn left (east) onto Collinsville Rd. Follow this to the sign for the Cahokia Mounds Historical Site. You will see the largest mound, Monks Mound, on your right.
Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1803-1804 building “Camp Dubois”, also called Camp Woods, and preparing for their journey. In mid-winter, despite sleet and snow, Clark explored the surrounding countryside. He often made trips out into the countryside, sometimes to hunt for game which was plentiful, sometimes for purposes related to the preparations for the expedition, but sometimes, it seemed from his journals, just to explore, to get away from the humdrum of the daily chores of the preparation.
On Monday, January 9, 1804, he took Collins, one of the men hired for the expedition, and “went across a Prary to a 2nd Bank.” On the Illinois side of the river, Clark came to a curious place. “I discovered an Indian Fortification,” he wrote. “This fortress is 9 mouns forming a Circle.” Confronted with something new, Clark responded by making measurements – a habit that would be his characteristic throughout the journey. “Two of them is about 7 foot above the leavel of the plain,” he continued. Looking around the mounds, he found “great quantities of Earthen ware & flints” and a “Grave on an Emenince.” The mounds were not in use. They were ancient and abandoned.
He had unwittingly stumbled onto what we now call Cahokia Mounds, the remains of the largest prehistoric earthen construction in the New World, built, according to discoveries by modern archeologists, between 700 A.D. and 1400 A.D. Looking back from our perspective, it was an ironic and curious discovery. He and Lewis were about to embark on a journey into what was perceived as wilderness, and Clark finds, quite accidentally and without any guidance, evidence that they were in the backyard of Native Americans who had affected that countryside for much longer than anyone understood. It demonstrated unequivocally that the lands along the Missouri River had long been settled by Native Americans who had selected where to live carefully in regard to nature’s resources, and who had lasting effects on the countryside. And just as the mounds formed a base on the level plains, the Indian cultures would provide a foundation for the expedition. The help that the contemporary generation of Indians would give to the Corps of Discovery during their trip would be invaluable. It is fair to say that the expedition would not have succeeded without that help.
We visited the mounds on a cool, drizzly April Day, driving from the center of St. Louis, past the Arch of Discovery celebrating the Lewis and Clark expedition and the city as the gateway to the West, past abandoned, brick-fronted industrial buildings with broken windows and cracked pavement near the city center, over the river on the interstate in the company of trucks and commuting passenger cars, past fast-food restaurants through a mixture of suburban development and farmland.
As we approached the modern town of Collinsville we saw a tall mound rising surprisingly high above the level farmland, back behind fences in a large open field. A large sign directed us to the well maintained Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. We found a beautiful modern facility in a park setting, with wide lawns, gardens of prairie grasses and flowers clearly labeled, and paths to the mounds.
Modern archeological studies tell us that, at its peak, the great mound city held about 20,000 inhabitants living in an urban population density similar to that of modern St. Louis. Cahokia was surrounded by a two mile long stockade of 20 foot high logs built from about 20,000 trees. At the height of its development, Cahokia included 120 mounds, all of Earth, and these made Cahokia the largest earthen structures in the new world. A large ceremonial mound reached 100 feet high, with a base of 14 acres and a building on top more than 100 feet long and 48 feet wide, and another 50 feet high. Archeologists estimate that more than 50 million cubic feet of earth was moved for the construction of the mounds.
It was like discovering Mayan temples in our backyard. Although the mounds have been designated a United Nations World Heritage Site and therefore recognized to have international significance, few people I met along our journey to rediscover the travels of Lewis and Clark knew about the mounds, and few we have spoken with since have heard of them. But there they are, just outside St. Louis, not far from the famous Arch of Discovery – the largest prehistoric city in the New World north of Mexico.
The sophistication of the culture that developed here was revealed by archeological finds in the 1960s, spurred by a plan to put the interstate through this location. An archeologist, Warren Wittry, discovered oval-shaped pits the size of posts made from trees, arranged in arcs of circles. These appear to have served as celestial calenders, much as Stonehenge did in England, and have become known as Woodhenge. The posts mark the winter and summer solstices and spring and fall equinoxes. As with other early agricultural people, the Cahokians were dependent on the seasons for planting and harvest and needed a method to predict when changes would come.
A densely populated, defended city was possible here near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers because the rivers and the surrounding countryside provided abundant natural resources. The floodplain had soil frequently re-enriched when the rivers flooded and deposited new soil carried from far upstream. Fish, freshwater shellfish, migrating and nesting water birds, and native mammals including deer, were abundant in the complex habitats along the river and over the wide floodplain. The location of the largest prehistoric city in North America was not accidental, but was a direct product of the natural resources.
Living close to the land and depending on it, the people of Cahokia responded to local differences in their natural resources. They farmed the eastern floodplain of the Mississippi, but not along the western shore. At the time, the western shore was a series of bluffs and valleys, comparatively poor land to farm. Today, you would not notice this difference because the bluffs have been removed and the land leveled as part of the development of St. Louis.
The city of Cahokia began a gradual decline around 1300 A. D. and was abandoned by 1500 A. D. Nobody knows the fate of its people. The Indians Clark met with around St. Louis knew no more than he did about the mounds. The history of the greatest city of ancient times in North America had been lost.
Did the mound builders overuse their natural resources and die-off or migrate away because they had destroyed their local environment? Did climate change around 1400 A. D. make it impossible for them to live? Or did politics and war put an end to their culture? Nobody knows. Bones of the dead suggest some malnutrition and disease, so perhaps there was an environmentally related decline in this civilization. Perhaps it is a history lesson we should pursue to see if there is any warning or message to help our civilization sustain itself and also sustain its natural resources. Our trip from downtown St. Louis that morning seemed to warn of a need to understand the decline of Cahokia. Although St. Louis had made civic attempts to redevelop and improve its waterfront and its center, the signs of urban decay were everywhere once away from publically-funded projects symbolized by the famous Arch. Would St. Louis survive as a viable city or decline as Cahokia did? The parallel seemed unavoidable and a was little disturbing, not the least because the park around Cahokia was one of the more beautiful landscapes we had seen in the St. Louis area.
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. I hope you enjoy it and find it rewarding.
- Daniel B. Botkin
All of the chapters published thus far can be found in the Passage of Discovery category. Please note that they are listed in reverse order of date posted.
More books by Daniel Botkin are available for purchase from the Center For the Study Of the Environment bookstore.
Take Interstate 270 from St. Louis east across the Mississippi River, then take Route 3 north to the exit for State Route 203. There is a sign before the exit that directs you to the Lewis and Clark Memorial Park. Go left (west) over Route 3 to the frontage road, then follow the sign to the Park, making a right turn and following the road onto the floodplain. At the end of this road is a parking area, the Mississippi River, and a circular structure that marks the location for the restoration. Directly across the river is Columbia Bottom, an area undergoing environmental restoration. Upstream (to your right) is the mouth of the Missouri River. In 1998 the state of Illinois allocated several million dollars for an interpretive center at Camp Dubois – or “Site 1″, as they call it.
Lewis and Clark stayed from December 12, 1803 until May 14, 1804 at Camp Dubois, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River at the mouth of the Dubois River. They built cabins just downstream and in view of the mouth of the Missouri River. Here they made their final preparations for the expedition. The exact site of their camp no longer exists. But a replica of Camp Dubois is being constructed at a location on the Mississippi River with the same relative position to the mouth of the Missouri River as the original one.
I visited this replica on a raw, cloudy spring morning when the combined Mississippi-Missouri River channel was so wide that the line of trees on the far shore looked no taller than the short hairs on a beaver’s head. It seemed a humble location for the beginning of a great expedition. The replica had not been built and was marked by flat cement pillars holding up a disk-shaped roof. Only a set of plaques on each pillar, one for each state through which the expedition passed, gave the location any historic aspect. Haze hung over the Mississippi. The road to the replica snaked through a bottomland forest where the water stood among the trees and spilled onto the roadway. Recent flooding had scattered leaves, twigs and limbs across the road. From the shore we could see in the distance where the Missouri emptied its churning, dangerous currents into the Mississippi channel. The threatening sky and dark forest accentuated the speed of the rolling waters. Here nature loomed large in width and power if not in height and beauty.
As I stood on the shore beside the wide river, I wondered, as have many others who have followed the Lewis and Clark journey: How did two young men, Meriwether Lewis and William Rogers Clark, lead a small corps of tough, resilient men more than 2,300 miles up the powerful, forceful river, over the Rocky Mountains, down the Columbia River, and return. The trip lasted from May 14, 1804 to September 23, 1806, a total of 864 days – two years and four months – and, from start to finish, covered approximately 8,000 miles. From April 1805 through August 1806, all communication with their civilization was suspended and in this sense they were truly in the wilderness. Many are familiar with their story, but we can only wonder at their success.
Their journey fascinates us at two levels. There is the surface level of the events of the expedition and of the expedition’s contact with a little known landscape. This is the novelistic story of their experiences, sometimes truly stranger than fiction. It is the story of how they survived the journey up a river that was constantly threatening them with sandbars, snags and tumbling cliffs; how they overcame grizzly bears, hailstorms, blizzards, and scarce food. This surface level is the one at which we discuss societal and political topics; it is the level of discourse about natural resources and land use issues — how we can combine the mixture of uses people want for the Missouri River and its valley: safe navigation on the river, freedom from the threat of floods, the opportunity to farm, build homes, see and conserve wildlife and fish and the natural ecosystems of the river, and enjoy the river and its countryside.
But that was only part of how the view from Camp Dubois affected me. I was much more strongly involved with another, much deeper level, one that I believe moves our curiosity even more strongly toward these two men and their expedition. The flat landscape at Camp Dubois, a view without distant vistas, obscured by vapors evaporating from the rivers, symbolized for me the unknown that confronted Lewis and Clark at the beginning of their expedition and that confronts us still today. Standing at this location, viewing a river that seemed ominous in the gray light beneath a threatening overcast sky, I could think only of the way that Joseph Conrad expressed such a trip on a wilderness river into an unknown continent by a solitary, independent man. Conrad wrote that “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth.” It was a trip into the “heart of darkness,” but not the darkness of the land, the darkness within a person’s soul, known and knowable only from a direct confrontation with nature, brought to light by the river journey.
Conrad knew that deep within us is a connection with that nature, a connection that is a longing, a desire, a process, and a continuation. Within our modern world, in our cities, our suburbs, our automobiles, we are linked indirectly to that nature; it is a permanent fact of humankind, but it is also a connection not usually on the surface of our lives, not within the range of our daily vision. Like the nutrients necessary for life suspended in the swirling, rushing reptilian gray of the Missouri’s waters and therefore not visible to the naked eye, it is not usually apparent to us, but it is essential.
How did they succeed? The view of the big rivers from Camp Dubois raises the question but does not give the answer. For that we must delve into their journals and into the records of others. The first and remarkable thing to notice about this expedition is that the members did keep records. It was the greatest wilderness trip ever recorded in pen on paper. A sobering thought about their success is that they were not the first, but the third expedition sent out by Jefferson to find the best route west. The two before had simply disappeared, perhaps because their leaders lost interest or courage and turned away.
It seemed to me that there are several answers to what makes for a successful expedition in addition to fortune and good luck. I reflected on my own experiences spread over thirty years discovering and studying nature. One of the first elements of a successful expedition is careful planning and preparation. President Jefferson sent Lewis to Philadelphia to take crash courses in botany, zoology and geology so that he could identify, collect, and report on the natural resources he encountered.
An important aspect of this planning was the careful selection of the participants. Lewis began by telling Jefferson that he would only lead the trip if his good friend in whom he had great faith, William Clark, would accompany him as co-leader. Lewis and Clark then selected the men for the expedition carefully. “Accept no soft-palmed gentlemen dazzled by dreams of high adventure,” Lewis had told Clark when they were interviewing people to make up the crew in 1803. “We must set our faces against all such applications and get rid of them on the best terms we can. They will not answer our purposes,” he wrote.
A second aspect of good planning is choosing the right equipment, and one important part of good equipment is simply good maps. Much of Lewis’s winter of 1803-1804 was spent talking in St. Louis with those who had traveled up the Missouri. Lewis copied and created maps as far as the land was known — from the mouth of the Missouri all the way to its middle portion, the present location of Bismarck, North Dakota. To put this in perspective, when the astronauts landed on the moon there were much better maps of the moon’s surface than Lewis and Clark had available to them of the American West when they began their journey.
Lewis was occupied for months with selection, as well as invention, of devices to take on the journey. He brought the best equipment available, purchasing only the best, including imported gunpowder, since at that time American-made powder was not of as good quality. He brought the latest in technology, including a newly-invented air rifle. He prepared for danger and brought equipment as gifts or to impress the Native Americans he would meet. In addition to the air rifle, Lewis brought three cannons mounted on the boats – not so much to win battles as to deter them – plus small flintlock pistols, muskets, blunderbusses, tomahawks and scalping knives.
He purchased the best clothing available for the members of his expedition, along with blankets, hooded coats, some clothing of a water-repellent material, 30 yards of flannel with which to make new clothing, and needles and awls to make the clothing. He brought a wide array of tools; so that everything that was needed could be repaired or made along the way. His medicine chest included the best available pharmaceuticals of the day.
On the Missouri, the expedition traveled on a 60-foot keelboat, called a bateau, and a large wooden canoe, called a pirogue. An iron-framed canoe that Lewis had tested especially for the trip was assembled after the group made its way past Great Falls. However, because they did not have the correct materials to seal the skins that covered the iron frame, the metal canoe sunk. Wooden dugout canoes were built and used instead. In all, the equipment for the trip weighed 3,500 pounds.
When appropriate equipment was lacking, Lewis invented new devices. He designed a rifle especially for the expedition, a design that became the model for the first mass-produced rifles of the U. S. Army. He packed carefully, making the most efficient use of the limited weight and space available to him. He designed watertight containers to hold gun powder that were made of lead. When a container was emptied of its powder, it could be melted down to make bullets. He brought 52 of these, and they worked exceedingly well. Even his estimate of the number of these turned out to be quite accurate. Twenty-seven were used on the outward journey and only five of the remaining ones had cracked and allowed water to reach the powder by the time they were ready to return home.
How could Lewis know that 52 canisters of gunpowder were enough? Experience in the field was part of the answer, and this too is an important quality in the preparations for such an expedition. Both Lewis and Clark were experienced soldiers and outdoorsmen, accustomed to the hardships and the necessity for good observation in the countryside.
Beyond these were the inner human qualities of commitment, responsibility and perseverance. As Joseph Conrad was to explain through his many novels a century later: The essence of human existence within nature and within society is the making of a commitment and accepting the responsibility to see things through. These are not qualities that come easily to mind in our modern world, it is not something that a cozy seat with a remote control for the TV brings to mind. They are deep and dense, and like boulders and water-saturated logs, rarely come to the surface. Perhaps there is a fascination therefore with these qualities of Lewis and Clark. And then there was just the willingness to do plain hard work, which Lewis and Clark as well as the other members of the expedition showed repeatedly.
Finally, there are the illusive qualities of leadership which the two men had in great abundance, an ability to command and lead, to make people want to go where they had not gone before and have them singing and dancing in the evenings, as happened upriver later in the expedition on numerous occasions.
Some of the writings in the early portions of the journal might make you think that Lewis might not have been a tough outdoors-man and leader, but rather an urbane gentleman. When Lewis and Clark left Camp Wood, Clark took the boats and sailed to St. Charles, just up the mouth of the Missouri. There, taking care of the last of the preparations, he waited for Lewis who came overland from St. Louis. On his way between St. Louis and St. Charles, Lewis wrote that the “morning was fair, and the weather pleasant,” and that he was “joined by Capt. Stoddard, Lieuts Milford & Worrell together with Messrs. A. Chouteau, C. Gratiot, and many other respectable inhabitants of St. Louis.” He bid “an affectionate adieu to my Hostis, that excellent woman the spouse of Mr. Peter Chouteau, and some of my fair friends of St. Louis,” as if he were off on a spring picnic with the highest society of the town, not off into the wilderness of a continent. And he “arrived at half after six and joined Capt Clark, found the party in good health and sperits, suped this evening with Monsr. Charles Tayong a Spanish Ensign and & late Commandant of St. Charles, at an early hour I retired to rest on board the barge” as if this were a well organized tourist holiday for which he was just another passenger. But do not be fooled by this bit of an aside, nor by Lewis’s ability to move at several levels within in society and without, for he could be both a gentleman of St. Louis and a rough and ready, experienced, thoughtful, tough, committed, knowledgeable, curious, leader of men.
It is with these things in mind that I left Camp Woods and began to search for the natural history of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I invite you to join me on this journey, as we seek to find what nature was like before it was changed by European civilization, how we might restore and conserve nature, how we might achieve simultaneous uses of the river and its surrounding landscapes and how we can find a place for ourselves and our civilization within that landscape.