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.

1. Camp Dubois: Preparing for the Journey

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.