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.

2. Cahokia: Clark Discovers An Ancient Indian Mound

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.