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.

3. St. Charles: Floods, Levees, Towns, and Wetlands

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.