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.

4. Columbia and The Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge: Approaches to Meeting All the Uses of the River

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.