by Daniel B. Botkin, originally published by Perigee Books, a division of Penguin/Putnam, 1999.

This book, originally published as “Passage of Discovery”, is an ecologist’s guide to the first half of the Lewis and Clark trail, their travels up the Missouri River from St. Louis to Three Forks, MT.  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.  Comparing what Lewis and Clark saw with what we see today is one of the best insights we can get of how nature and environment in American has changed since European settlement.   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.

8. Weston, Missouri: Where the River Meandered Away, Leaving the Town Without a Waterfront

Weston is north of Kansas City, Missouri and south of Atchison, Kansas.  From Kansas City take Interstate 435 exit 22 and to Route 45 north and west.  Follow Route 45 north and just north of Waldron turn left on County Route P which takes you into the town.

[The Missouri River is] eating all the time — eating yellow clay banks and cornfields, eighty acres at a mouthful.
- S. Vestal, The Missouri, Farrar & Rinehart, N.Y.  1945, p 13.

As the expedition moved up the Missouri River past the mouth of the Kansas River – the present day location of the Kansas Cities – Lewis and Clark and the men accompanying them found many beautiful areas along the shore and suggested some as fine locations for settlements or forts.  On July 2, 1804, George Drewyer, one of the major hunters for the expedition, told Clark that the lands he passed through that day and the day before on the south side “was generally Verry fine.”  On July 2, 1804, the expedition camped opposite an old Kansas Indian village where there was a large island in the river and “extensive” prairie beyond it.  The island, Clark wrote, appeared to have “thrown the Current of the river against the place the Village formerly Stood” so that the current washed away the bank, forming an arc or natural harbor.  “The Situation appears to be a verry elligable one for a Town, the valley rich & extensive, with a Small Brook Meanding through it and one part of the bank affording yet a good Landing for Boats,” Clark commented.  The French had once located a fort here, he noted.

In 1837, Weston was established at this location as predicted by Clark.  Soldiers from nearby Fort Leavenworth saw the potential of the location, bought the land and began to develop it.  Weston’s natural bay made a good port for boats to tie up, and there was good land nearby for farming and good upland locations — dry and well-drained for basements but with good water supply — for houses.  The soldiers established a dock and a main street that led from the dock away from the river.  Settlers moved in quickly and set up a variety of shops and activities.  The countryside was rich for farming.  Tobacco farms were established and their products shipped downstream on boats that tied up at Weston harbor.

A severe flood in 1844 damaged farmlands near Weston, and this was followed by an outbreak of diseases carried by water, such as typhoid.   But the town continued to increase: by 1850 there were 5,000 residents.  But in 1881 a bad flood occurred and the Missouri cut a new main channel two and one-half miles to the southwest of Weston.  In this one event, the river meandered away from the town, leaving Weston high and dry, with a harbor no longer at the foot of Main Street.

This event was natural for the river.  It is natural for any river in a valley wide enough to allow meanderings, but the Missouri is especially famous for such meanderings.  “Some people would think it was just a plain river running along in its bed at the same speed; but it ain’t,” a river man who raced boats on the Missouri River said a century after Lewis and Clark had traveled up it.  “The river runs crooked through the valley; and just the same way the channel runs crooked through the river…The crookedness you can see ain’t half the crookedness there is.”  The Missouri became known as the hungriest river ever created, “eating all the time – eating yellow clay banks and cornfields, eighty acres at a mouthful.”

A river on a wide and generally smooth floodplain does not flow in a straight line – or if it does, it does not maintain that straight line for long, especially if it is carrying a heavy load of sediments.  Meanders are a natural form of a river, in part because the meander form keeps an even slope as the water flows downhill, minimizing the energy used by the river.  In addition, even in a straight path, eventually some chance occurrences cause a difference in where material is deposited and other material is eroded – a log catches on the bottom, a pebble is pushed into the riverbed by the whirling water and catches hold.  If the riverbed and its borders had been smooth, they were no longer.  Because flowing water takes the path of least resistance, it begins to assume a sinuous shape around small obstacles, and the river begins to form a meander, creating shapes something like the reaction of spring steel that has been pulled straight and then released.

Although scientists can be sure that a river like the Missouri will meander, the exact location of any meander is influenced by chance events and cannot be predicted with compete accuracy.  That is to say: The river wanders.  It is also to say that the river is neither completely chaotic nor completely fixed.

Geologists who study rivers and how they affect the land tell us that, over time, the arc of a meander becomes sharper and sharper, so that the river forms a shape like a wishbone of a chicken or a sharply curving bow, usually called an oxbow.  Always seeking the path of least resistance, the flowing water will cut across the bottom of the bow, when conditions allow.

This hydrologically natural event was a disaster for Weston.  The fickleness of the Missouri led to a decline and almost an end to the town. For years, Weston was a tiny village where little happened.

In the 1960s there was a renewed interest in Weston because of its historic buildings.  The town began to redevelop as a tourist attraction and as a bedroom community for Kansas City, a short commute by today’s standards.  In 1998 the population had risen to 1500.  Weston is nestled among the bluffs west of the Missouri River, a picturesque location.  We spent a pleasant night there in a bed and breakfast and thought that it was one of the prettier places for a traveler to stay along the Missouri River. Like many other visitors, we walked down Main Street, only a few blocks long from where it begins in the hills to where it used to end at a dock on the Missouri River.  Across the railroad tracks at the bottom of the street, we could see the broad flat lands where once the main channel of the Missouri River flowed, now good bottomland agriculture.

Bruges, Belgium has a similar history to Weston, Missouri – it is also a town separated from water transportation.  Bruges, however, suffered from a change in its location to the sea.  Once a port city, Bruges had canals like those in Venice and was an active transportation center.  But over the centuries the land rose slowly and the Atlantic Ocean was forced away from the city.  Bruges ceased to be a major port.   But, like Weston, Missouri, because of this abandonment by water, Bruges became a settlement where old buildings were not replaced over the years as rapidly as elsewhere: Today these settlements make for modern tourists attractions.

Most major cities of the world are located on rivers, at crucial locations on those rivers, or on the ocean.  The quality of life in those cities is strongly affected by the quality of the waterfront and the way that the city is connected to the waterfront.      When the riverfront is a park and connected to the city, the city often flourishes.   But rivers have traditionally been used as an easy way to rid a settlement of its wastes.  The old stories are that a river will clean itself in one mile, or two miles, or four miles, meaning that you could dump whatever you liked into the river and it would remove it for you locally and transform it into something harmless for the next town downstream.

When populations were low and towns scattered widely, and when technology consisted of materials made of wood and stone, and wastes were natural organic ones, perhaps this belief could survive.  But with an increase in the density of human habitation and with the rise of technologies of steel, aluminum, chrome, lead, and other heavy metals, and a technology of thousands of artificial chemicals including long-lived plastics, this old tale has lost all of its credence.  But practices deep within cultures disappear slowly, and it is common that we continue to use our rivers as dumps and to ignore them as important to life in a city or town.

Weston’s fate illustrates the variableness and changeableness of the river, and the importance of such changes to the fate of human settlement.   It has survived because its residents have understood the beauty of historic buildings in a lovely setting.  The river wandered but the town remains.  When you visit Weston, walk down to the bottom of Main Street and consider what might be done elsewhere to improve the fate of our towns and cities to make them more vibrant and livable.

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.

7. Kansas City: Where the Kansas River Meets the Missouri – City Plans and River Pollution

Interstate 29, Interstate 35 and Interstate 70 pass through Kansas.  The confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers is just across the Missouri River from the Kansas City Airport, to the southwest.  Railroad tracks run along both sides of the Kansas River near the confluence and on the south shore of the Missouri River, while the north and east shores of the Missouri at the confluence are near the boundary of the airport.  On the south shore of the Missouri River near the mouth of the Kansas River, Market Street is near, but not at the junction of the rivers.  A new Riverfront Park is scheduled to open in late 1998 that will be reached initially from the Interstate 29/35 Front Street southbound ramps.

On June 26, 1804 the expedition camped just above the mouth of the Kansas River, at the present location of Kansas City, Kansas.  They spent several days there, because they had to repair the Perogue, which they emptied, brought up on land, and turned over.  During this work, on June 28, 1804, the expedition saw its first buffalo, which they did not kill.  These animals would soon become a principal source of food.

Clark praised the location for its beauty and its opportunity for defense.  He wrote that the Kansas Indians lived “in a open & butifull plain” and that “the high lands come to the river Kanses on the upper Side at about a mile” which made “a butifull place for a fort, a good landing place.”

Just downstream on June 25, 1804, the expedition camped in what now is Sugar Creek, a suburb of Kansas City, and there saw great numbers of deer “feeding on the young willows & hearbage in the Banks and on the Sand bars in the river.”  It was a productive location, with “Plumbs, Raspberries & vast quantities of wild (crab) apples.”  The next day they killed seven deer.  There they also saw “a great number of Parrot Queets,” the Carolina parakeet that is now extinct, but for which Lewis and Clark provided the first written observation west of the Mississippi.  It was a place of appealing biological diversity.

Kansas City was an important location for a geographic reason: Downstream, the Missouri runs east and west, above the Kansas River, it runs north and south.  This was the farthest west one could go on the Missouri below Sioux City, where the river once again turned west.  The choice of a traveler at the Kansas River mouth was to take that smaller river, which few did; go north to Omaha and take the Platte River west, which became the major route west; follow Lewis and Clark and continue up the Missouri; or begin travel by land.  This made the location a natural one for a city as well as a fort.

When we visited Kansas City, we tried to find an easy way to the mouth of the Kansas River and to get a sense of the geography of the city as Lewis and Clark might have seen it.  It is a large city, with more than one and a half million residents and with a metropolitan area said to be larger than Connecticut. I looked forward to visiting Kansas City.  Although my professional work has focused often on wilderness and endangered species, I like cities.  Kansas City is famous for jazz, and I looked forward to a break in our work to listen to jazz in the evening.  Reading up on this city before our visit, I found that it had been called “an exemplary model of urban planning.”  The Web site for the city’s Chamber of Commerce said that it had “more miles of boulevards than Paris and more fountains than any city but Rome” and that “a careful regard for beauty is evident throughout the city’s boulevards, lavish fountains, spacious parks and attractive business centers.”

Unlike so many American cities at the end of the twentieth century, it seemed to be prospering.  Many Fortune 500 companies have manufacturing plants or offices there; it is one of the nation’s centers for flour production and marketing, for railroads, and for many kinds of manufacturing.

So we arrived in Kansas City on a warm summer afternoon with considerable enthusiasm, stayed in an attractive redevelopment area of high-rise hotels, and listened to jazz in a small place in the evening.  The next day we set out to try to find either of the rivers, the Kansas or the Missouri.  Not an easy task, we discovered.  There wasn’t a major park along either river that we could see from a map.  So we left our hotel and walked to an outdoor Sunday public food market that was near the Missouri River.  Once we were out of the hotel area, we walked through a seemingly empty city where there were few other pedestrians, where empty store fronts confronted us as we approached the market.  The market was busy and interesting, but with no view of the river, and not in a particularly comfortable part of the city.

There seemed to be an environmental concern here, because the Chamber of Commerce also noted that  “Greater Kansas City was the first major city to have earned clean air status from the EPA.”  But in spite of pride in its urban planning and clean air, Kansas City seemed to have disconnected itself from its major rivers.

I couldn’t help comparing Kansas City with another Lewis and Clark city, Portland, Oregon, at the confluence of two other major rivers – the Willamette and the Columbia.  Portland had been blighted by Interstate 5 that passed between the downtown and the Willamette River.  The city had found funds to move the interstate across the river and to build a beautiful river front park.   The park is heavily used.  It is   a fashionable location for upscale condominiums, and a wonderful setting to walk from an urban desk to a view of a great river.  The new Riverside Park in Kansas City, planned but not built during our visit, may be a step in the right direction.

It seemed to me that cities that are well connected to their waterfronts tend to do better than those that are not – at least better culturally and as a place to live.  This is not a new discovery.  There is a history of formal, written city planning that extends back more than two thousand years in western civilization.  And there are two traditional goals in all of that history: military and aesthetic – to build a city that was at the same time defensible and beautiful.  There was a great emphasis on the planning of cities because it was long believed that cities were the center of civilization — of creativity, innovation, and commerce.

Settlements along the trail of Lewis and Clark did not develop in a way that suggested a recognition of that long history of city planning.  Towns and cities grew quickly after Lewis and Clark, as the West opened up and there was a need for places to buy supplies and centers to buy and sell the products of the land.   Cities grew up, used and converted the river’s resources, and forgot the ancient, and I believe hard-learned, lessons of city planning.

Kansas City, Missouri, began as a trading post in 1821, only 15 years after Lewis and Clark returned past the mouth of the Kansas River on their way back, and only two years after the first steamboat sailed on the Missouri River.  The town grew as steamboat activity increased.  Other towns and cities along the Missouri developed with similar speed and without the late twentieth century concern for the environment that we take for granted.

In the first half of the nineteenth century rivers provided transportation and took away wastes.  The river was a thing you traveled on and dumped into, but otherwise you might pay it little attention.

Perhaps this attitude began to change a little in 1910 when there was a serious increase in deaths from typhoid fever in the towns along the Missouri River, and in 1913 when the U. S. Public Health Service identified sewage as a major factor in typhoid deaths.   Typhoid is spread through contaminated sewage and waste water. But not much happened to reduce water pollution for many decades.  It was not until the 1960s that construction even began for primary sewage treatment.

Pollution of the Missouri River got worse before it got better.  Fish started to taste bad, and PCB levels were identified in 1969 as posing a potential health threat.  In 1970, one-quarter of fish sampled from a bay in reservoir behind Oahe Dam, one of the great dams on the Missouri River, were found to contain unsafe levels of mercury from a mine on a tributary stream.  In the early 1970s, PCBs and the pesticides aldrin and dieldren reached concentrations in fish that were determined to pose potential health threats.  Then in 1972 the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was passed, establishing national standards for wastewater effluents.  This was followed by the construction of secondary treatment plants.  But aldrin and dieldrin, from non-point source runoff from farmlands, continued to increase in fish, exceeding safe limits by 1976 on the Missouri River.

In 1989 more stringent limitations were imposed on discharges of toxic wastes from the major cities on the lower Missouri, including Kansas City.  In the 1940s, a downtown Sioux City hotel was the meeting place for visitors to the city.  A large restroom, open to the public, contained this sign: “Please flush the toilets, Omaha needs the water.”  Water quality has improved much since then.

The United States numbered about five million people at the time of Lewis and Clark, with a density of just over five people per square mile – a density we call rural today.  By 2004, the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the United States will number almost 300 million with a density of more than 70 people per square mile.  Most of those people will live in metropolitan regions.

Although it is common today to believe that cities will disappear or become unimportant in the future, as our computerized society moves to the suburbs and rural lands and we all telecommute, this is not the actual trend either in the United States or elsewhere around the world.  Urbanization continues with a relentless momentum.  Those with the right kind of training can live where they want, but most people will continue to go to a regular workplace, and these will continue to be in cities.

The future of our environment lies as much in the way that we treat our cities as it does in the way we treat our wildernesses, perhaps even more so. And the more pleasant our cities are to live in, the more that people will want to live there.  The more people want to live in cities, the less the human pressure will be on outlying areas for development and the more likely we will be able to share the landscape with other creatures.  Wilderness, wildlife, prairies and forests will benefit if our cities prosper.  So will we.

In 1968, I began scientific research on the possible ecological effects of global warming, and published my first scientific paper about this subject in 1973. During the same period, I developed a computer model of forest growth. Called JABOWA, it became one of the major methods in the 1980s and 1990s to forecast possible effects of global warming on forests and some endangered forest species. When I first became concerned about global warming, there was a relatively small group of scientists – ecologists, climatologists, and meteorologists mostly – who were thinking about it. In the years since, I have continued to do research and publish articles, both scientific and for lay people, about global warming. I devoted a chapter and more to this subject in my first major trade book, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, New York: 1990).

In all of this work, my goal was to do an objective scientific analysis and new research, following traditional scientific principles of disprovability. This research includes observations (empirical studies) and theory. Wherever possible, theoretical models have been tested and validated.

Now that global warming has become a major public issue, a great many people are speaking and writing about global warming , regardless of their knowledge, experience, research, and study of the subject. As a result, people have been asking me a variety of questions about the scientific basis of what we are being told.

(more…)

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.

6. Pelicans and Grand Pass: The River and Migrating Birds

From Arrow Rock take Route 41 west to Marshall where 41 joins 65.  Continue on 65 west to State Route N and take that to the end of the road, which is the entrance to Grand Pass.  The office is to your left.

Well up river, in the general vicinity of present day Onawa, Iowa, 40 miles south of Sioux City, the expedition saw a strange site on August 8, 1804.  Lewis wrote that  “ I saw a great number of feathers floating down the river,” covering sixty or seventy yards of the river’s width.  “For three miles after I saw those features continuing to run in that manner,” he continued;  “We did not percieve from whence they came.”  It was as if the river had painted itself white.  “At length we were surprised by the appearance of a flock of Pillican at rest on a large sand bar,” Lewis wrote.  Almost three months into the journey, you might think that Lewis was becoming used to strange and extraordinary sites, but miles of white feathers amazed him.  There were so many birds that he did not even try to count them, merely writing that the numbers “if estimated” would “appear almost in credible.”

He shot one bird as a specimen and made an accurate, written identification of its features as Jefferson had instructed him to do.  The beak was “a whiteish yellow” and the pouch under the beak was so big that they filled it with five gallons of water.  It had yellow feet, most white feathers except that the “large feathers of the wings are of a deep black.”  Lewis recognized these as the same pelicans that are found in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico — the white pelican.  The birds were “no doubt engaged in procuring their ordinary food,” Lewis wrote, “which is fish.”

The pelicans were all the more remarkable because Lewis noted that “We had seen but a few aquatic fouls of any kind on the river since we commenced our journey.”  He listed a few geese, wood ducks “common to every part of this country” and cranes.  The expedition had left too late to see the spring migration of waterfowl, which occurs generally in March or April, and saw primarily resident water birds.

Starting one of our trips along the Missouri River in late April, near the end of migration, we had better luck.  One of the best places to see waterfowl during their migration along the Missouri River is at Grand Pass Conservation Area, 5,000 acres managed by the Missouri Department of Conservation.  Pelicans pass through and stop here, just as they do along other parts of the Missouri where habitat is suitable.

We visited Grand Pass Wildlife Conservation Area with Rob Leonard, the top wildlife management biologist there, driving along gravel roads past many kinds of artificial wetlands developed to provide habitat for different species of wetland wildlife.  Rob, a direct descendent of William Rogers Clark, had the same red beard for which Clark was famous and the same outgoing manner and ready smile.

Grand Pass is one of many bottomland areas being restored for fish and wildlife habitat between Sioux City and St. Louis.  The challenge at each of them is to find the best and most economical way to recreate the muted mosaics of backwaters, oxbows, perennial wetlands, seasonal wetlands, wet prairies, and floodplain forests.

One approach is to do as much as possible to speed up natural processes.  This is the approach of the Missouri Department of Conservation at Grand Pass. Rob explained that Grand Pass is intensively managed to create wildlife habitat.  The Missouri Department of Conservation has chosen an active, intense management approach at Grand Pass, with creation of many artificial wetlands, and careful timing of when these were filled and emptied to try to match the natural, pre-channelization seasonal patterns.

We drove first to a pumping station where Rob told us that the pumps were capable of pumping 250 acre-feet a day – enough water to cover 250 acres a foot deep  and enough to provide a day’s water for more than 800,000 people, more than twice the number of people in St. Louis, at the liberal but U. S. average water use of 100 gallons a day.  Water pumped into a wetland is not lost to public use, rather it is enhanced and then returned to the river.  Rob commented that “wetlands should be viewed as a part of public infrastructure in much the same way as roads and highways.  Wetlands are nature’s way of providing clean water and flood control.”

The water is pumped into a set of large ponds and wetlands separated by levees of different heights, forming an artificial network.  About one-third of the area’s 5,000 acres is in a status Rob referred to as “refuge,” meaning once a pond or wetland is constructed there is a “no-touch” policy — no other actions are taken.  Refuge areas of no disturbance provide habitat to migrating waterfowl. The refuge wetlands are juxtaposed with actively managed areas where much more is done. Some are flooded only in the spring and the fall and then pumped dry in the summer and winter, to mimic seasonal wetlands as they used to be on the river.  Others are flooded for shorter periods.  Still others are restored as wet prairie, planted with switch grass to protect levees.  According to Rob “switch grass was selected because of its ability to hold soil, while providing wildlife habitat.”

Many kinds of waterfowl depend on the Missouri River and its backwaters for nesting, breeding, rearing, and migratory feeding habitat.  Today there are eighteen species of ducks that use the river.  Of these, wood ducks remain the most common nesting species, just as Lewis reported in his time. There are three geese: Canada, snow, and white fronted.   There are ten species of wading birds, 25 species of shorebirds.  A total of 200 species of migratory birds use the floodplains.

Some birds are threatened or endangered, or have become locally extinct along the Missouri.  The birds whose situation is of concern live in many of the kinds of habitats once common along the Missouri floodplain.  Restoring the floodplain for migrating birds means restoring many kinds of habitats, putting the mosaic back together.  In addition, wetlands are important for many species, as well as waterfowl.

An alternative to the intensive, active management at Grand Pass is a light touch, do-as-little-as-possible-and-let-nature-heal-itself approach.  This is one of the policies of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Big Muddy National Wildlife Refuge.  The light-touch idea is that a few smartly selected and well-executed actions could allow the river to repaint the landscape in the most natural way — a break in a levee at just the right location, for example, to form a single new chute.  Then the river would be left alone to erode a complex maze of channels the way it always had and, given the opportunity and following the laws of physics, always would.

The two policies, at Grand Pass and at the Big Muddy, were two different approaches to designing landscapes.  It was as if two different landscape painters were set before a large canvas. We tend to view environmental issues as a matter of a single truth whose identification is our goal and the solution.  But I have found that environmental issues are often a question of the best design.  The path to the best design is to try several, just as major building are often the focus of a design contest.  Lacking precise information and having only poor understanding of how nature worked in the past, we have no “silver bullets,” and it is wise to let a number of approaches bloom on the river.

The intense management at Grand Pass seemed to be working.  As we walked by one of these ponds, two sandhill cranes rose majestically into the air, banked and turned and flew away from us, their wings the warm brown of loess soils, to settle in a distant pond.  To our right several hundred ducks — shovelers and blue-winged teal mostly – swam among rushes and sedges and wetland grasses.  Here and there in other immense ponds and wetlands we saw great blue heron, cormorants, mallards, Canada geese, snow geese, coots, and the American white egret.  A blackboard at the headquarters listed more than 150,000 ducks having stopped at Grand Pass this spring and more than 50,000 snow geese.

And all this is relatively new.  Grand Pass land was purchased by the state of Missouri in the early 1980s, but the intense management did not start at Grand Pass until Rob arrived there in the late 1980s.

If you want to see migrating water birds that are characteristic of the Missouri River in Lewis and Clark’s time, you can do no better than stop at Grand Pass.  But if you want to see 150,000 ducks and 50,000 snow geese, then you have to pick your time carefully — March/April or November.  The migration timing various somewhat from year to year, so you may also need a little luck or flexibility.

I was impressed with both approaches I had seen, the intense management and the light touch, and glad that we had a landscape large enough to allow both to be happening at this time, in my lifetime, when I could see it.  Later in our trip, far upriver, we came across the last of the migrating pelicans.  When we stopped to watch them, they flew as a flock into the air and circled high above us in a pure blue sky.  When they flew one way, only their white wings reflected the sun and we saw a brilliant white spiral moving above us.  When they flew in the other direction, their black feathers caught the sun.  The alternating white and dark-gray spirals in the air illustrated the complexity of natural patterns and seemed to symbolize the multiple paths underway to try to restore the Missouri River’s habitats.

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.

5. Arrow Rock State Park: Cottonwoods and the Resiliency of Life

Arrow Rock is reached most easily from Interstate 70.  Take this interstate about 30 miles west of Columbia and turn north on Route 41, and follow this until you reach Main Street of Arrow Rock, which you take east.  To reach Arrow Rock State Park continue east to the end of Main Street, then turn right and follow the road as it winds around and down a small hill and passes over a small stream.  The road continues up the hill to the park.

While the Missouri River was treacherous, it also created a well-watered and fertile bottomland where trees adapted to these conditions grew in great abundance.   On June 9, 1804, Clark wrote that they passed a place called “Praire of Arrows” which was below a bluff called “arrow rock” and where there was a stream called the “Creek of Arrows” flowing into the Missouri. Clark observed a “Delghtfull land” on the south side of the river.  The next day he noted that they “passed a part of the River that the banks are falling in takeing with them large trees of Cotton woods which is the Common groth in the Bottom Subject to the Flud.”

The bottomlands were full of cottonwoods, and these came and went at the will of the river, sprouting after a flood, dying when the current cut the soil out from under them.  We saw these same natural processes working at the same location, as we stood on a bluff overlooking Arrow Creek and the Missouri River.   After the time of the expedition, Arrow Rock developed as a crossing point on the Missouri River because Arrow Creek provided a way up and over the steep bluffs.  The Santa Fe Trail, which originates in Independence, Missouri, came this way.  This charming, small town blossomed briefly.  Now a small village of about 70 residents, it is registered as a National Historic Landmark.

We visited Arrow Rock on a beautiful spring day.  We walked down the main street through the town, past pleasant, well maintained houses, surrounded by shade trees and blossoming redbuds, some of the houses converted to Bed and Breakfast hotels, past a summer stock theater well known in the region.  Stores on the main street had wooden sidewalks and wooden porch-fronts, like a movie set western frontier town.  Here the movie Tom Sawyer was made years ago, the local people told us.  Walking through Arrow Rock was like walking into the past and into the perfect image of small town America.  It made us aware of how villages waxed and waned, with just a few, like Arrow Rock, maintained as reminders of the past.

At the foot of main street we turned right and followed the road down a short slope.  In a short time, we reached Arrow Rock State Park, with its large, manicured lawn of playing fields and a few trees, oaks and other upland species.  The park stood on the edge of the bluff, providing a magnificent view of the Missouri River.  Below us flowed the Creek of Arrows, much as Clark had described it.

Beyond the creek and far below us was a vast field of young cottonwoods, light green against the black bottomland soil. Beyond the first field of trees was a wide expanse of open soil and then another field of cottonwoods mixed with willows. In the middle distance were the levees along the channelized Missouri River, and then the main channel flowed – as straight as an arrow, as straight as Main Street – reflecting the blue of the sky.  In the distance, limestone bluffs could be seen.

The day before, Jim Milligan, fisheries biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Big Muddy National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, had told me that hundreds of acres of young cottonwoods had sprouted up on former agricultural lands after the 1993 flood, creating stands so dense they were almost impossible to walk through now and, if you succeeded, hard to keep your sense of direction unless the sun shown brightly.  Now these trees were five years old.  Remarkably, some were 20 and 25 feet high and up to five inches – as thick as a wrist – in diameter.   I had seen trees that had grown that fast on only two other occasions. Once on the Tanana River outside of Fairbanks, Alaska where, in a similar situation, on sandbars on the floodplain, balsam poplar, a relative of these cottonwoods, had also grown five feet a year.  The other was in Costa Rica where we went to the tropical rain forests with a local forestry expert.  We ate lunch under several balsa trees about 30 feet high, and he told us that those trees had sprouted five years before.

Under good conditions, trees of the upland forests of Missouri and the states to the east – like the oaks growing near us on the top of the bluff in the woods bordering Arrow Rock State Park – grow a foot or maybe two taller, and a half inch in diameter a year.  In a poor year upland trees, especially those adapted to the deep shade of older forests, increase in diameter hardly at all, a hair width, just wide enough so you can see there was a growth ring when you look at a stump.  Some trees, including some of the oaks, can persist for years with this kind of small growth.  Cottonwood is a fast growing tree characteristic of what ecologists call the early successional stage in the development of forest — the time soon after a disturbance, like the 1993 flood, when light, water and nutrient elements are in great abundance and there is little competition.  Willows are much the same, germinating and sprouting on newly formed floodplain soils.  Sometimes the willows come in first, especially on the coarser soils of sandbars, followed by cottonwoods.  Sometimes, as in our view, the cottonwoods sprout immediately, especially on the heavier soils.  Cottonwood is also the dominant species in what appear to be mature bottomland forests on the Missouri River.

Lewis recognized this process of the natural change in dominant species.

On June 14, 1804, a little father upriver from Arrow Rock and toward Kansas City, Lewis gathered a sample of the narrow leaf willow which he noted “is invariably the first which makes it’s appearance on the newly made Lands on the borders of the Mississippi and Missouri.”  These, he wrote, “grow remarkably close and in some instances so much so that they form a thicket almost impenetrable.”

Lewis also observed that, once the trees were rooted, they helped build up the floodplain soil.  “The points of land which are forming all ways become eddies when overflown in high water,” he wrote.  “These willows obstruct the force of water and makes it more still which causes the mud and sand to be deposited in greater quantities.”  Lewis added that “the willow is not attal imbarrased or injured by this inundation, but (the moment the water subsides) puts forth an innumerable quantity of small fibrous roots from every part of its trunk near the surface of the water which further serve to collect the mud.”

He also observed that the trees thinned themselves over time. “As the willow increases in size and the land get higher (and more dry) by the annul inundations of the river, the weeker plants decline dye and give place to the cotton-wood which is it’s ordinary successor, and these last in their turn also thin themselves as they become larger in a similar manner and leave the ground open for the admission of other forest trees and under brush….”

This self-thinning was happening already below us on Jameson Island.  The faster growing trees shaded out the slower growing ones, and the slower growing ones died.  The dead organic material from these thinned trees improved the already rich soil.  The cottonwoods and willows were a clear example of life’s great productivity and its ability to restore itself when conditions were right.

Floodplain forests have declined greatly since the time of Lewis and Clark.   These forests covered three quarters the Missouri River floodplain in 1826, but only 13 percent by 1972.   During that time, clearing the land for farming was a major cause of this decrease.  Land in crops increased from 18 percent to 83 percent of the floodplain lands.  But channelization also had its effect.  Sprouting and survival of cottonwoods and willows declined greatly because of the reduction in spring flooding.  The habitat had been changed and was no longer available or suitable to these trees.

The view from Arrow Rock State Park illustrated a general rule about life: Most species do well as long as their habitats are in good condition.  It is better to have a small population in a good habitat than a large population in a poor habitat.  And here the habitat for cottonwoods was near to perfect – a floodplain whose soil was just renewed, laid bare of other vegetation that could compete with the cottonwood sprouts, which do poorly when shaded by other trees.

Jim Milligan said that one of the farmers along the river valley, seeing the great productivity of the cottonwoods since the flood, is using these as crops.  A five-year-old tree that was 25 feet high and five inches in diameter could be sold for fiber if a timber processing plant were near enough to make it economically feasible.  This was intriguing, because I had just completed an analysis of the world trade in timber products with an economist.  We had calculated that all of the world trade in timber for fiber and construction could be met with plantations on good land that would require less than ten percent of all the forest land in the world.  Here was an example of what we had proposed: Use land subjected naturally to frequent disturbances, whose trees are resilient and productive, and respond well to frequent harvests.  A field of cottonwoods, natural in this location, would benefit wildlife and fish as well.  Here was a way that farming and conservation could come together.

The scenery at Arrow Rock was not a duplicate of what Clark saw, in part because of natural changes in the location of the river channel and backwaters, in large part because of the channelization of the river.  But it was an exact replication of the ecological processes he observed.  Cottonwoods grew in the same abundance and after disturbance to the bottomlands just as Lewis and Clark had described them almost 200 years before us, and the species of trees changed with their elevation above the river just as Clark had said.  These patterns and processes are gateways to  opportunities to restore the landscape.  Given a good habitat, a small number of mature cottonwoods can provide the seeds to fill a valley.