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.