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.