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.

13. Along the Platte River: The Great Prairie River, Once the Route West, Now  Isolated from People

You can view the Platte at its mouth as described in the Shilling Wildlife Area entry.  But the Platte is an interesting river to follow.  Many roads cross the Platte through central Nebraska and it is often easy to find a place along one of these to stop and see the river.  Some Nebraska State Parks are on the Platte, but few have direct access to the river.  As practices change for the Nebraska State Parks, it is advisable also to contact the state offices for updates on access to the river, which will most likely increase in the next few years.  Grand Island in a major town and travel stop on Interstate 80, particularly because it is a major stopping location for migrating birds.  Mormon Island State Recreation Area is just off the Interstate.  Audubon and other organizations have tours during the sandhill crane migration seasons.

On July 21, 1804, after they viewed the mouth of the Platte River and measured the flows of the Platte and the Missouri, Lewis and Clark traveled a ways up the Platte, and found it shallow – not more than six or seven feet deep anywhere.   One of the men of the expedition had spent two winters along the Platte and told Clark that the Platte “does not rise seven feet, but Spreds over 3 miles at Some places.” Later pioneers would say the Platte was “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

And the pioneers followed the Platte.  Although Lewis and Clark — as well as Jefferson — hoped and assumed that the Missouri was the best way west, expecting there to be an easy portage between its headwaters and the Columbia River, in fact the better route was along the Platte.  Ironically, if the Lewis and Clark expedition had headed west at this location, they would have had a easier trip to the Pacific Coast. The Platte became the river of the Oregon, Missouri and Mormon Trails.

Today the Platte is worth seeing as part of a Lewis and Clark rediscovery trip, because it is one of the few major rivers of America that has not been greatly altered by channelization and dams.  Although the North Platte is dammed, it is one of the least altered of the major tributaries.

If you want to see a river that resembles the original lower Missouri before its channelization and before its levees, then one of the best things you can do is travel along the Platte.  And the Platte River’s Big Bend in the center of Nebraska is one of the most important habitats for migratory birds.  More than 240 species have been seen there, including sandhill cranes, whooping cranes, piping plovers and the least tern, species listed as endangered or of special concern.

The Platte is one of my favorite rivers, an odd, shallow, sometimes dried-out looking waif of a river meandering along a wide and sandy floodplain where scattered and usually half-starved looking cottonwoods struggle to survive on its banks and sandbars or, having lost the battle, lie as snags in its shallow current.  Between towns, the Platte and its countryside have a lonesome, open feel that is for me the character of the American West – open country, open sky, dry land.

It was the shallowness of the Platte that probably saved it from channelization and dams.  “An inch deep” – or the real average depth of the Platte – isn’t enough for a steamboat.  The Platte became the way west for those in Conestoga Wagons, on horseback or foot, guiding the way and giving enough water to drink, but never enough for navigation.

This is not to say that the Platte is without alteration.  Its waters were first diverted in 1838 and by 1885 the demand for Platte water for irrigation exceeded the average flow.  There are thousands of diversion structures and nearly 70 percent of the flow is used; what you see along the Platte is a river much closer to being an inch deep than it was at the time of Lewis and Clark.  Present flows on the Platte are about one million acre-feet a year, 4 percent of the water that flows down the Missouri River.  As a result of water diversions, the proportion of open areas, wetlands, and forested floodplains have changed, leading to concern about whether enough bird habitat remains.

Over the years, I have liked to travel along the Platte farther upstream where it  retains its prairie character.  But unfortunately it is not easy to get near the Platte other than at the places mentioned in the previous entry.  The State of Nebraska has a fine series of parks along the Platte River, but they are designed for recreation away from the river.

When I first began to explore the Missouri River country, I talked with ecologists and botanists about getting on the river.  They assured me that this would be easy because of all the Nebraska parks that fronted the Platte.  They assured me I would find outfitters who would rent canoes.  But I found nothing like this.  One day we traveled east from Lincoln, Nebraska on Interstate 80 to State Route 370 and then to Route 50, and crossed the Platte River at Louisville, Nebraska.  From there, we went south through Springfield to Schramm Park State Recreation Area.

Along the way, we stopped by a bridge over the Platte. Here the river was much wider there than it had seemed further to the west and the water was high.  A log floated past quickly, revealing a strong current.  Debris, mainly floating timber, had built up against the pilings of the bridge.  There were islands in the river and wetlands along the shore.

The Platte was so heavy with sediment that we could not see into the water at all.  Across the river was a large rock quarry where big trucks were moving and stirring dust into the air.  We drove across the Platte and stopped at the Louisville State Recreation Area located adjacent to the river.  Ironically, we could see the quarry buildings from the recreation area, but not the Platte.  We drove down to the end of the road in the park and found that the Platte was just barely visible through cottonwood trees but the river was not included in a scenic part of the park.  Between the major useable land in the recreation area and the river was an asphalt car-trailer parking area; beyond, at the very end, hidden by the cottonwoods, was my favorite prairie river.

We visited Mahoney State Park, a beautiful facility with many kinds of outdoor recreation, and a pretty lodge. The lodge was the one place where you could see the river, but that building imposed itself between everything else and the river.  You could only view the Platte from inside the lodge or on its porch.

It was a shock to find that the Platte River, one of the major rivers of the Great Plains, was so hard to get to and seemed never to be the center of attention or, even worse, to be obscured in every possible place by buildings.   This is representative of how our society has approached the relationship between human beings and nature throughout much of the twentieth century: as separate things not to be connected.

Pursuing the Platte at the right time of year is worthwhile in spite of these kinds of limitations and obstructions.  And the design of Nebraska parks is improving with the growing interest in the state’s rivers.  One of the best and most famous places to visit is Grand Island, a good two-hour drive west of Lincoln.   Grand Island is one of the most important locations on the Platte River bird migratory routes, especially for sandhill cranes. In the spring and the fall more than 500,000 of these large and magnificent birds stop for four to six weeks to feed and rest before continuing to their breeding grounds in Canada, Alaska and Siberia.  It is a bird that Lewis and Clark saw during their trip up the Missouri, and it is a characteristic bird of the central United States.  Its wingspan reaches six and a half feet, making it one of the largest birds of North America.  There are several parks at Grand Island that are near or on the river, and from these you can see the incredible abundance of the sandhill crane.

On the whole, the crane is an example of a success in biological conservation.  It was the first bird ever protected by international treaty, the 1916 bird migration treaty between the United States and Canada.   Protected from hunting, its numbers expanded to the point that in the 1960s farmers found these birds a pest as they migrated as a huge unit and ate grain from farm fields.  Hunting was proposed as a solution, but this bird has never attracted a great many hunters. Once numbering as few as 15,000 or 20,000, it has expanded greatly, repopulating the prairie.

The sandhill crane, the sandy floodplain and the Platte create a quality of the prairie countryside that was familiar to Lewis and Clark for many months.  Travel along the Platte brings back these qualities no longer accessible along most of the lower Missouri.

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.

12.  Shilling Wildlife Area: How the Platte Changes the Missouri

Shilling Wildlife Area is on the Platte River within view of the confluence with the Missouri.  To reach this wildlife area from Omaha take Route 75 south to Route 34. Follow the business loop of 34 through the town and then follow signs to the Shilling Wildlife.  From there you can go to the Plattsmouth Boat Ramp for another perspective.  Exiting the Shilling Wildlife Area, follow the road left (east) to that ramp.

From Iowa take the exit on Interstate 29 to Route 34.  Cross the Missouri River and follow Route 34 business loop north through Plattsmouth.  On the main street you will pass the County Courthouse and a sign that says “Historic Plattsmouth Welcomes You”.  Follow signs to the Shilling Wildlife Area.

On  July 21, 1804, Lewis and Clark had reached the mouth of the Platte River, at the time a well-known tributary of the Missouri.  It was a big river, one of the largest of the Missouri’s tributaries, and it was fast and full of large sandy sediment.  The sand was “remarkably small and light” and “easily boiled up and is hurried by this impetuous torrent in large masses from place to place with irristable forse.”  If Lewis needed any more evidence that rivers, as with all of nature, is in constant flux, he found it in the Platte, even more turbulent than the Missouri.  The sands were collecting and forming sandbars in the course of a few hours which “as suddingly disapated to form others and give place perhaps to the deepest channel of the river.”

The Platte flowed, Lewis wrote, with “a boiling motion” which he speculated was the result of “the roling and irregular motion of the sand of which its bed is entirely composed” — a good insight.  The bottom of the Platte, like the Missouri, is formed of its own sediment rather than bedrock or large boulders.  These bottom sediments are moved along by the water much the same way that wind drives sand.  Sediment dunes form just as sand dunes form from the wind.  These little hillocks force the water up and over, creating turbulence.  The resulting motion flows downstream and upwards, reaching the surface as large bubbling bursts that look just like boiling water in a kettle.  You can see this motion in the Missouri River when you stand along the shore.

Lewis and Clark measured the speed of the rivers, and found the Platte the fastest, running “at least” eight miles an hour.  The Missouri above the Platte was running about 3 ½ miles an hour in its widely dispersed, complex floodplain of many channels.  Below the Platte and influenced by that river, the Missouri was running five and a half miles an hour.  The faster a river flows, the heavier and coarser material it can carry, so the Platte could carry a sandy load, while the Missouri could lift only smaller silts.  Also the two rivers drained different kinds of countryside.  The Platte watershed is mostly sandy soils eroded from the Rocky Mountains and then deposited in western Nebraska long before, only to be picked up again and transported by the Platte.  The Missouri drains a landscape where the ice-age glaciers created soils of  many sizes of particles including small silts and clays.

At the mouth of the Platte the two kinds of sediment loads came together but did not yet mix.  The Platte was so swift and powerful that its current, having entered the Missouri River channel, forced the Missouri’s waters against the far bank “where it is compressed within a channel less than one third of the width it had just before occupyed,” Lewis wrote.  The currents could be distinguished by their colors.  The Platte did “not furnish the missouri with it’s colouring matter as has been asserted by some, but it throws into it immence quantities of sand.”  Lewis claimed that the separation of the currents “abates but little until it’s junction with the Mississippy.”

Both rivers were so full of sediment that neither was clear, but there was a difference.  The Platte deposited “very fine particles of white sand while that of the Missoury is composed principally of a dark rich loam – in much greater quantity.”   The Platte’s waters were “turbid at all seasons of the year but is by no means as much so as that of the Missourie.” These two painters of landscape had different palates and different styles of painting.

The Platte has a great effect on the Missouri in other ways than shoving its current to one side of the channel.  Above the Platte and below Gavins Point Dam — the farthest downstream of the dams on the Missouri — the channel is eroding and deepening — but this erosion is only in the main river channel, not in the surrounding floodplain. The river is incising itself into the engineered floodplain.

Below the mouth of the Platte, the river is depositing material on the bottomlands.  The floodplain is accumulating material, while the main channel, functioning as designed by the Army Corps of Engineers is not changing its depth; it is neither eroding or sedimenting.

The accumulating material on the Missouri River floodplain below the Platte has an important effect on floods.  This accretion is raising the level of the floodplain relative to the artificial levees, shrinking the height of the levees relative to the floodplain. The total volume of water that can be held back by the levees is therefore less.  It is like a stream carrying sand and silt into a swimming pool and depositing those sediments in the quiet waters.  Over time the sediments build up on the bottom and the pool can hold less water.  This was a factor that made the large floods of the 1990s so catastrophic.  In 1998, the Army Corps of Engineers reduced the flow from Gavins Point Dam, claiming bottom aggradation below Omaha was causing lowland flooding.

The aggrading land below the Platte has other biological effects.  As the floodplain builds up, its soils become drier; there are fewer wetlands but the soil becomes better for farming, at least where the deposits are not heavy sands.  Overall the floodplain habitats become fewer and simpler.

The Missouri is a complex system; fingers of tributaries feed waters of different colors, qualities, speeds and amounts into the main channel.  In this sense, the Missouri is many rivers, not one.  What happens on the tributaries affects the Missouri, and many of these have been channelized and controlled to prevent flooding.  Water from channelized tributaries flows faster and adds more quickly to the flood waters of a rising and dangerous Missouri.  The quality of the water from tributaries affects the Missouri, as does the chemical runoff from farms, industries and houses.  Just as the Missouri drains one-sixth of the continental United States, so does that land affect the quality of the Missouri’s waters.

Mark Brohman, and I drove to Shilling Wildlife Area at the mouth of the Platte.  Mark is the environmental scientist and lawyer with the State of Nebraska Department of Game and Parks who had taken me to Hamburg Bend as well.  Here, we watched people fish and tow their boats out of the Missouri as dusk fell.  The tumbling, mixing currents of the Platte and the Missouri still rushed together, still boiled, and still were able to evoke in us the feel of prairie and river countryside and remind us of the importance of the intimate linkages between rivers and their landscape and the constancy of change in nature.

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.

11. Hamburg Bend: The River Farms the Prairie and the Prairie Feeds the Fish

There are many habitat restoration projects on the Missouri River floodplain, some in operation, some in progress, and others planned.  Most are set up primarily as fish and wildlife habitat improvements and are not usually provided with tourist facilities or easy access.  Hamburg Bend is on the west (Nebraska) bank of the Missouri River six miles south of Nebraska City.  You can approach Hamburg Bend on the Nebraska side by taking County Route 66 from Nebraska City south and then west on County Route N.  Hamburg Bend is directly east of the small village of Minersville.  You can also go 1 mile south of Nebraska City (intersection of Highways 2 and 73/75) and drive east (left) on paved County Road K (marked by an Omaha Public Power District sign) 4 miles.  Before entering the power plant, drive south (right) on the gravel county road ½ mile, then drive east (left) 1 mile on a gravel road until you reach the parking lot adjacent to the levee.  You can walk along the levee above the bend by taking County Route N to its end and parking. To see Hamburg Bend from the Iowa Side, or to put a boat in, take Interstate 29 to the exit for the town of Hamburg, Route 333 and County Route J-64.  Take J-64 west, a gravel road, to the river’s edge and a parking area.  Hamburg Bend is across the river.

The easiest of the restoration areas to visit is Boyer’s Chute, which has visitor facilities. Boyer’s Chute is north of Omaha and east of Fort Calhoun, Nebraska.  Take Route 75 north from Omaha.  About one mile north of Nashville turn right (east) onto County Route P338, then left (north) on County Route P236, left (north) again on County Route 151, and right (east) on County Route 234.   Follow this route to the visitor’s facilities.  You can also take Route 75 north from Omaha to the southern edge of the city of Fort Calhoun.  Drive east on Madison Street until you reach Fort Atkinson Historical Park and go south (right).  On 7th Street go east (left) for 3 miles and you will reach Boyer Chute entrance.

On Tuesday, July 24, 1804,  Clark wrote that “one of the men cought a white Catfish, the eyes Small & Tale reseumbing that of a Dolfin.”  This was probably the channel catfish and Clark’s observations provided the first written description of the species, a new species to western science.  The expedition was camped on the eastern, Iowa side of the river across from Bellevue, Nebraska – a suburb of Omaha and the location of Fontenelle Forest Preserve. “Cat fish is verry Common and easy taken in any part of this river,” the journals noted at the end of July 1804.

Fish and fishing was not a major focus of the expedition.  Lewis and Clark’s eyes were on the lands along the river, their wildlife, vegetation, and their potential for settlement and development, and they were on the surface of the river whose treacherousness demanded constant alertness.    Most of the expedition’s protein came from four-footed game, especially buffalo, deer, elk and antelope.  The murky waters of the Missouri made it less likely that they would see fish unless they tried to catch some, and not too many of the men seemed to be fishing enthusiasts. This is not inconsistent with the economics of development since their time.  Fish can be an important source of protein, but usually, around the world, fishing is a minor part of the economy.

With settlement along the river, catfish became a highly desired catch.  They were an important food for those going west on the Sante Fe, Oregon, and Mormon Trails and they were important to the early homesteaders.  In the twentieth century, catfish were the focus of commercial fishery on the Missouri River and continued to be a prized recreational catch.

But like fisheries around the world, commercial fish catch on the Missouri declined in the twentieth century.  Commercial catch of catfish declined steadily after the second world war, decreasing by 61 percent between the 1940s and 1983.  Also, the average size of catfish decreased, meaning there were fewer mature adults.  Channel catfish can grow to four feet and sixty pounds and blue catfish can grow to 100 pounds, but by the 1980s channel catfish caught in the Missouri were less than 17 inches long and most were smaller.

In 1992 the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission closed all commercial harvest of catfish.  In part this decision was to help support recreational fishing, which had ranked as the major public activity on the river.

Although in Lewis and Clark’s time there were many fish in the main channel of the Missouri, these depended on quieter backwaters and on the small tributaries for many parts of their life cycle.  In those quiet waters it was also sometimes much easier to catch fish, as the expedition discovered.  On August 15, 1804, Clark took ten men to a creek along the Missouri River where they found a beaver dam and started to fish.  “With Some Small willow & Bark we made a Drag and haulted up the Creek,” Clark wrote, “and Cought 318 fish of different kind.”  He listed pike, bass, perch, catfish, something he called “salmon” but was probably a brook trout, since there are no native salmon on the Missouri, “red horse” and “a kind perch Called Silverfish on the Ohio.”

On July 29, 1804, when they were north of Omaha, Clark wrote that “we Stoped to Dine under Some high Trees near the high land” and “in a fiew minits Cought three verry large Catfish (3) one nearly white.”  He noted that “those fish are in great plenty on the Sides of the river and verry fat, a quart of Oile Came out of the Surpolous fat of one.”

The channelization and conversion of much of the floodplain from woodlands and wetlands to farming since that time has reduced the area in the backwaters and the  diversity of floodplain habitats. Along with overfishing, these habitat alterations caused the decline in many species of fish. Today there are more than 90 species found on the lower Missouri, including some introduced species that were not there at the time of Lewis and Clark.  Of these, the pallid sturgeon is listed as endangered under the U. S. Endangered Species Act and other species are listed as of special concern to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service because of their low abundances.

In recent years, work has begun on an extensive project to restore the Missouri River’s habitats for fish and wildlife.  Some of these are in the planning stage, others in development.  One of the currently active and most successful is Hamburg Bend Wildlife Management Area of the Nebraska Department of Game and Parks.  I went to Hamburg Bend to learn about the habitat of the fish and see an active restoration project.  The area occupies 1637 acres of prime hunting and fishing land and waters.  It is the first of six such areas planned in Nebraska and one of 25 or 30 planned between Sioux City and St. Louis, undertaken by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, in cooperation with state and other federal agencies (as first described in the entry on the Big Muddy National Wildlife Refuge).

Mark Brohman, an environmental scientist and lawyer with the State of Nebraska Department of Game and Parks, took me to see a number of these mitigation sites.  We viewed Hamburg Bend from the levee on the Nebraska side of the river, where I could see down to the almost hemispheric shape of the bend’s floodplain lands.  Then we went to a boat launching area on the Iowa side of the river, where we met Jerry Mestl, a fisheries biologist for the State of Nebraska Department of Game and Parks.  He took us to see Hamburg Bend in a wide, flat-bottomed aluminum boat.  Under cloudy skies and in a stiff, cold wind, we sped across the main channel of the river.  Once across the main channel we slowed, carefully moving over the turbulent, rolling waters at the entrance of a recently created chute — a side channel that had been opened up across the floodplain by the Army Corps of Engineers. The chute was meant to maintain a steady but controlled flow into the floodplain and reestablish some quiet backwaters.

Once inside the chute, Jerry put the engine at idle and we coasted down this new side channel.  The current was so gentle that he soon cut the engine completely.  The boat moved at a pleasant pace with the current, often rubbing up against the eastern shore of the chute.  Mark pushed the boat off the shore as we chatted.  Large logs were scattered all along the chute and in the water. The recently created chute was beginning to mimic some of the old river channel structures.  Jerry said that the river used to be incredibly productive of fish.  An old-timer told him recently that before channelization the reach of the river between Blair and Plattsmouth Nebraska supported 100 commercial fishermen.

I asked what was the key to restoring the fish in the river.  This appeared to be a complicated task, because there used to be so many kinds of habitats and kinds of vegetation.  But Jerry said that the key was surprisingly straightforward.

Many fish feed on insects, but in the swirling waters of the Missouri, insects have no place to gain a foothold, Jerry explained.  There are few boulders or places where bedrock outcrops into the riverbed.  Without a foothold, insects are swept downstream before they can feed.  If insects have a place to stand and feed, they can become food for fish.  In this constantly changing environment, snags – logs  that are caught in the bottom, hung up on a sand bar, or tangled in a group – provide  the main stable surface in the river.  They provide a place for insects to stand and they catch prairie grasses that fall into the river – food for insects.

Snags have been notoriously dangerous to navigation — the killers of steamboats since these first ran on the Missouri River, and destroyers of motorboats in the twentieth century.   Lewis and Clark were well aware of them as a danger that they encountered frequently.  On July 5, 1804, when they were near Atchison, Kansas, Clark wrote that “the Boat turned three times” on some driftwood.

And so there was an early movement to clear the river of these hazards.  Congress first authorized the removal of snags from the Missouri River with an act passed in 1832. By 1838, more than 2,000 large trees had been removed from the channel from the lower 400 miles of the river.   Between 1885 and 1910, these activities increased.  In 1901, along 528 miles of the river, more than 17,000 snags were removed, along with more than 6,000 trees whose limbs hung over the river.  Snag removal was completed about 1950.   As a result, insects became less abundant.  In one part of the unchannelized section of the river in Nebraska, from Gavins Point Dam to Ponca State Park, the annual production of river insects declined between 1963 and 1993 to one quarter of its former value.

Ironically, the snags that kill boats are also the saviors of the fish.  But the snags need not be in the main navigation channel.  They can lie only in side channels and backwaters.  In this way, two uses of the river, navigation and fisheries, can coexist.

A wonderful thing about the Missouri River is the resiliency of its life, because, when the habitats are available, the river provides plenty of water and nutrients.  We  can think of it as a kind of natural aquaculture.  Create a few, limited kinds of backwater channels on the river and fish production goes up.  The river is so fertile, the soil so rich and well watered that not that much else is needed.

In this way, the river farms the land.  It deposits fresh soil in some places, and there trees or prairie grow.  Elsewhere, the river undercuts and harvests.  The prairie feeds the river, but the river harvests the prairie, it harvests the floodplain forests.

In 2001, I was asked to give the Keynote address to the annual meeting of the Henry David Thoreau Society.  The talk, based on my book, No Man’s Garden, was published in The Concord Saunterer, the publication of the Thoreau Society.  Here is an except from it.

Ironies of the Information Age

During the time  that I have been an ecological scientist and involved with environmental issues, I have found several ironies of our modern technological and scientific information age. The first irony is that often we do not measure what we need to know. I have been involved in a lot of major environmental issues, from the conservation of bowhead and sperm whales to the possible effects of global warming on forests. In each case I find that there are key pieces of information missing that nobody has bothered to find out.

The second irony of the information age thing is that, if we do measure something useful, we usually don’t bother to use it. This is true among scientists as well as among public agencies and non-profit interest groups. We just archive information and forget it.

The third irony that, although we have the ability to gather many kinds of scientific information, we tend to solve environmental problems from ancient myths, plausibilities, false inferences, and ideologies. This means we often start with an answer that we wish were true and squeeze whatever scientific information we use into a mold that conforms to this wish. And we get very upset if people do not believe us.
(more…)

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.

10. Atchison, Kansas: Commerce in Beaver

See directions in the previous entry to Independence Park.

Beaver were an important part of North American fur trade long before the Lewis and Clark expedition.  Jefferson had a scientific curiosity about wildlife, plants and geology, but he was also interested in the commercial potentials of natural resources.  Two questions Lewis and Clark sought to answer were: whether beaver were abundant along their route and, if so, whether the United States might begin to take over some of the beaver trade with the Indians from Great Britain.

In spite of their interest in this species, Lewis and Clark did not record any observations of beaver until July 3, 1804, when they reached the neighborhood of Leavenworth, and Atchison, Kansas.  On that day Clark recorded that they stopped at a deserted old trading house where they “found a verry fat horse, which appears to have been lost a long time,” and passed a large island called Isle <la> de Vache or Cow Island.  On the shore was “a large Pond containg beever.”  The presence of the trading house marking the first observation of beaver suggests that Lewis and Clark were still within countryside known and used to some extent by trappers, who had exploited and pretty much eliminated beaver downstream.  Beaver, like other wild living resources, were generally perceived at the time as things to be exploited but not conserved, harvested but not sustained, and beaver were disappearing before the inroads of European-based settlement.

Lewis and Clark saw beaver next near Council Bluffs, just north of modern Omaha.  Afterwards, they saw these animals frequently. They caught a few in the fall when they had reached the Mandan villages where they would spend the winter.  The next spring, beaver were common among the cottonwoods and willows of the floodplain woodlands. Lewis and Clark’s observations are so good that they tell us that the beaver was once plentiful on streams which, as one writer has put it, “have not know(n) them for so many years that it is hard to believe they were ever present.”

Today much of the habitat along the Missouri that beaver might have used is gone – the backwaters, the bottomland forests.  Even many of the tributaries have been channelized and have levees along them.  When beaver do return, they are considered  pests whose dams flood land that people want in other uses.  So to see beaver on a Lewis and Clark journey, you will have to travel farther upstream to less intensively developed areas.  We saw a beaver house and a large cottonwood partially chewed through by beaver on our Zodiac boat trip from Niobrara State Park; both were on a large island in the Missouri River just upstream from the mouth of the Niobrara River.  We saw other signs of beaver in the wild and scenic portion of the Missouri River near Vermillion, South Dakota.  Such are the places, away from human settlement, a traveler in 1804 and today, would be likely to see these once common animals.

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.

9. Benedictine Bottom: Pollution as a Problem of Landscape Design

Benedictine Bottom is best observed from the campus of Benedictine College.  Route 59 is the main highway to Atchison, Kansas, passing through the city from east to west.  To reach the college campus, take 6th street north from Route 59 then turn right (east) onto Commercial Street and follow that to 2nd Street. Take 2nd Street north (left) up the bluff to the campus.  Drive onto the college campus and through the campus to a lookout from the bluff over Independence Creek, Benedictine Bottom, and the Missouri River.  To go to Independence Park, take Commercial Street past 2nd Street to River Street. Turn left (north) to the park.

On July 4, 1804, the expedition reached a tributary that entered the Missouri at the location of modern Atchison, Kansas.  Here they camped in what Clark wrote was “one of the most butifull Plains, I ever Saw, open & butifully diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the river covered with grass and a few scattering trees.”  The Creek was “handsom” and “The Plains of this countrey are covered with a Leek Green Grass, well calculated for the sweetest and most norushing hay,” suggesting that Clark was thinking of uses to which the land might be put.  Here, there seemed a wonderful potential for farming.  The land was already producing much to eat.  “Groops of Shrubs covered with the most delicious froot is to be seen in every direction, and nature appears to have exerted herself to butify the Senery by the variety of flous Delicately and highly flavered raised above the Grass, which Strikes & profumes the Sensation, and amuses the mind.”  The grassland was “interspersed with Cops of trees,” and the trees spread “ther lofty branchs over Pools springs or Brooks of fine water.”

The country was so beautiful that Clark wrote that it “throws into Conjecterng the cause of So magnificent a Senergy in a Country thus Situated far removed from the Sivilized world to be enjoyed by nothing but the Buffalo Elk Deer & Bear in which it abounds.”  It was one of the few times that Clark departed from his usually direct reporting style and list of measurements and waxed philosophical.

Since it was Independence Day, Lewis and Clark “ussered in the day by a discharge of one shot from our Bow piece,” the cannon, and named the tributary “Independence Creek,” a name that it still carries.

Today Atchison, Kansas is heavily developed and the surrounding countryside has been primarily in farmland for a long time.  We visited Atchison with Glenn Covington, Environmental Research Specialist with the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers office in Kansas City.  Trained in biology, Glenn was in charge of Benedictine Bottom, one of the  Missouri River mitigation projects, across Independence Creek from Atchison.  At the mouth of Independence Creek is a narrow but pleasant park and boat ramp.  The tributary, like many along the lower Missouri, has been channelized and levees have been built along its edges to protect farm land that developed in the bountiful landscape so appreciated by Clark.  Glenn said that the mouth had been straightened so that the Creek no longer entered the Missouri River exactly where Lewis and Clark saw it do so.

On July 4, 1804, Lewis walked up a “high moun from the top of which he had an extensive view” from which he saw “great numbers of Goslings.”  After viewing the park, we did the same, and traveled up the bluffs on city streets to the campus of Benedictine College.  Along the edge of the bluff of this pleasant campus, probably the same summit where Lewis stood, we sat on a park bench and we looked out to Independence Creek and Benedictine Bottom and the Missouri River beyond.  Benedictine Bottom consists of a large section still in row-crop agriculture on the bottomland that Clark so admired as a site for farming, and another that is in an early stage of restoration to wildlife habitat.  The view from the college is a good place to compare the two uses of the land.

Since the time of Lewis and Clark, the Missouri River Basin has become one of the nation’s major agricultural areas; about 95 percent of the basin’s use is for agriculture.  The emphasis on the lower Missouri downstream from Gavin’s Point Dam is on row crops; west and upstream, past the 100th longitudinal meridian, the predominant farming shifts to grazing.  This large-scale agriculture has been a great benefit to the United States, but it also has brought changes of an invisible kind not imaginable to Lewis and Clark or their contemporaries: the introduction of artificial chemicals used as pesticides and the increase in levels of nitrate and phosphate from widespread application of fertilizers.

Before the channelization of the Missouri River, measurements of water quality were few and scattered, but provide some baseline measurements.  These suggest that by 1984 nitrate and phosphate concentrations in the Missouri River waters below the big dams had increased to four times the baseline level.  Meanwhile, upstream in the reservoirs, nitrate and phosphate seemed to have decreased.

This downside of agriculture became apparent in 1964, when a fish kill extended more than 100 miles downstream from Kansas City, Missouri.  Monitoring of pesticides remained spotty, but between 1968 and 1976 fish flesh at Council Bluffs, Iowa, had concentrations of the pesticide dieldrin that exceeded public health standards in 13 percent of the samples, and DDT and its breakdown products exceeded public health standards in one third of the samples.  In the early 1970s, PCBs, aldrin and dieldrin levels in fish analyzed at Hermann, Missouri, posed a potential health threat.  In the mid 1970s dieldrin levels were high enough in catfish that the Missouri Department of Conservation issued warnings.  People stopped buying catfish, affecting commercial fisheries.

Pesticides were arriving in the river not just from agriculture but from urban, suburban, and industrial use.  By 1984, chlordane, commonly used at the time against household pest such as termites, exceeded established safe levels in fish in the lower Missouri.  In 1987 the Missouri Department of Health advised against consumption of specific commercial fish species from certain areas of the Missouri River because of contamination with toxic compounds.

When I returned from this trip I began to look into more recent information about the levels of pesticides and fertilizers in the Missouri River.  About 700 million pounds of pesticides of more than 100 compounds are applied nationwide, and herbicides account for about 60 percent of the total pesticides found in the nation’s waters.  Public health standards and environmental effects standards have been established for some but not all of these compounds.  I searched the scientific literature, the World Wide Web, and called many of my scientific colleagues who study rivers or organic chemicals, and scientists I had met while exploring the Missouri River countryside.  Surely, I thought, people who have done experiments to determine what happens to pesticides put onto row crops — how fast they decay, how fast they are transported to the river by water flowing on and below the surface.  Surely they have done experiments to determine what scientists call the “dose-response curve” — the curve showing effects on a species as the concentration of a toxin increases.  But I could not find such studies for actual locations in the Missouri River Valley or for fish and wildlife species found there.  All my colleagues agreed that the necessary research to determine the effects of these chemicals on fish and wildlife in the Missouri River had not been done.

Some things were being done.  Monitoring for the levels of these chemicals in the waters had increased greatly.  The United States Geological Survey has established a network for monitoring  60 sample watersheds throughout the nation.  One of these is for the Platte River, one of the major tributaries of the Missouri River.  The most common herbicides used for growing corn, sorghum and soybeans along the Platte River were alachlor, atrazine, cyanazine, and metolachlor, all organonitrogen herbicides. Monitoring on the Platte near Lincoln, Nebraska suggested that, during heavy spring runoff, concentrations of some herbicides might be reaching or exceeding established public health standards.  But this research is just beginning and it is difficult to make definitive conclusions about whether present concentrations are causing harm in public water supplies or to wildlife, fish, algae in fresh waters, or vegetation.  The advances in knowledge tell us much more and on a more regular basis how much of many artificial compounds are in the waters, but we are still unclear about their environmental effects.

The search for adequate information was frustrating.  Here was a potentially major national problem that received relatively little attention; most of the focus on pollution has been on urban, industrial, and feedlots, much less on pollution from row crop agriculture.  We are conducting experiments with nature without the usual qualities of the scientific method: treatments and controls, adequate monitoring, and  adequate long-term experimentation in laboratories.

The view from the bluff at Atchison was a mixed one.  It was not my purpose in  traveling the Lewis and Clark country to simply add another lament for the loss of the beauty of the past countryside; many have done that well before me.  Here I was seeking to understand how we go wrong, not merely that we may or may not have gone wrong.  The scene below us was a combination of farmlands, wetlands, streams, rivers and heavy land development.  It was no longer a scene to rhapsodize about the way  Clark did in 1804.  It was not that the land had been converted to uses with human benefits that was the problem for me.  It was that these changes seemed to have been done in the large part without the kind of care for design and beauty that one would take in the garden-like surroundings that Clark had found.  So it seemed with the invisible effects our activities were having on the river.  It was not so much a matter of absolute rights or wrongs, of winner and loser, but of an overall perspective.  What was needed was a connection between people and their natural resources, one that would lead us to be careful in causing novel changes in nature, to follow the best scientific procedure to assess their effects before putting them into use.