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.