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.