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.