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.