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.

17. Fort Atkinson State Historical Park: The River Shapes the Floodplain, Creating Good and Poor Sites for Settlement

Take Route 75 north from downtown Omaha, Nebraska, past the Interstate Beltway 680 around Omaha.  Go north on Route 75 to the town of Fort Calhoun.  A sign on Route 75 clearly marks the road to Fort Atkinson State Historical Park.

One of the most famous incidents of the Lewis and Clark expedition was their meeting on August 3, 1804 with the chiefs of the Otos and Missouri tribes on bluffs along the shore of the Missouri River just north of modern Omaha, Nebraska.

On July 23, 1804, Lewis and Clark sent Drewyer and Crousett  “with Some tobacco to invite the Otteaus if at their town and Panies if they Saw them to Come and talk with us at our Camp.”  The search for the Indians continued for more than a week, because the buffalo were in abundance and the Indians were hunting and away from their villages.  Meanwhile, the expedition sought a good location for a camp where they would meet the Indians.

Lewis and Clark named the meeting site Council Bluff, to commemorate their first major council with the Indians.  Historians have established that the town given that name in Iowa is south of the actual meeting place. The real Council Bluff was probably at or near the site of Fort Atkinson State Historical Park, near what is now an interstate beltway around the city.  And the river has meandered enough since Lewis and Clark passed this way that it may no longer exist as a bluff overlooking the river.  We decided to visit Fort Atkinson State Historical Park because this is at least very similar to the original location in its environmental attributes.  I was curious what kind of place Lewis and Clark chose as their first major meeting with Indian tribes.  To this point in their journey, they had encountered Indians, but not held a formal interchange.

On July 30, 1804, the two captains had left their camp early and walked three and three-quarter miles west, through “the most beautiful prospect imaginable.”  Between the river bottom and the prairie, Clark distinguished several distinct levels.  At the lowest level, along the river, Clark saw a “beautiful bottom land  . . . interspersed with groves of timber” containing willow, cottonwood, mulberry, elm, sycamore, and ash.  These are floodplain species.  If bottomland habitats along the river were restored today, this layering of kinds of trees would reappear.

Above that was a “lower Prarie” situated “above high water mark at the foot of the riseing ground & below the High Bluff.”   This was a river bench – a term geologists use – which means a kind of natural terracing, and finally at the top the uplands of prairies interspersed with groves of trees.  Today, geologists have come to understand that the river benches are the result of past changes in river flow and floods, deposition and erosion.

At the top, Lewis and Clark were in a “Clear open Prarie” which they estimated was “about 70 feet higher than the bottom.”  Clark wrote that the prairie extended as far as they could see and was “covered with grass about 10 or 12″ inches high, interspersed with groves of walnut, oak, hickory, Kentucky coffee tree, and basswood.  These are the trees characteristic of the upland forests in the better watered locations and on the best soils within the prairie.

Clark wrote extensive and detailed notes about the countryside he saw on that day, notes that are fascinating in the precision of his observations of the countryside.

He provides an accurate description of the physical shape of the landscape near the Missouri, before it was channelized in the twentieth century, as geologists understand these formations today.  And he also accurately described the different sets of vegetation found according to their nearness to the river, and therefore the frequency of flooding and the kind of soil.  With this description of the landscape on so large a pallet, Clark shows himself to be an interested and careful observer of natural history, one whose records I felt I could trust to be good depictions of the environment before major changes took place.  It was a big landscape, a big river valley where the river had deposited and eroded the land for a distance that Clark estimated “to be from 4 to 20 ms” from bluff to bluff.  It is a landscape big enough that most of us would drive through it without noticing these subtle differences in the countryside.

Clark thought that the location seemed ideal, not just for a council with the Indians on one day, but for future settlement.  “Perhaps no other situation is as well Calculated for a Trading establishment” Clark wrote of the site they selected.  Clark was right about this site, in the large and in detail.  A fort was established there in 1819 but the designers did not have the same eye for the landscape as Clark; they made the mistake of putting the fort along the river, on the bottomland.  This creates two problems: the dampness and abundance of insects can be unhealthy, and there is always a chance of floods.  A Yellowstone party – a group of travelers/explorers – spent the winter of 1819-20 at this fort, and sickness and bitter cold took the lives of more than 160 members of the expedition. A disastrous spring flood prompted the move from the bottomlands to the present site on the valley terrace above the floodplain.  When you walk around this location, consider its advantages in contrast to other locations.

Clark was aware of the importance of what geographers call site and situation, an idea about the location of forts, towns, and cities that we have all too often forgotten.  The “situation” is the relationship of one location to transportation and resources.  The situation of Fort Atkinson was excellent, near to the Missouri River as well as to wood, clay for bricks, and excellent soil for farming.  The “site” is the physical, chemical, and ecological conditions of a location.  Down by the river, on the floodplain, is a notoriously poor site, while up on the prairie, on the bluffs, where the clean wind blows and there is no danger of flooding, the site is excellent.  As we live through the floods on the Missouri at the end of the twentieth century, we should relearn the concepts that came so naturally to Clark, an experienced outdoorsman who was fascinated with the countryside and its potentials.

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.

16. The Allwine Prairie: Once Vast Prairies Are Now Rare

At 144th and State streets, Omaha. There are several routes from downtown Omaha.  You can take Route 64 west to 144th Street and go north on that street to the intersection with State Street.  Or you can take Interstate 680, the beltway, to Exit 6 and go northwest on Route 133 to the intersection with State Street.  Take State Street west to 144th St.  Permission is required; contact the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

We were standing at the corner of 144th and State Street in Omaha, Nebraska, looking for a prairie.  It was a sunny late afternoon in August, and we had left a large, sprawly Ramada Inn on the westside of Omaha, driving for more than an hour through dense rush hour traffic.  The air was hot, the paved landscape busy.

Following the directions we had been given, we reached the outskirts of the city, where the land opened into active farms, suburban homes, and tree-shaded roads.  We had been told to look past the intersection where we were and that we would see a sign.  There it was, attached to a tall chain-link fence:  “This is the Allwine Prairie Preserve, a Research Area of the University of Nebraska, Omaha.”

We parked on the side of the road and got out to stare at the peculiar site.  The fence protected the prairie preserve from us and us from the prairie.   For the past week, we had been searching the Nebraska and Iowa countryside, with advice from many friends and prairie experts, for remnants of the tallgrass prairie, and here was one, but locked away, protected, preserved.

It was an ironic sight.  In the pre-European settlement landscape, the landscape of Lewis and Clark, prairie once covered more land in the United States than any other kind of vegetation – more area than the green deciduous forests of the East that spread from Maine to Georgia; more area than the deserts of the southwest; more than that of the boreal forests that covered our northern border from Maine to Minnesota and spread into Canada to Hudson Bay.

Prairies dominated the landscape where it was too dry for forests, but not so dry as to allow cacti, coyote bush and sagebrush.  Here, most of the rain occurs in the spring and summer — from April through September — and averages about 29 inches a year – wet for prairie land.  In this wetter end of the prairie, fire keeps forest out, and in this experimental preserve, fires were lit regularly to maintain the grasslands.

At the time of Lewis and Clark, the prairie reached from the middle of Minnesota and the western side of Iowa to the Rocky Mountains.  Prairie reached north to the tundra in Canada, covered much of Saskatchewan and Alberta, covered eastern Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, western Illinois and Ohio, eastern Wyoming and Colorado, Kansas, western Missouri, the eastern edge of New Mexico, and spread into Oklahoma and Texas, ending at the edge of the desert in Arizona.  Separate outliers extended in the far West: the Palouse grasslands of Washington and the grasslands of California’s Great Central Valley.  These vast and often seemingly empty lands were the home of the Apache, Assiniboine, and Cheyenne; the Chippewa, Comanche, and Crow; the Kiowa, Mandan, Omaha, Osage, the Otee, Pawnee, Ponca, Sioux, and Wichita.   Prairies at one time covered one-fourth of the Earth’s surface: the steppes of Asia, the pampas of South America, the veld of South Africa.

I stared at the fence and the sign.  Why look for a prairie within a great city rather than in the countryside? Because it is only in tiny remnants, like the Allwine Prairie Restoration, that prairie exists today.  I thought about the typical impression of the Midwest by those who do not live there and only pass through it.  Easterner friends always say to me “drive as fast as you can from the mountains of the East to the mountains of the West; get past all that corn and soybeans, it’s so flat and boring.”  But originally prairies not only covered vast areas, they were, in that vastness, beautiful, overwhelming.   Staring at the locked up prairie, I could only think about the early impressions of the tall grasses by Lewis and Clark.   It was in the prairies that Lewis and Clark began the transition from the civilization they knew to the land unsettled by people of European descent, and it was through the prairies, on their return, that they re-entered their civilization.   So it was the prairies that first gave them the sensations of wild America.

Reading accounts of early travelers across America had fascinated me for years, and I remembered the descriptions of later travelers.  One was Josiah Gregg, who traveled the prairie by horseback some decades after Lewis and Clark and wrote that the land of tall grasses was “as level as the seas” and was so immense and wide that “the compass was our surest, as well as our principal guide.”  It was the big sky country.

“North America’s characteristic landscape,” Walt Whitman wrote, “while less stunning at first sight” than Yosemite, Niagara Falls and the upper Yellowstone, the prairie scenes “last longer, fill the aesthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest.”

But the American prairies contain some of the best farmland in the world, wonderful soils under a good, if fickle climate, and the land first opened up by Lewis and Clark was rapidly converted to corn and wheat and other small grains, and later to soybeans.  There was so much prairie that it seemed not a valuable commodity by itself, and few paid attention to its rapid disappearance.  In the nineteenth century, this vast, fertile and beautiful landscape had no hero, no John Muir, no Aldo Leopold.

And so the prairie all but disappeared.

We parked and got out and walked over to an interpretative sign that told us that the Prairie Preserve was “a reestablished bluestem grassland research area” on 140 acres that had been previously farmed.   The land had been donated to the University in 1959 and seeded in 1970 with native grasses – mainly big and little bluestem (known to botanists as Andropogon gerardii and Andropogon scoparus), with smaller amounts of side oats grama, Bouteloua, and Indian Grass (Sorghastum nutans), all major grasses of the eastern prairie.

We walked over to the restored prairie and saw some tall forbs (tall flowering plants that are not grasses) about six feet high, scattered among the grasses that grew about four feet tall.  Above, swallows swirled over the prairie.  Beyond, to our right, there was a large farm field where a John Deere tractor was pulling a hay harvester.   The tractor growled and shifted gears.  The harvester-bailer opened its huge jaws and vomited out a great cylinder of brown hay, neatly tied.  The jaws clanked shut and, almost with a smack of lips, settled down as the tractor began to mow once again, driving through a perfection of geometric uniformity.  In contrast to the farmland, the prairie vegetation appeared very patchy – a bunch of tall forbs in one place, some patches of grass, then a bunch of another flower; upslope the grasses had the reddish hue of little bluestem.

Seeing little bluestem was like visiting with an old friend, because this prairie grass found its way east thousands of years ago – during an especially warm period after the end of the last glaciers – a tongue of prairie that stuck out from Iowa into Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, east past New York City and all the way to eastern Long Island where, if you look carefully, you can see its pretty rusty-hue on the slopes along the Northern State Parkway as you drive to Orient Point, the far end of that island.

So here we were, viewing a restored prairie, and a tiny patch of one at that.  It was better than not seeing prairie at all, but there was none of the sense of vastness, of that special wind-wavy wildness.  Standing between farm field and restored prairie, we could see that the two fit together easily.  Unlike a lot of other conservation issues, there wasn’t a conflict here except for space.  Prairie and farmland can exist side by side.

In our century, the novelist Wallace Stegner, who grew up in the northern remnants of the prairie landscape called it “this grand ocean of wind-troubled grass and grain” which had “the biggest sky anywhere” and “a light to set a painter wild, a light pure, glareless, and transparent.”  He wrote that “the drama of this landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always moving. . . looked at for any length of time, they begin to impose their aweful perfection on the observer’s mind.”  It was that feeling of the big sky and the big grasses as far as the eye could see that I was searching for, a kind of wildness unfamiliar to modern America.  We returned to our car and set out once again to look for a larger patch of that aweful perfection, somewhere to the north, perhaps.

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.

15.  Fontenelle Forest Preserve: Killing Nature with Kindness

Fontenelle Forest and Neale Woods are two segments owned by the same non-profit organization.  The larger and main facility, Fontenelle Forest, is in Bellevue, a suburb south of Omaha, at 1111 Bellevue Blvd., North, Bellevue Nebraska 68005, (402) 731-3140.  Neale Woods Nature Center is to the north of Omaha, at 14323 Edith Marie Ave., Omaha, Nebraska 68112, (402) 453-5615.

To get to Fontenelle Forest go south on 13th Street in Omaha (an exit off of Interstate 80); drive to Bellevue (a short distance); look for signs that direct you to the left onto Camp Brewster Road which ends at a T intersection. Turn right, following a sign to the forest, and the entrance is on your left within a city block.

On July 22, 1804 the expedition reached the vicinity of modern Bellevue, Nebraska, just south of Omaha, on Papillion Creek. Lewis and Clark decided to camp here on the Iowa side of the river for several days, to dry out some of their provisions that had gotten wet and to see if they could find Indian chiefs and set up the meeting they would have soon afterwards at the place they called Council Bluffs.

The eastern white-tailed deer was common here as it had been on the journey, and was a common source of meat for the expedition.  On this day they brought in five deer, five the next, two on the 25th.  Deer were so common and readily taken that Clark noted on July 26th that “only 1 Deer Killed to day.” On July 27th, the expedition moved on upriver and Clark observed that on the Nebraska side there was “high land covered with timber.”

Today the Nebraska side of this location is the setting for Fontenelle Forest, the premier conservation organization of Nebraska.  It is one of the best places to see the upland woods and forests along this section of the Missouri.   I had been there several times and enjoyed the well maintained paths through the woodlands and down into hollows, the view of the river through the trees, and the  knowledgeable staff.  It is also one of the few places directly on the lower Missouri River where you can take natural history field courses and participate in guided hiking trips.

Fontenelle Forest has 368 species of flowering plants including 38 species of native trees, 17 species of shrubs, and 13 woody vines.   The woodlands are good habitat for birds, and more than 300 species have been observed in Fontenelle Forest and the surroundings.  Just as it was good deer habitat when Lewis and Clark were here, so it continues to be today.  In fact, it has become too good a deer habitat.

At Fontenelle Forest the latest scientific approaches to conservation and management of wild living resources are attempted.  So it was ironic and intriguing that the forest would be subjected in recent years to a problem with deer not of the staff’s own making.  In the 1980s the deer population increased noticeably within the preserve, both on the upland loess bluffs and the large wooded bottomland.  The problem continued into the 1990s where the feeding of the deer on young trees reduced saplings by 70 percent, a potentially serious decline in the ability of the forest to regenerate.  Deer, so much loved by people, were becoming a serious problem.

The rapid rise in deer appeared to be in part the result of the suburbanization of the land adjacent to Fontenelle Forest.  The surrounding high bluff was becoming an attractive place to build homes.  And with the best of intentions and the desire to have a pleasant setting, homeowners planted gardens and put in trees.  Many of the plants they grew were typical of young woodlands — low shrubs and small trees — just the kind of vegetation that deer loved to eat.

From a distance the Fontenelle woodlands resemble the wooded riverside seen by Lewis and Clark, but up close the forest has become denser and shadier.  Deer are animals of young woodlands.  They cannot reach very high and in a very old, very shady forests there are few leaves they can reach.  The kinds of trees and shrubs they prefer grow primarily in open areas or young forests, and this is what the suburban landscape was providing in abundance. The human neighborhood created a cafeteria of great interest and benefit to the deer, and the deer population soared.

The staff at Fontenelle Nature Preserve thought the problem over.  The first important point is to understand that deer depend on certain kinds of changes in nature, contrary to the usual assumptions that nature left alone by people remains constant.  Although a local 1959 publication by the Omaha Botany Club called the woodlands a “virgin forest,” the forest is not so.   Photographs from the turn of the twentieth century revealed much more open woodlands with oak and hickories scattered among prairie grasses, than occur now.  These oak openings are a product of frequent fires that occur naturally on prairies.  Oak openings develop on the wetter sites.  On the drier sites, prairie grasses return after fires.  Deer prefer acorns and require leaves and twigs of shrubs and trees; they need young forests and therefore are adapted to and require a landscape that changes, subjected to natural fires.

So deer depend on changes occurring in forests.  Nature does not paint the landscape once, but continuously revises the canvas.  If there were never any disturbance, never fire, then the forests would develop into closed woodlands of large trees, dense shade, and little that the deer could reach and eat.  The deer themselves are a force of change.  Given young forests and a high density of deer, these animals can convert woodlands to grasslands.

A deer hunt was organized in the early 1990s.  The hunt was restricted initially to where the deer seemed to congregate most, on Gifford Point, the bottomlands within the preserve.  The assumption was that the deer herd moved about freely and removing the deer from one part of the preserve would reduce the population density everywhere.    This seemed obvious, I thought, remembering the three deer I had seen swim the Missouri River on a cold April not far from this location.  It seemed obvious that the deer moved rather freely about the countryside as their need for food, habitat, cover, and breeding required.  But often the obvious, the plausible, isn’t true about wildlife.

These first efforts had some effects, but not as much as was expected.  In 1994 Fontenelle Forest began a cooperative research program with faculty at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.  As part of the study, 51 deer were tagged to learn about their movements within and outside the preserve. To everybody’s surprise, the deer maintained very small home ranges – often less than ½ square mile.  So the deer “do not act like gas molecules,” said Gary Garabrandt, Chief Ranger of the Fontenelle Forest Association . They do not fill a vacuum of deer.  They are not completely interchangeable gears in a machine.  Removing deer from one location does not result in immediate replacement from deer from elsewhere.

So the practice of harvesting deer from one part of the preserve was not having the desired effect.  Deer were not moving in at the rate expected from areas of high density to those that had been lowered by hunting.  In 1995 there were 495 deer in the seven square miles of the preserve, a density of 70 deer per square mile.  The staff at the forest determined that there should be no more than 20 deer per square mile. At this density or lower, the forest could withstand deer browsing and regenerate.

Taking this new finding into account, the Association adjusted the allowed hunting so that it could occur in more locations but remain carefully managed.  Along with the new hunting policy, the staff encouraged local homeowners to plant less palatable plants and provided information about these. In 1997 the overwintering population of deer in the preserve had been reduced to 316 or 45 deer in a square mile, and by 1998 to 256 or 36 per square mile.  The program appeared to be working towards the desired level.

The approach to deer management at Fontenelle Forest, with changes in policy made as new information develops, is known as adaptive management.  Scientific research is integrated into the management and conservation practices.  As part of adaptive management, nature was monitored and experiments were set up.  Part of this process was the establishment of exclosures within the preserve.  Four of these, each almost a quarter of an acre in area with eight-foot high fences to keep out the deer, have been set up.  These serve as controls to compare growth of young trees where deer cannot reach with growth of young trees on land subjected to deer browsing. The exclosures are part of a guide to whether the population of deer has been sufficiently reduced.

The experiences at Fontenelle Forest reveal the naturalness of certain changes but also help us separate desirable from undesirable changes.  For the purposes of Fontenelle Forest, whose goal is to have representatives of these forests much as Lewis and Clark saw them, desirable changes include frequent light fires and some browsing by deer, but not too much.  The experiences at Fontenelle forest also reinforced for me that we had to look beyond what seemed obvious and plausible, and continually test our knowledge against observations.  Here at Fontenelle Forest people are learning to refine general concept of natural change into practices of adaptive management that will maintain the countryside in ways that people want to see it.  When you visit the forest you can see another kind of countryside that is reminiscent of landscapes of the Lewis and Clark expedition.  And while you are there you can look at the forest for signs of deer, their browsing, and fires past and present.

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.

14. Omaha, Nebraska: Down the River with the Army Corps of Engineers

There are a few commercial boat trips on the Missouri River such as the Belle Riverboat Cruises which leaves from Abbott Driver at Freedom Park Rd in Omaha, Nebraska (402-342-3553).  It is likely that, as interest grows in the Lewis and Clark expedition and in recreation on the Missouri River, more boat operations will develop, so you should check in the major cities, especially Omaha, but also in Yankton, SD.

Anybody can build a bridge that will stand up; only an engineer can build a bridge that will just barely stand up.
– Anonymous

Before its valley was settled, the Missouri’s floods were not destructive, as they are now viewed, but beneficial events that rejuvenated the river.”
— Ken Bouc, In “Nebraska Land,” a publication of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.

From the beginning of the expedition, there was no doubt to Lewis and Clark that navigating the Missouri River in their boats was difficult.  On May 15, 1804, Clark wrote that they went nine miles and that “the Boat run on Logs three times to day.”  On May 23, 1804, Clark wrote that they “Set out early run on a log: under water and Detained one hour.”  And on the next day Clark reported that they passed through an reach called “Devils race Grounds,” and as they were passing a small island the boat struck the sands “which is continerly roaling (& turned) the Violence of the Current was so great that the Toe roap Broke, the Boat turned Broadside, as the Current Washed the Sand from under her She wheeled & lodge on the bank below as often as three times, biefore we got her in Deep water.”  This was accomplished “by mean of Swimmers.”

Boat transportation developed rapidly after the Lewis and Clark expedition, always meeting with the same difficulties, and it was not long before people traveling on the river began to petition Congress to do something to improve the safety of the navigation and to protect the increasing number of settlements from the river’s floods.   By 1884 Congress established a Missouri River Commission to improve navigation of the river by stabilizing the channel, protecting banks from erosion and removing snags.  In 1912 Congress authorized a six foot deep, 180-foot wide-channel to be constructed between Kansas City and St. Louis, extended in 1927 to Sioux City.  But the big changes in the engineering of the river began during the Great Depression.  The Flood Control Act of 1936 authorized “works of improvement” on more than 50 rivers, and in 1937 the first of the six big dams on the Missouri, Fort Peck, was completed in Montana.  The Pick-Sloan plan was authorized by Congress in 1944 for the construction of the six big dams as well as bank stabilization, hydropower generation, and maintenance of the navigation channel.  The next year the Rivers and Harbors Act authorized a much deeper and wider channel: nine feet deep and 275 feet wide.

With the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, concerns grew about the loss of wildlife and fish habitat on the Missouri from these alterations.  Between 1975 and 1980 the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers built “environmental notches” on more than 1,000 wing dikes between Sioux City and St. Louis to provide fish habitats.  In 1978 two portions of the river, 149 miles in Montana and 59 miles below Gavins Point Dam between South Dakota and Nebraska, were made part of the National Wild and Scenic River System.

Naturally, because Lewis and Clark traveled on the Missouri River, I wanted to travel the same way whenever possible to view the river from a similar perspective.  But I discovered early that it is not easy to get on a boat that travels a good distance on the lower Missouri River below Gavins Point Dam.  There are a few commercial tourist boats, one leaving from Omaha.  If you are curious about the river, it is well worth it to search these few opportunities out.  I had tried for several years to get onto the lower Missouri, without success.

Finally,  I had the good fortune to arrive in Omaha in April, the day before the Army Corps of Engineers was to send its large boat, The Mandan, down the river to St. Louis to check the condition of the river channel.  The Mandan makes this trip once or twice a year.  There was room on the boat for a few passengers and I was able to squeeze onboard.

It was a raw, windy day with heavy clouds threatening rain when we walked up the gangplank at 7:30 in the morning, our feet clanging against the cold metal.  People from several state and other federal agencies were also on board, some from wildlife refuges, to see the landscape and the river.

As the boat powered down the river, I talked with several of the engineers and started with the tough question:  “How does it feel to work for the agency that is enemy number one for many environmental groups?” Steve Earl, the head of the Omaha Army Corps of Engineering Office, responded: “You have to understand that we are just the tool of Congress.  In the last century and the first part of this one, Congress wanted the river safe for navigation and told us to do that, and we did,” he said “Now Congress asks us to restore wildlife and fish habitat.  We can do that, and we are.”

“We are caught between a lot of desires for different uses of the river,” another engineer added.  “You could say that whatever we do makes somebody unhappy.  But to understand our job, you have to understand the river as a huge hydrologic system, and you have to understand our responsibilities.”

I learned that, in an average year, the water that flows down the Missouri River is enough to cover 25 million acres a foot deep – 8.4 trillion gallons.  The average water use in the United States is 100 gallons a day per person — very high compared to the rest of the world.  In some countries, people make do with 10 gallons or less a day.  At 100 gallons use a day, the Missouri’s flow is enough to provide domestic water and public water use in the United States for about 230 million people. With a little water conservation and reduction in per capita use, the Missouri provides enough water for all the people, so great is its flow.

The six major dams on the river were designed for several purposes: to hold back and control flood waters; to release water so that there would always be enough in the channels for safe navigation; to keep enough water in the reservoirs to provide that flow in years of drought; and to provide water for irrigation.

There are two kinds of dams on the Missouri: big storage dams and control dams.  The storage dams are the ones farthest upstream: Fort Peck, Garrison, and Oahe, each of which can store approximately 25 million acre-feet; together they store a three-year supply of Missouri River water flow even if there were no rain or snow.

“Under perfect conditions, the storage drops to 50 million acre feet — a two year supply — in March, just before spring runoff from the mountains,” another engineer chimed in.  “Then we hope that the spring runoff will just be enough to fill the reservoirs back up to a three-year supply.”  As the upper dams fill, water is released to the three lower dams, which then release water so that the channel is maintained as close as possible to desired steady-state conditions.

“But when the weather doesn’t cooperate, then somebody is bound to be unhappy.  If there is a drought, then the storage may fall below two years,” one of the engineers continued.  “If there is a very wet year, then the dams reach their maximum capacity and water has to be released, with flooding the result. One of the things nobody planned on originally is that a lot of recreation grew up on the reservoirs.  Now in a drought year, when we have to let the water level fall in the dams, a lot of people complain that we are ruining the recreation.  People come from all over the West now to fish in the reservoirs.  Upstream people have become used to the reservoirs and want them at a high level.  Downstream they want no floods.  The farmers want land that is farmable…. We can’t solve everybody’s problem at the same time.”

The construction of the dams also meant that large areas of land would be covered by the reservoirs and lost as fish and wildlife habitats.  The big three of these six impound almost a million acres: Fort Peck 249,000 acres, Garrison 368,000, Oahe 371,000.  The three downstream, smaller dams impounded something under 200,000 acres: Big Bend 61,000; Fort Randall 102,000, Gavins Point 32,000.

Channelization of the river shortened it by 127 shoreline miles below the dams, by cutting off meanders – a loss of about five percent of the length.

Today, the idea of altering so much of a major river seems strange to many of us, but during the 1920s and 1930s, with the Dust Bowl and the Depression, our society embraced the idea that we needed big dams on our big rivers to provide water for irrigation and electricity for power.  During the same era that the big dams were being built on the Missouri, they were also being built on the Columbia, the other great river of the Lewis and Clark expedition.  Woody Guthrie was one of the first employees of the Bonneville Power Administration, set up to build the Columbia River dams. He was hired to write songs about the huge projects and popularize dams for irrigation and power, and he believed in it.

“Roll on Columbia roll on, Roll on Columbia Roll on, Your powers are turning the darkness to light, So Roll on Columbia Roll on,” Woody wrote.  About the Grand Coulee, he wrote it was “the biggest thing ever made by a man, to power our factories and water our land, so roll on Columbia roll on.”

Woody Guthrie was a social activist, a union organizer, a political radical; his support of these projects and his songs about their benefits show how different our society’s attitude was about the rivers.  They were just “a thousand years of water going to waste” he wrote in another song.

To understand the dilemmas that face us — our society — the people of America — we have to understand that social context about the environment.  In a time of desperation for many people, turning the power of the rivers to create jobs and better the lives of the poor was seen as a social good and an important political movement.

The irony from our perspective is that these dreams of social good came at the price of a high environmental cost, familiar today.   Not only were large areas of floodplain habitat lost, but the control of the flow removed seasonal patterns of change.  Before channelization and control of the flow, there was a natural hydrological seasonal pattern, with two floods in the spring.  The first was in March when the ice melted on the river and snow melted on the plains, as Lewis and Clark saw during their winter with the Mandans.  The second came in June when the snow melted in the Rockies and there was rainfall in the river basin.  Usually the June flood was higher.  Fish and wildlife had adapted to these seasonal variations, some requiring it as part of their life cycle.

Around lunch time the Mandan was offshore from Hamburg Bend, one of the fish and wildlife mitigation projects mentioned in an earlier entry.  The chute that the Corps had created there — a straight channel that allowed some of the river’s water to pass across the bend and create new fish and wildlife habitat — was a new thing.  Some of the engineers wanted to check that the chute was functioning as designed and wanted to walk its entire length.  The Mandan slowed and came to shore.

About a dozen of us got off with the engineers and walked three and a half miles along the chute.  It was designed to allow some water to pass through the bend, but not too much.  If the river were running free, it might switch and make that cutoff the main flow.  But the corps wanted the chute to remain a shallow side channel.

The wind was blowing so strong that we had to lean against it to stay upright.  We hiked across dry, caked mosaic-like silt and silty sands the river had recently laid down.  Here the powerful winds blew sand and silt into our faces.  We hiked quickly for about an hour, part of the time on the levee, part of the time right along the chute, then waited for the Mandan to find us where the chute emptied into the main channel.  The engineers were satisfied; the chute was flowing freely and hadn’t begun to dam up and spill over its banks, nor had it started to erode the bottom to the point that it might become the main channel.  It was precision engineering.  By the end of the hike along the chute at Hamburg Bend, I felt somewhat envious.  I compared what these engineers could do to achieve a goal in their work compared to what I and my colleagues tried to do in applying the science of ecology to solve environmental problems.  Once in a while we succeeded.  But mostly our proposed solutions didn’t achieve the desired goals.  We were driven by myths about nature, ideologies, over-simplifications, lack of understanding.

Out West on the other Lewis and Clark river, the Columbia, the Bonneville Power Administration had spent more than $1 billion on salmon research and restoration without a single sign of improvement, and the estimates I had heard suggested $3 billion dollars total had been spent for salmon there without success.  As we waited along the shore of the Missouri River for the Mandan to pick us up, I tried to think why there was such a difference between our ability to deal with the physical aspects of our environment and the biological.  Too often we made widespread policies for fisheries, forests, wildlife, based on what seemed plausible without tests and observations — without the equivalent of walking the side of Hamburg chute to find out if what we were doing worked.  I wished that we had the understanding, knowledge, facts, tools, and skills for the restoration of ecosystems that the Corps had for water, rock and sand.  Engineering, based on well understood physical principles, had a sound basis in the understanding of a river as a hydrological system worked.  Our understanding of biological systems lagged far behind, and had not caught up with our social goals.  At Hamburg Bend, at Grand Pass, and at the Big Muddy, other places I had visited and written about, there was a beginning of experiments in the design of landscapes and the start of an understanding of how ecological systems worked.

Back on board the Mandan, someone called to say that three deer were swimming across the Missouri.  We rushed to the bow, and the pilot slowed the boat.   Everybody watched.  The current here was seven to nine miles an hour, yet the deer seemed to be swimming strongly straight across, not dragged very much down the river by the current.  Not much more than their heads and backs were visible.  They made it across in a surprisingly short time and then, struggled onto the muddy edge of the floodplain and tried to jump a steep rise, about four or five feet high, to take them into the woods.

Perhaps the major mistake our society made in engineering the Missouri was to believe that there were simple direct solutions to our use of natural resources.  The warning from this experience is not simply that these past approaches were wrong, but that the entire set of natural systems are complex and that any of our actions will have many effects.

We all watched as one after another of the deer kept sliding back, soil kicked off by the hooves, only to try again.  The smallest gave up at the first spot and moved away looking for a break in the bank.  The animals looked tired and I thought they must be cold from the strong wind and the water.  Meanwhile the largest made it over, struggling, feet spaying, shook itself and moved into the brush.  The second found an old creek bed and jumped it.  Finally, the little one, seemingly abandoned by the others, made it up a shallower bank a little further down.  If anything symbolized the resiliency of life and the ability of life to deal with complexity, it was those three deer on that windy, cold day swimming the Missouri that would drown a human being in icy waters quickly.  Perhaps if we could only give life a chance, to do a little but not too much, to learn from our mistakes, some of the troubled landscapes along the Missouri could restore themselves.