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.