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.