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.

21. DeSoto Bend National Wildlife Refuge: What Happens When We Stop a River’s Meandering

DeSoto Bend National Wildlife Refuge is north of Omaha, Nebraska in Iowa.  From Omaha take Route 75 north to Fort Calhoun (you can then stop at Fort Atkinson on the way) to Blair, Nebraska.  Go right (east) on Route 30 over the Missouri River.  The refuge is off of Route 30.  Turn right at the signs to the refuge.  You can also reach the refuge by taking Interstate 29 in Iowa north to Route 30, then left (west) on 30 to the refuge.

With a series of cries and the beat of wings, snow geese rose from the icy waters and faded in and out in the falling snow, white upon white, up against down, birds swirling to the right, counterclockwise, snow angling left, clockwise, in the winter wind. An icy blast burnt my fingers and stung my eyes.  Everything seemed to move and the world  lost its color.  It was November, but the early snowstorm and blast of Canadian arctic air made it seem like January.  Lewis and Clark had passed this spot in the late summer, but they had known this kind of prairie winter when they wintered with the Mandan Indians near modern Bismarck, North Dakota.

This was my third visit to DeSoto Bend – whenever I came to Lewis and Clark country, I ended up here. This time I had come out to give a talk at the Fontenelle Forest Preserve.  Gary Garabrandt, chief naturalist at the forest had agreed to take me on a field trip to see more of the Lewis and Clark countryside in exchange for my talk.

It was my first view of snow geese and about as dramatic as I could image.  The  scene was like a Japanese watercolor – muted hues blended together.  It was worth fighting upwind against the cold that made blue jeans feel like thin cotton; so cold that I could only take my fingers out of my gloves long enough to take two snapshots; any longer than that and the cold metal started to feel like it was freezing my fingers up to the knuckles.

We parked in a tarmac lot and walked upwind to a bird-viewing blind on the oxbow lake for which the refuge is well known.  This was not wilderness, but in the winter air there was a feeling of wildness created by the swirling images and blasting wind.  A few other people braved the cold, but it was hard to see them.

The wildlife refuge had changed greatly since my first visit; some of the change was the effect of the season, but most of it was the result of the 1993 floods on the Missouri River.  The first time I visited DeSoto Bend had been in early spring a few years before that flood.  At that time, the work of the Army Corps of Engineers was intact and the wildlife refuge was one of the most accessible places to see the effects of channelization on the Missouri.  That first visit with Iowa State University professors, Tom Jurik and David Glenn-Lewin, we saw a Missouri River very much tamed – an Army Corps of Engineer’s canal, with broken rocks set along the shores, like an ocean breakwater, and the sides cut away and made uniform.  I thought about the great difference between the tamed Missouri that we saw and the river that Lewis and Clark observed when they reached this area under much milder conditions.

On August 4, 1804, Lewis and Clark were a little north of the present location of DeSoto Bend National Wildlife Refuge, when the variableness and fickleness of the river became dangerously apparent to them.  They wrote that the river banks were  “washing away & trees falling in constantly for 1 mile.”  The next day the boats followed a large meander in the river upstream.  In the evening Clark walked on the shore.  “In Pursueing Some Turkeys” he went on foot downstream 370 yards and found himself at the beginning of the meander, a distance he had measured to be 12 miles by river.   “In every bend the banks are falling in from the Current being thrown against those bends,” he wrote.  “Agreeable to the Customary Changes of the river I Conclud. that in two years the main current of the river will pass through” — it will cut off the meander.  Clark recognized the river’s natural tendency to change its channel, to meander across its floodplain, to create sandbars and then erode them away, to deposit soil on the edges and then undercut them into unstable cliffs.

It was just the kind of dangerousness that Lewis and Clark observed that the Army Corps of Engineering projects were supposed to remove – to make the river safe for people who lived and farmed on the floodplain, to provide a constant, reliable source of irrigation water from dams, and to make boat traffic safe and simple for navigation, with the belief that barge traffic would be a major way that goods would be transported through the Midwest in the late twentieth century.  But other forms of transportation – railroads, interstate highways, big trailer trucks and air freight —  interfered, and the channelized Missouri never became a big money maker for the transportation industry.  Today barges carry only three percent of the agricultural products of the region.

At this refuge in 1960 the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a channel that cut through a meander  to shorten river travel by seven miles, avoiding the DeSoto Bend of the river.  They built levees to cut off the meander, forming an oxbow.  In this case, the oxbow lake had a artificial original.  But before channelization natural oxbow lakes were continually being formed by the Missouri as it cut off meanders.  These are scattered over the countryside and many are recreational parks, such as Lewis and Clark State Park in Iowa.

A meander begins as a small bend in a river. Over time, the shape of a meander becomes more extremely arced, with more material deposited on the inside of the curve, where the river runs slower, than on the outside.  The river erodes the outer, longer bank and deposits along the shorter bank nearer to the main channel.  Eventually the meander takes on an extreme shape of a near circle, called an oxbow.  A flood carries the waters across the short bank at the inside of the meander, cutting off the meander.  This short channel becomes the path of the river; a lake with the shape of a crescent moon remains, called an oxbow lake. Meanders of the Missouri have been measured to migrate across the floodplain at an average rate of about 250 feet a year.

Over the years, the meanders themselves migrate back and forth across the river valley.   Over thousands of years, the river has wandered across the plains, eroding and depositing, like an artist working his oils over and over again on his canvas.  On this sculptured, painted landscape, Lewis and Clark pushed the small river crafts upstream, through the meanders, through the fallen sands, through the snags.  They saw the river’s sandy, silty painting at one moment in time.  It has become a common belief of our age that nature undisturbed by modern civilization was fixed, constant, steady, perhaps reliable and trustworthy.  But the real Missouri changed before Lewis and Clark passed its way, kept changing under their feet, and changed after they left.  The countryside, as a result, was also always changing.

During my first visit to DeSoto Bend, it seemed that the channelization of the river had extinguished the wonderful wild Missouri of fact and folklore.  In its place was a placid, tamed stream.  My reaction was not so much sentimental as it was a recognition that we had made a Faustian bargain with the river – trading short-time stability, a chance to build and live on the floodplain, to farm that floodplain for a number of years, without worrying about dreadful floods, in exchange for a loss of the renewing sediments that had created the fertile farmland in the first place, and in exchange for rarer but more dangerous floods that could occur in the future.

During that first visit, we strolled from the channelized banks back to low wetlands.  We saw large willows and cottonwoods that are so characteristic of these habitats.  But the willows were much larger – probably much older – than I was familiar with.  There was also a  dense understory of flowering dogwood.  David suggested that such an understory would never have existed with the natural flooding of the river, because dogwood cannot withstand flooding and the floods would bulldoze the small trees away.  He believed that the pre-settlement floodplain forests would have had a “cathedral” look – tall, arching trees, but little understory.  We saw there were few dead logs on the ground.  This also David thought unnatural;  there would have been many dead logs on the natural bottomland, some washed there from upstream by the river, the rest from trees that fell and remained in place.  Although a few floodplains trees were there, others that we expected to see were not, including elm and ash; the elimination of flooded areas seem to have eliminated many kinds of trees adapted to those wet, frequently flooding habitats.

The images of the wetlands and tamed river I had seen before the 1993 floods came to mind as we walked through the drifting snow to the edge of the river’s main channel.  The well-intentioned works of human beings on the river were in disarray.  The neat, straight banks were gone, washed away; the even line of boulders a jumble of rocks.

Since the time of Lewis and Clark, the Missouri River has been teaching the same lessons, but rarely have we listened, rarely have we learned.  We thought that our mechanized projects were a rational approach to the river, but it hasn’t worked out that way.  There is a rational approach we can take to living with the river, benefitting from its waters, conserving its living resources, enabling it to fertilize and help restore the land.

DeSoto Bend Wildlife Refuge is an example of how we can accomplish this today.  One of 500 U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuges throughout the United States, Desoto Bend is actively managed to increase production of wildlife.  This management is part of the reason that DeSoto is such a good place to see many of the water birds that were here when Lewis and Clark passed this way.  With much of the surrounding countryside under cultivation and many of the prairie pothole ponds and wetlands drained for farming, there are fewer places for migrating water birds to stop and feed.  At DeSoto, about 1,500 acres have been planted in grasslands including big and little bluestem, switchgrass, Indiangrass, sideoats grama, and wheat grass, classic grasses of the tall grass prairie.  These are burned on a three year rotation to prevent trees from entering, as are the loess hills.  Other fields are cultivated in crops, and the crops not harvested provide additional food for birds.

The snow geese swirling in the November snow was one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever seen on the Missouri River.  DeSoto Bend left me with a mixed message.  Channelization had caused many problems, but that didn’t mean all human attempts to improve nature were bad.  The planting of prairie grasses and of crops that were left for the wild birds was a natural resource management action that worked.  As Gary and I went on to view other natural areas along the Missouri where prairie restoration was in progress, I was convinced that we could learn the difference between those actions that can be beneficial and those that are likely to fail.  This was worth the walk in the cold and the snow.

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.

20. Loess Hills State Recreation Area: To Keep A Prairie, Disturb It With Fire

There are a number of parks, preserves, and wildlife management areas in the Loess Hills of Iowa east of Onawa, Iowa.  The best way to see them is to obtain the “Loess Hills Scenic Byway” brochure from Iowa Welcome Centers by writing the Harrison County Museum Welcome Center, RR #3, Box 130A, Missouri Valley, Iowa 51555.  You can reach several of these areas as follows: From Interstate 29 take Exit 112 and go east on Route 125 through Onawa.  Just east of town take County Route L12 northeast to the Loess Hills Wildlife Management Area.  Or continue on 175 to Turin and go north to Turin Loess Hills State Preserve.  Other Loess Hills public areas can be reached from Exit 95 on Interstate 29 by going east through the town of Little Sioux on County Route F20 to Pisgah and going north or south on Route 183.

On July 16, 1804,  Lewis and Clark were near today’s Iowa-Missouri border, on the river near the present location of Peru.  Clark wrote that the river was about two miles wide, but it was not deep, because he could see snags scattered across it, and on the far shore “about 20 acres of the hill has latterly slipped into the river above a cliff of Sand Stone for about two miles.”  Looking beyond the river, Clark saw “a range of Ball [bald] Hills parrelel to the river & at from 3 to 6 miles distant from it, and extends as far up & Down as I Can See.”  He was viewing a special kind of prairie that grows on a strange and rare kind of soil, called loess.  “This prarie I call Bald pated Prarie,” Clark wrote, seemingly because the brownish color of the soil and grasses made the hills look hairless at the top.

Our modern equivalent would be to call them monk-shaved hills, because the summits are clothed in grasses, while trees and shrubs surround the bases near the water, giving the hills the rounded appearance of a monk’s head with the hair shaved above the ears.  The next day, July 17, 1804, Lewis rode out into this prairie and along a stream that passed through it, which he referred to by its Indian name,  Neesh-nah-ba-to-na Creek.  Along this stream he found “Some few trees of oake walnut & mulberry.”  The hills were not as barren as they looked; several of the men went out hunting and one of the best hunters, Drewyer, “kill’ed 3 deer, & R. Fields one,” Clark wrote.

I had long wanted to visit loess hills in a place where the prairie still existed on them, because this is a strange and unusual formation.  Waubonsie State Park, Iowa is the nearest to where Clark first walked through loess hills, but opportunities did not come up for me to go there.  My first chance came when I visited Iowa State University, and I told my hosts, Tom Jurik and David Glenn-Lewin, about my desire to visit natural areas related to the Lewis and Clark expedition.  We agreed to an exchange: lectures to their classes for a natural history tour.

From Ames, Iowa we took State Route 30 west, passing the farm town of Grand Junction and miles of farmland.  We stopped by the side of the road to look at some prairie potholes that remained in the fields.  “Best soil in the world,” David said as I took some photographs and we looked at the black, wet prairie soils still bare of crops.

As we continued on Route 30 farther west, the landscape suddenly changed.  The relatively flat land with its black soil gave way to a strangely abrupt rolling landscape of a browner and finer soil.   We had come to the loess hills, the same kind of strange, wind-formed landscape that Clark had walked on almost two hundred years before.

Loess is a material found in only a few places on the Earth; the American Midwest and China have the two largest parcels.  Loess hills are a product of the glacial ages, forming between 30,000 and 17,000 thousands years ago, created by water and wind.

Loess began as silt eroded from the Rocky Mountains by the ancient Missouri River, and by the Platte River to the south.  The faster a river flows, the heavier the material it can carry.  A mountain stream pushes boulders during storms.  Rivers separate material they carry by size, leaving the heaviest material behind near the mountains when the water first begins to slow down.  Silts are fine particles and are carried a long way downstream to where the quieter waters can no longer carry them.  As the Missouri and Platte meandered across their floodplains over the centuries, they spilled their silt wide and deep.

Toward the end of the last ice age, intense winds developed, a result of the great difference in temperatures and reflection of light between the ice and the warmer bare ground.  The great winds created silt-storms that piled the soil into steep silt-dunes.  Like sand dunes, the silt dunes formed a rolling countryside of uniform material, without any apparent layers.  Seen from the side, especially along a road cut, the soil is deep but not layered.  Here in Iowa the loess sits on top of glacial till and on top of bedrock which is much, much older.  The cliffs that Clark saw when he first viewed the loess hills were laid down in the Pennsylvanian period, more than 286 million years ago, the age of coal formation.

Two days after Lewis and Clark first saw the loess hills, Clark went for a walk on shore after a breakfast of roasted ribs of deer and a little coffee.  He began to follow fresh tracks of elk and “after assending and passing thro a narrow Strip of wood Land, Came Suddenly into an open and bound less Prarie” where trees were “confiend to the River Creeks and Small branches” and the prairie “was Covered with grass about 18 inches or 2 feet high and contained little of any thing else.”  The grass was shorter than on the tallgrass prairie that grew on other kinds of soil.  “This prospect was So Sudden & entertaining that I forgot the object of my prosute, and turned my attention to the Variety which presented themselves to my view,” he wrote.  He continued up a hill toward a “line of woods” where he found “a butifull Streem” which he followed for three miles where it flowed into the Missouri River “between 2 clifts.”  He was near the location of modern Nebraska City, probably on Table Creek.

Loess makes poorer soil than till, partially because the soil is made up of particles of one size.  The best soils in Iowa are to the east, the poorer ones along the Missouri where Lewis and Clark passed.   This was one of the things that struck Clark about his Bald-pated prairie: The grasses on these hills were sort – 18 inches – rather  than the tall grasses of the eastern prairie, some of which reached six feet.  As a result, he could get a view of a long distance, and that view was pleasing.  Reading his accounts, and driving toward the loess hills, I thought of the irony of this landscape.  It was created by ice and wind, during episodes that, people, if present, would have found terrible and destructive.  This seemingly peaceful landscape would not have been here without an environmental disaster, next to which the dust storms of the 1930s would have seemed like small dust devils.

We passed the town of Denison, Iowa, and saw a sign on Route 30 stating that we had just crossed the divide between the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. East of this point, all the streams flowed to the Mississippi; west, all the streams flow into the Missouri.

At the recreation area, we parked and began to walk into the short, steep, rounded loess hills.  David told me that this is an actively managed area with the goal of returning the vegetation on the hills to the way that it was before European settlement – the way Lewis and Clark saw the loess countryside.  The way to accomplish this goal was to burn.

In our century, wildfires have been considered bad – we all know the Smokey Bear advertisements of the U.S. Forest Service.  With the suppression of fire, the vegetation on the loess hills changed.   The most impressive plant we saw was eastern red cedar, a small tree that reaches 20 or so feet high.  The seeds of red cedar are eaten and excreted by birds, which spread the seeds widely.  Red cedar grows rapidly in bright sunlight, when it is not shaded by taller trees.  If the seeds fall on bare soil, they can germinate and survive. But if there is a dense cover of grasses, then the seeds land within the grass and do not reach the soil.  So there are two major intervals following a fire when red cedar can get established: soon after a fire, before the grasses are well established, and ten or twenty years later, after the grasses have matured and some of the grasses die back and expose bare soil.  Where rainfall is high enough, cedar can survive past the seedling stage and grow for forty or fifty years.  Without fire, in this eastern edge of the prairie, in locations where the rainfall is relatively high, the cedars grow well.

In the distance we could see unburned hills that were dark green from a dense cover of red cedar.   But the first hill we walked up had recently been burned to clear it of cedars and restore the prairie.  The vegetation we walked through was burned to the ground or to the low mounds of bunch grasses, except for two or third rosettes of prairie forbs that had already sprouted since the fire.  The grasses we saw included big bluestem, prairie grass, Indian grass, foxtail grass, as well as little bluestem, a prairie grass common in the East.

After we walked through the first, burnt row of hills, we could see that the unburned hills had a distinct pattern.  On the south slopes the vegetation was almost all prairie grasses, while the north slopes were heavily wooded.  As a result, when I looked south and saw only north slopes, I saw only a wooded countryside.  If I had no other view, I would have believed myself in forest land.  Then I turned and looked north and, seeing only south slopes, saw hill after hill of brown grasslands. If it had been a sunny day, I would have taken two photographs, one north and one south, and could have shown it to my friends and made them believe they were from two completely different areas.  It was the clearest illustration of the effect of the direction that a hillslope faces on its vegetation.  A south-facing slope in the northern hemisphere gets sun most of the day, and sun dries out the soil.  A north-facing slope is shaded a good part of the day, stays cooler and retains its moisture.  The steep, short hills formed by loess accentuated these differences in this transitional countryside.

The drier south-facing slope is more likely to burn.  In this country, a south slope was like landscape far to the west, while a north slope was like land to the east, because the entire prairie land is in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains.  The average rainfall is lowest just east of the Rockies – in the high plains 100 miles east of Denver, for example, it averages 12 to 16 inches a year.  Then rainfall increases eastward, 20 inches per year at Dodge City, 28 inches near Lincoln, Nebraska, 36 inches east of Kansas City.

We walked through these steep, strange hills for several hours.  It was a satisfying day in spite of the clouds and drizzle; we had seen one of the stranger but pleasing landscapes of the Missouri River drainage, saw constructive activities to restore the large natural area to the way Lewis and Clark had seen it, saw the effects of ancient glacial and river events on the modern landscape and smelled the sweet and sharp scents of prairie plants.  I had learned, paradoxically, that the countryside Clark found “Sudden & entertaining” to the point that he forgot what else he was doing, was the product of cataclysmic forces of fire, ice and winds.

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.

19. Ledges State Park: Reading Ancient History in Tiny Grain of Pollen

From Ames, Iowa follow Route 30 to Route 164, just south of the town of Boone.  Take this route south to Ledges State Park.  From DeSoto Bend National Wildlife Refuge, take Route 30 east to the same junction with Route 164.

Although the main body of the expedition traveled by boat on the Missouri or along side  it by foot and horseback, Lewis and Clark took turns exploring the land back from the river.  Often they sent a few men out to hunt for food.  Those who hunted often roamed widely and sometimes – not too infrequently – became lost and returned to the expedition after a long enough hiatus to cause some concern.

Because the river and the surrounding land are intimately linked, exploration away from the river was necessary for the expedition to understand the natural history of the newly purchased lands.  So it is today.  The best way to get the feel of the Missouri River as countryside is to go back from it into the prairie and woodlands.   With this in mind I set out from Ames, Iowa to explore the countryside between that city and the Missouri River with two ecologists from Iowa State University, David Glenn-Lewin and Tom Jurik.

From Ames, Iowa we took State Route 30 west to Ledges State Park where there were beautiful sandstone ledges thrust out of soils deposited by the great continental glaciers more than 14,000 years ago.  The Pease and Des Moines Rivers sculptured these ledges through sandstone on their way to the Ames.

We walked through the park on trails to admire the view of bottomland woods; even on a cloudy, cold day the scenery was dramatic as we stood on the ledges and looked at the Des Moines River beyond.  This was not the Iowa of urban stereotypes, not miles upon miles of flat fields of corn, but a steeply rolling countryside of water, hills and forests.  The scenery was all the more striking because the forests on the hills obscured the steep descents along the bluffs until we walked out to an edge to make a sudden discovery of flowing water below and sandy cliffs beneath our feet.

Tom and David told me the ancient history of this landscape.  All that we saw from these bluffs was under hundreds of feet of ice 14,000 years ago and for many thousand years before that, the time of the last great continental ice age.  Those masses of ice bull-dozed the landscape, tearing rock and stone, pebble and crystal with an awful force and momentum, grinding rock to stone and stone to soil, tumbling clays and sands and pebbles and rocks together into a jumble that we call “glacial till”; sandpapering the hills and filling the valleys with masses of this till.

Then the climate changed and the ice melted back and torrential rivers began to flow, cutting through the till and into the bedrock sandstone that had resisted the icy mass for thousands of years.  Warmer and warmer it became; by 10,000 years ago elm and ash grew near these rivers, floodplain species then just as now.  For several thousand years, the landscape must have looked quite as we saw it this April day.  But then the climate grew even warmer, too warm for trees, and the climate and winds pushed the prairie ever eastward.  By 7,000 years ago the climate was the warmest it would become after the ice ages, and prairies pushed their way through these ledges and east, all the way to the Atlantic coast.  Then the climate cooled again and the prairies retreated westward and about 3,000 years ago the forests had fully returned, to cloak the hills as we saw them that day.

The history of the vegetation is learned from the study of one of the unlikeliest products of plants: their tiny pollen grains.  From them scientists have painstakingly reconstructed an ancient history, never available before. This knowledge of the countryside is something new; it is a late twentieth century item, the result of medium and high technology.  The people who uncovered the history of the migration of trees and grasses needed fine microscopes to examine pollen grains.  Each pollen grain has a hard outer coating of silicon; the grains, under a microscope, are elaborately patterned, like Victorian Christmas tree ornaments.  Each genus has its own characteristic pattern and overall shape and, for many plants, each species within a genus can be distinguished.  The patterns seem as various as snowflakes.  Cores taken with long metal tubes driven into mud on the bottoms of lakes and bogs provide the primary material.  This is subjected to strong acid washes to clean out everything but the resistant casings of the pollen.

But how to date the deposits?  That had to await the nuclear age and the invention of carbon dating.  Organic material in the muds, with the pollen casings, are removed and the amount of radioactive carbon counted.  This decreases over time at a rate that is calculated and carefully calibrated.  It is the ticking of the Pleistocene clock.  From this knowledge of the atomic age, scientists date the layers of pollen grains and then know what was growing when.  With these technologies, we have a moving picture of natural history not available to Lewis and Clark nor to any people before.  It is a grand cinema, deepening our understanding of nature.

Standing on these lovely ledges, we were awed by the history revealed to us, a time before civilization and agriculture, before Babylon.  Learning this history of the land and vegetation has changed the way that I look at countryside and the way that I feel about countryside.  Now I see this land as clothed in glacial till, its bare bones of bedrock arching in a few places above the fill, the deep, u-shaped glacier cut valleys hidden beneath rock and stone, silt and clay, the product of climate changes, migrations of species, and great forces beyond our imagination acting over thousands of years.

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.

18. Fort Atkinson: The Badger and Discovery of New Species

See previous entry for directions.

On July 30, 1804, when the expedition was near Fort Calhoun, the location Lewis and Clark were to call Council Bluffs, Joseph Fields, a member of the expedition who often hunted, killed a badger and brought it back to the camp.  The animal was new to western science; it had never been described and was little known.  Neither Lewis nor Clark had seen one before.  Following the charge given to them by President Jefferson, Lewis and Clark wrote a description of  this animal, providing the first written, scientific description.  Clark noted that the animal “burrows in the ground and feeds on Flesh (Prarie Dogs), Bugs & vigatables.”  He described the badger as having the size and shape of a beaver, a “head mouth & c.” like a dog “with Short ears,” hair and a tail like a ground hog, intestines like a pig.  Thus he described the different parts of the strange animals in terms of others that he knew.   This description sounds peculiar to us. But all the Clark was doing was describing something new in terms of things he and others were familiar with.  This is the way we always describe something new.

Lewis wrote a somewhat more detailed and scientific description, noting first that it was a “singular animal not common to any part of the United States,” was carnivorous, had “one long and sharp canine tooth on both sides of the upper jaw,” that its eyes were “small black and piercing” and it weighed sixteen pounds.

This badger was the first animal that Lewis and Clark preserved, skinned, stuffed and later sent back to President Jefferson with the soldiers who accompanied the expedition as far as Fort Mandan.  Along the way they would identify many new species of animals and plants.  They were the first to describe the mule deer, the pronghorn, the prairie dog, and the black footed ferret.  They found the rattlesnake, garter-snake, the horned lizard, and various snails. Many of their new discoveries are shown on the accompanying map.

Lewis and Clark were outdoorsmen, familiar with wildlife and with the preparation of skins.  Both were excellent naturalists, with curiosity about their surroundings and abilities to see what was new and different.  To fulfill Jefferson’s charge to them, they did elsewhere as they did with the badger: Shot or otherwise caught an individual of each species of wildlife, and measured and described the specimen.   They collected sample plants and pressed them and sent these back also with the returning soldiers. Their plant collection still exists at the Philadelphia Academy of Science, with most of the material intact and available on microfilm.

Most familiar with wildlife, their descriptions of mammals, birds, and snakes are generally accurate and homey.  Lewis, with his crash course in Philadelphia before the expedition, learned how to provide a formal description of plants and to press them for preservation.  Their observations are therefore helpful to us in considering one of the environmental issues that receives the greatest attention in the media today – conservation of endangered species, and the more general term, conservation of biological diversity.