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.