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.

26 Vermillion, South Dakota and Dixon, Nebraska: Buffalo Demise and Recovery

From Sioux City, Iowa take Interstate 29 south to Interstate129 west.  This becomes U.S. Route 20. Take Route 20 west past the junction with Route 9 to Tar Box Hollow Road.  Take this road south to a mailbox in the shape of a Buffalo to the Mason Ranch.  For brochures and directions, write Larry Mason, 57957 871st   Road, Dixon, NE 68732.

Other places to see buffalo include: Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Valentine, Nebraska; the National Buffalo Range; the Little Missouri Grassland and the Theodore Roosevelt National Monument in South Dakota; Custer State Park, South Dakota.  At Fort Belknap Indian Reservation of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Tribes there are Tribal Buffalo Tours (Call the Tribal Visitor Center 406-353-2205).  At Custer State Park there are guided jeep rides into a buffalo herd.  Fort Niobrara has a fenced-in self-drive wildlife viewing area.  There is an increase in interest in buffalo and many private ranches are developing tourist facilities, so it is worthwhile to seek local information as you travel in Nebraska, the Dakotas and Montana.

On August 25, 1804, Lewis and Clark along with nine men went north from the Missouri River to visit a place the Indians referred to as a mountain of evil spirits and which has become known as the “Spirit Mound.”  From the top of this hill, about 70 feet above the plains, they had a view of the river valley, which is wide at this point, and Clark noted that he saw upwards of 800 buffalo and elk feeding.  “From the top of this Mound we beheld a most butifull landscape: Numberous herd of buffalow were Seen feeding in various directions,” Clark wrote.

He was north of the location of modern Vermillion, South Dakota.  Although they had first seen buffalo when the expedition reached Kansas City, they did not shoot a buffalo until they neared present day Vermillion on August 23, 1804.  From this location until past Great Falls, Montana – until July 15, 1805 – they saw herds of buffalo on many occasions, and these animals became one of their principal sources of food.

Sometimes they saw large numbers — on June 30, 1805, when they were portaging around the falls downstream from modern Great Falls, Montana, Clark wrote that he thought they could see 10,000 buffalo in a single view.   After this they left the buffalo country and saw no more of these animals for the rest of their outbound journey.

Over the numerous trips that I made into the landscape where Lewis and Clark passed, I sought places where buffalo could be seen within a landscape as similar as possible to what Lewis and Clark might have experienced.  There are several National Wildlife Refuges, parks, and grasslands that maintain buffalo, and I tried several of these.  At the Little Missouri Grasslands and the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I looked for buffalo but on a hot August day saw only one.  At Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge, near to where the expedition passed, I read on a  website that a visitor was pretty much assured a view of buffalo.  But what I found was buffalo in a paddock — a large pasture and a high fence.  Jim Garrett, a Sioux Indian who had studied with me, told me that there were some on his reservation and discussed with me over several years a plan to develop a wildlife migratory corridor from the reservation to Canada, one in which the Sioux would once again be able to follow the big game.  But this has not become a reality. Fort Belknap Indian Reservation of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Tribes conducts buffalo tours.

As I continued to search for the best place to see buffalo, I thought about the demise of this once-major species of our continent.  We think of buffalo only as creatures of the American West, but they were found at the time of early European discovery and exploration of North America over a much wider range.  By the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the geographic range of the buffalo had been greatly reduced – something few Americans know.

Lewis and Clark’s  first sighting took place once they were past settlements of Europeans, where buffalo had been before but had been eliminated earlier.  This was the characteristic pattern: Buffalo were hunted to local extinction or driven out as farms with fences and grazing lands with European cattle were established.  The plow and the buffalo were considered incompatible.

It is little known how widely dispersed buffalo were at the time of European discovery and early settlement of North America.  Cabeza de Vaca, the famous Spanish castaway who spent eight years with the Indians in the 1530s and later recounted his experiences when he returned to Spain, saw buffalo in southern Texas in the 1530s.  In 1612, explorer Samuel Argoll, sailed on the Chesapeake Bay, and saw “a great store of cattle” which were “heavy, slow, and not so wild as other beasts in the wilderness.”  He had seen buffalo.  In 1701 there was an attempt to domesticate buffalo in a new settlement on the James River in Virginia.  Near Roanaoke, Virginia, buffalo were common at a salt lick until the mid-eighteenth century.  One herd was reported in southwestern Georgia in 1686.  Buffalo were killed off in Georgia by 1780, in South Carolina by 1775.  Some evidence suggests that the buffalo had only recently reached the East Coast when Europeans began to settle and explore that area.

These records and others suggest that before the arrival of Europeans, buffalo may have occupied one-third of North America, reaching their northern limit in the boreal forests of Canada and their southwestern limits in the chaparral of southwestern Texas.  Buffalo were found in Canada as far north as Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, to Latitude 60 degrees north, just north of the present Wood Buffalo National Park which lies in northern Alberta and the boundary of the Northwest Territories.  Fossils of bison, some as old as 40,000 B.C., have been found from New Jersey to California.

The buffalo continued in great abundance for many years after the Lewis and Clark expedition – until after the Civil War.   General Isaac I. Stevens was surveying for the transcontinental railway in North Dakota.  On July 10, 1853, he and others climbed a high hill and saw “for a great distance ahead every square mile” having “a herd of buffalo upon it.”  He wrote that “their number was variously estimated by the members of the party – some as high as half a million.  I do not think it any exaggeration to set it down at 200,000.”

One of the better attempts to estimate the number of buffalo in a herd was by Colonel R. I. Dodge, who took a wagon from Fort Zarah to Fort Larned on the Arkansas River in May 1871, a distance of 34 miles.  For at least 25 of those miles he found himself in a “dark blanket” of buffalo.  Dodge estimated that there were 480,000 in the mass of animals he saw in one day.  At one point he and his men traveled to the top of a hill, where he estimated that he could see six to ten miles, and from that high point there appeared to be a single solid mass of buffalo extending over 25 miles.  At 10 animals per acre, not a particularly high density, there would have been between 2.7 and 8 million animals.

Just before and just after the Civil War reports suggested that there were always buffalo somewhere along the tracks of Kansas Pacific Railroad.  In the fall of 1868, “a train traveled one hundred twenty miles between Ellsworth and Sheridan through a continuous, browsing herd, packed so thick that the engineer had to stop several times, mostly because the buffalo would scarcely get off the tracks for the whistle and the belching smoke.”  That spring a train had been delayed for eight hours while a single herd passed “in one steady, unending stream.”  At a density of 10 buffalo per acre — not an especially high density in a migrating herd — there would have been at least 750,000 animals, and quite likely many more — many millions – depending on the shape of the area covered by the entire herd.

The destruction of the buffalo took place with a rapidity that is hard to grasp. They were killed for two reasons: profit and to eliminate the food of the Indians, and therefore to kill the Indians – an ecological warfare.  Colonel R. I. Dodge, the same who made one of the estimates of the numbers in a herd, was quoted in 1867 to have said, “Kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”    In 1864 buffalo robes and tanned hides began to be shipped from St. Louis eastward.  New technologies made it possible to increase the use of buffalo.   Modern rifles made it easy to kill the animals.  Trains made transport of hunters and hides easier.  A new tanning process, developed in Germany, allowed the treatment of many more hides, and the finished hides provided a better, more desirable grade of leather. A European market opened for the improved hides.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the animals were seen as a commodity, like gold, to be removed as quickly as possible for individual profit.  Railway construction crews spent their winters, when it was not possible to work on the railroads, hunting buffalo.   Although many saw buffalo as a way to riches, ironically few of the buffalo hunters got rich.

The Civil War had its effect on the buffalo.  During the war, buffalo hides were used by the military, increasing the market.  After the war, army veterans, skilled in shooting rifles, headed west, where they used these skills against the buffalo.  A major increase in exploitation of many of America’s biological resources occurred just after the Civil War, as new lands opened up in the West, as displaced southerners found their way westward, and our nation shifted away from war to the development of transcontinental railways and the settlement of the West.  Wild Bill Hickok became one of the major buffalo hunters, along with Buffalo Bill Cody.

Records of the number of buffalo killed were neither organized nor all that well kept, but enough are available to give us some idea of the number taken.  The Indians were also killing large numbers of buffalo for their own use and for trade.  Estimates range to three and a half million buffalo killed a year during the 1850s.  In 1870 about two million buffalo were killed.  In 1872, one company in Dodge City handled 200,000 hides.  Estimates based on the sum of reports from such companies and guesses at how many more would have been taken by small operators and not reported, suggest that about 1,500,000 hides were shipped in 1872 and again in 1873.  In these years, buffalo hunting was the main economic activity in Kansas.

As this high harvest continued, concern about the possible extinction of buffalo grew.  In 1871, the U. S. Biological Survey sent George Grinnell to survey the herds along the Platte River.  He estimated that there were only 500,000 buffalo there, and that at the present rate of killing the animals would not last long.  As late as the spring of 1883 a herd of an estimated 75,000 crossed the Yellowstone River near Miles City, Montana, but fewer than 5,000 reached the border.  By the end of that year – only 15 years after the Kansas Pacific train was delayed for eight hours by a huge herd of buffalo – only a thousand or so buffalo could be found, 256 in captivity and about 835 roaming the plains.  A short time later, there were only 50 buffalo wild on the plains.  The great era of the buffalo on the plains was over.

The incredibly rapid demise of these animals demonstrates the power of nineteenth century technology when put to a destructive purpose.  But societal attitudes change.  With the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, concern with endangered species increased.  In recent decades a revival of interest in buffalo on the plains has begun.  People began to see profit in running buffalo.  One of these families, the Masons who live near Dixon, Nebraska, – not far south of where Lewis and Clark shot their first buffalo – started ranching buffalo in 1993.  The Masons are returning the land to prairie — in one area they have planted some prairie grasses and forbs, on most of the land they have let the grass go and as the buffalo graze, their grazing favors prairie grasses, which are reinvading.

Today, Larry, Rose and Monty Mason have 210 buffalo on 480 acres. Their primary business is selling young buffalo — calves born in the spring are sold in the fall — to people who want to have these animals on their own land, to produce buffalo meat or to just have buffalo on the range.  But once the business started, people like me began to visit and ask to see the buffalo, so a tourist operation began as an afterthought.  Today you can ride in a “haywagon” — a comfortable wagon with seats for 20 or more people, pulled by a tractor and with an arched awning reminiscent of a Conestoga wagon, and ride out into land that is being returned to prairie.  We visited the Mason ranch and went out with them. “You don’t want to walk among them,” Larry said, “they look peaceful, but they are wild animals.”  We drove out on the track where the buffalo were and watched them graze, push at each other to assert their position in a pecking order, and nurse calves.

I had heard that few ranches were going into the buffalo business because the animals were too strong and agile and it took expensive 8-foot fences to keep them in.  I asked Larry Mason about this.  “Don’t need a high fence,” he said, “I figured out there are two things you need to do.  Buffalo are herding animals.  If you only have a few, they jump a fence to search for a herd.  But if you have enough of them, then they want to stay together, and they don’t want to stray far.  The second thing is to get the buffalo young, so they become adjusted to your land and accept it as their home range.”  On the ride to see the buffalo, we passed through regular wire gatesand electric fences.

Larry had a lot more to say about buffalo: “The meat tastes better if an animal is shot on the pasture.  Doesn’t get their adrenalin up.”  You don’t know how good meat tastes until you had it this way. Buffalo meat is low in cholesterol and fat.  The buffalo don’t marble the meat.  They have their fat under the skin, to help keep them warm. These animals get no artificial chemicals.”

They found the animals easier to care for than cattle.  “Buffalo don’t have trouble calving.  They don’t freeze to death in blizzards.  When it snows, they face away from  the wind.  The wind blows away the ice that forms on their nostrils,” Larry said.  Cattle face into the wind, but they suffocate from the ice forming in their nostrils.  Most cattle die this way in storms. Buffalo are very healthy.  They don’t get cancer, as far we know.”

We rode on a dirt track through the rolling terrain to a hollow where the buffalo were herding together.  It was calving season and there were three or four puppy-like, snub-nosed, light-brown calves a few days old.  When we stopped, the buffalo ambled over to us and Monty took out a bucket full of the treats and handed some of them to us.  A big bull scratched his back against the haywagon, shaking it on its suspension.  He looked up, opened his mouth and put out a long, narrow tongue and took the cylinder of alfalfa and molasses.

“They’re curious animals,” Larry said, “you can’t leave anything out on the pasture.  They come and look at it, push it around.”  Curiosity and the treats brought them over to us.  We sat in the calm quiet and watched the herd.  Some grazed lazily.  Two young animals pushed at each other, horns locked, for a few seconds until one gave way.  In the quiet on the pasture, we heard the low, intestinal-like rumble that is a way the buffalo communicate with each other.  Birds called from trees whose leaves were just opening.  A gentle wind blew over the pasture.  This is a nature you can experience when you visit one of the small but well maintained buffalo ranches along the Lewis and Clark trail.

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.

25 Ponca State Park: Rocks Tell Stories and Soils Are Nature’s Braille

From Sioux City take U.S. Route 20 to Nebraska Route 12 and on to the entrance to Ponca State Park. From Gavins Point Dam take County Route 26E south to Nebraska Route 12 and then east to the park.

Early in 1998 a new overlook was built on a bluff in the park.  It was a state and national park service project and contains 4 excellent interpretive signs.  Three states – Nebraska, South Dakota and Iowa – are visible from these bluffs.

On August 22, 1804, Lewis and Clark “landed at a Bluff” where they got out and examined the exposed minerals.  They thought that these included “alum, Copperas, Cobalt, Pyrites.”  Lewis examined these closely – perhaps too closely.  “In proveing the quality of those minerals [Lewis] was near poisoning himself by the fumes & tast of the Cabalt,” Clark wrote.  Later when they camped for the night, Lewis “took a Dost of Salts to work off the effects of the Arsenic.”  As this episode makes clear, theirs was a hands-on expedition.  They not only saw, but they touched, tasted, and smelled.  In this way they came to better read and know the countryside.

The next day, August 23, 1804, Lewis and Clark did not have to reach out to the countryside; it came to them.  “The Wind blew hard West and raised the Sands off the bar in Such Clouds that we Could Scerely See,” Clark wrote, “this Sand being fine and verry light Stuck to every thing it touched, and in the Plain for a half a mile the distance I was out every Spire of Grass was covered with the Sand or Dust.”  They were not just passing through nature, they were in it.  The expedition and the land at this time were not two things, but one.

I am told in China, where fish have been farmed in ponds for several thousand years, that the farmer tends his ponds in a similarly intimate way.  In the morning he will go out to his pond, kneel on his haunches, take a palm-full of pond water, and smell it.  Depending on the smell, he will know what to do that day.  One smell tells him to add a little fertilizer; another, to get more air into the pond.  It is a knowledge handed down among generations and learned by each through the bachanian senses: touch and scent, those of motion, change, and intimate qualities.

Today, accustomed to learning about nature from television programs and a quick view from a moving vehicle, we tend to think of nature somewhat abstractly – as a view more than an experience.

I thought about these experiences when I went to Ponca State Park, near the bluffs where Lewis tasted and smelled the fumes.  This park marks the southern limit of the unchannelized and undammed stretch of the Missouri.  It is the most accessible location to experience this reach of the river and its nearby forests, the landscape and river as Lewis and Clark might have experienced them.

The road into the park had taken us through pleasant, shady forests to a picnic area along the shore.   There we saw floating and half-sunk logs interspersed with sand bars.  The river meandered, cutting away at the bank.  On a sandbar on the far, north side of the river, a family had beached their outboard motor boat.  The mother was sitting on a lounge chair on the sandbar while the father and the children were walking on the sandbar, swimming and splashing in the river.  The steep, almost vertical cliffs next to the river were pock-marked with swallow’s nests.  These bluffs, I thought, must be the ones mentioned by Lewis and Clark when they passed this way.  They were generally light colored, but had bands shading into dark, almost coal-like rocks.

Cottonwoods, willows and ash lined the shore.  Across the river on the far shore a herd of cows came down a bare-soil trail to the river to drink. It was quiet and peaceful, a pastoral scene.  The breeze rustled through the cottonwoods, but there were few other sounds.  Quiet was not the way we had been seeing the Missouri River, crowded in by highways and railroads, by industries and cities for most of its length downstream, or its surface resonating with the sound of motor boats.

We drove inland, following meandering roads within the park that led to a series of summits.  The bluffs descended steeply to the shore and were wooded with eastern deciduous forest vegetation: eastern white and red oaks, eastern red juniper, basswood and dogwood   It was the best developed, richest woodlands we had seen on our journeys into Lewis and Clark country.  Unlike most groves of trees that we visited along the Missouri, where grass grew beneath the trees and the woods seemed recently formed or replanted, these woodlands had a rich, dark surface of humus and leaf and twig litter and were dense with shrubs and saplings.

We stopped and strolled into the woods where I picked up some of the rich organic soil, smelling it and then rubbing a little between my thumb and first finger.  I could feel the slickness of fine silts and clays, the grittiness of a little sand, and the soft and pliable bits of leaves and twigs.  This handling of the soil, a standard practice among field soil scientists, is one of nature’s communications with us, a kind of braille. It might seem crude, but if you do it enough you get to tell one kind of soil from another quickly.

We returned to the river shore where we sat and ate a picnic lunch. I knelt down by the shore and picked up some sandy soil, like those on a sandbar, rubbing it between my thumb and first finger, to compare this with the soil of the woods.  I could feel the individual grains as they spilled back to the ground.  Nearby where there was some vegetation, and I did the same thing with the soil.  Between my fingers I could feel the slight stickiness of silt and the graininess of sand.  Three kinds of soil in three kinds of habitats, distinguishable by touch.

We were careful about where we chose to touch soils and rocks, because at Ponca State Park there is an official concern with endangered species.  Walking to the base of a steep bluff, we read a sign posted by the Army Corps of Engineers warning: “Attention boaters and recreationists; least terns and piping plovers are protected by State and Federal Endangered Species Laws.  Both species nest on sandbars and beaches on the river.  Some of these nesting areas are posted as closed to all access.  Do not disturb these birds.”

Returning to the shore with a good view of the sandbar in the middle of the channel, we sat back and took in the scent of the river and the downslope breezes carrying the scent of the forest.  I was reminded that knowing our surroundings is more than seeing them.  It is common to think of human activities as separate and outside of, or above, nature.  It is also common to believe that the activities of scientists separate them from nature.  Some believe that these activities are even bad for nature.  I thought about the field research I had done in forests in many places.  Our measurements often included the diameters and heights of trees, which put us into constant contact with the vegetation, struggling through dense stands of shrubs and saplings, brushing aside the sweat and the mosquitoes, insects that frequently bothered Lewis and Clark.  Putting a measuring tape around a tree trunk, we felt the differences among the species, the rough bark of a cottonwood, the smooth of alder – another of nature’s brailles.  Sometimes we collected leaves and soils for analysis, to see how rich they were in nutrients for wildlife.  At times we would pick up a little soil and rub it between our fingers.

I found that the process of making these measurements, of touching and smelling, led me to see things I had never noticed before.  In a natural area, each creature has a story to tell us.  Sometimes in the quiet a bird would fly by that I would have missed.  Sometimes I would come across a species of tree I hadn’t expected to find and would have missed except for the process of measurement. And I would ask myself what story this tree could tell me.  How did its seeds arrive?  Why, if it isn’t common here, has it survived?  Is there something different about the soil?  Or was there some event, that allowed it to persist and flourish?

To know the nature of the American Midwest, of the river, the prairie and the forests is to do more than see it and pass it by.  There is another level of experience, entered into by naturalists like Lewis and Clark through their senses, that sometimes manifests as an intuitive knowledge or understanding, non-verbal and non-visual.  This is how to read nature, to learn nature’s stories.

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.

24 South Sioux City and the Bluffs on Fire: Lewis and Clark Learn about Geology of the Missouri

From Sioux City, Iowa take Interstate 29 south to Interstate 129 West.  This becomes U.S. Route 20. Or, from South Sioux City, Nebraska, take U.S. Route 75 south to U.S. Route 20, then turn right.  Watch for roadside historic markers on U.S. Route 20, past Martin Airport to the west of South Sioux City.  The sign is located 1 mile west of Jackson, Nebraska.  One locates the campsite of August 21, 1804 and a second campsite of August 23 through 25, where Lewis and Clark saw the blue clay bluffs that appeared to have been on fire, with the ground too hot to touch.

From here you can reach Ponca State Park by continuing on U.S. Route 20 to the junction with Route 12, at Willis.  Take Route 12 northwest (a right hand turn) to the town of Ponca, then follow Route S26E to the park.  Weather permitting, you can see these bluffs across the river from Elk Point, South Dakota, which is on the Missouri floodplain to the north of the river’s course.

On August 24, 1804, Lewis and Clark saw “rugged bluffs” on the southwestern shore of the river rising “about 180 or 190 feet high.”  These bluffs are northeast of present day Newcastle, Nebraska, and 6 miles southeast of Vermillion, South Dakota.  Today they are known locally as the “Ionia Volcano”.  Clark wrote that the bluffs had “lately been on fire and is yet verry Hott,” wrote Clark. They examined these rocks and tried to ascertain what they were, referring to them as having a “Great appearance of Coal & imence quantities of Cabalt in Side of the part of the Bluff which sliped in.”  They were studying the geology of the Missouri River, as President Jefferson had commissioned them to do in his letter to Lewis before the journey began.  Jefferson instructed them to pay attention to “the mineral productions of every kind, but more particularly metals, limestone, pit coal & saltpeter; salines and mineral waters.”

They also studied the geography of the river, each day recording the direction of the river and the distance traveled, making measurements, winding the chronometer, wherever possible determining their latitude and longitude using a sextant.  Every day at noon they took a temperature reading.  During the day and at the end of each day they estimated the distance traveled.  Their measurements were incredibly accurate.   And so the days continued.  Breakfast, break camp, move up river, measure the distance, observe the countryside, its rocks, animals and plants, record these observations, hunt for food, keep the men of the expedition at their tasks, make camp, eat dinner, sleep, and begin again.  A measured journey, a scientific expedition, remarkable for its time, for any time.

And so when I was preparing to set out and learn the natural history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, I thought it would be easy to find information about the geology of the Missouri River.  After all, they had started this study almost 200 years before.  Just think what scientists ought to know now after that length of concerted effort.  I began a search for scientific papers and books about the Missouri River.  I readily found  information about most of the other great rivers of the world.  There were many books and papers about the Amazon River’s geology.  So too for the Columbia River, the Hudson, the Mississippi.  But oddly I couldn’t find much about the Missouri River.  Surely this can’t be right, I thought.  I had years of experience doing this kind of search for information.  What was I doing wrong now?

I decided I had better call my friend and colleague, Tom Dunne, one of the world’s experts on how rivers and landscape interact.  A geologist, he specializes in what is called “geomorphology,” the study of the shape and form of the Earth’s surface.

“No, you’re not making any mistakes,” Tom said over the phone, “You’re right.  There is not much written about the geomorphology of the Missouri.  This subject went out of fashion in the middle of the twentieth century,” Tom said.  “Then the big construction projects started on the Missouri — the dams, the channelization.  When geologists accepted the idea of plate tectonics, geomorphology came back into fashion.  But by that time, there wasn’t enough of the original Missouri left for geologists to get really interested in it.  So there hasn’t been as much done on that river as the other great rivers.”

And so geology, like other sciences I am acquainted with, has its fashions, one topic coming in and out of popularity.  Perhaps as the Lewis and Clark expedition becomes more and more popular and the concern with our rivers grows, the geomorphology of the Missouri will come back into fashion.

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.

23. Sioux City, Iowa, Waterfront Park: Highways and Riverfronts

Sioux City is easily reached by Interstate 29.

As the expedition moved up the Missouri River near the location of modern Sioux City, Iowa, Lewis and Clark found the river and the prairie rich with meat, fur, and fruits, a bountiful land.  On August 12, 1804, he noted that beaver were “verry plentiful on this part of the river.” On August 15, 1804, Clark saw “Verry fat ducks” and plovers “of different Kinds” on the river.  On August 21, 1804, in the vicinity of modern Sioux City, Iowa, Clark discovered “a very excellent froot” like a current, growing on a shurb “about the Common hight of a wild plumb.”  This is the first record of buffaloberry, one of the small bounties of the prairie.   And so their journals continue.

The biological richness of the prairie and the river provided a foundation that continues today.  The surrounding rich prairie soil is the basis for grain and meat production. And Sioux City, population 80,000 – 120,00 plus including suburbs — is a prosperous center for grain and meat processing.   Located at the confluence of the Big Sioux River, the Floyd River and the Missouri River, Sioux City is a natural location for a city to rise.  At this junction farmers could easily bring their produce and transport their purchases upriver to the northeast and to the west, or down river to the south.

We came to Sioux City to use it as a central jumping off place: to visit the only down river portion of the Missouri that has not been channelized or dammed, which is best visited at Ponca State Park, a 30 minute drive from here.  We came here also to see how the rest of the river and the countryside had been transformed by human actions since Lewis and Clark passed this way.  We stayed at an Inn in South Sioux City, Nebraska, across the river from Sioux City, Iowa, where we could view the city within its environmental setting.  “Sioux City” can and does confuse visitors because Sioux City is in Iowa, South Sioux City is in Nebraska, and North Sioux City is in South Dakota.

We had spent the day before driving through a lonely countryside of crops and few people.  Here, on the banks of the Missouri, the financial prosperity of the city and its suburbs was evident at a crowded bar where businessmen, vacationers, and military personnel on leave from an airbase talked at a high pitch.

From the bar, we could see a pleasant park across the river.  There, a large pavilion stood within a wide lawn, and within it a wedding was taking place in the lazy, late summer cocktail hour.  The bride came down with her entourage, then the groom and his friends.  Gradually, the ceremony colored the green lawn with white and black and pastels, a moving tapestry.  Between us and the wedding, small outboard motorboats buzzed upstream and floated downstream, sometimes in twos, with people conversing between boats and sharing beers.  There was a sense of prosperity and fun.  Bicyclers, walkers, and joggers moved past the wedding scene on a cement path along the river.

The Inn was separated from the river shore by a wide, irrigated lawn.  We strolled outside down the lawn as near to the river as we could get.  Here the channelized Missouri River flowed straight.  The buzz of conversations was replaced by the murky rumble of outboard engines.  The current was swift enough that boats coasting downstream seemed to go almost as fast as those motoring upstream.

I decided to measure the speed of the river.  I paced off a distance parallel to the river on the lawn of the Inn.  From my surveying days I knew that I could walk a measured pace that was close to five feet long.  I paced off 100 feet. There was quite a bit of small flotsam in the river: small tree branches, soda bottles bobbing in the boat wakes, fast-food restaurant plates.  I focused on one of the branches and, with my stopwatch, timed how long it took to float the distance.  Distance divided by time equals velocity.  I picked out a plastic soda bottle and timed its transit.  Pretty consistent: The river along its channelized shores was running between 5 and 6 miles per hour.  Interesting, because on July 17, 1804, Clark made the same measurement when the expedition was south of here, near the Iowa-Missouri border.  He recorded in his journal that the river took 41 seconds to run 50 fathoms.  A fathom is 6 feet, and so his measure worked out to 5 miles per hour.  The Missouri River I stood by at the end of the twentieth century was running just about the same speed as the Missouri River Clark had stood by almost 200 years before.  That’s a strong current for a river, I thought, and it would be hard to row upstream against that current.  Difficult today if I could find such a boat, and difficult when Lewis and Clark came by here with their pirogues.

I looked again at the entire scene.  In the setting sun it was pleasant, and clearly people were enjoying it here.  Otherwise the bride would not have picked the waterfront park for her wedding, the bar would have not been so full of conversation, the river not so dense with motorboats.  There was prosperity, but not much of a sense of place, of what was special about this setting. This was unlike many cities famous around the world, where people go to see not only architecture, but the connectedness between artifice and landscape.

Standing along this altered shore, I thought about the experiences of the past weeks, when we had sought to find remnants of the natural landscape and a sense of place for people within the prairie and along the river.  The second we had not found.  In nearby Gayville, South Dakota, a large billboard said “Hay Capitol of the World” and I wondered why Sioux City lacked a sign that said “Prairie City of the World” or “Missouri River City.”

We had found this indifference to the prairie heritage and prairie river  everywhere that we had gone over the past weeks.  What was missing here seemed to be missing throughout our nation in our approach to environmental issues, which are phrased mostly as “problems” rather than in terms of a natural heritage. Beer drinkers on a noisy outboard on a channelized Missouri River would be condemned by puritanical environmentalists, while those enjoying the boats, disconnected from the very surrounding heritage that gave rise to their prosperity, dismissed the accusations and the accusers.  Within one landscape, the two sides passed each other by, much as did the downstream and upstream boaters on the Missouri River, each with their own conversation, concerns, assumptions, and focus.  The environment was a “problem” viewed within our society as having defenders and opposers – both abstracted from the local natural heritage.  Why not seek to integrate a sense of natural history heritage into this setting in which the idea of an “environmental problem” would dissolve into an environmental heritage?  Here was one place to do it, with the discretionary income to make it possible.

In a few places, this is happening, as Bill Stevens of the New York Times wrote in his book, Miracle Under the Oaks.  Near Chicago, prairies are being restored as part of volunteer community projects.  People are enjoying their natural history heritage and celebrating it by restoring their connection to nature.  With that restoration, people can  once again feel a place within nature, and become once again a part of nature.

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.

22. Sergeant Charles Floyd Monument: Medicine and Nature

From Interstate 29 take Exit 143B, the first exit south of Sioux City.  The sign for this exit says Route 75, Industrial Road.  Take that exit and go north, and then turn into the parking area for the Floyd Monument.

The death of Sergeant Charles Floyd, the only member of the expedition to die during the journey, is one of the best known events in the Lewis and Clark journals.  The monument to him, completed in 1900, stands on top of a bluff above the Missouri River, clearly visible from Interstate 29.  Visiting it is a pilgrimage for most Lewis and Clark buffs, and the monument is listed on the National Park Service map of the Lewis and Clark expedition as one of about 80 places to visit.  What could be easier to find, we thought.

We set out on a beautiful summer day to see the monument, driving south from the center of Sioux City, Iowa.  There, ahead, stood the monument, a miniature Washington Monument and therefore unmistakable.  But the road to it was not marked on any of the standard roadmaps we had with us, including the AAA map.  We circled around on various roads without success.  It was time to ask directions.  But people we stopped did not know about the monument.  I wondered that such a famous and visible landmark seemed so unknown to the residents of this city.   It was a bit of an Alice-through-the-looking-glass experience; for a while, the harder we tried to reach the monument that was clearly visible to us, the further we found ourselves from it.  Eventually, we wandered onto the road that led to it, came across a sign about 500 feet before the entrance that was the first we had seen, and drove into the parking lot.

It was Monday morning and we were the only visitors.  The monument to a death on the prairie was surrounded by a large grass lawn of introduced plants.  The view from the bluff was a pleasant one of trees lining the Missouri River, of fields of hay, interspersed with highways and grain elevators, all beneath a cloudless sky – a  peaceful setting with a view of the great agricultural bounty of a prairie state, a place on this quiet day for contemplation, but not a setting in which one expects a sudden death.      This no doubt, had been the expectation as well of Lewis and Clark a few days before Floyd’s death.  On August 15, 1804, Floyd was one of three men sent out by Lewis and Clark to examine a prairie fire “at no great distance from the camp” which they found had been set by Sioux Indians.  Activities seemed more or less normal, except that Lewis and Clark had to deal with two attempted desertions.  Floyd was just another healthy, productive member of the crew.  But on August 19, 1804, Clark wrote that “Serjeant Floyd is taken verry bad all at onc with a Beliose Chorlick” and that they tried “to relieve him without Success as yet, he gets worse and we ar much allarmed at his Situation, all attention to him.”

On the next day, August 20, 1804, Clark wrote that they made him a warm bath “hopeing it would brace him a little,” but “before we could get him in to this bath he expired, with a great deel of composure, haveing Said to me before his death that he was going away and wished me to write a letter.”  Death came quickly and with little expectation.

The symptoms suggest a burst appendix, a rapid death in any century.  That only one man died on the expedition, and his death was from causes not related to the travel itself, is often remarked upon.  It is a demonstration of the remarkable leadership of Lewis and Clark who perservered through dangerous encounters with grizzly bears; intense storms; the terrible cold of the first winter near Bismarck, North Dakota; cold, wetness, and lack of food during the second winter near the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon; canoeing down rapids on the Columbia River – a feat never attempted by the local Indians; and an attack on the return trip by a hostile Indian tribe.

Floyd was buried at “the top of a high round hill overlooking the river & Country for a great distance,” long since washed away by the Missouri River, but similar to the location of the modern monument.  They named a river after him, and moved on toward greater unknowns.

A two-year expedition into the wilderness required especially careful consideration of medicines.  Needing to keep materials to a minimum, Lewis selected medicines carefully. His medicine chest included the best available pharmaceuticals of the day.  It is interesting that these were derived from plants or were simple minerals.  Here is what was in Lewis’s medicine chest. Balsam, from the tree.  Borax a mineral compound still in use today. Calomel, a mercury compound used as a purgative, a white, tasteless powder used in the twentieth century as a fungicide.  Camphor, a plant product used to treat pain and itching.  It is a whitish and translucent crystalline from the camphor tree that provides the clean scent in many public bathrooms.  Cloves, which relieve toothache and are still used today for that purpose.  Cinnamon.  Copperas, which is iron sulphate, and was used to treat anemia.  Ipecac, a dried root of a South America shrub, used as an emetic.  Jalap.  Laudanum, which is opium in a solution of water and drinking alcohol.   Niter, which we call saltpeter, an ingredient in gunpowder, which was also used to treat many diseases, especially asthma.  Nutmeg, which in small quantities is a familiar spice, but in larger quantities can have some mood-altering effects.

Many modern medicines have the same origins as those Lewis brought on the expedition.  Antibiotics, the products of fungi, are arguably the most spectacularly successful of mid-twentieth century medical discoveries from natural products.  The list of plant-derived medicines has grown tremendously, and the potential for new medicines is an argument I hear conservationists use commonly as one of the main utilitarian reasons we should conserve rare and endangered plants.  Taxol, a product of the comparatively rare Pacific Yew tree, found useful in therapy for some cancers, is one of the better known recent examples of such a find.  But aspirin is also a natural plant derivative, from the inner bark of willow. It was well known to the Indians.

It is an interesting question why plants might produce compounds that are helpful in curing diseases.  One reason is that plants produce many chemicals to ward off and kill organisms that feed on them or cause diseases.  Unable to strike back with a club, plants have evolved chemical methods to fight their predators and parasites.  These are therefore useful to us, in small doses that are not toxic to ourselves but toxic to disease organisms.

Although the interior of a modern hospital or physician’s office appears to be quite divorced from the raw nature Lewis and Clark confronted, in fact many of the medicines your physician prescribes come from that nature, or had their original source there.  It is another sobering way that we are closely connected to our surroundings, but rarely aware of them.

Our modern medical care – available just up the highway in Sioux City, would seem to protect us from such incidences.  But in spite of the tremendous medical advances made since Lewis and Clark stood by Sergeant Floyd as he lay dying, a wilderness hiker today would fare no better from a ruptured appendix.  That event requires a timely operation done, at a minimum, in the kind of field hospital used by a modern army, with sterilized instruments and modern anesthetics.

As I stood in contemplation of this sad event, I thought about modern hikers who often seek to find an experience as much like those of the early explorers as possible.  On any hiking trip or expedition, it is always a question what first aid to bring.  Usually, casual hikers carry less rather than more — sometimes nothing.  I remembered two young men I met hiking up Mount Washington, New Hampshire, famous for some of the worst weather ever recorded in the world, with snow recorded in every month of the year.  That day had started like the one at the Floyd Monument, warm and perfectly clear.  The two men were clad only in shorts, socks, and hiking shoes.  “Where are your shirts?” I asked, when we stopped for a brief conversation.  “Oh, it was so hot, we left them on a tree down below,” one of them said, unaware that storms with hail and snow had been known to descend on this mountain in a few hours with little warning.

If you choose to seek a wilderness experience as close as possible to that of Lewis and Clark, you would have to forgo the availability of modern medical assistance, and accept Floyd’s risk of death. The alternative, often accepted today even among the physically most rugged of us, is to have society support the search and rescue of sick and injured mountain climbers and wilderness seekers.  Recently, hikers equipped with GPS satellite positioning devices and cellular phones have been calling in to ask for helicopter assistance when they find themselves nearing dusk and not yet home, or lost.  This have-it and not-have-it wilderness experience is spiritually much different from the travels of Lewis and Clark.

As I stood near the monument and looked out at the peaceful scene below, I contemplated a nature that heals us in ways we have generally forgotten and confronts us with risks we think our modern technology eliminates.  Like the monument to Sergeant Floyd, these qualities are there before us to see, but are as often passed by, and are just as surprisingly difficult to approach as was our bungled attempt to find a quick and smooth route from a great prairie city to this historic marker.

Since our visit, the grounds at the Floyd Monument have been renovated.  The area at the base of the monument is known as the Dr. V. Strode Hinds Memorial Plaza.  Strode was a past president of the Lewis and Clark Foundation.  On the evening of August 20, 1998, the new lights illuminating the monument were turned on.  I am told the lights make the monument seem to glow against the night sky – truly a lovely sight and site.

23 Sioux City, Iowa, Waterfront Park: Highways and Riverfronts  Sioux City is easily reached by Interstate 29.

As the expedition moved up the Missouri River near the location of modern Sioux City, Iowa, Lewis and Clark found the river and the prairie rich with meat, fur, and fruits, a bountiful land.  On August 12, 1804, he noted that beaver were “verry plentiful on this part of the river.” On August 15, 1804, Clark saw “Verry fat ducks” and plovers “of different Kinds” on the river.  On August 21, 1804, in the vicinity of modern Sioux City, Iowa, Clark discovered “a very excellent froot” like a current, growing on a shurb “about the Common hight of a wild plumb.”  This is the first record of buffaloberry, one of the small bounties of the prairie.   And so their journals continue.

The biological richness of the prairie and the river provided a foundation that continues today.  The surrounding rich prairie soil is the basis for grain and meat production. And Sioux City, population 80,000 – 120,00 plus including suburbs — is a prosperous center for grain and meat processing.   Located at the confluence of the Big Sioux River, the Floyd River and the Missouri River, Sioux City is a natural location for a city to rise.  At this junction farmers could easily bring their produce and transport their purchases upriver to the northeast and to the west, or down river to the south.

We came to Sioux City to use it as a central jumping off place: to visit the only down river portion of the Missouri that has not been channelized or dammed, which is best visited at Ponca State Park, a 30 minute drive from here.  We came here also to see how the rest of the river and the countryside had been transformed by human actions since Lewis and Clark passed this way.  We stayed at an Inn in South Sioux City, Nebraska, across the river from Sioux City, Iowa, where we could view the city within its environmental setting.  “Sioux City” can and does confuse visitors because Sioux City is in Iowa, South Sioux City is in Nebraska, and North Sioux City is in South Dakota.

We had spent the day before driving through a lonely countryside of crops and few people.  Here, on the banks of the Missouri, the financial prosperity of the city and its suburbs was evident at a crowded bar where businessmen, vacationers, and military personnel on leave from an airbase talked at a high pitch.

From the bar, we could see a pleasant park across the river.  There, a large pavilion stood within a wide lawn, and within it a wedding was taking place in the lazy, late summer cocktail hour.  The bride came down with her entourage, then the groom and his friends.  Gradually, the ceremony colored the green lawn with white and black and pastels, a moving tapestry.  Between us and the wedding, small outboard motorboats buzzed upstream and floated downstream, sometimes in twos, with people conversing between boats and sharing beers.  There was a sense of prosperity and fun.  Bicyclers, walkers, and joggers moved past the wedding scene on a cement path along the river.

The Inn was separated from the river shore by a wide, irrigated lawn.  We strolled outside down the lawn as near to the river as we could get.  Here the channelized Missouri River flowed straight.  The buzz of conversations was replaced by the murky rumble of outboard engines.  The current was swift enough that boats coasting downstream seemed to go almost as fast as those motoring upstream.

I decided to measure the speed of the river.  I paced off a distance parallel to the river on the lawn of the Inn.  From my surveying days I knew that I could walk a measured pace that was close to five feet long.  I paced off 100 feet. There was quite a bit of small flotsam in the river: small tree branches, soda bottles bobbing in the boat wakes, fast-food restaurant plates.  I focused on one of the branches and, with my stopwatch, timed how long it took to float the distance.  Distance divided by time equals velocity.  I picked out a plastic soda bottle and timed its transit.  Pretty consistent: The river along its channelized shores was running between 5 and 6 miles per hour.  Interesting, because on July 17, 1804, Clark made the same measurement when the expedition was south of here, near the Iowa-Missouri border.  He recorded in his journal that the river took 41 seconds to run 50 fathoms.  A fathom is 6 feet, and so his measure worked out to 5 miles per hour.  The Missouri River I stood by at the end of the twentieth century was running just about the same speed as the Missouri River Clark had stood by almost 200 years before.  That’s a strong current for a river, I thought, and it would be hard to row upstream against that current.  Difficult today if I could find such a boat, and difficult when Lewis and Clark came by here with their pirogues.

I looked again at the entire scene.  In the setting sun it was pleasant, and clearly people were enjoying it here.  Otherwise the bride would not have picked the waterfront park for her wedding, the bar would have not been so full of conversation, the river not so dense with motorboats.  There was prosperity, but not much of a sense of place, of what was special about this setting. This was unlike many cities famous around the world, where people go to see not only architecture, but the connectedness between artifice and landscape.

Standing along this altered shore, I thought about the experiences of the past weeks, when we had sought to find remnants of the natural landscape and a sense of place for people within the prairie and along the river.  The second we had not found.  In nearby Gayville, South Dakota, a large billboard said “Hay Capitol of the World” and I wondered why Sioux City lacked a sign that said “Prairie City of the World” or “Missouri River City.”

We had found this indifference to the prairie heritage and prairie river  everywhere that we had gone over the past weeks.  What was missing here seemed to be missing throughout our nation in our approach to environmental issues, which are phrased mostly as “problems” rather than in terms of a natural heritage. Beer drinkers on a noisy outboard on a channelized Missouri River would be condemned by puritanical environmentalists, while those enjoying the boats, disconnected from the very surrounding heritage that gave rise to their prosperity, dismissed the accusations and the accusers.  Within one landscape, the two sides passed each other by, much as did the downstream and upstream boaters on the Missouri River, each with their own conversation, concerns, assumptions, and focus.  The environment was a “problem” viewed within our society as having defenders and opposers – both abstracted from the local natural heritage.  Why not seek to integrate a sense of natural history heritage into this setting in which the idea of an “environmental problem” would dissolve into an environmental heritage?  Here was one place to do it, with the discretionary income to make it possible.

In a few places, this is happening, as Bill Stevens of the New York Times wrote in his book, Miracle Under the Oaks.  Near Chicago, prairies are being restored as part of volunteer community projects.  People are enjoying their natural history heritage and celebrating it by restoring their connection to nature.  With that restoration, people can  once again feel a place within nature, and become once again a part of nature.