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.