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.