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.