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.