Chapter 30 – Passage of Discovery: An Ecologist’s Guide to the Missouri River of Lewis and Clark
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.
30. Fort Mandan, North Dakota: Winter on the Plains
From Bismarck take Route 83 north to Washburn. Do not take the turnoff into the town of Washburn. Go just north of Washburn and take a left turn on Route 200. Watch for a sign on the right that says two miles to the Fort Mandan reconstruction open 1-5 Tuesday through Sunday. Make an immediate right turn. This road takes you to the edge of the river, and you will be on the east side of the Missouri River. The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, dedicated in June 1997, is located here.
An interesting circle route from Bismarck is to go first to the reconstruction of Fort Mandan, then take Route 83 north to connect to Route 1806, a route named in honor of Lewis and Clark’s year of return, to Garrison Dam which forms Lake Sacagawea. Then drive to Sacagawea State Park where there is good viewing of wildlife. From there return on Route 1806 east to Route 200 south and visit the Knife River Indian Village National Historical Site. This is an archeological site and a reconstruction of the villages of the Indians that Lewis and Clark would have seen. From there take Route 200 south and east. If there is time, take a side trip on Route 200A to Hensier on a gravel road south a few miles to Sanger and then a gravel road east a few miles to Cross Ranch State Park on the shore of the Missouri River, a park purchased by the Nature Conservancy. From there return west on the gravel road and continue south on the first gravel road to Route 25 southeast to Interstate 94 and then to Bismarck.
Lewis and Clark reached the Mandan village where the expedition would spend its first winter on October 21, 1804. Auspiciously, the day after they arrived, they saw a beautiful plain “covered with herds of buffalo,” one of which they shot for food. Although winter was approaching, their arrival was pretty much as planned. They were still in “discovered” country, land that had become known to Europeans, mainly French-Canadian traders, trappers, and hunters, the usual raggle-taggle of the curious, the rough, the ill-fit, and the outcasts of civilization. From these, the Mandan villages were known to Lewis and Clark as a place of peaceful Indians where they might overwinter. The maps that they saw in St. Louis in 1803 and early 1804, and had copied and carried with them, showed the Missouri up to these villages.
Methodical as always, they had reached this destination just in time before winter set in, and knew that it would be impractical to proceed farther that year. Winter had approached the expedition with a deliberateness recorded firmly in the pages of their journals. Observant of everything and determined in their attempts to record what they saw, Lewis and Clark wrote of the change in the seasons as they approached the area that is now near Bismarck, North Dakota. On the first of October the leaves of ash and popular and most of the shrubs had begun to turn yellow and “decline.” There was a slight “white” frost on the fifth of October, and they saw brant and geese “passing to south”; frost the next night and teal, gulls, and mallards. On the 13th the cottonwoods were yellow and their leaves falling; on the 14th the leaves of all the ash, elm and all other trees except cottonwood had fallen; on the 17th snow geese passed overhead. Pronghorn antelope passed on their fall migration.
Lewis and Clark brought a thermometer along with them and recorded the temperature at noon and at four in the afternoon whenever possible. During their winter with the Mandans, they recorded temperatures in January 1805 that ranged within a few weeks time from minus forty to plus thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit. The next summer, Clark and Sacagawea were almost drowned by an intense thunder and hailstorm; within a month afterward, Clark walked in dry heat that gave him sunstroke. Extremes of weather seemed to be the rule. Part of the reason for these extremes is that the Missouri River Basin lies totally within the interior of a major continent far from the ameliorating effects of an ocean.
Interiors of continents are notorious for their highly variable climate. Fast changes in temperature, like those Lewis and Clark experienced in January 1805, occur because the Missouri River Basin is at the crossroads of major air masses. Some come from the north, some from the south, generally one alternating with the other. This leads to large changes in temperature over a few days, even within a few hours. In the basin as a whole, temperature extremes range from -20 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter to 110 degrees in the summer, although Lewis and Clark measured even deeper cold.
On the 19th of October, 1804, there was a hard frost, freezing clay near the river as well as water in containers. The day after they arrived at the Mandan villages, a half inch of snow fell. By the 25th all the leaves on the trees had fallen, including those of the cottonwoods. Snow fell but did not stay on the ground. Violent winds struck on the 28th and 29th, and in this way winter came.
They would stay here until April 7, 1805, – more than five months. They began to build their winter camp on the second of November, calling it Fort Mandan, at a site later known as Fort Clark, since believed to have been washed away by the Missouri. In the early summer of 1998, the federal government provided a grant for further work on Fort Mandan. Additional searching is now being conducted for Fort Mandan and a preliminary site survey has been made. I came to see a reconstruction of Fort Mandan at a small park located about eight miles down river from the original site. Since Bismarck, North Dakota and International Falls, Minnesota seem to vie for the coldest winter temperatures, I wanted to see the place where Lewis and Clark survived a cold winter with little equipment, and to find out as much as I could about how they did it.
I had spent most of one winter with my wife and newly born daughter in a small, old farmhouse heated only by one wood stove and two fireplaces. The house I stayed in was in Acworth, New Hampshire, far from North Dakota in miles, but with severe winters, perhaps not quite as cold as Bismarck, North Dakota, but chilly enough. The house sat on a slope, so that the winter winds whistled up through thin and worn siding into a partial basement and then into the living room. I heated the house with firewood that I cut and split myself. My daughter was born in the fall and knew her first five months in that house. The memories of the cold and the time spent cutting wood and keeping the fires going in the middle of the night came back to me as we drove out of Bismarck to find the reconstruction of the Lewis and Clark campsite.
We took Route 83 north, through farm country — hay, corn, grain, a few cows, then turned left onto Route 200. A sign on the right said two miles to the Fort Mandan reconstruction. We made an immediate right turn and drove to the river. A flock of magpies scattered in the grass by the road.
A sign at the visitor’s center showed a map of the area, indicating that the Fort Mandan reconstruction was several miles down the river from the original Fort Mandan. The original fort was upstream on this side of the Missouri, and almost directly across the river from the present Fort Clark State Historical site, a site off of Route 200 on the west shore. We could see that our circle route would take us to that historical site.
It was noon and there were no other visitors. I hadn’t understood from the Lewis and Clark journals that they had camped down on the floodplain where a modest bluff provided some protection from the winds, and within a grove of cottonwoods along the river that provided additional protection from the winds. The reconstruction had these features, and perhaps the original Fort Mandan was located near the shore for the same reasons, and also because that was where cottonwoods, the only large trees in any abundance in this part of the plains, grew. How much worse the winter would have been in crude huts up above the floodplain, without the protection of the bluffs along the river or the trees.
Lewis and Clark had the men build huts of cottonwood, “this being the only timber we have,” Clark wrote on November 6, 1804. Sargent Gass described the huts as “in two rows, containing four rooms each, and joined at one end forming an angle.” The floor was of split planks, covered with clay and grass. The roofs reached about 18 feet above the ground. Two store rooms were built in the angle formed by the other huts. During the building of the fort, two men cut themselves with axes. Meanwhile, ducks, geese, and brants continued to pass overhead. On November 13th, the men moved into their huts and began their stay for the winter. The next day Clark wrote that the ice was “running very thick” as the river rose and some snow fell. On the 16th “a very white frost” covered “all the trees” with ice, and all the men moved into huts, finished or not.
Along with, and as a consequence of, the varying temperatures, the Missouri River Basin has a great variation in wind, reaching 100 miles per hour. Winds are strongest in the spring as a rule. The high winds increase the rate of water evaporation, make the soil drier than would occur from the temperature and rainfall in comparatively still air. Winter blizzards – snow storms with strong winds – are a common winter hazard.
With the huts finished enough to protect them from the worst of the weather, the men of the expedition then turned to hunting — out of necessity. On the 19th of November the hunters returned with “32 deer, 12 elk and a buffalo,” the first mention in the journals of buffalo since mid-October, most likely because Lewis and Clark had been occupied with preparation for the winter, rather than the lack of the animals in the neighborhood. The weather improved toward the end of November. November 23rd was a “far warm day” as were the next two, but then the weather turned again and became very cold and windy.
On the 30th of November the Mandan chief told Lewis and Clark that some of his hunters had been attacked and killed by the Sioux. “We thought it well to show a disposition to aid and assist them against their enemies,” Clark wrote. Lewis and Clark took 23 men armed and on horseback with a promise to defend the Mandans, but the chief suggested that they wait until spring because the snow was too deep for the horses and it was too cold. Winter was closing in upon them and their crude huts were barely completed, a food supply was not in, but they took up arms and went out with their horses to help their hosts against enemies. So began their first winter on the plains.
On December 7, 1804 the Chief of the Mandans told Lewis and Clark that there were “great numbers of buffalo” on the hills nearby. Lewis went with a hunting party of 15 of his men and killed 11, “three in view of our fort,” but the weather was “so excessively cold and the wolves plenty, we only saved five of them.” Clark went with another party on the next day with 18 men and four horses, when the temperature was 44 degrees below freezing, and found buffalo about seven miles away. They killed eight, but several of the men suffered frostbite. On the ninth, Lewis went out and stayed out all night, experiencing “a cold disagreeable night . . . in the snow on a cold point with one small blanket.” The ice was so hard on the river that the buffalo crossed without breaking through. Lewis and his men killed nine buffalo, but many were “so meager that they [were] not fit for use.” On the 12th, pronghorn were seen but the weather was “so cold that we do not think it prudent to turn out to hunt.” Clark, however, with his proclivity to make measurements, paced the width of the river by walking across on the ice; he found it to be 500 yards wide.
Clark went on a hunting party on December 14 and 15 when there was “much snow” and it was 52 degrees below freezing. Buffalo continued to be seen on the 18th, but again the weather was too cold for hunting. Thus during this period they appeared to have been visited by a large herd which remained in the vicinity of the camp for ten days, not having seen buffalo since the end of October. They next reported buffalo on January 6th, when Clark was out hunting them with 16 men, killing a total of eight.
On January 14, Clark wrote that one of their hunters, who had been sent out for several days, returned to say that another member of the expedition, Whitehouse, was so badly frostbitten that he could not walk home.
In spite of the cold, Lewis reported on the same day that there was an eclipse of the moon which he observed with the small refracting telescope that was part of his sextant, having “no other glass to assist me in this observation.” He was able to “define the edge of the moon’s image.” He wrote that clouds interrupted his observations, which made the observation of the “commencement of total darkness” inaccurate. “The last two observations the end of total darkness and the end of the eclipse, were more satisfactory,” he wrote. These observations Lewis used to locate the longitude of their winter fort. Thus he continued, in spite of the cold, to carefully map the expedition’s course across the continent, and to make quantitative measurements, in keeping with the scientific purpose of the expedition.
While we think of “man and nature” as a primitive experience – men pitting themselves against nature without the aid of civilization – in fact technologies played a key role in the success of the expedition, as Clark’s use of his sextant to observe the moon testifies. Most important to the expedition along with the sextant were the compass, the gun, blacksmithing, knowledge of surveying, how to make wheels, wagons, ax handles and of course how to write. At times, the blacksmith traded his skills for Mandan corn and repaired many objects. The gun saved several of the men from grizzlies later in the trip, and hunting with guns provided the staple food, meat.
On the fourth of February, Lewis wrote that “no buffalo have made their appearance in our neighborhood for some weeks” and their “stock of meat” was nearly exhausted. Clark decided to take a group of men and go down river to hunt. They pulled their baggage on small wooden sleighs, and also brought three pack horses to carry any meat they acquired.
Clark returned on the night of the 12th. He and his men had walked 30 miles on the ice and through the woodlands. In some places the snow was up to their knees. On their first day, the fourth, they found nothing to hunt and had nothing to eat. On the second, Clark broke through the ice and his feet and legs were wet. On that day they killed a deer and two buffalo, but the buffalo were in too poor condition to eat. They saw buffalo on February 8th but found them again too lean to be worth taking. On the trip they killed elk and deer, which provided their meat until they were able to hunt again. They had killed a total of 40 deer, 3 buffalo, and 16 elk. They saw no more buffalo that winter.
Today we often romanticize about nature. Most of us see nature on television, in the comfort of central heating and air conditioning. Or we go to the ski slopes or snow-mobiling with the best of modern gear. It is cold, but relatively few of us test ourselves against winter as did Lewis and Clark and their men, arriving at a place strange to them, maintaining good terms with the Mandans, building shelter for the winter, and finding food. In the spring, they would move forward into an area completely unknown to the map-makers who came to St. Louis. It is well to remember the difficult winter Lewis and Clark spent with the Mandans when we romanticize about nature and believe that what we may conserve will always be benign for us to visit. It is just as likely to be like Clark’s hunting trip, with falls through the ice, buffalo too lean to eat, and the constant danger of frostbite.