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.

27. Vermillion: On the Wild and Scenic Missouri

In Sioux City, Iowa, Ponca, Nebraska, Vermillion and Yankton, South Dakota, seek local river guides.  There is no formal organization of these guides; check with bait shops, etc.

On August 26, 1804, Clark wrote that  “The river verry full of Sand bars,” as the expedition passed near the location of modern Vermillion, South Dakota, and moved upstream.  They saw “a Island & large Sand bars on both sides” where the river was wide and the expedition passed white cliffs and elsewhere others of blue or Dark earth of 2 mile in extent” — cliffs of white chalk estimated now to be late Cretaceous, therefore more than 60 million years old.  Two days later they found several sand bars on the river and Clark reported that “the river here is wide & Shallow full of Sand bars.”  One of the pirogues struck a snag which cut through it “and like to have sunk” Clark continued.  It was a difficult river, soon to be notorious for its ability to sink boats.   These qualities of the river would become all too familiar to steamboat pilots and their passengers.

Steamboats first ran on the Missouri on May 18, 1819, almost fifteen years to the day after Lewis and Clark started their trip.  Steamboating as a dominate form of transportation lasted only four decades, ending before the Civil War, replaced by railroads.  Yet so treacherous was the Missouri that more than 450 steamboats were lost on the river during that time – a rate of about 11 wrecks a year.  Some say that the average lifetime of a steamboat was four trips.

Most of that treacherous, wild Missouri exists no longer, replaced by the Army Corps of Engineers’ channelization of the river below Ponca State Park, Mile 753.  Although a hazard to navigation, this original river has a quality of the wild that is little known and little appreciated, except by a few who live along the only downstream reach of the Missouri that has not been channelized.  This is the lower wild and scenic portion of the Missouri; it extends 59 miles from near Gavins Point Dam to Ponca State Park.  It was here that we were fortunate to go out in a small boat with someone who had lived his life on this part of the river.

I”m just an old river rat,” Jim Peterson said, “I was born in Ponca, Nebraska, and my father took me on the river when I was a small boy.  Been boating on the river ever since.  Don’t fish.  People ask me what I do on the river.  I tell them I just like being on the river.”  It was a beautiful cloudless spring day when we pushed Jim’s outboard boat off of the silty bank, a bank that gave way under our feet if we stepped where it was wet – just a little warning by the river about the material that it used to make up its sandbars.

Soon we were out in the middle of the Missouri, passing a large sandbar of the type Clark observed almost two centuries before.  After busy days of travel by car and traveling here and there on the channelized Missouri, we felt a wonderful sense of peacefulness in the center of the river.  We passed lines of cottonwoods just opening their leaves on the large sandbar/island.  An occasional waterbird flew before us.  There was no one else on the river.  This was the most serene and beautiful of all of our experiences on the lower Missouri — the Missouri below the most downstream of the big dams.  Jim slowed the boat to see if we could get up a small tributary.  The silty sediment of the river scratched against the aluminum bottom of the boat. But for Jim’s experience and skill, we might have run aground.  Jim backed the boat off.  It may sound strange to say that a motorboat ride was serene and gave a sense of wildness, but on this big river, this is exactly what we felt.

“If anybody tells you he never ran aground on this part of the Missouri,” Jim said, “he’s a liar.  I run aground from time to time.”  Jim was much more than a river rat.  He had recently retired as a faculty member at the University of South Dakota and was President of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.  He was a devotee of the Lewis and Clark expedition; his pickup license plate was “LCTHF.”  Jim knew the river so well that he had navigated the paddle-wheel steamboat, the Far West, from Yankton, South Dakota to Ponca — through this untamed portion of the river — when that boat was being moved to Florida, having failed to attract enough customers to maintain a tourist business from Yankton.

We talked about why there was so little tourist business of taking people on the river.  He said the season was short — June, July and August, and the liability insurance rates extremely high for motor boats, and that a federal motor boat licence was required.  “As soon as Labor Day is past, children are in school and the business dries up,” he said.  But he also observed that the number of foreign visitors was increasing, and I suggested that this kind of business might begin to attract a different, wider audience as the Lewis and Clark journey became more popular.  Jim spoke of the difficulties of navigating the sandbars and snags on the river.  That is another reason this is a difficult tourist business.  The very qualities that made the Missouri a beautiful and peaceful place to be on that spring day are the ones that make it difficult to be there.

And so it is difficult today to find a way to travel on this wild and scenic reach of the Missouri River.  We asked Jim what someone could do, because there is no professional organization of river guides here.  “Go into a local bait shop, boat dealer or bar,” he said, “Ask around.  Usually you can find a river rat like me who will be happy to take you on the river.”  At least until the river becomes so popular that the boatmen form that professional organization.  As the boat eased back against the silty shore, we decided that, if your intention was to experience the sense of the river as it used to be, and to seek a place of beauty on the Missouri, you would come here.