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.

28. The Niobrara River Meets the Missouri: Cedars Persist on the Bright Bluffs

From Yankton, South Dakota take Route 81 south to Route 12, turn right (west) and continue through the town of Niobrara.  The road follows a bluff uphill and a short way beyond the town, on the slope, is the entrance to Niobrara State Park on the right.  To canoe on the Niobrara River, continue on Route 12 to Valentine, Nebraska, more than 120 miles to the west.  There are several outfitters in Valentine.

On August 25, 1998, a new bridge over the Missouri opened for traffic.  It is located about 3 miles east of Niobrara and will eventually connect Nebraska Route 14 to South Dakota Route 37.  The bridge ends in South Dakota at Running Water, about 10 miles west of Springfield, South Dakota.

On September 4, 1804, Lewis and Clark were traveling up the Missouri River where it flows generally west to east, upstream about 30 miles from today’s town of Yankton, South Dakota, when they reached the mouth of the Niobrara River.  That river flows  generally from southwest by west, Clark wrote, forming an acute angle with the Missouri River and leaving a peninsula between the two.  Clark observed that “Qui courrse,” referring to the river by its French name, “Comes roleing its Sands” and was “Throwing out Sands like the Platt (only Corser) forming bars in its mouth.”  As was his practice, he measured the river and found it “152 yards wide at the mouth & 4 feet Deep.” Traveling up the Niobrara three miles to where there had been a Ponca Indian village, he found that  “The river widens above its mouth and is devided by Sand and Island, the Current verry rapid.”   The river was colored light, “like that of the Plat.” Along the Niobrara, “on the upper Side” Clark saw “a butifull Plain riseing gradially from the river.” Wildlife was abundant.

The next day, On September 5, 1804, the expedition headed upstream on the Missouri River and Clark wrote that they “passed a large Island of about 3 miles long in the Middle” of the river opposite of which was Ponca Creek.

Today the lower Niobrara River is part of the Wild and Scenic River System and famous among boaters as one of the top ten canoeing rivers in the United States.  I had wanted to see this river for a long time, partly because the Niobrara has not been channelized or otherwise altered, except for a small dam near Valentine, Nebraska.   Although much smaller than the Missouri, it retains the characteristics of a prairie river as Clark described it, flowing rapidly, carrying a heavy sediment load, and divided by sandbars.  I had also wanted to see the Niobrara because it is the river of one of my favorite  books which I had read several times since highschool, Old Jules, by the great Nebraska writer, Marie Sandoz.  She portrayed a prairie country that was open, lonely, but with a certain special appeal of the Niobrara River.  Also recommended is her work, “Lovesong To The Plains”.  We arrived at the mouth of the Niobrara on a beautiful spring afternoon, full of anticipation, but still greatly surprised by the beauty of the landscape and of the two rivers, the Niobrara and the Missouri, at their confluence.

We stayed at Niobrara State Park in a cabin on a bluff overlooking the confluence and the surrounding rolling countryside.  It was the most beautiful place that we stayed on the Missouri River downstream of Montana.  Late that afternoon we went out on the river in a Zodiac powered by an outboard motor with Rick Plooster, Assistant Park Superintendent, a trip available to park visitors during the summer.  Here the Missouri River is upstream from Gavin’s Point Dam and downstream from the other five major Missouri River dams.  The river flow is controlled, but otherwise the Missouri has the aspect of the unchannelized river as Lewis and Clark described it.

The Missouri widens upstream from the mouth of the Niobrara into a beautiful stretch of water with extensive sandbars on the northern, South Dakota, side and with beautiful bluffs on the southern, Nebraska, side.  We passed a large island just as Clark had mentioned, and saw that it was  large enough to have several vacation homes on it and to be well wooded.  Along the island’s shore was a layer of silty and sandy sediment among which large cottonwoods grew, perhaps 60 feet high.  We stopped to look at a beaver lodge above the water level.   Rick said that the island was used frequently in the summer by deer who browse on its trees.

We moved away from the island.  Scaup and mergansers paddled and flew.  An immature eagle soared above us.  We saw that the land on the southern, Nebraska shore was a series of bluffs and valleys, each bluff like an arch and each valley with seasonal or flowing small drainages.  The exposed rocks on the bluffs were yellow chalk, brightening in the late afternoon sunlight.  On some bluffs, below the chalk a shale-like rock was wasting away like roof shingles decaying on an old ranch house.   Hundreds of swallow nests clung to the under ledges on the bluffs.  Red cedars covered the summits of the bluffs, bur oaks grew on the mid-slopes and grasses in the valleys.  In the angling sunlight, the blue sky, dark green cedars and yellow sandstones reflected beautifully from the river.  Beyond the river the land had the look of dry country and of the West.  Rick said he thought this was a hidden jewel of a park and we agreed.

Since cedars come into prairie when fire is suppressed, and since frequent fires keep the cedars out and promote grasses, I thought that the dense stands of cedars on the summits must be the result of fire suppression since settlement and farming of this land.   The pattern was well-known, and we had seen it at Loess Hills Recreation Area in Iowa: Where fire has been suppressed and water is abundant, cedars grow and shade out the prairie grasses.  But cedars are also relatively short-lived trees, few reaching 100 years.  I guessed that the dense cedars on the bluffs must be an indication that the wildfire suppression began within the last 100 years.

In the evening, we walked through the park.  We saw deer and turkeys in the twilight and heard the turkeys call, joined by the haunting fluting of whippoorwills.  After the sun went down, I decided to check the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition once again.  On September 4, 1804, Clark wrote that he saw “a large ganuge of turkeys,” much as we had seen and heard them that evening.  But I was surprised to read that upstream a little way from the mouth of the Niobrara, Clark “walked on the top of the hill forming a Cliff Covd with red Ceeder.”  And here the expedition stopped to make a new mast of cedar.  If the red cedar were there almost two hundred years ago just as they were on our visit, then it is unlikely that there has been a change in fire frequency.  I had been too quick to attribute causes to human interventions.  Perhaps the wildfire frequency was lower here than elsewhere because the two rivers came together at an acute angle, somewhat isolating the land between them from fires.  Also, fires were less likely to reach the tops of the bluffs, so the cedars might have been protected that way.  But some wildfires had to reach the cedars.  Otherwise the cedars would begin to reach their maximum age and die back, and we would have seen many dead cedars and logs, and perhaps other trees like the oaks would have been coming in among the cedars.

Once again, I found that there was much about the natural history of the American West that I could learn from the combination of reading these journals and reading the landscape.  The journals were more than the interesting history of an adventure.  They provided an accurate account of the landscape and its plants and animals almost two hundred years ago, a description difficult to obtain elsewhere because few made such careful notes as Lewis and Clark.  Even today, in our age of information, it is rare to find careful journals about the natural history of a region.

The next day we drove to Valentine, Nebraska, rented a canoe, and paddled down the Niobrara for about 12 miles.  A stiff wind blew and the water was cold in early spring.  It was before the main canoeing season and we saw no other people on the river, famous for its wall-to-wall canoeists in the summer.

In the fast moving current, we passed sandbars and wetlands as the river took us through a deep valley beside rising bluffs.  Once again we were surprised by the beauty of this landscape, a place we hoped one day to return; a place with the look and feel of the countryside seen by Lewis and Clark and from which we had learned a little more, with the help of Clark’s journal, about the natural history of the western landscape.