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.

29 The Confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers: Lewis and Clark Begin to See the Animals of the West

For directions to this area, refer to the entry for Niobrara State Park.

On September 4, 1804,  Clark recorded the expedition’s first encounter with mule deer and pronghorn, providing the first written scientific of the mule deer, whom they so named, and the name stuck.  Clark referred to “Several wild goats on the Clift & Deer with black tales.”  Later, on September 17, 1804, when the expedition neared the location of modern Chamberlain, South Dakota, Clark wrote a longer description of mule deer when one of the men, Colter, shot one.  Clark observed that it was “a Curious kind of Deer, A Darker grey than Common the hair longer & finer, the ears verry large & long a Small resepitical under its eye its tail round and white to near the end which is black & like a Cow” but “in every other respect like a Deer, except it runs like a goat” and later that it “jumps like a goat or Sheep” and it was “large.”

The expedition was near the 100th Longitudinal meridian, entering the short-grass prairie and the landscape and wildlife that we identify today as the American West – cowboy and Indian country of open plains and big skies.  They began to encounter a wealth of new species.

On that day also one of the hunters brought in “a Small wolf with a large bushey tail,” probably the expedition’s first encounter with a coyote. It was another of their contributions to biological science.  A few days later they would find prairie dogs and provide not only their first written description, but the first live specimen to be sent back and reach Virginia.   On September 16, 1804, they saw and shot a black-billed magpie, about which Lewis wrote a detailed description, noting that “the wings have nineteen feathers, of which the ten first have the longer side of their plumage white in the middle of the feather” and the “upper side of the wing, as well as the short side of the plumage” was “a dark blackis or bluish green sonetimes presenting as light orange yellow or bluish tin as it happens to be presented to different exposures of ligt.”  He wrote that “it is a most beatifull bird” with the outer wings changing in color with different light to be an orange green and then a reddish indigo blue.  He was observing one of the many kinds of birds whose plumage color is the result of the way light is refracted from the feathers rather than from an actual dye.

The mule deer is the characteristic deer of the western plains and Rocky Mountains, living in confer forests, desert shrublands, and prairies.  At the time of Lewis and Clark the mule deer occurred west from the Dakotas to the Pacific coast.  Along the coast, they were found from Baja California to British Columbia.  In the prairie, they ranged from the south edge of Alaska through Canada south into central Texas and interior Mexico.  Mule deer fees primarily on herbaceous plants including grasses, but also browse on shrubs and trees. The whitetail deer, the characteristic deer of the eastern United States, is more of a forest animal, primarily feeding on leaves and twigs of shrubs and trees as well as acorns.    At the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the whitetail had a larger range, and was found in Lewis and Clark’s home state of Virginia as well as the entire eastern seaboard.  It was absent at that time only from the Rocky Mountains and California.  Both deer remain abundant.

The pronghorn antelope is native only to North America.  It has been here for about 50 million years, since the Eocene.  Pronghorn feed on grasses and forbs during the growing season and eat shrubs in the fall and winter.  Some experts estimated that at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition pronghorn may have been almost as abundant as buffalo, perhaps numbering 30 or 40 million.  But soon after the Lewis and Clark expedition, pronghorn became a major item in the diet of pioneers, and was also sold commercially.  A creature of the prairie, the pronghorn lost its habitat to the plow and cattle.  By the beginning of the twentieth century there were only about 10,000 pronghorn remaining.

Concern about the decline of this species occurred rather early in the history of conservation in America.  In the early twentieth century, states began to pass laws protecting the pronghorn and outlawing hunting.  Yearly censuses of the herds began, as well as collection of information about diseases and predation.  In the 1920s the first extensive census was made over the entire range, and there appeared to be about 30,000 pronghorn.  Today, these animals number over a million, with the greatest numbers in Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota.   They remain relatively rare in South Dakota — under 10,000.  Pronghorn have increased in abundance for the past 85 years and more than doubled between the late 70s and late 80s.  With care and restoration of prairie habitat, the outlook for the pronghorn remain good, it is possible to see pronghorn along Interstate 90 east and west of Gillette, Wyoming, but most likely you will still have to seek wildlife refuges and prairie preserves to see these animals.