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.

35. Fort Peck Dam and the Pines Recreation Area: Grizzlies and the Conservation of Endangered Species

To Fort Peck Dam: From the north take Route 2 to Nashua, then Route 117 south to Route 24, which goes along the reservoir, Fort Peck Lake.  Then turn left to the dam.  From the south take Route 200 to Route 24; take Route 24 north to the dam.

To the Pines Recreation Area: from Fort Peck take Route 24 west to Maxness Road, then go about four miles west to Willow Creek Road.  Take this road west to the Pines Road.  Go south on the Pines Road to the recreation area, at the end of the road on the reservoir.

On May 11, 1805, when the expedition was northeast of what is now the Pine Recreation Area near Fort Peck Dam in eastern Montana, Bratton, one of the members of the expedition, went for a walk along the shore.  Soon after, he rushed up to Lewis “so much out of breath that it was several minutes before he could tell what had happened.”  Bratton had met and shot a grizzly bear, he told Lewis, but the bear didn’t fall; instead it ran about half a mile and was still alive.

Lewis took seven men and trailed the bear about a mile by following its blood in the shrubs and willows near the shore.  Finding it, they killed the bear with two shots through the skull. Upon cutting it open, they found that Bratton had shot the bear in the lungs, after which the bear had chased him a mile and a half.

“These bear being so hard to die rather intimidates us all,” Lewis wrote.  “The wonderful power of life which these animals possess,” the journals continued,  “renders them dreadful; their very track in the mud or sand, which we have sometimes found 11 inches long and 7 1/4 wide, exclusive of the talons, is alarming.”

Not far from this location, Lewis wrote the first scientific description of the grizzly, although it did not receive its scientific name, Ursus horribilis, until 1815.  Lewis described a male “not fully grown” that he estimated weighed 300 pounds, which they had killed after shooting it many times.  He wrote that the grizzly had longer legs than the black, that its color was “yellowish brown, the eyes small, black, and piercing; the front of the fore legs near the feet is usually black; the fur is finer thicker and deeper than that of the black bear.”

Their first encounter with a grizzly had taken place the previous fall, on October 20, 1804, when they were near Bismarck, North Dakota and about to set up their winter camp. That location, in the great plains hundreds of miles east of the Rocky Mountains, considerably extends the eastern range assumed for this animal.

Lewis and Clark saw grizzlies during the next spring and into the summer.   There were approximately 20 days between April 17 and the end of July that they saw these bears — about one encounter or sighting every five days.  They were especially troubled by them when they were portaging their equipment around the Great Falls.  Their last sighting was near Three Forks, Montana, the headwaters of the Missouri.  No grizzlies were found east of Pierre, South Dakota, nor west of a north-south line passing through Missoula, Montana; the grizzlies were confined to two regions of the trip – the upper Missouri and adjacent short grass prairies and the Rocky Mountain forests – the dry plains and the cold mountains.

Because grizzlies are so big and dangerous, Lewis and Clark recorded the number of bears (usually one) in each encounter.  Reading their accounts, I realized that it was possible to use the journals to estimate the original abundance of these dangerous animals and to learn about their original range.  The expedition encountered a total of 37 grizzlies over a distance of approximately 1,000 miles, or average about four grizzlies per 100 miles traveled. The area known to have grizzlies today, 20,000 square miles, is 6 percent of the presettlement range of the bear, based on the journals of Lewis and Clark.  Today, grizzly habitat occurs mainly on government land, mostly U.S. Forest Service land, in four states.  Only 5 percent is private land.  Much of the rest is in four national parks: Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and North Cascades.  Habitat in and around Yellowstone National Park that appears to have grizzlies at present is about 7,800 square miles.  You are very unlikely to see a grizzly. But you can, at the Pines Recreation Area and elsewhere, see grizzly bear habitat.  The rare encounter with a grizzly today would occur if you go cross country backpacking in one of the national parks or national forests.  You are more likely to see them in the Canadian Rockies, although there too the chances are low, or in Alaska where the chances are greater.

Why would anyone want to know how many grizzlies there were?  Grizzlies are listed as an endangered species, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a recovery plan for the grizzly bear.  But recovery to what?  Under present interpretation of the Endangered Species Act, a species can be listed as threatened or endangered if its numbers drop to less than one-half of the estimated “carrying-capacity” – the maximum number of animals that a habitat can support.  And the carrying capacity is typically taken to be the estimate of pre-settlement abundance. That number can be estimated from the Lewis and Clark journals.

Assuming on average that the men of the expedition could see about a half mile on each side of the river, then the density of the bears was about 4 for every 100 square miles.  Multiplying this by the assumed presettlement range of the bears, about 530,000 square miles, suggests that there might have been as many as 20,000.

Although it is legally required to restore the grizzlies and an estimate of the presettlement abundance is the usual method, I was surprised to find that there are few other studies that provided any useful estimate of this abundance.  One of these few was by the Craighead brothers, who have been two of America’s experts on grizzly bears.  Their study was limited to Yellowstone National Park, where they reported an average of 230 grizzlies between 1959 and 1967, which works out to an average density of 3 bears per 100 square miles in Yellowstone National Park, similar to my estimate from the Lewis and Clark journals.

Strangely, with the sole exception of information gathered in Yellowstone National Park, our present knowledge about the abundance and density of grizzlies is not much better than what someone could have surmised by a careful reading of Lewis and Clark’s journals when the expedition returned to St. Louis in 1806.

If this is what we know about one of the most famous, most readily reported, legally threatened and therefore protected species, whose abundance and whereabouts are of considerable interest to outdoorsmen as well as government agencies, what could be our knowledge of other species?  The answer is, in most cases, much worse.

But is a goal of restoring the abundance of an endangered species to a single presettlement number the right thing to do?  To do so is to believe in the constancy of nature – that before the influence of European civilization, the abundance of grizzlies and everything else in nature never changed from year to year.  This doesn’t make much practical sense and all the evidence available about wildlife suggests that this has never been true; populations of wildlife change all the time.  Such a belief, while consistent with the ancient idea of a perfect balance of nature, contradicts the inherent changeableness of the environment, which Lewis and Clark came to know all too well in their travels on the Missouri.

Scientists now know that populations of grizzlies and other animals and plants are, like the Missouri River, always changing.  There is no single “natural” abundance.  There is a range of abundances, all of which are “natural” in the sense that the population was at each level within the range at some time during the past, prior to effects of modern civilization. This has become known as the “historic range of variation.”

When we recognize this, then a plan to return the grizzlies to their original “abundance” becomes more complicated.  We begin to wonder not what was the right number, but what was the key to persistence.

Some more recent programs to restore endangered or threatened animals have begun to focus on this more realistic goal of a self-sustaining population.  Apparently, this was the goal for the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Grizzly Recovery Plan. Its objective was “to establish viable, self-sustaining populations in areas where the grizzly bear occurred in 1975.”  To accomplish the Fish and Wildlife’s recovery plan for the grizzly bear, we must understand much more about the requirements of this species than a single number.  We must understand what it needs from its habitat and the ecosystems within which it lives.  We have to obtain estimates of the abundances of the bears before and after settlement by Europeans, and, if possible, obtain estimates at different times so we can calculate the range of variation.

To believe that there is a single magic number which is the only sustainable one is to believe that a species is fragile and that individuals within a population are not resourceful.  This seemed hardly the case with the grizzlies that met Lewis and Clark.   The grizzlies were fearless, strong, able to withstand a number of bullet wounds; they seemed quick to respond, resourceful.   A population that persists and prevails over a long time must have abilities to respond to change.  We understand now that to be sustainable is different than to continue to exist at a single abundance; and that to exist at a single abundance may not be the best strategy for a species to persist.

On June 28, 1805, the expedition was camped and in the midst of portaging around the Great Falls of Montana.  Lewis noted in his journal that “The white bears have now become so troublesome to us that I do not think it prudent to send one man alone on an errand of any kind, particularly where he has to pass through the brush.” The bears were bold enough to “come close around our camp every night, but have never yet ventured to attack us and our dog gives us timely notice of their visits, he keeps constantly patrolling all night.” It was so dangerous, Lewis believed, that “I have made the men sleep with their arms by them.”   Reading this and the other accounts of the expedition’s experiences with grizzlies, I was at first caught up in the excitement, and danger that the bears posed, and in the bravery with which the men responded.  Lewis and Clark’s encounters with grizzly bears were their most dangerous encounters with any animal and among the most dangerous of all their experiences.  But the meaning of these encounters to us in our search of nature is much greater, much deeper.

From their encounters with the grizzlies, we learn much.  We learn about the limits of our present knowledge.  We learn that, in spite of much emotion and desire directed toward the conservation of rare and endangered animals during the last 30 years, our knowledge remains terribly limited.  We discover that we know little more about the range and density of the grizzly bears in the lower 48 states than one would have known from reading Lewis and Clark’s journals in the early nineteenth century.  We discover that clear, objective, written historical records can be a great help to us.  And in the end, we discover that we have a much longer journey ahead of us than Lewis and Clark if we are to be able to predict the results of our attempts to conserve endangered species.

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.

34. Fort Peck Dam and the Milk River: How the Ice Ages Altered the Course of the Missouri River

To Fort Peck Dam: From the north take U.S. Route 2 to Nashua, then Route 117 south to Route 24, which goes along the reservoir, Fort Peck Lake.  Turn left to the dam.  From the south take Route 200 to Route 24; take Route 24 north to the dam.

To see the Milk River: Take Route 2 west from Nashua.  The route passes now and again near the river.  Route 24 northwest from Fort Peck Dam goes to Glasgow where it passes a park along the Milk River in that town.

The Hewitt Lake and Bowdon National Wildlife Refuges are near Malta, Montana and are reached by following Route 2 west from Fort Peck. Bowdon National Wildlife Refuge is off Route 2 one mile east of Malta.  There turn east onto Old Highway 2.  The refuge headquarters is six miles down this road.  To reach Hewitt Lake National Wildlife Refuge,  from Malta take Route 2 east, then take a side road north toward Cree Crossing.  Then take a gravel road west across Nelson Reservoir.  The refuge is two miles west. It is advised that you use USGS or BLM local maps for details to reach this refuge.

A curious change occurs on the Missouri River upstream from Fort Peck Dam and from there to Loma, near Fort Benton, Montana.  The river you can see at Fort Benton or on a float trip through the white cliffs, wild and scenic portion of the Missouri River is very different from the river as it flows upstream from Great Falls or downstream from Fort Peck Dam.

Lewis and Clark saw this change in the Missouri River as they slowly moved upstream in the spring of 1805.  On May 7, 1805, the expedition was just downstream from the location of modern Fort Peck Dam, where Lewis wrote that “the country we passed today on the North side of the river is one of the most beautifull plains we have yet seen.”  He saw that the land rose “gradually” away from the river “to the hight of 50 or 60 feet, then becoming level as a bowling green.” That green landscape extended “as back as far as the eye can reach.”   But the floodplain of the Missouri changed abruptly upstream.  Four days later, on May 11, 1805, when the expedition was a little way upstream from the present site of that dam, Clark wrote that the “high land is rugged and approaches nearer than below, the hills and bluffs exhibit more mineral . . .  Salts than below.”   Lewis’s journal confirms this change with almost identical wording.  Below the site of Fort Peck, the Missouri flowed then, as it does today, in a wide and gently sloping valley.  Above the site of that dam, the river flowed through a narrow and steep valley.  Today, this change is not visible in a single view, because the upstream portion at Fort Peck Dam is covered by water.  But you can see the change when you compare the Missouri River that you see from the causeway below Fort Peck Dam with the Missouri you can see when you visit Fort Benton, Loma, Judith Landing, or Virgelle, Montana, and especially if you are able to take a boat trip down the famous white cliff section of the river.

I wondered why the river was so different in these two sections.  I thought perhaps it was simply because the upper Missouri section was relatively near to the headwaters and the Rocky Mountains, where the river still carried a heavy load of sediment that could knife a steep edge into the countryside.  But the Missouri upstream from Great Falls flows in a wider valley, not so steep as in the white cliffs section, so this explanation couldn’t be right.

A key to the reason that the upper Missouri River is so different from the lower is in a visit to the Milk River, a tributary that flows into the Missouri just below Fort Peck Dam.  That river has a different look and a different setting than the Missouri upstream from the dam.

Lewis saw the difference when he walked upstream on the Milk River. The expedition arrived at the mouth of the Milk River on May 8, 1805.  “We nooned it just above the entrance of a large river,” he wrote, and continued that he “took the advantage of this leasure moment and examined the river for about 3 miles.”  He found the Milk River to be deep and gentle with a “large boddy of water,” But most important he saw that “the bottoms of this stream are wide, level, fertile.”  He named it the “Milk River” because the water had “a peculiar whiteness, being about the colour of a cup of tea with the admixture of a tablespoonfull of milk.”

Lewis and Clark observed each of the rivers they came across carefully.  They wrote down each river’s characteristics, and gave the rivers names.  Theirs was a careful, natural history examination.  This is not the way most of us view rivers in the countryside.  Most of the time when we travel we accept the countryside as it is, as a static picture passing by us, without questioning how it came about.  But rivers on a landscape are telling us a story – a story about their history, why they are the kind of river we see.  Now here was a curiosity: two rivers coming together on the same landscape at the same location, but one, the Missouri, had cut itself steeply between bluffs while the other, the Milk River, flowed in a wide and gentle floodplain.  What caused the difference?

Geologists talk about “uniformitarianism,” a big word that means that the processes that exist today existed in the past, and also that the processes that occur in one place occur in another — the physical, chemical and biological processes that create a landscape have to follow the same rules of nature everywhere, in time and in space.  If that is true, then the Milk and Missouri River ought to look the same and flow in similar valleys.  Then how can these two rivers be so different?

It’s a curious question, and the answer lies in effects of the great continental ice sheets on the Missouri River tens of thousands of years ago.  During the last ice age, the ice sheet pushed down from Canada all the way to the Missouri River in this part of Montana. The ice was an irresistible force, and the Missouri, that mighty river, was not quite the immovable object.  The ice pushed the river out of its old bed along a section between Loma and Fort Peck.  The ice began to melt back about 15,000 years ago.

When we see a great river, it appears to us as a permanent and unchanging part of the landscape.  But a river has a history and goes through stages from young to mature.  When a river first starts to flow on a landscape, it cuts straight down.  The sediment that it carries wears away at the land.  A young river flows in a narrow valley with steep sides.  But over a much longer time, the river keeps undercutting the bluffs along its narrow valley. The bluffs collapse.  Lewis and Clark saw cliffs that had fallen into the Missouri just this way.  The river then moves the debris from those fallen bluffs downstream.  Slowly the valley widens.  The slopes become gentle.  When the valley is wide enough, the river can meander over it, and over the years it shifts its channel, creating oxbows, oxbow lakes, backwaters.  It becomes a mature river in a mature river valley.

The Missouri is an ancient river and for most of its length it flows through the wide and gently sloping valley that characterizes such a river.  But when the ice sheet pushed the Missouri out of its old bed, the river was forced to create a new one.  During the height of the ice age, the Missouri was pushed south and forced to flow just to the south of the ice where it began to cut a new valley into the countryside.  Once that valley was formed, the river was captured by it.  When the ice sheet retreated, it left debris in the Missouri’s old channel.  The river had cut its way down into the new one  and continues to flow through it today, from Loma to Fort Peck.  From Great Falls to Loma, the Missouri flows through a wide valley. But because of glaciers long ago, at Loma the Missouri begins to flow through a narrow canyon and continues to do so past where Lewis and Clark noticed the change in the countryside.

As the ice sheet melted, it left debris of boulders, rocks, sand, silt, and clay everywhere, helter-skelter, mixed together, but also somewhat smoothed out.  The beautiful plain that Lewis saw where the Milk River flows into the Missouri, at the site of present-day Fort Peck, was bull-dozed by the glaciers to create the rolling but relatively flat and pretty countryside that Lewis found so beautiful.  Huge boulders, here and there, dropped by the glaciers, are markers and testimony to the powerful work done by the moving sheets of ice.  They stand along the roadside to remind us of that awe-ful geologic history.

After the ice sheet retreated the Milk River began to flow in part of the Missouri’s  old channel.  A smaller river, it passes through a plain too big for it to have created.  It is a young river in an old river’s arms.

From Fort Peck Dam, you can travel to see the Milk River by going up to Nashua, Glasgow, or Malta, visiting the Hewitt Lake National Wildlife Refuge, which is on the big bend of the Milk River, or the Bowdon National Wildlife Refuge.  When you do this, you are seeing the original valley of the Missouri.  Just imagine a bigger river in this valley and you will be able to imagine the way that this countryside would look today if there had never been the great climate change of the ice age, a time when ice hundreds of feet thick pushed aside the landscape in its path, scraped and eroded mountains and hills, dumped the rocks and soil it had cut into valleys, disrupting the rivers, covering the forests.  As I traveled along the upper Missouri, I thought about the great irony of this history – an incredible large-scale change in the land — the arrival of a huge sheet of ice that persisted for thousands of years.  An environmental change that we would not want to happen now that we are occupying the land, and would do whatever we could to prevent the migration of  the Missouri River into a new channel that is now considered its most beautiful stretch.

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.

33. The Confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers: Wolves and the Conservation of Endangered Species

The confluence can be seen from the river access boat ramp in the North Dakota park adjacent to the North Dakota Fort Buford State Historical Site.  From Williston, ND take Route 2 west to Route 1804 south and follow signs to Fort Buford.  Instead of turning right into the Fort historic site, turn left, following the sign to the boat ramp and stop either at the ramp or in the park just before it.  The confluence is not easy to distinguish.  There is an island downstream from the confluence.   Then just upstream the Yellowstone comes in from the south.  The Missouri flows from east to west (left to right). The state of North Dakota is planning a visitor center to be built at the confluence, with an expected time of completion in 2001.  You can ask about the progress with this center at Fort Buford. There is no major road that goes directly to the confluence.  You can approach the general area from the west by taking Interstate 94, which follows the Yellowstone River from Bozeman to Glendive.  Then take Route 16, which follows the Yellowstone to Sidney, Montana.

Near the confluence are: Ft. Union Trading Post National Historic Site and Fort  Buford State Historic Site, both in North Dakota.  Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site is at the location Lewis recommended for a fort.  There are interpretive and live history demonstrations.  You reach the historic forts by taking Exit 10 on Interstate 94, going north on Route 85 to Watford City, then west on 85 to Rawson, north on 85, crossing the Missouri and then going west of Route 2.  At Williston go southwest on Route 1804, which goes to the historic forts.  Fort Union fronts on the Missouri or Fort Buford is at the confluence.  Route 58, which goes southwest off of Route 1804, crosses the Missouri as close to the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri Rivers as any road, and from this bridge is the best view of the Missouri near that confluence, from a paved road.

From Three Forks, Montana, the headwaters of the Missouri River, you can follow the Yellowstone River Floodplain, with frequent views of the Yellowstone, on Interstate 90 and then 94 to Glendive.  From Glendive Montana Route 16 follows the Yellowstone River to Sidney, the route 200 continues northeast to Fairview. From there, Route 58 continues north to Route 1804 as described above.

If any location on Lewis and Clark’s journey matched the idealized view of the presettlement American West as a Garden of Eden rich in vegetation with great numbers of wildlife, it was the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, just east of today’s Montana-North Dakota border.  The expedition arrived there on April 26, 1805.    Lewis took four men and went by foot to explore the Yellowstone River upstream from its mouth.  From a hilltop, Lewis wrote, “I had a most pleasing view of the country, perticularly of the wide and fertile vallies formed by the missouri and the yellowstone rivers, which occasionally unmasked by the wood on their borders disclose their meandering for many miles in their passage through these delightfull tracts of country.” Below him, “The whole face of the country was covered with herds of Buffaloe, elk & Antelopes; deer are also abundant,” he continued, and adding to the sense of a Garden of Eden, “the buffaloe Elk and Antelope are so gentle that we pass near them while feeding, without appearing to excite any alarm among them, and when we attract their attention, they frequently approach us more nearly to discover what we are, and in some instances pursue us a considerable distance apparently with that view.”

The vegetation was also rich and abundant.   “There is more timber in the neighborhood of the junction of these rivers,” Lewis wrote, “ than there is on any part of the Missouri above the entrance of the Chyenne river to this place.”  On the floodplains were cottonwood, “small elm, ash and boxalder;” and “Goosbury, choke cherry, purple currant; and honeysuckle bushes.” On sandbars in the river were willows, wild roses, and servicebury.   Where there were no trees, there were many small plants including “wild hyssop which rises to the hight of two feet” and which was a favorite food of “the Antelope, Buffaloe Elk and deer.”  Willows filled river sandbars and “furnish a favorite winter food to these anamals as well as the growse, the porcupine, hare and rabbit,” he added.

It was an American Serengeti, and everybody was happy to be there.  “To add in some measure to the general pleasure which seemed to pervade our little community, we ordered a dram to be issued to each person; this soon produced the fiddle, and they spent the evening with much hilarity, singing & dancing, and seemed as perfectly to forget their past toils, as they appeared regardless of those to come.”

But it was also in this region – below and above the confluence – that they saw many wolves.  On April 29, 1805, near the mouth of Martha’s River, they found themselves “surrounded with deer, elk, buffalo, antelopes, and their companions the wolves, which have become more numerous and make great ravages among them.”  A week later, on May 5, 1805, Lewis wrote that “Buffalo, elk, and goats or antelopes feeding in every direction” and “a great number of” wolves.

Today, for some people, the presence of wolves would be the final touch in creating a wilderness paradise; for others, the presence of wolves would destroy the very idea of such a place.  People have hated wolves throughout most of western history, and the desire to conserve wolves is relatively new in western civilization.   Ancient Greek and Roman writers, including Aristotle and Plutarch, mention the evil and dangerous nature of the wolf.  In Dante’s Inferno, the wolf represents human greed.  In contrast, some American Indian tribes had wolf clans, considering the wolf to be a fetish and a “brother.”

Today the wolf represents a powerful symbol of the character of wild nature.   In its wariness of people, the wolf epitomizes our predominant contemporary image of nature: nature as separate from human beings and human beings as divorced from nature.  Where we are, there are no wolves; where the wolf lives, there is wilderness.

Because of the ancient symbolic meaning to people, wolves, perhaps more than any other large animal of the American West, force us to ask why should we save endangered species, why we should extend large sums and restrict land use, hunting, fishing, and other activities on behalf of certain species. The great diversity and abundance of life at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers makes the question all the more compelling.  The controversy has focused upstream, in Yellowstone National Park, where wolves have been reintroduced where they had been locally extinct for 60 years, as part of a plan to help conserve this endangered species.

One standard answer why we should save any species from extinction is utilitarian: A species has direct benefit to people or might in the future. One of the purposes of the expedition was to find such benefits, including determining the potential for fur trade with the Indians of the West.  Therefore Lewis and Clark carefully recorded the distribution and abundance of beaver, of major economic importance at the time, as well the occurrence of beaver lodges, dams, and tree cutting.

Even grizzlies, so dangerous to the expedition, had a use – their hides were used by the expedition.  In contrast the wolves, the other big mammalian predator commonly seen by the expedition, were neither of use nor a threat.  If there were then or is now a reason to conserve wolves, it would seem to lie beyond some direct, practical benefit of the wolves to people.

The second standard argument for biological conservation is that a species plays some essential role in its ecosystem.  It is an ancient question, found in Greek and Roman writings, why there should be predators – referred to as vile and vicious creatures – on the Earth.  The answer has always been that these animals control the abundances of their prey.  This argument was picked up by the modern science of ecology and formulated in terms of the mathematics developed for mechanical systems and the physics of mechanics.  Hence, wolves are seen as mechanical devices, personality-less entities that bang into their prey at random.

The theory, still prevalent,  predicts that such predators and their prey will function together to control each other’s numbers with great precision and predictability.  According to this theory, the prey species would increase uncontrollably without its predator.  The prey would overeat its food supply and its population would crash, perhaps leading to its extinction.  But with both predator and prey present, the two would achieve a constant abundance that would persist indefinitely, or the two would oscillate forever, exactly out of phase, like two guitar strings tuned to the same note and the second plucked exactly at the moment when the first reached its peak of vibration.  The only problem with this theory is that it fails completely to predict anything real.  All field studies show that real predators and prey do not follow these rules.  Big game predators can reduce the numbers of their prey, but they have never been observed to control the abundance in the precise way the theory predicts.

This theory arises from the same world view that led to the belief that we could channelize the Missouri River, run it as if it were just a hydrological machine, and that we would receive only benefits and suffer no ill effects.  It is the same world view that ignores the connection between human settlements and the river, that has led us to put big interstates between cities and their river fronts.  It has failed with predators just as  it has failed with rivers and cities.

The other standard reasons for the conservation of endangered species are aesthetic and moral.  Wolves are social animals, and species with highly developed social behavior and signs of individualistic behavior that appeal strongly to many people.  Such social behavior and individualism is a primary argument behind the conservation of whales and porpoises, whose care for their young and appearing intelligence leads to moral arguments that these creatures have a right to exist.  Wolves share these qualities.  They live in packs of typically four or five to twenty.  There is a rigorous social structure, with a lead male and female who breed and whose pups are cared for by other adults as well as by the parents.   The lead male affirms his dominance through his posture and, when challenged, in fights.  The personality of the lead male seems to be able to influence the behavior of the entire pack.  He does not happen upon his prey at random.

But it is my opinion that the aesthetic justification is the underlying rationale for most people.  I have worked in wilderness areas where there are wolves, and what I remember most about the wolves is their calls at dusk and during the night.  Few other sounds bring out the primitive wildness of the woods as do these haunting sounds, evoking the essence of wilderness and the connection between human beings and nature.  People shy away from the aesthetic argument like a wolf shying from people, as if nobody would take this argument seriously. For me, these are powerful justifications to save the wolves.  And my guess is that, down deep, it is this aesthetic rationale that underlies the desires of most people who work to save endangered species.  However, most discussions place emphasis on the utilitarian and the ecological, both mechanistic approaches. They are echoes of the machine age of the nineteenth and early twentieth century when the science of ecology first attempted to explain how nature works.  To limit our justification for or against big predators like wolves to these echoes is to debase the deep connection between the human spirit and nature.  We have passed through a machine age era of arguments limited to the utilitarian, and seen the consequences of it in our rivers, our cities, and here, in the diversity of life.

New developments in ecological science point to ways we can deal with the complexities of real predators, with their individual behaviors, social interactions, and the effects of their environment.  And so the question before us at the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri Rivers is if there is a place, in our imaginations and in our realities, for the wolves in the idealization of the American West.  Do we want to envision the richness of life as Lewis and Clark found it there with wolves or without them?  With all the intricacies and complexities of nature, or without them?  When you visit the confluence and see the still well-watered bottomlands and the Yellowstone River, neither channelized nor dammed and therefore more in its presettlement condition than the Missouri, it is a time to reflect on this question.

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.

32. Little Missouri National Grasslands and the Theodore Roosevelt National Park:  Prairie Dogs, Black Footed Ferrets and the Short Grass Prairie

Approximately 100 miles west of Bismarck, N.D. and near the North Dakota-Montana border.  Take Interstate 94, Exit 24, Medora, then south to the Grasslands entrance; the southern section of the park is within this part of the grasslands.  To reach the northern section of the park take Interstate to 94 Exit 42.  Go north on Route 85 approximately 23 miles to the park entrance.  Both the north and south sections of the National Park are within the National Grasslands. Route 85 is a scenic road.

Lewis and Clark first saw prairie dogs when they went out walking together on September 7, 1804. They had climbed a dome-like hill about 70 feet high and on their way down “discovered a Village of Small animals that burrow in the grown” which they estimated covered about four acres with “great numbers of holes on the top of which those little animals Set erect make a Whistleing noise and whin allarmed Slip into their hole.”  They poured a lot of water – more than five barrels – into a prairie dog hole, and flushed one out, killed and examined it.

“Those Animals are about the Size of a Small Squrel” Clark recorded, “& thicker, the head much resembling a Squirel in every respect, except the ears which is Shorter, his tail like a ground Squirel which  Shake and & whistle when allarmed.”  Clark also described them as “the mouth resemble the rabit, head longer, legs short, & toe nails long, ther tail like a ground squirel which they Shake and make chattering noise, ther eyes like a dog, their colour is Gray and skin contains Soft fur.”  These small, social animals were familiar to the plains Indians and to the Canadians.  Clark noted that they were called by the French “pitite Chien”or little dog.  Lewis later wrote a more complete description that was the first scientific description of these animals.

Once prairie dogs were widespread throughout the short grass prairie, the western, drier prairie countryside that does not support the grand tall grasses of the eastern plains.  These animals feed on grasses, but need to see from their burrows to protect themselves, and would not do well in the tall grass prairie where they could not see beyond the next clump of grass.  At the time of Lewis and Clark, short grass prairie extended north-south from southern Saskatchewan, Canada, to northern Mexico, and eastward from Denver to about the 100th longitudinal meridian, which has been the traditional dividing line between the deep-rooted tall grasses with large leaves of the tall grass prairie and the shallow-rooted, short grasses with small leaves.  Along the trail of Lewis and Clark, the 100th longitudinal meridian passes north-south near the mouth of the Niobrara River,  that is to say, near where the Missouri River arrives at the Nebraska border and begins to form the Nebraska-South Dakota line.  This was near where Lewis and Clark first saw prairie dogs — a location within 15 miles of modern Fort Randall Dam.  But you won’t find prairie dogs easily in that area today.

Once individual prairie dog villages covered large areas and had great numbers of animals. At the turn of the twentieth century, an immense prairie dog town in Texas was reported to cover an area 100 by 250 miles and to contain 400 million prairie dogs.  Now some say that 98 percent of the prairie dog towns in the United States have been eliminated.

They have been eliminated from most of their range, directly by poisoning because they are thought to compete with cattle for grasses and their holes pose a problem to the movement of horses and cattle; and indirectly, because their habitat is destroyed with the plowing of short grass prairie or the intense use of it for cattle grazing.

Lewis and Clark saw prairie dogs and the short grass prairie over a long distance, from the Niobrara River to west of Bismarck, North Dakota.  After wintering with the Mandan Indians, Lewis and Clark sent back a live prairie dog specimen which reached President Jefferson in Washington, D.C.

We set out to find short grass prairie and to see prairie dogs and other wildlife of this part of the plains.  On a hot, sunny, August day we drove into the Little Missouri National Grasslands in North Dakota. This grassland is a huge area covering 1,200,000 acres, within which is the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which itself is made of up two sections totaling more than 70,000 acres.

We had driven here from Montana following Interstate 94 and the Yellowstone River, the route that Clark took on his return in 1806, when the expedition divided into two parties, one led by Lewis and one by Clark, to see if they could discover a better route across the mountains than the one they had taken westward the year before.  Interstate 94 travels along the Yellowstone River, often in sight of it, until the town of Glendive, Montana, where the interstate turns east and the Yellowstone River continues northeast to its confluence with the Missouri River.

The Little Missouri National Grasslands extends north from U.S. 12, in Bowman County, North Dakota, and lies east of the northerly coursing Little Missouri River and reaches almost to the Missouri directly north in western North Dakota.  Although this national grasslands is near to an interstate, we had the feeling that you have to want to get here if you are going to visit the area.  It is not the typical way that tourists would travel from coast to coast.

The North Dakota State Parks and Recreation Outdoor Adventure Guide that we picked up at a visitors center stated that this was the largest “and most diverse” of the 19 grasslands found in the western United States.   The guide went on to say that “this 140 mile stretch of rolling prairie, badlands terrain, woody draws and high buttes includes more than a million acres.  From the north half, big horn sheep can be seen in Hank’s Gully, Cottonwood Creek and Lone Butte.  In the south half, visitors may view the only stand of Limber Pine in the state, just north of Marmarth.”  Then west of Amidon there is the only natural ponderosa pine forest in the state.  There is a campground at Burning Coal Vein where an underground lignite seam has been burning for over a century.  North Dakota has four state forests – with oak, aspen, paper birch, green ash, American elm, poplar, willow and Ponderosa pine.  The trees listed are all eastern forest trees, except for ponderosa pine, so we are in an area where the eastern deciduous forest trees reach their western extension.

We passed along the Little Missouri River, North Dakota’s only designated  scenic river, which flows south to north through the park and the national grasslands and extends for a total of 274 miles until it enters the Missouri River.  The Little Missouri has carved a kind of badlands through this dry country.

After stopping at the park’s visitor center, we drove a 36-mile scenic loop.  The air was hot and dry.  The road, paved and two-lanes wide, climbed into badland-like bluffs, eroded by the Little Missouri River.  It was a little after noon and we decided to stop for lunch.  We found a small picnic ground by a prairie dog town, in a lowland where there were cottonwoods for shade and sagebrush in drier areas.  We sat in the shade and watched the prairie dogs acting cute, doing what Clark described them to do — sitting erect, whistling, appearing out of their holes and staring at us, moving around to eat.

We were tempted to go over and get acquainted with them, but we noticed a sign at the picnic ground that said to be careful because these animals carry a form of plague spread by fleas from one prairie dog to another, or, if touched by a person, spread to human beings.  The sign told us that we should not even dig around in their burrows, as we might come in contact with the fleas this way.  So we abandoned our idea to act like Lewis and Clark and decided instead to relax in the shade and watch the animals.  Because plowing and grazing and intentional killing have removed prairie dogs from most of their range, what was once a common site in the western plains is now a rarity, and the chance to watch the behavior of these animals in their village was something to take time and enjoy.

As we watched the prairie dogs sit up, alert, and turn their heads around to look for possible predators, I began to think how well these animals epitomize our society’s mixed attitudes and unresolved conflicts about wildlife.  Here prairie dogs were protected.  But outside parks and national grasslands such as these, the prairie dog was still an enemy.  The Web site for the State of South Dakota states that “the black-tailed prairie dog is found throughout western South Dakota. It’s no secret these small, gregarious rodents are a major irritant to stockmen whose cattle compete with the burrowing grass-eaters for grazing land.  There is no closed season, so it’s legal to shoot prairie dogs anytime.  The ideal time is from May through September.”  According to the Web site, any caliber rifle or handgun is legal.  And “the season is open year-round, and there is no limit on the number of prairie dogs you may shoot. The predator license, small game, waterfowl or big game license is needed to shoot prairie dogs. You can obtain a predator license from a license agent, such as a sporting goods store, when you arrive.”

Several issues arise when we talk of hunting prairie dogs.  Many tourists like to see them and consider hunting them rather unsportmanslike.  Perhaps more important – at least to the prairie dog – is that some of its predators are listed as rare or endangered and protected by state and federal laws.  The two most important of these are the black footed ferret and the burrowing owl.  The South Dakota Web site continues: “Please make sure your target is a prairie dog.  Burrowing owls often nest in abandoned prairie dog dens and look similar from a distance. The brownish owls are approximately 8 inches tall. They feed on insects and small mammals. This owl is believed to be declining in numbers, take time to verify your target before shooting. Burrowing owls are protected. If you observe one while you are in a prairie dog town, make a note of the precise location and call one of the contacts below.”

Of greatest conservation concern is the black footed ferret, called the most endangered mammal in North America.  According to the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, “the decline of the black footed ferret is almost entirely due to government-sponsored poisoning of prairie dog towns and development of farms, roads, towns, etc. over prairie dog colonies.”  Prairie dogs make up about 90 percent of the diet of the ferrets, which live in the prairie dog towns, inhabiting abandoned prairie dog burrows.  They depend on the prairie dogs for food and shelter.  In contrast to the statements of the state of South Dakota, this conservation association states that “recent studies have proven that the grass-eating prairie dogs are not significant competition with livestock for forage” and the problem is more one of education than of competition.

Once the ferret population had been reduced to very low numbers, it was then in danger of becoming extinct when the few remaining animals contracted canine distemper, which is fatal.  The Wyoming Game and Fish Research Facility started a captive breeding program with 18 animals, a population that has increased to about 330 animals.  These are now located in a number of zoos around the country and in Canada and some have been released back into grasslands.

On the one hand, money is made available to promote hunting of the prairie dogs, which in turn threatens prairie dog habitat and therefore the habitat of the black footed ferret.  On the other hand money is made available for captive breeding of the ferret with a plan to reintroduce it into its original habitat.  The state government and the ranchers argue that prairie dogs must be reduced because they compete with cattle; conservationists argue that this is not the case, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has to protect the ferret because it is listed as endangered under the U. S. Endangered Species Act.  So it is with many environmental issues, all epitomized by the cute animal who seemed, as it searched around, to think that its only enemy was a local non-human predator and was, of course, unaware of the complex social context within which its future is embedded.

I thought also about how the problem here related to ecological food webs – the web of life of who eats whom.  The most endangered species of the short grass prairie, the black footed ferret, is near the top of the food web, as a predator on the prairie dog.  The prairie dog eats vegetation for the most part, except for an occasional protein-rich grasshopper.  In general, the farther up a food web, the less abundant a species, and the more likely it is to become threatened and endangered.  The ferret’s problem was a combination of lack of food and lack of habitat, and that’s common for many  endangered and threatened species.

Well, the sun began to get too hot for that kind of speculation and reflection, and we certainly were not going to see a ferret.  It was time to move on.   After lunch, we continued our drive on the scenic route and saw the muddy Little Missouri River once again off to our left.  Sagebrush was widespread, but we saw dead cottonwoods and brown, unhealthy-looking cedars on the river’s floodplain.  Cottonwood is the characteristic tree of floodplains and riparian areas of the dry western plains.  Out here, cottonwoods are the only trees that can grow, and it is so dry that they are restricted to water courses.  It’s an old rule of thumb in the cowboy country that if you want water, look for cottonwood on the horizon.

We were more than satisfied with our visit to the short grass prairie of this public land.  Here is a good place to get a feel for the prairie through which the Lewis and Clark expedition passed during late summer and fall of 1804, the spring of 1805, and after they had crossed the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers on their way back in 1806.  And it is a good place to contemplate the mixed opinions and attitudes about wildlife that run through American culture.

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.

31. Knife River Indian Villages: Choosing a Place to Live Within Nature’s Constraints and Opportunities

From Bismarck, North Dakota, take Route 83 north past Washburn and turn left onto Route 200.  Turn left onto Country Route 37 where there is a sign to the Knife River Indian Village National Historical site.  Or you can make this visit part of a trip to the restoration of Fort Mandan.  To do this, take 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.  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.

Soon after Lewis and Clark arrived near the present location of Bismarck, North Dakota, they began to settle in for the winter, to build their cabins and fort, and to meet with the local Indians.  Several closely related groups of Indians lived in the area in small villages, some using different if related languages.  Lewis and Clark visited the nearby villages including one on the Knife River where they spoke with the chief.  Today, the Knife River village is a National Historical Site, historic because Indians lived there at the time of European expansion into the American West, and also a significant archaeological site, because Indians inhabited this village for many generations.  Its villagers were Hidatsas Indians known as the Awaxawi, who were close relatives of the Mandans.  Charbonneau and his and wife, Sacagewea, probably lived in this village before joining the expedition.

The Knife River Village people were known to later travelers.  Karl Bodmer, the famous landscape artist, painted this area and many of the Indians when he accompanied Prince Maximillian who came from Europe to retrace the travels of Lewis and Clark in 1833-34.  Living in the days before photography and being a person of considerable means, Maximillian brought Bodmer along as his personal illustrator of their travels.

I thought of Bodmer’s paintings and decided that the Knife River village would be a good place to try to understand how the Indians visited by Lewis and Clark lived within the countryside, in this environment famous for its cold winters.  I wanted to see in what ways they made use of the topography and if they located their village in proximity to resources.

Lewis and Clark chose to build their fort near a Mandan village but down on the floodplain of the Missouri River.  The Mandan and Hidatsas villages were somewhat away from the main channel, up on the prairie.  In our day, we are used to housing developed in large tracts where the land is bulldozed and flattened, where water is supplied by a central water authority, trash is picked up, sewage systems take away other wastes, and central heating and air conditioning keep us comfortable.  Within this modern environment, it is easy to think that there is no connection between the location of a settlement — village, town, fortification, or city — and its environment.  But that wasn’t true in the past, and it isn’t really true today.

We stayed overnight in Bismarck and drove north early in the next day.  The countryside to our right, away from the river, was planted in hay, corn, and small grains and looked pretty in the morning summer light.  Where a sign indicated a turnoff to the town of Washburn, we saw a dense band of trees covering a number of acres on the western, far, shore of the Missouri which looked less settled and populated.

We reached a parking area where a sign said “Awatixa X’e Village”.  We saw a  few people walking through the remains of the village.  It was a warm summer day with a pleasant steady breeze beneath cumulus clouds.  I walked about a half mile to the shore of the Knife River, a small, pleasant stream well wooded along its shores.  Along the way, I passed remains of Indian dwellings, round depressions in the soil.  These seemed to fit Clark’s description on October 27, 1804, when he visited a village of similar design and wrote that “the houses are round and Very large Containing Several families.” The dwelling sites were crowded so close together that there was little room between them even to dry corn, suggesting either a close-knit social structure or a need for protection against other tribes.  There were 51 such depressions visible. At least 400 people occupied this village from the late 1790s until 1834.  At the shore of the Knife River a sign advised us to look for artifacts, and we did, finding bones of animals embedded in the side of the bluff, where did not have to excavate in order to see them.

I looked at the village setting and asked myself, if I were to settle here and try to survive the winters, and also enjoy the kind of pleasant summer day that we were fortunate to find, would I pick this location?  Yes, I decided, I might.  It seemed to be a well chosen place for a village – near water, in a pretty countryside.  Game was nearby.  We noticed few annoying insects.  The streamside was wooded and would provide fuel for the winter.  From the village one could see buffalo or enemies in the distance.

Before modern technological civilization, people had to locate their villages and homes to make the best use of the topography and resources.  I had a friend who worked as a plumber but was well known for his ability to find Indian artifacts even where there was a highly settled landscape.  One day we got to talking about how he found so many arrowheads and other tools.  “It’s easy,” he said, “I just go to a place and look around and ask myself: If I were going to live here, where would I put my home?  Then I go to that spot, and that’s where I find Indian tools.”  The rules are the same, it just takes experience in understanding what makes a good dwelling site.  Perhaps his work as a plumber made him more aware of these factors.

When you visit the Knife River Indian Historic Landmark, you can look around and try to decide if you would want to set a village here, and if so, just where would you put your home.  It is a lesson we need to learn again.  Even with modern technology, a house will be more efficient in terms of energy use and more comfortable if it is properly situated in relation to its local environment. For thousands of years houses were designed so that they were position to gather sunlight in the winter.   The classic Mediterranean house of Greece and Rome had an enclosed courtyard that faced south so that the sun warmed the house in winter.  Recently, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency supported research that shows that deciduous shade trees planted on the south side of a house cool the house in warm climates significantly in the summer and let the sunlight warm the house in the winter.  The early European settlers built sod houses set partially into the ground, because this made them warmer.

Today there is a growing return to the understanding that the location of a house, the compass direction it faces on that location, and the kind of vegetation planted around it, can make a big difference in economics, energy efficiency, and the coziness of the house.

A visit to Knife River Indian Historic Landmark, in a cold climate where people lived for centuries, set me to thinking about this important connection between ourselves and our environment.  A breeze picked up and the air felt just a little chilly, a reminder of the cold that was ahead, and of the harsh winter that Lewis and Clark spent near here along the Missouri River.