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.