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.