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.

39. Ryan Dam: Scenery and Electricity

In Great Falls take 15th St. north, which is Route 87 North, crossing the Missouri River. Take Route 87 north 6 miles and turn right at a sign for Ryan Dam onto a paved road; follow signs taking the right hand road at a fork in the road. The road descends deeply through the bluffs by the river to a parking lot where a sign says “Montana Power Company Welcomes You.”  The total distance from Great Falls is 15 miles.  Walk across the footbridge to a park on the island in the river.

Lewis described the five falls on the upper Missouri River, for which the city of Great Falls is named, as one of the most beautiful scenes he had ever witnessed.  I had been fascinated by his long description of these falls ever since I first read the Lewis and Clark journals, and was anxious to see what remained of that scenery.  Having spent the night in Great Falls, Montana, we drove on an August afternoon to Ryan Dam, the site of one of those falls.

“From the extremity of this rolling country I overlook the most beautiful and level plain of great extent for at least fifty or sixty miles,” Lewis had written on Thursday, June 13, 1805, and within this plain “were infinitely more buffalo than I had ever before witnessed at a view.”   Just as Lewis had described it, we saw a rolling but rather level plain, now cattle grazing land, but with the same general aspect.  The river has incised itself within this landscape, cutting through the level plain, so that traveling away from the river, on a main road such as Route 87, you are not aware that one of the greatest rivers of the world is nearby.  It isn’t visible.

Rising out of this plain Lewis saw “two curious mountains” that were “square figures,” probably the buttes just south of Black Horse Lake that we could see as we drove on Route 87.  Lewis describes these as having perpendicular sides rising to a height of 250 feet and appearing to be formed of yellow clay.

On that same day, Lewis found the first of the great falls, which is now at the site of Ryan Dam.  He was traveling with four of the men of the expedition: Fields, Drewyer – one of the main hunters of the expedition – Gibson and Goodrich, and he sent the first three to kill some game for meat and then join him and Goodrich at the river for dinner.

“I had proceeded on this course about two miles with Goodrich at some distance behind me when my ears were saluted with the agreeable sound of a fall of water and advancing a little further I saw the spray rise above the plain like a column of smoke which would frequently disperse again in an instant caused I presumed by the wind which proved pretty hard from the southwest,” Lewis wrote, and “soon began to make a roaring too tremendous to be mistaken for any cause short of the Great Falls of the Missouri.”   This was a welcome sound because the Indians had told them earlier that the true Missouri River, the river that would lead them as far into the mountains as possible, had great water falls on it.

Walking 16 miles, he and Goodrich reached the falls at noon.  There they were, a small party in the midst of a huge region that was unmapped and unknown to his civilization.  Reading his accounts, I admired the energy and ambition with which he rushed to see a place of beauty, when the expedition was about to be confronted with one of their most difficult tasks — portaging their equipment around these falls, which would take them about a month.  But this was not what was in Lewis’s mind at the moment.  He heard the sound of a great fall of water and rushed to see what he hoped would be a beautiful view.

At a fork in the road, a sign directed us to the right, and the road descended steeply along a sheer, almost vertical sandstone bluff, to the riverside and a parking lot.      As he neared this point Lewis wrote that  “I hurried down the hill which was about 200 ft. high and difficult of access to gaze on this sublimely grand spectacle.  I took my position on the top of some rocks about 20 ft. high opposite the center of the falls.”

We parked and joined a summer crowd and strolled along a tree-shaded walk to a suspension foot bridge that led over the river to Ryan Island.  We walked over the bridge and strolled up the path to where we could watch the water cascading from the dam.

When Lewis descended the steep slope, he saw a double falls, one just back of and above the other.  The second, which he wrote was “an even sheet of water falling over a precipice of at least 80 feet” formed, with the first, “the grandest sight I ever beheld.” The second falls was especially beautiful, because “the irregular and somewhat projecting rocks below receive the water in its passage down and breaks it into a perfect white foam which assumes a thousand forms in a moment, sometimes flying up in jets of sparkling foam to the height of 15 or 20 ft. and are scarcely formed before large rolling bodies of the same beaten and foaming water is thrown over and concealed them,” he wrote.  The rocks appear to be perfectly placed to break up the water most beautifully.

Below in the river he saw an “abutment of rocks” that “defends a handsome little bottom grove of about three acres” and which was “agreeably shaded with some cottonwood trees.  In the lower extremity of the bottom there was a very thick grove of the same kind of trees which are small.”  The land was not uninhabited; he saw among the trees several Indian lodges “formed of sticks.”

The view that we saw at the dam was pretty, and there were people taking pictures, eating snacks, and enjoying the coolness of the air that rose from the river.  I thought about Lewis’s extensive and detailed descriptions of the falls, most of which were now no longer visible, because they are under the water of the reservoirs behind hydroelectric dams.

For most of the journey, Lewis and Clark had maintained a rather distant and professional tone in their notes.  Once in a while one of them would write that they saw a beautiful prairie or a wonderful and amazing number of animals, but these expressions about the beauty of nature were usually brief and reserved.  At the time of their expedition, a great change was taking place in western civilization concerning the idea of natural beauty.  The romantic poets of England — Wordsworth and Coleridge especially — were writing that the wildness of the Alps, with their fearsome heights, cliffs, ice, and wind, were objects of beauty.

Only a few decades before, mountains were perceived, as they had been since Greek and Roman times, as horrible places, out of symmetry and therefore ugly.  Until Lewis reaches the great falls, a reader of the journals would hardly know that Lewis was aware of such a debate over aesthetics and nature.  But something happened to him at the falls, and he opened up and wrote at considerable length about his own wonder at the beauty of the scenery, in the style of his time.  On that summer day, now long ago, he was responding to what you and I  seek today when we go to Yosemite, to the Grand Canyon, to the Tetons, or why people ski at Lake Tahoe rather than at more convenient locations, why vacationers travel from Europe and America to Fiji and Tahiti — to find a place of beauty in which they can enjoy nature and better enjoy themselves.  Sent by President Jefferson to find a route to the Pacific and to observe the condition of the countryside, its plants, animals, and minerals, traveling as military captains in charge of a group of rough men through unknown country wrought with great dangers, for the most part the two leaders do not admit in their notes that they have these sensitivities, they do not take the time or have the time, to just plain wonder at the beauty of the American West.

But at this first set of falls, Lewis saw a rainbow in the spray as the sun reflected off the water.  This, he wrote, “adds not a little to the beauty of this majestical grand scenery.”   And for once he sought within himself an ability to express the beauty of the landscape, not just its capabilities.  “After writing this imperfect description I again view the falls and am so much disgusted with the imperfect idea which is conveyed in the scene that I determine to draw my pen across it and begin again, but then reflected that I could not perhaps succeed better,” he wrote.  He wishes for “the pencil of Salvator Rosa” a seventeenth century Italian landscape painter of wild and desolate scenes, and for “the pen of Thompson,” an eighteenth century Scottish poet who was one of the forerunners of the Romantic movement.  He wishes that he had a camera obscura — the precursor of a photographic camera, basically a small room open only to the light outside through a lens that cast the image of the outside scene on a wall, and which artists could then trace exactly.

We walked around the entire island, enjoyed the shade of the trees and looked at the Missouri River from all sides.  It was the kind of pleasant afternoon outing that is depicted by the French Impressionists when they painted Sunday strollers carrying parasols along the Seine River.

The next day, June 14, 1805, Lewis reached several more of the falls and was most impressed with one he called Rainbow Falls, which is now much altered by Rainbow Dam.  This is “one of the most beautiful objects in nature,” he wrote.  Lewis spent some time trying to decide which of the two, the falls he had seen the day before or this one, was the most beautiful.  “At length I determined between these two,” he wrote, that Rainbow Falls was “pleasingly beautifull” while the one he saw the day before was “sublimely grand.”  These are the turns of phrases that were in use among the Romantic poets and their predecessors to describe aspects of beauty.  “Beauty” was used then to refer to the classic Greek and Roman idea of beauty through symmetry, perfection in geometry.  “Sublime” had come into fashion among the Romantic poets to refer to the awe-inspiring scenery of the great mountains in the Alps.   Lewis was using phraseology that would have been familiar in the aristocratic drawing rooms of England, and in Jefferson’s Monticello mansion, but would be unlikely to be a distinction that would occur to other explorers of the American West in Lewis’s time or for decades after, perhaps not until the great nineteenth century landscape painter, Thomas Moran, reached some of the great scenery of the American West after the Civil War.  Moran popularized the awe-inspiring scenery of the American West to the point of probably helping the movement that created American national parks.

Clark arrived at the falls a few days after Lewis, on Monday, June 17, 1805.  In contrast to Lewis, Clark remained true to his propensity to report directly and to make quantitative measurements — the first step in the scientific process.  “I beheld those Cateracts with astonishment,“ he wrote, “the whole of the water of this great river Confined in a Channel of 280 yards and pitching over a rock of 97 feet 3/4″ and also that the mist extended “for 150 yrds. down & to near the top of the Clifts” so that the “river below is Confined to a narrow Chanel of 93 yards haveing a Small bottom of timber.”

This point kept sticking in my mind as I looked at the tumbling waters coming down from Ryan Dan.  For one of the few times in the entire journey, Lewis revealed here, at this very spot, that he knew about art, literature and the culture of Europe and the eastern United States.  He stepped out of his role as military captain charged with getting across the Rocky Mountains, to reveal himself briefly as a young man greatly affected by nature’s beauty and educated about the philosophy of aesthetics.  Reading his accounts, I found this section of his journals an amazing release and admission of his humanity and personality.  His attempt to describe nature’s beauty, and his frustration with that attempt, is as impressive to me as the scene he described.

Soon he would be directing the movement of all the goods on which the expedition depended.  In fact the next morning, Friday June 15, 1805, Lewis “set one man about preparing a saffold and collecting wood to dry the meat.”  He sent a message back to Clark to start searching for the best location to camp at the base of the falls for the portage around them.   A few days later he would have a dangerous encounter with a grizzly bear.  A month in the future he would be searching for Indians from whom to buy horses and guide them over the Rocky Mountains, before winter was  to set in.  The entire expedition was at a crucial juncture.  But that was put aside when Lewis looked at the falls.  “I hope still to give to the world some faint idea of an object which at this moment fills me with such pleasure and astonishment, and which of it’s kind I will venture to ascert is second to but one in the known world.”

The afternoon sun was hot and the crowd was beginning to thin out as people returned to Great Falls.  This was one of the prettiest places we had seen on our travels, modern dam or not, and it was also one of the more obscure, not well marked on maps or in the available tourist material.  We lingered a long time on the island while I thought about the entire rationale behind the conservation of nature.  There are usually four reasons given for conservation: utilitarian, ecological, aesthetic and moral.

Conservationists usually tend to rely on the first and the second, the utilitarian and the ecological, which are the practical reasons to maintain nature.  It is my belief that most people who want to conserve nature, down deep want to do so because of nature’s beauty, and because of the importance of that beauty to them.  And here I was standing where Lewis had stood, after he had traveled more than a thousand miles by boat, by horse, and by foot, after he had wintered under the most difficult conditions, in rough huts that he and has men had built, after the death of one of the party, after many other trying experiences.  And on this day aesthetics was his preoccupation.  I began to realize why this portion of his journals had left such an impression on me.   The beauty of nature is a powerful argument, and one with often considerable financial payoff.  There was no need to shy away from that reason to want to sustain aspects of our environment.

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.

38. Fort Benton, Montana: Caches, Geology and the Location of Cities

From Great Falls take Route 87 east.  Follow 87 past the towns of Carter and Kershaw.  Watch for a sign and turn right on Route 80 to reach Fort Benton and the Missouri River.  Route 80 continues over the Missouri.

When Lewis and Clark approached the Rocky Mountains, they realized that it would be necessary to leave some of their equipment behind.  They had to lighten their load as much as possible to get over the mountains, and there were some things, such as their boats, that they could not bring up the Rockies.  They had to cache their heavy equipment, and the location they chose was near the present site of Fort Benton, Montana.  Downstream a little way from this town, they dug a large hole, like a house basement.  To be on the safe side, they stored some gunpowder and lead, “To guard against accedents,” as they noted in the journals – in case they lost the rest and needed more on their return.   They also left two of their “best falling axes, one auger, a set of plains, some files, blacksmiths bellowses and hammers Stake tongs &c. 1 Keg of flour, 2 kegs of parched meal, 2 kegs of Pork, 1 Ke of salt, some chissels, a cooper’s howel, some tin cups, 2 Musquest, 3 brown bear skins, beaver skins, horns of the bighorned animal, a part of the men’s robes clothing and all their superflous baggage of every discription, and beaver traps.”  They tied a boat, their red perogue, on a small island in the river and covered it with brush.

The first steamboat to navigate the Missouri, the Independence, moved up her waters on May 28, 1819, only 12 years after Fulton’s steamboat sailed on the Hudson River and only 13 years after Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis.  As the Pacific coast opened up and people sought better ways to travel west, steamboats began to take people and materials up the Missouri.  In 1846 a town, first called Fort Lewis but renamed in 1850 for Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, was located here and became the terminus of steamboat travel.  The town boomed in the California gold rush as people rushed to get to the West Coast, and as cattlemen began to use steamboat transportation for supplies. From here, travelers took the Mullan Wagon Road, 624 miles between Fort Benton and the head of navigation on the Columbia River, and for years it was the fastest route, taking 47 days.

Why did this location become a common place to stop and either cache excess baggage or stop bringing large boats farther?  Why did Lewis and Clark not wait until they reached the Great Falls, the truly impassible section of the river, and make a cache just below that?  Or why not leave things farther downstream than the area near Fort Benton?

For either the expedition or for steamboats, any location for many miles downstream from Fort Benton would have been difficult.  At the site of modern Fort Peck Dam, the Missouri River begins its passage through steep bluffs and cliffs, and these continue to Virgelle.  Even if Lewis and Clark had found a place to cache their goods in that section of the river — a place that would have been safe from flooding and where the soil was deep enough —  they would have had a difficult time finding a good trail that led down to the river on a gentle slope.

Knowing that the Rocky Mountains could not be too far in the distance, it would be a natural decision for explorers to stop and make a cache as soon as the land began to flatten out again.  This is what happens near Fort Benton.

Thus the geology of this location made it a good place to take things to, up the Missouri, but not take things farther.  The expedition, as well as later travelers going west, were affected by the geology and the geological history of the Missouri River Basin.

So it is with most major cities.  Today, we travel often unaware of these factors.   Most major cities around the world are located at crucial locations along rivers.  There are three kinds of these locations.  The first is the ocean mouth of a river, as with New York City and New Orleans.  The second is the junction of two major rivers, as with the site of St. Louis where the Mississippi and Missouri come together, and the site of Omaha, Nebraska, where the Platte River flows into the Missouri.  The third is at what is called the “fall line” where a river passes on its way downstream from harder, more erosion-resistant rocks to softer rocks.  Waterfalls or unnavigable rapids are the result.  The fall line is a natural location to create a city and a natural place for a city to succeed.  Not only is the fall line the farthest inland that a steamboat or ship can navigate, but a fall line is also typically far enough upstream to be easily spanned by a wooden bridge, important before the invention of modern steel suspension bridges.  And the falls are a good site for water power.  Great Falls, Montana is just upstream of the fall line; Fort Benton well situated not far below it.

Usually, the fall line is relatively near the ocean – within a few hundred miles.  This is the case with many major cities of the east. In Jefferson’s Virginia, the city of Richmond is on the fall line, as are most of the inland cities of the East Coast and south central plains, from San Antonio to Fort Worth, Texas, Little Rock, Arkansas, Montgomery, Alabama, Columbia, South Carolina, Washington, D.C., Baltimore Maryland, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On the Missouri, the only odd thing is the long distance from the ocean that the fall line occurs, at Great Falls.

The environment of cities and towns, and the reason that cities succeed in a location had long been a curiosity of mine, and I wanted to see this town that was the steamboat terminus on the Missouri.  In August, we left Great Falls and drove north on Route 87 to Fort Benton.  It had been a wet summer and, as we entered Chouteau County we saw that the bottomlands were flooded in many places.  We passed some pretty farms, pretty because there were many trees providing shade and variety on the landscape. About fifteen miles from Great Falls the road reached a crest and from there we viewed a sea of wheat.  The wheat was being harvested in strips and we saw long rectangles of golden wheat and brown soil stretching for long distances.

Soon we reached Route 386 where a sign said to take the next right to Fort Benton.  We passed through tree-lined streets until we saw a sign announcing the Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River, Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, 1963.     With the building of the railroads, Fort Benton diminished in importance as a transportation terminus and transit point.  It has become a pleasant small town – one of the nicest places to view the upper Missouri in Montana.

We turned left to see a park with big cottonwood trees growing on a lawn beside the fast-flowing river.  Fort Benton is dominated by a main street that parallels the river.   We walked several blocks down and saw a sign for the Grand Union Hotel, which opened to the public on November 1, 1882 a “haven of relaxation” in this “boisterous frontier town at the head of navigation on the Missouri.”  At a cost of $200,000 it was “the finest hostelry between Seattle and the twin cities.”  Here “steamboats blew for the landings and great cattle herds crossed the Missouri within sight and sound of the guests.” Now Fort Benton is a town that remembers its past and perhaps will grow a little more as tourism becomes a more and more important business in this region.   Geology created a location for this hotel, at least for a brief while until railroads came and made fast travel to the coast possible, ending the era of the Missouri steamboats.

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.

37. The Mouth of the Marias River: Which Was the Best Way West?

To the Confluence of the Marias and Missouri Rivers: from Great Falls take Route 87 northeast to Loma (11 miles northeast of Fort Benton).  The highway crosses the Marias River at the confluence with the Missouri.

Near the location upstream that Lewis reached in 1805: from Great Falls take Route 87 to Fort Benton, then take state secondary Route 223 north from that city to where it crosses the Marias River.

On June 3, 1805, the expedition was camped at what we know now as the mouth of the Marias River, but which appeared to Lewis and Clark as the junction of two large rivers.   The problem was that they weren’t sure which of the rivers was the real Missouri — the river that flowed in from the north, or the one that flowed in from the west.  In a certain sense this is arbitrary, because at the confluence of two major waterways, you can call either one the upstream continuation of the main river.  But for Lewis and Clark, the question was: Which river would take them the farthest into the mountains and give them the best route over the Rockies to the Columbia?  The Indians had told them to search for a river that had some great falls on it.  This would lead them to the trails used by the Indians to pass over the mountains.  This is the river they would call the real Missouri.

Choosing the wrong river and following it would have serious consequences for the expedition.  “To mistake the stream at this period of the season, two months of the traveling season having now elapsed, and to ascend such stream to the Rocky Mountains or perhaps much further before we could inform ourselves whether it did approach the Columbia or not, and then be obliged to return and take the other stream would not only lose us the whole of this season but would probably so dishearten the party that it might defeat the expedition altogether,” Lewis wrote.

Although the future of the expedition depended on the right choice, even perhaps their lives,  Lewis took a detached, almost scientific approach, as if he were a modern scientist sitting in a comfortable laboratory office, rather than at a rough camp in bad weather. He pursued the problem with a seeming academic curiosity, writing.  “An interesting question was now to be determined: which of these rivers was the Missouri.”

In a sense, the expedition was lost and needed directions.  We are all familiar with this problem.  Perhaps you are lost at this very moment that you read this section of my book, trying to follow the directions at the top of this section.  But the trouble was, in Lewis’s time, there wasn’t anybody handy to give them directions.  Today you can stop at a gas station, use your car phone if you have one, or even rely on a GPS device that is in some automobiles, to give you directions.

The problem the expedition faced was one of their own uncertainty.   The rivers were set in their directions and were not about to move at random over the next few days.

And so Lewis proposed an experiment: “To this end an investigation of both streams was the first thing to be done.”  He recognized the need to measure things about the river, making observations quantitative, to “learn their widths, depths, comparative rapidity . . . and thence the comparative bodies of water furnished by each,” and by these means attempt to infer which was the main stream.

Like a modern scientific team, the camp divided into two groups, each examining the available evidence and each proposing what we would refer to today as an hypothesis.  Most of the men believed the north fork was the main river and therefore the one to follow.  Lewis reviewed the evidence on their side:  The north fork was deeper but not as swift.  However, its waters ran “in the same boiling and rolling manner which has uniformly characterized the Missouri throughout its whole course.”  The waters were brown, thick, and turbid – the big muddy, so it seemed.  The bed of the river was also mainly mud, so that the “air and character of this river” seemed “precisely that of the Missouri below.”  For these reasons, most of those on the expedition were convinced that the north fork was the Missouri.  On the other side were Lewis and Clark who, Lewis wrote, were “not quite so precipitate.”

They decided to explore both forks, what scientists would call testing the two hypotheses.  The next morning Clark led a group up the left fork, while Lewis took a group on the right.  The rest of the expedition remained at the base camp where the two forks joined.  Lewis traveled up the north fork from June 4th to the 6th.  He found that this fork continued northward toward what is now the border between Montana and Alberta, Canada, and he became convinced that this direction was too far to the north to be the route to the Pacific.

After taking time to attempt a reading of the latitude and longitude (which failed because of cloudy weather) he began his return on June 7th to the junction of the two forks to rejoin the main body of the expedition.  Lewis was correct; the north fork was a small tributary that they named the Marias River (actually Maria’s River, in honor of Lewis’s cousin, Miss Maria Wood, but after a while, people dropped the apostrophe).

By waiting a few extra days on the Marias River to try to take measurements to determine his latitude and longitude, he was trying to reduce the uncertainty about the position of the expedition.  But a change in the weather, something he could not make accurate predictions about, prevented him from making the measurements.

In deciding which was the right river, Lewis and Clark were confronted simply with a lack of information.  They were uncertain about what to do and wanted to avoid making a crucial error. The error they faced at the junction of the two rivers was what scientists call an error of uncertainty of the first kind – a problem about the facts of a situation that already exists, or, given present conditions, must occur.  One of the channels was the main river – a fact that was not going to change during the time of the expedition.  There was only one correct river to take.   There was something direct and simple to do to resolve this uncertainty – explore the two rivers and determine by direct observation which was the correct one.

There is another kind of quality about nature that leads to a lack of certainty about what we can do.  Lewis experienced this kind on his way back to the confluence of the Marias and Missouri River.  This is the problem that we know that certain kinds of events can happen, but we don’t know when.  This is an uncertainty of the second kind – uncertainty of the occurrence of some event that has some probability of happening, but whose occurrence involves inherent uncertainty.

I call this is the Las Vegas uncertainty: Will you place a bet on dice that haven’t been rolled yet?  Unlike the first kind of uncertainty, the second kind is not resolved so directly and simply.  You can’t pick up your car phone, call the weather bureau and ask to know with complete certainty whether a thunderstorm will strike Loma exactly where the two rivers come together.  The best a weatherman can do is give you the odds on whether or not it will happen.  We cannot reduce the uncertainty of this kind of future event by studying it.  This is the problem with the flooding on the Missouri River.  It is an uncertainty of the second kind that leads us to build levees and dams.

We can, however, learn what the odds – or at least get an estimate of the odds – and decide if we want to accept those odds. We know, because people have rolled dice for a long time, and also because of mathematical analyzes of probabilities, what the chances are of any number coming up with a legitimate pair of dice, and we know that the number seven is most likely.  But we can’t find a route to always getting the number seven, the same way we can take Route 87 to Loma.

Traveling on Route 87, the countryside appeared similar to the badlands that Lewis and Clark described along the Missouri breaks, near to where we were driving.  Another historic marker told us that we had reached Marias River, “The Lewis and Clark expedition camped at the mouth of this river just east of here, June 3, 1805.”  A land of good directions, maps, and apparent certainty.

But Lewis and Clark saw it very differently.  Pushing up the river in a slow-moving boat against a six-mile-an-hour current, sleeping on its banks, studying the land through which it flowed, Lewis and Clark saw a Las Vegas style river.  Perhaps our problem with this kind of error in our knowledge is a matter of relative time scales.  Lewis and Clark spent more than a year on the Missouri, a time as long or longer than some of the variations of the river.  In this day of satellite and aircraft observations, of automobile travel, and vacations that are quick stops here and there, our time of observation is much shorter.  Most of us have just one shot to see the Missouri River of Lewis and Clark.  If it is flooded, well, we may lose that chance.  If it’s a dry year, we will remember the river as it looked that year and it will be fixed in our imagination as if it were always and forever that way.

On Lewis’s return, following the Marias River downstream, it began to rain, and the peculiar clay soil of the floodplain turned into a slippery mess, difficult to traverse.  After a “most disagreeable and restless night” camped in the rain, Lewis and his small band set off down river to join the rest of the expedition.  The clay soil prevented the rain from soaking through and became so slippery that it was like “walking over frozen ground which is thawed to small depth.”  We know today that they were walking on a clay derived from glacial till and shale, commonly called gumbo, a clay that turns into a plastic and sticky material when wet.

Lewis slipped on this soil while walking on a bluff above the river, but managed to save himself from falling 90 feet to the water.  Just after he had saved himself, he heard one of his men, Windsor, cry out “God, Captain, what shall I do?”  Lewis saw that Windsor had slipped on the clay and slid so that his right arm and leg hung over the bluff and he was holding on to the edge with his left arm and leg.  “I expected every instant to see him lose his strength and slip off,” Lewis wrote, but “I disguised my feelings and spoke very calmly to him and assured him that he was in no kind of danger.”  Lewis then astutely told Windsor to take his knife out of his belt with the hand that was hanging over the precipice, and dig a hole in the bank for his right foot, and by such effort work his way up, which Windsor did, and in that way he was saved.

Searching for the right fork is an inherently different problem from trying to avoid slipping on wet clay and falling into a river.  The second kind of uncertainties are referred to today as problems of risk, because the event has not yet happened and its occurrence has to do with inherent chance, or with processes whose causes, for all practical purposes, we cannot distinguish from true chance events.  Translated into human events, risk becomes a matter of prediction, forecasting, luck, and fortune, the latter two of which were also constant companions of the expedition.

Our modern environmental problems confront us with both kinds of uncertainty.   And it’s important that we understand which kind we are facing.  The floods on the Missouri in the 1990s showed us that we cannot treat uncertainties of the Las Vegas kind as if they were uncertainties of route directions.  We do not seem to have trouble accepting the idea of our own errors – that we might not know which river to take.  But we have a great difficulty understanding and accepting the second kind of uncertainty – that there may be some inherent chance in nature.

On the level plain we passed fields of hay and wheat, and we saw mountains along the horizon.  About 46 miles from Great Falls, we passed over a bridge where we saw the Marias River.   Here the river appears as a small meandering current in a floodplain of cottonwoods.  I think about the irony of what geographers say today: If Lewis and Clark had followed Marias River, they would have found a better pass through the mountains, one eventually used by the railroad and crosses the divide in Wyoming, that would have taken them more easily to the Columbia River.

If you have the time to take a canoe trip through the wild and scenic portion of the Missouri, you may have a chance to experience the river at the Lewis and Clark time scale.  When a friend of mine did this during a five-day trip, he got caught in an intense thunderstorm, and experienced the second kind of uncertainty directly.  Another friend canoed the region slightly upriver from Loma, and he was caught in a strong easterly wind, a headwind, so he and his companion had to canoe hard against that wind in spite of the fact that the river was flowing with them.

The Missouri’s refusal to stay put and stay constant has been the source of many a good story and pithy saying, but this quality has also interfered with our society, with commerce, and with our conservation of nature.  Most of our past methods to conserve and manage environmental factors assume the constancy of nature – except for human intervention.  But the reality is the other way around.  We try to fix a natural varying environment, believing that our interventions are the causes of variations in an otherwise static structure of environment. Like the fickle Missouri, all of nature changes at many scales of time and space.  We have longed for and tried to create an environment that is fixed, like the channelized Missouri downstream.  Having lost our heritage about the river and the prairie, we seem to have ignored its important message.

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.

36. Judith Landing: How Early People May Have Affected Wildlife

To the mouth of the Judith River and Judith Land Recreation Area: From Great Falls take 87 northeast past Ft. Benton to Big Sandy. Take route 236 right (southeast) to the mouth of the Judith Landing Recreation Area.  This road crosses the Missouri River to the mouth of the Judith River.

On May 29, 1805, the expedition reached the mouth of the Judith River where that river enters the Missouri in Montana.  Clark named the river for Judith Hancock of Fincastle, Virginia, whom he would marry in 1808.  On that day, Lewis wrote that near to this junction they passed the “remains of a vast many mangled carcases of Buffalow.”  He attributed these carcases to hunting by Indians who drove the animals over the cliffs, and records in considerable detail the methods by which this kind of hunting was done.

Clark makes a simpler note, mentioning that he walked on the shore and “saw the remains of a number of buffalow, which had been drove down a Clift of rocks.”  He does not go further in attributing the cause of these deaths.  This method of killing buffalo was one of the few available to peoples without guns and horses, and was a well-known practice among the plains Indians.  Lewis notes that “in this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke.” However, experts familiar with the method and the area near the Judith River, suggest that the “broken country back of this bluff is not really suitable for concentrating and stampeding buffalo” and therefore the large number of dead buffalo, which Clark estimated to be about 100, was more likely due to drowning during spring thaw and flood — due to changes in weather, rather than human impact.

This incident epitomizes a question that has intrigued naturalists, ecologists, and anthropologists for decades: What was the relative impact of the Indians on buffalo compared to the effects of natural environmental change?  In the nineteenth century, the famous British biologist, Alfred Wallace, wrote that an examination of the fossil record since the end of the ice age suggested that the “biggest and hugest and fiercest” animals had died off, such as the saber toothed tiger and the hairy mammoth.  Some speculate that the changing climate at the end of the ice age was the cause.  But these extinctions occurred around the time that the Indians were migrating to North America from Asia.  Paul Martin, an American anthropologist, suggested instead that perhaps these extinctions were due to  hunting by the newly immigrating Indians.  They would have been an introduced predator whose methods would have been unfamiliar to the native animals, and therefore there may have been little fear of human beings.  Martin suggested that a densely populated, moving wave of peoples coming down from the north could have used just this kind of method to kill vast numbers of the big animals, and lead to their extinction.  The matter, like the cause of the death of the buffalo that Lewis and Clark found near the Judith River, remains unresolved.

In his journal for that day, Lewis described this method of hunting buffalo.  “One of the most active and fleet young men is selected and disguised in a robe of buffaloe skin,” he wrote.  This man then positions himself near the herd and the precipice.  “The other Indians now surround the herd on the back and flanks and at a signal agreed on all shew themselves at the same time moving forward towards the buffaloe.”  This causes the animals to stampede.  Then the man disguised in the buffalo skin reveals himself to the animals and runs in front of them to get them to stampede toward the precipice. Blinded by fear, the buffalo keep going and fall over the cliff.  Meanwhile, this man has to be careful not to be run over by the buffalo. “If they are not very fleet runers the buffaloe tread them under foot and crush them to death, and sometimes drive them over the precepice also,” Lewis wrote.

Could the Indians have caused the extinction of such huge animals as the mammoth and the Saber toothed tiger with this method, along with killing individuals here and there with bows and arrows?   There is no doubt that the Indians had large effects on the native animals, including buffalo.  But it is my guess that the biggest impact was through alteration of the habitat — in the case of the plains Indians, the frequent setting of fires, which would have improved the habitat for grass-eating grazers like buffalo, and made it poorer for woodland feeding animals.  We know today that it is generally much harder to cause the complete extinction of a species by hunting down and killing all of the individuals.  Such hunting can greatly reduce the numbers of a species, but it is very hard to get the very last animal – especially if the tools available are stone arrow points and wooden bows and arrows, and the method of transportation is the human foot.

A much easier way to alter the abundance of an animal is to affect its habitat.  Most of the extinctions that modern technological civilization has brought about have occurred through habitat change, including physical alteration of the habitat and the introduction of exotic predators, competitors, and parasites.

At the time of Lewis and Clark, the number of buffalo on the plains was immense.  Estimates, based on the density of herds and the area a herd covered, suggest that there could have been 60 million of these animals in 1804.

With the coming of European technology and the introduction of the horse, and then with the invention of the train and telegraph, the potential to kill off the buffalo through hunting increased greatly and almost succeeded.  But this required a major intentional effort to destroy the buffalo in order to eliminate the primary food source of the Indians, as well as a major American and European market for buffalo hides.  The economic pressures to hunt buffalo and the intentional destruction of the herds by the military almost succeeded in causing the extinction of this species.  It might have, except for the work of a very few people who, seeing the demise of the great herds, began to collect small numbers of these animals and conserve them.  Ironically, Buffalo Bill was one of these, as were some Native Americans.

Elsewhere, with other species native to North America, hunting often came close to causing extinctions but did not.  Typically, when a species is reduced to a very small number it is both hard to find and no longer valuable as a commodity, so the chase is abandoned.  This happened with the bowhead whale, hunted from 1840 to 1920 by Yankee whalers out of New Bedford, Massachusetts.  Often the hunters, no longer able to find the few that remain, believe that the species is extinct while in fact a few pockets of the animals remain.  This was the case with the sea otter and elephant seal, also hunted in the nineteenth century.

Our relative effect on the environment and its animals and plants is a major question for today as well as yesterday.  The challenge is to sustain these wild living resources in the face of much smaller habitats and much greater human population pressures.

When you visit the confluence of the Missouri and the Judith River, take some time to look around the countryside and see if you think it might be possible to ambush a herd of buffalo and drive them over the cliffs, or whether the topography of the river might be one that would drown the animals during spring ice breakup and floods.