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.