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.