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.