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.

Afterward

By Robert Redford

As we approach the bicentennial of Lewis & Clark’s Voyage of Discovery, Dan Botkin’s book reveals the original Missouri now exists mainly on the pages of their journals.  Were the two explorers with us today, they would hardly recognize most of the Missouri River.  Just think about that for a minute.  The same exquisite, natural, wild places and wild inhabitants that provided these great explorers the challenges and adventure, wonderment and inspiration, human and spiritual fulfillment so vividly brought to life in their cherished journals would be simply, unrecognizable to them.

It goes without saying that their loss is our loss.  But it is also the loss of generations to follow, who will not have the opportunity to reap the same challenges, inspiration and fulfillment that Lewis & Clark did from their exploration of America’s longest and once great river.  The renewal of the soul and spirit that came with their adventures will be something only to be imagined rather than to be experienced.

The picture painted does indeed have strokes of bleakness.  But there is also hope in its broad canvass.  While certain remnants of the Missouri River of Lewis & Clark can never be brought back to their original natural wonder, and some of its wild inhabitants will never be seen there again, there’s still an opportunity to bring significant portions back to their original glory.  It’s not too late to restore some of what Lewis & Clark witnessed and explored for our children, and theirs.

The approach of the bicentennial of Lewis & Clark’s voyages can do more than remind us of what has been lost – it can serve as a national call to action to restore as much of the original greatness as possible, using the pages of their journal as our blueprint.  This may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for all of us to not only honor the memory of these phenomenal men, but to also honor those that follow us in this world by leaving a source of inspiration that might not exist otherwise.

To begin this national call to action American Rivers has proposed a four-part strategy to restore the Missouri and revitalize riverside communities:

Restore Natural Places

Riverside Communities and resource managers can create a string of natural places along the Missouri – including pockets of floodplain forest and prairie, side channels, sandbars and islands.  Restoring shallow water and floodplain habitat will help meet the needs of river wildlife by providing nesting, foraging and spawning areas.

Manage Dams for Wildlife and People

The Missouri’s dams should be operated to provide rising flows in the spring to trigger fish reproduction and cottonwood regeneration, and declining flows during the summer to support nesting wildlife and recreation.  Releasing more water in the spring will trigger reproduction by river wildlife, build sandbars, and aid cottonwood regeneration.  Reducing flows in the summer will aid young fish and birds like terns and plovers.

Revitalize Riverfronts and Improve River Access

Communities can revitalize their riverfronts in order to attract businesses, residents and tourists, helping boost the economic health of cities and towns along and near the Missouri.  Today, many towns and cities are recognizing the river’s potential as a community center, creating riverside parks and nature preserves connected by trails and greenways.

Reduce Impacts of Grazing

Ranchers and land managers should work together to reduce the impacts of grazing along the Wild and Scenic segment of the Missouri in Montana.  Scientists predict that cottonwoods will soon be virtually absent unless action is taken.

The work has already begun as evidenced in the many illustrations in Dan Botkin’s book of communities taking action toward the renewal of the Missouri River.  While we should find inspiration in this, we cannot afford to be complacent.  Whether or not we live near the once great Missouri, we can embrace it as an important part of our national heritage and the heritage we will leave for future generations.  Each and every one of us can make a difference as we begin our very own voyage, the voyage of recovery.  Supporting the efforts of American Rivers in the launch of this modern day voyage is a good first step. 

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.

42. Three Forks, Montana: Headwaters of the Missouri River

Take Interstate 90 to exit 278 and go north to Missouri Headwaters State Park.  You can take this route south to the town of Three Forks, a pleasant village.

As the expedition reached the headwaters of the Missouri, traveling on the river became more and more difficult.  The river was ever more shallow, and the men had to drag the canoes over the rapids.  The river current, descending from the steep mountains, was so swift that it was impossible for the men to paddle upstream even where the water was deep enough for the canoes to float.  It took great energy to advance the canoes with line and poles.

Lewis and Clark divided the expedition into an advance group that went ahead on foot to explore the river and decide the best route, and a main group that pulled and poled the boats upstream.  The exertion became exhausting and dangerous. Charbonneau sprained an ankle hiking in the rough country. Sergeant Gass fell in one of the boats and injured his back so that he could not help pull or push the boats.  Lewis assigned him to the advanced party on land.

During the winter at Fort Mandan, the Indians had told Lewis and Clark that when they followed the Missouri River they would arrive at “three forks” where three smaller rivers came together and flowed as one downstream.   Clark took a small group of men and headed upstream and, on July 25, 1805, was the first to arrive at this location, which he called “Three Forks.”  Lewis arrived with the main party two days later, July 27, 1805. Not far downstream from the three forks, the river passed through a narrow channel “hemned in by high cliffs.”  Lewis climbed to the top of one of these cliffs a “beautifull spot” where he “commanded a most perfect view of the neighbouring country”.  Below he could make out the three branches that flowed toward each other and met, two meeting upstream and then the third, the southeastern fork, joining the others a little farther downstream.  Each passed for many miles through large green meadows – riverside wetlands and floodplains.  Between the southeastern branch and the middle branch he saw “a distant range of lofty mountains” with “snow-clad tops.”   The mountains that would be one of their greatest tests and which they hoped would provide a short route to the Columbia, were near.

Rejoining the main party, he found that the cliffs soon opened up.  He passed the southeastern fork and followed the southwestern one for only one and three-fourths miles, where he set up camp.  “Beleiving this to be an essential point in the geography of this western part of the Continent,” he wrote, “I determined to remain at all events untill I obtained the necessary data for fixing its latitude Longitude.”  They settled in, unloaded the canoes, secured their goods on shore, and several men went out to hunt.

Having settled his men in camp, Lewis walked through the streamside meadows and examined the middle and southwestern forks, whose junction was upstream from the location of where the southeastern stream joined the main river.  Once again, a question that had caused the expedition considerable time came to the fore: Which was the Missouri? “I walked down the middle fork and examined and compared it with the S.W. fork,” Lewis wrote, “but could not satisfy myself which was the largest stream.” He decided that neither could be called the Missouri in preference to the other, because “they appeared if they had been cast in the same mould” and there was “no difference in character or size.”  Each was about 90 yards wide.

Clark soon after rejoined the main body, having explored the southwestern branch some 25 miles above, during which he suffered from sunstroke and lack of water and was sick at the camp for several days.  Reflecting on the similarity of these three branches, Clark and Lewis decided to call none of these the Missouri and instead consider them separate rivers and give each its own name.  They decided that the confluence of these three streams would thereby be marked as the headwaters of the Missouri.  They named the southwest fork the Jefferson, the middle fork the Madison, and the southeast fork “Gallitin’s River in honor of Albert Gallitin.”

In a sense, the decision not to call any of these these tributaries the Missouri was arbitrary, as events of the next weeks demonstrated.  After several days stay at Three Forks, they decided that the southwestern fork, the Jefferson, was most likely the river that would take them furthest west and into the mountains, and chose to follow it to its headwaters.  Once again the expedition divided into groups.

Lewis took a few men and followed an Indian road into the foothills, where they experienced great difficulties.  At one height of land, Drewyer “missed his step and had a very dangerous fall, he sprained one of his fingers and hirt his leg very much,” Lewis wrote on August 5.  Meanwhile the body of the expedition, still trying to proceed upstream by boat, had its own accidents. One of the canoes overturned on August 6 “and all the bagage wet, the medecine box among other articles,” In addition, “two other canoes had filled with water and wet their cargoes completely,” Lewis wrote, wetting their corn meal and many presents they had for the Indians.  One of the men, Whitehouse, was thrown from a canoe which then turned and came over him and “pressed him to the bottom as she passed over him,” Lewis wrote, “had the water been 2 inches shallower he must have been crushed to death.”

But they persevered, crossing small streams and rough country until they reached what Lewis concluded was the very beginning of the Jefferson.  And there he stopped and drank the water.  “Judge then of the pleasure I felt in allying my thirst with this pure and ice cold water which issues from the base of a low mountain or hill,” he wrote, for he had reached “the most distant fountain of the waters of the mighty Missouri in search of which we have spent so many toilsome days and writless nights.  Thus far I had accomplished one of those great objects on which my mind had been unalterably fixed for many years.”

Others of the crew were equally joyful.  “Two miles below McNeal stood with a foot on each side of this little rivulet and thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri,” Lewis noted, using that name for the first of the headwaters that he had been calling the Jefferson.  Having decided that this stream took them the farthest into the Rockies and the nearest to the continental divide, Lewis could have named  the southwest branch the Missouri River.  But he did not; the name “Jefferson River” remained.  No matter, it is arbitrary. The feat, the struggle, the long and dangerous trip had accomplished it first major objective.

Having drunk from the Missouri’s first water, Lewis walked up to the top of this eastern slope, crossing the continental divide – the location where all rivers to the east flowed into the Missouri to the Mississippi and to the Gulf of Mexico, or North, east of the Rockies to Hudson Bay, and all the rivers to the west flowed to the Pacific Ocean.  He walked a short way down the western slope.  “I now decended the mountain about 3/4 of a mile,” he wrote, “to a handsome bold running Creek of cold Clear water.  Here I first tasted the water of the great Columbia river.”  He was drinking out of Horseshoe Bend Creek, a tributary of the Lemhi River, which in turns flows into the Salmon and Snake and then into the Columbia.  The trip up the Missouri was completed.

As they had traveled from the great falls upstream to the continental divide, the expedition passed through an ecological transition, from the Great Plains to the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains.  New animals and plants appeared on the landscape.  On August 1, 1805, Clark shot a bighorn sheep – which they ate – and Lewis saw “a flock of the black or dark brown pheasants,” the blue grouse, one of which they shot, examined, and described.  It was a new species, “fully a third larger than the common phesant of the Atlantic states,” Lewis wrote, and then set down the first scientific description of this bird.  The same day Lewis saw “a blue bird about the size of the common robbin,” whose call and behavior he described.  It was the pinyon jay, and his description of this bird was also a scientific first.  On August 3, Fields killed a mountain lion. The animals of the plains were in their past, behind them; the animals of the mountains were coming into view.

Lewis was wary of this change, because it meant a transition from the abundant big game of the plains, especially the buffalo, to the wildlife-poor forests and mountains. The wealth of the wildlife in this country was in and near the streams — beaver and otter in great abundance, along with fish and water birds.  On August 3, Clark noted that they saw “great numbers of Beaver Otter &c. Some fish trout & bottle nose.”  This change in the abundance of big game animals was characteristic worldwide of a transition from grasslands to forests.  The greatest abundance of big game wildlife occurs in grasslands, as on the Serengeti Plains in Africa, declining rapidly in abundance with forest cover, as occurs in Africa when one travels west to the tropical rain forests.  Forests, whatever else their beauty, ecological value, and economic worth, are meager in meat for people to eat.

Although they were entering the mountains where forests usually dominate, they found few trees.  “The moutains are extreemly bare of timber” so that they were forced to hike “through steep valleys exposed to the heat of the sun without shade and scarecely a breath of air, ” Lewis wrote on August 1, 1805.  The east slope of the mountains was in the rainshadow of the Rockies.  A rainshadow occurs where moisture-full breezes from the Pacific Ocean flow inland and are pushed upwards by the mountains.  Rising, these cool, condensing their water, which is released as rain and falls on the western slopes and the mountain summits.  The air, thus dried, descends down the eastern slope and, sinking, is warmed and expands, and is able to absorb moisture from the land.  Dry itself, it makes the land below it even drier.  The rivers and streams were fed by the snows on the summits, but the surrounding, lower elevation countryside was dry.  As a result, the expedition forced their canoes upstream against strong water currents but hiked through dry country.

Not only did the mountains create a dry, tree-poor climate, but the Indians may have had an additional effect. “The Indians appear on some parts of the river to have distroyed a great proportion of the little timber which there is by seting fire to the bottoms,” Lewis wrote on August 4.

Their diet began to shift from meat of the plains to mountain fruits — berries and currants.  “We feasted suptuously on our wild fruit particularly the yellow courant and the deep purple servicebury which I found to be excellent,” Lewis wrote on August 2, 1805.  Everything that was happening to them was influenced to a great degree by the natural history of the location, by the geological formations that influence the climate, by the vegetation that was in turn influenced by that climate, by the change in wildlife that was a result of the change in vegetation and the decrease in rainfall.  The steepness of the streams, their rapid and dangerous currents, and the steep and rough country, were the products of the ancient and great mountain building events that began about 90 million years ago to form the Rocky Mountains and, as a result, to produce the Missouri River.  Ancient geological processes and modern ecological processes combined to challenge the expedition with tough going, little water except in the streams, and less and less game.

It was thus a location of great peril to the expedition, in which the Indians had to –  and would – play an important role.  As Lewis wrote on July 27 “we begin to feel considerable anxiety with respect to the Snake Indians. if we do not find them or some other nation who have horses I fear the successfull issue of our voyage will be very doubtfull or at all events much more difficult in it’s accomplishment.”

Lewis understood the changes to be expected in the transition from plains to mountains.  On foot and by stream, Lewis and Clark had developed their own understanding of the natural history of the Missouri River.  That learning was now at an end, to be replaced by the harsh lessons of the mountains and the Columbia River to the west.

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.

41. Gates of the Mountains: Continents Collide and We Are Rafted Along in Their Wake

Traveling south on Interstate 15, about  65 miles south of Great Falls, take the exit to the Gates of the Mountains Recreation Area.  Drive east on a paved road about four miles to the recreation area.  The area between Great Falls and Helena is an excellent place to experience the river where it has cut a broad and scenic canyon — either by following an access road and trail system along the river or by boat or raft.  This is also a good area for bicycling and picnicking. There are several good locations between Great Falls and Helena to launch and take out a boat, among them Craig and Wolf Creek.  Boat trips into the Gates of the Mountains are available at the recreation area (406) 458-5421.

On Friday, July 19, 1805, the expedition neared the location of modern Helena, Montana and came to an area of impressive scenery.  In the evening Lewis wrote that “we entered much the most remarkable clifts that we have yet seen.”  They seemed to “rise from the waters edge on either side perpendicularly to the hight of about 1200 feet.”  It was impressive and a little forbidding. “Every object here wears a dark and gloomy aspect.  The tow[er]ing and projecting rocks in many places seem ready to tumble on us,” Lewis continued, then discussed the geology of the location, as Jefferson had instructed him to do. “The river appears to have forced it’s way through this immence body of solid rock for the distance of 5 3/4 miles and where it makes it’s exit below has thrown on either side vast collumns of rocks mountains high,” he wrote.   It was so steep that for more than a mile there was only “a few yards in extent on which a man could rest the soal of his foot.”  Then Lewis notes, with a bit of understatement, “It was late in the evening before I entered this place and was obliged to continue my route untill sometime after dark before I found a place sufficiently large to encamp my small party.”

The rocks were of many shades and hue, from black to “yelloish brown and light creem colourd yellow.”  Clark described the hills as made up of “a dark grey Stone & a redish brown intermixed and no one Clift is Solid rock, all the rocks of everry description is in Small pices appears to have been broken by Some Convulsion.” The snow-capped mountains were in view, so Lewis wrote that “from the singular appearance of this place I called it the gates of the rocky mountains.”

Today the land nearby the river is little developed and, in spite of the fact that Gates of the Mountains is now between the reservoirs of Holter and Hauser Dams on the Missouri, this area looks much as Lewis and Clark saw it. Large areas are becoming protected for conservation.  The Montana Land Reliance has obtained conservation easements on 24 ranches, totaling 73,000 acres, protecting almost 150 miles of streams and riverbanks.

In early May the daunting mountains are snow-capped, while the land just above the river is stark and dry, after an exceptionally warm early spring.  At the Gates of the Mountain Recreation Area it is hot, just the way Lewis described it.  “Whever we get a view of the lofty summits of the mountains the snow presents itself,” he wrote, “ alto’ we are almost suffocated in this confined vally with heat.”  Above the river Lewis saw Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine, a “scattering of timber on the river and in the valley.”  There were bighorn sheep, beaver, and otter.  These are still found in this area today and if if you are lucky you will see one of them. The area also remains a prime habitat for many birds, including pelicans, gulls, bald eagles, merganzers, meadowlarks, osprey, loons, Canada geese, peregrine falcons, and the turkey vulture — to name a few of the 118 species spotted over a year by Tim Crawford, director of the Gates of the Mountains Foundation.

Crawford maintains the recreation area and conducts boat tours on three large open air river boats. Tours run several times a day from Memorial Day until October and during this time you can travel on a boat through the same passage between the cliffs where Lewis and Clark came. A tour lasts close to two hours and includes a stop at Meriweather picnic area, where Crawfold speculates the expedition camped for a night.  From there, hikers may choose to explore the Gates of the Mountains wilderness area, catching a later boat ride back to shore.

We’re a little early for a tour, but we watch as people prepare their boats for the season.  The day is warm with a light breeze, the sky a deep blue.  Despite activity in the area, as we look out on the expanse of Holter Lake the scene is one of peace and tranquility, unlike the feeling Lewis must have had as the expedition fought its way through the canyon to find a safe place to spend the night.

The power of the river and the even more powerful forces that created the surrounding mountains capture your attention when you visit this location.  If you take a boat tour, you might experience the power of the river as it cuts through the mountainous canyons and get a sense of the awe men of the expedition must have felt as they saw the nearby canyon opening up to the valley in the distance and snow-capped mountains beyond.  Crawford tells us the tour boat runs in a sort of circle within the close canyon area, giving the impression to passengers of the mountains opening and closing, like a gate.

“The river appears to have woarn a passage just the width of it’s channel or 150 yrds,” Lewis wrote.  Confronted with such an amazing landscape, one can’t help wondering what brings us the mountains.   Since the early nineteenth century, soon after the Lewis and Clark journey, early geologists recognized the processes of mountain building and mountain erosion.  But no one had an explanation about how this mountain building came about; where came the energy for the incredible forces that must have been involved. The answer is one of the great discoveries of twentieth century geology.

In 1914 Alfred Wegener, a German scientist,  proposed a radical theory that continents moved – drifted – based on the similarity of fossils of animals and plants found on different continents, and the parallelism of coastlines of African and South America.  But at the time the theory was dismissed; no one could conceive of a source of energy for that process, and it was too radical an idea for the dominant theories about the constancy of nature.  As the understanding of radioactivity increased, it became clear that the decay of radioactive elements deep in the Earth provided a source of energy and with intense heat and pressure the material forming the crust of the Earth could act as a semi-liquid.  Today this theory of plate tectonics is well accepted.

The term tectonics comes from the Greek word for carpenter or builder.  And if the river is the painter, the continents are the carpenters.  Mountains come about from the collision of the gigantic continental plates in motion.  The deep earth acts as a semiliquid and the cooler, lighter continents float on the surface, shifting about over time. The “solid” earth on which we stand moves.  Heated from below, the continents are to the rest of the Earth as the skim that forms on the top of chocolate pudding.   The depth of the continents are no thicker relative to the rest of the planet than the skim on the pudding. When the huge continental plates collide, mountains form as mere wrinkles on the surface.

The plates move slowly, but not so slowly that the movement cannot be measured.  The average rate is about 3 ½  inches a year — 108 inches in the two hundred years since Lewis and Clark passed by the Gates of the Mountains.   So where we stand today the Missouri River is nine feet further west in terms of a fixed longitude on the Earth, than it was when Lewis and Clark were here.

Mountains have formed whenever continental plates collide, and some mountains are old, like the Appalachians of Virginia, the home of Lewis and Clark.  The Rocky Mountains Lewis and Clark confronted at Gates of the Mountain, and were soon to cross, are comparatively young mountains, too young to have been worn smooth by rivers like the Gallatin, Jefferson and Madison, the rivers that form the Missouri.  That geological youth meant that in 1804 as in our time the Rockies were still high, steep, and rough, a challenge unexpected by the expedition.

Geologist Brian Skinner has written that “it is not just the continents that move, it is the entire lithosphere. The continents, the ocean basins, and everything else on the surface of the Earth are moving along like passengers on large rafts; the rafts are huge plates of lithosphere that float on the underlying convecting material.”

The colliding continental plates that formed the Rockies began their mountain building here near the end of the age of the dinosaurs and at the beginning of the age of mammals, more than  60 million years ago.  They are built from even more ancient deposits. The lighter, brighter colored rocks are ancient limestones that geologists call part of the Madison formation.  These formed in a seabed, deposits of ancient seashells and other materials from biological processes, in the Mississippian, more than 300 million years ago, when shallow seas were common on many continents, especially in North America. The darker gray rocks that Clark described are even older.  They are Greyson Shale formed more than 600 million years ago.

Before the Rocky Mountains began to rise, when dinosaurs roamed this country, most of Montana was coastline — near sea level or under water, part of a shallow sea that covered two-thirds of the state.  After a continental plate previously in the Pacific Ocean collided with the plate that formed North America, several things happened: The colliding westward plate formed the land that is now Washington and Oregon, where Lewis and Clark were soon to go. The Rockies began to rise; the land to the east that had been seashore rose also above sea level, and the sea was forced to retreat eastward.

Before the Rocky Mountains there was no Missouri River, and without the Rocky Mountains there would still be none.  A river is a necessary consequence of a mountain range.  Water must flow downhill and as it does it begins to carry sediment and erode a path.  Tributaries begin to come together and form a young river.  The young river cuts steeply through the rocks.  But just how a river will form depends on bedrock, climate, and the stresses and strains, the cracks and bends, to which the rocks have been subjected over their longer history on the Earth.

And so at Gates of the Mountain you have a dramatic view, as did Lewis and Clark, of these primary forces that bring us the landscape from which begins the river that drains one-sixth of the continental United States.  If you are able to take one of the excursion boats through Gates of the Mountain, you can imagine that you are on the continental raft being carried on a journey into the collision of continental plates.  This is part of the new view of our planet, one of constant motion at all scales, all materials, all levels.  It is a great journey, symbolized by the travel of Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River through the Gates of the Mountains.

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.

40. Giant Springs and Great Falls: Huge Quantities of Fresh Water Rise and Descend as Hail and Rain

The Giant Springs is in Great Falls, Montana.  From Interstate 94, take the Route 87 exit north, then take the east fork just before the Missouri River.  Follow 87 until Giant Springs Road veers to the left and Route 87 goes away from the river.  The park where the Giant Springs is located near this intersection.

On June 18, 1805, Lewis and Clark were approaching and scouting out the great falls on the Missouri River, to prepare for the portage of their materials around the falls, a task that was to take them about a month, from June 21st to July 14, 1805.  Clark set out early and, after passing the second of the great waterfalls, came on “the largest fountain or Spring I ever Saw.”  He made an estimate that this was “the largest in America Known.”  He was correct; the giant springs has been measured to discharge as much as 389 million gallons a day, with more recent measurements of 174 million to 213 million per day.  This is enough water to cover one to two square miles a foot deep every day!  “This water boils up from under the rocks near the edge of the river and falls imediately into the river 8 feet and keeps its Colour for ½ a mile which is emencely Clear and of a bluish Cast,” he wrote.

Eleven days later, on June 29, 1805, Lewis set out to see the same spring with the hunter and French-Canadian, Drewyer.  On his way, Lewis described the countryside as “a level beautiful plain for about Six miles.”  Lewis too concluded that the fountain, as he called it, was “the largest I ever held.” More likely than Clark to dwell on aesthetics, Lewis wrote that “the hadsome cascade which it affords over some steep and irregular rocks in it’s passage to the river adds not a little to it’s beauty.”  But like Clark, he also makes measurements, writing that the spring was about 25 yards from the river, “situated in a pretty little level plain, and has a suddon decent of about 6 feet in one part of it’s course.”  He noted, as did Clark, that the water was “extreemly tranparent and cold; nor is it impregnated with lime or any other extranious matter which I can discover, but is very pure and pleasent.”  There was so much water moving so quickly out of the ground that Lewis observed “the water of the fountain boil up with such force near it’s center that it’s surface in that part seems even higher than the surrounding earth which is a firm handsom terf of fine green grass.”

Today the giant springs is in a city park within an urban setting.  In the twentieth century, Great Falls developed around the production of electricity from Ryan Dam downstream whose reservoir flooded and covers the great falls for which the city is named and around which the expedition portaged.   At one time, Anaconda Copper had a large refining plant here to convert ore to metal, using the electric power from Ryan Dam.  Great Falls is a combination of pleasant residential, tired-out industrial, and pretty riverfront.  All the riverfront is public land, and there is a marina and, here and there walkways and picnic tables.

We visited the springs in early August.  The city’s River’s Edge Trail goes from the center of the city to Giant Springs.  Along this trail botanists recently have found 55 of the plant species collected by Lewis and Clark. The springs, the trail, and the Great Falls Interpretive Center celebrate the Lewis and Clark expedition.  It was near sundown and families with small children strolled along the riverfront path.  A tern flew overhead.  Canada geese and a gull were at the springs.   A steady breeze blew downriver.  We watched the natural, but incredible amount of bubbling water spewing out alongside and into the Missouri River, creating rapids that spread into the river.   For a good distance the clear waters of the spring flowed alongside the muddy waters of the Missouri without mingling.

And where does all this water come from, we wondered.  A sign at the Giant Springs told us about the geological processes that created the springs.  A formation of limestone, called Madison limestone, lies under most of Eastern Montana.  It was formed about 250 million years ago from the deposits of shells and other biological processes in the bed of an ancient sea.  Since the formation of the Rocky Mountains, which began about 90 million years ago, each year rainfall and snow soak into the limestone where it is exposed on the slopes of the Little Belt Mountains.  From there the water drains downward and then flows through openings in the limestone to the Great Falls area.  Next, under pressure because the water starts at a high elevation, the water flows upward and out at Giant Springs.  A fracture in this limestone allows the water to be pushed up.  The spring is a giant artesian well.  Flowing through limestone, the water dissolves calcium and magnesium that it brings to the surface.

On their way to the Giant Springs, Lewis and Drewyer were “overtaken by a violent gust of wind and rain from the S. W. attended with thunder and Litning.”  They took shelter “in a little gully wher there were some broad stones” that Lewis thought he could use to protect his head from hail.  They remained for about an hour “without shelter and took a copious drenching,” Lewis wrote.

At the same time, Clark was ascending the riverside, along the series of falls, so that he could retake some notes about the river that he had lost on his previous ascent.  With him was Charbonneau, the French-Canadian interpreter, his Indian wife, Sacagawea, her baby boy, and York, the only black person on the expedition.  They too saw the black cloud coming from the west.  Clark “looked about for a shelter but could find none without being in great danger of being blown into the river should the wind prove as violent as it sometimes is on those occasions in these plains.”   Clark found a deep ravine with “shelveing rocks” where they took shelter.  He put his guns and the compass under one of these rocks.  “Soon after a torrent of rain and hail fell more violent than ever I Saw before,” Clark wrote.

The intensity was so great that it “felt like one voley of water falling from the heavens” and produced a flow a water into the ravine where he and Sacagawea had taken shelter “with emence force tareing every thing before it takeing with it large rocks & mud,” he continued.  It was clear that they had to get out of the ravine which was flooding rapidly. He took his gun in his left hand and used his right to help Sacagawea, who was carrying her baby.  Charbonneau, meanwhile, was trying to pull his wife up.  “Before I got out of the bottom of the revein,” Clark wrote, ”the water was up to my waste & wet my watch.”

By the time he reached the top of the ravine, he estimated at least 15 feet of water had risen.  Sacagawea’s baby had lost his clothes, she was wet and cold and “just recovering from a Severe indispostion.” Clark was “fearfull of a relaps.”

Reading this account from the journals that evening, we then came back the next day and looked at the Giant Springs again.  It was an unlikely setting for one to imagine  the incredible storm of rare intensity that had struck Lewis and Clark at slightly different locations near the springs.   On this day, all seemed as quiet and peaceful as the design of human artifice could hope.

But other members of the expedition also suffered from that storm as they moved materials on the portage.  “Some nearly killed one knocked down three times and other without hats or any thing on their head bloodey & Complained verry much,” Clark wrote.   He gave everybody a little grog.

In the midst of the escape, he had lost the expedition’s large and best compass, which was a “serious loss” he wrote.  Fortunately, the next morning two of the men went to the falls and found the compass covered with mud and sand, but everything else,  including a tomahawk, shot pouch, powder and balls, moccasins, and the baby’s clothes and bedding, were gone.  These men found that the place where Clark had sought shelter the day before was “filled with huge rocks.”

Such rare events not only threatened the lives of Clark, Sacagawea and her baby, but also cause major changes to natural areas, leading to new channels in a river, clearings in a forest.  These rare, not often seen, events can play a major role in the dynamics of life on the Earth, resetting the ecological clock to start natural processes of restoration and recovery, to which many species are adapted.  It is well that we be aware of them though we rarely experience them.