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.