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.