Missouri river has long guided travelers west

By John Krist.
Senior reporter

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- It took the Lewis and Clark expedition three weeks to go as far as I did between breakfast and dinner on my first day of travel west from St. Louis.

As I retraced the expedition's journey up the Missouri, across the Continental Divide and on to the Pacific, I avoided interstate highways. It is nearly impossible to tell where you are in America when following one of these blandly efficient but numbingly featureless arteries of concrete. They avoid actual communities, passing instead on their tenuous outskirts through the clumps of franchised corporate establishments -- chain motels, chain gas stations, chain convenience stores, chain restaurants -- that have been strung along them like so many identical beads on a string. They offer few clues as to whether one is driving through Nevada, Texas or Alabama. Often, only the general lushness of vegetation and the gross features of topography offer any hint.

So I stuck to secondary roads, what author William Least Heat-Moon dubbed the "blue highways" in his 1982 book of the same name. His bestselling account of travels on the back roads of America (generally depicted as blue on old maps) belongs to a long literary tradition: the road trip. Although not exclusively American or modern -- Homer's "Ody-ssey," after all, is one of the great road-trip stories of all time, although it takes place largely at sea; and even Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" falls into the genre -- it has flowered rather spectacularly here, perhaps because few people have ever been as widely and insistently peripatetic as Americans.

John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" (and later, his much less interesting "Travels With Charley"), Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," even Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," all use travel as a mechanism for telling stories intended to reveal something about us as a nation and a people. I have, in fact, been preceded in my quest by Dayton Duncan, a gifted writer whose "Out West" describes his own road trip on the Lewis and Clark trail nearly two decades ago. (Duncan would later serve as writer and co-producer on Ken Burns' PBS documentary about the expedition.)

In truth, of course, the urge to head for the horizon is not peculiarly American; it is a fundamental human instinct. Our ancient hominid ancestors, after all, didn't disperse from their East African birthplace to the far corners of the globe by acting like couch potatoes.

The road trip tale is really just a variation of the quest, a storytelling form as old as our most ancient mythology, and one that clearly speaks to some deep inner urge.

Still, American history is in many ways a story of people uniquely capable of documenting for posterity their own incessant peregrinations, crossing the Atlantic to colonize a New World, and then moving progressively farther west, constantly shoving the frontier toward the sunset.

The Lewis and Clark expedition was the first and perhaps the greatest of all American road trips, and the journals constitute the first and therefore purest American example of the literary form.

Motion is a bit easier in our day than it was 200 years ago.

As I followed the Missouri River west, I traveled through one small town after another, past houses, front yards, schools and community parks. I ate lunch in an old cemetery -- usually a good place for picnicking, as they are quiet, generally have trees for shade and provide ample mealtime reading material in the form of weathered epitaphs. Although I was on secondary roads, which frequently force travelers to halt for stop signs, farm equipment, free-ranging livestock and other obstacles, I moved relatively quickly and easily. I was driving, after all, and my truck -- equipped with four-wheel drive, power steering and air conditioning -- didn't much care about the weather or the topography.

The explorers in whose wake I followed were not so fortunate. The expedition had embarked in the midst of the spring freshet on an unruly river that drains one-sixth of the continent.

Besides fighting against a formidable current (likely running at more than 5 mph), the expedition had to deal with unstable river banks, which frequently collapsed with great violence and threatened to swamp their boats. They were under constant assault by submerged trees, had to dodge floating logs coming at them like torpedoes, and ran aground on unpredictable shoals.

Often, the men waded in the river or fought through brush on the shore, dragging the 55-foot keelboat, loaded with 12 tons of supplies, upstream by ropes affixed to its bow and mast. (It could also be rowed, pushed along with poles or -- if the wind was favorable -- driven under sail.)

The weather was hot, the air cloudy with mosquitoes. Other boatmen rowed the smaller pirogues, battling the same powerful current.

In his journal entry for May 24, 1804, William Clark describes a typical wrestling match between his men and the river: "The swiftness of the current wheeled the boat, Broke our Toe rope, and was near to over Setting the boat, all hands jumped out on the upper Side and bore on that Side untill the Sand washed from under the boat and Wheeled on the next bank by the time She wheeled a 3rd time got a rope fast to her Stern and by the means of swimmers was Carred to Shore and when her stern was down whilst in the act of Swinging a third time into Deep Water near the shore, we returned to the Island where we set out ..."

Most days, they could manage only 10 miles. On my first day up the river, I traveled 275.

Remnants of the past

After I left St. Louis, I drove briefly east and, still in view of the Gateway Arch, stopped at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, location of the largest pre-Columbian settlement in North America.

There is a museum and visitor center there, explaining what is known about the Mississippian culture and the people who inhabited this densely populated community -- the largest prehistoric Indian city north of Mexico. At its height, between A.D. 1100 and 1200, the city covered nearly six square miles and had as many as 20,000 residents.

It is a rather eerie place. Cahokia's people were mound builders, erecting giant, steep-sided platforms of earth to support ceremonial buildings and residences. At one time, there were more than 120 such mounds; evidence of 68 is preserved within the park.

Those that escaped destruction by agriculture and urban development rise now from a sea of hay and corn. The largest still standing, Monk's Mound, rises in four terraces to a height of 100 feet and contains 22 million cubic feet of earth -- a lot to have been hauled one basketful at a time.

In his account of the company's winter in the vicinity, Clark reported visiting one such mound, which he called an "Indian Fortification."

The structures serve as reminders that even though Clark and his companions believed themselves to be journeying through a wilderness, they were traversing a landscape that had already seen the rise and fall of entire civilizations -- a landscape that was, in fact, already peopled.

From Cahokia, I drove north to Hartford, Ill., hoping to visit the small memorial erected to commemorate Camp Wood, where Lewis and Clark wintered before departing in May 1804. The actual location of their winter camp has been lost; the river changed course and swallowed it. The actual site is believed to be on the Missouri side of the river now, although the original camp -- sometimes referred to as Camp Dubois and commemorated as Lewis and Clark State Historic Site -- was in Illinois.

Annoyingly, access to the memorial was blocked because an elaborate new visitor center was being erected (one of many such bicentennial-related projects along the trail, this one costing an estimated $7 million) and the entire area had become a construction zone.

After watching heavy equipment rumble around the site, which lies amid green bottomland forest, I drove to Alton, crossed the Mississippi over Clark Bridge and began following the Missouri west.

I spent the rest of the day following the Missouri's broad valley through dozens of small towns -- Defiance, Dutzow, Marthas-ville, Treolar -- most with fewer than 200 inhabitants, each settlement comprising little more than a garage and a store. The river at their feet was swollen, a great, boiling creature the color of chocolate pudding. All the feeder creeks were high, too.

The countryside of the lower Missouri River is beautiful, rolling hills and limestone bluffs bracketing the flat-bottomed valley, which is heavily farmed. The hills are densely wooded.

I spent that night in those woods, at a campground called Pine Ridge in the Mark Twain National Forest. The pines surrounding my tent were planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. It was hot and still. Fireflies -- a commonplace magic of twilight in much of the country, but unfamiliar and therefore captivating to Californians such as myself -- flickered luminescent green in the undergrowth.

The next day, I drove to Rocheport, unloaded my bike and rode 55 miles along the Katy Trail. The Katy is the former route of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (MKT, or "Katy"), transformed into a bicycle path and state park after the railroad shut it down. Operated by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources as a state park, the trail stretches from St. Charles to Clinton, a distance of 225 miles.

The Corps of Discovery traveled primarily by water until it reached the Rockies, but some of the men traveled on shore at least part of the time. Lewis hiked most days, collecting plant specimens and making notes on topography, while several men hunted for fresh meat. Along much of its route, the Katy Trail parallels the Missouri River only a few yards from the shore, offering a good opportunity to experience first-hand the landscape Lewis and the hunters encountered

"The Countrey about this place is butifull on the river rich & well timbered," Clark wrote in his journal as the expedition passed this way, and I found myself in total agreement. The stretch of bike trail I rode was gorgeous, hemmed in between the river and high limestone bluffs, decorated by wildflowers and rich with wildlife. (I almost concluded it was too rich in wildlife when a deer leaped across the trail just a few feet in front of my oncoming bike; only luck prevented a collision, which I suspect would have been more traumatic for me than for the deer.)

The path passed through many tiny towns, each comprising just a handful of buildings, many dating to the 1870s or so. Although the river is in theory a major freight corridor -- its channel straightened and deepened to accommodate barge traffic -- I saw not a single barge. There were, however, many small aluminum boats carrying fishermen back and forth.

Although it was cooler than the day before, it was still in the high 80s, so I was sweating hard. The roadbed is of crushed limestone, powdery white. The dust my tires raised stuck to the sweat on my legs and arms, and by the end of the six-hour trip I looked like Casper the ghost in a bright blue helmet.

I had plenty of company; the Katy is popular with Missouri bicyclists, and the small towns abandoned by the railroad have found new economic life catering to two-wheeled traffic: bike shops, bars, bed-and-breakfast inns, restaurants and other businesses have sprung up along the route.

I turned around in Hartsburg after enjoying a cold beer on the deck of a little cafe there.

Afterward, my legs rubbery, I drove to Arrow Rock, a town that was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. I stopped there in the middle of the street to gawk at a huge snapping turtle, its shell the size of a serving platter, resting comfortably in the middle of the pavement. With its long tail, algae-encrusted back and gaze of armored unconcern, it looked positively prehistoric.

The town itself seems like something from out of the past, with its gutters of carved limestone, wooden sidewalks, overhead canopies along the storefronts, and a large collection of architectural gems, including a tavern built in 1834. Only 30 years after Lewis and Clark passed this way, encountering only the scattered villages of the Oto and Missouri tribes, there were enough white settlers in this "wilderness" to keep a bar and grill in business.

From the nearby state park, there is a nice overview of the Missouri winding through wooded bottomlands.

It was starting to rain when I arrived, with heavy thunderstorms predicted for overnight, so I left the park's otherwise tempting campground and drove back to Columbia and a motel. I needed a shower to wash off all the dust and sweat.

A meandering course

It rained all night, and my next day started with a wet visit to Big Muddy National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, which is in a trailer in a parking lot at a U.S. Geological Survey research station in Columbia. I met Barbara Moran, assistant refuge manager, who talked to me about the floodplain restoration the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the Corps of Engineers is carrying out to reverse damage to wildlife habitat and various species along the channelized, dammed Missouri River. (See accompanying story.) From there, it was west along the river again, through Independence and Kansas City, where the Missouri makes a 90-degree bend, and north into Iowa.

Crossing the river briefly into Nebraska, I stopped to tour Fort Atkinson State Historic Park, site of Lewis' and Clark's first formal meeting with Indians, where Clark later helped construct a military outpost and trading center. It was an important stop for the explorers, their first effort at international diplomacy between the United States and the sovereign tribes they would encounter in the new territory.

In their journals, Lewis and Clark refer to the place as "Camp Councile Bluff." This is not to be confused with Council Bluffs, the Iowa city nearly 30 miles southeast of the meeting place. Compounding the confusion, Fort Atkinson is actually in a town called Fort Calhoun.

So, to reach Fort Atkinson and the Council Bluff, you drive past Council Bluffs and head to Fort Calhoun. Traveling may be easier in the era of interstate highways, but the driving directions are sometimes as confusing as anything the Lewis and Clark expedition heard from the Indians.

Later, I stopped at DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge, which has the best visitor center of any wildlife refuge I've ever seen -- beautiful glassed-in views of the adjacent oxbow lake (a meander in the main Missouri channel until the Corps of Engineers cut it off by dredging a straight shipping channel across the neck), lots of nice displays. An entire room is devoted to an amazing collection of items recovered during excavation of a steamboat that sank nearby in 1865.

The boat went down in only 12 feet of water, so everyone walked off, but everything in the hold was buried in mud for over a century. The site was discovered in 1968 under a cornfield, and excavated. The boat had been carrying tons of consumer goods bound for gold mining towns far upstream in western Montana.

Everything was preserved perfectly by the mud, and has been lined up in racks -- clothing, tableware, tools, lamps, hardware, farm implements (there's a rack of dozens of shovels). The display was beautiful in its mundane and repetitive simplicity. The cargo -- including windowpanes and doorknobs by the dozen -- suggests just how quickly the empty places on Lewis' and Clark's maps had been filled in their wake.

From there it was a short drive to Onawa, Iowa, and one of the encounters I had most looked forward to when planning my project: a firsthand look at the boats that carried the Corps of Discovery halfway across the continent.

Messing around with boats

It was evening when I arrived at Lewis and Clark State Park, a small recreation site on an oxbow lake that was actually the main channel of the Missouri River in 1804 when the expedition came through the area (the river later moved itself to a new channel). There I met Butch Bouvier, who may be the only official park boatwright in the United States.

A garrulous pipe-smoker with a beard and a sturdy build, Bouvier directed me to a small dock extending into the lake. That, he said, is where I would find what he habitually referred to as "my girls."

Roped to the dock were three wooden boats, fully operational replicas of the vessels the Corps of Discovery piloted up the Missouri, all built by Bouvier and his corps of volunteers. In addition to a painstakingly accurate reproduction of the 55-foot keelboat, based on detailed drawings in the original Lewis and Clark journals, the fleet includes replicas of the expedition's two pirogues, one 32 feet long and the other 27 feet long. The design of these boats is based more on guesswork and hunches, since none of the expedition members described them in much detail. They are styled, Bouvier said, after typical Mississippi and Ohio river craft of the time, known as Mackinaw boats -- flat-bottomed, equipped with mast and sail as well as oars.

A former contractor smitten by a terminal fascination with wooden boats, Bouvier began building them as a hobby, and soon found that hobby taking over his life. "One of the problems I had as a contractor, there toward the end, was that everything I built started to look more and more like a boat," he said. "I walked away from a very lucrative career to do this."

I asked him why.

"If you could get paid to do something you absolutely loved, something you've done as a volunteer for 18 years, wouldn't you do it? I get to mess around with wooden boats here in the middle of Iowa, and people from all over the world come by and say, 'You built that?' "

Built of native oak, the keelboat draws 16 inches of water and weighs 13 tons. It has a cabin at the stern, a large mast, and parallel rows of lockers along the sides. Used to store goods, it has lids that could be opened to form a protective breastwork in case of attack. A small cannon is mounted on the bow.

The keelboat was Bouvier's first project, begun 18 years ago when the park supervisor was looking for something to make his small recreation area in this out-of-the-way corner of Iowa stand out.

"I said if the state would provide the lumber, I'd build the sonofabitch, and they took me up on it," Bouvier said

The volunteers had been forced to rebuild the keelboat a year earlier, he said; rot and decay had taken their toll. So now it's a reconstruction of a reconstruction.

"There is nothing that requires more maintenance than a wooden boat except a wife," Bouvier said.

Although he has a contract with the state park to be its resident boatwright, it isn't easy to make a living building historical replicas for museums and re-enactment groups. Bouvier said he was two weeks from declaring bankruptcy when the order came in for an $80,000 full-size keelboat replica, a cut-away version for the new visitor center under construction at Wood River, north of St. Louis. Other orders have followed. He will be building boats constantly for the next couple of years. He's building a half-size version for a nature center in Kirkwood, a St. Louis suburb.

The day of my visit, he was beginning work on a new pirogue. He and some volunteers planned to take it down the river from Gavins Point Dam in Nebraska to Sioux City, Iowa, re-enacting part of the expedition's journey home.

We sat on the dock and talked for a while, swapping favorite passages in the Lewis and Clark journals, talking about woodworking and history.

He suggested that besides being great fun, messing around with replicas of the expedition's boats constitutes "experimental archaeology," a way of discovering practical things about the past that you can't learn by reading old documents. It has given him new insights into the explorers' strategy for muscling their boats up the Missouri.

"Any method that was simplest to get the job done, that's what they'd do," he said.

"We are relearning history that has been forgotten."

After I had dinner at the Omaha tribal casino just down the road with Bouvier and several park employees and volunteers, we returned to the park and took the white pirogue out in the lake for a sunset cruise.

I got to work the sweep at the stern, which is like a rudder crossed with a kayak paddle -- you can steer with it, but also spin the boat around or make it go sideways.

Afterward, Bouvier and the park ranger, Russ Field, asked if I would like to spend the night on the keelboat, an offer I eagerly accepted.

After a couple hours of conversation and a few glasses of wine at Field's house nearby, I said goodnight, walked down to the dock and hauled my sleeping bag into the keelboat cabin. It was a bit cramped, the ceiling sloping from the door upward to the boat's stern, too low to stand upright. Two built-in bunks with rope mattresses flank the door, and two fold-down writing desks are attached to the back wall. There are three small square windows on each side of the cabin, two in the stern and one on each side of the door. Although small, it was snug, and smelled deliciously of wood and linseed oil. The polished deck felt good underfoot.

It was a beautiful night, clear and cool, with a light breeze coming off the lake. The boat creaked and rocked a little, all the wooden planks and hemp ropes squeaking and rubbing. Wooden boats are alive in a way that metal and fiberglass boats are not.

When school groups tour the boats, Bouvier tells them that the groans and creaks are Lewis and Clark talking to them.

I scribbled notes by flashlight, went outside to watch stars from the deck atop the cabin, and then turned in. For the first time since leaving St. Louis, I felt as if I could really sense something of what it must have been like for the explorers on their long journey into the unknown -- to have the only familiar things in the world be the wooden deck underfoot and the meager personal belongings at hand.

As the boat gently rocked, I fell asleep listening to the ghostly voices of Lewis and Clark speaking through the oak and hemp of Bouvier's loving creation.