Free In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark by Wallace G. Lewis Page B

bluff jutted out, now the site of Arrow Rock State Park, downstream from Saline City. Journalentries are replete with descriptions of the natural bounty found in the heavy vegetation along the banks of the Missouri River, which included wild grapes, black raspberries, plums, and crabapples. The bottomlands through which the river shifted and meandered were dominated by large, often even huge cottonwood trees throughout the prairie and high plains regions of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Montana. Sharing this floodplain were shrubs, willows, and other vegetation characteristic of wetlands created when the river had abandoned and cut off oxbow bends as it changed channels. Away from the floodplain, the terraces and bluffs were thick with upland forests of walnut, ash, hackberry, oak, and sycamore trees. 4
    The currents of the river, “a moody beast,” constantly changed speed. The men often had to jump into the shallows near the bank and pull on cordelles (long ropes) attached to the keelboat or push the pirogues when the current was too strong to make headway by poling or rowing. If the wind was favorable, sails could be hoisted to take advantage of it. When the wind blew against them, however, even pulling was ineffective, and the expedition had to put in to shore to wait it out. As if shifting currents and wind were not enough, the Missouri ate away at its banks, causing large chunks to break away without warning and threaten to swamp any nearby craft. Floating obstacles were also a common menace. Enormous cottonwoods that had fallen into the river often became “sawyers,” dead tree trunks that floated vertically with their tops just below the surface of the water. With little warning, the bobbing sawyers could rip open the hull of a keelboat or pirogue with tremendous power. 5
    At the mouth of the Kansas River in present-day Kansas City, which it reached on June 26, the expedition paused for several days. On the 28th the men saw their first buffalo but did not kill one. The respite was used to discipline John Collins and Hugh Hall, charged in a court-martial proceeding with drunkenness while on guard duty and with pilfering the whiskey supply. The punishment was harsh: Collins received 100 lashes and Hall 50. This was one of several courts-martial and disciplinary inflictions carried out on the lower Missouri segment of the outward journey. The men celebrated their first Fourth of July near Atchison, Kansas, firing the keelboat bow gun and examining a long-deserted site of a “Kanzas” Indian town inDonophan County. [II, 349n4] Moving past St. Joseph, they worked their way between present-day Missouri and Nebraska to the mouth of the Platte River, about ten miles south of Omaha.
    Today, Interstate 29 follows the river closely on the Missouri and Iowa side. The wild grapes, berries, and wild roses of midsummer could still be seen in profusion along the river’s banks, but the prairie land back from the eastern (or northern) bluffs was becoming more open, with fewer signs of timber or vegetation other than grasses. Although the grass became shorter as they moved further west into the interior of South Dakota, the riverine zone of Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa was dominated by “big bluestem,” which could grow as high as twelve feet. Moving out of the prairie region into the Great Plains, the land became progressively drier and higher in elevation. The Platte River, pouring into the Missouri near Bellevue, Nebraska, was known to be a major tributary flowing almost directly from the western mountains. Although not practically navigable, within forty years the Platte would guide and sustain emigrants passing over the great river roads to Oregon, California, and Utah. 6 Clark commented on the Platte: “This Great river being much more rapid than the Missouri forces its current against the opposite Shore . . . with great Velocity roleing its Sands into the Missouri, filling up its