Reliving Lewis and Clark: Ascending the Missouri

The current has been swift as well. And they have met what Mandrell calls a "heavy debris flow" in the river from time to time—drift logs 60 to 70 feet (18 to 21 meters) long and as much as 8 feet (2.5 meters) around.

Storms and the flooding they generate still rip cottonwood trees off the banks of the river and float them downstream. The reenactors have had to be vigilant navigating the river to avoid damaging the boats.

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All in all, however, these difficulties don't amount to much compared to what Lewis and Clark faced as they ascended the Missouri. Two days out of St. Charles, Lewis almost lost his life when he slipped and fell down a cliff he was climbing that bordered the river. He saved himself only by digging his knife into the ground to stop his fall.

The next day the expedition nearly lost its keelboat. The Missouri was full of islands that narrowed the channel. Where the channel was narrow, the current ran much more swiftly than usual, so swiftly sometimes that it "rolled" the sandbars that dotted the river downstream.

Normally they had to tow the keelboat through these portions of the river, because the men could not row or pole the boat fast enough to make way against the current. At one of these points, called the Devil's Raceground, the boat ran on one of these rolling sandbars and "the swiftness of the current wheeled the boat, broke our tow rope, and was nearly oversetting the boat," Clark wrote. "All hands jumped out on the upper side and bore on that side until the sand washed from under the boat and she wheeled on the next bank. By the time she wheeled a third time we got a rope fast to her stern and by the means of swimmers the rope was carried to shore and when her stern was down whilst in the act of swinging a third time she was drawn into deep water near the shore."

Extremely Tense Moment

Close call. The current was strong enough to overturn the boat should it have stuck hard broadside to it, and a moment like this was extremely tense. If the boat had capsized, all the equipment and supplies on board would have been spilled into the water, the boat itself might have been lost, and the expedition would have come to an end on the spot.

And moments like this were not uncommon. They ran aground on a sandbar on June 14 when the boat ran onto the point of a sandbar. "From the active exertions of the men, we prevented her from turning," Clark said. "If she had turned she must have overset."

The next day they wheeled on a sawyer, "which was near injuring us very much." The river was full of sandbars, driftwood, and sawyers. A sawyer is a tree with one end stuck in the river bottom, leaving the other end to bob up and down in the current like a saw. Sawyers were not always visible on the surface.

The Missouri was famous at the time for being difficult. It was also a muddy river, richly deserving its nickname, the Big Muddy. The men drank its water because there was no other water to drink. Some of the dysentery they were suffering was no doubt the result of drinking the river's sand and grit.

It was a difficult river indeed. Imagine what it was like to tow a boat full of supplies and weighing thousands of pounds up a river running against you at its swiftest points between two and three miles an hour (three to five kilometers an hour).

To give you an idea of what this meant, a kayak in the hands of an accomplished, strong kayaker moves through still water at a maximum rate of four miles (six kilometers) an hour. A current running against him two miles an hour would cut his progress in half. He might, if he had the stamina to paddle steadily for eight hours, make 16 miles (26 kilometers) a day, but almost nobody has that kind of stamina.

Now imagine 20 men trying to haul a heavy, cumbersome boat upstream from the shore, walking through reeds or brush or the nettles Clark mentioned once as being as high as his chest.

The work was incredibly strenuous. On days when the wind blew hard against them, they could not move upriver at all.

The keelboat had a mast and they could put up a sail when the wind was behind them, but on June 4, 1804, the helmsman on duty ran the boat under an overhanging tree and broke the mast. It was a week before they could make a replacement.

The reenactors, bless their hearts, are having a holiday. It was no holiday for the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It was, on the contrary, probably the toughest physical labor any of them had ever done. And it was going to get worse before it got better.

This was only June. In July and August, as they entered the treeless plains of what are now Nebraska and South Dakota, the temperatures would climb into the 90s (about 35 degrees Celsius), and sometimes higher.

Scroll down for a link to previous installments in this series and for links to related stories and sites.

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