River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (35 page)

That night we sought out a wet grocer to stock our lazarette for those stretched miles ahead through the Great American Beer Desert where we’d find nary an extra-stout or pale ale or genuine pilsner. I had read my Lewis and Clark, and I knew the importance of a ration at the end of a river day; for the Corps of Discovery, it helped maintain morale
and
discipline. My chum, I thought, was becoming a bit saucy.

I
T WAS OUR LAST DAY
on the lower Missouri, those bottom 750 miles the Corps of Engineers maintains for a virtual ghost fleet of barge traffic. By comparison with the nearly eighteen hundred miles of the upper portion, the lower segment was likely easy. Because of changes in this century, the Missouri is at least three different rivers: the navigable end, the giant reservoirs behind the giant dams in the Dakotas and eastern Montana, and the mostly free-flowing sections of the Far West. We did not really know then of a fourth river hidden among the others, one hardly recognized these days, a secret one that can spell the end of certain transcontinental aspirations.

Because there are no locks through the fifteen dams on the Missouri, we would have to portage
Nikawa
a few hundred yards around them; to help us along, I arranged a team of three, a for-the-nonce Order of Tri Pi’s—Pilotis, the Professor, and the Photographer. They would support the expedition as a tripod does a telescope. Pilotis and I would be on the river every day, while the others alternated moving the boat trailer and canoe toward the next dam. That morning, under overcast and a stiff north wind, we assembled, with the Professor ready to come aboard. Pilotis went to the dock to unknot us but stopped and stood staring in front of
Nikawa.
I looked down to see what was the matter, and I too stood in silence. “What is it?” the Professor said. There, carefully aligned with our cutwater, was a small thing, a circle with four spokes—red, white, blue, yellow. It was the Plains Indians’ ancient emblem of the sacred Four Directions, a symbol of the Great Mysterious, a token reminder of how we can proceed through the journey of our days. It was almost the size of a silver dollar, made of dyed porcupine quills; when I picked it up, I found it was a broken earring. The famous Lakota holy man says in
Black Elk Speaks:

Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance.

I said, If someone lost it right smack in front of our prow, it’s a remarkable coincidence—if someone placed it here, it’s an Indian blessing. I liked either idea because tomorrow we would enter the homelands of those people now commonly lumped together as Sioux but who prefer their tribal names: Yanktonai, Teton, Dakota, Lakota, Assiniboin, Hunkpapa, and more. Pilotis said, “At our exact halfway point, I really can’t believe the timing of this.” I took the little hoop into the pilothouse and affixed it to the forward plaque, Proceed As the Way Opens, for the Great Circle is very much about proceeding, ways, and openness.

We set off upstream into a wind that moved with the current to smooth it but forced us to buck the air. We left Omaha behind, the last real city we’d see until Portland, Oregon, almost three thousand river miles distant. The bluffs were now lower and farther away, often blocked from view by trees, and the tilled bottomlands steadily came closer to the water until they eradicated the green margin to expose low banks of soft brown earth that today require miles of stone revetment to withstand the engineered current. We might as well have been in a wide canal (a term some Corps employees still use on the river), the impression heightened by old wooden markers giving mileage to the Mississippi, figures more than fifty miles greater than the distance these days, a difference made by channeling the Missouri and cutting out meanders. A shorter river, of course, is a less abundant river.

One of those abandoned oxbows, the eight-mile curve of Desoto Bend, was now a wildlife refuge, a place of exceptional diversity—singing birds, calling frogs and toads, and greenery rustled by mam mals we couldn’t see. In 1865, a week before the Civil War ended, the packet
Bertrand
, built on the Ohio River and described as a “nice trim little steamer, neat but not gaudy, that sits upon the water like a duck,” started off on her maiden voyage up the Missouri from St. Louis to Fort Benton, Montana, only to hit a snag and go down in the bend. Years later, engineers straightened the river, leaving the flat hull of the boat thirty feet under what became a field. Then, more than a century after the vessel sank, treasure hunters appeared, excited by accounts like one in the
Omaha Weekly Bee
in 1896: “For the amount of traffic that has been carried on it, no stretch of water on the globe has swallowed up as much wealth as the Missouri River.” Hoping for a share of its legendary gold, the searchers at last found the boat and, surprisingly, reported it as law requires.

Archaeologists excavated the
Bertrand
and discovered not gold but something even more rare—one of the most abundant and diverse lodes of artifacts, almost two million items, ever to come to light in America, things instantly preserved in the anaerobic world of Missouri muck, much like household goods buried when volcanic ash covered Herculaneum. Diggers brought up object after object, conserved and displayed them in a new museum near the site of the wreck. Behind the glass cases today is a three-dimensional inventory of common life on the northern frontier, goods still seeming to be on the way to Montana, things just waiting for use: bottles of ale, Drake’s Plantation Bitters, bourbon whiskey cocktail, ketchup, brandied cherries, cod liver oil, horseradish, pepper sauce, and lemon syrup; maple sugar candy, flour, butter, lard, olive oil, canned oysters, sardines (soda crackers also, of course), pickles, and tamarinds; boots, brooms, candles, hats, clocks, ink, pen points, pencils, skillets, teakettles, churns, cutlery, goblets, griddles, coal-oil lamps, matches, dye, mirrors, shoe polish, soap, starch, washtubs, pickaxes, plows, sleigh bells, axle grease, bullwhips, cut nails, keyhole facings, tar paper, black powder, tobacco, and snoods.

Above Desoto Bend, the river valley widens in places to sixteen miles, an area gridded with roads and cut with diversion ditches to drain it and give it over to soybeans. Had the Missouri not created such a rich and level bottomland, it might have been spared to keep some of its native character, but its fertility undid it. Paraphrasing, I think, Kurt Vonnegut, I said, If only God in his infinite wisdom had made it worthless. To hold the river thereabouts in its single artificial channel, its chains, commonly requires ten wing-dikes to the mile on one side with three miles of rock riprap opposite; yet, over the last 350 miles above Kansas City, we had not seen a single tow under way. I said to my mates, These last couple of days
Nikawa
has been the only boat on the river, so, to put it bluntly, engineering this river has served today no other purpose than to get us upstream. Pilotis said, “I’ve heard that all the channels in the old river allowed pioneers at certain times to cross it in wagons.”

We passed beneath a big loess bluff covered with cliff swallow nests. Loess, the emblematic earth of the lower Missouri Valley, is a soil made from the fine grindings of glacial dust blown off exposed bars of the ancient braided river and commonly deposited near the shore. In its natural state, the soil has a peculiar and powerful adhesion that allows it to be sliced across like a big wheel of Cheddar and still stand vertically through years of rains and freezes; children dig shallow caves in it and, along highway exposures, carve in their names. But once loess is disturbed, it returns to its original powdery condition—good for farmers, useless for ten-year-olds—and the magic quiddity that Aeolus added to it fifteen thousand years ago is lost until the next glaciation.

Between Decatur, Nebraska, a town that used to be moved like a traveling tent show to follow the erratic Missouri, and Dakota City (as much a city as Kansas City is a village), we passed the Omaha and Winnebago reservations, further reminders that the Missouri once marked the edge of Indian country, the end of total white domination. These tribes, in a significant accomplishment, have held on to their reserves despite the increasing value of the land, but holding on to native things cultural and spiritual has been more problematic.

Rising high to starboard was the bluff containing the grave of Sergeant Charles Floyd, the only member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to die en route, probably from a ruptured appendix. Clark, in one of his finest expressions, wrote in August of 1804: “We Came to make a warm bath for Sergt. Floyd hopeing it would brace him a little; before we could get him in to this bath he expired with a great deel of composure, haveing Said to me before his death that he was going away and wished me to write a letter—we Buried him [in] the top of a high round hill over looking the river & Countrey for a great distance.”

The grave was so close to the edge of the bluff that, by 1857, the Missouri had undercut the cliff to spill some of Floyd’s bones into the muddy water. Citizens removed the remaining ones, made a cast of his skull, and reburied them; in 1895 the sergeant was again reburied farther from the precipice, a site now marked by a tall stone obelisk designed by Missouri River engineer
and
conservationist, as well as historian, the inimitable Hiram Chittenden.

At Sioux City, Iowa, we found a new shoreside park, and within its sheltered waters we lay to in a slip that would let me sleep without nightmaring about
Nikawa
being washed away like the bones of Sergeant Floyd. Our crew took a meal in a place overlooking the water, and from them I drew out all the advice and rumor each had recently gathered about our chances of farther ascending the Missouri. The opinions were one: the first miles on the upper river were going to test us in ways we’d not yet seen. I phoned a local boatman whose most positive comment when I asked whether we could make it was, “It’s dubious.” He thought I should call a steakhouse twenty miles up the road, a hangout of watermen (“river rats” was the actual term). There, a fellow considered my questions about the route up to the first dam eighty miles away, a braided stretch of old river full of shoals and sandbars and snags—the classic impediments. “I don’t know whether you can make it or not. I don’t know your boat, I don’t know your skill, but I do know this—the water is up, way up. If ever there’s a time to get through that section, you’ll be able to do it tomorrow.” He paused, then, “The best thing would be to get Billy Joe Conrad, the Indian. He’s the man. He lives alone out somewhere, but this time of year he’s probably sleeping with his dog in the bottom of a johnboat up some creek. I can tell you, getting up the river will be easier than finding him.”

I began calling Cedar County cafés and taverns near the Missouri but could come up with only traces of Billy; at each place he was just beyond my grasp. It was as if I were tracking him over rock. I returned to the crew and said, The kiddie party is over—tomorrow we meet the real river. “Good,” said Pilotis, “I’m tired of this fake one we’ve been on for seven hundred miles.”

VIII

The Missouri is, perhaps, different in appearance and character from all other rivers in the world; there is a terror in its manner which is sensibly felt the moment we enter its muddy waters from the Mississippi. From the mouth of the Yellow Stone River, which is the place from whence I am now writing, to its junction with the Mississippi, a distance of 2000 miles, the Missouri, with its boiling, turbid waters, sweeps off in one unceasing current, and in the whole distance there is scarcely an eddy or resting place for a canoe. Owing to the continual falling in of its rich alluvial banks, its water is always turbid and opaque, having at all seasons of the year the colour of a cup of chocolate or coffee with sugar and cream stirred into it. To give a better definition of its density and opacity, I have tried a number of simple experiments with it at this place and at other points below, at the results of which I was exceedingly surprised. By placing a piece of silver (and afterwards a piece of shell, which is a much whiter substance) in a tumbler of its water, and looking through the side of the glass, I ascertained that those substances could not be seen through the eighth part of an inch; this, however, is in the spring of the year when the freshet is upon the river, rendering the water, undoubtedly, much more turbid than it would be at other seasons; though it is always muddy and yellow, and from its boiling and wild character and uncommon colour, a stranger would think even in its lowest state there was a freshet upon it.