Click to Enlarge At the time of the expedition, the Missouri River was wide and full of sandbars and snags. Click to Enlarge Conservation Department employees (top left) have built several dugout canoes like those used in the expedition. The heavy canoes are seaworthy, stable and easy to steer. Today, the Missouri River (top right) is narrower and straighter than when Lewis & Clark traveled it. A distant relative of this midland softshell turtle (bottom) may have seen Lewis and Clark on their expedition.   Traveling on the Wild Missouri River by Martha Daniels Early traders and explorers faced great danger at every turn on the Missouri River. To read explorers' journals, the Missouri River of 200 years ago was a wild and raging beast compared to the river of today. The changes people have made to it over the years have tamed it, so to speak. Back then, Missouri River water was very muddy. People commonly said that it was "too thick to drink, but too thin to plow." As Auguste Chouteau and his traders traveled west from St. Louis in 1794, they saw a wide, twisting river. The winding river flowed near wetlands and marshes and shallow backwaters. Many types of habitats made up the river. The River Road The current in the channel was about 2 to 3 miles per hour. Travelers reported encountering great wads of trees that the water pushed around to create hazards and rapids. Miles of sandbars and wetlands were along the edges. They filled up during floods, providing resting and nesting places for ducks and geese and places for young fish to grow. Some of the boats commonly used on the Missouri River until the 1830s were dugout canoes, bullboats, keelboats and flatboats. Dugouts were the traditional transportation on the river. Native people and, later, traders and settlers made them by hollowing out logs of cottonwood, soft maple, sycamore or walnut. A dugout usually had a flat bottom and pointed ends and ranged between 20 and 30 feet long, but some were even longer. The boats weighed between 1,000 and 3,000 pounds. A few dugout canoes that were sealed in sand and mud for hundreds of years have been uncovered near streams and rivers. Keelboats were wooden boats, often 50-60 feet long, with a main deck, a covered cabin on top and an open hold for storage. Keelboats had sails and a large oar to help maneuver them. The current was too strong for the clumsy keelboats to go upstream against the main flow, so they traveled away from the main channel, usually along the bank where the current wasn't as strong. Flatboats were like barges. These large boats could run in shallow water. They hauled cargoes of furs, trade goods, grains and food supplies. Bullboats were used mostly to cross rivers in prairie areas, where there were no large trees. People built bullboats by stretching a bison, or buffalo, hide over a willow frame. Plains women often used bullboats to transport meat after a bison hunt. River Dangers Going downstream to St. Louis on the Missouri River was a breeze, especially in spring when snows melted, making the river high and swift. Going upstream was a lot harder. They didn't have motors back then. Instead, travelers relied on strong muscles to push a boat with a pole, paddle with oars and pull it with ropes. Poling the boat was the most common method. Men lined the walkways on each side of the keelboat deck and, together, they "walked" the boat forward with poles pushed into the river bottom. In places where the river bottom was too deep or soft for poling, the men pulled the boat from the bank with a long towrope. This was called cordelling. It was hard work to wade in sand and mud along the bank all day, pulling on a long rope. The river was also dangerous. Big submerged logs (called sawyers) could puncture a boat and sink it. Great rafts of trees floated downstream, too. Etienne de Bourgmont in 1714 described seeing an entire bank collapse and turn into what looked like a floating island. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark wrote on July 14, 1804: "The bank is falling in and lined with snags as far as we could see down." Making a Dugout Canoe To build a dugout canoe, a river traveler found a tall, straight cottonwood or soft maple tree near the riverbank. Cottonwood trees were the main trees used in this region because they were large, grew near the river and were tough enough to withstand the rigors of river travel. People built dugout canoes with hand tools, including saws, axes or hatchets, adzes, chisels, draw knives and mallets or hammers. An adze is an ax with the blade twisted on its side. They sharpened their tools with files. After cutting or felling a tree near the water, they removed its bark. They then flattened the straightest side of the log for the canoe bottom. After turning the log over, they shaped the ends so that the canoe could cut through the water. They used an adze to gouge out the soft inner wood of the log. Sometimes builders hurried the gouging process by making a fire in the log and scraping out the burning wood. The sides of a boat were usually 2 to 3 inches thick, and its bottom was 4 to 6 inches thick. The thicker bottom kept the boat steady in the water. Some dugouts were made with benches or dividers inside to increase strength. Building a dugout took from two days to two weeks! River Explorers When Lewis and Clark started up the Missouri River in 1804, their biggest concern was how to transport 27 tons of cargo. The explorers had a 55-foot keelboat with 22 oars, nicknamed "the barge." It carried 12 tons of food, supplies and equipment. There were two pirogues (pe-ROGZ), which were large rowboats. The red pirogue was 40 feet long and 12 feet wide with seven oars. Going upstream, they wrote of running the boats on logs and sand, passing under falling banks, working against swift currents that broke tow ropes and pulling through rapids a mile long. Their boat's sail mast broke close to modern-day Jefferson City, and they reported stopping to make new oars from ash trees. Storms, they wrote, almost swamped all of their boats one night. Clark was better at river navigation, so he stayed in the boat, while Lewis traveled along the river on horseback. Lewis and Clark wrote of the deer, ducks, geese and bears they found on the sandbars and islands. They also wrote about Forster's terns, soft-shelled turtles, blue catfish and channel catfish. Lewis and Clark arrived back in St. Louis in September 1806 with one pirogue and five dugout canoes. During the trip, the crew made more than 20 dugouts and bought four more from natives. They also used two bullboats. Almost 80 percent of their trip had been by water. The River Today The Missouri River today is much different from the one Lewis and Clark traveled. The river is straighter and narrower, and the Corps of Engineers maintains a channel deep enough for barges and large boats. Nowadays, pulling a boat upstream along the banks and the shallows would be impossible. The banks are steep, and rock walls, called wing dikes, stick out into the river. Paddling upstream in a dugout would be nearly impossible, too, because the current now flows at 5 or 6 miles per hour. The swift current sweeps silt, sand and logs from the channel. Silt and sand fill in behind the dikes, cutting the river off from its floodplain. When floods come in the spring and fall, the waters don't slow enough to soak into the floodplain or surrounding land. This means we have fewer wetlands, islands and sand bars available for wildlife habitat. A flood of traders and adventurers headed up the river after Lewis and Clark returned in 1806. By the 1830s, steamboats were traveling up and down the Missouri River loaded with furs, and villages began to dot the river's banks. Today, barges continue to carry cargo upstream and downstream, but people are using the river more often for boating, fishing, nature study, hunting and camping. It's as if we are rediscovering the wild and historic Misssouri River. CRAFTING A DUGOUT CANOE Make your own miniature dugout canoe and learn how they were built. Click to Enlarge MATERIALS: oven-bake polymer clay (white or brown) dental floss paperclip glass baking dish and waxed paper white paper for covering table toothpick DIRECTIONS: 1. Place paper on table, floor or other work surface. If needed, mix clay colors to form tan or brown by pulling and twisting the clay. 2. Form the clay into a log about 6 inches long and 1 inch thick. 3. Use the dental floss to flatten one side of the log. Roll the log over so the flat side is down. Place log in baking dish lined with waxed paper. 4. Use the dental floss to cut off and flatten the top of the log. Shape the ends using the floss or a table knife. 5. Pull the paperclip apart and bend one of the ends down. Use the paperclip "adze" to dig out the inside of the log. Be careful not to make the sides too thin or they will fold in when baking. 6. Place a toothpick in the back of the boat behind the seat. This is for the flag. Use another toothpick to make a hole in the front for a rope, if you like. 7. Ask an adult to help you bake the canoe according to clay directions (275 degrees for 30 minutes). 8. Allow the boat to cool. You can paint it with water-based acrylic paint. Cut out and color the flag and traders. Tape or glue the flag to the toothpick and set the traders in the boat.