Historical March 1989 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
It dumps over 100,000 cubic feet per second in the Mississippi.
It takes about two weeks to put a cubic mile of water into the conveyor heading to the Gulf of Mexico.
If it snows more than normal on the Dakotas and Montana, and if it rains a good deal in the spring along the Platte, then the volume of water grows rapidly.
We call that a flood.
When that happens, a cubic mile of water can come down the Missouri in a couple days. Prior to the Fort Peck Reservoir system on the Upper Missouri, boats used to go from St. Louis to Fort Benton, Montana, on a regular basis.
The seven dams of the system from Yankton, South Dakota to Fort Peck, Montana, changed all that and made the Missouri something of a pussy cat.
It used to take great quantities of water from the Judith, Musselshell, Powder, Yellowstone, Knife, and Platte Rivers and bring it all past St. Louis in great quantities.
No more; the beast is tamed. Lewis and Clark headed up the Missouri on May 14, 1804. Just a couple of months before, Amos Stoddard had transferred the Louisiana Territory to the United States at St. Louis.
A year after they left to find a water route to the Pacific, the United States Army began to build Fort Bellefontaine at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi.
A lot of soldiers would die there—not from Indian attack but from the vagaries of the Missouri. Disease was the main problem due to stagnant water left after flooding.
When the Missouri flooded it moved around. Nothing of the fort remains since the mouth of the Missouri moved south to its present location and washed it all away.
This process was obvious early on and plans were made to move the fort south. Land was purchased from Carondelet and the fort moved south of the River Des Peres where it was first named Adams Cantonment.
In 1826 the name was changed to Jefferson Barracks.
Meanwhile the mouth of Missouri shifted south and the Mississippi moved east.
The Missouri remained the easiest way to take settlers and commerce to the West.
It also remained one of the most dangerous bodies of water with collapsing banks, snags to catch boat bottoms, quicksand along its “shores,” and daily even hourly changes of channel.
The problem in understanding the Missouri is that we tend to confuse the river with water.
In fact, the Missouri is more of a fluid than a liquid.
The old steamboatmen used to tell tales of when greenhorns would fall off a boat and break an arm as they fell into the river.
The floodplain is really part of the river.
If the river is slow, the floodplain seems to grow; if the river is full of runoff and snowmelt from the hills and plains, than the floodplain is moving with all the rest of it.
It was this problem of moving fluids with more or less water that created the challenge of traveling on the Missouri.
In the early days keelboats, flatboats, and packet steamers were used to ascend the Missouri.
The packets were designed for the Mississippi and the Ohio.
The keelboats were primarily designed for the Ohio traffic to New Orleans. Flatboats were the most successful but they were difficult to control. Just before the Civil War a new design for river steamboats emerged which eventually conquered the Missouri (with some notable exceptions).
The upriver mountain packets, sometimes called “grasshoppers,” were designed to take commerce into Montana Territory.
They had almost no keel, almost a flat bottom, and the boilers were above the water line totally.
On the front of the mountain packets was a windless system which made it possible for the boats to pull themselves over sandbars and the many shallows created by the Missouri as it ebbed and flowed dropping tons of silt randomly the entire length of the river.
This winch system allowed the mountain packets to move up the Missouri even if the river was more silt than water. Only snags—trees caught in the bottom of the river and sticking up close to the surface— were left as a major danger, and these snags took a number of packets every year even on the Mississippi.
Even after Henry Shreeve invented the snag boat, these trees continued to take steamers to the bottom of the river.
The Missouri is over 2000 miles long.
It is formed in Montana where the three rivers, Jefferson, Gallatin, and Madison, come together near what is now the town of Three Forks.
These three rivers were named by Lewis and Clark when they reached the location in 1805 and took the Jefferson fork to the western edge of the Bitterroot Mountains.
At that time nearly every one thought it was simply a day or two journey from the Missouri to the Columbia River with a distance of perhaps 20 miles separating them.
In fact the distance was over 200 miles and the trip very arduous over some of the roughest mountain terrain in the country.
Obviously the Missouri was not a way to reach the Pacific easily, but it was the way west.
It was also the most convenient way to bring furs, gold, iron, and other resources east for production into goods for sale.
The railroad changed all that later in the nineteenth century, but even yet many commodities, such as coal and grain, are often most economically shipped by barge. Modern river management has changed the Missouri to the point that it is now safe. Rarely do tow boats or barges sink; rarely is the channel allowed to shift any great amount.
It is still, however, a changing fluid with many characteristics unique to itself.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, March 1989.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: Flow quantities, historical claims and claim of river safety are the author’s 1989 account, not present-day hydrologic or boating guidance.
Original source: SD_Times1989_03.pdf, printed page(s) 5; PDF page(s) 5.
