Missouri River

• 1. Introduction

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  The Missouri River is the longest river in the United States, and the first European to write about it was badly shaken by what he saw. In late June 1673, the French-Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet and the French explorer Jacques Marquette reached its mouth while the river was in full flood. "I never saw anything more terrific," Jolliet wrote. Whole trees came tumbling out of the Missouri with such force that crossing it seemed dangerous. The commotion churned the water so thoroughly that it "could not clear itself." The two men did not linger. They had set out hoping to reach the Pacific Ocean, and they soon learned that the Mississippi ran toward the Gulf of Mexico instead. They turned back without exploring the Missouri beyond its mouth.

  The river they dismissed drains a semi-arid land that takes in parts of ten U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. It feeds the Mississippi, yet it is slightly longer than the river it joins. This documentary follows the Missouri from its mountain springs to its muddy mouth. Where does a river this large actually begin? Why did its flow swing so wildly between flood and drought? Who lived beside it long before Jolliet arrived, and what became of them? And what did the United States do to the river once it decided to tame it?

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• 2. Headwaters To Mouth

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  At Brower's Spring, 9100 feet above sea level on the southeastern slopes of Mount Jefferson in Montana's Centennial Mountains, the longest source stream of the Missouri begins. It runs through Hell Roaring Creek and the Red Rock River, then becomes the Beaverhead River. Once it meets the Big Hole River, it takes the name Jefferson River. Two other streams feed the headwaters. The Firehole River rises at Madison Lake in Yellowstone National Park and joins the Gibbon River to form the Madison. The Gallatin River flows out of Gallatin Lake, which also lies inside the park.

  The Missouri officially starts where the Jefferson and Madison meet in Missouri Headwaters State Park, near Three Forks, Montana. The Gallatin joins a mile downstream. Next the water crosses Canyon Ferry Lake, a reservoir west of the Big Belt Mountains. At the city of Great Falls it drops over a series of five substantial waterfalls. East of there the river winds through the canyons and badlands of the Missouri Breaks, then spreads out into the reservoir of Fort Peck Lake.

  In North Dakota, the Yellowstone River comes in from the southwest. At that meeting point the Yellowstone is actually the larger of the two rivers. Farther on, the Missouri passes Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, and later forms the boundary between South Dakota and Nebraska. At Omaha it receives the Platte River, its longest tributary. At Kansas City, where the Kansas River enters from the west, the Missouri swings east across the state that shares its name. It passes south of Columbia and below Jefferson City. Then it rounds the northern side of St. Louis and joins the Mississippi on the border between Missouri and Illinois.

  Along its main stem the river runs 2341 miles. Measured from the farthest source at Brower's Spring, it stretches 2639 miles, dropping 8626 feet to a mouth just over 400 feet above sea level. Added to the lower Mississippi, it forms the fourth-longest river system in the world, at 3745 miles. More than 95 significant tributaries feed it, most of the larger ones arriving near the end of its course. At the opposite extreme sits Montana's Roe River, only 201 feet long and counted among the shortest rivers in the world.

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• 3. The Big Muddy

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  Before the dams, the Missouri carried between 175 and 320 million short tons of sediment every year. That enormous load earned it the nickname "Big Muddy." Today the figure is only 20 to 25 million tons. Much of the old load came from the floodplain, also called the meander belt. Each time the river changed course, it tore soil and rock from its banks. Dams and channels now keep the river away from those natural sources, and reservoirs trap roughly 36.4 million tons a year. Even so, the Missouri still delivers more than half of all the silt that reaches the Gulf of Mexico.

  The story of that sediment begins in the Rocky Mountains of southwestern Montana, which rose during the Laramide Orogeny, a mountain-building episode lasting from about 70 to 45 million years ago. The uplift pushed up Cretaceous rocks along the western edge of the Western Interior Seaway, a shallow sea that once stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. As the sea retreated, rivers began carrying eroded material across the plains. Layers such as the White River Formation, the Arikaree Group and the Ogallala gave the Great Plains their gentle eastward tilt. The Ogallala also forms a major aquifer. Snow and ice melting in those same Rockies still supply most of the river's water.

  Before the Quaternary Ice Age, the Missouri was probably split into three separate segments. The upper portion drained north toward Hudson Bay, while the middle and lower sections flowed eastward. Advancing glaciers diverted the river southeastward and joined the pieces into one system. Ice sheets also dammed the river and its tributaries into temporary lakes, including Glacial Lakes Great Falls and Musselshell. When those lakes overflowed, they carved channels that are now abandoned, such as the 100-mile Shonkin Sag. Sapphires turn up in some spots along the river in western Montana.

  The riverbanks today are lined mostly with cottonwoods, willows and sycamores. Heavy sediment keeps the river poor in aquatic invertebrates, yet the basin supports about 300 species of birds and 150 species of fish. Among the fish is the pallid sturgeon, which is endangered. The World Wide Fund For Nature divides the watershed into three freshwater ecoregions, and the Upper Missouri holds no known endemic species.

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• 4. Floods And Droughts

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  On the 31st of July 1993, during a historic flood, the Missouri reached its largest recorded flow, more than 750,000 cubic feet per second. The lowest recorded flow came on the 23rd of December 1963. An ice dam had formed, and the river dwindled to a mere 602 cubic feet per second. At Hermann, Missouri, the average annual flow from 1897 to 2010 was 87,520 cubic feet per second. The wettest year averaged 181,800, in 1993, and the driest averaged 41,690, in 2006.

  Before dams, the river flooded twice each year. The "April Rise," or "Spring Fresh," came from snow melting on the plains. The "June Rise" came from mountain snowmelt and summer rainstorms, and it was far more destructive. In some years it lifted the river to over ten times its normal flow. Catastrophic floods struck in 1844-1881 and 1926-27. Today more than 17,000 reservoirs hold some 141 million acre-feet, which flattens the peaks and raises the low flows. Evaporation from the main-stem reservoirs alone costs over 3 million acre-feet a year.

  The climate explains the swings. Most of the watershed receives only 8 to 10 inches of precipitation a year, though the Rockies and southeastern Missouri can receive as much as 40 inches. In the upper basin, short and intense summer thunderstorms are common. One of them produced the 1972 Black Hills flood through Rapid City, South Dakota.

  The drainage basin covers 529,350 square miles. That is nearly one-sixth of the United States, just over five percent of North America, and comparable to the Canadian province of Quebec. The Missouri supplies 45 percent of the Mississippi's annual flow past St. Louis, and as much as 70 percent in certain droughts. In 1990, about 12 million people lived in the basin, including the entire population of Nebraska. Its largest city is Denver, home to more than six hundred thousand people.

  More than 170,000 square miles of the basin lie under the plow. That amounts to roughly one-fourth of all farmland in the United States and more than a third of the nation's wheat, flax, barley and oats. Yet only 11,000 square miles of that farmland is irrigated.

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• 5. First Peoples

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  Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene, the first human beings settled in the Missouri watershed, according to archaeological evidence found especially in Missouri. The river became one of the main migration paths of that era. Most travelers eventually settled in the Ohio Valley and the lower Mississippi Valley. Many others, including the Mound builders, stayed along the Missouri and became ancestors of the later Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. Early colonists named many of the major tribes, among them the Otoe, Missouria, Omaha, Ponca, Dakota, Lakota, Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, Assiniboine, Gros Ventres and Blackfeet. These peoples left no written records from before European contact.

  The center of wealth and trade lay on the great bend of the river in the Dakotas. Walled Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara villages stood on bluffs and islands there and housed thousands of people. Later they served as a market and trading post for early French and British explorers and fur traders. Most other nations in the region were semi-nomadic, with different summer and winter camps.

  Tens of millions of American bison once roamed the basin. Most nations depended on them for food, and hides and bones became household goods. Periodic controlled burns of the grasslands cleared old growth and helped the herds in turn. Then horses arrived, possibly descended from feral European-introduced animals. They carried people over far greater distances, which changed hunting, trade and communication, and also warfare and the expulsion of many tribes.

  After Europeans arrived, bison and people alike declined quickly. Massive over-hunting for sport wiped out the bison east of the Mississippi River by 1833 and left only a few hundred in the Missouri basin. Smallpox and other foreign diseases ravaged Native populations. Without their main source of food, many survivors were forced onto reservations, often at gunpoint. The twentieth century would take more of their land, this time under rising water.

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• 6. Explorers And A Purchase

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  In 1714, Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont led an expedition up the Missouri that reached at least the mouth of the Platte River. He described blond-haired Mandans in his journals, so he probably reached their villages in what is now North Dakota. That year he published The Route To Be Taken To Ascend The Missouri River, the first known document to use the name "Missouri River." Many of the tributary names he recorded, mostly taken from local tribes, are still used today. The cartographer Guillaume Delisle drew on his findings to map the lower river.

  Bourgmont's record was complicated. In 1706 he had deserted his post as commandant of Fort Detroit after poorly handling an Ottawa attack that killed thirty-one people. Yet in 1720 the Pawnee, whom he had befriended, massacred the Spanish Villasur expedition near present-day Columbus, Nebraska. That temporarily halted Spanish encroachment on French Louisiana, and it restored his reputation. In 1723 he founded Fort Orleans near present-day Brunswick, Missouri, the first European settlement of any kind on the river. In 1725 he brought chiefs of several river tribes to France, where he was raised to the rank of nobility. He never went back. Fort Orleans was abandoned, or its small garrison was massacred, in 1726.

  By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France gave its Canadian possessions to Britain and gained Louisiana from Spain. Spain at first let French traders work under license. After a report of Hudson's Bay Company trappers in the upper basin, Spain chartered the "Missouri Company" in 1795 and offered a reward to the first person to reach the Pacific by the Missouri. Several expeditions failed. James MacKay and John Evans built Fort Charles as a winter camp about 20 miles south of present-day Sioux City. At the Mandan villages they expelled British traders and pinpointed the Yellowstone River, which the French called Roche Jaune, meaning "Yellow Rock." They never reached the Pacific, but they drew the first accurate map of the upper Missouri.

  In 1800 Spain secretly returned Louisiana to Napoleonic France. President Thomas Jefferson, fearing the Mississippi and New Orleans might be closed to Americans again, offered $10 million for the port. Napoleon, facing a debt crisis, offered the entire territory for $15 million, less than 3 cents per acre. The 1803 deal doubled the size of the United States.

  Jefferson then told Meriwether Lewis to explore the Missouri and look for a water route to the Pacific. Many believed the Columbia and Missouri systems nearly connected. Spanish authorities warned Lewis off and tried to keep the MacKay and Evans map from him, but he eventually saw it. In 1804 Lewis and William Clark set out with thirty-three people in three boats. They found no Northwest Passage, but they became the first Europeans to travel the whole Missouri and reach the Pacific by way of the Columbia. Their journals, maps and reports supplied many of the place names still used in the upper basin.

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• 7. Frontier Highway

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  When Lewis and Clark returned in 1806, their journals described country stocked with thousands of buffalo, beaver and river otter. In 1807 the explorer Manuel Lisa led an expedition up the Missouri and Yellowstone, trading manufactured goods to Native tribes for furs. His men began building Fort Raymond that autumn, on a bluff over the Yellowstone and Bighorn. In 1809 Lisa founded the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company with William Clark and Pierre Choteau, among others. In 1828 the American Fur Company built Fort Union at the Missouri-Yellowstone confluence, which became headquarters for the upper basin trade. Trappers, called mountain men, blazed trails that pioneers later followed. By the late 1830s silk had replaced beaver as a fashion, and the beaver themselves had been hunted nearly out. The trade vanished from the Great Plains around 1850.

  By then the river had become the gateway to the West. The California, Mormon, Oregon and Santa Fe trails all began on its banks. The first leg of the Pony Express was a ferry across the Missouri at St. Joseph, Missouri. From the 1830s to the 1860s, over 500,000 people set out from the river town of Independence, Missouri. Most went up the river to Omaha and then followed the Platte. One explorer remarked that the Platte was "too thick to drink, too thin to plow." In 1869 the Hannibal Bridge became the first bridge across the Missouri, a main reason Kansas City grew into the largest city on the river above St. Louis.

  The first steamboat on the Missouri was the Independence, which began running between St. Louis and Keytesville, Missouri, around 1819. Steamboat traffic peaked in 1858, with over 130 boats working full-time. The river's shifting levels and heavy silt wrecked some 300 vessels, and the average ship lasted about four years. When gold strikes drew people to Montana in the 1860s, over 80 percent of passengers and freight went by boat, a trip taking 150 days upstream. Railroads then drove the steamboats out, and almost none remained by the 1890s.

  Settlement brought violence. Over 1,000 battles, big and small, were fought between the U.S. military and Native Americans. Red Cloud's War, fought over the Bozeman Trail, ended in a complete victory for the Lakota and Cheyenne. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie "guaranteed" the Black Hills and Powder River Country to Native Americans. Yet gold discovered in the Black Hills sparked the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. Both sides won major battles and nearly a thousand people died. The war ended in an American victory, and survivors were moved onto reservations in Wyoming and southeastern Montana.

  The river also marked the line of conflict between Kansas and Missouri. During Bleeding Kansas, pro-slavery forces crossed the Missouri to stir up violence in Kansas. In the American Civil War, the 1861 Battle of Boonville let the Union seize control of river transport. That discouraged the state of Missouri from joining the Confederacy.

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• 8. Dams And Barges

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  Black Eagle Dam, built in 1891 on Black Eagle Falls, was the first dam on the Missouri. It was little more than a small weir that diverted part of the flow into a power plant. In 1908, Hauser Dam failed because of structural deficiencies, flooding the river all the way downstream past Craig. At Great Falls, workers dynamited part of the Black Eagle Dam to save nearby factories. Hauser was rebuilt in 1910 as a concrete gravity structure, and it still stands. Holter Dam, finished in 1918, flooded a limestone canyon called the Gates of the Mountains. Meriwether Lewis had described its "towering and projecting rocks" that seemed "ready to tumble on us."

  The truly massive projects came with the New Deal. In 1940 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed Fort Peck Dam in Montana, which gave jobs to more than 50,000 laborers. Yet it controlled runoff from only 11 percent of the watershed. Three years later a severe snowmelt flood submerged manufacturing plants in Omaha and Kansas City and delayed military shipments during World War II. Congress responded with the Flood Control Act of 1944, which authorized the Pick-Sloan Plan. It merged two proposals. The Pick plan wanted large main-stem dams for flood control and power. The Sloan plan wanted roughly 85 smaller tributary dams for irrigation. A planned set of 27 dams on the Yellowstone drew local opposition. Instead, engineers enlarged the dam at Riverdale, today's Garrison Dam. That is why the Yellowstone is now the longest free-flowing river in the contiguous United States.

  In the 1950s came five main-stem dams: Garrison, Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall and Gavins Point. Together with Fort Peck, they form the Missouri River Mainstem System. In total fifteen dams impound the main stem, all on the upper half of the river. The reservoirs include Lake Sakakawea, Lake Oahe and Fort Peck Lake, the largest, second-largest and fourth-largest artificial lakes in the United States by surface area. The system can hold more than three years of the river's flow. Its power plants produce about 9.3 billion kilowatt-hours a year.

  The cost fell heavily on Native nations. Garrison Dam took 150,000 acres of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes sued under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which barred taking reservation land without their consent and Congress's. In 1947 they were coerced into accepting $5.1 million, just $33 per acre. In 1949 the sum rose to $12.6 million. The tribes were even denied use of the reservoir shore for grazing, hunting and fishing.

  Below Sioux City the river runs free of dams but is heavily engineered for barges. In 1912 the Corps was authorized to maintain a 6-foot channel from Kansas City to the mouth. In 1945 it began the Bank Stabilization and Navigation Project, aiming for a channel 300 feet wide and 9 feet deep. Work continues today. Rock dikes, cut-off meanders and dredging have left about 32 percent of the river in straightened channels. The river's length has dropped from some 2540 miles in the late 19th century to 2341.

  The cargo never came. In 1929 the Missouri River Navigation Commission estimated shipments at 15 million tons a year. From 1994 to 2006 they averaged only 683,000 tons. Almost all of it is sand and gravel dredged from the lower 500 miles. Richard Opper, former executive director of the Missouri River Basin Association, said navigation "never achieved its expectations. Even under the very best of circumstances, it was never a huge industry." When drought lifted in 2010, about 334,000 short tons were barged. Then flooding in 2011 closed record stretches of the river, "washing away hopes for a bounce-back year."

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