‘The Treacherous Missouri’

An Ever-Shifting Channel Made of The “Big Muddy” the Most Difficult of All Streams to Navigate; 298 Steamboats were

Wrecked At the Bends Along the Missouri’s Course from 1819 to 1898; Navigation on the Yellowstone

by Dan R. Conway

(First appeared in the Hysham Echo on April 7, 1927)

There was, perhaps, no stream in the world so difficult to navigate as the Missouri river. In the earliest days, traffic of any sort was all but an impossibility. The Sieur Hubert in his report to his government in 1705 stated that the birchbark canoe could not be used to navigate its waters.

One of the greatest difficulties encountered in navigating the river was caused by constant changes in the shifting of the mouth of the Platte river and the Mississippi, the Missouri on each side is lined with bluffs which are nearly parallel to each other at an average distance of two miles. Except during flood stage, the channel is confined to from one-fourth to one-half this distance, leaving the remainder bottom land. A leeway for the channel is furnished by this bottom, which is alluvial soil, and which was originally covered with a primeval forest. Scientists claim that this was “made land,” caused from accretions, and the river has never relinquished its title to it. Perhaps it may have been thousands of years in the forming but those familiar with the formations and the unusual characteristics of the river claim that sooner or later, the channel, unless restrained, will go back and claim its own.

Shifting Channels

These channels, in changing, always leave a sandbar, which, as time progresses, becomes covered with a thick growth of willows and young cottonwoods. These, in their tangled masses, catch and retain the silt of subsequent floods and freshets, which, together with decaying vegetation, ultimately becomes a high and adjacent land. It is easily understood, then, how this process going on for centuries, forms and reforms these bottom lands, moving the channel back and forth at the will of the elements.

Phil E. Chappell of Kansas City, Mo., in his contribution to the Historical Collections of Kansas, says: “Let a hole be bored anywhere in the river bottom, a mile or more from the present bed of the river, and it is probable that at a distance of about twenty-five feet, or when the level of the water in the river is reached, a wrack heap or an old log will be struck that has lain there embedded in the soil for centuries, thus proving conclusively that the channel of the river at one time flowed there.”

(Cont. next week) Print this post