Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>> If the rivers and streams carry the force of life
through the continent,
then Missouri surely forms the heartland.
For this is where our two mightiest rivers meet...
the Missouri and Mississippi,
north of their joining, carry water for more than
700-thousand square miles of North America.
Before the building of roads and rails these meandering
waterways guided the journeys of early travelers.
Native Americans were followed by trappers and traders,
adventurers and explorers.
They saw an exciting land, vast, rich and untamed.
One in which the land and the streams
formed a fragile balance.
In 1805, Meriwether Lewis described his vision
of the Missouri River in a letter to his mother.
"This immense river, so far as we have yet ascended,
waters one of the fairest portions of the globe.
Nor have we seen a country equally fertile, well watered,
and intersected by such a number of navigable streams.
The rhythm of the rivers and streams set the schedules,
controlled the traffic.
The Missouri River itself had a swift current,
shifting sandbars and snags, half hidden by turbid waters.
Timbers could quickly wreck a boat.
Yet the boats kept coming.
The steamboat owned by captain Kinney from Boonville Missouri
made 50-thousand dollars one year
by traveling the 23-hundred miles to Montana and back again.
The Missouri River was for a time,
the greatest highway to the west until the 1860s
when railroads and overland trails took over.
And the land began its long, great change.
Loggers, miners, farmers went up the rivers,
up the streams and spread across Missouri.
People came and the places changed.
Pine forests of the Ozarks
were cut and sent downstream to market.
The land left was burned again and again
by men who didn't know any better.
Settlers tore into
the rich prairies of bluestem and buffalo.
They cleared bottomland forests to make way for new towns,
new crops, new lives.
And all the while, the streams and rivers
kept on flowing silently by.
Miles and miles of waterways quietly bearing a burden
that grew as the earth burned and plowed, plowed and burned,
made its way into the streams.
And still today, silt and gravel continue to fill channels
and pools as the waters shed what they cannot carry.
Stream banks stripped of roots
no longer hold the earth in place.
Soil which once enriched the land now is washed into rivers.
Artificial straightened channels
try to hold in check streams that tend to wander.
The balance it seems, has been broken.
the question is not what have we done.
The question is what are we going to do?
And the answer lies
hidden in the nature of the streams themselves.
Rivers and streams are dynamic things,
nearly always on the move.
They're an important part of the water cycle we depend on.
Three-fourths of Missouri's drinking water in fact
comes from our rivers systems.
A stream carries life, moves life,
gives life to the earth.
No pipeline or concrete canal can do the same.
Though we create ponds and reservoirs,
we can't very well create new streams and rivers.
They're uniquely of the earth formed naturally by the lands
through which they flow.
A stream begins with raindrops.
The raindrops glide downhill
forming rivulets which join into draws.
These flow into a growing web of channels.
And finally, the land sheds its water into something big enough
to be called a stream.
The watershed, all this land where the water
has passed through on its way to the stream,
gives the water its character, its purity, its life.
The quality of our water then begins on land.
The energy of water in a stream or river comes from the force
of gravity which pulls down, always down,
to the lowest point of land as the water works
its way to sea level.
This force makes rivers natural artists,
sculptures of the landscapes
whose speed is slowed by bending channels.
Along the banks of rivers and streams, this force,
this tension, is played out constantly
between the water and the land.
Its why trees and other plants along the shore are so essential
to hold the land in place to maintain the fragile balance.
A plant-rich river hedge also filters pollutants
which inevitably head down slope into the waterways.
A healthy stream is full of life.
Plants and animals find all sorts of
nooks and crannies to live in.
Soil and gravel stay on the land.
The waterways remain open and free
rather than choked by silt and gravel.
Deep pools slow the rushing currents.
Riffles add oxygen as the water churns across an uneven bottom.
Healthy streams need to bend now and then.
A straightened channelized stream speeds the rush of water
that in turns scours the stream bed destroying places animals
and plants need to live.
Channelized streams therefore support much less life than
natural winding waterways.
The streams and rivers of Missouri are a diverse life
reflecting a great variety of landscapes.
Each provides different kinds of homes.
Each supports different types of plants and animals.
And all rivers and streams depend on the land around them.
Tumbling through rocky terrain up to a billion years old,
the waters of the Ozarks rushes in riffles and pause in pools.
Fish like hog suckers have adapted with flattened heads
to hunker down against the swift current.
Others, like darters, conquer the currents
in part with over-sized pectoral fins.
Underground waters emerge through bubbling springs.
Prairie streams work their way
across gently rolling landscapes.
The clay soil hangs suspended, giving the waters
a more cloudy look than the clear Ozarks streams.
Some animals have adapted with a keen sense of touch and taste
so they're better equipped to find their food.
Channel catfish whiskers
rake the stream bottom for tasty bits.
Bullheads have taste organs all over their bodies to help them
find food in murky water.
Prairie streams team with life.
Southeastern Missouri
was once covered extensively with cypress swamps.
It's still a very flat land
giving rise to streams that move at a snails pace through
the sandy sediments laid down in ancient seas.
In the early 1900s,
much of the Bootheel was drained for farmland.
So few unaltered lowland streams remain.
The greatest natural sculptures
of the landscape are the big rivers.
They're the water-hauling, earth-moving,
catch-all carriers.
They drain the 56-thousand miles of streams in Missouri.
They're the homes of the big fish; the paddlefish,
the sturgeon and the blue catfish.
Many Missourians drink their waters.
Though locks, dams and dikes have altered the rivers,
they're still home in places to lots of life.
Clean flowing water supporting all sorts of rich aquatic life.
That's what Missourians once had and now are working to win back.
Some people have thrown themselves directly into the
task through local conservation efforts like Stream Teams.
They're lending a hand wherever they can to remove debris,
monitor water, and plant stream banks.
Landowners help by keeping an edge of life along the rivers by
seeing the true value in a dense corridor of trees and shrubs.
But, whether you own land at the rivers edge or not,
we all affect someone else downstream so we can all help
by knowing what chemicals we're using,
by knowing where our trash and wastes go
when they leave our homes, and by adding as little
as possible to the debris on the planet.
We can help by keeping a cover of grass, trees and other plants
on the earth which hold the soil and gravel in place
and out of streams and rivers.
We can all help by understanding the life of a stream or river,
by respecting its needs to move back and forth
between stable banks rather than in life-less, rigid walls.
For no matter how we fight them, the waters will win in the end.
Flowing, always flowing, down to the seas.
Whether they continue to carry the force of life
as well is up to us.