"This senery already rich pleasing and beautiful was still farther hightened by immence herds of Buffaloe deer Elk and Antelopes which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be comprehended at one view to amount to 3,000." -- Meriwether Lewis, September 17, 1804.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition conjures images of grandeur on the untamed Missouri River, though there were often scenes of carnage as well. Stephen Rinella's book American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon documents the perils river crossings posed to herds of buffalo.
"In the summer of 1867, a herd of four thousand buffalo went into the mud at the confluence of the Platte River and Plum Creek, and only two thousand came out. The remaining two thousand -- or around 2.5 million pounds of buffalo -- joined the riverbed. South of the Platte River, along the Arkansas, an army officer named Dangerfield Parker attempted to stalk a herd of buffalo that were wading in the water. When he got close enough, he realized that the buffalo were perfectly dead. Stuck fast in the mud, the carcasses had become mummified in the dry prairie air."
We usually think of the river as habitat -- a unique biome with overlapping food chains -- not as predator, ingesting entire herds of animals, changing its structure through these additions, like John Gacy scouring his crawlspace for building materials
The forest is an edible graveyard, with myriad organisms munching away at the beetle-killed, lightning-felled, wind-broken or just old, breaking plant flesh down into humus that tomorrow's beetle-meal sucks through a straw.
The river's mass buffalo banquets must have hit home though in a way that mossy deadfall cannot. These were enormous, sentient, flesh-and-blood creatures, masses of them.
"All of these drowned buffalo carcasses had dramatic effects on the ecology of large rivers. Along the Missouri River, the annual 'runs' of dead buffalo were an important part of the environmental cycle. People passing near Great Falls, Montana, reported concentrations of grizzly bears gathered their in the spring to feed on drowned buffalo that came over the falls and got bashed against the rocks. John Bradbury described how the carcasses on the Missouri 'attracted an immense number of turkey buzzards.'"
Sometimes the river didn't just kill them, it swallowed them up and river-ized their carcasses.
"Prince Maxmilian reported that many of the river's islands were formed by the collection of silt against rafts of drowned buffalo. Still others claimed to see the entire river dammed by accumulation of beached carcasses."
Understanding this makes river history more familiar. A castle or a fort is built, perhaps less literally, on bones. Over millennia the river established its course, its features, through the sublimation of millions of sentient creatures.
Your SDPB Outdoors Correspondent kept all this in mind on a hot, windy, Fort to Field 50. The Fort to Field challenges paddlers to take on a relatively natural stretch of the Mighty Mo from just past the Fort Randall Dam to Springfield, South Dakota.
Fifty miles on a fairly slow-moving stretch of river is never easy, but conditions make a difference.
"The return of the Fort to Field 50 did face a lot of challenges," says event organizer Jarett Bies. "Our team had not hosted one since 2019, so that was a factor, but so was the low water level of the river, the strong wind and the heat. In the face of these hurdles, the paddlers did a great job, only surpassed by the volunteers."
Of the ninety paddlers who started, fewer than thirty finished.
Your correspondent, who managed to finish in 2019, was well over ten miles from the finish line when a safety boat picked up myself and another paddler as darkness fell.
A friend (met at a previous Fifty) missed the first checkpoint and ended up stopping in a small river town on the route, catching a ride to the nearest area with cell service to ask for a pickup. There must have been many stories (at least sixty or so) of how people bailed on the Fifty. The length of time it took many of us to make the first checkpoint was a bad sign.
The wind was a killer. You could look at the shore line and think, I could be walking faster than this. The heat was in the upper-90's. I must have wet my hair a thousand times, but the wind would have it blow dried in seconds.
I imagined herds of buffalo skulls looking up through the water at me. Would the river simply swallow us up, kayak and all and incorporate us into a sandbar or a sliver of reeds hovering on the surface?
"We had a total of zero percent who were unaccounted for, injured or killed," says Bies. "So while we endured punches, we won the fight. We had newcomer volunteers who worked thirteen hour days. We had new safety boat teams who helped ferry to safety almost a dozen paddlers stuck with swamped boats. We had a communications team who overcame many obstacles, from no-service areas to a limited repeater system, and they kept our event on track."
After checkpoint one, time seemed to slow down and the river expanded, increasing the distance between paddlers. When the wind is fighting you and the sun is beating down, it can be a struggle to conserve energy. "Push," don't pull," I tell myself, but eventually I'm pulling again. The water is too choppy to take breaks in a long tripping kayak built for speed but not for sitting sideways on waves.
Sometimes I'd notice two distant paddlers, than one. The turkey buzzards circled above, perhaps buoyed by memories of smorgasbords long ago.
With nobody in sight and less than an encyclopedic knowledge of the river, optical illusions get in the way of navigation. Which way does it bend ahead? It appeared right, but now left? Is this a dead end? The more beauty the river reveals, the more it beguiles. Chalkstone bluffs reflect blinding light. The calcite critters entombed in these cliffs were the first captives of this moving mausoleum.
Chalk white cottonwoods cut through the surface like compound fractures exposing fragments of the Styxian underworld submerged below.
Eventually there was just your Outdoor Correspondent and another paddler on the water. We had both missed checkpoint two and had been paddling for at least eight hours since checkpoint one. Finally the Chief Standing Bear Bridge stood out on the horizon. Just past that is checkpoint three. But an illusion of paddling toward the bridge led us into an impassable cove surrounded by sand bars and reeds.
We backtracked and started to cut through channels between reedy islands. The bridge would disappear for awhile, then reappear not much closer than before. As dusk fell, bald eagles perched on bleached, antler-ish cottonwood branches. Beavers came up for air. A racoon searched for mice among the reeds. Push, don't pull. The surface of the water grew darker, less differentiated. I couldn't see the last sandbar coming. Stuck there, I wondered how I would make it the bridge, then the safety boat came up and Jonah said, "We're going to pick you up, but we have to get this other guy first, then come back for you." They loaded my latest companion's boat, then came back and loaded mine. The (probably) less than forty miles seemed substantially more than 2019's Fifty.
My mind and muscles replayed the havoc the wind had caused, on my efforts, and how it must have impacted the organizers and volunteers.
"I organized my first kayak race in 2009," recalls Bies. "It was a failure. Kept at it and had a successful one in 2010. Did that until 2014, then created another one, then another and then a fourth. In all, I have hosted more than two dozen river events, along with countless paddling fairs. I do not exaggerate when I say I have literally put thousands of people on the water over these last thirteen years.
"In all honesty it comes back to this: I grew up in the country, on an acre-and-a-half. I was the youngest. No siblings around, and few kids my age. So, I played alone a lot, outside. I hosted a few birthday party sleepovers in my youth and they were among my fondest memories. That same feeling -- of bringing a bunch of people together to come to my backyard and see a river I know so well and share it with them -- that's my motivation.
"Hosting so many folks over so many years has really made me a better person. I am a cheerleader, fundraiser, paddler, paddling advocate.
"A few years back, as the campers at the Fifty were starting to settle down into their tents, I overheard a small group of them exchanging stories and tips and recounting past times they had been on the course and how they did, who had won ... all sorts of banter. And I thought to myself, 'They're talking about this as if it's the Boston Marathon or something, not just something I made up out of nothing ...' and to me, that's another reason behind doing it."
This sounds familiar to me. I've met people at the Fifty that are Facebook friends, who I might never see again, but may bump into at another Fifty, or some other event or more randomly... who knows. We don't know each other well, but when we run into each other, we'll easily strike up a conversation about that crazy day on the river in '22.
And there's something about knowing those crazy days on the river that seems pretty fundamental to knowing... the river.
Are there more of those days ahead?
"In 2019, we had one of the best years ever for the 50," says Bies. "Same for the Kayak Challenge. Both events were near-record participation, and both had great weather and few dropouts.
"As the 2022 event is concluded and the final checks written and the last items mailed back to those who forgot or lost them, it might be fun to put July 15, 2023 on a calendar and begin again.
"We shall see. The paddlers deserve it. If our sponsors and the volunteer battalion is game -- as well as my wife, Laura -- perhaps.
"Right now I just want to close the books on this one officially and get back on the water and just paddle with Laura and Maggie."