Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark led their “Corps of Discovery” on an unprecedented expedition to explore the vast dimensions of the nation’s longest and largest river basin—the Missouri. Their central charge was to seek a water route to the Pacific Ocean to support commerce and development. Since those early days, the Missouri River and its tributaries have occupied a unique place in United States history. Like many of the nation’s major river systems in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Missouri was viewed as a river to be controlled for purposes of human settlement and as a resource to support economic development. The Missouri River’s water.
