Big Muddy Speaker Series presents:

Published: June 12, 2018

Presentation by historian and Arrow Rock State Historic Site Administrator Michael Dickey, Mo. Dept of Natural Resources

Original Presentation was Tuesday, June 12, 2018

• Click here to download PDF of presentation slides.
• Click here to download presentation script. 

at the Les Bourgeois Bistro in Rocheport, MO. 

Hosted by Missouri River Relief

The Missouri River we enjoy today is a completely different character than the river that Native tribes lived with and Lewis and Clark's crew poled up against. The historic river was on average 3 times wider, several hundred miles longer, carried 5 times more sediment and could never decide one day to the next just where it wanted to be. Its flood pulses reflected the seasons as they played out across the river's massive watershed.

The challenges that steamboats encountered on this wild river in the 1800's led to a push in the mid-1900's to tame, deepen, channelize and straighten the Missouri River for navigation and to stabilize its banks for agriculture. This highly successful river engineering project has been followed by an effort to restore a few pieces of habitat lost during the channelization.

Historian Mike Dickey, one of the Big Muddy Speaker Series most popular repeat presenters, will share some of the ancestral spirit of the Missouri River to help us understand why we have made some of our management decisions in the past and to better understand some of the nature of the Big Muddy that we've lost.