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THE
LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF
CAPT. STEPHEN B. HANKS,
GREAT RACE BETWEEN NOMINEE AND DR. FRANKLIN NO. 2
Sept. 17, 1921
The winter of 1852-3 I spent in
Stillwater with my brother. The work the summer of 1853 was a
repetition of the work of several pervious seasons. The last
trip I made was with lumber from John McKusick to Alton, Ill.,
and I remained there until It got all hauled out of the
water. It was about this time the Chicago and Alton Railroad
had completed its line to Alton and it had a very large and
swift steamer called the Altona making two round trips a day
to St. Louis and I was engaged for a time to change off with
the regular pilot, taking each alternate trip. I took the
night work and spent the day banking the lumber. This made me
double work with double wages also.
One day a man engaged in the
construction of the railroad heard my name and hunted me up.
He proved to be Alfred Beck, a son of my Uncle John Beck whom
I had not seen since twenty years before when we moved with
Alfred Slocumb and family from White county to Knox county.
We had a very nice visit and I agreed to go to his home when
my work at Alton was completed. This I did and had a very
pleasant time. I found my Uncle a widower having lost his
wife, his mother, (my grandmother Beck) and a daughter the
year before of cholera, three from his household; truly a dad
bereavement. While there I made several trips to Springfield
in an effort to see my cousin, Abraham Lincoln, who was then
becoming prominent in our state’s affairs and already
attracting national attention, but he was not in the city so I
failed to meet him.
En route I used the C.&A. to
Bloomington; the I. C. to La Salle; the
C.C.R.I.&P. to Geneseo and then stage to
Albany, crossing Rock river at Crandall’s ferry, quite an
improvement over previous years before the advent of
railroads.
The winter of 1853-4, I spent at Albany
and went to Stillwater in the spring. During the winter Mr.
McKusick, contrary to his usual custom, had sawed most of the
time through the cold weather and had had a raft to run early
and I had also three log rafts, some of the logs being my
own. This made a fleet of four rafts and required care and
watchfulness. The water was unusually high when we started
and seemed to get higher the farther down we got. At
Muscatine I laid up one of the rafts in order to strengthen
the crews on the others, but his did not save us from
disaster. Floods out of the Iowa river added to the already
high Mississippi spread water out over the banks in every
direction for miles and it was impossible to keep the rafts in
the river. To make a long story short the two log rafts and
one lumber raft were entirely broken in pieces and logs and
lumber scattered all over the bottoms. One crib was found
mile from the river and one field of corn nearly entirely
covered with logs. It must be remembered that I was running
on contract and was responsible for sale delivery of the goods
in my charge. We commenced at once to gather up the fragments
and I never did harder wok in my life. When we got delivery
on what we could find the losses totaled some ten thousand
dollars, which put me out of business and I turned over all my
money and property to make good the loss. I was until the
next year the liquidating and at the end of it all I had
seventy fie dollars.
Soon after this disaster I made a trip
to Stillwater with two rafts leaving one at Clayton and one at
Dubuque. I shipped my rafting its to Albany where they were
stored in a warehouse that not long after was destroyed by
fire, a fitting climax to my troubles in the year 1854. That
season was the last of my career on the river as a floating
raft pilot and I closed the season by making a few trips on
the Dr. Franklin No. 2, with my friend Smith Harris, and on
the Nominee.
On our first trip of the Dr. Franklin
No. 2, with Captain Smith Harris occurred a somewhat
memorable and exciting race with another boat of those days,
the Nominee, Capt. Orrin Smith, a brother-in-law of
Capt. Smith Harris. The Dr. Franklin No. 2 was in the St.
Louis and St. Paul trade making a round trip every two weeks;
the Nominee was making a round trip from Galena to St. Paul
each week. There was some rivalry as the Nominee having been
recently put into the trade was making some inroad into what
the Dr. Franklin No. 2 interests conceived to be their
pasture. On our way up we had some brushes with her but there
was nothing decisive. On the return tip she left St. Paul
first and we left as soon after as we could, it being early in
the evening. We traveled fast keeping a sharp lookout of our
rival. At Read’s Landing we heard she was just ahead of us
and when we reached grand encampment some six or seven miles
below Read’s , found her lying under a point waiting us. She
swung out right behind us with the evident intention of giving
us the led and then running by is in a straight test of speed
or strategy, either being a victory for her and a discomfiture
for us. We slacked up and offer her a chance to take the lead
but she declined to take it so we settled down to a fair fight
and no favors and the race soon became very exciting. At
Crooked slough the Nominee attempted a little strategy by
going through Paint Rock slough but she came out further
behind us than when starting in. At Guttenburg we took a wood
flat in tow, dumped the wood on board as soon as possible and
still held the lead into Dubuque where both boats landed. We
got away first and kept the lead into Galena reaching there
early in the evening; twenty two hours from St. Paul, the
quickest time I ever made between those point sand the longest
drawn out and hottest race I ever under took. There were
times when the oats were not far apart and the cheering and
the jeering that passed back and forth with the excitement and
nerve strain made some extremely tense moments.
Our trip to St. Louis and return to
Galena was without special incident so far as I now recall but
when I got back to Galena I transferred my affections and
belongings to our rival, the Nominee. The river was now
falling to normal stage and the owners of the rival vessels
were negotiating for a consolidation of interests which was
successful and resulted in the formation of the Minnesota
Packet company.
Note:- further in regard to the
race between the Dr. Franklin No. 2 and the Nominee. Mr. M.
W. Hanks, of Stillwater Minn., a son of Captain Hanks, give
the following: “I have often heard my father talk about his
race as being the most exciting and hardest fought one he had
ever experienced in all his career and a steamboat pilot. In
his account of it he does not mention the fact that he never
left the pilot house from the time he left St. Paul until they
reached Dubuque and that he piloted the boat the whole trip
from St. Paul to Galena.
“He also told me that when they were
obliged to land for wood, as they did not always find a wood
cargo to take in tow all the passengers, as well as the crew
helped to ‘wood Up” in order to get started as son as
possible. It was when either boat stopped for wood that the
other would get ahead, so it was a game of see-saw a great
part of the distance until the Franklin took the lead at
Guttenburg after which she was always ahead.
“In those days the boats carried the
iron torch baskets in which was burned pine wood and pitch, or
resin, for light when at landings. Father said they had a
plentiful supply of resin in barrels on board which was freely
used in the furnace to keep her boiling and before they
reached Dubuque the breechings were practical red hot to the
top of their jackets from use of resin and oil in the furnace.
“All freight was refused except that
which would be taken on without loss of time when stopping to
deliver or take on mail, which they were obliged to stop for.”
Some good old days, eh?” F. A. B. |
