THE LARGEST RAFTS

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    The largest raft brought down the river during the fifty years from 1865, when they first began using steamer to tow the raft until the steamer 'Ottumwa Belle' ran the last raft 1915, was taken from Stillwater on Lake Saint Croix to Saint Louis by Captain George Winans with the steamer 'Saturn.'

    This raft was sixteen strings wide and forty-four cribs long, rafted twenty-six courses deep.

    It was two hundred and seventy feet wide by fourteen and fifty feet long and with the top load contained nine million feet of timber.

    The 'Saturn II' was a good, strong boat with engines sixteen inches by five foot and Captain Winans had a good bow-boat on the head. This trip was made in 1901.

    The largest log raft was brought from Lynxville to Rock Island in 1896 by O.E. McGinley with the steamer 'F.C.A. Denkman,' using the 'H.C. Brockman' as her bowboat. The raft was two hundred and seventy feet wide and fifteen hundred and fifty feet long, containing about two and one- quarter million feet.

    Some double-decked or double-tiered log rafts were brought from Stillwater in the nineties. When they were careful to place only small log on top, crosswise, they did fairly well in good river, but when they were careless and hauled large logs up on top and loaded unevenly, these rafts soon encountered trouble when they struck shallow water. Double-deckers were never popular with the pilots who had to run them or the crew that had to work on and over them.

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The Last Raft - The End of the Game

    The first rafts run from 1838 to 1843 were lumber from the Wisconsin river and from Saint Croix Falls. The last raft brought down the Mississippi was also lumber sawed and rafted at Hudson, Wisconsin, on Lake saint Croix. I was in eight strings, thirty-six cribs long and rafted twenty-eight courses deep. They made a raft one hundred and twenty-eight feet wide and eleven hundred and fifty feet long, which contained three and one-half million feet of lumber and it carried about a million feet of top load consisting of, timbers, lumber and lath.

    This raft was towed by the steamer 'Ottumwa Belle' with the 'Pathfinder' as a bowboat. The little steamer ' J.M.,' that had been engaged in towing logs from Saint Paul boom to Prescott was hitched in alongside the raft near the bow and taken down river to be sold.

    Captain W.L. Hunter of Wynona was in charge as master and pilot and made a nice, clean trip from Hudson to S.& J.C. Atlee at Fort Madison in fourteen days with a single crew.

    Captain Hunter had been on the 'Ottumwa Belle' doing Atlee's running until the logs gave out, but in `1915 was piloting on the 'Morning Star' in the Davenport and Saint Paul trade.

    Mr. Atlee wanted Captain Hunter to run this last raft and Captain Hunter was pleased to do it; so we arranged that I would stand his watch on the 'Morning Star' while he made the trip that wound up the great industry that had lasted seventy-five years and really made all the good towns on the Upper Mississippi.

    It started in a small way and demanded skill and hard work to cut the logs and drive them down to the booms where they were held, assorted, rafted and scaled

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Old Time Rafters Living at Reads Landing, 1871

These boats are waiting a rise on the Chippewa to bring out their lumber. Left to right they are Hiram rice, L. W. Grane, Annie Girdon, L. W. Barden, Buckeye, Clyde, St. Crois, Wm. Hyde Clark, and Silas Wright, all adapted except the Clyde.

 

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and then floated under man-power control to the mills.

     There were many disappointments and failures in the early days but study and hard work, guided by experience, soon won the game and got the prize.

     When Chancy Lamb of Clinton invented the 'nigger' for controlling the position of the towboat behind the raft he did a great thing for the business. He did not patent it. It was built and sold at a very low price. Any one who could was free to add any improvement, but no one ever did so.

     It completely filled the bill, just what was needed, and it has never been changed. I never could learn who invented the 'three-link iron boom chain' first used in rafting at Beef Slough and later everywhere. It was a great improvement over the old rope booming and much cheaper, because the chains were taken off at the mill where the logs were sawed and sent back to the rafting works. Our boats made no charge for carrying back these chains which were often a burden in low water. A few of these chains were lost in break-ups, but ninety-five percent of them were used over and over again - there was no wear out to them.