IAGenWeb - Scott County

THE GREAT RIVER THEN (1878)
AND NOW (1928)

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    During the year, 1878, there was considerable life on the Upper Mississippi aside from the rafting business. There were many small, local packets running in short trades, like the 'Charles Rebstock,' or 'Albany,' between Davenport and Clinton, the 'Ella' between Ferryville and Lansing, the 'Vigor' between Brownsville and LaCrosse, the 'Robert Harris' between Fountain City and Winina. The 'Penquin' ran between Alma and Winona, the 'Lion' from Alma to Wabasha, the 'Ida Heerman' from Read's Landing up the Chippewa to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the 'Phil Schaeckel' Read's up to Menominee, the 'G.B. Knapp' between Prescott and Taylor's Falls, the 'Maggie Reany' from Stillwater to Saint Paul, and the 'Belle of Pepin' be- tween Pepin and Lake City.

     The Diamond Jo Line operated the new steamer 'Josephine' between Fulton and Burlington, and also had the ' Diamond Jo,' the 'Josie,' the 'Imperial,' the 'Arkansas,' the 'Tidal Wave,' the 'Libby Conger,' and many barges, operating between Fulton and Saint Paul.

     Also the consolidated Keokuk-Northern Line packet company had a large fleet of fine, side-wheel steamers like the 'Minneapolis, 'Minnesota’, ‘Muscatine’, 'Belle of LaCrosse’, 'Northwestern’, 'Red Wing’, 'Clinton', and 'Lake Superior’, and the stern-wheelers 'Annie' (later the 'White Eagle'), 'Great Pa- …

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... cific’, 'Keokuk’, and others, giving frequent and regular service over the entire Upper Mississippi.

     In 1881, the Diamond Jo Line added two new large stern-wheelers, the 'Sidney' and 'Pittsburgh’, to its fleet, and became a strong competitor of Keokuk Northern Line for the passing business between Saint Louis and Saint Paul.

     The 'Pittsburgh' was conceded to be the best all-round stern-wheeler on the Upper Mississippi. She was two hundred and fifty-eight feet long, forty feet wide, five and eight-tenths feet in the hold, and measured seven hundred and twenty-two tons. She had fine engines, twenty-two inches by seven feet, three large boilers, a good cabin, and large, roomy texas. The 'Pittsburgh' was fast, of light draft, and a good handler, Captain John F. Killeen, superintendent of the Diamond Jo Line, was her master from 1882 to 1893, and under his management she became very popular and successful.

     In 1878, there were a few fine raft-boats whose owners made provisions for pleasure trips foe their families and friends, which did not in the least interfere with the regular work. The crews were glad to have company aboard.

     C. Lamb and Sons of Clinton, Iowa had the 'Artimus Lamb,' one of the handsomest and best boats ever built. The Hershey Lumber Company, of Muscatine, Iowa, owned the 'B. Hershey,' a strong, comfortable boat.

     The 'Hershey' was in charge of that prince of pilots and thorough gentleman, Cyprian Buisson, of Wabasha, Minnesota. There were four of these Buisson brothers, of whom three, Henry, Joseph, and Cyprian, took to rafting, and were very successful pilots and mas- …

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Picture: Steamer C. J. Caffrey Rebuilt at Rock Island for Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann. Launched in 1873, in charge of Captain O. P. McMann of Clinton. She had a long and successful run.

…ters. Their quarter Indian blood showed plainly in their looks and habits. All three were highly esteemed by their employers and associates on the river. Captain 'Cyp's' last piloting was done for me on the large side-wheeler 'Morning Star,' running from Davenport to Saint Paul. I have never met a man who had more in him to admire and love.

     Weyerhauser and Denkmann had the 'C.J. Caffrey,' a powerful raft-boat, rebuilt from the United States side-wheeler snag-boat of the same name, Captain O.P. McMann, of Clinton, Iowa, was her master pilot for many years.

     W.J. Young and Company, of Clinton, Iowa used the 'J.W. Mills' as the family boat. She was not large, but was strong and well fitted up. Paul Kerz, of Galena, Illinois, was her captain.. Later, when Young and Company built the 'Douglas Boardman,' a much larger and finer boat, Captain Kerz and his excellent engineer, Conrad Kraus, also of Galena, were transferred to her, and for a time she was the family boat until the 'J.W. Young, Jr.' was built. She was the real queen of the raft-boats Captain Kerz died in Galena in 1893.

     Another fine, powerful boat was the 'Blue Lodge,' owned by the Clinton Lumber Company. She had been an Ohio river tow-boat. During the low water season, 1878, the Diamond Jo Line has her under charter towing grain in barges.

     Captain Van Sant and the Musser Lumber Company of Muscatine, Iowa,\ had the comfortable steamer 'Silver Wave,' and she seldom made a trip north without a few 'people in the cabin,' as extras are called. Not only was Captain Van Sant a charming host, but her chef was equaled to none. I am sure Joe Gallenor's …

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... cooking had much to do with the popularity of the boat. I spent three busy and happy seasons on the 'Silver Wave,' and never failed to appreciate Joe's cooking. He was not expensive either, a poor cook is that, for so much is wasted, not eaten, but thrown down the 'dollar hole,' as they called the chute from the kitchen to the river.

     Joe Gallenor was the most inveterate practical joker I ever knew. He played jokes on all of us. Time and again, when I was aroused before breakfast, someone would call" when did you get promoted?" and on turning my head around, would find a thin, warm pancake cosily resting on each shoulder, epaulets. He had placed them there so quickly, as I was passing, that I had not noticed his act.

     J.A. Hanley, now a dignified and successful lawyer in Davenport, Iowa, was our cabin-boy on the 'Silver Wave' in those days Of him I will have more to say in the next chapter.

     Captain A.R. Young of Stillwater. Minnesota, had the largest and most powerful of all the raft-boats. She was called the 'Tow-boat Minnesota.' to distinguish her from the side-wheel steamer of the same name, a Saint Louis packet. Her engines were sixteen inches by six feet. She was used in floating-raft days, to tow fleets of rafts through Lakes Saint Croix and Pepin. While towing down river, Sam Hitchcock and Frank LePoint were her pilots.

Shulenburg and Boeckeler, of Saint Louis, had a splendid boat, the ‘Helene Shulenburg’. That prince of good fellows, Captain Robert Dodds, of Saint Louis, was master of her, W. B. Milligan, of Davenport, chief engineer, and the genial, versatile James Henry Harris, his assistant. Harris always took great pride in keeping …

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Picture: The Clinton Nigger Invented by Chaney Lamb in 1874. The ends of the guy lines were made fast on the outside corners of the stern of the raft. By running this double –spooled “nigger”, to which the guy lines were fastened, it paid out on one side and took in on the other and kept an even strain on the lines. By this “nigger” the towboat’s stern was swing to either side and held in any desired position to control the movement of the raft.

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... the engine-room well painted, with bright tools, shiny copper oil-cans, brass bell-pulls, and pictures, all as neat as a lady’s parlor.

    McDonald Brothers, of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, had a large fleet of raft-boats, but they made no effort to make them attractive for passengers, and seldom carried any. W. A. Suiter, their office manager and manage of their boat store, told me, in later years, that while he had handled all the business of the McDonald fleet for twenty-seven years, he had not ridden five miles on one of their boats.

    When we had young people with us for a trip, they often wanted to go with me, in the large skiff, when we pulled ahead to get mail and supplies while the boat was backing some bend or double-tripping a bridge, or simply towing down river. In the latter case, we had a long pull on the oars to catch her.

     One time, tow fine young ladies from Muscatine, Iowa, were with us two full weeks while we made two short trips from Beef Slough to Lansing, Iowa, and then on to Muscatine. Being out so long from our base of supplies I had to make many trips ashore to replenish our stores, and if in daytime or evening, the girls always wanted to go along. They always bought candy, nuts, or cigars for the two linemen, so they made no complaint about the extra load to row.

     One day, though, the girls didn’t care to go, nor the next time either, and of course I did not urge them, much as I enjoyed their company. It was my first season on the “Silver Wave’, and as one of the girls was the daughter of one of the part owners of the boat and the Lumber Company, I didn’t want to be fresh.

     I wondered, however, why those girls quit the shore trips, and was pleased when on our last two days out, …

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... they asked permission to go again. Then I got the explanation. Joe Gallenor had told them that seriously he didn’t think it safe for them to go with me. Pressed for a reason, he told them I was subject to fits. “A good fellow, and we all like him. It’s too bad, but”, he said, and Jim Hanley stood there and declared Joe to be telling the truth. Of course I forgave the culprits on the grounds that they really meant no harm, but were just jealous, that was all.

     In one party that we carried on the “LeClaire Belle” was a very fastidious maiden lady of mature years, one of the self-considered “unclaimed blessings’. She was not satisfied until I gave up my room to her, and I then had to move in with the mate. The second morning out, she quietly and confidentially informed me that something had to be done to remedy the situation. She said that she had been kept awake two whole nights by bed bugs, and she blushed deeply when she named them. I was sure she was mistaken, but thought it best to humor her and asked her what we could do to get rid of them. She told me to get a solution of corrosive sublimate and apply it with a feather to the mattress and springs. At LaCrosse I purchased a fifty cent bottle of the deadly mixture and took it back to the store room to Harry Carlton, the cabin-boy, telling him exactly where and how to use it. I then told Miss Thompson what I had done and that we hoped she would have a good night’s rest. She did, and thanked me kindly, and she was my warm friend ever after.

    But sometime later, one dull day, we took everything off the store-room shelves to check up. Shipley found a bottle with a poison label, which had never been opened, and held it up, saying “What in h—is this?” The cabin-boy turned red and confessed “Why that’s …

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Picture: Steamer Charlotte Boeckeler A large, powerful boat, owned by Shulenburg and Boeckeler of Saint Louis. Captain Robert Dodds, master and pilot. She was well built at New Albany, Ind., and came out in 1881. Her engines were fifteen inches by seven feet.

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... the bed-bug poison the clerk bought at LaCrosse to kill the bugs in his room, but I forgot to use it”. Shipley said, “Throw it in the river for we might make a mistake and get it in the pudding sauce, and make some of the rousters sick,” “No, “ replied Harry, “it might make some of them sick, but no danger of it killing them. They could season their cabbage with paris green and enjoy it.” We did not find any more bed-bugs, on the boat, so I can safely recommend corrosive sublimate as an effective remedy.

    The water was very low in August and September 1878. Packets and raft-boats were having much trouble on the crossing from Queen’s Bluff over to Hammond Chute (one of the mouths of Black river). Here the current, leaving the bluff, spread out over a wide, shallow bar. This situation was remedied by a long low, cheap dam, of willow mattresses and broken rock, which narrowed the channel, and caused it to scour, or cut deeper.

     This was the first “wig” dam I can recall. I think it was the first one on the Upper Mississippi. Its success led to the adoption of the system of improvement in vogue since that time. Wing dams, with their bases on shore and projecting out into the stream from one side of the river, or both, carry out the “jetty” plan of Captain Eads, which he used so successfully in deepening the channel through the South Pass into the Gulf of Mexico.

    Now (in 1927) we have three hundred wing dams in the thirty miles between Prescott, Minnesota, and Saint Paul. There are over four hundred between Winona and Wabasha, Minnesota, a distance of forty miles, and they are quite numerous all the way down the Mississippi as far south as the mouth of the Missouri. In ad- …

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… dition to those wing dams, many miles of shore protection work has been done to keep the banks from caving and falling in.

    This work is done by first clearing the bank of trees and stumps, grading it down to a thirty degree slope, and then covering it with long, wide mattresses of willows, loaded down and held in place by a layer of eight to twelve inches of broken rock.

    Now, boats are running close along a rocky shore, or past the ends of these hundreds of jetties. In many places, where they leave a channel only four hundred feet wide, safe navigation at night demands a thorough knowledge of the river, skill in steering and handling a boat, and a good search light to pick up the buoys that mark the ends of the most dangerous of the dams.

    The improvement has given us a narrow, crooked, rocklined channel, deep enough for practical navigation through the low water season, but dangerous and difficult to run at all times.

    When I began there were no rocks in the river from Clinton, Iowa, to Saint Paul, and, in fair or good stages of water, the pilot followed up a shore until he came to a certain mark, a high-topped tree, a break in the timber, or the mouth of a slough or foot of an island, from where he would cross over to some object on the other shore, and so on, often following up one shore for many miles.

    Nowadays, however, the pilot has his boat out in the middle of the stream finding his way between a lot of dams, covered with water, which flows over them thus hiding them, but not being deep enough to carry the boat over without sticking.

    Had this improvement work not been done (even though much of it poorly carried out) there would …

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Picture: Steamer Dexter This was an old boat when McDonald Bros. of LaCrosse added her to their rafting fleet in 1874 with Captain Peter O’Rourke in charge. She was dismantled at LaCrosse, Wis., 1887.

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... have been no practical navigation of the Upper Mississippi except in time of high water. The large amount of sand and mud carried in by its northern tributaries would have formed in large, flat bars with very shallow water flowing over them. The river bed has filled up tremendously in my time. Many big sand-bars have formed and are now covered with timber, and more are forming. A channel has been maintained, largely, by contracting its width. They have nearly reached the limit in this direction. From now on, much money and energy will have to be expended in pumping new deposits out of the channel. Left along, in three years this river will not be navigable at an ordinary stage of water, let alone during low water.

    Why don’t the United States engineers stop most of this inflow by protecting the soft, sandy bands of the Lower Chippewa and Wisconsin rivers from coming in and washing out into the sluggish Mississippi? A small amount spent in that way would help the situation greatly.

    If a man had a cellar that had to be pumped out every time the water came down the gutters of his street, don’t you think he would find the hole that was letting the water into his cellar, and plug the hole? I have never heard of a United States engineer suggesting any such remedy, nor will they consider it when someone else suggests it. They call for more money and more pumps. They don’t want to save money. The all know how to spend it, and seem to enjoy so doing.