TIME ON THE MISSISSIPPI
(originally published in North American Review, Jan/Feb 2002)
(originally published in North American Review, Jan/Feb 2002)
The Mississippi River logs about 33 of its 2,300 miles creeping past the shores of Dubuque County. It may be the Old Man River, but it's only just got its cane by the time it rounds the bend at Waupeton, an 1861 railroad town, at the county's northern border. This isn't the gangly youth that ripples through Minnesota. (That's the Mississippi?, I thought in disbelief when I first saw the river in Minneapolis.) But it's not yet the sedentary giant that lumbers past St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.
But even by its arrival at Waupeton, the Mississippi has established predatory habits, having confiscated the waters of the Minnesota, St. Croix, and Wisconsin rivers, and drawn to it the homage of innumerable creeks and streams. In Dubuque County it will add the Little Maquoketa River and Catfish Creek. The entire river system, with the help of the Missouri and Ohio, will drain over a million square miles from the Rockies to the Appalachians, the third largest drainage basin in the world, and will roll more than half a million cubic feet of water per second into the Gulf of Mexico.
Even then it will refuse to quit, funneling its warm stream northeast through the Atlantic to temper the European climate.
An unusual feat, of course, to export a continent's entire seasons, shipped, crated, and second-hand.
River names: Ball's Island, Hurricane Chute, Mulligan Island, Finley's Landing, Potosi Canal, Specht Ferry, Mud Lake, Lock and Dam #11, Lake Peosta Channel, Steamboat Hollow, Hamm Island, Frentress Lake, Crooked Slough, Massey Station Marina, Menominee Slough, Nine Mile Island. Along Dubuque County, the Mississippi is bounded on the western shore by the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad. At the north it is fed by Waupeton Creek. At Waupeton the Mississippi flows almost due east before taking a mighty southern dive on the big nose bob of Iowa. In the south, the river spills out of Dubuque County a hundred yards below the mouth of Têtes de Mort Creek.
In between, the Mississippi River gives Dubuque County its singular most certain defining fact. A river rolls past it. And it's America's great river.
Moving at three miles per hour, the Mississippi waters will course past Dubuque County in 11 hours, in the channel at least. My own schedule isn't quite as luxurious, and I propose instead to sneak a view of the river whenever I can this fall. Time, after all, is a commodity in short supply.
Finley's Landing, September 4, 8:30 a.m.
My feet provoke the river's first ripples this morning. I fully expect the shock of an autumn chill, but am pleasantly surprised at the water's languid warmth about my ankles. The urgency of current, however, will soon carry summer downstream.
There is an earnest current here, but not a showy one. I had spent the previous weekend canoeing with the Boy Scouts on the Wisconsin River, not far to the north. We played in the water, leaning forward into the current like walkers battling a hurricane wind, and sitting back into the current in armchair fashion while the water buoyed us up. The Wisconsin River prances like a puppy. The Mississippi isn't playful. But it is deadly earnest.
Pick out a log or a piece of floating debris, and peg its location against the Wisconsin shore, and you'll see the river's force. It may sound sluggish at three miles per hour, but the Mississippi is pushing nine deep feet of water through the main channel; the river has work to do and doesn't abide much nonsense.
But Finley's landing seems to be a place for play, a rare public beach along the river. Two hundred yards of clean light-brown dredged-up sand. Enough sand for castles and carved out play towns, for volleyball and beach towels stretched out end to end on weekends, for swimming and tossing frisbees in the water, for watching girls and burning one's feet. And there's always sand enough to accumulate in little kids' diapers. All innocent enough.
Yet mothers wisely watch their children. The Mississippi has little tolerance for nonsense.
I find some of the river's business buried in the sand at the north edge of the beach. The summer crowd has dispersed and this morning I'm alone on the beach, combing for treasure. At first I think this plank of wood I've tripped over is another log, for the northern lip of beach, at the mouth of Basswood Creek, is littered with driftwood washed against the shore and long stripped of bark. But I have tripped, instead, on a half-buried remnant of a wooden fishing boat, its starboard side long gone and its port side rotting in the sand.
May 13, 1937: Letter from C.J. McCarthy, Dubuque City Harbor Master, to Mr. L. Case, LaCrosse, Wisconsin:
"Your letter of May 12th received. If the sunken boat is yours, please have same removed immediately, as it is a hazard to navigation."
* * *
My family gathers once or twice each summer on the Waupeton Beach of Ball's Island, just north of Finley's Landing. For true Mississippi paradise you take a boat to an isolated island, spread out your blankets and beach chairs on the sand, pull out the cooler, and start a campfire with gathered drywood. Smear on the sun goop. Don't think or talk about anything too heavy. Or maybe you do talk, there where there's no distraction and no quick escape. Cell phones not allowed.
* * *
A lot of water has washed past this beach in a million years, but only the last 12,000 have been under the watchful eye of humans. Paleo-Indians first entered the Upper Mississippi Valley as the glaciers retreated. Can't say whether they sat on my beach, though, for they were nomadic, in search of mastodons and other mega-fauna left over from the Ice Ages. Their only mark, so to speak, were occasional stone tools left behind. Later, Woodland Indians became more settled, and left their handiwork in the bluffs along the river, where they built mounds, sometimes to intern their dead, sometimes to bury ceremonial pots and ornaments. Elsewhere the Ojibway gave the river its name: the "mis isipi," or Great River. Most recently, the Mesquakie tribe fished, farmed, and cobbled out some lead in the lands that would become Dubuque County, making this their home till the white man arrived.
The white man's torrent started out as a trickle. Louis Joliet and Fr. Jacques Marquette canoed past Dubuque's bluffs in 1673, scoping things out for the King of France. Nicholas Perrot set up a post on the east side of the river in 1690 to trade with the Indians for lead. Julien Dubuque mined lead with the Mesquakies' approval from 1797 till his death in 1810. Zebulon Pike paid a courtesy call at the mines while exploring for President Jefferson in 1805. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who eventually discovered the headwaters of the Mississippi, visited the village of the Kettle Chief at the Mouth of the Catfish Creek in 1820, and described the 19 huts he found there. By 1830, lead miners were poised on the eastern shore, eager to take possession, occasionally rushing over illegally and being run back across by the U.S. military. In 1832, with the end of the Blackhawk War, the U.S. government ordered the Mesquakie off the land, and the white flood was unleashed.
Mud Lake, Friday September 25
Sloughs separate the ecologists from the sight-seers: it's hard to love a slough. The ecologist sees an ecosystem teeming with frogs, sunfish, and lily pads. The sight-seer finds an algae patch and weeds you can't navigate a boat through, and names it Mud Lake.
Even the name "slough" (pronounced /slew/) condemns it to the legion of unsavory places, like ditches, flats, and barrens. My dictionary calls it a "soft, deep mud hole," and then reports that "slough" has also come to mean a situation of "hopeless discouragement, degradation, decline." Sl-words get all the bad press: a slough harbors slugs, sludge, and all sorts of slippery slime. "Slough" is identical in spelling, though not etymology, to the word pronounced /sluff/, which means to cast off wastes or dead things, as a snake sloughs its skin.
Mud Lake is a slough, a "stump field" on the Pool 11 map, created by the flooding of shoreline woodlands by Lock & Dam #11. I have found a log to sit on at the edge of the backwaters. Twice I grab at the stump of tree branch to pull myself forward, and twice it breaks off in my hand due to long undisturbed decay. A wet reed like a palm branch has fallen across my leg.
The bluffs of the main river valley are about 1/4-mile away. Between lies an algae-covered water, stagnant to the casual eye. Reeds line the edge of the slough, then water lilies stretch out across the shallow water to some small islands that mark the edge of the main river channel.
Dams cause sins enough, but sloughs are not among them. Sloughs were natural to the original river bed, famous for its wandering ways. The undammed river routinely cut off flow streams like recalcitrant heirs lopped from a will, creating still backwaters where fish could breed and birds habitate. The undammed river could leave a backwater high and dry by late summer, though, when the rains stopped. The dam enhanced the backwaters by flooding low-lying woodlands and farm fields, and keeping them wet year-round. Fish and fishermen had banner years in the first decades following the dam construction.
The flooded backwaters--stump-fields, sloughs--make up the bulk of the 194,000 acres of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, federally protected bottomlands that stretch more than 260 miles along the river from Wabasha, Minnesota, to Rock Island, Illinois.
Dams set in motion their own deaths, however, capturing and piling up silt, especially in the sloughs. If it wasn't truly a mud lake when they named it, it will be, eventually. Bait Shack co-owner David Lincoln calls siltation the biggest single threat to the fishing habitat. He recalls places in the river that once had fifteen feet of water now barely slosh in two feet. As the slough waters grow murkier and the bottom sediment softer (since the pools never dry out), backwater aquatic plants lose their foothold and die off, and fish lose another habitat.
This morning Mud Lake sounds and looks plentifully alive. Compass plants, daisies, and trumpet honeysuckle line the water's edge, the last clear stand of dry earth before the river. A constant drone and buzz of insects is interrupted every few seconds by the twirk of a sparrow.
My sandaled feet are wet-draped with cut grass from the lawn of the county park at Mud Lake. I swish them in the slough, and they emerge--clean.
* * *
Which river do you mean when you say "the natural river"? The short stump of a waterway that two million years ago drained the Pleistocene Era into a Gulf of Mexico whose shoreline reached all the way up to southern Illinois? Or the swelled torrent that carved the Upper Mississippi Valley when it drained the Wisconsin Period's mile-thick glaciers during the meltdown 12,000 years ago? This river cut a valley 250 feet deeper than the one you see today, and sometimes ran brim to brim. The meltdown lasted three hundred years. Eventually the torrent slowed, and the river and its tributaries filled much of the old valley with the glacial sediment it had been whisking away. Or by "natural river," do you mean the lazy river of Mark Twain's day, that meandered about its glacial sediment, and chose, willy nilly, first this path, then that, in the river bottoms that stretched between the bluffs?
What you probably don't mean is the river harnessed by twenty-nine locks and dams, lined up and numbered, from St. Paul to St. Louis.
Lock & Dam #11, October 15
Today a fog has rolled in with the first hint of season's change. It roils and softens the edge of the Eagle Point bluff that rises 350 feet above the water, and it muffles the steady hiss of the lock and dam.
Despite the bluffs that leap up from the shoreline along the upper Mississippi, the river itself falls only 420 feet in the 669 miles between St. Paul and St. Louis. Before the locks and dams, the river's tepid descent, along with the unpredictability of the seasons, made the Mississippi unnavigable in times of low water. Cargo would be waylaid.
Already by the 1830s the U.S. government took note of the Mississippi's potential for commerce, & began hauling out snags, digging through sandbars, and dynamiting bedrock where there were rapids. By 1878 they had dug a 4-1/2 foot deep channel. By 1907 the feds were building wing dams--long fingers of rock & boulder extending from the shore to midriver to usher the water to the center. Wing dams carved a six-foot channel.
Six feet of flowing water could float a steamboat, but it would take nine feet to bring a diesel-powered barge tow upstream. The Great Depression, too, begged for massive labor projects, and from 1930 to 1940 most of the twenty-nine locks and dams were built to address both problems.
Dubuque's Zebulon Pike Lock and Dam #11 was completed in 1937 as a WPA project. On average, 36,000 cubic feet per second tumble through the dam gates at Dubuque, though the amount ebbs and swells with drought and flood. A record 306,000 cubic feet per second rushed through in 1965.
The Dubuque dam stretches 4,818 feet across the river, and then extends along another 3,540 feet of earthen dike. The locks and dams create a stairway effect, with each dam holding up a pool in slightly higher elevation than the pool below, flooding out the tricky spots where rapids had kept the barges from lumbering northward. The lock then lifts and lowers boats and barges to the new level. The Dubuque lock raises and lowers vessels eleven feet between pools 11 & 12. It's a mixed environmental bag. Wetlands vs. siltation. In addition, the massive engines & propellers of barges churn up the river's sediment and inevitably dribble oil across the water. But barges save the countryside from an even greater onslaught of train and truck traffic. A single tow of 15 barges cabled together--each individual barge unit typically stretching 195 feet long by 35 feet wide--hauls more cargo than two trains, or more than 850 semi-trailers. The cargo
consists mostly of corn--10 million tons of it--hauled south to New Orleans for distribution across the oceans, and coal--
3.5 million tons--hauled northward to feed electric plants and the needs of northern commerce. In addition, barges haul fertilizer, soybeans, building cement, oil, and steel, sand and gravel, and more. In all, 22.5 million tons of cargo passed through Dubuque's Lock & Dam #11 in 1999, on 22,000 barges. A huge industrial float.
At issue now is whether to double the length of some locks from 600 to 1200 feet, although the Dubuque lock itself is not being considered. Fifteen-barge tows usually stretch about 1200 feet long, and therefore have to divide their loads in half, locking through twice before reassembling and proceeding upriver, a process that can take up to two hours. Quicker locking may mean more barges: less cargo needing to be hauled by inefficient trucks; more grinding of the river bottom and disruption of habitat.
The Mississippi River dams were built strictly to allow for better navigation. For allowing barge horns to blast through the fog. Only one dam, at Keokuk Iowa, provides electricity. Nor do the Mississippi River dams provide flood control. When the great floods come, the Army Corps of Engineers raises the gates in surrender and lets the river run free.
City of Dubuque, April 1965
The Mississippi River flood plain runs along the four miles of the City of Dubuque and reaches one-half to one mile inland. The history of the city made the flood plain prime real estate in the early days. The lead miners worked along the edges of the bluffs as well as back in the hills, but the river offered a handy lane for shipping pigs of lead downstream. Merchants and suppliers found the lowlands ideal for setting up shop along the few straight streets that run through town. The factory owners followed. And the laborers found the flats a reasonable walk to work. Only the wealthy built up on the hills, at least at first. Great Victorian mansions overlooked the stores and factories and workers.
But the Mississippi, born from glacial meltwater, every so often decided to celebrate its past, much to human dismay. In 1870, 1951, and 1952 the river sent ice-chilled spring snowmelt from Wisconsin and Minnesota through the flood plain, damaging and destroying homes and businesses in its path. In April 1965 it sent a record flood that crested at 26.9 feet, a full ten feet above flood stage and eighteen feet above the minimum channel depth.
Over three thousand volunteers filled and piled 350,000 sandbags, creating three miles of temporary dikes, in some places as wide as thirteen feet. The dike was built along the upper two-thirds of the city area that lay within the flood plain. The sandbag dikes protected 4,815 residents and 111 businesses. Sandbags kept the Julien Dubuque Bridge in operation, the only open bridge for 302 miles. As for the lower one-third of the town, according to city records "the decision was made to abandon all south of this dike." The river took its tithing of 192 residents' homes and 148 businesses. Almost 6,000 workers were cut off from their jobs. The flood caused $10 million in damage and required another $5 million in city and community services to fight it.
Photographs from the 1965 flood produced a plethora of ironic signs, little "found poems" that ordinarily wouldn't catch the eye. A billboard poked from the waters, gushing "We're glad you're here in Iowa." A street sign pointed downstream and intoned, like an idiot, "One Way."
Dubuquers had considered building a flood wall after the 1950s' double floods, but had shied away from the needed taxes. This time they went to Congress and obtained $10 million to lay 1.4 miles of concrete walls and to pack five miles of clay and sand levees, enough to contain a 30-foot flood. Construction began in June 1968 and was completed in August 1973. The City Council laid down three miles of bike and hiking trails atop the levees, and from that perch the town watched the near-record waters of 1993 ride safely past, to flood someone else's field downstream.
The Ice Harbor, October 31
(Nustled snuggly and safely behind floodgate walls.)
Of course, neither the lock and dam nor the flood wall represent the first harnessing of the river. By 1830, Americans were already floating lumber downstream to the city of Dubuque and beyond, floating great islands of northern white pine cut from the forests of Minnesota, roped together in three- to four-acre rafts, and sent enmass to lumber mills. The Dubuque Lumber Company boasted 2,500 feet of water front at the northern edge of the city, and cut 100,000 feet of board every ten-hour day. By 1870 the rafts were pushed and guided downstream by steamboats. By 1915 the northern forests were depleted.
The steamboats, however, turn the story to the Dubuque Ice Harbor. A small boat harbor had been dug out of Dubuque's marshy shore already by the 1850s to accommodate steamboat landings, which had soared to 1,000 a year by 1857. In 1885 the Army Corps of Engineers enlarged and dredged the harbor to give safe winter quarters for up to twenty steamboats and fifty small barges. The improved Ice Harbor, as it was called, soon became home to the Iowa Iron Works, shipbuilders who, along with the Diamond Jo Reynolds boatyard further north at Eagle Point, made Dubuque the biggest inland shipbuilding center in the nation. The first iron-hulled steamboat, The Clyde, was built in 1870 to work the lumber rafts. The world's largest-ever steamboat, The Sprague, was built and launched from the Ice Harbor in 1901. The Mississippi and Ohio rivers, with their shallow bottoms and rock-strewn rapids, required shallow, iron hulls for a big steamboat, and that's how they built 'em.
But the steamboat passengers soon defected to rail, then to car and plane, and steamboat freight soon traveled by barge. Shipbuilding foundered and finally sank away altogether. Today, the "Diamond Jo" docked in the Ice Harbor is a modern gambling casino, not some newly built steamboat hot off the launch-pad.
Tomorrow's Ice Harbor may once again become a gathering place to celebrate the river, this time for education and recreation. On the drawing board is the Mississippi River Discovery Center, with four 25-foot aquariums, a river museum, a boardwalk extending over a wetlands reclamation, and a riverwalk and outdoor amphitheater.
The river keeps rolling past, but the times and the people sure change.
from the Journal of Fr. Jacques Marquette, 1673
"Here we are on this so renowned river. . . .Its current which flows southward is slow and easy. On the right one sees a chain of very high mountains, and on the left beautiful stretches of land divided in various places by islands."
[Some miles down river where the land flattens out on either side, Marquette continues]: "It is here that we became keenly away of a complete change of landscape. From there on there were scarcely any more woods or mountains."
Marquette had, of course, just paddled past the future city's bluffs.
* * *
The Julien Dubuque Bridge
Steamboats'll get you up and down the Mississippi River in the 1850s, but for quick and direct crossing, nothing beats a ferry boat. Mathias Ham established the first one in 1836 further north at his fledgling town of Eagle Point, now the site of the lock and dam, to shuttle lead, supplies, and miners back and forth across the river. Other ferries popped up here and there along the county's shores. Specht's Ferry opened for business in 1852, powered at first by a horse tread wheel. Here at the city proper, the A.F. Gregoire steam ferry hauled goods and people back and forth from Dunleith, later renamed East Dubuque, Illinois. Figures from 1855 report the following crossings for the year: 10,700 wagons; 4,200 carriages; 12,110 horses; 14,210 cattle; 4,600 sheep; 16,134 hogs; and 38,400 persons.
Above me today, arcing gracefully across the Julien Dubuque Bridge into East Dubuque, 19,000 cars and trucks cross the river on a daily basis.
The Wing Dams, November 12
Clear south of the city by now. Room to breathe. Quiet. Places to fish. The wingdams are ideal for the more advanced fishermen, those who know how to secure a boat in fast water,
and who like a fight with their fish. Wingdams, I have said, were the first channelizing project, sweeping water toward the river's center where it could then scour itself clean. Fish that love swift currents--smallmouth bass and walleye--took up residence along this altered habitat.
Many alien river creatures have taken up residence in the meantime. Fishermen curse the carp--too bony to eat unless smoked--brought in by the U.S. Fishing Commission over 100 years ago to satisfy the tastes of European immigrants, who liked them. Ecologists curse them as well. Carp root up the bottom of the backwaters, disturbing the egg nests of native fish and clouding up the water. Zebra mussels are another species that create havoc. Introduced accidentally from Europe, the smallish zebra mussels coat underwater surfaces and plug underwater pipes. They'll strangle a larger native mussel by attaching to its shell. Prolific, they've been charted reproducing from 7 to 4,000 mussels in a square meter of river bottom in a single year's time.
In flow, at least, the backwaters south of the dam--like Frentress Lake Slough and Crooked Slough--probably retain more qualities of the natural river, the waters flooding and receding from the islands with the ebb and flow of seasons. Here the water is lazy and the fishing more relaxed. Catch a panfish or a muddy Catfish. Pull up an island for a snooze. If you sleep for a month the cut may have closed up on you, leaving you high and dry. This, too, would be OK.
Overhead, geese, ducks, and even monarch butterflies use the river as a navigational guide as they head south for the winter, and they'll come back the same way in the spring. Forty percent of the nation's waterfowl use this highway. Surprised we don't collect a toll.
The Mines of Spain, December 8
A cold spell is working on the river, attempting to fashion its first ice. Like most first tries, it achieves a messy slush. This morning I'm watching a whorl of icy slush, twenty feet in diameter, cartwheel along the shore. As it scrapes the rocky edge it offers a schussing sound to the morning's stillness, and leaves a contribution of ice to the growing pack of shards shelving up along the riverside.
The Mines of Spain was Dubuque's first, noisiest spot. Though Julien Dubuque's mines extended northward full up through the future city lands, the mouth of the Catfish Creek is where he set up a cabin, his smelting furnace, and his sheds. When he died, this is where the Mesquakie set up their village of the Kettle Chief, and this is where many of the first miners flocked to when the legal gates were unlocked. Later, they built their city to the north, left Julien Dubuque buried on a bluff above the Catfish, and let the land return to a natural state. In the quiet of the morning I spy a bald eagle roosting in branches high up above the river's edge.
* * *
The Mississippi River exits Dubuque County a few hundred yards below Têtes de Mort Creek, and plows headlong into Jackson County. All told, about 120 counties and parishes line the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Louisiana. I am situated, as the fish swims, 276 miles below Minneapolis, 406 miles above St. Louis, and 1,552 miles till the Mississippi Delta offers these waters to the Gulf of Mexico. About 12 million folk live alongside this river. You'd think they'd throw a party.
But it seems always to go something like this. Têtes de Mort is the creek whose name means "Heads of Death," so-named on account of skulls found there from an old Indian battle when the Mesquakie defeated the Kaskaskias. J.C. Beltrani, an Italian traveler, described the scene in 1828, noting the "heads they fixed upon poles as trophies of their victories." A vision lurking at the edge of the land.
Human history is one long effort to name and conquer, to wrap with boundaries. Ironically, I too have stopped at the county border. The river rolls through it, though, and carries the blood downstream.
Massey Station, December 20, 8:45 a.m.
An inch of mottled snow remains encrusted on the reeds and grasses, left over from a minor squall a few days ago. Thin ice films stretch across the puddles in the parking lot at Massey Station, and a fragile frozen band extends nine inches or so inward from the river's edge. Thin and transparent, the ice clings tenuously to the sand and pebbles edging the shoreline. With the morning temperature already at 31˚, winter hasn't yet determined to hang around.
This edge of winter fascinates me. For a moment it is still summer--or autumn perhaps--while the sun, harsh in my eyes, makes fish scales in the ripples offshore. The air is not so cold to breathe, but at ground level the frost has fashioned fern-shaped ice crystals in the sand and flattened grass.
A long woods trails southward from the Massey Marina along the Shawon Dasse Slough. The season's fall of maple leaves lies muddied and frozen. I hike the river shoreline and an iffy trail through the woods to get out of view of the remaining houses.
For I've neared the county's southern edge, just a half-mile above the Têtes de Mort, and I want to test the waters. In September the river still carried the summer southward, water warm and channeled like blood, exporting picnics and shirt-sleeved cookouts down river as surely as the barges hauled away our grain. I find a log protruding into the well-hidden slough, find a perch and slip off boot and sock. This will do.
I plunge the whole of my right foot into December's Mississippi, and the shock registers instantly. In a moment I am re-socked, re-booted. I've made my obvious point, to myself at least.
This river brought us here, one way or another. Native
Americans canoed its length, and the Mesquakie found fit to make their village at Catfish Creek. Julien Dubuque, and all the miners and farmers and merchants and laborers who followed him, crossed over from the east, floated downstream from St. Paul, or steamboated up from St. Louis.
But these teepees, bricks, and luggage we've hauled across just skim the river's back. The Mississippi is deeper and longer and older than all that. Hauling the seasons in and hauling them away again, the river's real cargo is time, and that the old man carries away with placid efficiency.
But even by its arrival at Waupeton, the Mississippi has established predatory habits, having confiscated the waters of the Minnesota, St. Croix, and Wisconsin rivers, and drawn to it the homage of innumerable creeks and streams. In Dubuque County it will add the Little Maquoketa River and Catfish Creek. The entire river system, with the help of the Missouri and Ohio, will drain over a million square miles from the Rockies to the Appalachians, the third largest drainage basin in the world, and will roll more than half a million cubic feet of water per second into the Gulf of Mexico.
Even then it will refuse to quit, funneling its warm stream northeast through the Atlantic to temper the European climate.
An unusual feat, of course, to export a continent's entire seasons, shipped, crated, and second-hand.
River names: Ball's Island, Hurricane Chute, Mulligan Island, Finley's Landing, Potosi Canal, Specht Ferry, Mud Lake, Lock and Dam #11, Lake Peosta Channel, Steamboat Hollow, Hamm Island, Frentress Lake, Crooked Slough, Massey Station Marina, Menominee Slough, Nine Mile Island. Along Dubuque County, the Mississippi is bounded on the western shore by the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad. At the north it is fed by Waupeton Creek. At Waupeton the Mississippi flows almost due east before taking a mighty southern dive on the big nose bob of Iowa. In the south, the river spills out of Dubuque County a hundred yards below the mouth of Têtes de Mort Creek.
In between, the Mississippi River gives Dubuque County its singular most certain defining fact. A river rolls past it. And it's America's great river.
Moving at three miles per hour, the Mississippi waters will course past Dubuque County in 11 hours, in the channel at least. My own schedule isn't quite as luxurious, and I propose instead to sneak a view of the river whenever I can this fall. Time, after all, is a commodity in short supply.
Finley's Landing, September 4, 8:30 a.m.
My feet provoke the river's first ripples this morning. I fully expect the shock of an autumn chill, but am pleasantly surprised at the water's languid warmth about my ankles. The urgency of current, however, will soon carry summer downstream.
There is an earnest current here, but not a showy one. I had spent the previous weekend canoeing with the Boy Scouts on the Wisconsin River, not far to the north. We played in the water, leaning forward into the current like walkers battling a hurricane wind, and sitting back into the current in armchair fashion while the water buoyed us up. The Wisconsin River prances like a puppy. The Mississippi isn't playful. But it is deadly earnest.
Pick out a log or a piece of floating debris, and peg its location against the Wisconsin shore, and you'll see the river's force. It may sound sluggish at three miles per hour, but the Mississippi is pushing nine deep feet of water through the main channel; the river has work to do and doesn't abide much nonsense.
But Finley's landing seems to be a place for play, a rare public beach along the river. Two hundred yards of clean light-brown dredged-up sand. Enough sand for castles and carved out play towns, for volleyball and beach towels stretched out end to end on weekends, for swimming and tossing frisbees in the water, for watching girls and burning one's feet. And there's always sand enough to accumulate in little kids' diapers. All innocent enough.
Yet mothers wisely watch their children. The Mississippi has little tolerance for nonsense.
I find some of the river's business buried in the sand at the north edge of the beach. The summer crowd has dispersed and this morning I'm alone on the beach, combing for treasure. At first I think this plank of wood I've tripped over is another log, for the northern lip of beach, at the mouth of Basswood Creek, is littered with driftwood washed against the shore and long stripped of bark. But I have tripped, instead, on a half-buried remnant of a wooden fishing boat, its starboard side long gone and its port side rotting in the sand.
May 13, 1937: Letter from C.J. McCarthy, Dubuque City Harbor Master, to Mr. L. Case, LaCrosse, Wisconsin:
"Your letter of May 12th received. If the sunken boat is yours, please have same removed immediately, as it is a hazard to navigation."
* * *
My family gathers once or twice each summer on the Waupeton Beach of Ball's Island, just north of Finley's Landing. For true Mississippi paradise you take a boat to an isolated island, spread out your blankets and beach chairs on the sand, pull out the cooler, and start a campfire with gathered drywood. Smear on the sun goop. Don't think or talk about anything too heavy. Or maybe you do talk, there where there's no distraction and no quick escape. Cell phones not allowed.
* * *
A lot of water has washed past this beach in a million years, but only the last 12,000 have been under the watchful eye of humans. Paleo-Indians first entered the Upper Mississippi Valley as the glaciers retreated. Can't say whether they sat on my beach, though, for they were nomadic, in search of mastodons and other mega-fauna left over from the Ice Ages. Their only mark, so to speak, were occasional stone tools left behind. Later, Woodland Indians became more settled, and left their handiwork in the bluffs along the river, where they built mounds, sometimes to intern their dead, sometimes to bury ceremonial pots and ornaments. Elsewhere the Ojibway gave the river its name: the "mis isipi," or Great River. Most recently, the Mesquakie tribe fished, farmed, and cobbled out some lead in the lands that would become Dubuque County, making this their home till the white man arrived.
The white man's torrent started out as a trickle. Louis Joliet and Fr. Jacques Marquette canoed past Dubuque's bluffs in 1673, scoping things out for the King of France. Nicholas Perrot set up a post on the east side of the river in 1690 to trade with the Indians for lead. Julien Dubuque mined lead with the Mesquakies' approval from 1797 till his death in 1810. Zebulon Pike paid a courtesy call at the mines while exploring for President Jefferson in 1805. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who eventually discovered the headwaters of the Mississippi, visited the village of the Kettle Chief at the Mouth of the Catfish Creek in 1820, and described the 19 huts he found there. By 1830, lead miners were poised on the eastern shore, eager to take possession, occasionally rushing over illegally and being run back across by the U.S. military. In 1832, with the end of the Blackhawk War, the U.S. government ordered the Mesquakie off the land, and the white flood was unleashed.
Mud Lake, Friday September 25
Sloughs separate the ecologists from the sight-seers: it's hard to love a slough. The ecologist sees an ecosystem teeming with frogs, sunfish, and lily pads. The sight-seer finds an algae patch and weeds you can't navigate a boat through, and names it Mud Lake.
Even the name "slough" (pronounced /slew/) condemns it to the legion of unsavory places, like ditches, flats, and barrens. My dictionary calls it a "soft, deep mud hole," and then reports that "slough" has also come to mean a situation of "hopeless discouragement, degradation, decline." Sl-words get all the bad press: a slough harbors slugs, sludge, and all sorts of slippery slime. "Slough" is identical in spelling, though not etymology, to the word pronounced /sluff/, which means to cast off wastes or dead things, as a snake sloughs its skin.
Mud Lake is a slough, a "stump field" on the Pool 11 map, created by the flooding of shoreline woodlands by Lock & Dam #11. I have found a log to sit on at the edge of the backwaters. Twice I grab at the stump of tree branch to pull myself forward, and twice it breaks off in my hand due to long undisturbed decay. A wet reed like a palm branch has fallen across my leg.
The bluffs of the main river valley are about 1/4-mile away. Between lies an algae-covered water, stagnant to the casual eye. Reeds line the edge of the slough, then water lilies stretch out across the shallow water to some small islands that mark the edge of the main river channel.
Dams cause sins enough, but sloughs are not among them. Sloughs were natural to the original river bed, famous for its wandering ways. The undammed river routinely cut off flow streams like recalcitrant heirs lopped from a will, creating still backwaters where fish could breed and birds habitate. The undammed river could leave a backwater high and dry by late summer, though, when the rains stopped. The dam enhanced the backwaters by flooding low-lying woodlands and farm fields, and keeping them wet year-round. Fish and fishermen had banner years in the first decades following the dam construction.
The flooded backwaters--stump-fields, sloughs--make up the bulk of the 194,000 acres of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, federally protected bottomlands that stretch more than 260 miles along the river from Wabasha, Minnesota, to Rock Island, Illinois.
Dams set in motion their own deaths, however, capturing and piling up silt, especially in the sloughs. If it wasn't truly a mud lake when they named it, it will be, eventually. Bait Shack co-owner David Lincoln calls siltation the biggest single threat to the fishing habitat. He recalls places in the river that once had fifteen feet of water now barely slosh in two feet. As the slough waters grow murkier and the bottom sediment softer (since the pools never dry out), backwater aquatic plants lose their foothold and die off, and fish lose another habitat.
This morning Mud Lake sounds and looks plentifully alive. Compass plants, daisies, and trumpet honeysuckle line the water's edge, the last clear stand of dry earth before the river. A constant drone and buzz of insects is interrupted every few seconds by the twirk of a sparrow.
My sandaled feet are wet-draped with cut grass from the lawn of the county park at Mud Lake. I swish them in the slough, and they emerge--clean.
* * *
Which river do you mean when you say "the natural river"? The short stump of a waterway that two million years ago drained the Pleistocene Era into a Gulf of Mexico whose shoreline reached all the way up to southern Illinois? Or the swelled torrent that carved the Upper Mississippi Valley when it drained the Wisconsin Period's mile-thick glaciers during the meltdown 12,000 years ago? This river cut a valley 250 feet deeper than the one you see today, and sometimes ran brim to brim. The meltdown lasted three hundred years. Eventually the torrent slowed, and the river and its tributaries filled much of the old valley with the glacial sediment it had been whisking away. Or by "natural river," do you mean the lazy river of Mark Twain's day, that meandered about its glacial sediment, and chose, willy nilly, first this path, then that, in the river bottoms that stretched between the bluffs?
What you probably don't mean is the river harnessed by twenty-nine locks and dams, lined up and numbered, from St. Paul to St. Louis.
Lock & Dam #11, October 15
Today a fog has rolled in with the first hint of season's change. It roils and softens the edge of the Eagle Point bluff that rises 350 feet above the water, and it muffles the steady hiss of the lock and dam.
Despite the bluffs that leap up from the shoreline along the upper Mississippi, the river itself falls only 420 feet in the 669 miles between St. Paul and St. Louis. Before the locks and dams, the river's tepid descent, along with the unpredictability of the seasons, made the Mississippi unnavigable in times of low water. Cargo would be waylaid.
Already by the 1830s the U.S. government took note of the Mississippi's potential for commerce, & began hauling out snags, digging through sandbars, and dynamiting bedrock where there were rapids. By 1878 they had dug a 4-1/2 foot deep channel. By 1907 the feds were building wing dams--long fingers of rock & boulder extending from the shore to midriver to usher the water to the center. Wing dams carved a six-foot channel.
Six feet of flowing water could float a steamboat, but it would take nine feet to bring a diesel-powered barge tow upstream. The Great Depression, too, begged for massive labor projects, and from 1930 to 1940 most of the twenty-nine locks and dams were built to address both problems.
Dubuque's Zebulon Pike Lock and Dam #11 was completed in 1937 as a WPA project. On average, 36,000 cubic feet per second tumble through the dam gates at Dubuque, though the amount ebbs and swells with drought and flood. A record 306,000 cubic feet per second rushed through in 1965.
The Dubuque dam stretches 4,818 feet across the river, and then extends along another 3,540 feet of earthen dike. The locks and dams create a stairway effect, with each dam holding up a pool in slightly higher elevation than the pool below, flooding out the tricky spots where rapids had kept the barges from lumbering northward. The lock then lifts and lowers boats and barges to the new level. The Dubuque lock raises and lowers vessels eleven feet between pools 11 & 12. It's a mixed environmental bag. Wetlands vs. siltation. In addition, the massive engines & propellers of barges churn up the river's sediment and inevitably dribble oil across the water. But barges save the countryside from an even greater onslaught of train and truck traffic. A single tow of 15 barges cabled together--each individual barge unit typically stretching 195 feet long by 35 feet wide--hauls more cargo than two trains, or more than 850 semi-trailers. The cargo
consists mostly of corn--10 million tons of it--hauled south to New Orleans for distribution across the oceans, and coal--
3.5 million tons--hauled northward to feed electric plants and the needs of northern commerce. In addition, barges haul fertilizer, soybeans, building cement, oil, and steel, sand and gravel, and more. In all, 22.5 million tons of cargo passed through Dubuque's Lock & Dam #11 in 1999, on 22,000 barges. A huge industrial float.
At issue now is whether to double the length of some locks from 600 to 1200 feet, although the Dubuque lock itself is not being considered. Fifteen-barge tows usually stretch about 1200 feet long, and therefore have to divide their loads in half, locking through twice before reassembling and proceeding upriver, a process that can take up to two hours. Quicker locking may mean more barges: less cargo needing to be hauled by inefficient trucks; more grinding of the river bottom and disruption of habitat.
The Mississippi River dams were built strictly to allow for better navigation. For allowing barge horns to blast through the fog. Only one dam, at Keokuk Iowa, provides electricity. Nor do the Mississippi River dams provide flood control. When the great floods come, the Army Corps of Engineers raises the gates in surrender and lets the river run free.
City of Dubuque, April 1965
The Mississippi River flood plain runs along the four miles of the City of Dubuque and reaches one-half to one mile inland. The history of the city made the flood plain prime real estate in the early days. The lead miners worked along the edges of the bluffs as well as back in the hills, but the river offered a handy lane for shipping pigs of lead downstream. Merchants and suppliers found the lowlands ideal for setting up shop along the few straight streets that run through town. The factory owners followed. And the laborers found the flats a reasonable walk to work. Only the wealthy built up on the hills, at least at first. Great Victorian mansions overlooked the stores and factories and workers.
But the Mississippi, born from glacial meltwater, every so often decided to celebrate its past, much to human dismay. In 1870, 1951, and 1952 the river sent ice-chilled spring snowmelt from Wisconsin and Minnesota through the flood plain, damaging and destroying homes and businesses in its path. In April 1965 it sent a record flood that crested at 26.9 feet, a full ten feet above flood stage and eighteen feet above the minimum channel depth.
Over three thousand volunteers filled and piled 350,000 sandbags, creating three miles of temporary dikes, in some places as wide as thirteen feet. The dike was built along the upper two-thirds of the city area that lay within the flood plain. The sandbag dikes protected 4,815 residents and 111 businesses. Sandbags kept the Julien Dubuque Bridge in operation, the only open bridge for 302 miles. As for the lower one-third of the town, according to city records "the decision was made to abandon all south of this dike." The river took its tithing of 192 residents' homes and 148 businesses. Almost 6,000 workers were cut off from their jobs. The flood caused $10 million in damage and required another $5 million in city and community services to fight it.
Photographs from the 1965 flood produced a plethora of ironic signs, little "found poems" that ordinarily wouldn't catch the eye. A billboard poked from the waters, gushing "We're glad you're here in Iowa." A street sign pointed downstream and intoned, like an idiot, "One Way."
Dubuquers had considered building a flood wall after the 1950s' double floods, but had shied away from the needed taxes. This time they went to Congress and obtained $10 million to lay 1.4 miles of concrete walls and to pack five miles of clay and sand levees, enough to contain a 30-foot flood. Construction began in June 1968 and was completed in August 1973. The City Council laid down three miles of bike and hiking trails atop the levees, and from that perch the town watched the near-record waters of 1993 ride safely past, to flood someone else's field downstream.
The Ice Harbor, October 31
(Nustled snuggly and safely behind floodgate walls.)
Of course, neither the lock and dam nor the flood wall represent the first harnessing of the river. By 1830, Americans were already floating lumber downstream to the city of Dubuque and beyond, floating great islands of northern white pine cut from the forests of Minnesota, roped together in three- to four-acre rafts, and sent enmass to lumber mills. The Dubuque Lumber Company boasted 2,500 feet of water front at the northern edge of the city, and cut 100,000 feet of board every ten-hour day. By 1870 the rafts were pushed and guided downstream by steamboats. By 1915 the northern forests were depleted.
The steamboats, however, turn the story to the Dubuque Ice Harbor. A small boat harbor had been dug out of Dubuque's marshy shore already by the 1850s to accommodate steamboat landings, which had soared to 1,000 a year by 1857. In 1885 the Army Corps of Engineers enlarged and dredged the harbor to give safe winter quarters for up to twenty steamboats and fifty small barges. The improved Ice Harbor, as it was called, soon became home to the Iowa Iron Works, shipbuilders who, along with the Diamond Jo Reynolds boatyard further north at Eagle Point, made Dubuque the biggest inland shipbuilding center in the nation. The first iron-hulled steamboat, The Clyde, was built in 1870 to work the lumber rafts. The world's largest-ever steamboat, The Sprague, was built and launched from the Ice Harbor in 1901. The Mississippi and Ohio rivers, with their shallow bottoms and rock-strewn rapids, required shallow, iron hulls for a big steamboat, and that's how they built 'em.
But the steamboat passengers soon defected to rail, then to car and plane, and steamboat freight soon traveled by barge. Shipbuilding foundered and finally sank away altogether. Today, the "Diamond Jo" docked in the Ice Harbor is a modern gambling casino, not some newly built steamboat hot off the launch-pad.
Tomorrow's Ice Harbor may once again become a gathering place to celebrate the river, this time for education and recreation. On the drawing board is the Mississippi River Discovery Center, with four 25-foot aquariums, a river museum, a boardwalk extending over a wetlands reclamation, and a riverwalk and outdoor amphitheater.
The river keeps rolling past, but the times and the people sure change.
from the Journal of Fr. Jacques Marquette, 1673
"Here we are on this so renowned river. . . .Its current which flows southward is slow and easy. On the right one sees a chain of very high mountains, and on the left beautiful stretches of land divided in various places by islands."
[Some miles down river where the land flattens out on either side, Marquette continues]: "It is here that we became keenly away of a complete change of landscape. From there on there were scarcely any more woods or mountains."
Marquette had, of course, just paddled past the future city's bluffs.
* * *
The Julien Dubuque Bridge
Steamboats'll get you up and down the Mississippi River in the 1850s, but for quick and direct crossing, nothing beats a ferry boat. Mathias Ham established the first one in 1836 further north at his fledgling town of Eagle Point, now the site of the lock and dam, to shuttle lead, supplies, and miners back and forth across the river. Other ferries popped up here and there along the county's shores. Specht's Ferry opened for business in 1852, powered at first by a horse tread wheel. Here at the city proper, the A.F. Gregoire steam ferry hauled goods and people back and forth from Dunleith, later renamed East Dubuque, Illinois. Figures from 1855 report the following crossings for the year: 10,700 wagons; 4,200 carriages; 12,110 horses; 14,210 cattle; 4,600 sheep; 16,134 hogs; and 38,400 persons.
Above me today, arcing gracefully across the Julien Dubuque Bridge into East Dubuque, 19,000 cars and trucks cross the river on a daily basis.
The Wing Dams, November 12
Clear south of the city by now. Room to breathe. Quiet. Places to fish. The wingdams are ideal for the more advanced fishermen, those who know how to secure a boat in fast water,
and who like a fight with their fish. Wingdams, I have said, were the first channelizing project, sweeping water toward the river's center where it could then scour itself clean. Fish that love swift currents--smallmouth bass and walleye--took up residence along this altered habitat.
Many alien river creatures have taken up residence in the meantime. Fishermen curse the carp--too bony to eat unless smoked--brought in by the U.S. Fishing Commission over 100 years ago to satisfy the tastes of European immigrants, who liked them. Ecologists curse them as well. Carp root up the bottom of the backwaters, disturbing the egg nests of native fish and clouding up the water. Zebra mussels are another species that create havoc. Introduced accidentally from Europe, the smallish zebra mussels coat underwater surfaces and plug underwater pipes. They'll strangle a larger native mussel by attaching to its shell. Prolific, they've been charted reproducing from 7 to 4,000 mussels in a square meter of river bottom in a single year's time.
In flow, at least, the backwaters south of the dam--like Frentress Lake Slough and Crooked Slough--probably retain more qualities of the natural river, the waters flooding and receding from the islands with the ebb and flow of seasons. Here the water is lazy and the fishing more relaxed. Catch a panfish or a muddy Catfish. Pull up an island for a snooze. If you sleep for a month the cut may have closed up on you, leaving you high and dry. This, too, would be OK.
Overhead, geese, ducks, and even monarch butterflies use the river as a navigational guide as they head south for the winter, and they'll come back the same way in the spring. Forty percent of the nation's waterfowl use this highway. Surprised we don't collect a toll.
The Mines of Spain, December 8
A cold spell is working on the river, attempting to fashion its first ice. Like most first tries, it achieves a messy slush. This morning I'm watching a whorl of icy slush, twenty feet in diameter, cartwheel along the shore. As it scrapes the rocky edge it offers a schussing sound to the morning's stillness, and leaves a contribution of ice to the growing pack of shards shelving up along the riverside.
The Mines of Spain was Dubuque's first, noisiest spot. Though Julien Dubuque's mines extended northward full up through the future city lands, the mouth of the Catfish Creek is where he set up a cabin, his smelting furnace, and his sheds. When he died, this is where the Mesquakie set up their village of the Kettle Chief, and this is where many of the first miners flocked to when the legal gates were unlocked. Later, they built their city to the north, left Julien Dubuque buried on a bluff above the Catfish, and let the land return to a natural state. In the quiet of the morning I spy a bald eagle roosting in branches high up above the river's edge.
* * *
The Mississippi River exits Dubuque County a few hundred yards below Têtes de Mort Creek, and plows headlong into Jackson County. All told, about 120 counties and parishes line the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Louisiana. I am situated, as the fish swims, 276 miles below Minneapolis, 406 miles above St. Louis, and 1,552 miles till the Mississippi Delta offers these waters to the Gulf of Mexico. About 12 million folk live alongside this river. You'd think they'd throw a party.
But it seems always to go something like this. Têtes de Mort is the creek whose name means "Heads of Death," so-named on account of skulls found there from an old Indian battle when the Mesquakie defeated the Kaskaskias. J.C. Beltrani, an Italian traveler, described the scene in 1828, noting the "heads they fixed upon poles as trophies of their victories." A vision lurking at the edge of the land.
Human history is one long effort to name and conquer, to wrap with boundaries. Ironically, I too have stopped at the county border. The river rolls through it, though, and carries the blood downstream.
Massey Station, December 20, 8:45 a.m.
An inch of mottled snow remains encrusted on the reeds and grasses, left over from a minor squall a few days ago. Thin ice films stretch across the puddles in the parking lot at Massey Station, and a fragile frozen band extends nine inches or so inward from the river's edge. Thin and transparent, the ice clings tenuously to the sand and pebbles edging the shoreline. With the morning temperature already at 31˚, winter hasn't yet determined to hang around.
This edge of winter fascinates me. For a moment it is still summer--or autumn perhaps--while the sun, harsh in my eyes, makes fish scales in the ripples offshore. The air is not so cold to breathe, but at ground level the frost has fashioned fern-shaped ice crystals in the sand and flattened grass.
A long woods trails southward from the Massey Marina along the Shawon Dasse Slough. The season's fall of maple leaves lies muddied and frozen. I hike the river shoreline and an iffy trail through the woods to get out of view of the remaining houses.
For I've neared the county's southern edge, just a half-mile above the Têtes de Mort, and I want to test the waters. In September the river still carried the summer southward, water warm and channeled like blood, exporting picnics and shirt-sleeved cookouts down river as surely as the barges hauled away our grain. I find a log protruding into the well-hidden slough, find a perch and slip off boot and sock. This will do.
I plunge the whole of my right foot into December's Mississippi, and the shock registers instantly. In a moment I am re-socked, re-booted. I've made my obvious point, to myself at least.
This river brought us here, one way or another. Native
Americans canoed its length, and the Mesquakie found fit to make their village at Catfish Creek. Julien Dubuque, and all the miners and farmers and merchants and laborers who followed him, crossed over from the east, floated downstream from St. Paul, or steamboated up from St. Louis.
But these teepees, bricks, and luggage we've hauled across just skim the river's back. The Mississippi is deeper and longer and older than all that. Hauling the seasons in and hauling them away again, the river's real cargo is time, and that the old man carries away with placid efficiency.