Episode 17: Boundaries and Bridges

It seems to be in our nature to draw lines that separate us from this or that. Rivers offer a convenient way for us to draw some of those lines, those boundaries, especially big rivers. In this episode, I tell a few stories about how we’ve used the Mississippi River to draw political lines, some of which didn’t quite go according to plan. (Ever wonder why Minnesota has that funny hat-shaped addition at the top?) I also look at how the Mississippi River marked a boundary between freedom and oppression for pre-Civil War African Americans in St. Louis and dig into the troubles we’ve made for ourselves by trying to define a hard boundary between land and water along a big river. We eventually, inevitably, built bridges—over a hundred of them!—to span the Mississippi and make crossing that boundary much easier. I take a look at what was involved in building a few of the earliest bridges, from the very first bridge to span the river at Minneapolis to its most enduring (the Eads Bridge at St. Louis).

In the Mississippi Minute, I offer a tribute to a friend who passed away this year, David Lobbig, and wonder who will pick up his legacy of busting boundaries.

Check out the A Way With Words episode on Thalweg.

In the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, the US and England defined the western boundary between Canada and the US as follows:

…thence through Lake Superior Northward of the Isles Royal & Phelipeaux to the Long Lake; Thence through the middle of said Long Lake and the Water Communication between it & the Lake of the Woods, to the said Lake of the Woods; Thence through the said Lake to the most Northwestern Point thereof, and from thence on a due West Course to the river Mississippi; Thence by a Line to be drawn along the Middle of the said river Mississippi until it shall intersect the Northernmost Part of the thirty-first Degree of North Latitude…” [New Orleans].

The 1818 treaty began to deal with the issue by acknowledging that the Mississippi didn’t go as far north as previously thought:

It is agreed that a Line drawn from the most North Western Point of the Lake of the Woods, along the forty Ninth Parallel of North Latitude, or, if the said Point shall not be in the Forty Ninth Parallel of North Latitude, then that a Line drawn from the said Point due North or South as the Case may be, until the said Line shall intersect the said Parallel of North Latitude, and from the Point of such Intersection due West along and with the said Parallel shall be the Line of Demarcation between the Territories of the United States, and those of His Britannic Majesty, and that the said Line shall form the Northern Boundary of the said Territories of the United States, and the Southern Boundary of the Territories of His Britannic Majesty, from the Lake of the Woods to the Stony Mountains.

As agreed that a line drawn from the most northwestern point of Lake of the Woods, along the 49th parallel of north latitude, or, if said point shall not be in the 49th parallel of north latitude, then, that a line drawn from said point due north or south as the case may be until said line shall intersect said parallel of north latitude, and from the point of that intersection due west…

Here are the coordinates for the far northwest point of the Lake of the Woods, in case you’re thinking of going there:

• 49° 23’ 04.1 north latitude [+49.384472]
• 95° 09’ 12.2 west longitude [-95.153389]

Pictures! Check out these pictures of early bridges that spanned the Mississippi River:

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Tue, Nov 28, 2023 7:56AM • 56:22

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

river, bridge, mississippi, mississippi river, boundary, eads, louis, steamboat, illinois, treaty, build, years, crossing, land, railroad, construction, belknap, west, miles, island

SPEAKERS

Dean Klinkenberg

Dean Klinkenberg 00:00

Ten states have at least part of their territory defined by the Mississippi River. A boundar set by the river. Rivers though make fickle boundaries, especially big rivers.

Dean Klinkenberg 00:32

Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg and I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me on this podcast as I go deep into the characters and places along the river, and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Subscribe to this series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. You’ll find the show notes at MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast. And while you’re there, take some time to explore the rest of the website, you’ll find a lot of stuff about the Mississippi River and you can even download some free content. And now on to the show.

Dean Klinkenberg 01:19

Welcome to Episode 17 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. Today, my mind is on boundaries, the ways that we as human beings like to create categories and mark something off from something else. It’s that time of year when for some of us at least we’re in that boundary between winter and spring or maybe between spring and summer. That fun time of year when you never know how many layers of clothing you need to put on when you leave the house. When you may need a different number of layers when you leave the house versus when you come back home. Things can change very quickly this time of year, those boundaries are very fluid. Well, I was thinking about how the Mississippi River has served as a boundary for us for a lot of different ways. So in this episode, I’m gonna take a look at how we use the river to define those lines between different state and political entities. How the river has served as a boundary between freedom and oppression. The trouble we’ve had defining a boundary between land and water along the big river. How we use bridges to conquer the Mississippi and I’m going to go into some depth on the history of bridge building along the river as part of this episode. And then I’m just going to finish with a few thoughts about how the Mississippi marked a personal boundary for me many years ago. As always, I thank all of you who show your love through Patreon. Your support keeps this podcast going and it makes me smile. If Patreon is not your thing, you can always buy me a coffee. I drink a lot of coffee and I appreciate your help keeping that habit going. Just go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast and you’ll find out how you can contribute through either Patreon or just buy me that coffee. And now on with the episode.

Dean Klinkenberg 03:23

The first Lutheran Evangelical Church near McGregor, Iowa, built in 1861 is the oldest frame church west of the Mississippi River. Radio and television stations west of the Mississippi were generally assigned call letters beginning with K. While stations east of the Mississippi usually began with W, at least after 1923. The first radio station west of the Mississippi was Davenport’s WOC, or maybe it was WSUI in Iowa City or WEW in St. Louis or KGU in Honolulu. Each has its own claim. But you get the point. In the United States, we define ourselves geographically speaking by which side of the Mississippi River we’re on. It’s been that way for quite some time. For many indigenous communities, the Mississippi marked the boundary between tribes. Colonial powers continued that tradition. With the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the United States and its former colonial master, Great Britain, agreed that the new country’s western border would be the Mississippi River, which had defined the western boundary of England’s claims before that. At that time, the land on the other side of the river was controlled by Spain, but had previously been claimed by France. St. Louis on the west bank of the Mississippi was founded by French entrepreneurs, but it’s black, white and Native American residents were governed by Spanish bureaucrats for the first 40 years. When those early St. Louisans wanted to visit their neighbors down river at Kaskaskia, Illinois, they weren’t just crossing the Mississippi River, they were passing over an international border. The Mississippi still serves as a boundary. And not just for the call letters of radio stations. Scan through the news on just about any day and you’ll almost certainly come across a reference to something that is the biggest, tallest, oldest, longest, most obnoxious east west of the Mississippi River. Birmingham, Alabama has its “East of the Mississippi Diner”. Although if you don’t know your east of the Mississippi, when you’re in Alabama, the name of that diner isn’t going to help you much. Likewise, if you need to ask Google ,”Is California west of the Mississippi River?” as many people apparently do, maybe you should just spend a few minutes looking over an actual map of the United States.

Dean Klinkenberg 03:23

Ten states have at least part of their territory defined by the Mississippi River. A boundary set by the river. Rivers though make fickle boundaries, especially big rivers, and we don’t have to look hard to find examples of why. Take the curious case of Kaskaskia, Illinois. The community called Kaskaskia has actually been located in six different places. The first one, a community of Illini Indians, was founded on the upper reaches of the Illinois River in the 1670s, near the present town of Utica. In 1703, after a couple of intervening moves, residents moved south to the west bank of the Kaskaskia River about four miles from its confluence with the Mississippi, where they joined a small community of other Native Americans, French traders and their families. This is the beginning of the village that most people think of when they think of Kaskaskia, if they think of Kaskaskia, of course. In 1719, most of the Native Americans moved further up the Kaskaskia River and started a new village because they thought the French were overruning the village. Their new home was sometimes called Indian Kaskaskia. It remained an active community until the 1790s. The Kaskaskia they left behind continued to grow into a busy community of French settlers, free and enslaved blacks and some Native Americans, getting as big as 7000 residents at one point. It even served as the capital of Illinois territory and the state capital from 1818 to 1820. The village was built on a small peninsula that extended into the Mississippi from the east bank, near the mouth of the Kaskaskia River. It flooded repeatedly as you might think, but residents always managed to survive and rebuild, at least until the great flood of 1844 began to wash away the land itself. In April of 1881, the Mississippi carved a new channel closer to the Illinois bluffs that turned the village of Kaskaskia into Kaskaskia Island, and began to slowly erode what was left of the original village. The village was rebuilt south of the original site and Kaskaskia, Illinois survives to this day, but its new location hasn’t proved much drier. Major floods in 1973 and 1993, continued to wear away at the villages foundation. And in the great flood of 1993, the village and island were swamped by over 20 feet of water. All that flooding has taken its toll. In 1900 the village counted 177 residents. In 2020, there were just 21. But those shifts and the river’s channel also separated Kaskaskia from Illinois. If you want to drive to Kaskaskia today, the only road access is from St Mary, Missouri, via St. Genevieve County Highway U which becomes Randolph County 15 after crossing over a shadow of the old channel of the Mississippi. Kaskaskia, the former Illinois territorial capital and one of the oldest cities in the state, is now west of the Mississippi’s main channel.

Dean Klinkenberg 08:49

The Mississippi constantly messes with our attempts to use it to mark boundaries. For boundaries defined by rivers, a line down the main navigation channel, a line called the thalweg, determines where the boundary is. The word looks like it should be pronounced “thalweg” t-h-a-l-w-e-g, but it is typically pronounced “tol veg”. The podcast, A Way With Words, did a deep dive into this phrase in a particular episode and I’ll post a link to that in the show notes. It’s a really fascinating history. I’m just gonna say that let you know that the word comes from German roots from the German words ‘tal’ for valley and ‘weg’ for path. You’ll see it reflected in names like ‘Neandertal’, the Neander Valley, where fossil remains of early hominids were found. When it comes to rivers, the thalweg is basically basically the deepest part of a navigable channel. As the river does what rivers do, land adjacent to it is constantly reshaped. These gradual changes where soil is picked up from one place and dropped somewhere else to build new land are called accretions. With these gradual changes, these accretions, the thalweg adjusts with the changes in the river’s channel. State boundaries along the river can therefore occasionally be as fluid as the river itself. Sometimes though river channels change abruptly rather than gradually. This process is called an avulsion. When this happens, the boundary line doesn’t move for the river. Arkansas owns dozens of bits of land that are actually east of the Mississippi River because of sudden changes in the river’s channel. One of those pieces of land abuts the northwest corner of Tennessee’s Fort Pillow State Park. If you’re on the west bank across from the park, you can take a boat across the Mississippi to the east bank and walk around without ever leaving the state of Arkansas. These disputes aren’t relics from an earlier time either. Some continue today. In the late 1980s, Mississippi sued for control of 2000 acres of land along seven miles on the west side of the Mississippi near Lake Providence, Louisiana, that Mississippi claimed as its own. The dispute goes back to a time when a place called Stack Island existed in the river. The main channel flowed past the west side of the island, so the island belonged to Mississippi. And just to complicate matters further, boundary lines are often treated differently when an island is present. And those cases are laws to find the boundary line around an island as permanent. If the river shifts its main channel that boundary line around that island does not move. When the boundary was drawn between Mississippi and Louisiana, the line went around the west side of Stack Island so it belonged to Mississippi. Louisiana claimed that the island washed away and that the land in dispute was new, new land that had been created by the river through accretion. Mississippi responded, “Hey, not so fast, Louisiana, that land is what’s left of Stack Island, so it’s still ours.” The case was argued in front of the US Supreme Court in one of those rare cases where the Constitution requires the Supreme Court to act as a trial court. The justices heard arguments and appointed a special master, Vincent McKusick, to investigate the facts of the case. McKusick visited the area twice, and after submitting his case to the court, the Justice ruled unanimously in 1995 that the land was indeed Stack Island, so therefore still belonged to Mississippi.

Dean Klinkenberg 12:25

The Mississippi has created other boundary confusions, although they weren’t always the river’s doing. South of the Ohio River, the Mississippi makes a dramatic loop that’s called the New Madrid Bend, or the Kentucky Bend, if you live on the river’s east bank. As surveyors worked their way west to map the boundary between Tennessee and Kentucky, they intended to draw a straight line of 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude, but they messed up when they reached the Tennessee River. So the boundary between the states jumps north about 17 miles of the intended line all the way to Virginia. The surveyors failed to notice that their line cut across the Mississippi River meander. The two states fought over these boundary lines as you might expect. In 1820 they reached an agreement on the boundary east of the Tennessee River, but the area with a meander remained a bone of contention for quite a while longer. That line had consequences. The land inside the meander amounted to 17 and a half square miles or about 11,000 acres. The land border with Tennessee runs just two and three quarter miles. But the Mississippi River surrounds the rest of it. 20 miles of boundary defined by the Mississippi. The two states fought over this isolated area for decades. The dispute was eventually resolved in Kentucky’s favor, which meant that this little Kentucky outpost would find a home in Fulton County, even though it had no land connection to the rest of the state or its governing county. Geographers call this type of anomaly an exclave where a part of a territory is completely isolated from the rest of that territory. While geographers have a term for the area, settling on a name has been tougher. It’s been variously called Madrid Bend, Kentucky Bend and Bessie Bend after nearby Bessie, Tennessee. The killjoys at the US Census Department call it West Census County Division. The fun people call it “Bubbleland”, so I’m going to use that term. Bubblelanders were and still are mostly farmers. In the early years most people grew corn and wheat with cotton became the dominant crop before the Civil War. Just about every farm that was next to the river also had a landing for steamboats. Many of them with wood yards to refuel the boats. Places like Watson’s Landing, Harris’s Landing, Compromise, Nolan’s Landing, Kentucky Point, Kerrigan’s Flat, Adam’s Landing, Moss Landing, State Line Landing. There were a lot of landings. The narrowest point into the bend is just a half mile wide. So at one time, a steamboat passenger could disembark at the state line on one side of the bend, get a night’s sleep, then board that same steamer on the other side of the band and continue their trip. Or so the story goes. The population probably peaked in the late 19th century at just over 300 people, many of whom grew cotton, the sharecroppers. In “Life on the Mississippi”, Mark Twain had a lot of fun telling the story of a colorful feud between the Darnell and Watson families. In one passage, he wrote, “Both families belong to the same church. They lived each side of the state line, and the church was at a landing called Compromise. Half the church and half the aisle was in Kentucky, the other half in Tennessee.” You’ll have to go read the “Life on the Mississippi” to find out just where that feud went. Changes in agriculture and repeated flooding eventually took a toll on Bubbleland. In 1937, a levee break flooded the peninsula and left behind blue holes and piles of sand. The area also flooded in 1912, 1950, ’73, ’78 and 1983. The dozen or so remaining residents of Bubbleland might be more isolated today than they were in the 19th century. New Madrid, Missouri is the closest city but you need a boat to get there and ferry service ended a long time ago. The only land route into the area is via Tennessee State Road 22. Their mail goes through Tiptonville, Tennessee, cotton has been replaced by corn and soybeans. The nearest grocery store and health care facilities are 12 miles away in Tiptonville. To vote residents have to drive 40 miles to Hickman, Kentucky, passing through Tennessee before re-entering their home state. Their children go to school in Lake County, Tennessee. Bubbleland today is a handful of houses, a cemetery and a few 1000 acres of cultivated land, surrounded by tall levees meant to keep that pesky Mississippi River from flooding it again.

Dean Klinkenberg 17:05

If you aren’t familiar with the shape of the state of Minnesota, take a quick look at a map. You’ll notice a small part roughly in the shape of a chimney or a partially squashed top hat that extends farther north than the rest of the state and includes The Lake of the Woods. That area is known as the northwest angle, and is part of Minnesota because of a mistaken belief in the 18th century that the Mississippi River extended much farther north than it actually does. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, the US and England defined a western boundary between Canada and US that was supposed to go from roughly Grand Portage, Minnesota, up the Pigeon River through Rainy Lake and Rainy River to the far northwest corner of The Lake of the Woods, then by a straight line to the west to connect with the northern point of the Mississippi River. I’ll drop that treaty definition in the show notes in case you want to see the full language of that. The boundaries were based on John Mitchell’s “A Map of the British Colonies in North America”, published in 1775. Interestingly, Mitchell was not a cartographer, and had never visited the area. His map extended the Mississippi River about 200 miles too far to the north. By 1790, it was clear to most folks that this boundary was bogus. In 1794, the US and Great Britain were cleaning up some loose ends from the 1783 Treaty of Paris, in what became known as Jay’s Treaty. Both sides were pretty sure by then that the Mississippi didn’t go nearly as far north as believed just two years earlier. Two solutions were proposed, but Thomas Jefferson killed them both and substituted language that called for a boundary survey. During negotiations of the 1803 King Hawkesbury Convention, man they had some catchy names for treaties, the English brought up the issue again offering a new proposal for drawing the boundary. But the Louisiana Purchase changed the dynamics of the treaty negotiations by then, as the Mississippi River was now entirely within the political boundaries of the United States. For the next century, the US and England, then the US and Canada kept trying to establish a clear northern boundary. In an 1818 Treaty, England and the US affirmed that the boundary between the US and Canada was the 49th parallel, which was the line established in 1713 treaty that defined the boundary between Louisiana and Canada. So many treaties. That line worked fine as the border for the western half of Minnesota through the western US, but mapmakers still had to deal with the language of the 1783 Treaty that mucked up the international boundary through The Lake of the Woods. The 1818 Treaty began to deal with the issue by acknowledging that the Mississippi didn’t go as far north as previously thought, and both sides agreed to new language defining the border which seemed like progress but didn’t end the dispute. Again, I’ll drop the new definition in the show notes if you want to see that. The border terrain around Lake of the Woods is a challenging mix of large and small granite islands with rocky irregular shorelines rising out of a very large lake in a remote part of the continent. It took another century of surveys and negotiations to determine exactly which islands would belong to which country. In 1841, the English hired an astronomer to determine the northwest most point. He got the job done, then the line was dropped due south to the 49th parallel, thereby creating the northwest angle. The next year, Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton figured out the boundary line from Lake Superior to Rainy Lake. It wasn’t until 1872, however, that the far northwest point of Lake of the Woods was precisely defined. And again, go to the shownotes if you want to see the exact coordinates. Still, the US and an independent Canada did not reach final agreement on the exact boundaries until 1925, only 142 years after the initial treaty. While this may seem like an amusing little anecdote about a boundary dispute in a remote area where are hardly anyone lived, the consequences have been extraordinary. At one time, the English proposed a border that would have run from Lake Superior due west to the Mississippi. The US rejected that proposal, perhaps in part because of Ben Franklin. Franklin was involved in negotiations of the 1783 Treaty of Paris and there’s growing evidence that he was not only aware that the map was wrong, but that he’d also heard that there could be mineral deposits in the area just northwest of Lake Superior. Just northwest of where the line would have put the land and Canada. A century after the Treaty of Paris, prospectors discovered iron ore in Minnesota’s Vermilion Range in the arrowhead region of Minnesota, and later exploration found extensive deposits just southwest of there in the Mesabi Range. Both of these rich veins of iron ore were just northwest of the boundary line that the English had at one time proposed. Had that boundary been accepted, millions of tons of iron ore would have belonged to Canada instead of the US. Just one of those mines in the Mesabi range, the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine at Hibbing, extracted one quarter of the domestic iron ore that fueled the production of steel for the US war machine and World War Two.

Dean Klinkenberg 22:37

In 1847, the state of Missouri passed a law that banned educating black people. Up until that time, John Berry Meachum had been running a school in a basement. Meachum was born enslaved in 1789. But by the age of 21, he had earned enough money mining saltpeter to buy his freedom. Before he had earned enough money to free his wife, her enslaver have moved her to St. Louis. So Meachum followed her there in 1815. He set up a business as a cooper and carpenter and made enough from that to buy his wife and children out of enslavement. In 1825, he was ordained as a Baptist minister and helped found the First African Baptist Church. Three years later the congregation, 220 members strong, 200 of whom were enslaved, built a new church very close to where the Arch rises today. It would later grow to 500 members. Meachum served as pastor while maintaining his barrel and cask making shop and a steamboat that supplied other boats on the St. Louis riverfront. Beachum purchased as many as 20 enslaved people and taught them each the skills they needed to live as free men in a slave society. After they had worked enough to pay back what he’d paid for them, he freed each one. Meachum also ran a school in a church basement to educate blacks in St. Louis for at least 20 years before the Missouri ban went into effect. Even though St. Louis had an ordinance that banned education for free blacks, it wasn’t regularly enforced. When the state ban had passed, Meachum reputedly moved the school to a steamboat on the Mississippi, an area beyond the state boundary, which would have been under federal law and not impacted by the Missouri ban. The river would have literally offered Meachum the freedom to educate. Meachum may have educated hundreds of black children on this steamboat in the Mississippi. I say, may have, because the story has been difficult to confirm, maybe for good reasons. Educating black children at that time would have posed significant risks. So it’s possible that Meachum didn’t want to document what he was doing. The house he and his wife Mary owned was also part of the Underground Railroad. They had actively helped enslaved people cross the Mississippi River to freedom. After his death in 1854, he fell dead at the podium as he was preaching in his church, Mary continued her role with the Underground Railroad. On May 21 1855, she was arrested while trying to help a few enslaved people escape across the Mississippi River. Among the children trying to escape was an enslaved woman named Esther and her two children. They were the property of Henry Shaw, the man who founded the Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park. Shaw had triggered Esther’s escape when he sold her down the river to Vicksburg, while keeping her children in St. Louis. Mary was jailed, but it’s not known if she was convicted. The court records no longer exist. Her efforts have been honored with a plaque at the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing on the Mississippi River Greenway, which was formerly called the Riverfront Trail. And the First African Baptist Church is now the First Baptist Church in St. Louis, and it’s still going strong.

Dean Klinkenberg 26:00

Water is water and land is land, right? Well, some of us and some engineers may think like that, but along a river, especially big one like the Mississippi, it’s not always clear where the water ends and the land begins. The boundary between the river and the land next to it changes from minute to minute, day to day, season to season and often in dramatic ways. At St. Paul, the difference between the highest and lowest recorded river levels is 23 feet. As you head down river to the middle and lower Mississippi, that difference gets more extreme, 55 feet at St. Louis, 59 feet at Memphis, 64 feet at Helena, Arkansas. The difference between the highest and lowest recorded river levels at Helena, Arkansas is taller than a six story building. That space between rivers highs and lows is a zone where our ideas about land and water getting murky. Sometimes that space is river. Sometimes that’s dried out and fractured dirt. Sometimes it’s squishy mud. The only thing that certain is that as a matter of habit, that area will cycle between each of those states and probably within a few weeks. The flatlands along the river are a ribbon of ambiguity, sometimes wet sometimes dry, often something in between. These zones. riparian ecosystems are critically important areas. The plant and animal life is typically more diverse and more dense than adjacent ecosystems. They offer abundance to migrating animals and a link between ecosystems. Plants and animals of course have adapted to living in this variable world. Trees like cottonwoods, willows and soap and silver maples can tolerate getting their feet wet for a while, or even a long while. Still, it’s the variability that is so important for many species. The common arrowhead for example, a favorite treat for ducks and muskrats, needs the lands to dry out for a while before it will grow and thrive. Riparian systems have a natural resilience. They bounce back quickly from floods, even big ones. Even disruption from other animals like beavers, increases an ecosystems diversity. While the plants and animals have adapted to varying wet and dry times, we found that much more difficult. While traveling along the lower Mississippi in 1846, Charles Landman noted, “You might travel 100 miles without finding a place sufficiently secure to land and the water is always so very muddy, that a tumbler full will always yield half an inch of virgin soil.” We’ve had a hard time living with that muddy ribbon and dealing with its periods of high and low water. We chose to deal with this by artificially trying to separate the land from the water. Our attempts to do so have had some unfortunate consequences. The locks and dams we built on the upper river produce consistent water levels for barges, but they ended those periods of varying water levels that feed the biodiversity of the rivers ecosystems. These manmade structures, the dams and levees interrupt those natural cycles, reducing diversity and resilience for plants and animal communities along the river. The Corps of Engineers, those would be river tamers, have tested out a few small ways to restore some of the rivers natural rhythms, but only in cases where it doesn’t impact navigation. It’s not clear that they are anywhere near enough to restore the rivers rhythms. And even if they are, these efforts will have to be done regularly to benefit the ecosystems. Once you take on the job of managing the natural world, you don’t get to take a day off.

Dean Klinkenberg 29:49

Hey, Dean Klinkenberg here interrupting myself. Just wanted to remind you that if you’d like to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write The Mississippi Valley Travel guide books for people who want to get to know the river better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series set in certain places along the Mississippi. Read those books to find out how many different ways my protagonist Frank Dodge can get into trouble. My newest book “Mississippi River Mayhem” details some of the disasters and tragedies that happened along Old Man River, find any of them wherever books are sold.

Dean Klinkenberg 30:36

As the river rises and falls, it creates a ribbon of mud, a fluid boundary between itself and the land it cuts through. And while that mud is important to the riparian world, getting across that wet boundary was a risky proposition in the days before bridges. River ferries were about the only way across and most of those could only carry a few people and horses at a time. As migration west picked up steam, people on the move often got hung up for days on the east bank of the Mississippi waiting for a spot on one of those ferries. Building a bridge across the Mississippi was no easy task though. The river was wide in many places and finding bedrock to anchor piers was a challenge. Getting a bridge built was an expensive project and finding the money to make it happen wasn’t easy. As the railroads expanded from east to west, though, the Mississippi was a major obstacle to their through traffic. In some places, the contents of rail cars were emptied onto ferries, carried across the river, then reloaded onto trains on the other side. Sometimes whole rail cars were loaded on the ferries. As the river froze in the northern reaches of the river, railroads laid temporary tracks across the ice. These were hardly viable long term solutions though. The rush to bridge the Mississippi began in Minneapolis although other bridges followed quickly. The first bridge to span the Mississippi had its grand opening on January 23 1855. It connected Minneapolis on the west bank with the St. Anthony on the east bank. The two cities would later become a united Minneapolis in 1872. And this new bridge was purely for pedestrians and carts. Speculators led by Franklin Steel constructed the Father Louis Hennepin Bridge close to where the current Hennepin Avenue Bridge is. Cables hung from a single arch, supported a deck made of wood planks. The two towers at either end would look at home in a Monty Python film. For three cents, folks could walk across the temporary loose planks that separated them from a plunge into the river. A tornado damaged the bridge on March 25 of that year, so after a few repairs and some reengineering, the bridge officially reopened for business on July 4 1855. As the city’s population grew, that first bridge quickly became obsolete. It was replaced in 1877 by a bigger, more stable span. Just a few months after the first Hennepin Bridge opened, the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi was completed. Chicago railroad interests had been pushing for a rail bridge for a while but steamboat companies and their supporters were vigorously opposed. Those steamboat interests had a supporter in Washington DC, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who was lobbying for a southern route for the first transcontinental railroad and a Mississippi River crossing down there. In spite of the opposition, construction on a rail bridge started on July 16 1853, in the Quad Cities. The plan was to span the relatively narrow stretch of the river from Davenport, Iowa to Arsenal Island, then to build a second span connecting the island to Rock Island, Illinois. The bridge would connect the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad with the Missouri and Mississippi Railroad, that was then under construction in Iowa. Which would later provide a connection for the first transcontinental railroad. Building across Arsenal Island was problematic however, as had had previously housed federal military posts. Secretary Davis waited for months before officially rejecting the railroad’s plans to build tracks across the island. The railroad had already started construction on the island, however, and when they received Davis’ letter, they just ignored it. Davis sued in federal court to stop construction, but a judge ruled in July 1855 that the War Department had abandoned the property and allowed construction to continue. That wouldn’t be the first time that the bridge was the center of a lawsuit. The bridge was finished on April 21 1856. Six spans stretch over 1500 feet across the river with a swing span over the main navigation channel. The first train crossed the bridge the day after it was finished, but the good times didn’t last long. On May 6, barely two weeks after the bridge opened, the steamer Effie Afton crashed into the bridge, destroying the boat and burning much of the bridge. The bridge was repaired and reopened by September 8, but the owners of the Effie Afton sued the owners of the bridge, declaring the bridge a public nuisance and navigation hazard. The owners of the Effie Afton claimed that the bridges piers altered the rivers current creating eddies that caused the boat crash. They wanted the bridge removed and asked for a ban on all future bridges across the Mississippi River. The railroad hired an impressive defense team that included Abraham Lincoln. The initial case resulted in a hung jury, which was basically a win for the railroad. Steamboat interest didn’t stop there, however, in 1858 a St. Louis steamboat owner James Ward sued in federal court to have the bridge removed. He also wanted it declared a navigation hazard. A judge ruled in his favor on April 3 1860, but the US Supreme Court reversed the decision three years later. After that there was no sound legal argument to stop the railroads from bridging the Mississippi River. The first railroad bridge at the Quad Cities had a short lifespan. It was rebuilt in 1872 at a new location so the government could build an arsenal on the island and to accommodate more rail traffic. In 1896, it was rebuilt again with a deck for trains and another for pedestrians and street traffic and that bridge is still in use today. Although the last train crossed in 1980.

Dean Klinkenberg 36:32

With the end of the Civil War and to the legal questions about bridging the Mississippi, construction boomed. New bridges connected Fulton, Illinois with Clinton, Iowa in 1865. Gulf Port Illinois with Burlington, Iowa in 1868. Quincy, Illinois with West Quincy, Missouri in 1868. Dunleith, now East Dubuque, Illinois with Dubuque, Iowa in 1869. East Hannibal with Hannibal in 1871, and Hamilton with Keokuk in 1871. If you listen closely to that previous list, noticeably absent of the list of bridges was one at St. Louis. At that time, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the United States. In 1870, the city’s main competitor in the middle of the country, Chicago, probably had about 20,000 fewer residents, although it was hard to know for sure because population counts were often fudged. But Chicago was growing quickly and the railroads were a big part of their growth. There had been talk about building a bridge at St. Louis as early as 1839. But the city was a river town and steamboat interests aggressively fought any plans to build a bridge across the river in their city. River interests controlled the boundary. Besides that, it was a tough spot to build a bridge. The river was wide and bedrock was buried deep under silt. The economic pressures though eventually were too great to ignore. Getting freight across the Mississippi at St. Louis was an ordeal, but the Wiggins Ferry Company owned a monopoly and a lot of political influence. When the first railroad reached Illinoistown, which is now East St. Louis in 1857, the ferry company insisted it could handle the increased cargo. It was a messy process and often dangerous. William Taussig wrote, “It’s a pity that Dante, when he wrote his Inferno, had no knowledge of the tortures of the transfer between St. Louis and East St. Louis in those times. Had he known of it, he would have let the condemned be taken across the dark waters by that method, instead of having them rowed over by Charon in a comparatively peaceful way.” After the Civil War, leaders of St. Louis feared that their future fortunes would be dim if they didn’t build a river bridge. There had been two previous proposals to build a bridge at St. Louis, one in 1839, and another in 1857. But they were both too expensive. In the immediate post war years, James Eads essentially took over the St. Louis and Illinois Bridge Company and brought in partners that he wanted to work with. He proposed a bridge design to attract financing, then maneuvered to merge with a rival company agreeing to take on their name, the Illinois and St. Louis Bridge Company by driving out their key partners. Eads is often lauded for his groundbreaking engineering ideas, but really, I think his greatest asset may have been his ability to raise money. Investors respected his reputation for turning a profit. Eads was a fascinating character, a self taught engineer who made a fortune by salvaging what he could from steamboat wrecks. He designed an underwater breathing apparatus, a diving bell with a hose running from his salvage boat that allowed him to walk on the bottom of the river, often for you know, long periods of time. He started the salvage business at the age of 24 and made enough money to retire, twice. During the Civil War, he designed ironclad boats that helped the union gain control of the Mississippi River. Few individuals have impacted the Mississippi more than Eads. To build a bridge at St. Louis Eads assembled an impressive team of engineers and experienced builders, Henry Flad, Charles Pfeifer, Milnor, Roberts, Theodore Cooper, many of whom would directly supervise key aspects of construction. Work officially began in August 1867, on the west abutment and would proceed in fits and starts for nearly seven years. The basic design Eads proposed, a triple arched structure, was inspired by a railroad bridge in Koblenz, Germany. Eads’ bridge, though, would require many innovations and design and construction techniques to succeed. His ideas were often derided by peers, although Eads never doubted himself. He was immaculately confident. He had a lot of personal experience with rivers’ currents from his years in salvage, so he was certain that the piers for the bridge needed to be built on bedrock. Doing so though, would require digging down through 100 feet of mud and muck, a technically challenging job at the time. Overseeing construction of the first pier exhausted Eads. He was prone to overworking himself, so he took a break and traveled to Europe. While in France, he learned about pneumatic caissons. Back in St. Louis, he put that new knowledge into practice using caissons to build the other piers. The caissons became something of a tourist draw with men and women in Victorian finery descending the spiral staircase to the air chamber on the bottom of the river, then getting out as quickly as they could. For the men who toiled in the caissons every day, though, the work was dark, damp and dangerous. Of the 600 men who worked in the caissons 119 got sick from the bends, and 14 died before the construction team figured out that workers needed to ascend slowly. The new approach was still not good enough by today’s standards, but it was good enough to save a few lives at that time. The Keystone Bridge Company got the contract to build the bridges superstructure. One of its owners was Andrew Carnegie, who was also an investor in the bridge company. Eads annoyed Carnegie. The two fought over many aspects of construction, but especially over Eads exacting standards for the steel and iron work. At that time, mills relied more on instinct and gut feelings than science and rigor in their production processes. Manufacturers had a hard time meeting Eads’ demanding specifications, which delayed construction for months and added to the bridges cost. Eads had wanted to use carbon steel on the superstructure, but no one could come close to the quality he demanded, so he used chrome steel instead. Later, engineers would make a big deal of Eads use of steel, but at the time, no one was impressed, including Eads. And while Eads gets credit for his use of steel on the bridge, more than half of the bridge was constructed with wrought iron still. As if the construction challenges weren’t significant enough, Eads faced one more hurdle in getting the bridge completed. In 1873, as the first arch was nearing completion, river interests noticed that they didn’t offer the amount of clearance that was required under the enabling legislation passed by the US Congress. They asked the US Army Corps of Engineers to investigate. The head of the Corps at the time was General A.A. Humphreys. He and Eads would spend much of their professional lives fighting bitterly over river projects. The Corps conducted a study that concluded that the bridge was indeed an obstruction to river traffic. The recommendations in the report included suggestions to replace the arches with horizontal trusses, or to build a canal around the bridge through East St. Louis, both of which would have been impractically expensive and killed the whole project. General Humphreys approved the report and passed it up the chain to his boss, Secretary of War, William Belknap. Eads was in Europe at the time recovering from another period of exhaustion. When he returned to St. Louis, he wrote a lengthy rebuttal, but it wasn’t enough to kill the report. So he arranged a meeting with President Ulysses Grant in Washington DC. Eads worked with Grant during the Civil War, building those gunboats that were critical to the success of the Union army on the Mississippi River. Eads presented his case to Grant who called in Secretary Belknap and asked if the bridge was compliant with the enabling legislation. When Belknap said he believed so, Grant ordered him to drop the report. The bridge, in fact, didn’t offer the required amount of clearance but Grant’s support and Belknap’s unwillingness to press the issue, ensured that the bridge would be completed. Maybe Belknap was distracted at the time. After all, he was later impeached by Congress for taking bribes. The Illinois and St. Louis Bridge officially opened on July 4 1874, three years later than projected and $6 million over budget. The opening festivities drew a huge crowd, upwards of 300,000 people jammed the riverfront for a celebration that included a 14 mile long parade, fireworks and the symbolic driving of the last spike by Civil War hero, General William Tecumseh Sherman. In spite of the monumental effort and the expense, the bridge was a financial flop for its investors. The Illinois and St. Louis Bridge Company went bankrupt just a year after it opened, burdened by several factors that took longer to solve, including its inability to build a central train depot in St. Louis, unexpectedly robust competition from the ferry company, and difficulties connecting the bridge and tunnel to existing rail lines. It took another 20 years to fully integrate the bridge into the region’s transportation network. And by then another river bridge had been completed.

Dean Klinkenberg 46:12

Eads didn’t stay involved with the bridge’s operation. Once the arches were closed, he moved on to another bigger project. He designed a series of jetties that opened the mouth of the Mississippi River to commercial shipping that took New Orleans from the ninth busiest US port to the second. His plan for the jetties was another project that pitted him against General Humphreys of the Corps, and was another win for Eads. Eads was never content to mess with little ideas. Following the success of his jetties, he proposed building a railway across the narrowest part of Mexico that could be used to move ships from one ocean to another. He believed that idea was more economically viable than digging the canal. He didn’t live long enough to push that project though, however. He died March 8 1887. The Eads bridge is now the second oldest Mississippi River Bridge still in use. The Wabash Bridge of Hannibal is three years older, but it was greatly modified in 1994 when it swing span was replaced by lift spans. The Eads Bridge though has never been as big a financial success as an engineering marvel. The last trolley crossed in 1935. As trains got bigger and heavier, it became obsolete. The last freight train crossed in July 1974. Fewer cars crossed as new and free bridges were built nearby. By the 1990s the road deck was reduced to a single lane, then closed completely. The bridge sat deteriorating for nearly 20 years until it was repurposed as the river crossing for the region’s new light rail system. The bridge has now been through a major overhaul and is still in use. The lower deck carries those light rail trains and the top deck is open again with room for cars and a protected crossing for pedestrians and bicycles. The views from the top are just as good as ever.

Dean Klinkenberg 48:11

Bridging the Mississippi often required some innovative solutions. At Prairie du Chen, Wisconsin, a bridge with pontoon swing spans was built across 8000 feet of river channels and islands. John Lawler ran a ferry at Prairie du Chien, but he knew its future was limited. He hired a Bavarian engineer, Michael Spoettle, who designed a complex of trestles and floating draw spans that only took a year to build. A lot quicker than Eads bridge took to build. It opened on April 15 1874 with two floating spans. A 396 foot pontoon section over the east channel, and a 405 foot pontoon over the west channel. The pontoons were designed to rise and fall with the river and swung open to allow boats to pass through. It provided a rail crossing for nearly 90 years before it was closed and dismantled in 1961. The bridge building boom was confined mostly to the upper half of the river. The geology of the lower Mississippi made construction difficult and more expensive, and was complicated by the fact that bridges had to be built tall enough for bigger boats. The first bridge to span the lower Mississippi was the Memphis Bridge now called The Frisco Bridge, which was completed in 1892. At the time it opened it had the highest clearance of any bridge in the United States. New Orleans, in Louisiana, didn’t get its first Mississippi River bridge until 1935 when the massive Huey P Long Bridge opened. There are now more than 100 bridges across the main channel from the Twin Cities to New Orleans, but only 24 of those bridges are south of St. Louis. And if you want to cross the Mississippi down river of New Orleans, you’ll have to take a ferry. The bridges were built to move people across the river quickly from one side to the other. They made continental railroads possible and spread the demise of the steamboat economy. They also erased the boundary and turned the river into an afterthought for most people.

Dean Klinkenberg 50:14

The drive from Albert Lea, Minnesota to La Crosse, Wisconsin cuts through the plains of southern Minnesota, through acres and acres of cultivated fields thick with corn and soybeans. I first made the drive in the spring of 1982 so I could visit my future home on the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse campus. The monotony of the drive ends abruptly just a few miles west of lacrosse as the highway turns northeast and begins a descent of some 500 feet down into an unexpected valley. As the road bends its way through what I would later learn locals call ‘a coulee’, the Mississippi River comes into view. A braided blue ribbon threading its way past islands of green. It’s a breathtaking view, a dramatic change from the flat greens and pale yellows of the plains, to the deep blues and vibrant greens of the river valley. That view touched something in me. Awakened the passion that has only grown stronger with time. I talked about this in more detail in the first podcast episode. When I crossed the Mississippi that day, I was a miserable 18 year old who knew just one thing, I wanted to get the hell out of Albert Lea and away from the high school where I felt suffocated. I’d grown up in the plains of Kansas, Oklahoma and Minnesota, in small cities and suburbs. Crossing into Wisconsin on that spring day, I had no idea how much my life was going to change, and how the river was going to accompany for so much of it. Crossing the river didn’t turn me into a less miserable young man, but it did give me a new place to brood. It took several more years of brooding and introspection to bend the curve of my emotional life. But it did happen. I like to think the river had something to do with that. As a rootless young man, the river gave me a sense of place, of home. Somewhere I finally felt I belonged. I moved a lot growing up. Six homes in 18 years. My sense of home had little to do with a physical place, and more to do with who was around me. When I left home at 18, I had little of either. Over time, living next to the river, playing on and along it, the Mississippi became the constant that I lacked. Home didn’t have to be a single place on a map. As long as I was anchored to the Mississippi River. Any place along that river was my home. With that move from west of the Mississippi to east of it, the river marked a crossing of personal boundaries, from despondent to hopeful, from rootless to rooted from childhood to young adulthood.

Dean Klinkenberg 53:02

And now it’s time for the Mississippi Minute. I lost a friend earlier this year. David Lobbig passed away on January 1 2023. He was a good friend, somebody I enjoyed spending time with and comparing notes about what we knew about the river and sharing stories about our own experiences with the river. I met him a few years back at a small event where I was giving a talk to a group of about 10 people or so. It was not a massive turnout for this particular event, but I was trying to roll out a new talk and just to gauge what the reaction was going to be. And David was in the crowd. And he graciously came up to me afterwards and introduced himself. And we made a connection that day that that lasted for several years. He was a regular attendee at river themed happy hours that we did for a while here in St. Louis, and was always interested in hearing other people’s stories about the river and listening to what they had to say, and even as he was in the midst of planning one of the major projects of his life. He was an environmental historian by trade. He worked for the Missouri Historical Society, where he was planning a major exhibit on the Mississippi River. And I talked with him quite a bit during those years when he was planning and I know how much of his time and energy, how much of his soul that process consumed. So when that exhibit debuted in 2019, it was a monumental moment. The exhibit was was brilliant. It displayed a lot of the history of our relationship with the river focusing mostly on the middle Mississippi. Unfortunately, it debuted just before Covid became a thing, so not as many people got to experience that exhibit, as I think we all hoped, but it doesn’t take away from the accomplishment. It was a marvelous series of displays about our relationship with the river. I was thinking about David, in the context of this particular episode. I think he was a boundary buster himself. He spent a good part of his life trying to bust those artificial lines that we draw between ourselves, that we draw between our communities. And that bigger artificial line that we draw between us and the rest of life on this planet. Made me wonder who the next boundary busters are going to be? Who are our next David Lobbigs?

Dean Klinkenberg 55:35

Thanks for listening. I offer the podcast for free but when you support the show with a few bucks through patreon you help keep the program going. Just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. I’d be grateful if you’d leave a review on iTunes or your preferred podcast app. Each review makes a difference and helps other fans of the Mississippi River and the Midwest find this show. The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time.