The Boats / Missouri River Hazards

Missouri River Hazards

The travails of river travel

By Joseph A. Mussulman

Habits & Eccentricities

The Missouri River today is what it is because of what it was in Lewis and Clark’s day, what it had been for eons, and was to be until the middle of the 20th century. Back in 1907, just five years after the Missouri River Commission was abolished, a Midwestern newspaperman and humorist named George Fitch wrote a character sketch of the unruly river. The following excerpts will convey some of the highlights of Fitch’s likeness.There are rivers of all lengths and sizes and of all degrees of wetness. There are rivers with all sorts of peculiarities and with widely varying claims to fame. But there is only one river with a personality, habits, dissipations, [and] a sense of humor; a river that goes traveling sidewise, that interferes in politics, rearranges geography and dabbles in real estate:[1]George Fitch, “The Missouri River: Its Habits and Eccentricities Described by a Personal Friend,” American Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 6 (April 1907), 637-40.

It is a perpetual dissatisfaction with its bed that is the greatest peculiarity of the Missouri. It is harder to suit in the matter of beds than a traveling man. Time after time it has gotten out of its bed in the middle of the night, with no apparent provocation, and has hunted up a new bed, all littered with forests, cornfields, brick houses, railroad ties and telegraph poles. It has flopped into this prickly mess with a gurgle of content and has flowed along, placidly, for years, gradually assimilating the foreign substances and wearing down the bumps in its alluvial mattress. Then it has suddenly taken a fancy to its old bed, which by this time has been filled with suburban architecture, and back it has gone with a whoop and a rush, as happy as if it had really found something worth while. . . .

The Missouri is the original loop-the-loop artist. The river for most of its length flows in giant loops with which it is forever performing circus marvels, leaping nimbly from one loop to another in a single night. . . .

Because the river is always busy dissolving farms and shifting sand bars it is the muddiest stream in the world. It is so thick that it cracks, sometimes, in working its way around the bends. At certain seasons of the year there is scarcely enough water to keep the mud moist, and it has to be drunk with a fork. . . .

In the old days the Missouri teemed with steamboats. . . . Business prospered until the railroads came. Then the steamers vanished. Today the river is as lonely as a school room in vacation.

Scientists tell us that the Missouri’s peculiarities are due to the loose alluvial soil through which it flows—a soil so soluble that the least flirt of a current will dig a hole into the bank which in time widens to a bay, then to a horseshoe curve and finally to a loop thirty miles around. This explanation may be satisfactory to scientists, but it is thin and unpalatable to those who know the river and have sat up nights with it. . . . Does it explain the force that laughs at abutments, fascines, willow mattresses, ripraps, wing dams, stone dams, state lines and cuss words, and that snatches the work of months away in a single night? . . . Can it diagnose that queer, eerie half murmur, half chuckle with which the water goes about its work of destruction?

“Alluvial soil” is a pretty fair sort of amateur explanation, but it would grow humpbacked and decrepit trying to carry all the blame of the Missouri’s record. More things than alluvial soil are ailing the Missouri. Blessed be the man who shall first find a way to chain it down and pull its teeth.The most notable, if not blessed, of the candidates for that honor were Lieutenant General Lewis Pick, of the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Glenn Sloan, an engineer for the Bureau of Reclamation. Their ingenious but divergent plans were reconciled in the 1940s during the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The surgery, carried out by the Missouri River Bank Stabilization and Navigation Project, was officially completed in 1981, but shortly thereafter the new and comparatively subservient river was diagnosed with heart trouble.

The “Big Muddy” gained its nickname not long after the French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette first saw it in 1673, not only because of its color, but also its character.[2]Its “real” name is said to have come from the now-extinct Indians of the Siouan linguistic family, who were known as the Missouris–meaning “those who have dugout canoes,” or … Continue reading William Clark, in his “Slight View of the Missouri River,” called it “a turbilant & muddey Stream,” before proceeding to list the principal features and values—so far as he knew them then—of the land and the people within its reach.[3]Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (12 vols., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983-99), 3:480.

Cornfed River

There’s a saying among farmers who plant crops in the Missouri River flood plain—”You never know whether you’re going to harvest corn or catfish.” All rivers do it sometimes, in some places, but the unchastened Missouri won countless springtime championships in its time. Still does, as Jim Peterson’s photo, above, proves. Every spring, when the freshet rises the Missouri begins to dance—sashaying from bank to bank through the yielding flood plain. It pushes hard and hurriedly against one bank, while slowing and settling on the other. The dance may last, with diminishing flourishes, until the end of summer.

Mark Twain put it as well as anyone ever has. He speaks here of the Mississippi, but the Missouri deserves his eloquence too: It is “a just and equitable river; it never tumbles one man’s farm overboard without building a new farm just like it for that man’s neighbor. This keeps down hard feelings.”[4]Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 203.

Frequently, the dangers of collapsing banks were worsened by combinations of other impediments—strong wind, swift current, shifting sands, trees and debris precipitated into the river. On one occasion (June 15, 1804) the Corps “passed thro a verry bad part of the river, the wost moveing Sands I ever Saw, the Current So Strong that the Ours [oars] and Sales under a Stiff bresse Cld. not Stem it, we wre oblged to use a toe rope, under a bank Constantly falling.” On the night of September 21, 1804, they barely survived an even worse situation. Clark wrote:

at half past one oClock this morning the Sand bar on which we Camped began to under mind and give way which allarmed the Sergeant on Guard, the motion of the boat awakened me; I get up & by the light of the moon observed that the land had given away both above and below our Camp & was falling in fast. I ordered all hands on as quick as possible & pushed off, we had pushed off but a few minets before the bank under which the Boat & perogus lay give way, which would Certainly have Sunk both Perogues, by the time we made the opsd. Shore our Camp fell in.

Sawyers

“Snags” in the Missouri River, somewhere in Nebraska.

Logs along a high river shore

Photo by Jim Peterson

Sometime in the more or less distant past, springtime floodwaters deposited rich loam on the floodplain here, then ran on downhill toward the Gulf of Mexico. At the water’s margins cottonwood trees, Populus deltoides(1) like these took root in the hospitable soil, reaching down to drink, holding on for dear life.

Annually, the river sips away at the banks and claims what it left on them back then. In due time the cottonwoods succumb to the river’s subversion, lie down in the depths and die, and become snags. They are submarine sieves, straining through their flailing limbs and naked rootwads all the flotsam the river brings their way. Sometimes, even today, they trap boats and, occasionally, boaters. They are open manholes on the riverine roadways of the West.

All the snags’ branches wave under the water much as they blew in the wind. Those that protrude above the river’s surface also oscillate in the current, as if to warn sensible creatures away. These are called sawyers.

Captain Lewis recorded an encounter that Sergeant Ordway and Private Willard had with a gang of sawyers on the night of August 4, 1806, somewhere downstream from the mouth of the Milk River.

Ordway and Willard delayed so much time in hunting today that they did not overtake us untill about midnight. . . . In passing a bend just below the gulph, it being dark, they were drawn by the currant in among a parsel of sawyers, under one of which the canoe was driven and throwed Willard who was steering overboard. He caught the sawyer and held by it. Ordway with the canoe drifted down about half a mile among the sawyers under a falling bank. The canoe struck frequently but did not overset. He at length gained the shore and returned by land to learn the fate of Willard whom he found was yet on the sawyer. It was impossible for him to take the canoe to his relief. Willard at length tied a couple of sticks together which had lodged against the sawyer on which he was and set himself adrift among the sawyers which he fortunately escaped and was taken up about a mile below by Ordway with the canoe; they sustained no loss on this occasion. It was fortunate for Willard that he could swim tolerably well.

Snags and sawyers that break loose during high water can collect into log jams, which the French-Canadian boatmen with the Corps would have called embarrases—”hinderances.”—which could pin a boat broadside against its upstream edge, and possibly cause the current to capsize it.

 

Hair-raising Hazards

Perhaps the best luck the Corps of Discovery had in the entire two years, four months and ten days it was en route, was that it didn’t suffer any fatal encounters with hazards of this magnitude. Considering only as much of the tree trunk as can be seen in the photo above (at least one limb has already been sawed off), it was nearly six feet in diameter. If about thirty feet of the butt end of the trunk is visible, and if the tree is a cottonwood, then this piece of it weighed about five tons—dry! (Cottonwood weighs thirty-eight pounds per dry cubic foot). The entire tree may have weighed three or four times that much. Imagine the crews of the barge (called the ‘boat’ or ‘barge’ but never the ‘keelboat’) and the two pirogues dealing with snags like this.

On 31 March 1805 Meriwether Lewis wrote a long letter to his mother, Lucy Marks, from Fort Mandan detailing the daunting dangers he had faced on the Missouri River, and hinting at the anxiety that, even as a natural risk-taker, he was feeling in anticipation of rivers to come.[6]Donald Jackson, Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1854, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 222–25. The original letter is at the Missouri … Continue reading

 

So far, we have experienced more difficulty from the navigation of the Missouri, than danger from the Savages. The difficulties which oppose themselves to the navigation of this immence river, arise from the rapidity of it’s current, it’s falling banks, sandbars, and timber which remains wholy, or partially concealed in it’s bed, usually called by the navigators of the Missouri and Mississippi Sawyers or planters.

One of those difficulties, the navigator never ceases to contend with, from the entrance of the Missouri to this place; and in innumerable instances most of those obstructions are at the sam[e] instant combined to oppose his progress, or threaten his distruction. To these we may also add a fifth and not much less inconsiderable difficulty, the turbed quality of the water, which renders it impracticable to discover any obstruction even to the debth of a single inch.

Such is the velocity of the current at all seasons of the year, from the entrance of the Missouri, to the mouth of the great river Platte, that it is impossible to resist it’s force by means of oars or poles in the main channel of the river; the eddies therefore which generally exist one side or the other of the river, are saught by the navigator; but these are almost universally incumbered with concealed timber, or within the reach of the falling banks, but notwithstanding are usually preferable to that of passing along the edges of the sand bars, over which, the water tho’ shallow runs with such violence, that if your vessel happens to touch the sand, or is by any accedent turned sidewise to the current it is driven on the bar, and overset in an instant, generally distroyed, and always attended with the loss of the cargo.

The base of the river banks being composed of a fine light sand, is easily removed by the water, it hapens that when this capricious and violent current, sets against it’s banks, which are usually covered with heavy timber, it quickly undermines them, sometimes to the debth of 40 or 50 paces, and several miles in length. The banks being unable to support themselves longer, tumble into the river with tremendious force, distroying every thing within their reach.

The timber thus precipitated into the water with large masses of earth about their roots, are seen drifting with the stream, their points above the water, while the roots more heavy are draged along the bottom untill they become firmly fixed in the quicksands which form the bed of the river, where they remain for many years, forming an irregular, tho’ dangerous chevauxdefrise[7]Properly, cheveux défriser (literally, “to straighten the hair”), a French-Canadian riverman’s expression meaning hair-raising or frightening.

At the onset of the steamboat era in the early 1830s it became obvious that, considering the economic investments of the new industry and its importance to citizens living in the Midwest and Northwest, the federal government needed to do something about the kinds of river hazards Lewis and Clark had encountered, beginning with the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Congressional appropriations were first discussed in 1832, and work began in 1838. In that year alone, two snagboats, the Heliopolis and the Archimedes, removed 2,245 snags of all sizes, and trimmed off 1,710 overhanging branches, within the 385 miles between the Mississippi and the vicinity of today’s Kansas City.[8]Chittenden, op. cit., II:421.

 

Notes

Notes
1 George Fitch, “The Missouri River: Its Habits and Eccentricities Described by a Personal Friend,” American Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 6 (April 1907), 637-40.
2 Its “real” name is said to have come from the now-extinct Indians of the Siouan linguistic family, who were known as the Missouris–meaning “those who have dugout canoes,” or “(people having) wooden canoes.” John Reed Swanton, The Indian Tribes of North America, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1952), 269.
3 Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (12 vols., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983-99), 3:480.
4 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 203.
5 From Hiram Chittenden, History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1903), II:420.
6 Donald Jackson, Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1854, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 222–25. The original letter is at the Missouri Historical Society Library in St. Louis. (Re-paragraphed here for the reader’s convenience.)
7 Properly, cheveux défriser (literally, “to straighten the hair”), a French-Canadian riverman’s expression meaning hair-raising or frightening.
8 Chittenden, op. cit., II:421.

Discover More

  • The Lewis and Clark Expedition: Day by Day by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). The story in prose, 14 May 1804–23 September 1806.
  • The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery (abridged) by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Selected journal excerpts, 14 May 1804–23 September 1806.
  • The Lewis and Clark Journals. by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001). The complete story in 13 volumes.