by Lynne Diebel
Crossing the Driftless
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Crossing the Driftless
A Canoe Trip through a Midwestern Landscape
Lynne Diebel
Illustrated by
Robert Diebel
Terrace Books
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
Terrace Books
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
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Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
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Copyright © 2015
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Diebel, Lynne Smith, author.
Crossing the Driftless: a canoe trip through a Midwestern landscape / Lynne Diebel;
illustrated by Robert Diebel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-299-30294-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-299-30293-1 (e-book)
1. Diebel, Lynne Smith—Travel—Driftless Area.
2. Canoes and canoeing—Driftless Area.
3. Rivers—Driftless Area. 4. Driftless Area.
I. Diebel, Robert, illustrator. II. Title.
GV776.W6D54 2015
797.1220977—dc23
2014030800
To
Bob,
always
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Down the Cannon
On the Upper Mississippi
Windbound on Pepin
Locking Through
Of Barges and Steamboats
In Their Own Pool
Take a Left at Wyalusing
Up the Lower Wisconsin
Fourth of July
Out of the Fog
Defeated by the Bottoms
River Home Yahara
References
Index of River Names
Preface
This project began on a canoe trip with my husband, Bob. As we always do, we passed those long midsummer days of paddling with talk about rivers and their ways, people we met on the river, questions we couldn’t answer. Near the end of this particular riverine adventure, Bob said, “You know, you could write a book about this. Not a guidebook. A book about the rivers of the Driftless.” And so this account of our journey evolved, in the way that writing tracks life, a journey across a landscape that has captured my imagination in its rugged grasp, between the two places that hold my heart.
The distinctively beautiful landscape of the Driftless Area spreads over southwestern Wisconsin and edges into the northwestern corner of Illinois. Until I started writing this book, I thought the Driftless Area covered southeast Minnesota and northeast Iowa as well. I was wrong. “No part of Minnesota escaped glaciation,” said Carrie Jennings, glacial geologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “Driftless” tells us that geologists have found no evidence of glacial “drift,” a nineteenth-century term for the glacier’s calling cards: deposits of sand, gravel, and rock carried in by the glacier from elsewhere and left behind when it melted. Geologists today call this material glacial till or sediment. Maps of the Driftless Area often include what is called the Blufflands region of southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa, in part because glaciers did not cover these areas during the Wisconsin Glaciation, the most recent ice age that ended about eleven thousand years ago—though the ice sheet lingered longer in northern Wisconsin—and in part because the Blufflands look so similar to the true Driftless land of southwestern Wisconsin, though softer and more undulating. I believe it is the commonalities in the two landscapes—the Driftless and the Blufflands—that lead people like me who are not geologists to consider them as one alluring whole.
To me, it is all the Driftless, a rugged landscape of forested hills, deep coulees, bedrock outcrops, and bluffs; of caves, sinkholes, springs, and disappearing streams; of effigy mounds and geologic mounds; of bottomland and blufftop farms. And flowing down the many coulees and valleys is an intricate network of streams: countless narrow, fast-moving trout streams and quick-to-flood rivers like the Root and the Whitewater in Minnesota and the Kickapoo and the Pecatonica in Wisconsin. Some flow into the broad Lower Wisconsin with its evershifting sandbars, others into the Upper Mississippi, which has carved itself a wide valley flanked by bluffs almost six hundred feet high. This valley forms the western boundary of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area and the eastern boundary of the younger Minnesota and Iowa Blufflands. In both topographies, the ancient Paleozoic Plateau, once a vast seabed, was dissected, sculpted, and scoured by the erosive power of rivers with millennia to do their patient work.
I grew up along two of those rivers. The South Fork of the Zumbro begins in Minnesota prairie farmland just off the northwest edge of the Blufflands. The Cannon heads up in the same landscape, a bit farther north. Like their companion rivers the Root and the Whitewater, they flow east through the Blufflands to the Mississippi. Many years, the Zumbro floods, sometimes spectacularly, causing no end of trouble for the cities and towns in its valley. The floods aren’t as frequent or as disastrous now as they were in the early twentieth century, but when the water rises, everyone thinks about the river.
My favorite place to think about rivers is in a canoe. We have lived in Wisconsin for many years now, in a small town just off the eastern edge of the Driftless, where our home is about a block from another river, the Yahara, which was the last leg of our canoe trip across the Driftless. Over the years, Bob and I have paddled many other rivers of the Driftless. We have talked with people who know about these rivers, and with scientists far more knowledgeable about rivers and their landscapes than we are, about the ways that people affect and are affected by those rivers. Drawing from these conversations and from my own understanding and experience, I have tried to portray these rivers as they are now: the twenty-first century relationship between these rivers and their people; the efforts to repair the damages we humans have wrought on the rivers; the challenges, such as phosphorus and invasive species, that rivers and people face together.
Before the Clean Water Act of 1972 dramatically changed the ways we relate to rivers, farming and industrialization had already inflicted significant damage on the delicate balance of these river ecosystems and changed the hydrology—or movement of water in relation to the land—of each river’s watershed, which is the land from which all surface water flows into that river. I try to address the question of whether the rivers of this region are better off now th
an one hundred years ago, when human abuse seemed to have done its worst, and the related question of whether river restoration is possible and practical.
The way we understand our physical surroundings is influenced by how we travel across the landscape. As recently as the nineteenth century, the traveler routinely journeyed on this river network and understood its ways by necessity. In our world of concrete, it is easy to be oblivious of rivers. When Bob and I paddle Minnehaha Creek through the middle of Minneapolis, for example, slipping under almost a hundred urban bridges along the way, it is the creek that we see and feel and work with, not the eight-lane highway and the traffic overhead. If we were to switch places with one of those drivers above us and cruise along the middle of the wide bridge, we might not even notice that a small creek flows beneath us. On the creek, though, our reality is that intensely natural world, the more primitive layer. We respect its power, watch for its secretive denizens, understand its habits just a little better each time we go there. In the same way, the hiker on the Appalachian Trail sees the mountain terrain more intimately and connects to the landscape differently from the motorist on the Blue Ridge Parkway. When we get out of our motorized vehicles our perspective shifts, in ways that we only gradually understand. To me, seeking to understand the world at river level is essential.
Crossing the Driftless by river highway yielded that sense of connection and knowledge I was after; it also raised many questions that I could not answer. In part, this book is a record of my attempts, through the perspectives of others, to understand more deeply this landscape and its beautiful and vulnerable rivers.
As in Wallace Stegner’s novel Crossing to Safety, this story is set in part in Madison, Wisconsin. Also as in Stegner’s book, evoking a sense of place is not just about communicating what it’s like to inhabit that place, but also expressing what it’s like to cross out of and into that place. And often, going home means not just crossing to safety but also experiencing the familiar anew. This book tells the story of traveling from home to home, and of seeing things differently.
Acknowledgments
I feel privileged to have the University of Wisconsin Press publish this book, and I thank Raphael Kadushin for creating this opportunity and for his thoughtful help with the subtitle question, Matthew Cosby for his invaluable assistance, and Adam Mehring and Ann Klefstad for their careful and skillful copyediting.
Thomas F. Waters was professor of fisheries at the University of Minnesota, a fly fisherman, an environmentalist, a canoeist, and a tireless advocate for rivers. He was the author of the classic river book The Streams and Rivers of Minnesota, among other books. Bob and I met Tom in 2003 while we were working on our Minnesota paddling guides, Paddling Northern Minnesota and Paddling Southern Minnesota, and over the years, he taught me a great deal about rivers. Tom agreed with Bob’s idea that I should write a book about the trip and about the Driftless. I knew that he had long planned to write a book about the Driftless himself and had gathered all sorts of materials—books, pamphlets, research papers, maps. He gave me as much of his massive collection as I was willing to carry away, along with his encouragement. Tom died in October of 2012, while the manuscript was still in its infancy, so he never knew that I had finished it. I will always be grateful to have had his friendship and guidance.
Many thanks go to Carrie Jennings for her excellent tutelage in basic Driftless geology, to John Sullivan for helping me understand more deeply the importance of the Mississippi and its backwaters, and to both for their close readings and knowledgeable comments. I thank Beth Kallestad for helping me better understand the Cannon, Jim Patterson and Bruce Ause for their canoeing tales, Cara Grisim for that ride to Reads Landing, Denny Caneff for always knowing who I should ask, Helen Sarakinos and Rochelle Weiss for explaining thermal discharge regulation, David Aslakson and Gary Birch for helping create the Lower Wisconsin Riverway and for sharing their stories, Jordan Weeks for his enthusiasm about Driftless trout streams, Bob Hansis for the great tour of his stream restoration project, Dave Hopper for helping me understand trout just a little, Pete Jopke for his deep knowledge of Black Earth Creek, and Pat Dillon for that ride.
In addition, thanks go to Mike Davis, Duane Hager, Jon Hendrickson, Mary Stefanski, Steve Zigler, Ann Runstrom, Rich Biske, Jeff Janvrin, Ann Muirhead, Tom Caya, Marian Havlik, Mark Cupp, Abbie Church, Brad Hutnik, Ryan Schmudlach, Scott Teuber, David Heath, Joel Block, Jeff Maxted, and Sara Lubinski for interesting and informative conversations about the rivers we all love. Michelle and Kevin, Brandy and Steve, your generosity to strangers on the river was wonderful.
Most of all, I thank my family. Many thanks to Julie Quinn and her daughter Hannah for kindly and generously launching us on our voyage, to Corrie and Luke Brekke for the camera errand, and to brother Bob Smith for unraveling the mysteries of freight train routes. I thank our son Matt, who answered my endless questions about all things riverine, encouraged me to make the book truly about the rivers, suggested new ways of thinking about the subjects, connected me with other scientists, and explained river science in ways I could understand. He read the whole manuscript, twice, and he gave us that ride, in the middle of a working day. I thank his wife Rebecca for her enthusiasm about this project and for always saying yes when we invite them to go canoeing, even when she was six months pregnant with their daughter Cora, whose arrival we celebrated before the copyediting began. I’m grateful to our daughter Anne, ever-perceptive and astute reader, for her careful reading and inspired suggestions and for taking on this project right at the beginning of a semester of teaching, and to Anne’s friend Rafil Kroll-Zaidi for his sage advice on the subtitle. Our son Greg has my gratitude for being our travel concierge on the river and for joining us on many paddling adventures. I thank son James and his wife Devon for their long-distance encouragement; their son Henry was born a month before I finished writing, and our excitement about Henry’s arrival gave me the surge I needed to finish the manuscript.
Bob is not only my all-time favorite paddling partner, he had the idea for the journey that led to this book and the idea that shaped the book, and as he has with all my book projects, he encouraged and supported me every step of the way, with only occasional and understandable moments of crabbiness. Bob drew the book’s wonderful maps, surprising and delighting me with each whimsical drawing. An engineer by profession, Bob is also an artist who sees the world with amusement, and thus the maps are both precise and playful. I can never thank him enough.
It was a great journey.
Crossing the Driftless
Joseph N. Nicollet’s map Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi River, 1843 (Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi-73129)
Prologue
It was in a small history center in Minnesota that we first thought of traveling back to our Wisconsin home by canoe. The center stands near Traverse des Sioux, a shallow river crossing on the Lower Minnesota River. Traverse des Sioux evokes the cultural alliance between nomadic Native American tribes who were the territory’s first inhabitants and the peripatetic French fur traders who had lived in this land since the early seventeenth century, those who left their cultural footprints by naming many of Minnesota’s and Wisconsin’s places and by bequeathing their own surnames to their many descendants, names such as LaCanne, LeMieux, LaDuc, LaRoche, Larpenteur. Traverse des Sioux references both the ancient crossing and its eponymous trading post and town, gone now for over a century and a half. And it was a Frenchman who drew the map that so intrigued us that hot summer day.
Astronomer and cartographer Joseph N. Nicollet came to the territory of Minnesota in the 1830s, fleeing from his debts in France, and died in Washington, D.C., soon after he finished charting the northern wilderness. The land Nicollet found enthralled him, and he wrote about southern Minnesota in terms both loving and poetic. The young John C. Frémont, later famous for his 1840s Rocky Mountain expeditions, assisted him, as did German botanist Charles Geyer and Dakota guide Manza Ostag Mani. As they traveled the r
ivers and prairies by canoe and by oxcart, Nicollet determined the locations of river confluences and heights of land with sextant, compass, chronometer, and barometer. Historian William H. Goetzmann writes that Nicollet took over ninety thousand readings, with remarkable accuracy, and that he was one of the first in the world to use the technique of drawing hachured contour lines—series of parallel lines that follow the direction of the land’s slope to create a relief map. An astute observer of the natural and cultural worlds, Nicollet filled his journals with descriptions of the land and people, particularly the various tribal groups of the Dakota people, whom he understood would be displaced by settlers, and his journals and map are the only reliable record of original American Indian place names in the area. From these journals, historian Martha Coleman Bray has written several books chronicling Nicollet’s expeditions. Using existing surveys of the territory of southern Wisconsin and explorers’ charts of the plains, Nicollet was able to expand the map he drew of the Mississippi River Basin beyond the scope of his wide-ranging expeditions.
The War Department, through its newly created U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, commissioned Nicollet to chart the territory and determine if the land was fertile and suitable for settlement. The map was complete in 1841, but because the first printing in 1842 lacked his important hachure lines and was thus a deep disappointment to Nicollet, the Army Corps agreed to try again. In 1843, the U.S. House of Representatives authorized a smaller—hachured—version of the map and had it printed and distributed. After the 1851 Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, thousands of settlers followed the map into southern Minnesota territory. A series of small but increasingly violent conflicts between these new arrivals and the Dakota tribes displaced by the treaties culminated in the tragic and bloody U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.
