Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  At the landing, Prairie du Chien doesn’t feel historic, just a typical river town, its barren riverbanks and concrete boat landings a bit forlorn. But it is truly historic. In 1673 Father Marquette the Jesuit missionary and Louis Joliet the fur trader, the requisite duo for exploring the north woods in those days, were the first Europeans to see the Mississippi, yet Native Americans had already lived and farmed for centuries on the broad, flat river terrace where the town of Prairie du Chien now stands. Conveniently situated as it is near the confluence of the region’s two major river routes, the Mississippi and the Wisconsin, the wide prairie was a favored trading and gathering center for tribal groups. In Immortal River, Fremling writes that long before Europeans arrived, traders at this riverine marketplace bought and sold an impressive array of goods: copper brought down the St. Croix and Mississippi from Lake Superior’s Isle Royale, lead ore carried upriver from Illinois and Iowa, pipestone transported from southwestern Minnesota by way of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, obsidian and grizzly bear teeth brought from out west by way of the Missouri and Mississippi, alligator teeth from the Mississippi Delta, and whelk and conch shells from the Gulf of Mexico. During the Late Woodland period, people who lived here traveled down the Mississippi to trade at Cahokia, the largest city in prehistoric North America, which stood on the Illinois side of the Mississippi across from present-day St. Louis.

  According to researchers at Wyalusing State Park, at least fourteen different tribes lived in the Prairie du Chien area or visited to trade, and as the land around the confluence was considered a neutral area, trading generally proceeded peaceably. This trade nexus expanded much more during the fur trade era. When the French first arrived in 1673, a large, well-established Fox village stood by the river, and the women of the tribe farmed the prairie to the east. Fur traders quickly established a trading post, and a multicultural town emerged on St. Feriole Island, where we are landing. Prairie du Chien later became the site of an historic 1825 treaty between the Sioux, Ojibwe, Sauk and Fox, Menominee, Iowa, Ho-Chunk, Ottawa, and Potawatomi nations that established boundary lines around their respective hunting grounds, boundaries that the United States later used, with unintended irony, to force cession of the tribal lands to settlement.

  In order to allot this corner of the world its proper significance, think about the time frame. When Marquette and Joliet arrived at the populous Fox village that stood at the intersection of the Mississippi and the Wisconsin rivers, the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth Rock just over fifty years before, the young country that was forming had no identity, and the rebellion against England was years in the future. Yet this confluence, out here in the middle of the presumed wilderness, was already an important center of commerce. It’s not exactly paddle-past country.

  On a low-water day like today, Prairie du Chien seems well situated. But ever since Europeans moved in and built permanent dwellings, the city’s location has created challenges. For centuries, the river’s natural flooding cycles plagued neighborhoods and businesses built on low-lying St. Feriole Island, and during the historic flood of 1965 the Mississippi really outdid itself, cresting here at over twenty-five feet, its highest recorded level, completely inundating the place and ruining almost everything that had been built here. This deluge launched a dramatic change in Prairie du Chien’s relationship with the river. Island residents wanted to rebuild and asked the Corps to construct dikes and floodwalls, but the Corps decided to fund moving them off the flood-plain island instead, at about the same time the Corps was also relocating the town of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin (a story for a later chapter). By the late 1970s, almost all the residents had left St. Feriole Island; and only a few buildings now remain along the empty streets. The historic mansion Villa Louis still stands at the north end of the island, built as it is atop a large prehistoric Indian mound; it is said that though the river sometimes fills the basement, the main floor has never been flooded. The mansion’s modern visitor center is not located on the high ground of the mound but is instead perched on stilts. Part of nineteenth-century Fort Crawford had originally been built on the same mound, but most of the fort flooded so often and so disastrously that in 1830 the military moved the whole thing to higher ground.

  Why do the Mississippi and other Driftless rivers flood so much? Flooding is simply part of the river’s annual cycle. On a river like the Mississippi, floods flush, rejuvenate, and fertilize the riparian zone, rearrange the sediment, recharge the groundwater, move fish to the backwaters to spawn and, in Fremling’s words, to “feast in untapped pantries.” It’s a wild spring housecleaning. On a river like the Kickapoo, floods serve the same purpose, but they cause even more trouble because people have changed the landscape so much that the land around the river system can’t absorb the runoff as well as it could before settlement arrived. The river by its nature is flow and change, never static, always moving, always in flux, a wild creature that won’t be confined without putting up a ferocious fight.

  Another question is one my father used to ask—rhetorically, and with vehemence, as he didn’t like it that taxpayers bear the burden of these risky decisions. Why do people build in floodplains? In the case of early settlers at Prairie du Chien, living in the floodplain meant they were close to the river highway, to a convenient water supply and abundant fish, and to fertile floodplain ground for planting. With these amenities, who would not want to live by the river?

  Today, people generally value waterfront property for the aesthetics. If the river is presumed likely to flood in a disastrous fashion only every one hundred years—the common, willful misinterpretation of the term hundred-years flood—the modern property owner’s decision to build in a picturesque waterfront location can be seen as a reasonable gamble. Until the flood arrives, that is. Then the landowner must acknowledge that the term actually means that a flood of that magnitude has a 1 percent chance of arriving every year, not that there will be a hundred years between each huge flood. In settlement times, frequent flooding would have eventually forced the initially shortsighted property owner to move. Today, the individual expects engineers and government to solve the human problems caused by the natural event of a flood.

  But another piece of the flooding question is that scientists tell us floods are worse now than when the land was uncultivated and undeveloped. Farming practices such as putting steep slopes under plow, ditching fields, tiling wetlands, and planting right up to the edge of streams; the sea of pavement that is the modern city; and the storm sewers that rush water off the streets and into the tributaries have all irreversibly altered the river’s hydrological profile. Worst, we have disconnected many rivers from their floodplains. “Rivers adjust their shape to carry some mean flow. Fluvial geomorphologists argue about what is the channel-forming flood. But we know that the result is a channel that fits most of the time. Sometimes it would rather be in the skinny jeans, and sometimes the fat jeans. But is has to make do with the average jeans all the time,” said Carrie Jennings. “It is time for a new pair of jeans. Really fat jeans, but know that they will flap around us the rest of the year after our new drainage systems squeeze the soil dry.” If we don’t give the river the space it needs, inhabited and farmed floodplains will be inundated. Simply put, floods are worse now because of the destructive things we have done and do each day to the land and to the rivers and we must adjust to that reality.

  When the rivers are damaged, so are the mussels. In 1975, the Higgins eye pearly mussel, already on the Endangered Species List, was known to live here in the East Channel at Prairie du Chien, in huge prosperous beds, along with thirty other varieties of mussel. When Marian Havlik, a former nurse who became an expert on Mississippi River mussels and who was known all along the river as “that clam lady,” found out that the Corps was planning to dredge the channel, she told them about the endangered mussel. They dredged anyway. Havlik said that afterwards, she found two hundred, mostly freshly dead, Higgins eye mussels in the dredge material. She went to federal offi
cials, and ever after, the Corps did mussel surveys before dredging. The Higgins eye is Havlik’s favorite mussel. “I like the colors inside—white to shades of orange and pink— and I like the heft of the species. It’s a fairly big mussel,” she said. “And at first the Higgins eye made a difference for the whole mussel population on the Mississippi. Federal and state agencies spent millions of dollars protecting it. Despite all the money, things have gone downhill. That’s in part because of the zebra mussel and in part because of barge traffic, which churns the mussel beds. In the 1970s, there were thirty-four species in the East Channel. In a recent study, only seven were found.” After forty years of studying and advocating for these humble creatures, Havlik is discouraged. The mussels are struggling.

  Right now Bob and I are not looking for mussels but for water we can drink. Our quest leads us on an early morning walking tour of the island park. The restroom buildings are locked, there’s not a hand pump anywhere, and not a soul around. Then, happily, a truck pulls up and a uniformed young man hops out. Though he says he probably shouldn’t, he agrees to turn on the building’s outdoor faucet, the handle of which has been inexplicably removed, leaving only a post. He uses a vise-grip to turn the post, and the water flows. This generous young man seems worried that he shouldn’t be doing this, and I feel guilty for asking him. As soon as our bottles are full, Bob and I both thank him profusely and run back to the canoe, clutching our contraband.

  Past the highway bridges, we stay along the Wisconsin shore, following the edge of an intricate delta of sandbars and tiny islands fuzzy with alder and sandbar willow thickets until we soon come to the unmistakable confluence with the Wisconsin River.

  Time to turn left.

  Bob and I climb out of the canoe and stand in the shallows at the mouth. I want to believe it looks the same as it did centuries before, that damming has not permanently altered the river beyond recognition. Is this the river that Nicollet saw? The massive, enduring bluffs of Wyalusing that tower above us are silent.

  The confluence has gravity, actual sandy gravity. Under our feet, here at the mouth of the Wisconsin, the sandy sediment that covers the bedrock floor of the Mississippi gorge is three hundred feet deep, which means the gorge was once scoured that much deeper. And the blufftops are over five hundred feet above the water. This valley must have once looked like a little Grand Canyon. The deep layer of sediment on the riverbed gradually diminishes as the river flows downstream, and by the time the Mississippi reaches the Quad Cities, where the Rock River flows in, the riverbed is almost down to bedrock, swept clean of the weight of the glacial sand, and the big river has left the Driftless behind.

  Did the idea of confluence hold significance for the prehistoric inhabitants of the area? Ancient Woodland Indian burial mounds in Wisconsin’s Wyalusing State Park are on bluffs above the confluence. Across the river from Prairie du Chien, effigy mounds of birds and bears were built on bluff tops in Iowa’s Effigy Mounds National Monument. There once were mounds on many of the bluff tops above confluences along the Upper Mississippi, though most are no longer there. In his essay “The View from Man Mound,” Curt Meine notes that, “Lakes, streams, and wetlands were the most important features of the early maps. The geography of the Indian mounds reflects this. Almost all were located in gathering places near water.” In order to travel long distances most efficiently, the tribes, the traders, and the explorers had to bow to the topographical realities of the Driftless landscape, where the river was the best conduit, and knowing the confluences was like knowing which turns to take on a system of roads.

  It is at the confluence where the meaning of the river as highway, as trade route, as connection, is concentrated. Research shows that during the Hopewell period—500 BC to AD 500—people used rivers all over the Upper Midwest as organized transportation routes. After that, more Indians, and then a steady stream of missionaries, fur traders, adventurers, soldiers, settlers, and historians, traveled up and down the Mississippi and the Wisconsin to this place, just to be here. Nicollet unwillingly spent a miserable December here in 1838. Some wrote of their travels and most did not. A few became famous. For all these travelers the remote wooded confluence was a destination.

  From this crossroads, a traveler could paddle north up the Mississippi, connect with the Minnesota River, then with the Red River of the North and the route to Hudson’s Bay. Or the traveler could push just a little further up the Mississippi and paddle up the St. Croix, cross the portage at Solon Springs, head down the Bois Brule River and thence to the north shore of Lake Superior, the route to the famous Grand Portage and the vast fur trade country. One hundred sixteen miles up the Wisconsin, a two-mile portage into the Fox River links the Mississippi with the Great Lakes. To the south lie the confluences with the Missouri and the route west, and with the Ohio and points east. Or a traveler could head all the way down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. This confluence was a north woods version of Chicago’s Union Station.

  But the answer to my unspoken question is that of course the river and the land through which it flows have changed. The river is all about change—where and when it flows, when and where it chooses to flood—and the river continually changes the land through which it flows. About the undammed lower river Mark Twain wrote, “The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way—its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump!” In a sense, all that matters is what the river looks like today.

  Looking up at Wyalusing again, I can see the curved manmade stone wall that bounds the park’s Point Lookout, where on other visits we arrived by car, looked down at the confluence, and talked abstractly about paddling this trip. Now we’re about to paddle up the Wisconsin, the river that flows for over four hundred miles from Lac Vieux Desert, its source in the far northeastern corner of the state, gathering the waters that flow from one-fifth of Wisconsin’s land area. After seven days of paddling downstream, our muscles are warmed up and ready, yet we both harbor small secret doubts about whether we can do this. I remind myself that we’re only planning to go seventy-eight miles. Bob does the numbers to reassure me: at low water levels like these, the Lower Wisconsin flows at an average of only two to three miles per hour. When we’re on flat water, we can paddle all day at about four miles an hour, which means that at worst we will average as little as one mile an hour. Even if that were the best we could do, it would take us just over a week to travel to Arena and the connection to Black Earth Creek. If we do better, that’s great.

  We have already established that we aren’t purists. That was clear when we started the trip in Faribault instead of at Cedar Lake and again when we accepted the ride from Lake City to Reads Landing. All along, we’ve held Plan B in quiet reserve: calling one of our sons to ask for a ride home. But that would mean ignominious defeat, and we’re not going to even talk about that plan when we haven’t even tried. So off we go.

  Now here is a remarkable thing. All the way down the Mississippi, we had a tailwind. When we were headed southeast, the wind blew steadily out of the north-northwest. When we reached La Crosse and headed south, the cold north wind whooshed us down the river. Today, as we turn east-northeast to go up the Wisconsin, the wind has shifted again and is now blowing from the west-southwest at about nine miles per hour. How can it be that the wind always follows us? No answer. It definitely beats a headwind.

  Up on the railroad bridge where long freight trains cross the Wisconsin on their way up and down the Mississippi, a crew works on the tracks. Soon after, we pass by a backwater pool where an elderly couple is fishing, dressed in matching gray coveralls, their johnboat anchored. He hooks a smallish fish; she nets it. “Catfish,” she says, quietly, and he casts again. They’re a team.

  The paddling is surprisingly similar to paddling downstream, just slower. According to the readings on Bob’s GPS unit, we’re traveling at two miles per hou
r. After a mile of steady paddling, he says we’re keeping that pace. There’s no need for an embarrassed plea for help. All my inner angst was for naught.

  Alongside a wooded bank bordered by a narrow margin of sand we meet the avian counterpart of our laconic anglers. It’s a wild introduction. In a sudden flurry of black and white feathers, a bald eagle rockets in on a shallow flight path, wings outstretched, flared talons thrust formidably before, and nails a hapless fish that is cruising near the surface of the river just upstream. Unfortunately for the eagle as well, however, this particular fish is too heavy for an eagle, which can only lift about four pounds. As we watch from a respectful distance, a brief tragicomic drama unfolds. The eagle and the fish struggle ferociously in the shallows, wings and tails flapping and flopping. Without releasing the fish, the eagle hops awkwardly through the shallows and onto the sand, dragging the wildly thrashing fish along the shoreline, dredging its catch in sand, lifting it just a little with each determined hop, its earnest efforts faintly absurd. The eagle pauses to reset its talons, one eye on the predators in the canoe, and then in a burst of wing flapping, briefly lifts off again, breakfast in tow. The fish—a long, fat shorthead redhorse—is indeed too big, however, and the pair sags heavily to the earth. This much failure seems to defeat the eagle, which extracts its talons and flaps away, leaving the exhausted, dying fish draped across a rock in the shade of an old cedar overhanging the shore, a scene that the eagle will no doubt revisit, possibly for lunch.

  I regret that the Lower Wisconsin is mostly too turbid for us to see the fish swimming beneath us. But they are there. Eagles thrive on the Lower Wisconsin in part because it is home to the most fish species anywhere in the state, 98 of Wisconsin’s 147 native species.