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The Meeting of the Rivers IL174
Long known to the Indians who used the two great rivers as his highway for trade and war, this junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi was first sighted by Europeans when Marquette and Joliet glided past in 1623. Ten years later La Salle explored the area and established France's claim to the Mississippi Valley. From that time on this confluence was recognized as a strategic site for settlement and fortification. George Rogers Clark, following the capture of Kaskaskia in 1778, stationed armed boats at this junction to guard against attacks on the Illinois country by the British or Spanish. Here in 1811, the "New Orleans", first steamboat to navigate Western waters, lay at anchor during three nights of the New Madrid earthquake. In April of 1861 Fort Defiance was established at the confluence to thwart Confederate invasion and blockade the trade of the South. From here was launched General Grant's Great flanking movement up the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, which began at Fort Henry and ended at Vicksburg, giving the Union complete control of the Mississippi. [Gen. Grant is Ulysses S. Grant; Joliet and Marquette are: Louis Joliet, and Father Jacques Marquette.] [Notice during the constant meeting of the vast Ohio and Mississippi rivers, refusing to merge, the Ohio waters become a blue ribbon rippling far down the brown Mississippi currents.]
Rafting on the Mississippi WI149
After 1837 the vast timber resources of northern Wisconsin were eagerly sought by settlers moving into the mid-Mississippi valley. By 1847 there were more than thirty sawmills on the Wisconsin, Chippewa, and St. Croix river systems, cutting largely Wisconsin white pine. During long winter months, logging crews felled and stacked logs on the frozen rivers. Spring thaws flushed the logs down the stream toward the Mississippi River. Here logs were caught, sorted, scaled, and rafted. Between 1837 and 1901 more than forty million board feet of logs floated down the Great River to saw-mills. The largest log raft on the Mississippi was assembled at Lynxville in 1896. It was 270 feet wide and 1550 feet long, containing two and one-fourth million board feet of lumber. The largest lumber raft on the river originated on Lake St. Croix in 1901. Somewhat smaller in size, 270 feet wide and 1450 feet long, it carried more lumber-nine million board feet. The last rafting of lumber on the Mississippi came in 1915, ending a rich, exciting, and colorful era in the history of Wisconsin and the Great River.
Lewis and Clark: Corps of Discovery IL150
CORPS OF DISCOVERY CHARTING THE CONFLUENCE On November 14, 1803, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the Corps of Discovery stayed for six days, one of the longest stops made by the expedition. Here, they saw the Mississippi for the first time, noted the mistletoe on the large timber and to their surprise, caught a 128 pound blue catfish. Their stay allowed Captain Lewis to teach Captain Clark the use of the navigational equipment: a compass and sextant. Because the 3rd Principal Meridian begins at the mouth of the Ohio, astronomical observations at this point were crucial. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned U.S. Army Officers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to conduct an expedition to the Pacific coast through a region entirely unknown to European civilization. Their assignment - to cross the North American continent from the Mississippi River to the Pacific ocean by way of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers. They left from Pittsburgh on the Ohio River August 31, 1803, on the Eastern Legacy of the trip. This area south of Cairo, in Alexander County, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet, was forested with massive cottonwood and sycamore trees and there was a thick covering of small cane and vines. In this area, they recorded over 178 plants and 122 animal species, including prairie chickens, Carolina parakeets, doves, swans, Canada geese, woodpeckers, and many species of ducks. Their expedition and starting discoveries opened the door for westward expansion and the growth of a new nation - a legacy for the past 200 years.
Lewis and Clark in Illinois IL144
In November of 1803, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their party camped on the slate rock bank of the Mississippi River near here. They found moving the boats up river very difficult and traveled only about one mile per hour against the strong current. It was only a taste of the long journey ahead.
Lewis and Clark in Illinois IL143
On November 14, 1803, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their party landed at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the site of the present day Cairo. They spent nearly a week here, learning how to determine longitude and latitude, a skill they would need on their westward expedition.
Lewis and Clark in Illinois IL142
On November 20, 1803, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their men made camp near this site. It was their first day moving up the Mississippi River and they only traveled 10 1/2 miles. The River's current was stronger than they ever imagined. Would they need more men for their journey?
Lewis and Clark - Montburn Tavern MO121
"Rained all last night Set out at 6 oClock after a heavy Shower, and proceeded on, passed a large Island a Creek opposite on the St. Side Just abov a Cave Called Monbrun Tavern & River...we Made 14 miles to day, the river Continue to rise, the County on each Side appear full of Water." Shortly after leaving camp on the morning of May 30, 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition passed by a well-known river landmark called Montbrun (or Monbrun) Tavern that was located at the mouth of the Little Tavern Creek. This was the second "Tavern" that the expedition had passed. On May 23, Captain William Clark had been set ashore at a river landmark called Tavern Cave; Clark saw Indian pictographs and the names of French explorers painted on its walls. The expedition did not stop at Montburn's Tavern, although members were aware of its existence. It is unclear why both this shelter cave and Tavern Cave were called "Taverns." River travelers probably used them as camping shelters whose spacious and dry interiors provided protection against the elements. Given the sparse populations along the lower Missouri, it is unlikely that either shelter was a business establishment. The site appears on a map Lewis and Clark had with them that had been prepared by James MacKay and John Evans. Tavern and Little Tavern Creeks, in today's Callaway County, were probably named after Montbrun Tavern. Montbrun Tavern was described two decades later, in 1833, by Duke Paul of Württemberg, a German naturalist who made several trips up the Missouri River. Duke Paul described a 300-foot-high bluff next to the creek with a 30-foot overhang: "The lowest level is most deeply hollowed out, forming a long, commodious chamber, which extends crescent-shaped some hundred feet along the creek and the Missouri. In the space thus created, several hundred persons could seek shelter from the rain and bad weather...I found many traces of Indian painting on the walls of the bluff...very well preserved." The cave was probably named after Etinne Boucher de Monbrun, a retired militia officer. Sadly, Montbrun Tavern, or Cave, does not exist today. Most likely it was destroyed by the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad during track construction in the 1890's, or during quarrying by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1930's. A few smaller overhangs still exist along the creek bluff. The Lewis and Clark Expedition continued upriver another 15 miles before camping opposite present-day Mokane. [On this marker from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr.; a painted scene by George Catlin of the Missouri River with its collapsing alluvial banks, snags, and rafts of debris. To point out that neither the Ohio nor Mississippi rivers prepared the expedition for the perils that lay around every bend of the Missouri River.] The Missouri River not only looked different in 1804, but also was far more difficult to navigate. The main channel tended to be relatively free of debris, but the current there was too strong for the expedition's three boats, a 55-foot long keelboat and two smaller pirogues. The Corps of Discovery was forced to hug to one shore or the other where the water was less swift. Near the shore, their boats were vulnerable to other hazards including shifting sandbars, collapsing banks, floating mats of logs (called embarras by the Franch) and snags and sawyers (trees with one end embedded in the bottom of the river). Lewis and Clark hired experienced French boatmen such as Pierre Cruzatte and François Labiche specifically to deal with navigating the keelboat through this dangerous obstacle course. In May and June 1804, the river was fast and high from heavy rains. Above the Grand River in central Missouri, the Missouri was even more treacherous. Pierre-Antoine Tabeau, who traded extensively with Missouri River Indians, wrote that "...it is only by unbelievable efforts and precautions that the Missouri can be navigated. The extreme rapidity of the water over a bottom none too firm makes navigation difficult as well as perilous."
Smallpox Island MO99
A monument that honors the 233 confederate prisoners of war and 16 civilians who died of the disease on the vanished island. The crack of Enfield muskets and the strains of "Dixie" were heard during a memorial to Confederate prisoners who died of smallpox on a Mississippi River island that washed away long ago. The occasion was the dedication of a stone monument across the river from Alton, Illinois. The site, only a few feet from a preserved piece of the old Alton Dam, [upper left of photo] is on-or near- what was known as Smallpox Island during the Civil War. Nowadays, the site is part of the Lincoln Shields Recreation Area, alongside a new Clark Bridge. Over the years, the island blended into the Missouri bank and eventually disappeared beneath Alton Lake. The island was used as quarantine for Confederates who contracted smallpox while imprisoned in Alton, which housed captured rebels during the most of the Civil War. The monument names 233 soldiers and 16 civilians, including one woman, who died on the island and were buried in its trench graves. The Army Corps of Engineers completed the monument. The memorial slipped easily into the $970 million budget for the new Melvin Price Lock and Dam 26 just below Alton. Federal law required the corps to commemorate historical sites in the path of its heavy work. Don Huber, Alton Township Supervisor said, "We need to pay proper respects for this unrecognized cemetery. The consequence of fighting for the South is secondary. They fought for a cause they thought was honorable, and they died a miserable death." The site of the old penitentiary is just uphill from the big ConAgra elevators in downtown Alton. The state closed it in 1860, but the Union Army reopened it on Feb.9,1862. The first case of smallpox among the prisoners was discovered eight months later. In August 1863, guards began rowing sick prisoners across the river to Sunflower Island, which soon earned its new name. The prison housed 11,764 Confederate prisoners, plus a few secessionist-sympathizing civilians and lawbreaking Union soldiers, during its three-year run as a POW camp. About 1,800 of them died and were buried in trenches at a cemetery on Rozier Street in North Alton. An unknown number were rowed to wooden shelters on Smallpox Island. Those who died were buried at the downstream end of the 14-acre island. In 1935, workers digging for the original Alton Dam hit a mass grave. A young reporter for the Alton Telegraph, went over to investigate and found skulls and other bones. His report under the headline, "Island Yields Skeletons of Prison Dead", ran on July 23, 1935. Flooded by Alton Lake, the site was once again largely forgotten.
Civil War - Boone's Lick Road Area MO98
BOONE'S LICK ROAD AREA Missouri achieved statehood in 1821 as a result of the famous "Missouri Compromise." It was decreed that Missouri be admitted as a slave state, but thereafter no state north of the 36° 30' North latitude in the Louisiana Territory would be permitted to harbor the institution." The Compromise left an uneasy equilibrium that kept the country together until the troubles in Kansas began in the 1850's. The first consequence of Missouri's admission as a slave state was a flood of immigration by people Southern heritage, from states such as Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia. Southerners, like Easterners, were on the move westward in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of these new Missourians located in the fertile Missouri River Valley; Some brought slaves, and many others who did not own slaves brought with them a tolerance for the slave culture. The area of central Missouri having the highest proportion of slave-holders came to be known as "Boonslick". The boundaries of this territory are subject to conjecture, then as now, but in this part of Missouri the boundary can be laid out along the deep valley of the Loutre River that exists 2½ miles west of here. This natural barrier, the existence of German settlements centered at Hermann, only 15 miles to the south, and of a railroad tying commerce to St. Louis, just to the east, would turn Danville into a no-man's land by the end of the Civil War. The Boonslick was isolated from the rest of the slave-holding South by the mountain region known as the Ozark plateau, where (as elsewhere in the South) the slave culture did not take root. Even as the 1860's arrived, transportation of goods and agriculture products in and out of the Boonslick depended inordinately on steamboats plying the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. St. Louis, by then a manufacturing center with a large proportion of European immigrant labor, stood squarely between the Boonslick and the rest of the slave-holding South. In 1861, the area we now know as "Little Dixie" - the Boonslick - was the northernmost pocket of Southern and slave-holding sympathies in all of the United States. By early 1862, the Confederacy lost any opportunity it ever had to control the Boonslick by force of arms, and regular Confederate armies were operating out of Arkansas. It was simple geography and some say a heavy-handed military adminstration of the population sympathetic to Southern views, and that brought about the fierce guerrilla civil forces warfare, practiced by both sides, that most people associate with Missouri's Civil War. All of these factors helped to bring about Danville's date with destiny, October 14, 1864.
Chippewa River and Menomonie Railway WI90
"Crooked, Rough and Muddy" During the middle 1870's, when the great logging era of northern Wisconsin was in its infancy, the Mississippi River Logging Company attempted to float pine logs down the Soft Maple and Potato creeks to the Chippewa River but the streams were too shallow and crooked. To solve the problem the first logging railroad in Wisconsin was constructed in 1875-76 from Potato Lake to the Big Bend of the Chippewa River with a later extension northward. The town road which can be seen to the immediate west of this site follows that railroad grade. Sleds pulled by horses carried the locomotive, cars, and tracks overland from Chippewa Falls. In July 1884, this railroad and a subsequent line constructed through the Blue Hills were formally organized as the Chippewa River and Menomonie Railway Company. Display # 41 - 50 of 128 |