River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  For the distance of 1000 miles above St. Louis, the shore of this river (and in many places the whole bed of the stream) are filled with snags and raft formed of trees of the largest size, which have been undermined by the falling banks and cast into the stream, their roots becoming fastened in the bottom of the river, with their tops floating on the surface of the water and pointing down the stream, forming the most frightful and discouraging prospect for the adventurous voyageur.

  Almost every island and sand-bar is covered with huge piles of these floating trees, and when the river is flooded, its surface is almost literally covered with floating raft and drift wood which bid positive defiance to keel-boats and steamers on their way up the river.

  With what propriety this “Hell of waters” might be denominated the “River Styx,” I will not undertake to decide; but nothing could be more appropriate or innocent than to call it the River of Sticks.

  George Catlin

  Illustrations of the Manners, Customs, and

  Condition of the North American Indians, 1841

  We Find the Fourth Missouri

  I HAD FEW FEARS greater than discovering that big portions of the upper Missouri would be impassable to Nikawa, forcing us into the canoe long before I planned to use it many miles farther upstream from Sioux City. Too much time in the small boat would cause us to miss the June rise of snowmelt and thereby doom our reaching the Pacific that year. For months I’d studied maps and aerial photographs, queried anyone who might know the river, continually played the draft of Nikawa against the shallows, speed and time against miles and obstructions, hope against ignorance. During my research I came across this chilling sentence from paddlewheel days: “Navigating the Missouri at low water is like putting a steamer on dry land and sending a boy ahead with a watering pot.”

  All that searching decided what types of boats would have the best chances of making the ascent in the brief rise the river would likely give us. The upper Missouri determined nearly everything on the voyage, from hulls to departure dates, because no other portion of our route would demand so much. That morning in Iowa, the time for answers arrived, and I was eager for resolution, animated by expectation, and fidgety from the possibility the river would entrap us, ensnare the entire venture, and send me home broken in ways I didn’t want to think about.

  Elevation Report: 808 feet above the Atlantic, twenty-seven hundred miles distant from it.

  I couldn’t find Billy Joe. Under a cloudless sky and light wind, the kind William Clark called a “jentle brease,” we set out north beyond the mouth of the Big Sioux River, the demarcation between Iowa and South Dakota, where the Missouri changes from almost due north to considerably more westward, a pleasing direction since we wanted the Pacific Ocean, not the Arctic. For the next many miles, if we could accomplish passage, we’d gain about one degree of longitude each day. Despite American geographers’ insistence that the hundredth meridian marks the beginning of the West, the country now looked different; although still four degrees east of that famous demarcation, we were certainly in the Near West, the land between Middle and Far, the country where Lewis and Clark killed their first bison, an animal they’d never before seen.

  The Upper Missouri, Sioux City to Pierre, 333 river miles

  For twenty miles the riprap and wing-dikes continued to make an easy channel, but just below Ponca State Park they ceased, and 752 miles above the Mississippi, the Missouri at last showed us its native face, a thing I’d both longed for and dreaded. I set Nikawa onto a sandy beach, and the crew took an ambulation while I asked a fisherman about the next thirty-five miles. He did his best to describe them as I translated his words into a charted sailing line through the strands of channels and backwaters. The problem would be not so much shoals but snags (trees caught in the bottom) and stumps (still rooted trunks). He said, “The Missouri eats props the way a baby does cookies—just chews them into a mess. Are you sure you don’t want to use your canoe?” The poor quality of the Corps chartbooks and its badly printed sets of aerial photos fifteen years out of date further hindered us, but all our maps were the best I’d been able to find.

  We went on a couple of miles to below the first real islands we’d seen on the Missouri and stopped at a ramp where we were to meet the Professor hauling the trailer and searching for Billy Joe. Our colleague had not found Conrad but did come up with another man who had run a tour boat in the navigable section and was willing to try to direct us through the invisible maze, so he came aboard, Pilotis made sandwiches, and we shoved off. Almost immediately we hit something that deformed a propeller. I was able to wrench it back into service; stainless-steel props can take harder hits, but once bent, you can’t straighten them without a forge. The guide dropped his sandwich, the chart twice, broke the clasp on the forward hatch, and laughed when he didn’t know the way. Still, he was a man trying for responsibility, and we liked him, but I repeatedly struggled between his recommendations and my reading of the river, and it concerned me that he readily gave in to my intuitions. We went forward slowly and had time to take in the new river reshaping itself according to ancient natural law, the fourth Missouri, the one hardly known because it endlessly remakes itself.

  Islands of low vegetation and clean-swept sandbars became prevalent as the river took up its braiding and, in places, gave us four or five channels to choose from. Because a boat bound downriver can be carried deeply into a dead-end chute and struggle to get out, I was glad for once that we were running against the current; when I chose a wrong channel, I could wheel the nose of Nikawa a few degrees to let the river catch her bow and turn us back downstream. The trick was to avoid driving her too hard into the sand.

  Off to port, below a ninety-degree bend, we passed Volcano Hill, about which William Clark wrote, “Those Bluffs has been lately on fire and is yet verry Hott.” For years geologists believed the formation was a genuine volcano that erupted whenever the Missouri dumped floodwater into subterranean caverns of molten rock, but in fact the heat came from carbonaceous shale oxidizing as it eroded. Nevertheless, if there’s a river in this country that can set fire to rock, it is the mysterious Missouri.

  Above the mouth of the Vermilion, our river became broad enough to slow the current to invisibility except where it crossed an extreme shallow. After a string of islands and bars, the water narrowed to turn sharply north at Mulberry Bend and then spread out again into a veritable lake only inches deep and splotched with snags and stumps, ugly and dangerous things, just the kind painters like Karl Bodmer depicted in early-nineteenth-century riverscapes. Up there, people sometimes call those broken trees rampikes, a name as nasty as their threat. The nearly mile-wide water lay like a sheet of imperceptible flow, and I had no idea what course to pursue. I looked at our guide who laughed again. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s your boat.”

  I did what one does on the Missouri: go slowly into the outside of the bends where the current is supposed to be, even though that out-curve was full of snags. I wove a deviant sailing line among them, then ran out of water. I said, How the hell can a sandbar run athwart the channel of an outside bend? Our depth finder was below the transom, a place of some protection from drift, but its readings were always of the bottom behind us. Pilotis went forward with the sounding pole, and the Photographer watched at the stern for the amount of sediment we stirred up. The place was too narrow to turn around in, so before I could come about, I had to back us down, props dangerously first. I tried another strand of dark water. There too we grounded out and had to rock the little dory to get her free. I essayed one more. Creepingly we went forward until I heard the hull grate into sand. Of sounds a riverman can encounter, that’s one of the most sickening. Nikawa refused to be wallowed free, so we took up the poles and shoved and pushed and cursed, and she slid off the bar. “What would we do if she had a vee-shaped hull?” the Photographer said. Pilotis: “Turn her into a duck blind and go home.”

  I must say here, in unabashed self-defense, that cursing is
part of a Missouri River pilot’s proper and honored method of ascent; to go upriver without it is simply unhistorical, probably unhealthy, and certainly unlikely, so much so that even devoted Southern Baptists and Missouri Synod Lutherans deem it less than a peccadillo.

  I went atop the pilothouse to try to discern a route, but all I could see was a big sprawl of wetness spiked with snags and glistening riffles, every place looking equally passable, even where we had shoaled out. I had no idea what to try next. Three faces turned to me expectantly, confident the man who had studied things so long would have the answer. I looked again, hoping for a hidden route, this time seeing not the river but a most evident truth. My months of speculation now had answer: Nikawa could not get through. I was overmatched, and the Pacific was too far away for that year. That was it. The trip was done for.

  As despair crawled up me, our guide came out with the lore that the east side of any river will always be deeper because of the rotation of the earth. I didn’t point out that we were on the east side, but I did say, This goddamn Missouri River doesn’t answer to the goddamn spin of the planet—it answers only to itsgoddamnself.

  Pilotis said, “Two choices, skipper. Try again, or go back downriver.” Standing atop the pilothouse, I yelled out into the wide empty space, I am not going the goddamn hell back down this goddamn bastard river! I jumped to the deck and went to the wheel, cranked Nikawa around hard, and rammed her across a narrow shoal and turned her violently upriver. I was losing the voyage, and I didn’t give a damn that I was failing to avoid irritation at the way not opening, a small thing compared to despondence. “The props! The props!” Pilotis begged as I jammed us toward the other side. “Steady, Captain! Please! Please!”

  The Photographer pointed upstream. “Look at that crazy monkey!” Coming down was a small boat, going fast. I hated his insane speed. Pilotis: “Maybe he’s not crazy Maybe he knows the way” Hail the bastard, I ordered, and Pilotis went to the bow and waved both arms, but the boat continued its course, then suddenly veered toward us. The Photographer put the binoculars on it. He said, “Somebody’s signaling. I think he’s warning us.” I’ll warn the goddamn hell out of him, I said.

  As the boat approached, our nominal guide announced, “That guy standing up—I know him.” Marvelous, I said, we’ll just have us a little old fuckin fish fry out here on this pissant of a goddamn river— who is that peckerwood anyway? “Billy Joe Conrad.” I threw the motors into neutral and coasted to a stop. Say again? “Hell yes, that’s Billy all right.”

  Said Pilotis to the Photographer, “I just can’t believe this. We’re in South Dakota, sitting alone on a sheet of nowhere water, the trip finished, and out of the blue comes the one man who knows the channel.” Then to me, “If you write about this, you better include affidavits from us that it actually happened.” I knew things did look a bit too miraculous, but all I said was, I do believe the way just opened.

  When the other boat pulled alongside, our guide and Billy Joe changed places. Under his arm was a twelve-pack of beer. He was forty years old, solidly and broadly built in the Siouan manner, a large belly, but not tall. His eyes were slightly reddened, I hoped only from a morning on the water, and his speech had the slight lilt of Indians of the West. He said, “I don’t like to run the river when it’s high like this—it’s tricky.” There’s good news, I said, which way? “Straight on for now,” and he opened a beer. He told us the Professor had stumbled onto him upstream and told him to keep an eye out for a little tugboat with green trim. I moved us forward slowly, and he said, “No, no. Speed her up, get her up out of the water.” She’s got a flat hull, I explained, she doesn’t really get up out of the water. “That’s okay,” Billy said, “give her some speed.” I pushed the throttles forward, and he said, “More.” The Missouri clicked underneath us in a way that could spell disaster.

  “Maybe you can teach us your secrets,” Pilotis said, and Billy answered, “Sure. You just got to look ahead, see what’s ahead.” He spoke that while staring toward the stern, watching where we’d been, and Pilotis said, “Is it good to look back at the river?” And Billy, “Why would you do that? You got to see ahead.” He worked on the beer, occasionally calling for a change in our course. He said, “I’m blind in one eye.” Blind? I reached for the throttles. You’ve got only one good eye? “It works. You’ve got two eyes, so you should see real good. You just got to learn to look ahead. Don’t slow down. You want a beer anybody?”

  Ripples lay dead ahead, and I asked, Which side? He turned to glance upstream. “That’s nothing, but when you cross them, get over against the bank, right against it,” and he turned again to face downriver. “You know, I’m not responsible if you hit something.” The Photographer asked what a certain agitation in the water meant, and Billy, not even turning, said, “That’s nothing.” We had a nasty hit this morning, I added, to alert him. “Yeah, you weren’t looking ahead good. Okay, now come on over right, not too far. If you don’t look ahead, it’s hard.” I said, I know—looking backward has made these last two thousand miles from the Atlantic hell. “Where?” Billy said. “I never been there. Okay, go back left and get against the bank so I can pick the daisies,” and he swigged. “I don’t like it when the river’s up.” If this is up, I said, I’d hate to see it down. Then I realized: Of course! The river is easier when it’s low, because that’s the time you can see the pools and through channels; everything else, the mirage river, is dry. Imagine a parlor filled with six feet of sand; take half away and then you can find yourself a chair.

  Pilotis asked, “How can you navigate looking backwards?” Billy said, “It’s the same river.” I told him of our friend, old Ed Miller, who once answered when I’d asked whether he returned the same way he’d gone to Colorado: “No, I came back on the other side of the road.” “Sure,” Billy said. “Get closer to the bank.”

  I asked him what his tribe was. “Santee. I’m part Santee. Santee and white.” His work was delivering diesel fuel to farmers in the field. “I used to box,” he said and turned forward for a glance. “Cross over now and don’t slow down. I couldn’t be beat. Nobody.”

  When we reached Goat Island, three and a half miles long in high water and even longer in low, I pulled up at a small tavern, a spot, to my surprise, I’d phoned the night before. The Professor was waiting to change places with the Photographer. Billy said, “I’ll get out here.” Whoa! I called, we’ve got twenty more miles of this. He shrugged. “Okay, but I don’t know the run up to Yankton so good. But, you want to try it, I’ll try it.” Off we went. “Faster! You got to get your boat up.” She’s as up as she gets, I said. “Sure.” Billy nodded. “You want a beer?” Not too thirsty right now, I said. “Anybody thirsty?” Billy whispered, “I’m ninety-nine percent drunk myself, but I’ll get you through. Come on over left. You know, I’m not responsible if we hit something up here.”

  Hey! I called to Pilotis and the Professor, help Billy with that beer—we’ll buy him some more when we get there! I motioned for them to drink a couple fast, and I took one and faked sipping it. “I’ll get you through,” Billy said. “See that ripple up there? That’s nothing. But that other one, stay off it.” Pilotis said, “They look the same to me. What’s the difference?” “Sure,” Billy said, “they’re different. Better believe it.”

  His voice became so soft I had trouble hearing him, and I began saying loud, pointless things to keep anyone from nodding off, and Pilotis helped with, “Tell us about your boxing.” Billy, slurring, almost inaudible, “I couldn’t be beat. Nobody. Cross over now.” Pilotis, fortissimo: “Boxing’s a great sport!” Billy: “Not if you get beat.” Then he turned forward and stood up so he could see past the mouth of the James, and he motioned me to stop. “I don’t know this up here so good, but I know that way there is stumps and that over there is rocks. Take your pick.” I stared too, then headed for stumps and said, This one we’ll do slow. Pilotis went to the bow to watch for trees. Finally Billy said, “Okay, we’re through it,” and I t
hrottled forward and the props banged something hard. Within sight of Yankton luck ran out. I raised the motors, and the Professor went aft to look and shouted that the blades were still sound, so we went on, past a shore lined with junked cars used for revetment; otherwise, Yankton showed well from the river. Four miles farther we reached Gavins Point Dam, and below the spillway was our man waving the orange flag to direct us to the ramp. When we had Nikawa on the trailer, I looked at Billy, and he said with pride, “I got you through.” You did indeed, I said, you’re one terrific guide, the best I ever saw. I pressed on him our thanks but he declined it, so I put it in his pocket and said, This isn’t for you—it’s for your dog. I gripped his hand. “Sure,” he said, “but you better remember to look ahead.”