Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  Winona’s founder built his city on sand. And the geological past, both ancient and relatively recent, explains the present. Not only is Winona built on sand, its sandbar foundation is in the river’s flood-plain. Unlike Red Wing, Wabasha, Minnesota City, Trempealeau, La Crosse, and Prairie du Chien, all of which are built on sand terraces that are higher than the floodplain, logical places for both prehistoric and historic inhabitants to build their settlements, Winona is right down at river level. Flooding probably wasn’t a big problem for the Dakota who had long had a prosperous village on the sandbar, as their dwellings were easy enough to move when floodwaters threatened. But European-style buildings are less portable.

  In 1851, right after the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota opened Minnesota for development, Orin Smith, a longtime steamboat captain, quickly claimed the land and platted the town. He must have known that a town on the Mississippi in the new territory would become a center of commerce, which it did; but he was a river man and should also have realized that flooding would be a big problem for a city built on a floodplain.

  Winona now has eleven miles of levees to protect it from the Mississippi’s rampages, and massive pumps remove water that does manage to get in. But back in April of 1965, when the Upper Mississippi was building up to its biggest deluge in collective local memory, the city had just started constructing those levee walls. They knew the flood was coming. As Fremling writes: “For almost a month, the city was like a war zone, with trucks, heavy machinery, and hundreds of people working twenty-four hours a day. Volunteers and contractors saved the city … by building a temporary levee over twenty feet high.” Busloads of high school students from towns as far away as Rochester, Minnesota, came to help fill and pile sandbags. The river crested at 20.77 feet.

  Winona will be paying for Orrin Smith’s city planning for a long time.

  Of course the Mississippi levee dilemma is much larger than just Winona. Hydrologists have documented that the more levees that are built along the Mississippi, the higher the river will rise during a flood, ever more tightly constricted as it will be by levee walls that separate the floodwater from the floodplain, which is where the river wants to go and needs to go. But because levees create a false sense of security about building on the floodplain, more building occurs on the Mississippi River floodplain every year, particularly down around St. Louis. The federal government has encouraged this unwise practice by subsidizing levee construction and now, when the levees fail, by bailing out the communities with taxpayer-supported relief.

  And it’s not just cities that build levees. Bottomland has rich soil, and floodplain farmers protect their fields with levees. Not so much on the Upper Mississippi, however. According to the United States Geological Survey, only 3 percent of the relatively narrow floodplain along Upper Mississippi River Navigational Pools 1–13, the reach that extends from Minneapolis to Clinton, Iowa, is currently behind agricultural levees. This is small potatoes compared with the reach between Clinton, Iowa, and St. Louis, where 53 percent of the agricultural floodplain is behind levees, and the reach downstream of the confluence with the Ohio, where up to 82 percent of the floodplain is behind agricultural levees. The difference here along the Upper Mississippi River is that the great majority of bottomlands in the Refuge are publicly owned wildlife areas, where new levees will not be built.

  In the early days of attempting to manage the river, the engineers on the Corps River Commission held firm to the idea that levees were the only answer to flood protection. In 1883, Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi: “One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver— not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.” It has taken over a hundred years for the River Commission to admit defeat, but Twain would probably be gratified to learn that the Corps is finally wising up and slowly rethinking the “levees only” policy.

  As we float around the bend at the head of Latsch Island, I look back into the dead end slough on the right, where at least a dozen empty barges are moored along the shore. From this angle, I glimpse the new museum that has come to Winona, the Minnesota Maritime Art Museum. Their online newsletter just advertised a new exhibit titled The Art of the Canoe, so we stopped there on the drive to Faribault, and found an intriguing collection of canoes, mostly historic. But I was entranced with what the museum’s designers had done with the site, transforming a tired and ugly industrial waterfront with a vast swath of flowering native prairie plants that blankets the land around the new Prairie-style building. Along the waterfront levee wall, a feature that in the site’s former life projected the ugly nature of the urban riverbank, the designers have transformed the scene by the simple act of adding an attractive iron railing and tables and chairs that face and embrace the river. It’s almost as if the long rows of rusting, empty barges across the backwater, formerly the grimy reality of the river scene, are now a serendipitous floating art installation.

  Dead ahead, the road between Minnesota and Wisconsin crosses the main channel on a cantilever through-truss bridge that soars over a small sandy beach on Latsch Island, where we stop for lunch. Refueled, and recalling the suggestion of our Winona friend Sue, we decide to visit the other side of the island, Latsch’s alter ego. To get there, we will paddle upstream on the channel that flows between the island and the woods of Wisconsin.

  And around the tip of the island’s tail is another art installation. A continuous string of houseboats, or boathouses as Latsch Islanders call them, one hundred quirky residences, all moored along the island’s back channel. A few are simply boathouses, that is, houses for boats. But I discovered that about a quarter of them are fulltime dwellings for people. Several are two stories high. Many are gussied up with sundecks, container gardens, clotheslines, and solar panels. One sports a roof made of sheet metal pieces arranged into a crude patchwork resembling a geodesic dome. The houses float on wooden platforms built over dozens of fifty-gallon barrels. Though they have no electricity, no cable television, no internet, and no plumbing, they do have a neighborhood alliance— the Winona Boathouse Association. It looks like a good life.

  Cruising along the Wisconsin shore, where a berm topped with railroad tracks forms another riverbank dike, we come to Trempealeau Mountain, the cone-shaped, forested knob that stands haughtily aloof from the nearest community of bluffs. Before we began our journey, I read various accounts about traveling the Upper Mississippi in centuries past. One writer who paid particular attention to Trempealeau Mountain was George Featherstonhaugh (Brits pronounce it “Fanshaw”), who in 1835, just a few years before Nicollet began his mapping expeditions, journeyed down the Wisconsin, up the Mississippi, and up the Minnesota.

  In A Canoe Voyage Up the Minnay Sotor, Featherstonhaugh relates his encounter with this puzzling geographical anomaly and his subsequent conversation with the Yankton Sioux with whom he shared supper:

  At 2 p.m. we reached Trombalo, and as this rock had attracted a good deal of notice, I determined to examine it carefully. It is not an island, as it has been supposed to be, but is an outlier of the sandstone and limestone bluffs, running nearly a mile and a half east and west, being separated from the west bank of the Mississippi, and not from the east bank, as some travellers have supposed … From this outlier, or part of the bluff; thus standing as it were in the water the early French travellers called it “La Montagne qui trempe à l’Eau,” which is now corrupted to Trombalo … I then asked them the name of the mountain at the base of which we were, and they answered “Minnay Chon ka hah,”—literally, as I afterwards found, “Bluff in the Water,”—than which nothing could be more descriptive … and Ompaytoo Wakee, or Daylight, brother to Wabeshaw, a celebrated chief … (said that) Minnay Chon ka hah, the ou
tlier we had visited in the afternoon, was in fact, he said, a sort of island, as there was an obscure passage round it … (and) it was the custom of his band to go to the top of Minnay Chon ka hah, at the season for hunting wild geese, and that they made offerings to Mangwah Wakon (“wild goose god”), that he might be favourable to them in their hunting.

  As Ompaytoo told Featherstonhaugh, there is water behind the mountain. When Nicollet passed this way, the peripatetic Frenchman referred to the Trempealeau as Mountain Island River and inscribed this name on his map, interestingly without any mention of the river’s French appellation.

  But the open water of those days is no more. According to Fremling, railroad construction in the early twentieth century diverted the Trempealeau River to flow between the outlier and the bluffs of Perrot State Park, and the railroad built a berm along the channel. The Trempealeau River’s heavy sediment load subsequently filled in what is still euphemistically called Trempealeau Bay, creating a wetland that is now a wildlife refuge. And the mountain is no longer an island.

  The Trempealeau, which according to the Wisconsin DNR has the highest phosphorus levels of any river in Wisconsin, delivers a lot of unwanted nutrients with its sediment, though the approximately three thousand acres of wetlands at the confluence help recycle the nutrients rather than send them all down the Mississippi. “Most wetlands only temporarily detain phosphorus; plants take it up, but then release it when they die. Any permanent ‘removal’ from the river isn’t sustainable, as it happens through sedimentation, which will eventually fill up the wetland. Wetlands can, however, permanently remove nitrogen by denitrification, which sends it back to the atmosphere as N2 gas,” explained Matt Diebel, Wisconsin DNR aquatic ecologist. “Denitrification” is the breakdown by anaerobic bacteria of nitrates in the sediment into molecular nitrogen.

  This wetland ecosystem took a big hit during the flood of April 1965, when the berm of the Burlington & Green Bay Railroad that separates the wetland from the river gave way. The entire wetland was inundated and the river dropped eight inches. In his 1994 article in Big River magazine, Rob Drieslein recalls the aftermath of the break: “The flooded waters overrunning the area had deposited tons of thick, muddy silt into the backwater area. The silt provides a poor substrate for aquatic vegetation, an important food source for wildlife. Refuge personnel blamed the poor substrate, in part, for the failed attempts to establish wild celery in the refuge during the mid-1980s.” According to Drieslein, some residents still believe that certain individuals used dynamite to break the berm and save Winona from flooding, but this has never been proven.

  Three thousand acres of savanna and bottomland forest, the balance of Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge’s acreage, shelter both nesting and migrating birds, thousands of ducks, geese, and swans. The Tremp’s confluence is a lovely place, embraced as it is by the refuge and by Perrot State Park and the bluffs. Several hiking trails in the park lead to the top of Brady’s Bluff. From this 520-foot bluff, which looks down on Trempealeau Mountain, the hiker looks across the confluence to the outlier and beyond, if the day is clear, up the vast river valley as far as Winona.

  Next stop is the town of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, and the eponymous hotel where we will spend the night. We land at the Sunset Bay Marina, where a young man charges us twenty-two dollars to store the canoe for the night, just sixteen cents less than the price of our room at the Alma Hotel, and we walk to the Trempealeau Hotel, a beautiful old establishment a block from the river where an upstairs room with a shared bath costs only thirty-five dollars. The town is hopping tonight, couples strolling, children running, music pouring out of bars, the band warming up at the hotel, the dining room packed. Down by the river, another train hurtles past, its powerful deep-throated voice vibrating everything in town.

  After dining on walnut burgers, we walk to the top of the hill to find cell phone reception. Bob calls niece Corrie, who lives in La Crosse, to talk about the camera. She will buy us a new one at Best Buy and her husband Luke will meet us at the La Crosse Marina tomorrow for the handoff.

  I call Greg, who sounds amused by our soft new style of canoe travel. He calls back after a few moments to say that he has found us a riverside motel for tomorrow night in Genoa, Wisconsin, only thirty-five miles downstream.

  “She said to call an hour ahead to let them know when you’ll arrive,” he adds.

  Thirty-nine miles today. Dance music rocks the barroom downstairs, another freight rattles past down by the river, and the canoe still gently rocks beneath me as I fall asleep.

  Of Barges and Steamboats

  June the thirtieth. At dawn, a cold heavy fog and its accompanying sense of mystery drench the river. Alive with the possibilities of the day, we slide our canoe into the current downstream of Lock & Dam 6. We know that by afternoon boredom will have set in and all the trees will look alike, but for now the river runs through our veins. Once again, we’re the only boat on the river, yet we’re not alone. Herons and egrets fish the shallows and eagles soar above. The eyes of a big snapping turtle watch us, disappearing swiftly and silently as we get too close.

  We follow the channel and the channel follows the Minnesota shore, where a stately line of half-dome bluffs rises over five hundred feet above the river, a precipitously steep wooded array of cliffs, faced in places with rocky outcrops of St. Peter sandstone or of the Prairie du Chien Formation, the rocky layers of ancient seabed that built these bluffs. Across the Mississippi in Wisconsin, the top of a ghostly pointed bluff, twin brother to Trempealeau Mountain, appears to float on the surface of the low-lying mist. We’re in the embrace of the bluffs now and I feel the visual power of this familiar landscape in a way that only happens for me on the river. Viewing the river valley from a bridge or an overlook is a snapshot, a static moment. Floating the river is a movie. It’s a subtle but telling difference. As we travel down this wide, deep valley, the ebb and flow of shape and form, the ever-evolving view, slide past my eyes in a visual narrative, and the grandeur of the Upper Mississippi builds.

  I find a kindred sense in the accounts of early explorers, who at first believed the lines of bluffs were mountain ranges, and in the many accounts of writers who followed. In Letters and Notes, George Catlin wrote, “From day to day, the eye is riveted in listless, tireless admiration, upon the thousand bluffs which tower in majesty above the river on either side, and alternate as the river bends, into countless fascinating forms.”

  The paddler finds that the morning fog shapes a different image than does the late afternoon sun. On every passage down the river, the angle of the light, the hues and textures of water and land change. When Catlin painted the familiar forms of the Mississippi bluffs, many were treeless; today, after centuries of wildfire suppression, most are thickly forested. I recall historic accounts and art as we float, and the images blur into one. We’re traveling down a river valley peopled by the ghosts of paddlers past.

  But the river is quite real, and very soon, it seems, Pool 7 comes to an end. As we pass Dresbach Island, both the speedboat traffic and our ever-present tailwind begin to rise. A fight ensues between the wakes and the waves and we’re caught in the middle of the muddle. We paddle cautiously into Lock & Dam 7 through water that our paddling friend Warren would call “squirrely,” a chaos of current, cross-chopped waves, and boat wakes bouncing off the concrete walls that guide the river craft into the lock’s inner sanctum.

  From within, I look downstream, over top of the lock gates, all the way to the bridge that carries Interstate 90, the bridge I have crossed so many times in my life. I’m about to see it from underneath for the first time. Already I sense how disconnected the bridge is from the river, how foreign its linear shape and concrete materials are in this curvaceous riverine world. When we cross the same bridge in our car, concrete side-walls prevent us from looking down to the river that flows directly below us; only distant water is visible.

  My perfect bridge is one built of wood or stone, with see-through railings that a
fford a clear view of the river, a tacit acknowledgement that the river should be seen, has beauty and importance. A bridge with solid sidewalls one cannot see through is a statement that what lies below is not worth looking at, that all that matters is crossing the river. In the same way, locking through forces us to encounter the river as a human construct rather than a natural flow of water over land.

  Beyond the bridge, a glimpse of a distant cluster of moored houseboats—a house on the water has definite allure—alongside scattered sandbar encampments—even better—returns me to an intimate relationship with the river. We’re at the upstream end of the long river town of La Crosse and also at the upstream end of an elaborate riverine highway interchange. The Black and the La Crosse both flow into the Mississippi from Wisconsin at this sprawling confluence, and the Root River joins the Mississippi from Minnesota at the downstream end of town.

  On his 1843 map, Nicollet called the Black by its Winnebago name: the Sappah, which means Black. He drew a three-pronged set of outlets for the river, labeling them, in downstream order, Old Mouth, Broken Gun Chanl, and New Mouth, which was the widest. In his 1853 Wisconsin Gazetteer, John W. Hunt also refers to the Broken Gun Channel as the middle outlet of the Black River; I have searched for but never found an account of the curious naming of the Broken Gun Channel. Though historic maps are sometimes simplified and thus deceptive, it seems that the delta of the Black now has a more complex network of channels. One of these, known as Tank Creek, is what is known as a distributary, the mirror image of a tributary. Like the Atchafalaya River that departs from the Mississippi at Simmesport, Louisiana, to carve its own route to the Gulf, Tank Creek departs the Black to follow its own path to the Mississippi.