News From Iowa Water Trails Association; Lots of Scheduled or Rescheduled Events, Master River Stewards Class in Cedar River Watershed, Event Reports, & the Quizzes!

Our thoughts are with all of you, as you navigate your scheduled WT activities and events through the mood swings of Mother Nature. Kind of difficult to find mussels when the river is at flood stage, isn't it?

Our challenge is to keep folks informed without overloading their email in-boxes, so we're relying on a combination of occasional updates and lots of encouragement to check the event website or call ahead before traveling any great distance.

With your assistance, we'll do our best to encourage participation in your event, whether it's on schedule or rescheduled.

Let's hope that July is the month that Iowa's rivers return to normal levels, the birds eat all the gnats, and we can really enjoy our growing network of WTs.

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What Water Trail Means: Steamboats Arrive on the Mississippi "Water Trail"

"The first steamboat came down the Mississippi in 1811--in fact, it was swamped and almost sank in the backwash of the Great Shakes (editor--a series of earthquakes near New Madrid, one of which caused surface waves making the river appear to run upstream). By the end of that decade, around a dozen steamboats were on the river system. In the 1830s, the steamboat population was estimated to be around five hundred. By the time of the Civil War, it was four thousand.

"There was a simple explanation for the ascendancy of the steamboats: they could move upriver almost as easily as they did down. This gave them a decisive advantage over every other form of river transport. They rendered the old, ornate, impractical keelboats obsolete--no need for bushwhacking or cordelling when the steamboats could churn their way up against the strongest current. Keelboats disappeared from the river by the 1840s. By the 1850s, even the flatboat population was in decline. The only serious competition the steamboats had left was the great rafts and barges--they survived because the steamboats didn't have their bulk carrying capacity.

"The rise of the steamboats also wrecked the old river etiquette. The river had never been policed, but there had always been a logic to its traffic flow, one dictated by practical necessity: the downriver traffic ran in the channels, while the upriver traffic stuck to the shallows. The steamboats put an end to all that. They cut in and out of the channels no matter which direction they were traveling. Their pilots were notoriously indifferent to the chaos they could leave in their wake. The steamboats routinely swamped the smaller boats as they passed; often they ran right over them and blasted them to splinters. And if the boat people were injured or drowned, if their boats were destroyed and all their possessions were sunk, there was no recourse. It wasn't uncommon for the boat people, when they saw a steamboat approaching--particularly one with a reputation as a channel hog--to bring out their rifles and take shots at the pilothouse."

Excerpt from the book "Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild," by Lee Sandlin, Vintage Books, pp 114-115.