The rise and fall of log rafting on the river

Quoting from Conrad Kohrs autobiography "Then I went to St. Croix, Wisconsin, and got work running logs down the Mississippi to St. Louis. On account of getting on many sand bars the work was heavy. However, the trip was made and after a few days at St. Louis I returned to St. Croix by steam-boat and made another trip with a raft of lumber. I then went to St. Clair, about eighteen miles above Davenport, helped several rafts over the rapids and through the bridge at Davenport. This was the end of my river work and in the Fall I went to work in my brother-in-laws store." (Pages 5-6)

From the Quad Cities Times: By Roald Tweet
FOR ON THE RIVER | Monday, November 24, 2008 9:48 AM CST

When the first few white pine logs began floating down the Mississippi in the 1830s to sawmills at places such as Clinton, Davenport and Rock Island, the supply had seemed inexhaustable. It was the largest region for white pine in the world, covering 38 million acres — an area roughly the size of New England. But the demand for white pine turned out to be equally unlimited. It was easy to cut, and the wood was tall, straight, light and strong. It was considered the perfect wood for the new villages and farms springing up throughout the Midwest. The first logs that came downriver were free floating. Along the way to the mills, many were scattered by storms and floods, and were lost or ended up at the wrong mill. In 1843, a young riverman named Stephen B. Hanks — a cousin of Abraham Lincoln — devised a method of tying logs together into a loose raft 16 feet wide and between 400 and 600 feet long. The practice caught on. Soon, such rafts became a common sight on the river. Each raft was manned by a crew of about 20, who steered the raft with the use of long oars, or sweeps. During the trip downriver, workers lived aboard the raft, eating from a small cook shed at the stern.


On May 6, 1869, a new development changed rafting forever. Samuel R. Van Sant of the Van Sant Boat Yard at LeClaire, Iowa, gave Rock Island lumber baron Fred Weyerhaeuser a ride in his new sternwheel steamboat, which was specially designed with enough power to push large rafts. Weyerhaeuser was impressed. Within a few years, about 70 raftboats were taking ever-larger rafts of white pine down to the mills. Often, at the bow of the raft, a smaller steamboat was tied sideways to steer it. The new rafts, which were about 300 feet wide and up to 1,500 feet long, could carry as much as 10 million board feet of lumber. As a result, the Minnesota and Wisconsin forest began disappearing quickly. By the 1880s, as many as 500 rafts came downriver per month. By 1900, it was clear that the age of white pine was coming to an end. Weyerhaeuser moved from Rock Island to St. Paul, Minn., then out to Washington. On Nov. 18, 1905, the last log came upriver to the Weyerhaeuser Mill in Rock Island, where it closed for good. The white pine that remained grew smaller and smaller, until a single log no longer would support a raftsman’s weight. As the Ottumwa Belle came downriver in 1915 with the last raft, its captain stopped at Albany, Ill., to take aboard an honored guest — Hanks — who at the time was 94 years old. He had begun the raft industry in 1843, and participated in its end. Hanks took the wheel in the pilot house and steered the raft south to Davenport. As the last raft passed various villages and towns along the river, residents came down to the waterfront to witness the end of an era.


REFERENCE

1.Conrad Kohrs : an autobiography. by Conrad Kohrs. Publisher C.K. Warren, ©1977.

2. Quad Cities Times: The rise and fall of log rafting on the river: By Roald Tweet
FOR ON THE RIVER | Monday, November 24, 2008. Retrieved March 23, 2009 from http://www.qctimes.com/articles/2006/06/08/on_the_river/river_tales/doc448853d715f43490678993.txt