BIG MUDDY

How the Missouri River Became a Great Force in the Advancement of Civilization. Jean Baptiste Trudeau was Father of Navigation on the Big Muddy. Primitive River Craft and the Pioneers Who Manned Them. Coming of the Missouri River Steamboats

By Dan R. Conway

(Originally printed in the Hysham Echo March 24, 1927)

“This is the first of a series of four articles having to do with Navigation on the Upper Missouri River”
(Editor’s note: due to the fact that the Hysham Echo pages now are smaller this series will probably continue until the summer.... I didn’t realize how long it was until I had already started on it. I find this subject very interesting, so feel it is worth the time and space and I hope you do to!)

From the earliest times in the history of the West, the head waters of the Missouri river have formed the objective point of explorers. To Sierre de La Verendrye and his sons belongs the credit for discovering the upper reaches of the stream. To Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark we owe its exploration and to them, in a measure, may belong the honor of opening up to commerce the combined navigable stretches of the Missouri, Yellowstone, Mississippi, Ohio and tributary rivers, giving to the Union over 16,000 miles of navigable waters.
There is little doubt that had the Missouri river been discovered before the Mississippi, the name of the former would have been applied to both streams, the Missouri being considered the main stream and the upper Mississippi the tributary. From the mouth of the three forks in Montana to the Missouri’s confluence with the Mississippi, is a distance of 2,547 miles, and from the three forks to the gulf of Mexico the Missouri-Mississippi has a length of 3,823 miles. The Missouri drains a watershed of 580,000 square miles.

Marquette and Joliet

When, about July 1, 1673, the Jesuit explorers, Marquette and Joliet, the first white men to descend the Mississippi, arrived at the mouth of the Missouri, they found it to be the same ugly, muddy, treacherous stream that it is today. They were astonished to find flowing in from the west, a torrent of yellow, muddy water which rushed furiously athwart the clear, blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and sweeping in its course, logs, branches and uprooted trees. Marquette in his journal says:

“I have seen nothing more dreadful. An accumulation of large and entire trees, branches and floating islands was issuing from the mouth of the river Pekistanoui with such impetuosity that we could not, without great danger, risk passing through it. *** Pekistanoui is a river of considerable size, coming from the northwest from a great distance.”

The Coureus Des Bois

It is not definitely known just when the first white men ascended the Missouri above its mouth, but as early as 1700 it was reported that there were not less than 100 coureurs des bois, or trappers, living among the different tribes along the Missouri river. The coureur de bois was a type of the earliest pioneer, now long since extinct. He was a French Canadian, sometimes a half-breed, and in his habits were blended the innocent simplicity of the fun-loving Frenchman and the wild traits and woodcraft of the Indian. Born in the woods, he was accustomed from childhood to the hardships and exposures of a wilderness life and he was invariably a skillful hunter and trapper. His free-and-easy-going manners, peaceable disposition and vivacity qualified him for association with the uncivilized Indian, whose customs he adopted, often even marrying into the tribe.

Route of the Explorers

For 200 years the history of the Missouri river has been the history of the country through which its flows, and the influence of this mighty stream upon the development of the United States as a world power cannot be overestimated. In the first place, the Missouri river made possible the exploring of the vast area between the Mississippi river and the pacific ocean by Lewis and Clark in 1804-05-06; by Major Zebulon Pike in 1805-06-07; and by Major Long in 1819-20.
Secondly, the introduction of steam navigation on the Missouri in 1829 and the use of that stream for passenger and freight traffic as far west as Fort Benton during the ensuing half-century, was one of the most important and far-reaching events in the history of the United States.

The general invasion and over-running of the immense region west of the Mississippi by English speaking Americans took place, roughly speaking, between the years 1829 and 1870 beginning with the establishment of a steam packet service between St. Louis and Fort Leavenworth in 1829. This was followed three years later by the arrival of the steamer Yellowstone at the mouth of the Yellowstone river in what is now Montana.

The New America

Then, within a period of 20 years, the people of the United States added to their domain and settled a quarter of a million square miles of territory known as the Oregon country of the northwest; took about 600,000 square miles of territory in the west and southwest from Mexico; established themselves along a thousand miles of the Pacific coast and overran the whole of the intervening region between the Pacific and the Mississippi in an unparalleled series of overland migrations.
Two million square miles of territory were penetrated and occupied as a result of these overland hegiras between 1840 and 1850. Both the travel movement and the area affected by it were, in respect of size, the most extensive and largest involved in any similar movement recorded within a like interval of human history.

The economic and political history of the world has been, and is destined to be, more deeply influenced by these overland travel-surges than by any other movements which have taken place elsewhere. Among existing conditions due, either directly or indirectly, to the American people’s sudden occupation of the region between the Mississippi and the Pacific ocean and bordering countries in the world’s affairs, the political expansion of the United States, the increase to this country of immigration from all other lands, a swifter industrial and economic development of this nation; its evolution as a world power, the creation of the Panama canal and the far-reaching effect of all these things upon the affairs of mankind.

The Trailblazers

The men who traveled up the Missouri river in keel boats and steamboats, breaking the trail for the pioneers who followed by boat and with ox-trains, can be seen by us in two characters. In one sense, they are seen as men and women like ourselves, engaged in a long and tedious journey undertaken for personal reasons of one kind and another and hopeful of improving their condition. In a broader sense, they do not seem as individuals, but as a strange and colossal spectacle moving in response to a world impulse which summoned them to play a mighty part in the affairs of men - and left them ignorant of what they had done, just as most of us are ignorant of what we collectively are doing today.

Navigation’s Evolution

On the dark bosom of the Missouri, the Indian paddled his canoe and his bull boat for centuries before the advent of the white man. Then came the French voyageur and his pirogue, his bateau, his keelboat, and his mackinaw boat, without which the fur trade, the principal commerce in that day, could not have attained its great proportions. At last came the steamboat, the most wonderful invention of the nineteenth century.

For half a century the Missouri river was the great thoroughfare from the East and the West, and on it floated the travel and commerce of the trans-Mississippi section. No one can now appreciate its importance in the past. Military posts were established that supplies by the river route might be easily obtained, and settlements were made with a view to transporting the products of the farm to the markets on its waters. Capitals of states were located on its banks, that they might be accessible.

The Cottonwood Canoe

It is interesting to study the primitive craft which plied the muddy waters of the Missouri, The ordinary canoe needs no description; yet, the canoe of the Missouri river was somewhat different from modern-day craft which bears that name. The birch-bark canoe, so often seen on the northern lakes and such as were used by the northeastern tribesmen, was not adapted to the Missouri, due to its frail construction; and besides, the birch tree, from which the bark was taken, is not found along the Missouri. This craft was usually the cottonwood canoe, or “dugout,” made from the log of a cottonwood fifteen to twenty-five feet long and three or four feet in diameter. The cottonwood grows along the river everywhere an such logs were easily procured. The usual size of the cottonwood canoe was 20 feet in length with a beam of three feet. It was made with a broadax and an adz, and the hull had a thickness of from three to four inches along the bottom of the boat. Such a canoe possessed the requisites of strength, lightness of draft and durability. Print this post