The Twainian Volume 16 Number 1 (1957)
RAFTING ON THE MISSISSIPPI IN EARLY DAYS OF MARK
(Hannibal Built from Rafted Lumber)
By Mrs. Oliver Howard
Hannibal was founded by a keelboat operator, on land secured in a swap for a New Madrid Earthquake Claim, and its first settlers were cabin dwellers. But the town’s frame buildings and fortunes were built through the physical efforts of a bunch of rip-roaring sons of perdition—the river raftsmen.
Rafted lumber gave the town its start, and literally built it into a trading center in the 1840's. Prior to the lumber trade, Hannibal was just another little settlement, competing with others for supremacy.
The raftsmen who brought lumber and riches to Hannibal were the roughest, toughest and most profane men of the empire-building period. They worked hard, lived recklessly, and died suddenly or in poverty. The lumber dealers, boat-builders and wagon-makers who used their lumber, amassed fortunes and built mansions in the hills.
If you have an old house, you may find two-inch holes in the joists, rafters or frame. Our basement ceiling, which used to be the joists of the house before we added the basement, is full of such holes. These holes are excellent for storing ball bats, threading extension cords, or hiding matches and keys from the children. That lumber is par excellent Wisconsin pine, cut from virgin stands of timber which will never again be found in America. The holes prove that it is rafted lumber. The sawlogs were pegged together through those holes, to form the raft.
The Mississippi floods of 1836, which washed out Marion City upstream, also took out a sandbar at the mouth of Bear Creek, which had ruined Hannibal as a river landing. Now a landing was established and Hannibal became a point for the landing of lumber rafts and rivercraft. Great logs from the rafts lay in vast drying yards all along Bear Creek. When dried, the logs were ready to be worked up for the lumber yards which sprang up in the community.
Several steam sawmills were erected along the river front. Boatyards and wagon factories used the finished lumber. Frame homes and business houses were built. Stockyards, flour mills and merchants lined the levee, for this was the day of river shipping. Suddenly, Hannibal was not the frontier—it was a metropolis with the world at both ends of the muddy stream which flowed by the front door. True, it was a small metropolis, but now its residents thought of more than daily needs. Industry was on the way.
Rafting lumber was rough work from start to finish. To build a lumber raft, logs were placed end to end, to form stringers. These stringers were laid side by side to form the width of the raft. In adding stringers, logs of different lengths must lie side by side, to prevent even breaks across the raft. If logs of equal lengths were side by side, the raft popped apart when rounding a bend in the river. At best, the strength of the raft was unpredictable. Often the logs came loose and spread out over the current like fallen leaves.
Birch and burr-oak were needed to build the raft. Holes were bored in the pine logs, birch limbs were laid across to bind the stringers and logs together. A withe of split burr-oak was bent over the birch limb, like a staple, and the ends of the withe were wedged into the two-inch round holes with square pegs.
At the end of each string of saw-logs a plank sweep oar was mounted to the butt of a young tree. A ten-string raft thus had 10 oars at each end, and required 20 raftsmen. A 15-string raft had 15-oars at each end.
It must be remembered that the logs came from giant trees. A raft of 15 strings sometimes had an area of three acres, and looked like a plowed field afloat. There was plenty of room for the 30 raftsmen, but the transportation lacked the niceties of deluxe travel.
Rafting lumber was dangerous. The crew spent more time in the river than they did on the craft. Protected by the clothes on their backs, they warmed and dried themselves by fires along the banks at night, or by fires built in sandboxes on a waist-high pile of cribs on the raft. They ate rough food, supplemented by the game and fish they bagged en route, and drank forty-rod or tanglefoot whiskey.
These men had to get their cumbersome craft from Wisconsin to the drying yards of Hannibal, St. Louis or other towns as distant as New Orleans. They could take no permanent pride in the craft, for it was a transient thing, to be ripped apart at their destination, leaving them to make their way back upstream.
With this water-logged conveyance, they had to run rapids, navigate among snags and sandbars. Sometimes the raft had to be taken apart and rebuilt farther downstream. Often, it took itself apart, and the raftsmen swam around to shove the logs to the banks.
As industry grew in the north, sawed lumber was rafted down on top of the sawlogs, giving the crew a cargo to cope with. This lumber was loaded in tied sections, called cribs. Several cribs were bound together in a “rapids piece.” Usually these rapids pieces could be unloaded and floated through rapids or shoved through shallow points. But occasionally the cargo had to be torn down into cribs and carried across sandbars. When stuck on an island, the raft had to be torn apart, logs floated around, retied and reloaded.
Life on the raft was elementary. When the stream ran wide and the channel deep, the crew had nothing to do but steer. Then they danced barefoot on the raft, fished from it, wrestled, and told yarns. Tradition says that every time a raftsman told the truth his ears fell off. Few rivermen lacked ears.
Household chores were few. The cookstove was mounted in a sandbox on the cribs near the center of the raft. On windy days, a rough screen was put up to protect the fire. There were a few iron pots, tin plates and cups—nothing fancy, for the pantryware might be dumped and sink to the bottom any time.
Most raft crews had no special cook. Some unwilling member was forced to cook, until another volunteered in self-defense. If anyone criticized the cooking, he got the job. A reluctant cook once dumped salt in the flapjacks, and waited for the criticism which would end his stint. The first man to spear a mouthful uttered a colorful oath and said, “These here d—— flapjacks are saltier than h——.” Then he remembered the rule and hastily bowed to the cook, “but they sure are fine eating.”
Come nightfall, the raftsmen tied the raft to a tree along the banks. If there was a settlement near, the raftsmen went to town. There they drank a dozen rounds of forty-rod and ended with a free for all. Town people feared raftsmen. Families hid their daughters and their silverware when a raft tied up by the town. Folks considered rafting to be a mere sideline of the raftsmen— seemingly their real business was mischief, mayhem and murder.
Saloon keepers did a fine business, but too often the raftsmen wrecked the place before they left. One dramshop keeper agreed to trade a raftsman a drink of whiskey for a bundle of laths. Since the place was small, he asked the customer to put the bundle outside the back door. Pretty soon another raftsman entered with a bundle of laths, made a similar deal, and was asked to stack the laths out back. As the evening progressed, more men from the raft came, and the owner dreamed of having enough laths to finish his house. After the raft moved on at dawn, the busy man looked outside. There stood one bundle of laths. He had been trading for the same bundle all night. (And precious lucky he was that they left him that.)
A raft boss got a late start downstream one year, with a 15-string raft and crew. Near the head of the river, he stopped and bought several jugs of whiskey. He buried them at the base of a tree along the bank, in readiness to treat his crew when they made their way home the next spring. After a winter in New Orleans, they made their way north, their $12.50 a month wages rapidly dwindling.
The boss congratulated himself on his forethought. But when he dug for the treat, he was disappointed. The contents had frozen and broken the jugs.
He raged into the settlement, ready to murder the man who sold him whiskey so weak it froze. The terrified barkeep whimpered, “That was summer whiskey I sold you. I didn’t know you wanted frost-proofed winter whiskey!”
As railroads were built, rafting lumber was gradually abandoned. It would be difficult to find enough men nowadays physically able and willing to crew a raft of lumber. The raftsmen who survived drifted into other work.
It was small loss to those who built fortunes and towns from the sweat of the raftman’s work. These citizens sought to bring culture and charm to their river towns, and so were glad when the uncouth raftsmen disappeared from the American scene.