Chippewa River Reminder of Areas Development

     It has been many names, this river which drains 7,000,000 acres or 10,000 square miles know as the Chippewa Valley.
     The river, which starts innocently far up in Wisconsin and Upper Michigan almost on the shore of Lake Superior, eventually winds its way to the broad Mississippi.
     The Indians called it Otchipew and the white man would have many names for it before the name Chippewa was adopted many years ago.
     According to legend, near its headwaters in the higher elevations south of Lake Superior, at a point called "och-a-sua-sepe" by the Indians, lived Po-go-ne-ge-shik, a great Chippewa Indian chief.
     The river over the years sometimes flowed as easily and swiftly as a deer -- and at other times with the slowness and laziness of a turtle plodding along. In its distance it has a fall of 500 feet.
     It sometimes flowed for miles in a straight direction following contour of the land, only to dive and meander in some places, like Half Moon Lake in Eau Claire, and eventually carve a new bed.
     The river was narrow and fast in some channels and wide and lazy and placid at other points, with back swamps as it nears the Mississippi River.

River not the same

     Today the river is not the same. It has been held back by dams at many points to produce hydroelectric power. It flows past fertile farmland and numerous cities and communities along its banks at key locations.
     Conditions on the river were much different as recently as 200 years ago when only a few white men had seen this stream. It made its way across rock left by the last great glacier which covered the northern and eastern half of the state.
     After the glacier the great pine forest of the north developed along the valley of the river. There were also spots of oak, maple, birch and other varieties of trees.
     More than 15,000 Indians lived along its banks at one time or other when the Chippewa Indians moved in from the Lake Superior area and started to push the Sioux from a Woodland Indian into a people who moved westward to plains states.
     A geological study shows the valley served by the river extends about three miles into Michigan's Upper Peninsula, including a small tip of land adjacent to Wisconsin's Vilas County.

175 miles long

     Thus, an early Indian who wished to hike the length and breadth of the valley would have made a trip of 175 miles at the longest point, 82 miles wide and 20 miles at the narrowest (in Pepin County near the confluence with the Mississippi).
     All or parts of 20 counties are in the Chippewa Valley drainage system. They are Vilas, Iron, Ashland, Price, Bayfield, Sawyer, Washburn, Rusk, Taylor, Barron, Oneida, St. Croix, Polk, Pierce, Chippewa, Eau Claire, Dunn, Buffalo, Pepin and Clark.
     Other that Indians hunting and fishing on the river, the only sound heard 200 years ago was that of a building river in spring when scores of tributaries started to swell as the sun created small ribbons of water, building until the valley was full of water racing toward escape into the Mississippi.
     However, because of huge trees and vast cover, the great roaring waters did little damage to banks of the streams. That, too, was to change from the middle of the 19th century until the dawn of the 20th century.
     The Indian who lived in the valley did little to change the river. He merely fished its streams for bass, pickerel, bullheads and sunfish and its cool tributaries for trout.

Early Visitor

     It was still this way in 1680, when Michael Accau, Antoine Auguel and Louis Hennepin turned their canoes through Beef Slough at the confluence with the Mississippi and headed north. It was called the "River of the Bulls" by Hennepin.
     What he and his colleagues saw was a river, unharnessed and flowing freely, being fed by streams we know today as Hay Creek and the Red Cedar, Eau Galle, a couple of Yellow Rivers, the Eau Claire and its north and south forks, Duncan, O'Neil, Paint and scores of other creeks -- and other streams farther north like the Flambeau, Jump and Thornapple Rivers, and many creeks with names such as Beaver and Maple.
     Following Hennepin and his fellow Frenchmen were other white men who called the Chippewa "Rivers Des Dauteurs" and "Bon Secours."
     Jonathan Carver and his companions in 1767 saw the river and wrote of "great open lands two days up the river where the shorelines were lined by buffalo and elk.

Noted clearwater

     It was Carver who traveled up the river after heavy rains and noted its dark and murky color. However, when he reached the point where the Eau Claire River (once known as the Rufus) flowed into the Chippewa, he noted the water was much clearer and thus the early name "Clearwater" was given to the Eau Claire.
     After 1814 when Wisconsin Territory was established as part of the United States, it was inevitable the white man would soon be making his way from Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and from Canada.
     The cry for great timber that lined the banks of the river and its supporting streams was in demand as the word of the "inexhaustible pinery" made its way to a lumber hungry expanding nation.
     Already some logs were being cut and sent to Prairie du Chien for building purposes.
     The man with an axe and eye for tall timber was not far behind because the valley had ingredients necessary for a successful lumbering operation -- great pineries, a mode of transportation (the river), power potential and holding areas for logs.
     First man to lead the way for the lumberjack, Capt. Hardin Perkins, hired a James H. Lockwood who in 1822 built the first mill in the valley, on Wilson Creek on the then Monomonie River, later to be called the Red Cedar.
     The river suddenly turned from a free-spirited one moving as it wanted to, to one that was broken and harnessed by man.

More dams built

The Chippewa River has unleashed its fury on the City of Chippewa Falls many times in modern history. here Duncan Creek backs up to cause destruction during the flood of 1934. Flooding during the lumbering era was a source of much trouble, as about every 10 years high water washed out dams, mills and carried logs well past the mills. But each time man rebuilt.

     As loggers came, a number of dams were shoved across the river and its great pine forests were starting to fall. Logs were dragged to the river and its arteries to be stored until spring floods would carry them downstream to huge sawmills driven by power created by the new dams.
     Giant logjams were frequent on the river, keeping it from swirling along as it once had. Downstream, "ric-rac" dams were constructed to slow the flow so logs could be retrieved by owners and channeled to sawmills.
     Although logging operations had just begun to develop in 1847 at Eau Claire and at the Falls (Chippewa), the river responded to the new obstacles in its wake with the first of a number of major floods.
     One in 1847 knocked out the lumbering venture about six miles north of the Falls at Chippewa City, sending some 10,000 logs from the Yellow River into the mill house, the dam and then carried the logs and equipment from the mill far downstream.

Men more determined

Residents of Eau Claire await help from persons in a boat during the 1884 flood, one of the worst in the valley. Most damaging floods were in spring. However, that year high water followed heavy rains in September and whn dams at Bloomer went out on Duncan Creek, it set up a chain reaction all along the river. All Eau Claire bridges, with teh exception of one railroad bridge, were wiped out.

     However, men became more determined to control the river. New mills and dams were built and bigger logging operations began on the river. H.S. Allen of Menomonie built a new mill at the Falls at Chippewa and in the next eight years his mills turned out some of the finest lumber the world has known.
     No trees were cut that could not produce a 12-inch log 24 feet up from the stump. Great trees in whose midst the Indian hunted were now sent floating down the river. The logs chased out the trapping and fur-trading business developed by the French.
     In 1855 the river filled with water to an angry peak and again mills and dams were washed out. This time 70,000 logs broke free at the Falls and washed ashore along the course of the river.
     But, again the mills were rebuilt.
     In 1880 the river again rebelled against man; this time all the mills along the course were severely damaged and some 25,000,000 logs were freed to plunge down the river.
     The Chippewa Valley was hit by heavy rains that had swollen all its tributaries and on June 12 that year, the river rose 22 feet, sweeping through communities with great force.

Cities battered

     In Eau Claire, long logs came down in enormous quantities and were carried over the banks in all directions. Thousands were left from the main stream when the water receded. Buildings and bridges were carried downstream.
     The river flooded again in 1884 when heavy rain poured down in September. Bridges in Eau Claire were torn loose and the Grand Avenue Bridge went out when a loaded raft of lumber crashed into it. Only two railroad bridges remained on the second day.
     However, the C.M. and St. P. bridge above the dells went out the next day, carrying away its frame mingled with masses of debris, timber, houses, furniture, carcasses of animals and a heavy run of logs from boom further upstream.
     The flood was caused partially by dams giving out upstream, including one on Duncan Creek at Chippewa Falls and one further up at Bloomer.

Not to be underestimated

     The river was never kind to those who underestimated its turbulent might.
     In 1855 a small settlement was started on bottomlands in Pepin County about where Bear Creek flows into the river. About 30 buildings were standing when the flood of 1855 struck and washed out the upstart village. Settlers later moved to the site which is now Durand.
     It was another in a series of small communities which started to develop along the river in the late 1850's, many going up in key places where just a few years earlier tepees of the Chippewa and Sioux had stood.
     The Indian had packed his gear and traveled west of the Mississippi.
     The river had claimed lives of hundreds, from early explorers through raftsmen during the lumber era and scores of others who ventured onto it for many reasons.
     One of the most tragic mishaps happened July 7, 1905, when 74 log drivers left Chippewa Falls to break up a logjam near Holcombe dam, known then as Little Falls.
     Suddenly, swift current carried a boat with 16 men in it ruching downstream and only five survived. It has been called "The Greatest Calamity" in one single incident in the river's history.
     The river erupted periodically, but by 1900 it was to come under control of man. Still more dams were built and electric power was introduced in a few locales.
     A generator attached to a lineshaft of the large mill at the Falls provided a tiny bit of power and lighted an incandescent lamp May 18, 1882.
     People from miles around made their way to larger cities in the Valley -- Chippewa Falls, Eau Claire and Menomonie -- to see what man could produce by controlling swirling waters of the river.

Indian fades from scene

     As people were attracted by such events, the Indian was being pushed farther away from the river which had once been his lifeline.
     Great numbers of men made their way up the river in the fall, staying in cold log buildings throughout the harsh winters while clearing virgin pinery along the river and its tributaries.
     And with logs being cut by the thousands, there naturally had to be better ways to bring them to sawmills downriver.
     Log rafts were floated down the river but they encountered problems as they were too hard to move, particularly in low water. Progress was slow.
     Transportation on the river was the only way of coming upstream except for a few walking and wagon trails winding along the river, often pushed far off course by swamps and hilly areas.

Steamboats on the river

The Chippewa River transportred and stored millions of logs during the logging era. Here, thousands are retained by booms constructed at Dells Pond in Eau Claire. They were also sorted and redirected to various mills according to logging marks stamped on ends and sides of logs.

     The need to move lumbar rafts and for transportation marked the coming of the steamboats to the Chippewa. Most runs were from the mouth of the river above Lake Pepin to the mouth of the Red Cedar and to Eau Claire.
     A few steamers which drew only a few feet of water made it as far north as the rapids at the Falls. However, when Dells Dam was built at Eau Claire, steamer travel up the river beyond "Clearwater" was ended.
     Scores of steamboats were piloted up and down the river and men like Capt. Phil Scheckel were on the river more than 40 years, carefully excluding ever-treacherous sandbars and logs lurking along the bottom of the narrow channels.

Ferried Civil War volunteers

     Great guns of a divided nation rumbled in the east and south in the early 1860's. Although the river was not a witness to any bloody struggles of that conflict, it did carry hundreds of volunteers from the valley into this test of whether the nation would remain as one union.
     Steamers carried troops from marshalling areas in Eau Claire down the river to the Mississippi and farther south where some would battle at faraway places.
     With coming of the railroad and beginning of the end of the lumber era, the steamboat left the river before the start of the 20th century.

Pine forests disappear

     By the end of the 1890's, most of the pinery along the valley had disappeared and the great mill at the Falls had dropped from producing hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber to a few thousand in a year's time.
     The lumberjack followed the big lumbermen such as Weyerhaeuser to new finds in the Northwest section of the country.
     The logging era which had first brought men to the valley was over.
     While the river flowed on, those in the area were wondering what would happen next.
     In a few years, men and their families, with everything they owned strapped on a wagon pulled by oxen, started to make their way into the valley.
     However, for the first time men moved away from the river, seeking fertile farmland in higher ground left void of timber by the lumber barons. Pulling stumps and clearing land was hard work, but the men and women brought agriculture to the valley for the first time.
     A few head of cattle and rows of crops were all they produced in the first years of their endeavor.
     It wasn't long, however, before wheat and grain were being shipped out of the valley in large quantities. Some of the first grain produced in the area of Rusk in Dunn County was shipped to the cities on steamers picking it up where the Red Cedar flows into the Chippewa River.
     The river was free for a few years from the great logjams as only a few mills for grinding wheat were along the banks.
     But men with copper coils had their eye on the river and larger and more powerful dams, coupled with reservoirs, were developed across the river as men saw a new era and hydroelectricity production became the major use of the river.

The river has harnessed by men building large dams and power plants to supply energy to industry which sprang up in the valleys after the logging days. The plants also generated electricty supplied to area towns not on the river and later to farmers. This photograph of the Northern States Power Company plant at Chippewa Falls was taken before the Bridge Street bridge was constructed.

River quality change

     With the age of industrialization and more and more people along its banks, the once fresh, clear water of the river gradually became less appealing and in some areas people are now warned not to swim in it. Man polluted the river, his lifeline here in the first days.
     But then, too, the river itself for centuries had been the carrier of another pollutant, sediment, and to such a great extent dirt and silt from the entire valley was deposited at the mouth of the river for so long that the Mississippi backed up to create Lake Pepin
     Fortunately, some have realized what the river has meant and will mean in the future as men of vision are now engaged in ending misuse of the river to make it appealing to a new breed of visitor, one not seeking timber, fortune or power, but a few of those giant fish, the musky, to boast about during cold winters in Iowa, Illinois and Indiana.
     Waters of the river still may be used for another purpose as the valley moves into the final 25 years of the 20th century.
     With the proposed coming of nuclear power generating plants, waters of the river near the confluence of the Red Cedar will be used to cool the reactors and then channeled back into the river to make its way eventually to the sea.
     Thus the Chippewa, once called Otchipwe by the Indian, has gone the full circle. The history of the river is the history of man here.

--Arnie Hoffman

Extracted from the Eau Claire Leader Telegram
Special Publication, Our Story 'The Chippewa Valley and Beyond', published 1976
Used with permission.