Durand man recalls those steamboat days

     It's more than 75 years since a steamboat has been on a regular run on the Chippewa River. Most persons can't imagine what a steamboat would look like on the river.
     However, Joe Schlumpf, 89, lifelong Durand resident, recalls when smoke billowing from wood-burning steam engines was a common sight.
     Schlumpf, a retired sheet metal worker, said he can best remember the old jimmy post used to get the steamers off the sand bars which often plagued them.
     "They'd run into those sand bars," the low-talking Schlumpf said, "and drive a post in the ground, run a rope out to it and pull themselves off of it.
     "I can remember the crewmen jumping off the boat and putting down the post."
     Schlumpf, an avid fisherman and trapper, knows the river bottoms in this part of Pepin County as well as anyone else.
     "One of those steamers had a birch bark or a dug-out canoe on it. It was about 10-foot long. We all wanted to take a ride in it.
     "One day it must have broken loose and we found it. It was pretty tough to stay right side up in it," he added.
     Then a youngster, Schlumpf remembers things that make impressions on children, like when rafts of lumber, pushed by the streamers would hit some of those piles. Boards would go flying in all directions and at times members of the crew with them.
      "They'd hire folks from around to come and pick up the loose boards." Schlumpf said.
     The Durand native's father, August, was indirectly connected with the steamboats. he used to bake bread for them. "That was before my time, though," Schlumpf added.
      Schlumpf says he remembers well the time the "Phil Scheckel" had a race with the "Good Luck", a piledriver owned by the Mississippi Logging Co.
     "The 'Good Luck' beat the 'Phil Scheckel' badly. It was more of a flatbed boat and had more power needed to drive the piles."
     Schlumpf remembers the "Phil Scheckel" pushing lumber rafts down the river toward Read's Landing at the mouth of the Chippewa. "It ran every day when I was a youngster. It was the last one on the river that I know of," he said.
     Schlumpf noted that the river has changed a lot because of the dams upstream. "It's bad business right now. I don't think I've ever seen it as low as it gets sometimes now.

-- Arnie Hoffman

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