Keelboats once king of river

     One of the greatest problems facing western frontiersmen in the nineteenth century was moving supplies and people to remote areas by primitive methods.
     The lumber industry in the lower Chippewa Valley illustrates this problem very well. As lumbermen entered the Valley beginning in the early 1820s, they relied almost exclusively on river travel, using craft such as the Durham, Mackinaw, canoe, piroque or dugout which had been used by fur traders.
     The need to move heavy machinery and other supplies, also forced lumbermen to utilize the keelboat which was not unknown to fur traders on lower portions of tributaries of the Upper Mississippi.

Round bottomed

     The keelboat on the Chippewa was a round bottomed boat - a modification of the flatboat - which was from 30 to 80 feet long and from eight to 12 feet wide. This craft was four to five feet high on the sides and pointed at both bow and stern. On each side of the entire length were running boards with cleats about two feet wide. The cargo occupied the center and was covered by a canvas awning during bad weather.
     Keelboatmen employed three methods of propelling the boat up the rather difficult waters of the Chippewa and its tributary the Red Cedar.
      First, they pulled the boat from the shore with a long rope or cordelle, but the heavy brush and timer along the banks did not permit the development of a good towpath. This was usually calling cordelling.
     The second method was called warping. By using a skiff, a boatman tied a cordelle, perhaps one-thousand feet long, to a rock or tree upstream, and then by pulling with the hands or using a windlass to draw in the cordelle, the crew moved the boat slowly upriver. These two ways were restricted to very shallow waters, especially rapids with their rocky bottoms, and to very deep waters, two areas in which poling did not work well.
     The primary method of moving the keelboat was poling. Twelve to 20 men divided into two equal groups used poles 18 to 20 feet long with a knob or crotch-like top which fitted the shoulder and at the opposite end, an iron shoe which rested on the bottom of the river. As men walked to the stern, the boat inched ahead. When each man reached the end of the running boards, he jumped aside and returned to the bow and began again.

Arduous work

     Poling a heavily-laden keelboat was arduous work. At times keelboatmen with their shoulders against the poles and pushing as hard as possible would bend so low they could almost touch the running boards with their hands. On a relatively narrow river like the Chippewa, the use of sails which was popular on many large western rivers was not practical. A man in the bow and one in the stern, the latter with a long oar, were pilot and steersman respectively.

Describe cargo

     One boat in 1842 carried 100 barrels of pork, 50 barrels of flour, besides sugar, coffee, tea, syrup, and other dry goods. The value of this cargo was $2,000. Returning raftsmen who had deposited their lumber rafts at Reed's Landing opposite the mouth of the Chippewa often boarded a keelboat. In fact, during this early period of lumbering, tow raft crews, each having eight men and a pilot, made an adequate crew for the boat. Keelboats entered the waters of the Chippewa after leaving the "Rockes," site of present-day Wabasha, Nelson's Landing, or the more widely used Reed's Landing.
     The lower end of the river was studded with sand bars and islands, the most important of which was the circular island about one mile from the mouth known as the Flower Pot which gave a lot of trouble, especially during low water. When the keelboats reached the mouth of the Red Cedar, some made their way up that river to the sawmills constructed by James Lockwood, Joseph Rolette, and others. The main traffic, however, made its way past present-day Meridean to mills at the mouth of the Eau Claire.

Lower Dalles tough

     The most difficult section of the rive was yet to come. The Lower Dalles on the Chippewa, where Dells Dam was later built, was a real problem, much more than the Upper Dalles, four miles below the Falls on the Chippewa. Keelboats stopped naturally at the Falls, where Hercules L. Dousman of Prairie du Chien and others completed a good sized mill which began sawing logs in 1840.
     There is some evidence that a keelboat, after two days of very hard work on the part of the crew, finally made it over the Falls in 1842. The trip from the mouth of the Chippewa to the Red Cedar might take one and one-half days from the Red Cedar to the Falls another two and one-half days, though the entire trip might require as 10 days.
     The downstream trip was a much different story. Andrew Davis, who worked on a railroad survey on the Red Cedar in 1857, left his account of a trip on a keelboat: "Tuesday, August 4, all hands walked to Eau Claire, dined, and started in a keelboat down the Chippewa. At night I slept wrapped up in a blanket, in imminent danger of rolling off into the water, on the ledge of the boat where men stood to pole. About four o'clock the next afternoon we reached Reed's Landing, on the Mississippi." If he boarded the boat about p.m., the trip required about 20 hours.
     The keelboat was the main freight boat on the Chippewa in the 1830s and 1840s, and it did not leave the river in 1850, when the first steamboat, the "Dr. Franklin No. 2," ascended as far as the Red Cedar. Of course, steamboats never did ply the Red Cedar. But in the 1850s the keelboat had to share increasingly the river business with the steamboat. As late as 1857, however, when 11 steamboats made a total of 57 trips to Eau Claire, keelboats probably did one-half the business.

Keelboat revival

     In the decade of the 1860s, interestingly, the keelboat also played a vital role in building up the lumber industry of the Chippewa Valley. In August, 1860 there seemed to have been a revival of keelboating, for the Eau Claire paper reported: "Several keel boats came upriver this week and last, heavily loaded with goods." And two weeks later: "A keel boat arrived on Sunday evening with 12 tons of freight."
     Evidently these boats were used because the water was too low for steamboats. Four years later the water problem was so severe that keelboats ascended only as far as Durand, where teams picked up freight destined for Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls.
     In contrast to steamboats which were always identified by name, keelboats either were not given names or the names have been lost to history. Yet there was the "Dutch Lady" in 1856, described as the first keelboat in general service on the Chippewa, carrying freight for several years between Eau Claire and Read's Landing. The "White Gull" appeared two years later and the "Sea Gull" the following year. Perhaps these boats were the same.

Other methods

     The keelboat on the Chippewa finally gave way to the steamboat just as the latter was to give way tot he railroad many years later. In fact, the railroad also cut into the business of the keelboat, for the railroad reached Sparta on its way to La Crosse in 1858, which meant that freight and people came to Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls by wagon and stagecoach.
     Moreover, the stagecoach, which was faster than the keelboat, had carried people in increasing numbers since the late 1850s between Eau Claire and the Mississippi River at points near the mouth of the Chippewa.
     The story of the keelboat shows how transportation was constantly changing to meet the needs of the community builders in the lower Chippewa Valley.

-- Dale Peterson

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