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Scouting the Grand Excursion
Minnesota Monthly, May 2004
© 2004 by Greg Breining
The luminaries had arrived from Chicago aboard two trains. At Rock Island, they had transferred to five steamboats. Beneath banners and fireworks, they were bound for St. Paul, nearly 400 miles upstream-"the outskirts of creation," in the words of the Galena Daily Advertiser, "the choicest portion of the United States for the residence of civilized man." Foremost among the passengers was ex-president Millard Fillmore, out of office a bit more than a year.
The affair was known as the Grand Excursion. The Chicago and Rock Island Railroad Company, which paid the bill, had just laid 180 miles of track from Chicago to Rock Island, becoming the first railroad to join the Eastern Seaboard to the Mississippi. "The main object of the company," wrote The [St. Paul] Daily Democrat, "appears to be to induce such Eastern capitalists and others, who possess the greatest influence in railroad matters, to visit the Territory, and witness for themselves its mighty resources, and the field which it presents for the investment of capital, and the prosecution of railroad enterprise."
This summer, more than 50 towns and cities along the river in Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota will celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Grand Excursion with festivals, tours, and performances. Events will climax with a flotilla of sternwheelers and modern boats cruising up the river from the Quad Cities to St. Paul June 25 through July 5.
Will they see the river the Grand Excursionists saw? No, not with the dams, cities, and highways of today. But the broad outlines of the Mississippi remain much the same—the majestic bluffs, the broad reaches between graceful bends, and the gray towns resting on the shoulders of a gray river.
To imagine the Mississippi as it might have appeared 150 years ago and to consider what has become of the cities on its shores, I decided to follow the path of the river. I wanted to start as the excursionists did 150 years ago, in the Quad Cities, where the railroad met the river.
"The trains arrived at Rock Island at about 5 o'clock P.M.... They were welcomed by cheers from an immense concourse of people, and music by bands, and the firing of cannon. Ex-President Fillmore was recognized by the crowd, and called upon to address them. He responded briefly, but in tones so pertinent and eloquent, as to call forth repeated and prolonged cheers. The throng being transferred from the cars, to the boats, the fleet crossed the Mississippi to Davenport. As they passed by the island, brilliant fire-works were lighted and displayed, presenting a scene of surpassing beauty and magnificence."
- The [St. Paul] Daily Pioneer
Today Rock Island and the rest of the Quad Cities are hard-working towns of brick and steel-brown and gray, like the Mississippi itself, as though carved by the river from its bluffs and backwaters.
Behind my Davenport hotel is Arsenal Island, where a replica of Fort Armstrong aims its cannons at Illinois. Across the street is the Quad-City Times with another venerable fixture of the Mississippi, one Bill Wundram.
"There's a lot to do and a lot to see," Wundram says. I had asked how he would convince someone to visit. "There's certainly the romance of the river, as you know. The river is everything. Always the river."
Wundram claims to be the "only known columnist in America who writes a column seven days a week." At 79 his face is impish, with blue eyes set off by a bowtie. His delightful illustrated history of the Quad Cities, A Time We Remember, recalls eras of steamboats, sawmills, and railroads. The cities were rollicking river towns, with speakeasies and mobsters, floods and fires.
But how are they doing today?
"It's very upbeat," Wundram says. The $113.5 million River Renaissance Project is dressing up downtown Davenport. You can take day cruises along the river, attend the July Bix Beiderbecke Festival (honoring the great jazz cornetist born in Davenport), visit botanical gardens, ride bikes along the 62-mile Great River Trail, or gamble on three floating casinos.
"I tell you, this gambling thing is a big thing here," Wundram exclaims. "These riverboats. Holy Samoley! It's a boon. I think the future of the Quad Cities has never been greater."
Wundram has lived his whole life in Bettendorf and Davenport. "It's corny, but it's a city of decent people that are polite and proud. I like it here. I love the river. I love to drive along the river. I love the smell of the river. The river is everything. It's always the river."
So I set out to find some of the things Wundram had mentioned, including the boutiques of East Davenport, the tony houses on the bluff of Bettendorf, the John Hauberg Indian Museum, tucked in the wooded hills of the Blackhawk State Historic Site in Rock Island.
In West Davenport I find the Putnam Museum and Imax Theater, with aquaria of river fish and an Egyptian mummy. Next door is the Davenport Museum of Art (to reopen in 2005 in a new 100,000-square-foot facility). I find what I'm looking for: "House in the Woods" by native son Grant Wood "Spring Storm" by Thomas Hart Benton, and "F5 Tornado 2002" by Ellen Wagener. All speak of rolling farmland and violent weather.
Back down by the river in Moline sits the John Deere Pavilion, a palace of glass, brick, and tile where vintage John Deere implements sit next to monstrous modern equipment. Blacksmith John Deere brought his plow business to Moline in 1847. In 1918, the company began selling the bright green tractors common throughout farm country.
Across the street in the Moline Tractor and Plow Company I find a John Deere Model A that looks like the tractor my uncle drove. Its two-cylinder engine stated with a pop-pop-pop. On a weekday, there's not a big crowd-just a few old farmers who, like me, are chasing a memory.
"Five superb steamers...freighted to their utmost capacity with the elite of the American Republic, in regard to talent, wealth, beauty and worth, majestically plowing the waters of our noble 'inland sea,'... is not a sight that we may reasonably expect to witness more than once in a lifetime."
-The [St. Paul] Daily Minnesotian
The Excursions-original and modern-are ironic, each in its own way. The modern one because it is a promotion of a promotion. The 1854 Excursion, because in retrospect, it celebrated the very settlement that would soon drive the nation to its bloodiest war.
Because North and South argued over the status of slavery in new territories, each expansion further divided the nation. Writes David M. Potter in The Impending Crisis, "Seen this way, the decade of the [eighteen] fifties becomes a kind of vortex, whirling the country in ever narrower circles and more rapid revolutions into the pit of war."
A further irony is Fillmore himself. With a name fit for a melodrama, he has become a synonym for mediocrity. His major initiative: backing the Compromise of 1850, an ultimately futile attempt to patch over differences between North and South. Fillmore, a Whig, was denied his own party's nomination for president in 1852. By the time of the Grand Excursion, the party itself was dead. Two years later, Fillmore would run for president as the Know-Nothing candidate. Fillmore, says today's White House web site (brazenly or admiringly, considering the current occupant), "demonstrated that through methodical industry and some competence an uninspiring man could make the American dream come true." So, some celebration. Yet at the time, Excursionists and townsfolk who welcomed them were caught up in an extravaganza of boosterism. "It was a big deal for the upper Mississippi valley because it was kind of our coming-out party," says H. Scott Wolfe, a historian and librarian in Galena, Ill.
At the same time, "they were very worried about making the wrong impression or having the Easterners be offended by something," says Steven J. Keillor, author of A Splendid Affair, a new book recounting the Excursion. Midwestern reporters compensated for their insecurity by cranking up the intensity of their already hyperbolic prose.
"We had those aboard who had visited the Rhine, the Nile, the Danube, ... and if the delight depicted upon their faces and the exclamations of adoration, breaking from their lips, are any indication of their feelings, it may be set down that, in their minds, the Upper Mississippi has attractions possessed by no other body of water in the world."
-Galena Jeffersonian
Driving northward, I pass the Buffalo Bill Museum in LeClaire, Iowa, the Buffalo Bill Homestead in Princeton, and then the river town of Clinton, with weedy railroad yards.
But then, I plunge into wooded ravines beneath towering outcrops, climb rolling hills with picturesque farms, and discover old villages, some nearly ghost towns, moldering on the floodplain. This is Grant Wood country, a landscape of stylized hills and valleys. At Bellevue State Park I overlook the town of the same name, snuggled against the bluff and river. The view extends for miles upstream, over channels and islands. Behind a fence, along the brow of the high bluff, are low hills signed as Indian mounds, each with a grand vantage of the river. It is easy to imagine this was a powerful place to the people who once lived here, though I can't be sure of its impression upon the dead.
Below the bluff, sits a five-story bright red mill, Potter's Mill Restaurant and Bed and Breakfast. Built on Big Mill Creek in 1843, it had fallen into disrepair and was about to be auctioned off for its lumber in 1980, when hometown boy Daryll Eggers, then a doctor in Marshalltown, learned it was for sale.
"I had been gone from here for just a long enough time to realize that anytime you ever saw anything about Bellevue there would be a picture of Potter's Mill," he says while showing me around. "This thing is too important of a thing to just get torn down."
So he and his wife bought it. They filled the hole in the foundation, plugged the leak that flooded the floor, shored up and restored the interior, with original oak beams, 45 feet long and 16 inches square. Today Potter's Mill is on National Register of Historic Places, an enduring emblem of Bellevue.
"It was an unfortunate event that the weather proved somewhat unfavorable when the party was landed at Galena on Tuesday morning. Notwithstanding this drawback, the Galenians were on hand to receive the guests in a manner becoming the well-earned reputation of that enterprising city. An excursion was had to the mines, and at the boats addresses were made and happy responses received from Hon. Edward Bates, of St. Louis, Ex-President Fillmore and others."
-The [St. Paul] Daily Minnesotian
"We were the principal river port between St. Louis and St. Paul," explains H. Scott Wolfe, Galena librarian, surrounded by ancient newspapers in the city library. "It's hard to believe when you view that little trickle that is out here now." Below town flows the phlegmatic Galena River, just deep enough to float a flock of mallards. "That's where the five vessels of the Grand Excursion would have stopped."
By 1854, the area's lead mines, for which Galena is named, had nearly played out. Though big among river ports, Galena would be bypassed by the next big thing-the railroad, which established its western terminus at nearby East Dubuque. Like Rip van Winkle, Galena would fall into slumber, from which it would not awaken for a century.
"What saved it was that it was so poor," Wolfe says. Fifty years ago, "when it came time to say let's tear down those old buildings and build new, we couldn't afford it."
And so the town survived, more or less intact, until about 30 years ago, when more far-sighted types began to restore the antebellum buildings.
"Oh, if you could see what some people started with, it would amaze you-rat infested, caving in. My own house was just four stone walls. A normal person would look at it and say, 'Let's just knock it down and start over.' But happily we had so many people who could see possibilities in some of these structures that they saved them."
Today, Galena is achingly quaint, a model railroad sort of town. In fact, 85 percent of town is in a national register historic district. Some of the restored homes date to the 1820s.
Driving the steep city streets, Wolfe points out architectural masterpieces and recalls their stories. His own home, built by a German stonemason on the edge of "Cabbagetown," is filled with antiques-his wife's collection of Victorian and Edwardian clothing and his own of military uniforms and Civil War battlefield artifacts. "People say we live in a museum."
Galena's hottest historical commodities-other than the town itself-are the two houses of Civil War general and President U.S. Grant. The first is a brick box Grant rented before the war, when he ran a leathergoods store downtown. The second is a brick two-story given him by prominent Republicans after the war. Galena is a victim of its own prosperity. Main street is lined with bars, restaurants, and boutiques-places only a tourist would visit. In fact, Wolfe drives a mile from town to find a hardware store. On the other hand, the tourist trade has made the preservation of this unique town possible, and the result is elegant and pleasing.
"The boats...reached Dubuque somewhat late in the afternoon. ...A heavy rain now setting in, no demonstration was anticipated on the part of the citizens of that city. But when the fleet arrived, the whole population of the city seemed debouched on the levee, while flags hoisted at all the principal buildings, their loud cheers, and the booming of cannon, attested the hearty welcome of the people."
-The [St. Paul] Daily Pioneer
Founded by Julien Dubuque, who wrangled a lead mine from Meskwakie Indians in 1788, Dubuque has run through phases of lawlessness, sawmilling, meatpacking, shipping, boat-building, and now tourism and casino gambling. In a gleaming new facility on the harbor, the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, tells stories of the city and river. The museum's Hall of Fame honors historical characters important to the nation's rivers, from inventor Robert Fulton to Mark Twain. A video game tests your skill in piloting barges. ("Watch out for other boats!" "That current is pushing you pretty fast!") Out the back door, you can follow a boardwalk around a wetland and watch the harbor at work.
But best are several aquaria replicating Mississippi habitats from headwaters to mouth, with bass, crappies, walleyes, sunfish, catfish, sturgeon, wood ducks, frogs, water moccasins, and even an alligator snapping turtle and giant alligator. The displays demonstrate that the Mississippi, altered however much by dredging, damming, and the construction of cities along its banks, is still a river, full of life and power, a breathing dragon stretching across the belly of the nation.
"Over one hundred and fifty miles of unimaginable fairy-land, genie-land, and world of visions, have we passed during the last twenty-four hours...Throw away your guide books; heed not the statement of travelers; deal not with seekers after and retailers of the picturesque; believe no man, but see for yourself the Mississippi River above Dubuque."
-New York Times
Named for the rough-and-tumble game played by Ho-Chunks and other tribes in the region, La Crosse is a fine river town, with two universities, a busy port and grain-shipping terminal, an ambitious symphony orchestra, and a recent award for downtown preservation from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The steam-powered sternwheeler Julia Belle Swain sets out for frequent excursions (as do more modern boats). Among the city's other charms is the world's largest six pack, standing outside the brewery, once owned by G. Heileman Brewing and now run by employees and local investors as City Brewery. It is open for tours. Driving east from downtown, I soon come smack against Granddad's Bluff and follow the road that winds to the top. Nearly 600 feet above the city and river, I share a view with Millard Fillmore's 22-year-old daughter, Mary Abigail, who accompanied him on the excursion. From nearby Trempealeau Bluff, recalled a young pilot on the steamship Galena, "she could see for many miles up and down the river and it seemed to her to be all islands and she did not see how in the world the pilots found their way through the myriad of channels, all seemingly alike." I imagine her, bright and adventurous, looking out over the future of the nation, her nation. She would die from cholera just seven weeks later.
Heading homeward, I cross the river to Winona to look at its stunning banks-not river banks, but the money kind. A mural of the Mississippi bottomlands hangs over the lobby of Merchant's National Bank. Soothing green light filters through geometric patterns of stained glass windows. The Egyptian Revival Winona Savings Bank is built of light gray stone, also with stained glass windows. A teller hands me a pamphlet and directs me to the third floor "museum," a collection of African hunting trophies.
Back to Wisconsin, and up the river. Fountain City, squeezed between the bluff and the river, is one of the loveliest small towns on the river. Then Alma, with a view of the river from Buena Vista park, on the bluff behind town. Towns small and large-the river gathers them up in its valley, as through cradling them in its hands, giving each a measure of composition and beauty.
The road plunges and winds, past sprawling backwaters and bold bluffs. It is the drive you wish for in the height of summer, when days are hot and evenings long and you ride forever in sweet twilight.
"Two full bands of music were on board, both of which struck up lively airs as the boats neared the landing. This, with the rays of the bright June sun which broke forth in all his glory after three days storm; the animation of the company on board the boats, and the enthusiasm of the assembled hundreds on shore and on the decks of the Admiral, then lying at the landing, produced a scene of excitement which St. Paul has never before witnessed, and perhaps will not again for many years."
-The [St. Paul] Daily Minnesotian
As I approach the Twin Cities, I realize the view of the river I have missed most is that from the river itself, which is not just a view, but an experience-the slap of current against a hull, the smell of an organic tide of life and death swept down distant tributaries, carrying you along.
On the occasion of the Grand Excursion's sesquicentennial, you owe yourself a journey on the river. If not 11 days aboard the Mississippi Queen for five grand, then a day on the Julia Belle Swain or Jonathan Padelford. Or a few hours fishing from a johnboat, or paddling the backwaters in a canoe.
Several years ago, I traveled a short stretch of the river near Wabasha. Cooking, eating, and sleeping aboard a houseboat, we had the sense of being vagabonds, carried along not only by the greatest river on the continent, but by its history as well. We felt free to do anything, free to go anywhere, but knew that somehow the river would take us where it would.
The magic of the Mississippi is to be transported to the days of Huck Finn and the Grand Excursion. One hundred fifty years-what is that? In human terms, a lot—a civil war, the building of the railroad, industry, cities, cars, highways, reversals, and revivals. Yet to the river, it is a trifling. Will our own endeavors enjoy anything like the lifespan of the river?