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HERE'S A SPECTACULAR view of the Nauvoo, Illinois, riverfront
25 years ago when Ol' Man Winter turned Pool 19, Upper Mississippi
River, into an icy prison. Don Griffiths took the aerial photo a few
days before Christmas in 1983. Eight towboats and nearly 100 loaded
barges were trapped near the Colusa Elevator Company's terminal
at Mile 374. Many towboats were also stranded downstream in
Pool 25.
Ice-bound Towboats
This story is reprinted from Dean Gabbert's collection of river stories, BrownWater Boating.
At a distance, they resemble tall gray ghosts, locked in an arctic wasteland. There are eight of them, proud Mississippi River towboats that gambled on the December weather of 1983 and lost.
Together with nearly 100 grain and chemical barges, the boats are caught in an icy prison at Nauvoo, Illinois, and it could be spring before they are released. Nauvoo is 197 miles north of St. Louis, the destination of most of these vessels when freak ice conditions forced them to tie up. Ironically, most of them are Lower Mississippi boats whose crews have never before tasted the fury of a Midwest winter. They are clustered along a half-mile stretch of river between the Colusa Elevator Co. terminal and Nauvoo Upper light at Mile 377.2.
Eugene Banta, captain of the George W. Banta, is philosophical about his predicament. "We're here and there isn't much we can do about it," he said in an easy Louisiana drawl. I figure it would take at least a week and a half of 40-degree weather to get us out of here."
Based in Baton Rouge, the George W. Banta runs... Continue
White Snow on Brown Water
John Gabbert at 12:03 pm on Dec. 1, 2007
The Upper Mississippi River seems a quiet place this time of year, with its long, winding groove cut deep into the geology of the great Midwest, now nearly empty of people and boats. New ice keeps the duck hunters at home, and the ice folks themselves, fishing gear in hand, stay near the banks for a few more days. The trains and highway traffic still run along each side in most places, not all. Tundra swans and their haunting calls in undulating formations passed through a week ago, mostly at night, barely visible in the lights of the river towns along their path.
Towboats large have fled downriver with the last barge strings full of corn and beans. The harbor tows freeze in at the docks, their crews gone home or working ashore. We've seen the last of the fine steamboat Julia Belle Swain until spring when she'll again roll upriver, perhaps with the spirit of pilot-musician John Hartford up top at the wheel. Not long after, the Coast Guard buoy tender Gasconade will reset the channel nuns and cans, so tows like the Jack D. Wofford will again work the river along with the excursion boats, the gambling boats, the Corps boats and dredges, the work boats, the research boats, and the few remaining commercial fishing boats.
These working boats and the people aboard and around them, and the river itself represent favorite subject matter to my river journalist father, Dean Gabbert, of Nauvoo, Illinois. From my earliest days as a flatland kid descending the steep hills to cross the Mighty Mississippi at Burlington, Keokuk, Fort Madison, or Muscatine, I heard stories like these in Brown-Water Boating, fascinating, better-than-fiction tales about the boats and the people and the river.
Later, when I finally grew old enough to get out there afloat myself, I felt that kinship to the Mississippi River and its people, a sense of the historical and cultural that I learned from my dad. (In that, I realize what a lucky kid I am.) So, pull up your easy chair, and while the snow flies outside, take some quiet time for yourself to read these masterful stories of life on the river.
