This post covers two days of traveling along the Great River Road that skirts the Mississippi River. This has been a pre-occupation of mine since I read Jonathan Raban's book, Old Glory, about his trip from Minneapolis to New Orleans in a small boat with a cabin and an outboard motor. I will state the obvious that he had a much better view of the river than I did. What we had in common was in getting a sense of the commerce and the various attractions of the river. Along much of the route the river channel takes up only a minor part of the territory dominated by the waterway. There are islands and marshes and sloughs and lakes behind dams and locks. Trains of BNSF run constantly, two or three an hour around the clock, along the eastern shoreline. Trains of Canadian National (which owns the old Illinois Central) run less frequently along the western shoreline. The barge tows are less than half the size of the ones south of St. Louis and, at least at this time of year, a lot less frequent. The corn crop is currently being harvested from Missouri to Minnesota, so a lot of the rail traffic is grain cars heading south.
One topic that Raban first alerted me to was the now-defunct pearl button industry that was centered around Muscatine, Iowa. The industry was started in that city by a Swiss-German immigrant in 1891, and at its height accounted for 40 percent of the world's button production. The last pearl buttons were manufactured in Muscatine in 1967. So how and why did they make pearl buttons? They were drilled out of the shells of fresh-water mussels indigenous in great abundance in the rivers and streams of the Midwest. They had survived the influx of population because the mussel was inedible by humans. If fact, after they were harvested for their shells, the mussels were steamed to open them, and the animal inside was discarded or used for animal feed. After the 1930's industry went into decline as shell buttons were replaced as fasteners by zippers and buttons made of plastic. What's left is the chronicle of this chapter of American commercial history described in the Pearl Button Museum, which I visited in Muscatine.
It turns out that Muscatine is and has been a commercial overachiever. The pearl button industry had been a timely follow-up to the lumber milling industry which was petering out in the Midwest in the latter part of the 19th century. Muscatine is also the founding home of the HON furniture company, the Bandag tire retreading company and the Stanley Group, an engineering/consulting organization. Monsanto has been making herbicides here since the 1970s, including Roundup for the past 20 years, and HJ Heinz has a large tomato-processing facility. The latter is the source of the area's latest demographic change, an influx of Latino people, who now comprise 16 percent of the city's population. The facility produces Heinz Ketchup, at a rate of 70 to 80 truckloads a day.
In the mid-1800's, Muscatine was the home of the largest black community in Iowa. Alexander Clark, Sr., a barber, lumber salesman and real estate speculator, lived there. Clark helped organize Iowa's civil war black regiment, the 60th United States Colored Infantry. In 1868 he sued to desegregate Muscatine's school. His son, Alexander, Jr., was the first black person to graduate from the University of Iowa. Alexander, Sr., the university's second black graduate, at age 58, was appointed US Ambassador to Liberia in 1890.
Muscatine is truly an interesting place.
I camped Saturday night at Wyalusing State Park, south of Pierre du Chein, Wisconsin. A surprising thing to me was that in spite of weather--intermittent rain--and the temperature--30's and 40's--the campground was nearly full. A second surprising thing to me occurred the following morning when I found that the facilities had already been closed for the season, despite the heavy use of the campground. So for my $24 nonresident fee I had primitive camped for 12 hours.
I stayed in a motel Sunday night, which was just as well since when I arrived in Rice Lake, there had been snow flurries falling for an hour. The motel clerk said, "you think this is bad, you should have been here last May when we had 17 inches of snow in one day."
Day 4 mileage: 333
Day 5 mileage: 251
Cumulative mileage: 1,663
