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WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Good afternoon, with news from Minnesota Public Radio, I'm William Wilcoxen. ADC Telecommunications is getting out of the optical components business. The company will decide in the next three months whether to sell or close several plants that make lasers. Facilities in Shakopee and Vadnais Heights are among the plants that could be closed. A total of 180 people work at those two plants.

ADC officials say they are leaving the optical components business to save money and improve profits after several quarters of poor performance. ADC, which is based in Eden Prairie, has cut 3,300 jobs since November, leaving the company with 9,200 employees.

The Mid-America Business Conditions Index declined in July to its lowest level since January as confidence among business leaders slipped and the sluggish recovery. Creighton University economics professor Ernie Goss conducts a monthly survey of supply managers and business leaders in a nine state region, including Minnesota. Goss says the July survey provides further evidence the post-recession expansion remains much weaker than expected, in spite of Federal Reserve efforts to stimulate the economy.

The four major candidates for governor will face off today in Worthington in their second debate in two days. The four candidates met in their first televised debate last night. Today's debate is expected to focus on rural issues, including roads.

A chance of thunderstorms in the southeast this afternoon. Partly cloudy and windy in the southwest. Highs from the lower 70s in the Red River Valley to the mid 80s in the southwest. For the Twin Cities, high in the lower 80s with partly cloudy skies.

Currently, around the region, in Rochester, it's partly sunny and 77. In Duluth, cloudy in 68 degrees. In the Twin Cities, it's partly sunny in 77. Bemidji reporting sunny skies in 64 degrees. And in Moorhead, it's partly sunny in 64. And that's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm William Wilcoxen.

REPORTER: Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by the Walker Art Center, where this summer, you can experience the meditative video environments of Iranian born artist Shirin Neshat.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MIKE EDGERLY: Good afternoon, and welcome back to Midday. I'm Mike Edgerly. Gary Eichten has the week off. In this hour, an hour on the river. On this edition of Voices of Minnesota, we hear from Mississippi riverboat captain Bill Bowell. He grew up selling popcorn on the streets of St Paul. He was a paratrooper in World War II. And he's best known as founder of the Padelford Packet Boat Company.

Later in the hour, we'll hear from National Park Service Ranger John Anfinson talk about attempts through the decades to manage the flow of the Mississippi River. Minnesota Public Radio's William Wilcoxen talked with Captain Bowell.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Bill Bowell is rarely seen in public without the black nautical cap that marks him as a riverboat captain. Between a thick gray mustache and the shiny brim of his hat, bulls eyes gleam with a vigor that belies his 81 years. His build is slight, but his mannerisms spry, and a bracelet occasionally tinkles as he punctuates his remarks with animated gestures.

The open windows of his office aboard the Jonathan Padelford admitted a breeze from the Mississippi River. The walls surrounding Captain Bowell are covered with paintings, photographs, and other mementos from a lifetime on the river. He explains that he was one of 12 children born in St. Paul to a father who sold cars when the automobile was young. Bowell says his dad also tinkered with other machinery.

BILL BOWELL: He built a popcorn wagon, which you can see on this painting right here. I have immortalized it by having it included on that painting. But us kids would operate that popcorn wagon.

And in fact, we used to come down to Harriet Island or Lake Phalen. And my dad would park the car and leave us kids there. And invariably some park superintendent would come by and tell us we couldn't be there. And we said, well, our father's not here. We can't drive. We were only 10 or 11 years old or whatever at the time. So it was kind of funny.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: So you and your brothers and sisters would operate the popcorn wagon?

BILL BOWELL: Dad and we did everything imaginable. We were very capable of earning nickels and dimes. We sold papers in downtown St. Paul. We had a national championship for The Saturday Evening Post. That and the popcorn.

We had to stand over here in the old pavilion on Harriet Island. And we had French fried popcorn. We had the first fearless popper. Would pop the popcorn with the flavor inside because you put oil on top of it. And that was a brand new thing back then.

But yeah. We had a phrase, "Sharpen your teeth and comb your hair and makes you feel like a millionaire. Hey, hey, it's French fried popcorn. Only a nickel, half a dime, keeps you eating all the time."

[LAUGHTER]

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Oh, that's great.

BILL BOWELL: That was a long time ago.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: And so you had the-- the popcorn wagon was on the back of a truck, the one that you would move around to the island and into Phalen. And then you had a stand.

BILL BOWELL: Nobody in the family knows whatever happened to it. And I figure we probably lost it to a finance company. And then as I grew a little bit older, I shined shoes in Del's Barber Shop for quite a few years while I was going to Roosevelt Junior High and Humboldt later high school. But we lived in many, many different places. I've got a list that boggle your mind of where we used to live.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: All in St. Paul, though?

BILL BOWELL: All in St. Paul, yeah. Well, one time in Minneapolis.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Why did the family move around as much as they did?

BILL BOWELL: I think we were one month ahead of the rent.

[LAUGHTER]

I don't know really.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: What was Harriet Island like in those days when you were growing up in the '20s and '30s?

BILL BOWELL: Well, one of the great things were the [INAUDIBLE] and the dances in the pavilion. And evidently, [INAUDIBLE] meant having good food, drinking, and having a heck of a good time.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: And that's what Harriet Island was famous for in the early days.

BILL BOWELL: Harriet Island was in that period of time. And it was also a swimming beach. Back in those really early days, the river wasn't as polluted. Prior to probably about 1930s, it wasn't really that polluted. We used to swim in the river all the time. We'd swim across and not think too much about it.

We'd go down river here. And there used to be under the high bridge were a number of caves where they grew mushrooms in those caves. Originally, the caves were created because there was a very fine silica sand in the caves. And that silica sand was used at the Ford Motor Company to make glass for the cars.

And so they dug them out. And then they found out that the caves had an ideal temperature of about 55, 54 degrees, which was ideal for mushrooms. But we'd go down to Pickle Lake where the old bridge is still there, the trestle, and walk over. And we had our spot where we did all our skinny dipping and all that kind of stuff.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: And Harriet Island was actually an island in those days, right?

BILL BOWELL: In those days. Harriet Island was an island. I can remember vividly the bridge that we had to come across, little rickety bridge that came over to the island.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: When you were a little kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

BILL BOWELL: Well, I had a rather-- to begin with, I was the introvert of the family, I think. My brothers, all of whom were great salesmen, some of them cuter than others. My one young brother, Jim, he had blonde head full of curls.

And when we would go downtown, we had a Chinese place up on St. Peter where we'd go in and we'd buy little luck charms, four for a quarter. And then we'd go out and we'd sell them in the joints, particularly if we could find a guy that had been drinking.

[LAUGHS]

Anyhow, this brother of mine, we put a little dirt on his face. And he'd go into and sell his luck charms and invariably get a big tip. And then we kind of went upscale. And we all went to work for postal telegraph and Western Union. And they had greetings that you could send to somebody for a birthday or Christmas or whatever.

So we would go out. We got the idea of selling those, going joint to joint, using our background of having sold newspapers in the joints and magazines and all that stuff. And we did phenomenally well. In fact it matters, Chicago manager called and wanted to know what the devil is going on over there in St. Paul where they're selling so many of these greetings.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: So you went to Humboldt, you mentioned. And then in the '30s, you joined the Civilian Conservation Corps?

BILL BOWELL: Yeah, I joined the CCCs '37-'38 about. And that was a great, great, great thing. The first six months there were very tough on me. I was not a physical worker.

But about the time the second six months started, I got the job as a coffee cook in the woods for a lumbering crew. And I became a star. Because one of the things I would do in the morning, we'd have these what I call CC rolls. They were big cinnamon rolls with a frosting on top and they were delicious.

But in the morning, I'd eat one of them. That's enough. So I'd go around to the tables after breakfast and pick up all the rolls and put them in a sack. Then when it was coffee time, about 1030, I'd bring those rolls out and they loved it.

And I made-- I even made egg coffee. In other words, I'd mix the grounds with egg, whites of the egg, and put the shells in. And I had this beautiful, clear, delicious coffee. So I gained a reputation.

[LAUGHS]

And also I learned typing. And I learned the radio code, which became very important when I went into the army a few years later.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: So you must have been, what, about 16, 17 when you joined the corps, the CCC?

BILL BOWELL: CCC? About 17, I think. Yeah.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: And where were you-- where you up in Northern Minnesota?

BILL BOWELL: Yeah, I was in Ely, nine miles south. I know that nine miles like the back of my hand because I walked it so many times going to town.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Then the war broke out. Now, how-- you must have been about 20 years old. What do you remember about Pearl Harbor day?

BILL BOWELL: I had been in the National Guard and I had radio training there. And we joined the National Guard to get the shoes at that time. This is an honest God's fact. In our days, getting a pair of shoes, that was something else. But the training was very helpful. And I was immediately put into a radio group in the army itself.

MIKE EDGERLY: You're listening to the Voices of Minnesota conversation with riverboat captain William Bowell. In his early '20s, Bowell ventured far from the Mississippi when he served as a paratrooper in World War II. Family members say for most of his adult life, Bowell has said little about his time in the service. But recently, as his retirement drew near, his wartime memories floated to the surface. His stories show how profoundly he was affected by his service on the battlefields of Europe.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: How did you wind up being a paratrooper?

BILL BOWELL: Well, I was out in Camp Roberts, California where I took my basic training, 13 weeks. And they came around looking for volunteers for the paratroops. Well, this was in an early stage of the paratroops. And they put you through some movies to try to scare you to death-- jumping from the airplane looking straight down. And even the movies were made in England because we had an advanced far enough to have our own movies.

So I remember looking down at square hole, that's the British paratrooper. Yeah, and it kind of got you right in the gut. But anyhow, you had to go before this one-man board. And he said, why do you want to go into paratroopers? And I said this stone face, I want to come back with some medals or I don't want to come back at all. And I think these-- now, I think what a stupid statement.

[LAUGHS]

Ridiculous. But kids are kids. So that's the way it was.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: How much training did you get?

BILL BOWELL: It was a terrific training program. For one thing, I was a tumbler at Humboldt. I took naturally the falls, the push-ups. We could do 175 push-ups like nothing. And we were in superb condition. Absolutely superb.

We would run five miles a day every day with packs on. And we even had a 40-mile hike I remember across the sand dunes of Lance, Nebraska. My regiment became quite well known because of the battles we were in and whatnot.

I was in Normandy and then I was in the [INAUDIBLE]. And in the [INAUDIBLE] because we were not properly equipped with the winter clothing. I almost lost my feet because I had a circulatory problem. And they had tried to send me back to the United States before, but I got my commanding officer to get me out of the hospital because they knew about this circulatory thing.

I was wounded on June 14. We were moving forward. I was in first battalion headquarters. We were moving forward. And my god, all of a sudden, we're being flanked by the Germans.

And I looked over to the next hedgerow and here's all lined up with Germans. And I immediately thought of what's his name? Cooper, Gary Cooper in that World War I show where he talks in terms of when you're after turkeys, you pick one down in the [INAUDIBLE]. The next one won't know it. You're getting it and you get them all.

Well, I lay down there and I was picking them off one at a time. I hate to tell you how many I picked off. But all of a sudden, a shot came right over my helmet. And I reached up to see if it made a crease and it hadn't. And they started dumping mortars in there.

I was in the back of a house in an orchard and the mortars were exploding in the trees above me. Anyhow, I got up and I ran around the corner of the house and I ran right smack into a German. And I was carrying my gun with a hand on the trigger. And as he ran away, I shot him in the back.

I don't know if I should be telling these stories. But anyhow, a friend of mine came screaming at me. Bowell, Bowell, I've been hit! And I had to put my hand up around his neck to stop the blood. And I took him up to a crossroad, which couldn't have been 100 feet. And I said, lieutenant, what should I do with it?

He said, get him on that Jeep. I said, he's going to fall off. He says, go with him. So I go back to the aid station and I dumped him off. And I turned to go around to leave. And the guy says, wait a minute. We better take a look at you. And I said, well, why? And he says, well, you've been hit. And I said, where? He said, look at your arm.

And I looked at my arm and of course it was. And next thing I know, the sergeant says to the lieutenant, what should I do with him? He's got shrapnel. And he says, send him back. So I started walking back towards the front. He says, no, the other way.

So I ended up in-- to this day now, I have misgivings that I should have stayed there because I wasn't hurt that bad. And then now, as I look back, I wonder what happened to all my buddies. When I looked around, I ended up on that hedgerow by myself and that one other guy that got hit. And to this day-- and this didn't hit me until about 10 years ago. Where did everybody else go at the time?

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Because you had gone to the aid station with your wounded compatriot there.

BILL BOWELL: Right.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: You jumped on D-Day.

BILL BOWELL: Oh yeah, at 2 o'clock in the morning. And I got shot down. I was a radio operator of a demolition crew to blow up a bridge. And, of course, we went around the Cherbourg Peninsula and came in over by Marseille, the back end. And I imagine better conditions for wind or something.

And 35 or 30 miles from the drop zone, we got hit. We got 2,000 pounds of dynamite and TNT underneath the airplane. That's going to drop with us. And nothing blew up. But the plane was going down. And we had GI blankets.

When we stood up, they fell through the floor. And then somebody slipped on them, about number 7 in a stick. There's 16 guys in a stick. I was probably 13 or 14. And the door was jammed and the airplane is going down. I got out in about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, boom! I hit the ground. But the chute opened.

But I sprained an ankle, which I'd never done before. And as I'm laying on the ground, I dropped my knife I'd spent weeks sharpening, pulled it out of my boot and dropped it. And I picked it up, and I picked up the blade not thinking. I'm trying to cut myself out with the wrong hand. I cut the devil out of my hand.

[LAUGHS]

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: So the plane was going down when you jumped?

BILL BOWELL: It crashed. I don't know any of the guys that were on it. On the second day, we made contact with the French underground. There were only four of us who got together.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Four of you who had survived the plane crash.

BILL BOWELL: Yeah. And we found this farmhouse. And we were creeping up on it, I was. I left the other guys out. We were overlooking our river. And we had to get across that river to get back to our unit. By this time, we're hungry. I'm hungry. And we had a lieutenant. And he told me not to go up to that farmhouse. And I said, I won't.

[LAUGHS]

He says, if you do, when we get back, I'm going to court martial. Anyhow, I went up. And sure enough, as I'm creeping up on this farmhouse in the back yard, I hear this noise behind. I swing around with my rifle, M1. And there's a little old lady, probably about 85 years old. 90 years old, coming up and out to the outhouse.

[LAUGHS]

Anyhow, I said, I'm the Americano. And she was all excited! Oh, yeah, yeah! I go in the house. She opens the front door right there and she hollered, Americano! Paratrooper! And people came out of the walls. I couldn't believe it. And they brought out pictures and said they were part of the French underground.

I went back and got the other guys. But she took a loaf of bread. And she cut it in half in the middle. And then she carved out the center, and she patted it full of butter. I'll never forget. That was really great.

And I took it. And they gave me cognac. And being a young kid not knowing nothing from nothing, I take my canteen cup. I'm going to fill it up. And they went, oh, hey, hey. You're supposed to take a little shot.

But anyhow, I learned that. And I apologized. But I went back and got my friends. And they hid us a couple of days in the barn right there next to the house under a haystack. And we could hear tanks going by and all that stuff. So it turned out that they had got 50 guys, paratroopers, that all were on the wrong side of the river.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: These were 50 people who this family that was part of the underground were helping to get back.

BILL BOWELL: All paratroopers.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Not just from--

BILL BOWELL: From the 82nd, all different-- keep in mind the tremendous armada of airplanes that went in and went across there. So anyhow-- and this young kid would take us in a rowboat five at a time across the river. It took us two nights to get the 50 people. By then we got 50 people together. And we formed a battle unit.

I got across the first night. And of course, a lot of the French people know we're there. It couldn't be a mile. And there was a big German encampment. But we then moved forward. And the first thing that happens, we found some parachutes that had machine guns in it that we're really delighted to get.

Then we blew up a money wagon that was taken payroll. We then blew up an ammunition. These were horse drawn. All of a sudden, we had a German machine gun right on a bend and we're in trouble. We got this ammunition wagon blown up behind us. Stuff going all over.

But anyhow, the lieutenant who was going to court martial me-- and now became dark. And we'd sent out a number of patrols trying to get that German machine gun so we could move forward. And he went out on one of the patrols and somebody followed him out also. And somebody said, is that you, lieutenant? And he said, yeah.

And the guy threw a Gammon grenade and hit him right in the head. And he had booties hanging around his neck, which always spooked me because invariably you develop different feelings on the battlefield about things like that. You don't want to test anybody, whether it's the guy above or who it is. You don't want to test them. So there my court martial was saved.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Yeah, yeah.

BILL BOWELL: Out of the 50, there were about 12 of us left. And I figured we had it. And it was raining. It was cold. And by golly, the next morning, somebody said the infantry is coming, and it was our infantry. And they broke through.

And all of a sudden, I get up, I'm free. I have lived and I'm walking back, stumbling over American and German bodies but just kept on. Later that day, I got back to my outfit. And then I found a German motorcycle, and I got back there in a hurry. And it was like, to see everybody, the ones that lived and find out who got killed and something else.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Did you know, even going into that, that was going to be one of the most fateful days of the war?

BILL BOWELL: We knew that it was very, very important. I would say yes. The significance of it today is far greater now than it has been for the last quite a few years. More people know what D-Day was.

For many years, young kids didn't know what D-Day was. Now, they're reading about it, and then they find out you were in the middle of it. Then it makes a big difference.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: After returning from the war with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, Bill Bowell earned a degree from Macalester College, then worked in the printing business in Chicago for a time. Later, he returned to St. Paul and joined a brother in running a plastics manufacturing business. But his attraction to the Mississippi River never waned and finally prompted him to become a riverboat captain.

BILL BOWELL: When I was in Macalester College, I wanted a boat. There weren't any excursion boats around at that time. The last major boat here was the Capitol that you see up there. Now, the Capitol was demolished in 1945.

Prior to that time, it was the biggest thing probably in St. Paul because the big bands played on it. And the trip would be from St. Paul Lambert Landing there down to Hastings. Turn around above the lock and come back. That was a terrific trip. So this market was wide open and people literally thought I was nuts. This is 1969.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: They thought you were nuts when you decided you wanted to start Padelford?

BILL BOWELL: Yes, right. Absolutely! This guy has lost his mind.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: Now, somewhere along the line here, you got a river pilot's license, right? Am I right about that?

BILL BOWELL: Oh yeah. I have to go to Dubuque, the Coast Guard. I go down there and there's this old guy by the name of Schmoker. And this is 1951. And I go into the office. He's sitting there with his feet up on an old oak desk.

And he said, sit down. He says, I understand you want to get a license. I said, I sure would like to get a license. And he says, well, he says, what side of the boat is port? I said, well, it's the left side.

And he said, well, what side is the right side? What side is the other side, he said. Well, I said that's starboard. And that's right. He said, son, you just passed your license.

And the license is hanging on the wall. That was my first license. And of course, I've upgraded that license many times to higher tonnage. But when I tell that to the Coast Guard people, they'd like to croak.

[LAUGHTER]

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: You had to go all the way down to Dubuque to tell them which was port and which was starboard. Well, what made you-- I mean, how did it get started? How did you get the whole idea of the Packet Boat Company?

BILL BOWELL: I had to find a new way to make a living. And the boat idea came back. I ended up finding a boat builder down in Dubuque, a guy by the name of Henry Miller. And he and I got along real well. And Henry had this idea of doing economical passenger vessels.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: So your first boat was the--

BILL BOWELL: The Jonathan Padelford. So then we get up. We got our first trip. Everything is working smooth. And we had it tied out to the dock where we used to be. And we had a heck of a wind. I got a load of school kids. I'm backing down in the wind, figuring the only thing I can do is get down below the dock and turn.

I get down below the dock and she wouldn't turn. So the wind pushes it into the bank, which is another 50 yards. But fortunately, there's a gap on the shore just wide enough to put the boat in. By maneuvering the throttle, I slid her in there, ended up calling a friend of mine with a tow boat.

First, a big tow boat. And he couldn't get in there. The water was too shallow. So Padelford only draws about a foot and a half to two foot. So anyhow, I got another guy and he came in there. And within 20 minutes, we were all out on the river going upriver as if nothing happened. But in the meantime, I think my wife had a heart attack.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: What did you like the best about running the business?

BILL BOWELL: The contact with the people. That can put joy into your heart. And also, I've always been interested in history. In fact, I have a library of 2,000 books on the Mississippi River and its tributary and the explorers. But I just like to present a service that is clean and wholesome and have people enjoy it.

I get a real kick out of piloting the Padelford. Because if you can run a Padelford, you can run any boat because of the paddle wheel. And on some of these big dinner parties, I'll make the final approach for the landing, only I'll stop the boat out in midstream. And then I'll come in square to the dock.

And everybody was wondering, how in the hell is he doing that? And actually, it's very simple. What you're using the boat like a weather vane, only you're using the current. Or if you got any wind, you can use that also. So that's the real technique of running the Padelford.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: So you've been going up and down the same stretch of the river basically for 37 years. I think some people might think that that would get tiresome. But what keeps it fresh and interesting for you?

BILL BOWELL: You sit in front of a fire and watch the flames flicker. Do you ever get tired of it? I never get tired of it. It's the same thing with the river. It has the same charisma. Now, I will turn down an opportunity to run the boat because I'd rather be out in my little 23 footer. I go up to-- I can go quickly up to the end of the Minnesota River up here or up in the Minneapolis or down towards Hastings. quickly. I hate to think that I'm getting old at 81. But right now, all I can think about is going fishing.

[LAUGHS]

So the serenity, the quietness, the mobility, it's just a wonderful thing. The minute you get in the water, your mind slows down.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: What do you think you're going to be doing in your retirement?

BILL BOWELL: Well, I'm working on my autobiography. And I have another project. I also want to develop a bibliography of all books written on the river. But the project I want I think more than anything is a book on the art of the river. And that in one book would thumbnail maybe five or six to a page a picture of the artwork with all the information-- who the artist is, where it is, and so forth. That I think would be a tremendous contribution.

WILLIAM WILCOXEN: 81-year-old Captain Bill Bowell. He retired this summer from the Padelford Packet Boat Company he founded. I'm William Wilcox in Minnesota Public Radio.

MIKE EDGERLY: You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. We're spending an hour on the river. And a reminder that you can go to our website, minnesotapublicradio.org and check out a collection of special reports on rivers in Minnesota. It's called Changing Currents. And it's available on minnesotapublicradio.org.

Next, we hear about the history of managing the Mississippi River to suit human needs. Minnesota Public Radio's Kate Smith talked with National Park Service Ranger John Anfinson.

KATE SMITH: Minnesota is rich with water, with the land of 10,000 lakes. But we're also a land of more than 6,000 rivers, the largest is the Mississippi. It was first called the misi-ziibi, an Ojibwa word that means big river.

The Mississippi carries more water than any other river in the US. Its tributaries empty for more than 30 states and two Canadian provinces. The Mississippi provides habitat for more than 400 species. It's one of the most diverse ecological systems in the world.

The river bears our imprint too. For hundreds of years, it's carried our commerce. There's debate now about expanding the locks and dams on the upper Mississippi. Larger locks can carry bigger barges. Some say more cargo means more business to and from Midwest farm states. Some look to the river's history for answers about the future.

John Anfinson is a Ranger and historian with the National Park Service. He works for the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. I joined him recently for a tour of the river.

We paddled from the University of Minnesota campus through lock and dam number 1 to hidden Falls Park just below the dam. Our canoe floats deep in the Mississippi River gorge. And after a while, you can almost forget you're in the middle of two cities.

You have so many good stories about the river. What's your earliest first recollection of the river?

JOHN ANFINSON: Well, there's two. One is my mother grew up in Brainerd, Minnesota, about a block from the Mississippi, And I knew it was the place we couldn't go down to.

They often warned us about not going over the bluff there and down the river because my mother had grown up down there and not supposed to go down there. She did many times and has lots of stories about the Mississippi and Brainerd. But I didn't think of it as the Mississippi at that time. I didn't have that consciousness of the great river. I grew up on the plains in Western Minnesota and hadn't been that close to the river.

My first contact with the Mississippi is at the University of Minnesota and it's walking across the Washington Avenue Bridge thousands of times as I worked through my degrees in history at the U. And constantly walking back and forth and back and forth and looking at the river and wondering why it didn't go up and down very much? Why did it stay so much the same?

Even during low water years, it didn't go down that far. And I didn't understand that there was a lock and dam-- called lock and dam 1 that kept it that high or that there other locks and dams. And so that was my first thinking about the Mississippi.

And you can't help but walk across the river and study history and not realize that that river is going somewhere. It's constantly going downstream and out to the world. So you think about that as you're walking across it. It's about a five-minute walk at least across that bridge. So multiply that by the thousands of times I walked across it, you have a lot of time to think about it.

KATE SMITH: So as we're sitting here, I'm struck by how clearly you characterize the natural river. Give us a sense of that and how long was it that way?

JOHN ANFINSON: Well, it was that way since the retreat of the glaciers tens of thousands of years-- 10,000 years in the Mississippi Valley gorge here in the heart of the Twin Cities. Down river, it becomes millions of years that it was a natural river. And it was that way until about 1866. And then that's when Congress authorizes the first project to begin dredging the river and pulling out the trees out of the river.

And that changes it somewhat but not much. The river is much too powerful. It just returned the sandbars and returned the trees. But then that natural river was. innumerable is what I call it. Because all the explorers and traders, they talk about the innumerable islands, the innumerable channels that they created, the innumerable passenger pigeons, the innumerable buffalo.

Everything was innumerable at that time when the first explorers came up the river. And today, the islands are all numbered or named. The channel has changed dramatically anywhere between here and St. Louis.

You could have walked across the river on sandbars on hundreds of places you could have done that. There were deep pools and pockets, but in between them were these sandbars that ran all the way across the river. So you're talking knee deep, waist deep maybe walking across the river. So it's an extremely shallow river and wide. And the sandbars are immense.

KATE SMITH: You write about this 26 year old, this Lieutenant Pike. And I had to write them down because the goals for his trip seemed amazing to me. So the Pike Expedition in 1805 was supposed to discover the source of the river, choose and acquire the best sites for military posts, make alliances with the Chippewa and Dakota, stop inter-tribal fighting, assess the fur trade, take meteorological observations, and evaluate resources of the land that the US had acquired with the Louisiana Purchase. How'd he do on that list of goals?

JOHN ANFINSON: He did surprisingly good. And I think he was supposed to be back within the year, but he ended up taking longer. He ended up going up to the headwaters and wintering over in the headwaters and then coming back in 1806. This is the parallel in a way, to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, although it's different. The president himself did not send Zebulon Pike.

But Pike was going into an area that hadn't been acquired through the Louisiana Purchase. And the east side of the Mississippi had already been acquired technically following the American Revolution. And we had just acquired the west side. So Pike was going to see what we had acquired.

Pike meets with Native American, the Dakota at Pike Island, and establishes the American presence and says, we're here. You can forget the British. You have to pay attention to the Americans now. But Pike first identifies the Fort Snelling site as a potential fort site in other places. And so he does the initial categorization of what is in the area, what the river's like.

He gives good descriptions of the river and actually complains about the river, especially through the gorge here. He comes up the river and complains that it's a continuous rapids from Fort Snelling all the way to Saint Anthony Falls. And it's aggravated by the interruption of over a dozen islands. And once he gets above the falls, his boat continually grounds. And this is October.

And so he's got to get out of the boat with his men and walk it over all the rapids that they're coming on. It's so shallow. So he talks about that a man of any less will than he had would have given up this journey completely and gone back to St Louis. But he had the fortitude to continue up river. I don't know how much--

KATE SMITH: Or men of any sense.

JOHN ANFINSON: Or man of any sense. I don't know how much his crew appreciated it. He thought they lacked his determination.

KATE SMITH: It seems from about 1880 to the early 1900s is the time, the period of time when the river is transformed from natural state to a modern commercial navigation channel. What does that mean for the river? What are the results of that work.

JOHN ANFINSON: The wing dams and closing dams begin narrowing the Mississippi tremendously. Instead of being a free-flowing river capable of choosing its own channel, the river is constricted to one navigation channel, and it's becoming deeper. It's not deep enough for navigation to be successful, but it's still deeper.

Instead of having hundreds of places you can walk across the Mississippi at low water, there's many fewer places you can do that. As a closing-- as the river falls is when the wing dams really begin having their effect. And so at low water, water can't go down the side channels anymore. By the early 1900s, the Corps has closed off almost all the side channels on the Mississippi.

During high water, the water can flow over the closing dams. It can flow over the wing dams. But at low water, the river starts to becoming narrower and narrower. One of the engineers who comes up with the idea of the wing dams, which is based on a German model, says it's not about narrowing the river. It's about building up the banks.

So as the sediment collects between the wing dams and brush and then trees start growing out of the wing dams and between them, the banks become narrower and narrower. So that if you looked at a picture of the river from the early 1880s and then looked at a picture from 1915 at the same place, it would look like a very different river, a much narrower river, both in terms of the banks being closer in and the number of trees and brush in the floodplain that used to be sandbars or open river.

Ecologically, that also starts changing the rivers. The river mussels can't live as easily between the wing dams because they collect sediment so fast. And they can't live out in the main channel as easily because the current's moving too fast. So it makes it harder for them. And it also makes it harder for fish to find backwater pools or escape backwater pools as the closing dams cut off the connectivity between the backwaters and the main channel.

KATE SMITH: To the river, the number is 4 and 1/2 and 6 and 9 seemed to be really important. Why?

JOHN ANFINSON: Each of those numbers represents an effort to make the river deeper, hopefully deep enough so that barges can carry enough grain or whatever to compete with railroads. And that they can carry it consistently over the year, carry it reliably from year to year. So that what navigation boosters argue each time is if we can get a deeper river, we can compete with railroads.

It just needs to be a little deeper. And then commerce will come back to the Mississippi. So in 1878, Congress authorizes this 4 and 1/2 foot channel project. In 1907, it authorizes the 6-foot channel project. That's a project to build more wing dams and closing dams.

They just build them higher so that the water is deflected to the main channel earlier in the year. They build the closing dams higher so that the water is deflected or diverted away from the side channels to the main channel earlier in the year. And they build more of them. And they extend the length of some of them so they can pinch the river even more. And that project lasts up until 1930s when Congress authorizes the 9-foot channel project.

And that's a radically different way of approaching the river. Because that's going to rely on locks and dams that are going to create reservoirs, big lakes essentially out of the Mississippi. And that's going to flood over all those wing dams and closing dams. And it's going to keep the river high at least 9-feet deep throughout the year so that it can't fall to its natural low water stage.

KATE SMITH: So does the 9-foot channel program effectively wipe out any sign that the other two still exist under there somewhere?

JOHN ANFINSON: You have to know what you're looking for. If you're driving along the river and you see a ripple pattern going out from the shore perpendicular to the shore, and then you drive a little further and you see another ripple pattern. It looks like going out vertically. Those are wing dams under water.

If you're in a boat up somewhat, you can really see that pattern on the river. Otherwise, they're invisible, and people don't know about them. What I hear is that many of the boaters on the river learn about them when they lose a prop going over them because they're not that far below the water, in some cases, especially close to shore on the inside of a bend.

So that river is gone. If people could have seen what the Mississippi looked like in 1930, in some reaches on the eve of that lock and dam project, they wouldn't have believed it was the same Mississippi it is today. It was vastly different. It was a very, very, very narrow channel.

Wing dams had trees growing out of them that were 50 years old in some cases. They looked like these permanent windrows of trees that were natural in some way. But they're really marking where the wing dams were.

KATE SMITH: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota interview. John Anfinson is a Ranger with the National Park Service. His book on the history of the Mississippi River is called The River We Have Wrought.

[SHIP HORN HONKS]

At the point at which this country experiences one of its biggest economic crises in its history, the government decides to spend millions upon millions of dollars to build that 9-foot channel. Would that have happened without the depression, without the interest of creating that much of a public works project?

JOHN ANFINSON: One of the myths about the 9-foot channel project is that it was a New Deal project. It wouldn't have happened without the New Deal. Yet Hoover had said early on, as secretary of commerce before he became president, he said it was essential to build a system of navigable waterways throughout the country. He was totally behind it. And he thought it could be done in five years or less. And he was ready to get behind it.

When the depression started, he turned against the project and became one of its most avid critics because he did not believe in deficit spending. So they actually had to fight harder to get the project authorized because of the depression than they would have had it not occurred. And the idea that it was a New Deal project is also wrong in the sense that the project-- the movement had been going for five years before the depression ever started.

It wasn't something that happened because of the depression. It came up for authorization shortly after the depression started. And so the push by navigation boosters was to say, use all the arguments they'd used in the past. And then they added the depression as another argument, like the idea of connecting the North and the South after the Civil War.

It was just another argument among many other arguments they already had for why it should occur. In fact, millions of dollars did come out of New Deal projects for the locks and dams on the Mississippi. And thousands of workers were put to work on that project through relief funds.

KATE SMITH: How successful do you think our managing of this resource, the river, has been over time?

JOHN ANFINSON: I don't think it's been very successful overall. And it's a criticism many people in water resources have, I think, is that we have so many agencies with so many different interests managing the Mississippi, but no one entity overseeing it all. So it's a piecemeal approach. And piecemeal approaches don't always work the best.

So it's problematic. And today, on one side of the equation, you have the navigation industry arguing that the Mississippi needs more navigation improvements. The Midwest just isn't keeping up with other parts of the world in the competition for marketing of grain internationally. We need longer locks and dams on the lower part of the system if we're going to compete internationally.

Yet environmentalists are arguing that the river is going through a potential ecosystem collapse, that the river is again dying because of the locks and dams. They don't allow it to go through that low water part of the cycle, which is essential. It's like a pulse. It comes, surges and then recedes and surges and recedes.

And that pulse is essential to aquatic plant growth, to the sediments compacting on the Mississippi so plants can grow. It's essential to many aspects of the river's life. So right now we're caught between having a river that's navigable and having a river that functions ecologically like a large floodplain river that it is.

KATE SMITH: Your book is coming out around the same time the debate about expanding the lower locks and dams to allow even larger barges to go through. Are you seeing this as a let's learn from history? Are you seeing this as-- is the timing meaningful?

JOHN ANFINSON: Yes, very much so. What I hope my book does is, first of all, it doesn't answer the question of what we should do with the river. I don't have the solution of what should happen. But the debate is going on and the debate needs to get out there to the public.

If decisions are going to be made about what's going to happen to this river, I want the public to have a role in those decisions. And I want them to be informed decisions. Right now, the public is largely ignorant that there is even a debate. They probably don't care a lot because they don't know about how important it is.

But what happens with Congress right now in terms of what happens with this river is going to determine the future of the Midwest economy and the future of the Mississippi's ecosystem. The debate that's going on right now is being conducted by biologists, environmentalists, engineers, project managers, city and government officials with very little understanding of what has happened on the river and why. So I would like those people who are engaged in that debate to know a little bit more of what they're talking about, how the river became what it is.

One of the common cliches is that everything the Corps has done is pork barrel. It's just if you're an environmentalist, that's just one of the things you have to say, if you want any credence. And yet none of the major navigation projects were pork barrel.

They were pushed for by the region. They were pushed for by the country. They were big picture things to try to improve the economy of the Midwest and the nation. They weren't local projects to benefit a local congressperson.

When you understand that, then you have to deal with something that's much more powerful than simple pork barrel. You have to ask if these arguments are still legitimate, are they still valid, and in what sense are they valid or legitimate? And how do they stack up next to other arguments that are also legitimate and valid about the environment?

KATE SMITH: You've been listening to a Voices of Minnesota interview. John Anfinson is a historian with the National Park Service. His book on the Mississippi is due out next year. It's called The River We Have Wrought-- A History of the Upper Mississippi River. We talked along the river as the Mississippi passes through Minneapolis and St. Paul. I'm Kate Smith.

[JOHN HARTFORD, "TAKE ME BACK TO MY MISSISSIPPI RIVER HOME"] Taking me back

Taking me back

Taking me back to that Mississippi River home.

Taking me back

Taking me back

Taking me back to that Mississippi River home.

MIKE EDGERLY: That's our Voices of Minnesota hour on the river. We heard first from retiring Jonathan Padelford Riverboat Captain Bill Bowell. The Voices of Minnesota series producer is Dan Olson. And reminder about our changing current collection of stories on our website minnesotapublicradio.org. Lots of stories about the Mississippi, the Minnesota, and other waterways in Minnesota on our website minnesotapublicradio.org. And this program will be repeated tonight at 9:00.

CATHY WURZER: I'm Cathy Wurzer, regional host of MPR's Morning Edition. When you wake up tomorrow, don't forget to tune in to this station where you'll find out what's going on everywhere from New Delhi to New Ulm. That's Morning Edition from 4:00 to 9:00 right here on Minnesota Public Radio.

MIKE EDGERLY: This is Minnesota Public Radio.