Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Edward Lekosky II knows every inch of the Mississippi River—its reaches and bends, its shipwrecks and pumping stations and towboats. His email address begins with “woodhawk,” the old name for the vendors who sold wood to steamboats, and his life centers on the river—much as St. Louis’ early life did.
“St. Louis was founded on the closest high ground to the Confluence,” Lekosky points out. “Where the Arch now sits, that was the bluff… You know, in the old days, a third of the people in St. Louis worked on the river.”
Lekosky lives in Columbia, Ill., high on the bluffs. As a kid, he craned his neck every time his family drove across the Jefferson Barracks Bridge, fascinated by the view of St. Louis’ lower harbor. He talks familiarly about the upper harbor, too, and “the extreme upper harbor” where you find the petroleum industry of East St. Louis, and the “back channel” up by the Chain of Rocks Bridge. The Chain of Rocks Canal was built, he explains, because Sawyer’s Bend (the stretch near the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge) was so dangerous to navigate. “Along the rocks, the flow falls 18 inches a mile, instead of the usual 6 inches. You are rockin’ and rollin’!”
He started his river adventures with a trip on the Julia Belle Swain steamboat from Rock Island, Ill., up to Galena. After that, he couldn’t stop. “In 1990, I took my university professor onboard the Show-Me State, a 25-barge tow, a two-stacker, loaded with grain,” he says with a grin. “We just asked Cargill’s permission. Caught it at East Carondelet and got shanghaied all the way down to Kentucky!
“When I was documenting the wreck of the City of Saltillo, I bought a johnboat,” he continues, “but the problem with that boat is, you get wet, because the waves are pretty big out there. So I broke the piggybank and bought a bateau.” With high gunnels and a flat bottom,
it was just what he needed. “I launched it right below the J.B. Bridge,” he says, “and sailed down to Hoppie’s Marina, where Fern and Charles [Hopkins, the owners] told me about an anchor they had found in low water. It could have been from the Idlewild that ice took out in 1893.”
In 1996, Lekosky took a 38-foot Chris-Craft through a storm from Hoppie’s, which is the oldest marina in the St. Louis area, to Paducah, Ky. In 2006, Lekosky filmed the race between the Mississippi Queen and the Delta Queen. “The Delta Queen was condemned by President [George W.] Bush as a firetrap. Under the [1966] Safety at Sea Act, all wooden overnight passenger boats were condemned. Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton had all granted the Delta Queen an exemption. But in 2008, Bush II condemned her.
“The cruises are supposed to go back online in 2012,” Lekosky says, his gloom lifting. American Cruise Lines (americancruiselines.com) is building a Mississippi stern-wheeler to restore inland cruises to the Mississippi River. It will be the grandest paddle-wheeler built in decades. It will offer seven-day trips up and down the river. And it will not be made of wood.
Lekosky talks about the old Sea Scout base below Portage des Sioux as though he was there in the 1940s; he waxes nostalgic about the Anchor Line, a St. Louis/New Orleans steamboat company that “went bankrupt in 1898, after the Great Tornado of 1896 wiped out many of its steamboats. Anchor Line kept such good time, it was known as ‘the railroad line.’” He groans over the fictional steamboat captain at the National Great Rivers Museum, and the new plan for the riverfront: “It’s goofy! You don’t need all that razzle-dazzle stuff. Put back the old steam-powered ferry. People just want to get out on the water.”
Lekosky Lore
Facts from Lekosky’s manuscript “A Historical Tour of the Middle Reach of the St. Louis Harbor”:
• A line towboat will consume an average amount of fuel equal to its horsepower. For example, a line towboat of two stacks (7,000 horsepower) will have an average fuel consumption of 7,000 gallons of diesel fuel in its 24-hour workday.
• The modern steel barge can carry 1,500 tons of weight in the Mississippi River channel, taking a fleet of 60 semitrailers off the highway.
• A standard tow of 15 fully loaded barges takes the load of a freight train 2 ¼ miles long.
• St. Louis is the oldest continuous harbor on the Mississippi River.
• The Mississippi River channel oscillates every two miles from one bank to the opposite bank.
• Its current has run as slowly as 1.2 miles an hour, in frozen or drought conditions, and as fast as 10.12 miles an hour, during the Great Flood of 1993.
• From their confluence, the flows of the Upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers take about 37 miles to commingle.
• The Admiral was once the largest riverboat in the world, and with its dance hall in a former freight-train bay, it had the largest dance hall (12,000 square feet) in St. Louis.
