Postings on the River

Should you choose to wonder, that river, the one in the photo, is a proud neighbor of ours, now humbled greatly by human ingenuity, by the Army Corps of Engineers, who created a series of dams that now largely controls the flow of the nation's longest river. Once upon a time, the Missouri was a blessed neighbor that had to be feared. It was once the reason most of us came, an interstate highway, as it had been for centuries for Omaha and Yankton.  It was the very means by which we could stay, the supplier of all our goods, but, still, all too often a monster. 

Once upon a time our Missouri overflowed with life. Once there were steamships here, great flatline 150 passenger cruisers piloted by wizened captains so adept at their trade they could navigate an ever-changing maze of spacious sandbars and cottonwood snares capable of crunching a steamboat as if it were cardboard. Three years--three shipping seasons--was the average life span of the monsters that once chugged along up and down this very Missouri River. 

Sioux City honors its riverboat heritage in many ways, but one of them is a wonderful walkway that lines the river with due diligence and honor. If you take the time to walk that way, you've likely seen these time-worn posts.

I couldn't help asking: might it have been possible that these old storied posts at one time held docked steamers on their trips up and down the river? It's a wonderful idea, but not true. 

Once upon a time, before the dams, those posts were driven into the river and then connected, like this:

I'm told that some of those old posts may date back to the 1890s, but were driven into the river sometime between 1930 and 1950. Once they were in place, a dredge came up, dug out the river's channels, and dumped what they dug up behind the barriers created by those posts to reclaim river bottom as land, much as the Dutch took land back from the sea.

It was all done as a deterrent to the river's eternal rowdiness. The Missouri, an old neighbor, was forever a naughty kid, far too ready to act out. 

After the dams, the case for the discipline represented by those posts was largely moot. A couple of years ago, the Missouri showed some signs of its old delinquency, but otherwise those posts do no one's bidding now but create their own riverfront museum as emblems of another time, when the city--and the whole region--could yet be described as, well, the frontier--symbols of the wild, wild west we were, on a river we could only meekly call ours. 

On your next walk along the river, don't miss 'em. They're not leaving any time soon.