Down the Not-So-Lazy River: Commercial Steamboats in the Fox River Valley, 1843-1900
by Timothy A. Casiana

Sternwheel Excursion Steamboat at Fond du Lac, before 1908

On June 16, 1856, the residents of Wisconsin’s Fox and Wolf River Valleys had plenty of reason to “gather at the river” and celebrate, and in Appleton, celebrate they did! A good part of Appleton’s population of roughly 2,000 people had anxiously assembled along both shores of the Fox River. Among those gathered were a delegation of enthusiastic officials from the cities of Neenah and Menasha. It would have been obvious to even the most ignorant passer-by that something quite important was about to happen along the shores of the Upper Fox River. ¹

On this day the 133-foot paddle steamer Aquila puffed up the Fox River to Appleton to meet the steamboat Pioneer. At approximately eleven o’clock, the Aquila chugged around the last point below the city into the view of the excited crowd. As the Aquila came into sight, the air was instantly filled with exuberant cheers and feverish applause from the animated assembly of flag-waving well-wishers. After a few moments the brass band on each vessel began to play triumphant music, accompanied by the sharp and steady polytonal shriek of steam-whistles. The editor of the Appleton Crescent described the celebrated meeting as “one of the most beautiful sights we have ever seen.”

Although the sight of two steamers passing each other on the Fox had by this time become common, this meeting was still special, for the Aquila was the first steam vessel to make the trip by way of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers, both of which were now linked to the Fox by the newly completed Portage Canal. This meeting symbolized the unification of America’s northeastern water transportation system, stretching from the Atlantic Coast through the Great Lakes to the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio River System. From the standpoint of national pride, the day was also special because two examples of one of America’s first serious contri-butions to industrial technology, in the form of steam-powered waterborne transportation, were on display.

The day was also special for one participant, Captain Steven Hotaling. Captain Hotaling was the son of Peter Hotaling, the man who had brought this rapid and reliable means of com-mercial transportation to the region. ² Peter Hotaling had established the precedent for Fox/Wolf River commercial steam navigation by bringing the first river steamer to Green Bay thirteen years earlier. For nearly a century after Captain Hotaling’s steamer arrived, steam-powered waterborne transportation served as an important agent to economic progress and development in the Fox Valley.

From ice-out in mid-April until freeze-over in November, the chimney stacks of hard-working paddle steamers could be seen belching smoke on the Fox and Wolf anywhere from the northern docks of Fremont and Green Bay to the Portage Canal and beyond in the West, and to the shores of Lake Winnebago at Fond du Lac in the South. This was an era of commercial water navigation in which paddle steamers moved wood and wheat to milling centers, coal for industry, food from farm to market, and people from village to village. ³

Long before the arrival of the Aquila, the foundation for steam-powered river transpor-tation on Wisconsin’s Fox and Wolf Rivers was established by the glacial topography of the region. The entire river basin runs parallel to an important land feature known as the Niagara escarpment. Several thousand years ago, glaciers moved into Wisconsin and channeled along the escarpment, thereby creating the Fox River.

The upper Fox River meanders on a gentle 107-mile course from Portage to Oshkosh. The Wolf River, which at one time extended commercial transportation as far as Shawano, flows southward through the north-central section of the State and joins the Fox via Lake Poygan and Lake Buttes des Morts. The upper Fox River is characterized by a network of narrows, shallows, and horseshoe bends. Conversely, the lower Fox is quite straight as it rushes from the north end of Lake Winnebago into Green Bay. The current of the lower section of the Fox contrasts great-ly with that of the upper river, for the lower Fox drops more than 160 feet in just 39 miles, while the upper portion declines a mere 35 feet over more than twice that distance. The Wolf River from Fremont to the mouth of Lake Poygan had geographic properties that resemble the upper Fox, while north of Fremont, the twisting course of the Wolf closely resembles the features of the lower Fox.

In the early nineteenth century, American pioneers in the Wisconsin territory used the Fox and Wolf Rivers both for transportation of goods and for facilitating immigration. They shipped lead in flat-bottomed Durham Boats from Galena to Green Bay by way of the Wisconsin-Fox River route. Typical Durham Boats were between forty-five and sixty feet long, with a ten-to-twelve-foot beam, and could carry a load weighing twenty to thirty tons. Ten to twelve men took turns placing poles on the river bottom at the bow and then walked toward the stern, moving the boat forward. Most of the settlers who came to the Lake Winnebago region in the 1830s and 1840s came up the Fox River from Green Bay by means of Durham Boats. ⁴

A major move for economic development of the region occurred in 1835, when Federal land sales pushed the frontier line of agricultural settlement in and through the Fox River Valley. ⁵ During the decade that followed, speculators and farmers from New England and the Mid-Atlantic States migrated to cities like Chicago and Detroit to purchase tracts of land for urban and agricultural development. Since the majority of these emigrants traveled by water, it was only a matter of time before a few enterprising settlers saw the full economic significance of the Fox/Wolf River route. Cities sprouted up along the river banks and developed quickly: Fond du Lac profited from superior geographical position at the foot of Lake Winnebago, and the city developed in response to the rapid settlement of nearby fertile prairie land. Oshkosh took ad-vantage of both northern forests and the Wolf River flowage to become a concentrated lumber industry town. Neenah, Menasha, and Appleton spawned prosperous milling industries powered by the steady current of the lower Fox. ⁶

As these cities and their industries developed, so did the demand for a swift method of transporting goods and people among them. The technological answer to this demand came in the form of the paddle wheel steamboat. From the mid 1850s to the early 1900s, steam-powered packet boats, grouser tugs, standard tugs, and freighters facilitated economic progress and indus-trial development in the Fox River Valley. Packet boats were both the most common and largest type of boat in the region. These double (sometimes triple) decked steamers were “jacks of all trades,” vessels that carried mixed loads of passengers and freight. ⁷

There were also many steam-powered tugboats at work in the region during the 1800s. One such vessel was a specially rigged boat known as a grouser tug. The grouser was developed for the purpose of pulling logs. There were also a number of standard tow boats. Contrary to what their name might suggest, these boats pushed barges and timber rafts from the side or rear – a method still popular for modern diesel tugs. Both types of tug looked like small packet boats with a reinforced stern and bulkhead. By the 1870s, the steam powered tugboats were the second most common boats on the Fox and Wolf.

A typical Fox/Wolf River steam freighter was nothing more than a single-deck steamboat with a small pilothouse at the stern. While some of the steam freighters had fully enclosed hatches, most were simply “flat-bed” cargo carriers. There were no fewer than ten such freighters on the Fox and Wolf Rivers between 1860 and 1890. The average Fox/Wolf freighter could carry approximately two hundred tons of cargo.

Forty per cent of the steamboats that navigated the Fox and Wolf Rivers were packet boats, thirty per cent were tugs, and twenty per cent were freighters (the remaining ten per cent were of indeterminate type). Although they were the largest in terms of overall size, packet steamers were on average fifteen feet shorter than the 130-foot freighters. Steam tugs, which carried little more than fuel and crew, averaged about 70 feet in length.

Like their big brothers on the Mississippi, the vast majority of Fox and Wolf River steam-boats possessed a series of decks and bore a resemblance to a huge, rectangular, twin-layer cake. ⁸ The lowest level of the vessel, known as the “main deck,” supported the heavy boilers and engines. The main deck also bolstered a second story deck called the “boiler deck,” which carried most freight on cargo runs. Atop the boiler deck, an open-air deck called the “hurricane deck” accommodated cumbersome loads of finished products or baggage. The hurricane deck also sometimes served as the foundation for a small, fully-enclosed structure called the “texas.” The texas provided accommodations for crew members and was typically positioned directly behind the pilot house. The windowed pilot’s cabin, located high and to the front of most Fox/Wolf River steamers, was the control center of the boat. In the pilot’s house, one could find the rudder wheel, internal and external signaling systems (literally bells and whistles), a pot-belly stove, and a “lazy bench” for visiting captains or family members.

Also adopted from Mississippi-style paddle steamers was the support system of chains and diagonal timbers that rivermen referred to as “hog chains.” ⁹ The timbers ran skyward from connection points on the hull near the boiler and engine sections and held up chains that would be tightened with turnbuckles to add dynamic tension to the structure. The end result looked similar to the support system used for suspension bridges. This aspect of technology was parti-cularly important to local builders because strength and carrying capacity mattered more than appearance or comfort.

Almost every part of American paddle steamers was made of wood. White oak was the standard for the superstructure and planking, while pine was used for the decks. ¹⁰ Iron techno-logy was quickly coming of age, but timber was easier to repair and absorbed more shock, two important advantages to local navigators, because both the Fox and the Wolf Rivers were noto-riously filled with hull-ravaging snags and “sawyers” (sand bars) that changed location each spring. ¹¹ Exceptions to the “all-wood rule” included propulsion machinery and parts of the paddle wheel and steering mechanism.

Due both to regional river transportation requirements and to the rush to fill the demand, steamboats on the Fox and Wolf Rivers differed significantly from the expansive and elaborately adorned paddle steamers that operated on the Mississippi. Because the Fox River was shallow and winding, local steamboat builders were obliged to construct vessels that were smaller, more maneuverable, and of lighter draft than the standard Mississippi-style paddle wheeler. Speci-fically, Fox and Wolf River steamers were typically about one hundred feet shorter than their two- to three-hundred foot comrades that maneuvered the Mississippi. Since they were smaller, Fox and Wolf River steamers had smaller engines and half as many boilers. Local boat hulls also had a low length-to-beam ratio (about five to one) and therefore typically drew only two or three feet of water. ¹²

Steamboat hulls also varied in shape according to the river in which they operated. In the East, steamboat hulls had moderate “V” shaped hulls that flared outward just above the water line. Such a hull closely resembled those of modern ocean-going vessels. Robert Fulton’s Clermont, the first fully functional commercial steamboat, is a prime example. As river ex- ploration progressed North and West, depth and width were not adequate to support a hull that drew so much water. ¹³ Practical steamboats on western rivers were either entirely flat-bottomed or gently rounded near the perimeter of the hull. Successful commercial steam vessels of the Fox and Wolf River valley, which navigated both narrow river stretches and wide expanses of open water in lakes like Winnebago and Poygan, were hybrids by virtue of necessity. In general, commercially effective Fox and Wolf River steamers were characterized by a hull rounded in the rear and a midsection that narrowed to a steeply “V”-shaped bow.

Another contrast between the Fox/Wolf and Mississippi River systems is the distance that boats had to travel. Due to their long journeys, Mississippi steamers often had second-story staterooms filled with sleeping berths. In contrast, the vast majority of steamboats navigating the Fox and Wolf Rivers rarely made excursion trips longer than one day’s duration. Local steam-boat companies had no reason to provide overnight accommodations other than for the crew.

Mississippi-style riverboats were often adorned with elaborate jigsaw scrollwork. ¹⁴ This ornamentation served no utilitarian purpose, and the Fox River valley “workhorses” therefore virtually eliminated such frills. Fox Valley boat companies also eliminated frivolities like second story skylight roofs and elaborate interior furnishings, simply because such “extras” added to material costs and lengthened building time. While the standard Fox River vessel was quite unsightly in comparison to the highly decorated Mississippi-style steamer, most were fully capable of efficient transport of people, finished products and raw materials.

At least one majestic exception to the well-established Fox/Wolf “ugly duckling work boat dictum” was built in Oshkosh in 1921. Her name was the Valley Queen. This 140-foot-long stern-wheel excursion vessel had a fully-enclosed second floor deck, complete with a dance floor. The picturesque excursion boat also boasted deluxe cabinetwork and a pilothouse orna-ment. Unfortunately, the Valley Queen burned to the waterline after only one full season in operation. ¹⁵

Between 1837 and 1840, a group of Green Bay entrepreneurs triggered the boom in local waterborne steam transportation when they negotiated with Captain Peter Hotaling to bring a steam vessel to the Fox River Valley from Buffalo, New York. ¹⁶ Three years later, Captain Hotaling made regional history when he reached Green Bay in the Black Hawk. The crude Black Hawk was nothing special to look at. Apparently Captain Hotaling procured an Erie Canal barge and slapped a steam power plant and paddle wheel on it. The vessel was described by the Milwaukee Courier as “the queerest-looking steam watercraft that ever condescended to pay us a visit.” Regardless of her appearance, the city of Green Bay was grateful for her arrival. After a brief delay, a rebuild, and a name change, this vessel became the first steamboat providing commercial transportation in the Fox River Valley.

Captain Hotaling at first faced a logistical problem of the highest order when he attempt-ed to penetrate the lower Fox River. Eight violent rapids between Green Bay and Oshkosh were simply impossible for a steam-driven vessel of any size to navigate. The Black Hawk made approximately three-quarters of the trip before Captain Hotaling scrapped the idea of being the first man to reach Oshkosh via paddle steamer, but only after he had conducted an exhausting ten-day endeavor to portage the vessel across the Grand Kakalin rapids, where Kaukauna is located today.

Peter Hotaling found out the hard way that the lower Fox River would require major im-provement if steam-powered vessels were to be a success. Fortunately, Wisconsin already had a high-powered river-improvement crusader, Morgan L. Martin of Green Bay. In 1831, Martin began working to secure Federal funds to open the Fox to navigation. After fifteen years of tireless lobbying, Martin introduced the Fox-Wisconsin Improvement Bill to Congress while serving as a delegate for the Territory. Martin’s bill provided that “a grant of every odd numbered section of land within three miles of the proposed water route should be available for the raising of funds to improve the Fox River and build a canal across Portage.” ¹⁷

In late 1847, President James K. Polk signed Martin’s bill into law. Shortly thereafter, a five-man board was appointed to organize construction. This board was probably the first state board in the history of Wisconsin. In 1848, work on locks began in Menasha, and digging of a canal commenced in Portage in June of the following year. Despite financial setbacks and political problems that hindered the development of the waterways throughout the years, the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers improvement project was completed in 1856. ¹⁸

After completion of the waterway, one task that steamboats performed was to dredge the nine (upper) and seventeen (lower) locks of the Fox-Wisconsin system. There were no fewer than ten government-operated steam-powered dredges and grouser tugs at work on the river system on a daily basis by the mid 1870s. ¹⁹

By the mid 1860s the demand for steam-powered vessels far exceeded the supply on the Fox and Wolf Rivers. The November 12, 1867 Oshkosh Times printed the complaints of a Omro shingle mill owner who stated that the “supply of lumber [alone] is ‘inexhaustible’ and the demand would be five times what it now is, had we the proper facilities for transportation.” Given the level of demand, it became standard practice for local boat builders to produce vessels as quickly and cheaply as they could in order to fill the niche. Nearly every paddle steamer built along the shores of the Fox or Wolf after 1860 was constructed in three months, sometimes less, typically during the winter months. ²⁰

Due to the flourishing lumber industry, there was probably no cheaper place in the United States to construct any wood product than in the Fox River Valley during the 1860s and 1870s. An April issue of the 1886 Oshkosh Daily Northwestern stated that “western boateries were beginning to understand” the value of Fox Valley boats and noted that out of state orders for new vessels “were coming in every day.”

By the mid-1860s most every community in the Fox River Valley had some sort of boat building industry. ²¹ So prolific was the industry that, according to one author, “to list all the builders and the vessels they constructed would be akin to cataloguing the ships which the Greeks launched against the Trojans.” ²² For example, an April 1866 issue of the Oshkosh Northwestern noted that the Winneconne boat construction firm of Lake, McArthur, and Webster were constructing no less than six grain barges, several other barge frames, and a side-wheel rafting tug. In Oshkosh, the Barnes Company was busy with five more barges, while the com-panies of Neff and Lynch and R. C. Ryan were building a packet steamer and propeller-driven steam tug, respectively. At Eureka, Weber and Company constructed two more vessels in 1866. Steamboat builders of the Fox and Wolf River region were most active between 1860 and 1870. Nearly fifty per cent of all the steamboats that operated on the Fox/Wolf River system were built during this decade.

At least sixty-two steam-driven passenger- and freight-carrying packet boats were built along the shores of the Fox and Wolf Rivers between 1844 and 1908. ²³ Conservatively, this meant that the steamboat construction business earned roughly $992,000 for constructing this type of vessel during the sixty-four-year time span. Forty-two steam-powered tugboats were built in the region between 1853 and 1874. ²⁴ Since the average cost of a nineteenth-century steam tug was around $6000, the total revenue for building these boats during the twenty-one-year period was about $252,000. While records exist for steam-powered craft, there is no way to tabulate either the individual cost or total number of powerless barges that were built in the area. At least eight were built in 1866. In any event, it is clear that barge-building also made a signi-ficant contribution to the local economy.

Following his failed portage of the Grand Kakalin, Captain Hotaling rebuilt the Black Hawk on the shores of Lake Winnebago and renamed her the Manchester. From 1844 until 1850 the 85-foot-long Manchester transported passengers, logs, flour, and lead between ports at Fond du Lac, Taycheedah, Neenah, and Fort Winnebago. Like most of the Fox/Wolf River steamboats that followed her, the combination of the Manchester’s shallow draft and her long gangplanks allowed her to “dock” just about anywhere along the shoreline of the lake. It is likely that Cap-tain Hotaling also conducted a great deal of business through casual pickups and deliveries along the banks of Lake Winnebago. ²⁵

In 1849 a joint stock company of Fox River Valley built the second steamboat of the region, the Peytonia. Although the 115 foot-long Peytonia suffered financially in her first year, between 1850 and 1853 the Peytonia was filled to capacity with settlers on most every one of her daily runs from Oshkosh to Fond du Lac. ²⁶ Peytonia could probably carry about 300 passengers per trip, which means that she may have hauled as many as 200,000 people on journeys on the lake during those three years.

In 1850 a Menasha firm built the Menasha. This vessel is of special interest because the 165-foot-long sidewheeler was probably the largest steamboat that ever navigated the Fox/Wolf waterway. Between 1849 and 1854, at least ten more steamers were built and put to work on the Fox and Wolf Rivers. Of the ten in operation, the Peytonia, as well as at least four of the others, were purchased by Fitzgerald and Company of Oshkosh in 1854. During their first year of operation, Fitzgerald and Company boats earned nearly $40,000 dollars for the locally-based steam transportation company. ²⁷

By the late 1800s, the wheat and lumber industries became the principal employers of Fox River Valley steamboat companies. The rise of wheat and lumber milling in the Fox and Wolf River Valleys in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s was nothing less than meteoric. The overall cut of Wisconsin timber soared from two hundred million board feet in 1853 to over a billion board feet within twenty years. ²⁸ More than half of this lumber was felled from pine forests situated along the Wolf River and its tributaries. Cultivated land devoted to wheat in Wisconsin increased from 325,000 acres in 1850 to 1,215,000 in 1860. The largest wheat crop Wisconsin ever produced, 29,000,000 bushels, was produced in 1860. While wheat farming was at first popular in South Central Wisconsin, by the end of the 1860s, the counties surrounding the Fox River Valley were producing higher yields than any other region of the state. ²⁹

Steamboats on the Fox and Wolf Rivers developed the economy of the region by carrying a significant amount of Neenah’s and Menasha’s flour from mill to market. By 1860, the two cities had at least ten flour mills in operation. In 1861 alone, steam-powered freighters, tugs, and packet boats transported 64,000 barrels of flour from the two cities. Steamboats were also bringing locally grown wheat to the mills. In the same year, more than 126,000 bushels of wheat reached Neenah and Menasha from Green Bay. By the 1870s the annual output of flour for the two cities approximated 300,000 barrels. In 1870, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported that the Lake and River Transportation Company, just one of several steamboat companies, had brought 18,000 barrels of flour into Menasha for processing. Although rail transportation was available by the 1870s, moving wheat from nearby farms to urban milling centers was far less expensive if conducted by steamboat. ³⁰

Despite some early setbacks, the steamboat was critical in developing the Fox River Valley lumber industry during the period from 1850 to 1870. From the arrival of the Black Hawk/Manchester in 1844 until 1853, several of the early Fox and Wolf River steamboats attempted either to push or to pull timber from the Wolf River pine forests to lumber mills and shingle factories in cities such as Oshkosh, Omro, Berlin, and Winneconne. ³¹ It was soon discovered that the limited horsepower and design flaws of the earliest river steamers limited their commercial effectiveness in the lumber hauling trade.

This changed with the technological breakthrough pioneered by David Hume of Omro. In 1853, Hume designed a steam-powered craft tailored for log transport and named it the Swan. The Swan differed from the standard freighting steamboats in that it had a steam winch and was rigged with a “grouser pole.” ³² The grouser pole, which had been invented by Hume’s father in 1847, was a long vertical timber that ran through the forward deck of the steamboat and was driven into the riverbed in order to hold the boat in place. ³³ During operation, the grouser tug steamed forward and paid out line attached to a set of log rafts. The vessel then positioned the grouser pole, reeled the raft up to the boat, and repeated the process.

Prior to Hume’s invention, 250-foot x 50-foot log rafts typically had been floated down the upper Wolf River to Boom Bay on Lake Poygan. From Boom Bay, the rafts were towed by horseboat to their destination. ³⁴ Despite the fact that the Fox River from Boom Bay to Oshkosh has little fall, and consequently only a slow current, a considerable amount of animate “horse-power” was required to move enough of these wooden monstrosities to keep up with the ever-growing demand for timber down river. ³⁵

One year after the trial of the Swan, a larger and more practical grouser tug, named Active, was constructed in Berlin by the Hume family. The Active was quite powerful; her horizontal engine cylinders were ten inches larger than those of the Swan. She was quickly purchased from the Hume family and put into service. With the coming of the Active, steam-powered grouser tugs quickly replaced the horse boat as the standard method transportation for the logging industry for the next thirty years. ³⁶

While the introduction of the steam grouser tug had an extremely positive effect on the entire Fox Valley lumber industry, its impact was particularly important to the city of Oshkosh. By 1867, more than twenty-three tugs worked in the region. Of these, at least half were grousers. ³⁷ In that same year the Oshkosh Daily Times reported that an estimated 175,000,000 feet of logs yearly were entering the city’s thirty-seven sawmills and fifteen shingle factories. ³⁸ Captain Edwin Marion Neff noted in his log that by 1874 the number of steam-powered tugs operating on the Fox and Wolf rivers had increased to forty-seven. ³⁹ From 1850 to 1870, the population of Oshkosh skyrocketed from 702 to 12,675. This population explosion was largely due to the economic growth driven by the lumber industry, an industry that was facilitated by the introduction of steam-powered log tugs. ⁴⁰

Just as steam powered grouser and rafting tugs were primarily responsible for bringing raw timber into Oshkosh for processing, the finished products were often transported either to Green Bay or to Portage by steam freighters and steam-propelled barges. In 1850, Oshkosh mills were yielding 100,000,000 feet of lumber per year and 100,000,000 shingles. ⁴¹ Since Oshkosh had no rail transportation at this time, it is probable that the vast majority of the city’s finished lumber commodities moved to market by means of steam-powered watercraft.

In the late 1800s, coal began to replace wood as the primary fuel source for industrial and domestic use in the Fox River Valley. The bulk of Northeastern Wisconsin’s coal was shipped to Green Bay from Lake Erie ports and from Green Bay to the region’s interior. So complete was the acceptance of coal that the annual tonnage arriving at Green Bay skyrocketed from 10,000 to 415,000 tons between 1880 and 1908. ⁴²

While rail transportation had become common in Wisconsin by the 1870s, it was still at least thirty per cent cheaper to transport coal from Green Bay to the interior by steamboat. ⁴³ Therefore, in the late 1800s steamboats typically included a substantial quantity of this “non-rush” commodity on their cargo manifests. From the late 1880s to the early 1900s, the Cook and Brown Company of Oshkosh operated the Herman Hitz, the R.C. Brown, and the B.F. Carter as coal haulers on the Green Bay-Lower Fox River route. ⁴⁴ Each of these three vessels could tow barges holding two or three hundred tons of coal. During the two decades of their operation, these three workhorses moved abut 100,000 tons of coal into the Fox River Valley each year. ⁴⁵ Much of this coal was used by the burgeoning paper industry, which also received no less than 33,000 tons of pulpwood per year delivered via steamboats up to 1890. ⁴⁶

While side-wheel steamers dominated the Fox/Wolf transport industry in the early years, stern-driven vessels like the rugged B. F. Carter were built at a ratio of two to one over side-wheelers from 1876 to 1903. ⁴⁷ There were several practical reasons for this change: Stern-wheelers were more efficient at pushing barges, because with the wheel positioned astern, its “dip” (the distance the paddles reached into the water) could be adjusted for maximum efficiency. A rear wheel also had the advantage of having the hull push aside floating debris that might otherwise snag in the paddles. Given that the Fox and Wolf Rivers were quite shallow, or “thin,” in the waterman’s jargon, the stern-wheeler had the advantage of being able to back off shoals and sand bars before finding itself too mired to do anything about it.

Notwithstanding her duties as a workhorse, the trusty 110-foot-long B. F. Carter was often cleaned up and put to work as an excursion vessel. The rugged Carter served patrons of the Fox and Wolf Rivers for 24 years. Considering that the average boat lasted approximately three to five years, it is fair to say that the B. F. Carter was probably the most durable steamboat ever built along the shores of the Fox and Wolf Rivers.

On an expanding basis from late 1800s to the mid-1920s, companies like Cook and Brown augmented their incomes by leasing their boats out for recreational excursions. At first the boats were typically used on Tuesdays and weekends for this purpose. One such example was the trip that Brooklyn made from Oshkosh to Green Bay in July 1879. The leisurely two-day excursion, which included meals and hotel accommodations, cost just $2.50 per person. ⁴⁸ Berlin’s Fashion and Thistle were often chartered by Oshkosh businessmen to make day trips to the city. On a trip in August of 1882, travelers were given the opportunity to steam to Oshkosh “to witness maneuvers of the second Wisconsin Military Regiment” for the price of $1.00. ⁴⁹

As time went on and the population and prosperity of the Fox River Valley grew, the excursion business became a viable trade in its own right. By the 1900s, nearly as many steamboat “days of the river season” were devoted to passenger service (mainly chartered cruises) as were devoted to freight. In 1903, the Oshkosh Weekly Courier carried an article stating that 13,027 people visited the city via steamboat in that year and 12,200 had done so the year before. The travelers had arrived from Berlin, Eureka, Omro, Neenah, Menasha, and the eastern shore of Lake Winnebago. The average number of patrons for each trip was approxi-mately 200. Since the average fare was around $1.00, excursion traffic in 1903 and 1904 netted transportation companies in the area of $25,000. The Courier also estimated that each patron spent an average of $5 per person during their visit, which meant that Oshkosh businesses gained approximately $126,000 from the local travelers during those same two years.

Aside from their cargoes of lumber, wheat, coal, and passengers, the steamboats of the Fox and Wolf Rivers carried everything from broomsticks to sand to apples to clamshells. In 1861, the Oshkosh Weekly Manufacturer noted that the steamers Bay City and Fountain City were filled with produce and finished products “to overflowing on every trip” from Green Bay to the cities of the lower Fox. ⁵⁰ Considering that these twin 130-foot side-wheelers made the trip one way each day, it is probable that they delivered no less than 12,000 tons of various cargo during that year alone. In June 1861, the Manufacturer noted that seven boats passed the locks at Menasha within a one-hour time span. Among these vessels, the steam tug Neenah towed two barges of wheat and flour, while another, called the Lady Jane, pushed three more barges filled with “salt, lumber, and merchandise.” In 1868, the Oshkosh City Times reported that in a single day the Winnebago, the E.P. Weston, the Island City, and the Verona were loaded with products at Colvin’s Dock in Oshkosh. These boats steamed to Oshkosh from Green Bay on the Fox, from the eastern shore of Lake Winnebago, and from Berlin, on the upper Fox. If these vessels made even one trip per week and carried thirty tons per trip, they would have transported a minimum of 840 tons of goods per vessel in a standard seven-month season. ⁵¹

Well into the last years of the nineteenth century, there were more than 12,000 annual passages through the seventeen locks of the lower Fox alone. Through these locks in 1890 passed a grand total of 389,291 tons of goods. Tonnage totals for that year included 33,446 tons of pulpwood, 35,034 tons of brick, 2,510 tons of general merchandise, 321 tons of perishables in the form of beer, fish, potatoes, apples, and cranberries, and five tons of broomsticks. ⁵² Probably the largest single object ever transported via Fox/Wolf steamboat was a 42-foot-high grist mill. The 40 x 55 x 42-foot Reliance Flouring Mill was positioned atop a pair of barges and pushed from Winneconne to Oshkosh by the steam tug Ajax on July 4 and 5, 1879. According to the July 5 issue of the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, “Captain [Edward] Neff pushed [the mill] to the foot of the Minnesota Street bridge” in Oshkosh in just three hours.

By the late 1870s, the steam-powered locomotive was starting to displace the steamboat from its role as the key means of commercial transportation in the Fox River Valley. The “iron horse” was faster, operated on a year-round schedule, and could travel a much straighter, and therefore shorter, course than that offered by the rivers. Considering the economic explosion and the length of the winters in the Fox River Valley, when steamboats came to a halt, it was simply a matter of time before steam-powered transportation via rail took the place of the river steamer in the region.

The multifaceted efficiency of the locomotive eventually quashed the steamboat’s ability to compete as a commercial entity in the Fox River Valley. In 1862, the Chicago and North-western extended its tracks along the eastern shore of Lake Winnebago to Green Bay. ⁵³ In 1871, the Wisconsin Central Rail Road opened a western line from Neenah to Stevens Point. Eleven years later, a competitor opened rail service from the Fox Valley to Milwaukee. ⁵⁴ These three routes define a key reason for the ascendancy of the “iron horse” over the steamboat, for they connected the Fox Valley directly to the growing metropolitan marketplaces of Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Chicago.

Direct routes and faster travel were a powerful combination for both passenger and freight transportation. In January 1865, a traveler could get on a train in Omro at 5:00 A.M. and arrive in Milwaukee an hour before noon. ⁵⁵ Even the earliest locomotives could travel a straight route at somewhere between 10 and 15 miles an hour. Compared to the day-long trips the Manchester made crossing the 20-plus miles of Lake Winnebago just a few years earlier, this more rapid form of transportation was seen as revolutionary in a rapid growth region where both distance-to-time parameters and enthusiasm for modern technology were paramount. And of course, the journey by rail from Omro to Milwaukee could be made in January, a time when all steamboat transportation had been halted months before and would remain at a standstill until the spring thawing of the lake and river system.

The steamboats that navigated the Fox and Wolf Rivers between 1843 and the early 1900s served as the first mechanical agent of commercial transportation for the region. Prior to their arrival, the only way to move bulk commodities in and out of Wisconsin’s interior had been by such inefficient means as horse teams, human-propelled Durham boats, horse boats, and perhaps by schooners that were limited to the lakes and were at the constant mercy of the wind. None of these transportation methods provided travel at a sustained speed, nor could they move their cargoes any faster then two to five miles per hour. With the arrival of the Black Hawk in 1843, it suddenly had become possible to move large quantities of raw materials and finished goods throughout the Fox River Valley at speeds of up to ten miles an hour, whether with or against the current. Within fifteen years of the Black Hawk revolution, Wisconsin’s pioneers had modified the river system enough to initiate a speedy interstate distribution service that fostered economic and industrial development in the interior of East Central Wisconsin. During the next three decades, the paddle steamer operated on this lake and river, canal, and lock system as the principal method of commercial transportation.

The technical revolution was swift. Steam-powered Fox and Wolf River grouser tugs had virtually eliminated the archaic horse boat by the mid-1850s. The steam tugs filled a huge demand by offering the lumber industry the great advantage of reduced transportation time for raw materials. Between 1850 and 1870, steam grouser tugs spurred cities like Oshkosh to rapid growth by moving no less than two billion feet of raw timber to Fox Valley mills. By 1860 Winnebago County, in which Oshkosh is located, was second only to Milwaukee County in terms of industrial output, mainly due to the lumber industry. ⁵⁶ From this timber, Oshkosh produced more than 2,000 tons of shingles and 1,000,000 tons of lumber. These products together brought a minimum of $15,000,000 in revenue for the Oshkosh lumber industry during this twenty year time span. Steam-powered grouser and standard tugs continued to fill this commercial transportation niche well into the 1880s.

In the 1860s, flour production became centered in the Fox Valley and therein generated further demand for rapid and reliable bulk transportation. Once again, the steamboat answered the call and filled the niche by offering speedy and reliable distribution from farm to mill and from mill to market. Since the average barrel of wheat cost approximately $4 during the 1860s, it is probable that Fox River steamboats carried no less than $2.4 million worth of milled wheat during the decade, and a significant amount was transported thereafter. By 1870, the milling centers of Neenah and Menasha were second only to Milwaukee in the Wisconsin flour milling industry. ⁵⁷

As the era progressed, steam-powered tugs, packet boats and freighters further contributed to regional economic development by moving coal, people, and various other agricultural and manufactured products in and out of the Fox and Wolf River Valley. Between 1880 and 1910, steamboats transported no less than $10 million worth of high-demand coal for use in factories and homes of the region, and they shipped an average of at least another million dollars worth of other products annually. Added to these dollar figures were the financial gains accrued by development of the steamboat excursion business, which, even if it operated for just four years at full capacity, netted local businessmen and boat companies approximately $300,000. The boat construction business, which contributed a minimum of another $1.2 million, must also be taken into account. Thus the total dollar figure for the value of all products carried by Fox River steamboats from the late 1840s to the early 1900s approximated $76.2 million, expressed in the dollars of the day.

In 1927 Fox Valley residents witnessed the last vestige of commercial steamboat transportation on the Fox-Wolf River system. On a summer day in that year the Mayflower II pulled away from Neenah on her final trip to Oshkosh. The fate of the steamboat had been sealed by the advent of the steam-powered locomotive. As tracks were laid across the State, it rapidly became evident that the high cost of maintaining the Fox-Wisconsin river system could no longer be justified. Regional bulk waterborne transportation via steamboat was system-atically supplanted by railroads during the decades between the late 1860s and the early 1900s.

1 - Appleton Crescent, June 16, 1856. return

2 - Marcelia Neff, By Paddle-Wheel, Sail, and Steam (Oshkosh, Wisconsin: Private Publication, 1989), 13. return

3 - Clarence J. Jungwirth, History of the City of Oshkosh: The Early Years (Oshkosh, Wisconsin: Private Publication, 1995), IV, 95. Polk Library Collection, Oshkosh. return

4 - John W. Arndt, Pioneers and Durham Boats on the Fox River (Madison, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976), 185-187. return

5 - Charles N. Glaab and Lawrence H. Larsen, Factories In The Valley: Neenah-Menasha, 1870-1915 (Madison, Wisconsin: Warzalla Publishing Company, 1969), 6. return

6 - Glaab and Larsen, 12. return

7 - Don Mitchell, Steamboats on the Fox River (Oshkosh, Wisconsin: Castle Piece Press, 1986). Local steam-powered water navigation began in 1843 and steadily declined from the 1870s. Don Mitchell witnessed the last Fox River steamboat trip in the summer of 1927. return

8 - Ralph T. Ward, Steamboats: A History of Early Adventure (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1973), 74. return

9 - Ken Watson, Paddle Steamers: An Illustrated History of Steamboats on the Mississippi and Its Tributaries (New York: Norton and Company, 1985), 29. return

10 - Watson, 54. return

11 - Watson, 34. return

12 - Mitchell, 19. return

13 - Ward, 81. return

14 - Watson, 31. return

15 - Mitchell, 65. return

16 - M. Neff, 15. return

17 - William A. Titus, History of the Fox River Valley, Lake Winnebago, and the Green Bay Region (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1930), 316. return

18 - Titus, 316. return

19 - Mitchell, 86-111. return

20 - William Neff, “Our Flotilla” (A chronological survey of Fox and Wolf River vessels), Oshkosh Daily Courier (various issues, 1899). return

21 - James Metz, et al., Prairie, Pines, and People: Winnebago County in a New Perspective (Oshkosh, Wisconsin: The Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, 1976), 259. return

22 - Metz, 253. return

23 - Ray Hughes Whitbeck, Geography of the Fox River Valley (Madison, Wisconsin: State of Wisconsin, 1915), 34. return

24 - W. Neff, 64. return

25 - Watson, 47. return

26 - Oshkosh: One Hundred Years a City, v. I: 1853-1893 (Oshkosh, Wisconsin: Privately Printed, 1953), 209 return

27 - W. Neff, 28. return

28 - Glaab and Larsen, 7. return

29 - Robert C. Nesbit, The History of Wisconsin, v. III: Urbanization and Industrialization, 1873-1893 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 281-283. return

30 - Metz, 262. return

31 - Jungwirth, 94. return

32 - W. Neff, 29. return

33 - W. Neff, 21. return

34 - Jungwirth, 94. return

35 - Joseph Schafer, The Winnebago-Horicon Basin: A Type Study in Western History (Madison, Wisconsin: State Historical Society, 1937), 289. return

36 - W. Neff, 30. return

37 - W. Neff, 64. return

38 - W. Neff, 119. return

39 - Edward Neff, “Neff and Lynch Steamboat Company Ledger,” 1874. return

40 - Metz, 13. return

41 - Oshkosh: One Hundred Years a City (1953), 95. return

42 - Whitbeck, 73. return

43 - Whitbeck, 52. return

44 - Jungwirth, 95. return

45 - Oshkosh: One Hundred Years a City (1953), 95. return

46 - Whitbeck, 36. return

47 - J. L. Barton, “Tabulation of Steamboats on the Fox and Wolf Rivers” (Oshkosh Public Museum Archives, 1909). return

48 - Robert E. Gard and Elaine Reetz, The Trail of the Serpent (Madison, Wisconsin: Wisconsin House Ltd. Book Publishers, 1973), 12. return

49 - Gard and Reetz, 172. return

50 - Metz, 261. return

51- Metz, 261. return

52 - Whitbeck, 36. return

53 - Nesbit, 314. return

54 - Glaab and Larsen, 17. return

55 - Metz, 274. return

56 - Metz, 246. return

57 - Metz, 249. return

Copyright 2002 by Clarence B. Davis. All Rights Reserved. Printed by Action Printing, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
Electronic publication by Fond du Lac Public Library has been approved by Clarence B. Davis.

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