[steam whooshing]
- Narrator: Steam engines still pass through La Crosse a few
times a year, a reminder of an time when steamboats,
steam engines and steam-powered sawmills drove the economy.
In 1858, the Milwaukee and La Crosse Railroad
tunneled through the hills near Tomah.
And following the La Crosse river valley,
reached the newly-incorporated city of La Crosse.
The impact of the railroads would be profound.
They would challenge the steamboat
for control of shipping,
trigger a radical reshaping of the Mississippi River,
and lay the groundwork for an economic boom.
- Chuck Lee: The railroad was what truly opened up this region
to many more people logging.
- Narrator: After the civil war,
a surge of immigrants arrived,
drawn by the lure of jobs in the lumber industry.
- Ed Hill: It just expanded so rapidly
and hired so many people.
And the lumber companies moved in,
they saw this as a good way to get rich quick.
And it was.
And they began advertising,
sending broadsides to European countries,
especially Scandinavia,
indicating that there were great jobs here,
and work that they knew how to do,
so that was not only a major economic force locally,
but it was a major immigration force, as well.
- Chuck Lee: An awful lot of trees were floating
by this place and floating down to this place.
At one point in the '70s and '80s, there were, I believe,
33 sawmills in La Crosse,
stretching along the Black River and along the Mississippi.
- Narrator: Steamboats lost a lot of business
to the railroads, and began to specialize.
Many became raft-boats,
pushing the ever-growing rafts of logs and lumber to market.
- Chuck Lee: To see the photos of these log rafts
coming down either the Black River or the Mississippi River,
it's just unbelievable the amount of lumber
that was being moved at the time.
If you look to our west, to Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas,
the barns there
were built with Wisconsin trees and Wisconsin lumber.
- Narrator: The lumber industry produced great fortunes,
and a number of large homes still maintained today
display the wealth generated by the lumber barons.
In the 1850s, lumberman Gideon Hixon built
what is now called the Hixon House, a museum
maintained by the La Crosse County Historical society.
Charles Haas: Gideon Hixon was one of the early settlers
in La Crosse, came here in 1856.
And when Hixon came to La Crosse he went into the lumber business
and made his money in white pine.
- Narrator: The house is a step back in the life
of a prominent early family,
authentically restored, with original furnishings.
Charles Haas: When the society was given the house
in the early 1960s, it came with the furniture.
- Narrator: For years, lumber barons fought the building
of a railroad bridge across the Black and Mississippi Rivers
because it would block the movement of their lumber rafts.
- Ed Hill: That didn't stop the railroads, however,
from going across.
There were railroad ferries.
You could take two or three railroad cars across
and put them on their way.
In the wintertime, if the ice was thick enough,
you laid tracks on the ice and ran the railroad,
not the full length of the train by any means,
but several cars at a time.
- Narrator: Because white pine logs floated,
pushing them down-river was relatively easy.
Steamboats had a much harder time
carrying grain and other heavy freight
on the free-flowing and often shallow Mississippi.
- Chuck Lee: The earliest descriptions of the upper
Mississippi, unlike anything you would see today,
it was a river that had rapids in it.
It was a river that if you were in a boat in it,
you couldn't see the bluffs most of the time.
You knew they were there, but you couldn't see them,
because the river was so choked with islands.
And those islands were covered with trees.
And there was so many different channels,
some of them dead-end and some of them blocked by sandbars,
others open.
- Ed Hill: You had a huge range of a river
that might be 10, 12, 15 feet deep at some point,
to a river you could wade across without getting your knees wet.
And then, in those low drought periods, low water periods,
steamboats traffic didn't move,
and you took your chances out there.
A lot of boats were wrecked.
If they hit a log or a stump in the water
and punctured the hull,
there would be the end of that trip right there.
In the early years, in the 1830s and '40s,
a boat might live three or four years on average,
but with each passing decade, boat life got longer.
And it's because very quickly
the steamboat companies were lobbying Congress
to improve the harbors and improve the river.
- John Anfinson: In 1866, Congress authorizes the first
project to begin reshaping the Mississippi river.
It's called the Four Foot Channel Project.
What the Congress wanted the Corps of Engineers to do
was create a continuous deep channel
all the way from St. Paul to St. Louis.
And they were going to do that by dredging out the sandbars
and trying to pull out all the snags in the Mississippi river.
- Narrator: While river traffic struggled,
the railroads finally succeeded
in building a bridge across the Mississippi,
a symbol of the growing power of the railroads.
Trains now shipped even heavy and bulky freight,
like farmers' crops.
- John Anfinson: The river has a hard time competing
with railroads because farmers' crops become ripe in the fall
just when the river goes to its lowest stage.
So, farmers are kind of stuck going with railroads,
even if they charge more.
They really become the primary proponents of another project
that's finally authorized in 1878,
called the Four and a Half Foot Channel.
That sounds not a lot different than the Four Foot Channel,
it's only a half-foot more, what's the big deal.
Well, the big deal is
that this is going to be the first project
to fundamentally transform the Mississippi River.
This project will change the river
like no force since the glaciers.
What the corps of engineers start to do
is they start building these wing dams in the river.
They're long, narrow piers of rock and brush,
layer upon layer, that stick out into the river.
They work like nozzle
of a garden hose that's being tightened down.
The tighter you turn down the nozzle on the hose
the faster the water moves.
So as the wing dams narrow the river,
they cut through those sandbars.
- Narrator: River improvements, the railroads,
and the booming lumber business
drove other industrial development in La Crosse,
based on processing the area's rich natural resources.
Boatyards used the plentiful wood supplies
to build and maintain La Crosse's fleet of steamboats,
the biggest on the upper Mississippi.
Gathering the harvest of the area's farms,
La Crosse became a flour milling and grain shipping center.
Early breweries also processed grain,
and stored the beer in caves like this one,
carved into a bluff in 1864.
- Chuck Lee: Harvesting natural resources
and then processing them,
that was the nature of La Crosse's economy into the 1890s.
So long as the resources held out,
that was the business of the community,
and that's how the city grew.