“ ‘Our next misadventure’ came about 11am on December 27, 1935." This was the recollection of Captain E. Clare Carpenter from Meigs County, Ohio. He was then on the crew of the sternwheel towboat ISTHMIAN (try to say it fast) on the Mississippi River. Life on a riverboat could be exhausting, fun, mesmerizing, and dangerous, often all in the same day.
ISTHMIAN and her crew were on a string of bad luck. A few weeks earlier, a deckhand named Jimmy had fallen overboard and drowned. Next a clicking sound in the sternwheel revealed a crack in the 20 ton steel shaft. They had to call for help. Today, we'd reach for our mobile phone. Then, they had to row a yawl 15 miles, then be driven another 50 miles to Ripley TN - just to find a phone. It took a week to replace the cracked shaft.
Then came the "next misadventure." They were headed upriver just after a heavy snow. There was ice in the river which was beginning to damage the wooden paddle wheel. Capt. Harry Nichols piloted the boat to some ice-free open water. But the high river level obscured a long sand bar. Carpenter's memoir: "The ISTHMIAN slid gently up on the sand and no one noticed until we stopped."
Two other boats tried to pull the ISTHMIAN free. No luck. The river had fallen, holding ISTHMIAN even firmer. Lack of flotation put visible stress on the hull. Meanwhile, the temperature fell to 10 degrees and ten inches of snow fell. It was a grim situation.
They urgently needed to reduce the weight of the boat to minimize hull stress and make it easier to get free from the sand bar. They crew had to manually offload 100 tons of coal used for fuel. Whew!
After that they had time to kill. Carpenter: "Well, it can't be all work and disaster,...there has to be some fun, too." They noticed lots of rabbit tracks on the sand bar, using hollow logs as dens. Roasted rabbit meat sounded good; it was a favorite of Clare’s. Once on the towboat G. W. McBRIDE Clare and another crew member went ashore to get water at a farmhouse. They were invited in for breakfast. “No thanks,” they said. But when they heard, “We’re having rabbit,” they changed their mind and sat down to rabbit, biscuits, and gravy. Upon returning to the boat, they caught hell from the captain for holding up the boat while they feasted.
So, the challenge for the ISTHMIAN crew was how to catch the rabbits. Curtis Morton lived opposite the marooned boat on the Missouri side. He loaned them a shotgun. Meanwhile the clever crew figured out how to snatch the rabbits out of the hollow logs; they never fired the gun once.
Curtis loved coon hunting and offered to take crew members with him if the weather was good. One frigid night Captain Byrnside suggested they go hunting with Curtis. Clare said, "There won't be a coon out in the whole state of Missouri on a night like this." But they rowed over to Curtis's house anyway. Curtis laughed when they arrived. No way they'd go hunting. Instead they had an enjoyable couple of hours "eating popcorn...and telling tall tales."
The Corps of Engineers dredge BURGESS started digging through to the boat on December 31. The ISTHMIAN was now 4 feet above water level. Would she capsize sliding down to the water? All crew were taken off. Finally, on January 2, she slid into the water, heeling "so far over her stacks looked like cannons on a battleship," and water washed over her deck. The ISTHMIAN righted herself! No leaks or major damage. Congratulations all around.
Clare remembered hearing a loud crash on board as the ISTHMIAN heeled over. A large safe on wheels had rolled into a bulkhead. He was relieved the bulkhead had held. The safe contained an engagement ring he’d bought for Mabel, his wife-to-be.
January 6, 1936: The ISTHMIAN was back on the river. No more “misadventures.”
OTHER NOTES:
E. Clare Carpenter (1907-1989) started his time on ISTHMIAN as a coal passer, a tough job shoveling coal into the fire box, like scenes from the Titanic movie. While on the ISTHMIAN, he was promoted to deckhand and later to watchman. He worked on the river for 42 years, the last 32 as pilot and captain.
His illustrious career had at least one rough patch; he may have had an “attitude.”Remember the episode on the G. W. McBRIDE when Clare held up the boat while eating breakfast on shore? It may have the beginning of the end for his employment. He later called McBRIDE Captain Otho Jump "an old dough bellied bastard" while conversing with a crew mate. Turns out the captain's son Johnnie had recently joined the crew and happened to overhear the comment. There had been some other friction, too, not all of it Carpenter's fault. He was fired by Captain Jump, given money for transportation home, and left the McBRIDE at Lock 16 on the Ohio River which was located then just east of Marietta at Reno, Ohio.
The word ISTHMIAN? It means anything related to an isthmus, a narrow stretch of land connecting two larger land masses.
ISTHMIAN is hard to pronounce and spell. No problem. Her name was changed in 1936 to THOMAS MOSES. The MOSES née ISTHMIAN was owned by Carnegie Steel Company.
Local Connection: The W. P. SNYDER JR., moored today at Marietta and originally owned by Carnegie, ran the similar routes as ISTHMIAN. They probably passed each other often on the Monongahela River. Both boats operated until the 1950s when diesel towboats took over.
