The Largest Rafts 



The largest raft brought down the river during the 

 fifty years from 1865, when they first began using steam- 

 boats to tow the rafts until the steamer "Ottumwa 

 Belle" ran the last raft in 191 5, was taken from Still- 

 water on Lake Saint Croix to Saint Louis by Captain 

 George Winans with the steamer "Saturn." 



This raft was sixteen strings wide and forty-four 

 cribs long, rafted twenty-six courses deep. 



It was two hundred and seventy feet wide by four- 

 teen hundred and fifty feet long and with the top load 

 contained nine million feet of lumber. 



The "Saturn ll" was a good, strong boat with engines 

 sixteen inches by five-foot and Captain Winans had a 

 good bow-boat on the head. This trip was made in 1901. 



The largest log raft was brought from Lynxville to 

 Rock Island in 1896 by Captain O. E. McGinley with 

 the steamer "F. C. A. Denkmann," using the "H. C. 

 Brockman" as her bowboat. The raft was two hundred 

 and seventy feet wide and fifteen hundred and fifty feet 

 long, containing about two and one-quarter million feet. 



Some double-decked or double-tiered log rafts were 

 brought from Stillwater in the nineties. When they 

 were careful to place only small logs on top, crosswise, 

 they did fairly well in good river, but when they were 

 careless and hauled large logs up on top and loaded 

 unevenly, these rafts soon encountered trouble when 

 they struck shallow water. Double-deckers were never 

 popular with the pilots who had to run them or the 

 crews that had to work on and over them. 



