Road Trip Through History: The Sergeant Floyd River Museum
In some ways, the Sergeant Floyd River Museum in Sioux City, Iowa, feels like the historical equivalent of a set of nesting Russian dolls, with one iteration of Sergeant Floyd fitted into another and then another to make up the whole.
- The historical heart of the museum is Sergeant Charles Floyd himself. He was a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition who died of what was probably a ruptured appendix on the site of modern Sioux City Iowa, the only member of the expedition to die on the journey. A granite obelisk marking his grave stands on the high ground over the city, the first nationally registered historical landmark in the United States.*
- The museum is housed in the M.V. Sergeant Floyd, named after Charles Floyd. The boat was used by the United States Corps of Engineers for light towing, survey and inspection work, and improvement projects on the Missouri River from 1932 to 1975 as part of its mission to keep “Old Misery” navigable. Beginning in 1976, as part of the nation’s Bicentennial celebration, the Corps used the boat as a floating museum.
- In 1983, Sioux City bought the decommissioned vessel and turned it into the Sergeant Floyd River Museum, which devotes a fair amount of space to the story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with an emphasis on, ahem, Sergeant Charles Floyd. (Including a reconstruction of his face by a forensic artist, using a plaster cast of his remains from the fourth time that he was reburied. In one of those quirky coincidences that pop up in history-land now and then, the artist turned out to be a great-grandniece of Sergeant Floyd.)
The museum is fundamentally a local history museum housed in an unusual facility. After the section on Lewis and Clark, the museum moved on to a brief and not very sophisticated exhibit about the Native American peoples who inhabited the area before white settlers arrived.** From there it went on to look at the fur trade, the founding and development of Sioux City as a depot on the Missouri River, and steamboat traffic on the Missouri. (These weren’t the steamboats of your imagination. The steamboats that traveled the Missouri were intercity trade boats, not the gilded palaces that traveled the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans.)
The parts that captured my imagination the most were the panels dealing with navigation on the Missouri River, beginning with the Lewis and Clark expedition. Before the Corps of Engineers took over the task of trying to keep the river navigable in the mid-19th century, piloting a boat down the river required skill and luck. The river was nicknamed “Old Misery” for a reason. Its channels shifted on a regular basis, thanks to summer storms, winter ice dams, and the annual rise of the river’s water level each spring. The upper reaches of the river were clogged with snags and sandbars, some of which could not be steered around, slid over, or smashed through. Snags that broke away from the bottom during high water could collect in log jams, which the French-Canadian rivermen called embarrases—”hinderances.” These could pin a boat broadside and cause it to capsize—a situation that could be described by another meaning of embarras, a predicament.
All these hindrances, and the possible predicaments caused by them, inspired rivermen to develop a number of ways to get around them, including:
- The Lewis and Clark expedition, and every keelboat captain who followed them, used a technique known as cordelling, in which rivermen walked their boats upstream when the river was too clogged by snags or the current was too strong for rowing, pulling it with a heavy line attached to the boat. Sometimes they walked along the bank, sometimes they worked waist deep in the river. The line itself was known as a cordelle, from the French word for rope, a holdover from the days when French voyageurs controlled the Missouri and Mississippi. Which were not that long ago from the perspective of Lewis and Clark.
- When conditions didn’t allow cordelling, rivermen harnessed the strength of the trees that lined the river (and were responsible for the snags) in a related technique called warping, in which they tied the cordelle to a tree and then hauled the boat hand over hand up the river
- By the days of steamboats,*** every Missouri River steamboat carried a pair of “grasshoppers”: tall wooden poles that could be lowered into the mud and used like giant crutches (or possibly chopsticks) to “walk” the boat to deeper water.
Human ingenuity never ceases to amaze me.
* If we had known this at the time, we might have made the time to drive up the hill to see it. Or maybe not. We also chose not to stop at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, which was located in the same museum campus as the Sergeant Floyd River Museum. Our long road trips are a constant set of compromises between the time, distance, and interest.
** This is a subject that not many local history museums do a good job with, and that some ignore altogether. After visiting many, many such museums over the decades years, I’ve come to the conclusion that local history museums that focus on a specific element of Native American history in their region create more meaningful exhibits than those that make sweeping generalities. In fact, I would argue that is true for small museums as a whole. Give me a specific story that illustrates a topic rather than trying to give me the story of the fur trade as whole.
***Earlier than I realized. Steamboats were introduced on the western rivers in 1811.
This cracked me up.
Travelers’ Tip: I recommend Madonna Rose in Sioux City for breakfast. The restaurant’s huevos rancheros, served on a base of black bean and chorizo chili was pretty amazing. In fact, it has me plotting how to make a similar chili at home come the fall.
In Which I Stand Corrected
In a recent post, writing about the Civilian Conservation Corps, which provided jobs and job training for some three million unemployed men between the ages of 18 and 25 from 1933 and 1942, I stated that that there was nothing similar for young women. A regular and valued reader of this blog immediately and politely informed me that in fact there was a female equivalent of the CCC, called the She She She by its critics. It wasn’t as big or as well-known as the CCC, but it did exist. He then gave me a link to an excellent article on the subject on the New England Historical Society website. *
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- In Maine
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- In New Jersey
Red-faced, and fascinated, I headed off to find out more. The NEHS article provided me with links, which provided me with more links and I spent a happy afternoon going down the historical rabbit hole. I’ve got to say, after working my way through the readily available material on the program, I’m not surprised that I had never heard of it.
The “She She She” wasn’t actually a single program with a unified curriculum or set of goals. It may not have even had an umbrella name beyond the description “Resident Schools and Educational Camps for Unemployed Women” or at least I have not be able to find one.** Most of the studies I have read on the program refer to it as “the She She She camps,” using the derisive name given to it by its critics, suggesting that their authors were also not able to find an umbrella name for the program.
Soon after FDR signed the bill creating the CCC into law on April 1, 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt suggested the establishment of a similar program for women. FDR turned the idea over to Harry Hopkins, who was his right hand man on New Deal relief programs.
At first, it looked like Hopkins was going to make it happen. The first camp for unemployed women, Camp Tera, opened as an experiment on June 10, 1933. When Eleanor visited the camp a month later, expecting to see 200 young women, she found only 20. That November, when it was clear that Hopkins was doing little to create the camps or otherwise help unemployed women, she organized a White House Conference on Women to advocate for New Deal programs for women. Under pressure from the First Lady, Hopkins turned the problem over to Hilda Worthington Smith, the New Deal’s education specialist.
Hopkins’ lack of interest in the program was reflected in Federal Emergency Relief Administration (later the WPA) as a whole. (One FERA official warned Smith that there would be serious discipline problems if groups of women lived together.***) Bad attitudes about working women weren’t limited to FERA. At the start of the Great Depression, women made up 25% of the American workforce, but the general public believed that women were inherently temporary employees who would leave the work force when they got married. **** Worse, many believed that jobs programs for woman came at the expense of jobs for men, who, after all, were the real breadwinners.
With support from Eleanor Roosevelt, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and other prominent women, Smith managed to get limited federal financial support for camps for women from Hopkins despite opposition from FERA in general and CCC administrators in particular. Responsibility for the camps themselves was turned over to individual states to implement. The camps were housed in private estates, country clubs, summer resorts, unused YWCA campgrounds and abandoned school buildings. The curriculum of each camp depended on local resources and opinions and residence at the camps varied from six weeks to three months. At one camp, housed at the summer home of the president of the Temple University Women’s Club, the enrollees spent twelve weeks taking classes in shorthand, typing, bookkeeping, business English and home economics. But in other camps, women produced Braille materials and hospital dressings, repaired toys, put on plays, and learned “domestic arts.” One camp even offered a course called “Charm by Choice” —a far cry from the job skills and general education offered in the CCC camps.
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- In Minnesota
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- In Maine
This is how civil rights activist Pauli Murray, who attended Camp Tera in the fall of 1933, described the experience: “It was little more than a recreational camp for adult women at the time I was there, since it offered no work experience beyond our camp duties and was only one step removed from the dole. Yet for me, as for most other women in the camp, it provided a sanctuary from the pressures of unemployed city life.” At least the camps provided women who were underfed and exhausted when they arrived with three meals a day for several weeks.
Smith had hoped to open 150 camps and schools and provide work and training for 15,000 young women. Between 1933 and 1937, the program opened 90 centers and enrolled roughly 8,000 women. In 1935 alone, the CCC had 500,000 men in 2,600 camps.
I’ll let you do the math.
*I love it when readers send me down a new research path, even when it starts because I make a mistake. Y’all are the best.
**Under the circumstances, I’m going to be cautious about what I say on this subject.
*** Grrr. Don’t get me started.
**** A classic Catch 22: often women were required to leave the workforce when they married. Double grr.
Running from Bondage: A Q & A with Dr. Karen Cook Bell
Between the combination of the approval of Juneteenth as a federal holiday and the July 4th holiday , the American Revolution has been on my mind for the last few weeks. And thanks to a recently published book, those thoughts have taken some new turns.
It is not often that a book crosses my desk that causes me to look at the American Revolution through a new lens. Historian Karen Cook Bell’s Running From Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America is such a book. Bell tells the compelling stories of enslaved women and the ways in which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. By reconstructing fugitive women’s stories through newspaper advertisements, first-person accounts in trial records, antebellum memories, and interviews with former slaves, Bell is able to explore the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role.
It is a fascinating perspective, that highlights the tension between freedom and slavery that was part of the United States from the beginning. A tension that is often nodded at in classrooms and popular accounts of history without being explored in a meaningful way.
I am delighted to Karen Cook Bell here on the Margins to answer some questions about Running from Bondage.
In Running from Bondage, you explore the experience of black women who attempted to escape from slavery during the American Revolution. What inspired you to write about these women?
Researching my first book introduced me to women who fled slavery either alone or with their families during the late eighteenth century. This led me to question how widespread was the flight of enslaved women. My research led me to the American Revolution which according to historian Benjamin Quarles was the first large scale slave rebellion. I wanted to tell the stories of these women who fled or attempted to flee bondage during the Revolutionary Era.
How does adding these women back into history change our understanding of the American Revolution?
The American Revolution was based on the premise of freedom for the colonies from the control of the British monarchy. The ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness resonated with enslaved women who used the rhetoric of the Revolution to claim their right to freedom. Women heard about these ideals from listening to the conversations of their enslavers as well as through the slave grapevine which carried news from plantation to plantation and from city to city.
The American Revolution brought into sharp focus the paradox of slavery and freedom. African American women contributed mightily to the story of American Independence. They believed in the independence of the individual. They valued in the most fundamental way what Thomas Jefferson and others would identify as inalienable rights.
Moving forward, how does their re-inclusion change our understanding of the growth and development of the abolitionist movement?
Instead of viewing Black women at the margins of the American Revolution and abolitionism, it is important to see them as visible participants and self-determined figures who put their lives on the line for freedom. They protested with their feet by running away which underscores the vital role of Black women in seeking to move the nation toward a more perfect union.
My book dispels the idea that black women did not flee or attempt to flee bondage during the Revolutionary era. Black women were an essential part of the long war against slavery and an essential part of the early abolitionist movement.
What were your greatest challenges in researching the experience of these women?
I began this study five years ago and the research for the study brought me to the realization that there is so much that historians can uncover in the lives of enslaved women. Although the evidence is fragmented, the experiences of fugitive women are far from unknowable. I used runaway slave advertisements, trial records of fugitive slaves, as well as an interview with George Washington’s escaped slave Ona Judge. There is a great amount of literature on enslaved people who escaped during the 1800s, however, the accounts of runaways during the 1700s are limited to colonial newspaper advertisements for runaways.
Each fugitive advertisement is valuable because it reveals the agency of enslaved women who despite formidable obstacles risked everything including their lives for freedom. Each advertisement describes the story of a real person, not an abstraction. When further research is done in other sources, real human beings begin to emerge from the records. We do not know the ultimate fate of the majority of the individuals named in the advertisements. But given these limitations, the runaway advertisements offer a remarkable amount of information about women caught in a horrific system of bondage.
The silences within the runaway newspaper advertisements were my greatest challenge. I had to imagine the varied meanings and possibilities that were inherent in these silences. For example, I had to reconstruct the backstory of the women featured in my book, their lives during slavery, why they ran away at their historical moment, and the challenges they faced.
You use the word “fugitivity” to describe these women’s actions. The word seems to be a term of art in writing about Black slave resistance. Can you talk a little bit about what is packed into that word?
As articulated by historian Marisa Fuentes, fugitivity denotes the experience of enslaved women as fugitives – both hidden from view and in the state of absconding. It also signifies the fragile condition of runaways who came into visibility through runaway advertisements. It captures the agency and mobility of enslaved women who escaped or who attempted to escape bondage.
Is there an individual woman’s story that stands out for you?
Black women were not willing to leave their children behind and were willing to risk running away if it meant a chance for freedom. This was the case for Jenny an enslaved woman that is featured in Chapter 3 who was the mother of a two year old named Winney. Jenny escaped slavery from Virginia in 1776 while she was “big with child” according to the advertisement of her escape. Jenny and her child were on the run for seven months when her enslaver placed an advertisement for her escape.
Also, the story of Margaret Grant will surprise people. Margaret escaped slavery twice, first in 1770 then in 1773 both times from Baltimore, Maryland; and in her first escape she wore men’s clothing and sought to conceal her identity by dressing as a waiting boy to an escaped English convict servant, John Chambers. So Margaret sought to escape by passing as both white and male performing fugitivity in a way that Ellen Craft, another escaped slave, would do decades later.
My readers are always interested in the historian as well as the history. What inspired your interest in history? Did you get hooked on history as a child or did your interest come later?
I was an Accounting major as an undergraduate and changed my major to history during my junior year. I have always had an interest in history growing up from reading the history books of my siblings to writing about historical events for my college newspaper. After viewing a project on African American spirituals, I wondered about the people who created these sorrow songs and wanted to know more about their experiences. I changed my major to history thereafter and have been researching and writing about people who have been marginalized from power and the archives ever since.
And just for fun: If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?
There were so many great women in history that it would be difficult to choose just one. However, I would choose Congresswoman Shirley Chisolm, the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968 and the first Black woman to run for President of the United States in 1972. She was not a politician but found her political voice as a wife and educator. Her story represents an important part of Black women’s political history and adds to the discourse of how African American women organized in their communities, protested slavery and segregation, built institutions, and fought for equal access to the ballot. Black women have been in the forefront of movements to address iniquity, social oppression, and freedom for the Black community for centuries. This is a fight that began during the Revolutionary Era.
Karen Cook Bell is Associate Professor of History at Bowie State University. She is the author of Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia, which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award. She specializes in the studies of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and women’s history.
Interested in learning more about Dr. Bell and her work? Check out her website: https://karencookbell.com/