Tower Rock

Tower Rock is the rock the rivermen feared. The sixty-foot Devonian limestone pillar standing in the Mississippi south of Wittenberg — 400 million years old, left standing when the river washed away the softer rock around it — had a reputation before it had a name: Indigenous warnings about the whirlpool at its base, and in 1673 Marquette and Joliet's party erected a cross on top to disempower the demons the boatmen said lived in the water.

The river earned the fear — Lewis noted in November 1803 that at high water the current 'meets the other portion of the river' in an immense whirlpool 'which no boat dare approach,' the counter-current that 'would instantly dash them to attoms.' Passing the Tower was the Mississippi rite of passage — Lewis recorded that first-timers were 'compelled to pay or furnish some sperits to drink or be ducked,' the riverman's equator-crossing.

The rock survived the century's engineering — the Corps of Engineers proposed blasting it after the Civil War, and President Grant's 1871 executive order spared it, reportedly for a railroad bridge footing that was never used. It stands in the river still — reachable on dry sand when the gauge runs low, watched by towboat pilots when it runs high — the landmark every generation of river traffic learned to respect.

Tower Rock is the archive's whirlpool file — the 400-million-year-old limestone tower in the Mississippi that Marquette's party exorcised with a cross in 1673, Lewis and Clark mapped in 1803, and Grant saved from the Corps' blasting in 1871.