Quapaw Canoe Company ~ Celebrating 25 years of service 1998-2023
Providing high quality adventures in hand crafted canoes -- on the Lower Mississippi River -- all 954 miles from Cairo Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico (plus Arkansas & Atchafalaya Rivers!)
Lower Mississippi River Dispatch No. 930
"Voice of the Lower Mississippi River"
Memphis, TN ~ Wilson, AR ~ Clarksdale, MS ~ Vicksburg, MS
Quapaw Canoe Company ~ Celebrating 25 years of serviceWe are celebrating our 25th anniversary 1998-2023. For over a quarter century we have been providing high quality adventures in hand crafted cypress strip canoes. Our service is to our Queen, the Lower Mississippi River. We follow her wherever she goes, on all sections found within the 954 miles from the Ohio River confluence (Cairo, Illinois) to the Gulf of Mexico. We also serve the Atchafalaya and Arkansas Rivers, the Yazoo and Big Sunflower, the Lower White River, the Loosahatchie and Forked Deer, and the St. Francis and Anguille Rivers. In this issue we share some of the best stories, videos and podcasts of 2023 featuring QCC activities and river guides. The first one below comes from our good friend Dean Klinkenberg's "River Life" podcast in which 5 Women Discuss Their Paths and Passions as Mississippi River Guides:
1. Five Women Discuss Their Paths and Passions as Mississippi River Guides (featuring Red River Otter, Cory Maria Dack and Sarah Lent!)
Episode 32: The River Life: Five Women Discuss Their Paths and Passions as Mississippi River Guides “The River Life” Dean Klinkenberg Podcast — Dec, 2023 Featuring our very own Red River Otter (Heather Crosse), as well as the amazing Cory Maria Dack and Sarah Lent -- and also river guides Amber “Sparky” Lynum, and Melissa Sauter. Cut & Paste: https://mississippivalleytraveler.com/episode-32-the-river-life-five-women-discuss-their-paths-and-passions-as-mississippi-river-guides/ "Men have dominated the world of outdoor adventuring and guiding for so long, that it’s easy to overlook the increasing presence of women in all spheres. More women now complete long-distance paddles on the Mississippi, as well as through hikes on the major trails. The world of guided paddling on the Mississippi reflects the trend. In this episode, I talk with five women who worked this past season as river guides on the Mississippi for one of the outfitters or river-focused organizations. I asked each to talk about their paths to guiding, to describe their stretch of the Mississippi, and to spotlight a few places and experiences that highlighted their year. At the end of the conversation, I asked each woman to identifying something about their experience on the Mississippi this year that they’re grateful for." -Dean Klinkenberg
2. Mississippi River Seminar: Great Books in the Wild (with UT Dr. Jim Bailey, the Healthy City)
GREAT BOOKS IN THE WILD: RETRACING JOHN RUSKEY'S (SF90) LEGENDARY TWAIN SEMINAR ON THE MISSISSIPPI (St. John’s College Alumni News) November 9, 2023 | By Jennifer Levin Cut & Paste: https://www.sjc.edu/news/great-books-wild-retracing-john-ruskeys-sf90-legendary-twain-seminar-mississippi
3. “For the Benefit and Health of Our Queen” by Ann Fisher-Wirth
“For the Benefit and Health of Our Queen”: John Ruskey and the Quapaw River Canoe Company. Clarksdale, Mississippi Cut & Paste: https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/on-rivers/river-bodies/ann-fisher-wirth/ Black Earth Institute ~ About Place Journal, Winter 2023: “On Rivers” Issue A literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society
4. John Davidson Photographer for March, 2024 British National Geographic featuring Matthew Burdine, Mississippi River Expeditions (Quapaw Memphis)
Featuring Matthew Burdine, Mississippi River Expeditions (Quapaw Memphis) John Davidson Photographer For March, 2024 British National Geographic
Cut & Paste: https://www.johndavidsonphoto.com/STORIES/COMMISSIONS/MISSISSIPPI-RIVER-BY-CANOE/1
5. Jackson Clarion Ledger: 25 years canoeing the Mighty Mississippi: John Ruskey shares stories from the Big Muddy
25 years canoeing the Mighty Mississippi: John Ruskey shares stories from the Big Muddy Clarion Ledger Sept 26 2023, by Ross Reilly
Cut & Paste: https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2023/09/26/25-years-of-quapaw-canoe-company/70960160007/
(Note: If you’re not a Clarion Ledger subscriber, got to end of this newsletter for article…)
6. Tinyboat Sessions by Jordan Hanssen: Driftwood John Ruskey sings ‘Pretty Bird: Last Tree Standing'
Tiny Boat Sessions by adventurer Jordan Hanssen: Driftwood John Ruskey sings ‘Pretty Bird: Last Tree Standing' On the Sunflower River in Clarksdale, Miss
“I know Driftwood John from the Mississippi River. I’ve had the pleasure of rowing down the muddy waters of America's heart twice. On the voyage, I've met larger-than-life characters, Sandy the Pancake Lady, Big Muddy Mike, and down in Clarksdale, Mississippi a man named Driftwood Johnny. Painter, poet, paddler, and musician (among other things) he’s lived and worked along the Sunflower River in Clarksdale first at the blues museum and now running Quawpaw Canoea–a paddling company that's made its business getting folks on the muddy water so the river is learned to be loved, and not feared. It is no mean feat. John is one of the characters I would hope every paddler would meet on this journey, he’s provided a dry space, a portage a warm meal, but most importantly a feeling of community and family for many who have undertaken this American Pilgrimage. When I started tinyboatsession John was one of the folks I knew I could reach out to beyond my home waters of the Puget Sound who would get this idea and follow through with it. I asked him for a song in a tinyboat, and though in the middle of the pandemic, he made me a tinyboatsession from the banks of the Mississippi River and sent it to me for season 3. When I first came to the south he was the person I called to see if he knew anyone. He introduced me to Wolfie, who told me about a backyard musical fundraiser for a musical canoe, and on that evening I met Arlee Leonard, April Goltz, and Phoeobe Valassis and through the three of them met every single musician I knew in Louisiana, and from them musicians across every state I crossed to make my way home to Seattle. I filmed John on a warm spring evening. Folks along the bank caught fish. The cypresses were big and John’s songs made me thoughtful and very glad for all the journeys I had decided to make that led me to this moment.”
-Jordan Hanssen
~~~ 2024~~~
7. Music Lover’s Heaven, by Lonely Planet, Otago Daily Times, Tuesday, 9 January 2024 Dunedin, New Zealand
From: "Music Lover’s Heaven" by Lonely Planet Otago Daily Times, Tuesday, 9 January 2024 Dunedin, New Zealand Cut & Paste: https://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/travel/music-lover’s-heaven
Lonely Planet, Oct 31, 2023 Excerpted from the book: Your Trip Starts Here, by Lonely Planet “A soulful Musical Pilgrimage through USA’s South”
“The Mississippi Blues Driving south of Memphis sees you enter Mississippi, a state once notorious for murderous Ku Klux Klan racists. Travelling through these flat lands may prompt often-challenging reflections on the struggle between love and hate, justice and barbarism — and the brutality and injustice that was allowed to reign here. There are no easy answers, but Clarksdale, a former cotton-growing town a little over an hour’s drive from Memphis via the legendary Hwy 61, demonstrates how music can bring people together and heal divisions. Clarksdale is famous for once having been home to celebrated musicians Robert Johnson, Ike Turner and Sam Cooke. Today, this sleepy town is a blues mecca; some say it’s home to the mythic crossroads where a devilish bargain was struck in Johnson’s famous Cross Road Blues. Ground Zero Blues Club puts on top blues and R&B artists; if you want an authentic juke-joint experience drop into the truly unrefined Red’s. Roger Stolle, owner of the Cat Head store — where you can buy Mississippi records, books, folk art and much else — notes that "for me, Clarksdale is the closest you can get to the heart of the blues. The history is amazing here, the people are like characters in a novel and the music is truly alive". Because Clarksdale has live blues 365 nights a year, and over a dozen annual festivals, our rustic little downtown has come back. Clarksdale is home (appropriately) to the Delta Blues Museum — look and learn — and Quapaw Canoe Company, which offers guided canoe trips on the Mississippi River; taking to the water is a great opportunity to unleash your inner Huck Finn. An hour’s drive south takes you to Indianola, another quiet town with a mighty blues history — here is the BB King Museum and Delta Interpretive Centre. Honouring native son Riley "Blues Boy" King, this new museum digs deep into Mississippi history (good, bad and ugly) and allows for meditation on how, via blues, Riley became an ambassador not just for African-American culture but human creativity and dignity.”
-Lonely Planet
8. Featuring Quapaw Vicksburg: “This Small Mississippi Town Has SO Much to See and Do”
Featuring Water Possum Layne Logue’s Quapaw Vicksburg: “This Small Mississippi Town Has SO Much to See and Do” (Published on January 31, 2024)
Cut & Paste: https://styleblueprint.com/everyday/things-to-do-in-vicksburg-ms/
“Outdoor Adventures Whether you’re looking to get out on the Mississippi River, embark on a relaxing hike, or get your blood pumping during a bike ride, Vicksburg offers ample opportunities to get outside. Quapaw Canoe Company offers river expeditions for those seeking up-close views of Vicksburg’s natural beauty. Offering day, overnight, and multi-day trips, you can expect to travel through adjacent rivers and back channels while taking in views of nearby bluffs and forests.”
-Brianna Goebel
9. Have you visited “Wild Miles” lately?
Have you visited “Wild Miles” lately? *Big Muddy* Mike Clark and I composed and published the WILD MILES several decades ago. It still stands the test of time, although I am sad to report that we have lost many “wild miles” since then. (*Big Muddy Adventures* our affiliate serving the big rivers around St. Louis)
Wild Miles on the Middle & Lower Mississippi River — “where the beauty of nature predominates in the heart of America…”
Cut & Paste: https://wildmiles.org/
SUMMARY OF THE WILD MILES:
There are 515 Wild Miles on the Lower Mississippi River between Cairo, Illinois, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 71% of the scenery viewed from canoes or kayaks paddling down the river looks & feels wild.
There are 105 Wild Miles on the Lower Mississippi River between St. Louis, Missouri, and Cairo, Illinois. 56% of the scenery viewed from canoes or kayaks paddling down the river looks & feels wild.
INTRODUCTION TO THE WILD MILES:
This is a list of the last remaining Wild Miles along the Middle and Lower Mississippi River, places where nature predominates and nothing is seen of mankind save passing tows (and other river traffic) and maybe a tiny hunting camp or a single fisherman buzzing by in a johnboat. These are places where the landscape is filled with giant islands bounded by endless mud banks & sandbars, where the river is overseen by big skies and where the sun sets uninterrupted by buildings or wires and where big river predominates with creative wild beauty, each high water results in shifting sand dunes and re-made sandbars. This is a floodplain valley where only deer & coyote tracks are seen along the sandbars and enormous flocks of shy birds like the White Pelican and Double Breasted Cormorant are comfortable enough to make landing for the night. These are places where it’s dark & quiet at night, where the stars fill the skies like brightly shining jewels poured out on a dark purple velvet blanket, almost as thick & vibrant as the night skies of the Great Plains or Rocky Mountains.
Wild Miles are the kinds of places that the 24 million paddlers in North America will travel long distances to enjoy, and we should preserve for future generations of Americans. In sheer “wild value” the Lower Mississippi ranks alongside the Boundary Waters, the Allagash or the Okeefenokee. The Lower Mississippi Water Trail is as important to our national identity and heritage as the Erie Canal, the Santa Fe Trail or the Appalachian Trail. It has been travelled by millions of Americans including the Sioux, the Natchez, and more recently Abe Lincoln, John James Audubon, Langston Hughes and Rose & Jimmie Carter, and has always been our single most important route of migration & transportation. It is the life blood of our nation flowing directly from the productive heartland through the cultural flowering of the south and into the vitality of the Gulf of Mexico.
We are identifying these Wild Miles as the focus for future preservation and as the places where new industry & agriculture installations should not be placed. One single smokestack could corrupt the feeling of wildness for miles upstream or downstream. Wild Miles describes the Middle and Lower Mississippi River mile-by-mile with photos, videos and audio clips. Our goal is to document the Wild Miles, and compare the Wild Miles with the Not-Wild Miles (Industrialized or otherwise).
My first survey was 2009. We updated the entire listing during 2011-2016 Rivergator explorations. My last complete survey St. Louis to Gulf of Mexico was completed in 2017. In there last years we have updating particular sections as they are eyewitnessed during trips, and have witnessed some sad examples of significant loss, such as the rip-roaring steel industry frontier terrorizing the alluvial floodplain around Osceola, AR.
If you know of new industry, or maybe of former industrial sites deconstructed, please let us know! We are like the flock of pelicans on the sandbar. Alone no one stands a chance. Coyote is going to get you. But together we see it all, and coyote has no chance. Many eyes illuminate the whole. Thanks to documentation and trip-reports by long distance paddlers Cory Maria Dack & Sarah Lent, and Jean Canôt, and others, we have been able to update some particular sections.
America has an opportunity to discover the “wilderness within” by recognizing and preserving the below Wild Miles in the center of the country. It just so happens that the gigantic floodplain of the Mississippi creates these Wild Miles. These places have been preserved mostly by neglect, by the power of the river, by its catastrophic rises & falls, and the danger of building anything within its floodplain. Moreover, in light of recent flood cycles and the declining population of the Delta, this area is receiving attention as one of the best places to restore native bottomland hardwood forests. Restored forest creates habitat for wildlife, improved water quality, a buffer to flooding, and is an important means of reducing the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone,” caused by nutrient runoff into the river.
Developers: Instead of building any new sites within these Wild Miles, please consider placing new industry and agriculture construction within those places already industrialized such as within one of the many harbors along the way, or building it far enough behind the levee that it won’t be seen or heard from the river.
"25 years canoeing the Mighty Mississippi: John Ruskey shares stories from the Big Muddy” originally published in the Jackson Clarion Ledger Sept 26 2023, by Ross Reily
25 years canoeing the Mighty Mississippi: John Ruskey shares stories from the Big Muddy Jackson Clarion Ledger Sept 26 2023, by Ross Reily Forty years ago, in 1983, John Ruskey embarked on a raft trip from home state of Colorado, traversing rivers in an attempt to get to the Gulf of Mexico. Five months into the expedition, he wound up shipwrecked on an island in northern Mississippi. That experience eventually led him back to Mississippi, where he started Quapaw Canoe Company, and 25 years after that, he said, "We are still boogying up and down the Mississippi." Ruskey, along with his crew, provide wilderness adventures by canoe, kayak or paddle board on any section of the last 954 miles of the Mississippi River, from Cairo Illinois down to the Gulf of Mexico. They also serve the Atchafalaya “River of Trees,” and many other tributary feeder rivers, such as the Arkansas. He landed in Clarksdale in the early 1990s for the blues music scene and even worked as the curator of the Delta Blues Museum. He bought a canoe and started offering people canoe trips, one trip at a time in a 17-foot aluminum canoe in the largest river in North America. That is how Quapaw Canoe Company started in 1998. Since then, Ruskey estimates he has safely guided more than 30,000 people on tours of the river, which include church groups, schools, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, families, couples and individuals. In his estimation, there was never before or isn't now another modern guiding and outfitting business anywhere along the lower Mississippi River. "That raft trip in the '80s really put something in my heart for Mississippi," Ruskey said. "There is an incredible intersection of music and the river in Clarksdale and that's part of the reason I am there." The name Quapaw comes from the Quapaw Nation of Native Americans, that inhabited areas from Oklahoma to the Midwest and down the Mississippi River as late as the 17th century. Quapaw landing is the closest landing on the Mississippi River to Clarksdale, due west of town. He added 10 more aluminum canoes and then hand-crafted a 29 foot cypress-strip canoe, named the Ladybug, that now has many brothers and sisters that carry customers all along the river. "We call the Ladybug the Queen of the Mississippi River," Ruskey quipped about the 11-person original wooden canoe.
Former New York Giants defensive back Mark "River" Peoples is Ruskey's right-hand man and has been along for the ride from the beginning. "You know, the river just speaks to me," Peoples said. "It's the lifeblood of our country." When not on the water, Peoples mentors Delta youth and educates them on the importance of the protection and preservation of our national treasure for generations to come. While he has guided literally thousands of people up and down the river, Peoples has said that one of the most interesting trips he had was guiding a group that included a couple from Norway. He said the wife was 9 months pregnant and ultimately went into labor soon after the completion of their expedition. Ruskey said most of the people who take the river expeditions have never been on the Mississippi River previously, and in many cases have never paddled any type of vessel anywhere. There have been mayors, business people, kids, adults, journalists, photographers as well as the secretary of transportation for the state of Arkansas. And all of them have to help paddle along the way. He shared a recent experience involving a group of high school girls who started a weekend trip afraid of any bug that got near them. By the end of the trip, Ruskey said they were picking up large beetles and asking him to identify them. "By the way, it was the Eastern Click Beetle," he said. "By the end of the trip one of the young ladies was so affected by the trip, she had applied to our apprenticeship program." He has expanded on that and has created a summer camp program to help educate people on the importance of the Mississippi River Valley and what it means. It is a traditional style canoe camp that focuses on survival skills, teamwork and leadership. Mostly, however, Quapaw is a custom trip company that caters to anyone wanting a river experience, whether that be a day trip, a weekend experience or a week-long expedition. The longest trip runs from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico and lasts for six weeks. "We don't do that one very often," Ruskey said. "But our mission is to share the raw, wild Mississippi River with whoever wants to see it." The mission has been so successful that Quapaw is now running expeditions out of Memphis and Vicksburg as well as Quapaw Landing near Clarksdale. — Ross Reily can be reached by email at rreily@gannett.com or 601-573-2952. You can follow him on Twitter @GreenOkra1.