Today’s post was written by our local guest blogger, Fred Eggers. I consider him an outstanding researcher and a great blessing to our museum.

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In 1968, Jess E. Thilenius and Felix F. Snider published the booklet Tower Rock (la Roche de la Croix) in Cape Girardeau.  At that time, it was likely the first compilation of information on this well-known landmark that was available.  The booklet did not have a table of contents or index and the stories that it contained were not in chronological order, but it did contain a lot of historical information.  Somehow the editors did miss the visit to the rock by the Discovery Expedition of Lewis and Clark in 1803, but they did not have all the internet resources that we have now.  I am a little surprised that they missed it since Dr. Snider was a professor and the chairman of the library science department at Southeast Missouri State University where the Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition 1804-1806 were located on the shelves of the Kent Library.

Among the many interesting stories in that booklet was one entitled The Three Pilots, on page 26.  The opening paragraph read:

“In 1841 three good friends, Captains Isaiah Sellers, Samuel Donalds (formerly Donaldson), and Joseph Dryden, Mississippi pilots all, decided they should find the most beautiful spot along the entire river.  Here they would buy adjacent tracts of land, establish their homes, and spend the rest of their days as neighbors.  They chose a place on the Missouri side of Tower Rock, a short distance below Wittenberg.”

A map that was made in 1865 by United States Coastal Survey shows that Sellers, Donald, and Drydensburg, were indeed located adjacent to one another very close to Tower Rock.

However, with some more research with the resources available on the internet, I think that it is time to revisit the three pilots to determine how factual this story is.  I will look at each of the pilots individually first, then summarize my conclusions.

Isaiah Sellers is one of the legendary river captains from the golden age of steamboats on the rivers of the United States.  This is what the National Rivers Hall of Fame said about him when he was inducted in 1991: 

“Captain Isaiah Sellers was a steamboat pilot who logged over one million miles at the wheel during his illustrious thirty-five-year career. Sellers was said to remember every changing towhead, channel and settlement. He introduced the tap of the bell as a signal to heave the lead when taking a sounding. In 1857, while piloting the Aleck Scott, he introduced the signal for the passing whistle, which was made into law by Congress, and with modifications, is still in use today. His record time of 3 days, 23 hours, 9 minutes on the J. M. White for the New Orleans to St. Louis route in 1844 stood for 26 years until broken by the Natchez in 1870.”

Mark Twain wrote about Captain Sellers in his epic travelogue Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883.  Wikipedia includes a comment about this:

“Isaiah Sellers (c. 1802–1864) was the riverboat captain from whom Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) claimed to have appropriated the pen name Mark Twain. The story of how Clemens started to use the name is told in chapter 50 of Life on the Mississippi and is summarized in the main article on Mark Twain. He allegedly wrote articles for the New Orleans Daily Picayune. Since there are a few problems with the chronology of Sellers’ death and Clemens’ first use of the name, the story is not accepted uncritically by Twain scholars. Captain Isaiah Sellers is buried at Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.”

A notice of the death of Captain Sellers appeared in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat on March 10, 1864, commenting on his death in Memphis and his historic career.

Now back to Tower Rock and the records at the Perry County Recorder’s Office.  Isaiah Sellers purchased 150 acres “opposite the Devil’s Oven” from Napolean and Sarah Gill on September 7, 1847.  This was a part of U S Survey number 2130, that was granted to James Manning.  I was unable to find him in Perry County census records for 1850 or 1860 and he was known to live in St. Louis in his later years, so there is not definite proof that Captain Sellers lived on this land.

I generally do not dwell on death and grave records, but the monument at the grave of Captain Sellers in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis is worth seeing.  This is an image of it from Life on the Mississippi.

The next pilot that we will study is Joseph Dryden.  It is not Joseph, who was born in 1848, that we are interested in.  His father, James Dryden, would been a contemporary of the other two pilots.  He purchased land south of Tower Rock in U S Survey 2175 from William Peyton.  That land had been granted to James Hutchins based on his Spanish Land Grant.  James Dryden was born in 1816 and located in Perry County in 1851 according to information in the Dryden Family History that I found on a genealogy site on the internet.

Most of the family trees and the family history give 1858 as the year of the death of Captain Dryden; however, an article from the Evansville Daily Journal, dated September 6, 1855, states that he died of dropsy on August 22 of that year in Bailey Springs, Alabama.  Dropsy was an early term for edema which is the swelling of soft tissues due to the accumulation of fluids, often leading to congestive heart failure.  Dryden would have spent most of his working life standing at the wheel of a steamboat and that likely would have contributed to this condition.

So, what was he doing in Bailey Springs, Alabama?  That place was located near the Muscle Shoals which was the farthest a steamboat could travel on the Tennessee River, but he was likely there for health reasons.  Bailey Springs was a health resort that promoted ‘taking of the waters’ for the restoration of health.

Following the death of James Dryden, his wife continued to live south of Tower Rock with her family.  Their sons, James and Joseph also became renowned steamboat Captains, and the family and its descendants still live in the area and own a significant part of the land that was acquired at that location.

The third pilot was Samuel Donalds.  He purchased land just north of Tower Rock from Rebecca Bishop on August 30, 1839, and November 3, 1841.  That land was in U S Survey 364.  He appears in the 1840 census for Perry County along with Rebecca Bishop and the Peytons and Gills that were previously mentioned.

Now, back to the Tower Rock Booklet.  This is where it gets interesting.  The second paragraph of The Three Pilots story tells us:

“In 1844 there occurred the greatest Mississippi River flood of modern times. (Note that this was written before the 1973, 1993, and the other seven more recent floods that exceeded the 1844 flood.)  On June 27^th of that year Captain Donalds decided they should permanently mark the highest level reached by the floodwaters while the evidence was still clearly visible.  So he, his wife Parlee, his sisters Margaret and Jane, and a negro servant set out.  But it was not to be.  The servant lost control of the boat in the rushing torrent and all were drowned in the attempt to place a highwater mark on the side of the island.”

I was able to find documentation for his death in an article that appeared in a newspaper published in New Orleans.

His parents and brothers appear in the 1850 census living in the area in 1850 and his mother and his brother James also are still there in the 1860 census.  James would marry Sarah Burrows (Burroughs) in 1863 but that is another story for another time.

Now that we know something about all three of the pilots, how does this all fit together, or does it?  We know that they all owned land in the same area near Tower Rock, but the dates do not all fit together.  They may have all known one another at some point, but Samuel Donalds died before James Dryden came to Missouri in 1851 and before Isaiah Sellers purchased his land in 1847.  Therefore it is highly unlikely that they made their agreement regarding the purchase of land at Tower Rock in 1841, but it made for a great story in 1968 when the Tower Rock Booklet was published.

In addition to the James Donalds to Sarah Burrows marriage, I have also found some documentation that may link Samuel Donalds more closely with the immigration of my ancestors in 1842.  But that, like they say, is the rest of the story to be told at another time.

I came upon this story about The Three Pilots while researching for the next exhibit that we are working on for the south gallery of the Museum which will include some artifacts for the Mississippi River that were recently acquired and more history on Tower Rock.  Keep watch on the Facebook page for additional details as they become available.