FOR CENTURIES, MANY SOUGHT A PIECE OF THE ROCK
November 6, 1988

Author: E.F. Porter Jr. Of the Post-Dispatch Staff

Estimated printed pages: 8

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WITH the exception of the two great rivers, there is probably no natural feature in Missouri that has stimulated more mythic nonsense, attracted more attention or served more often as a motif for painters than the singular, mesa-like limestone eminence known as Tower Rock.

Or Grand Tower, or Grand Tower Roc, or La Roche de la Croix - it has been called them all.

Nestled in a crook of the Mississippi River about 100 yards off the coast of Perry County, about 100 miles downstream from St. Louis, it looms like a colossal tree stump about 80 feet above the river. The roughly flat summit is approximately three quarters of an acre.

It loomed into media attention, too, last summer when the river level fell so low that for the first time in the memory of local residents the stone shelf between the rock and the mainland was left dry and vis itors could walk out to it. The rock became an instant scenic attraction.

It always was. Pere Jacques Marquette, who paddled by it in 1673, mentioned it in his journal. He described it as ''a place that is dreaded by the savages because they believe the Manitou is there, that is to say, a demon that devours travelers.''

There was some truth to the superstition, Marquette went on to say, since there is a dangerous eddy between the rock and the shore that roars during high water, ''which inspires terror in the savages, who fear everything.''

Twenty-five years later, three French missionaries led by Jean Francois de Saint Cosme performed a kind of exorcism.

''On the rock we planted a beautiful cross, singing the Vexilla Regis, and our people fired three volleys of musketry,'' he wrote in his journal. ''God grant that the cross, which has never been known in this region, may triumph and our Lord pour forth abundantly the merits of His Holy Passion.''

New superstitions have arisen to replace the old, however. One of them is that the rock is the nation's smallest national park. This canard was first advanced by Robert Ripley, author of ''Believe it or Not,'' in 1933 and has been perpetuated in a notation on the Army Corps of Engineers' navigational chart of the river.

Another is that it is the Lutheran Plymouth Rock, because of the followers of Martin Stephan who immigrated to Perry County from Upper Saxony in 1838 and planted the seeds that became the Missouri Synod. There is no record the Stephanites ever set foot on Tower Rock.

The fact is that one of the uncertainties about the rock is its ownership. Perry County, the state of Missouri and the federal government have all at one time or another asserted claims.

The rock's picturesque quality naturally stimulated dozens of artists and illustrators, and its likeness, often of indifferent quality and accuracy, appeared in many illustrated travel books in the last century.

Some of them, however, remain highly esteemed to this day, and of these, perhaps the most respected are those of Karl Bodmer and Seth Eastman.

Bodmer, the more famous of the two, was a Swiss whose main reputation was gained for his precise yet vigorous watercolor portraits of plains Indians that he made during an expedition to the upper Missouri basin in the years 1832 to 1834 with Prince Maximilian of Weid-Neuweid.

The prince, a member of the militaristic Prussian aristocracy who had served in the Napoleonic wars, had become a naturalist and ethnologist who realized that the aboriginal American West was fading fast and wanted to study it before it was too late. He hired Bodmer to accompany him as illustrator, much as a National Geographic expedition today might include a photographer. Bodmer, who sometimes substituted Charles and Carl for Karl, was in his mid-20s.

Bodmer recorded what he saw almost every step of the way, beginning with embarkation at Rotterdam through landing at Boston, crossing Pennsylvania, descending the Ohio and ascending the Mississippi and the Missouri to Montana.

As a landscape painter, Bodmer occasionally indulged in some of the romantic mannerisms of his time, such as trees more feathery and fernlike and rocks more craggy than life. And though his landscapes lacked the vigor of his Indian pictures, they exhibit a restrained good taste and virtuoso command of atmosphere, perspective and proportion that is both charming and impressive.

Alas, Bodmer's original painting of Tower Rock appears to have been lost - if it ever existed. After Bodmer and his patron returned to Europe, Maximilian published an account of the expedition illustrated with colored aquatint engravings copied, under Bodmer's supervision, from the watercolors and sketches he had made in the field.

According to David C. Hunt, curator of Western art at the Joslyn Museum in Omaha, Neb., where the leading collection of Bodmer's work reposes, in some instances Bodmer apparently had painted no completed scenes, so the engravers had only his sketches and memory to work from. Some of the engravings, consequently, are composites, with the gaps improvised according to Bodmer's recollection.

This may well be the case with Bodmer's engraving of Tower Rock. Bodmer's landscapes generally exhibit a restraint and fidelity to reality that was unusual in his day. The engraving of Tower Rock that appears in Maximilian's book shows a distant ridge line above the Illinois shore that is more dramatically alpine than the one that is actually there.

Notwithstanding his awesome competence, Bodmer spent the rest of his life in relative obscurity. He never returned to the North America he had so successfully depicted.

Eastman was a native of Brunswick, Maine, who had studied painting and drawing while a cadet at West Point and who remained for seven years after graduation to teach it under Charles Robert Leslie and Robert W. Weir. West Point was chiefly an engineering school in those days, and the ability to turn out exquisitely accurate sketches and renderin gs in color, of landscapes as well as of machinery and buildings, was considered part of the educational equipment of every engineer.

Eastman's painting style, despite his military training, was looser, less formal and less literal than Bodmer's. After his West Point stint, Eastman spent most of his career in the Indian country in the upper Mississippi Valley, in Florida and in Texas.

Like Bodmer, his principal subject was Indians, and his reputation for fair and friendly dealings with them won him entree to their settlements. Probably his best-known works are his illustrations for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's monumental ''Indian Tribes of the United States,'' and murals of Indian villages and scenes in the committee rooms in the Capitol in Washington.

Eastman's delightful watercolor of Tower Rock was one of about 80 riverine landscapes, each about 4 by 7 inches, that were gathered in a portfolio entitled, (not entirely accurately), ''Sketches on the Mississippi from the Falls of St. Anthony to St. Louis by Lt. Col. S. Eastman, U.S. Army, made in the years 1847/48/49.'' Tower Rock, of course, is below St. Louis. Eastman painted it while he was on his way downstream to a new assignment in Texas.

The portfolio was missing for many years. It was rediscovered in 1970 by the Rev. James P. Duncan, a Presbyterian minister in Perryville, among items he had inherited from Henry Lewis, a landscape painter in St. Louis who had bought them from Eastman and published reproductions of several of them in Germany. The Tower Rock watercolor, along with about two dozen of the other pictures from the portfolio, is now in the St. Louis Art Museum. Tower Rock has the paradoxical distinction of being both unique and unremarkable. There is nothing else like it along the Mississippi, yet from the point of view of geologists, it is merely an erosional remnant, not appreciably different from many others across the face of the globe, that (for reasons they do not attempt to explain) was overlooked by the river as it ground away the surrounding rock.

The chronology, as explained by Professor George W. Viele, professor of geology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, is briefly this:

The Bailey formation rock of which Tower Rock and the surrounding hills are constituted is the petrified residue of marine sediments that accumulated over about 50 million years on the floor of a shallow sea that covered the region during the Devonian age, a period ending about 350 million years ago. It is mostly limestone interspersed with chert (flint), with some strata of shale that some of the surveyors rather loosely termed slate, though it is not of a quality that would have commercial value.

Toward the close of the Paleozoic era, about 300 million years ago, the great limestone platform was heaved upward owing to pressure exerted from below by older, harder rocks deposited much earlier. In the ensuing millennia, much of the limestone has been worn away, exposing the underlying granite near the summit of the uplift around Ironton, and uncovering the Devonian strata along the course of the Mississippi to the east.

In some locations, the uplift became tilted and fractured. The Wittenberg Fault crosses the river only a mile upstream from Tower Rock and is revealed by the Devil's Bake oven and the Devil's Backbone, two grotesque, rocky prominences on the Illinois shore.

But the bedding planes of Tower Rock itself are almost perfectly horizontal, and there is no faulting immediately around it.

It was not until the beginning of the Pleistocene period, a mere half-million years ago, that the Mississippi River system began carrying away the remaining overlying limestone and scouring its channel. It is within this final split second of geological history that the landforms of the Mississippi we see today, including the fantastic shapes near Tower Rock, were sculpted.

Any discussion of the ownership of Tower Rock reads like a full-employment plan for lawyers. The recent history of the question goes approximately like this:

In 1971, Missouri's then attorney general, John C. Danforth, issued a formal opinion declaring that the rock was the property of Perry County. Employing a line of legal logic that even Missouri officials now regard as farfetched, Danforth reasoned that because the rock was really part of the river bed, title had passed to the state at the time of its admission to the Union in 1821 and thence, by force of an 1895 Missouri law conveying river bed titles to the counties, to the county.

What appears to be the generally accepted final word on the subject, of actual ownership, however, is a plat and description formally entered in the records of the federal Bureau of Land Management in Washington, proclaiming the rock as the property of Uncle Sam. It is based on a survey conducted in 1970.

The BLM is the agency that administers that vast category of federal real estate known as the public lands, such as those constituting most of states such as Nevada and Wyoming that have never been settled. Tower Rock, says the BLM, is just a parcel that was unaccounted for when that part of the Missouri territory was originally surveyed in 1817, was never claimed or homesteaded, and therefore remains in the public domain.

What made the federal government take such a sudden interest in the rock after so many years is not clear. Perhaps not altogether coincidentally, the plat was formally authenticated on April 2, 1971 - just four days before Danforth issued his opinion.

The BLM, the direct bureaucrat descendant of the General Land Office of frontier days, has years of experience with claim jumping.

In any event, in 1983 the Missouri Department of Conservation, tacitly acknowledging the federal claim, asked the BLM to deed the rock to the state for recreational and scenic purposes. The request is still pending. The rock would be incorporated into the department's Tower Rock Natural Area, a picnic area on the nearby shore.

There may be some complicating factors. Under an executive order issued by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871, the rock was ''reserved for public purposes, as recommended by the Secretary of the Interior.'' Grant's order doesn't specify what purposes he had in mind, but the popularly held belief was that there were plans to use it for a bridge pier.

Then, in 1891, the Interior Department turned all the islands in the Mississippi River over to the Corps of Engineers, presumably so the Corps could remove the ones that interfered with navigation. The Corps' St. Louis office, whose territory includes the reach where Tower Rock lies, says it is unaware of the order, however.

Finally, in 1970, Tower Rock was formally listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a form of canonization that is meant to provide immunity against damage or destruction by any federal, or federally funded, action.

Copyright (c) 1988 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Record Number: 8802090726