Historical March 1991 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Like so many other street names. Goodfellow is a wonderful occasion for a storyteller. Not a whole lot is known about John Goodfellow.
He was not of special ancestry or historic French extraction.
He didn’t even make it into Neal Primm’s Lion of the Valley!
In many ways that makes it easier to tell the story he is connected with since it isn’t about to be cluttered up with a whole lot of biographical detail. Even though not a lot is known about him, John Goodfellow occupies a significant place in the history of the St. Louis Riverfrontlargely by accident. Colonel Stephen Long first noted officially for the federal government that the Mississippi at St. Louis was moving east.
While yet in St. Louis in the spring of 1819 before heading up the Missouri on his special steamboat designed to scare the Indians because the steam came out of the prow to appear like a dragon (it being presumed the Indians knew what dragons were). Colonel Long noted that it was a shame the St. Louis harbor was about to be left behind. St. Louis was going to end up high and dry as the Mississippi moved around in the flood plane and the two islands. Bloody Island and Duncan’s Island. grew together and became the western bank of the river—nearly a mile east of where the river bank was at that time. Frankly speaking, Colonel Long was not the first to note the problem of the silting in of the St. Louis Riverfront.
The St. Louis Board of Trustees had discussed it almost from their beginning in 1809.
When the City of St. Louis was created and the first election of the Board of Aldermen completed in 1823, the discussions continued in a more august forum.
It was the Board of Aldermen who came up with what they thought was at least a partial solution.
Most everyone has heard of anthropomorphic thinking—sometimes called mythic thinking. Its central characteristic is the projection of human qualities into other inanimate or at least non-human objects.
A common manifestation of mythic thinking is the Classic pantheon of gods and goddesses who seem to be mere projections of human attributes, weaknesses, or habits. Examples of anthropomorphic projections should not be limited to the Classic era, however. Further, they should not be limited to the faith or religious situation either.
The social and political arena can be found to have anthropomorphic projections, and John Goodfellow fell into one of these examples of misapplied social situations and reaped the benefit.
It all had to do with the silting of the St. Louis harbor.
The idea originated with Thomas F. Riddick—memorialized in another St. Louis myth as the so-called “famous horsemen” who supposedly rode to Washington to get public land for public education in St. Louis. Riddick eventually had a school named after him even though historic evidence suggests his land activity had quite the opposite intent.
However, our story today is about Goodfellow. Colonel Riddick suggested that the river needed help in moving the sand islands out of the way of the harbor.
He took his idea to the Board of Aldermen as well as several wealthy business leaders.
According to Mayor John Darby, it was largely money from Bernard Pratte and a couple other wealthy men who made Goodfellow’s deed possible. John Goodfellow was hired by the City of St. Louis beginning in 1833 to plow up Duncan’s Island to make it less compact when the annual spring flood of the Mississippi moved the detritus and runoff toward the Gulf of Mexico.
The reason John Goodfellow was hired was the sturdiness of his ox teams.
He apparently was renowned for his bovine plow pullers.
The making and training of ox teams is something of a skill.
The bull must be castrated at just the right stage in its development after maturity so it has maximum strength but no experience with cows. John Goodfellow’s oxen were of great strength and yet quite tractable.
In other words, a Goodfellow ox could do a substantial day’s work!
The City fathers, including Colonel Riddick and Bernard Pratte, considered the problem of the sand islands in the harbor, especially Duncan’s Island, of sufficient magnitude to require the work of Goodfellow’s ox teams.
There is no specific record of how John thought about it, but there is enough to indicate he probably thought it somewhat curious that he would be hired to loosen river sand islands because of the supposed weakness of the Mississippi. Whether or not he understood mythic and anthropomorphic thinking is not known.
But clearly the attribution of “weakness” or some other human quality to the Mississippi is anthropomorphic. Acting on such verbal anthropomorphisms is akin to superstition.
The John Goodfellow story of the plowing of the sand islands in the St. Louis harbor is suggestive of how St. Louisans have thought about the Mississippi since time began.
It may be that even yet we tend to think of the river in anthropomorphic terms.
There is little doubt that “Ol’ Man River” is thought of as danger ous, whimsical, unpredictable, and just plain mean and dirty. Like reptilian models of old, the river “snakes” its way through the collective consciousness with attributed qualities best epitomized in such rascals as Mike Fink.
In Minnesota it was Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox who tamed the river and made it straight and calm for adjacent settlement.
The early settlers in Minnesota had a hard time dealing with the changing and meandering shape of the Mississippi.
According to the yarn, these settlers prevailed upon Paul Bunyan to bring his big blue ox, attach it to the river, and get it to flow straight in a fixed location. Much the same thing seems to have happened in St. Louis. Unlike Bunyan, however. John Goodfellow was able to smile all the way to the bank when he was paid for his oxen and their work— strangely reminiscent of the Paul Bunyan tale every Minnesota school child reads in a third grade setting. Such anthropomorphic thinking gets in the way of finding real solutions to real situations.
It was Mayor Darby who eventually found a real solution when he went to Brigadier General Charles Gratiot, Jr., the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Gratiot, son of Charles Gratiot and Victoire Chouteau, the half-sister of Auguste Chouteau, sent one of the bright engineers in his office, Lt. Robert E Lee to St. Louis.
The rest is history.
From that same history, John Goodfellow went back to his farms and animal husbandry.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, March 1991.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1991_03.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
