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Pollywogging in the Mississippi River January 14, 2025 |
Hi, Read about Pollywogging on the Mississippi River. Meet my friends, Charlene and her two sons, Ed and Richard. ![]() Pollywoggers: Ed, Charlene & Richard Charlene, Ed and Richard attend the same church as I do, where my son, Ethan pastors and my husband Mark assists him. One Sunday while chatting with Ed he told me about their pollywogging days in later 1970s on the Mississippi River. I was fascinated. I'd heard about shell divers and seen them often on the river, but pollywogging was a new term all together for me. My husband and I moved to Muscatine in 1976 so I didn't grow up knowing all these river stories. Charlene's husband was a commercial fisherman and for bait he used mostly clam meat. It was Richard and Ed's job to pollywog for the clams. Pollywogging requires the person to stoop down on their hands and knees and feel around in the bottom of a lake or stream to search for freshwater mussels. The term was likely coined because this technique might loosely resemble how a pollywog, or tadpole, might move in water. Another way of saying it is grubbing through the sand and gravel beds of a stream looking for clams. Rather than pollywog in the main Mississippi River channel, they pollywogged in Blanchard's Schute where there was no current and clams were plentiful, which ran from Muscatine riverfront to Bass Island near the Kilpeck Landing close to the Louisa power plant. Baiting 1,400 catfish hooks daily took lots of clams and after an hour or so, because they knew where the clam beds were, the boys and Charlene and any friends they could round up would fill the boat with clams found either by feeling in the mud or swimming down 10-15 feet and picking up two or three clams at a time from the bottom. They'd throw them in the boat and slide them down a slanted board with a hole in it to make sure the sizes were big enough to keep. If the clams fell through the hole, they threw them back in the water. Then came boiling the clams and checking for pearls and slugs, which they found occasionally and sold to a local dealer. Charlene reminisces about a beautiful pearl the size of her thumb she sold for only $50. Ed was reminded of one perfect pearl button shaped pearl that he later gave to his wife. They also mentioned black and brown pearls. At age 12, all this was loads of fun for Richard, and eventually he was paid $10 per week for helping out with this job. It was more of a chore for Ed who at age 15 already owned a car which he'd rather be driving than pollywogging. After cooking the meat it was cut up small, not too big or they'd get scolded for "feeding" the fish, not "catching" them and put on the hooks. To Richard, baiting the hooks was the hardest part. Other bait they'd use included grasshoppers which were caught by a homemade contraption added to the front of a pickup and driven through the tall grasses, catalpa worms (also known as Catfish Candy - Some fishermen refer to the catalpa as the “fish bait tree”) and dew worms. Eventually they started using box traps for catfish and there was no more need to bait so many fish hooks. This trio enjoyed telling about their adventures on the Mississippi River - like modern day Huckleberry Finns and Tom Sawyers in a Mark Twain adventure. They told about finding an abandoned houseboat and using it for vacations, in turn leaving it stocked with canned goods for the next people to find and enjoy it. There were also lots of frog catching adventures by hand in ditches or by a piece of a sock on a hook and I heard how tasty Iowa frogs can be. Trapping muskrats was also a big past time. Apparently they are not good to eat. It was so much fun listening to all these lovely stories about my local history. Have you ever gone pollywogging? I'd love to hear about your adventures! Did you know that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and his mother and brother used to live in Muscatine, Iowa? His brother Orion Clemens owned the newspaper here at one time and his younger brother, Samuel would help him. Maybe this is where the famous Mark Twain got his start.
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God bless and thank you for being a part of KariPearls.
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