Susan Angeline Collins: with a Hallelujah Heart

By Janis Bennington Van Buren

Ten percent of book profits will go to the Susan Angeline Collins Scholarship at Upper Iowa University in Fayette, Iowa.

Get ready to delve into a world of hardship, challenge, and fulfillment. Explore the life of African American Susan Angeline Collins and be inspired by her faith, pioneering attitude, missionary successes, unfailing courage, and belief in everyone’s right to an education.

As Miss Collins’ life unfolds before you, relevant social issues affecting people of color are intertwined. Issues examined include economics, education, gender, race, religion, and Africa’s colonization from her 1851 birth in Illinois until her 1940 death in Iowa. Her resourcefulness in overcoming obstacles during her 33-year commitment to missionary service in the Congo Delta Region and Angola is compelling. Miss Collins’ story demonstrates the difference one person can make in the lives of an unknown number of women and children, some orphaned and homeless and others escaping early marriage and subservience. Her leadership is evidenced when starting a girls’ school in the northern Angolan high plateau region years before Mary Jane McLeod Bethune initiated her school for African-American girls in Florida.

You will be gratified to discover how this diminutive bundle of energy achieved recognition as a stalwart missionary, leader, teacher, nurse, construction manager, and surrogate mother to “her girls.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664225749

Janis Bennington Van Buren

Janis Bennington Van Buren grew up in rural Northeast Iowa where Susan Angeline Collins lived for 37 years. Those who knew Miss Collins shared their recollections with Van Buren. With their encouragement she undertook the challenge of bringing awareness to Susan’s accomplished life. Examining Miss Collins’ experiences has allowed her to combine historical research and missionary interests through the lens of a Midwestern native. Van Buren has a doctorate from Iowa State University, was a tenured professor at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, and lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.

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Copyright © 2021 Janis Bennington Van Buren.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-2575-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-2576-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-2574-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021904163

WestBow Press rev. date: 04/20/2021

To my husband and best friend, James R. Boyle.

And to the women throughout the ages who have risked their lives to bring education, love, and security to children throughout the world.

And in loving memory of my parents, Glen and Mildred Bennington, for instilling in me an inquisitive nature and the joy of learning.

Contents

Introduction

Time Line: Life and Missionary Career of Susan Angeline Collins

Chapter 1 Susan’s Formative Years

Chapter 2 A Country Divided

Chapter 3 Susan’s Teen Years: Experiencing Iowa

Chapter 4 The 1870s: Susan’s Decade of Transitions

Chapter 5 An Independent Woman: Leaving Iowa

Chapter 6 Living in Chicago: Preparing for the Future

Chapter 7 Unchartered Territory: Keeping the Commitment

Chapter 8 Susan Sails to Africa: New Stars to Follow

Chapter 9 Africa at Last: New Sights, Sounds, and Experiences

Chapter 10 Life in Angola: What’s Next?

Chapter 11 Angolan Experiences: Teaching the Children

Chapter 12 Traveling Home and Back: A Time of Stress and Change

Chapter 13 Busy Days and Nights: Never Enough Time

Chapter 14 Envisioning Growth: Bishop Hartzell Facilitates

Chapter 15 Fewer Missionaries: Increasing Workloads

Chapter 16 Concluding an Era: Susan Leaves Quessua

Chapter 17 Completed Circle: Return to Iowa

Chapter 18 Comfortable in Fayette: Savoring Past and Present

Chapter 19 Surrounded by Friends: Cherished by Many

Afterword

So Much Unknown: Questions I Would Ask Susan If I Could

Acknowledgments

Reading Group Guide

Bibliography

Notes

Introduction

On a blustery Sunday evening in March, with the snow still piled high from a long, cold Iowa winter, I squirmed uncomfortably in the oak church pew while the minister’s voice droned. I not so subtly elbowed my five-year-old sister, three years my junior, and earned a stern glare from my father. Fabricating an innocent smile, I looked upward as if in deep contemplation.

That’s when my roving eyes spotted a bright, star-shaped light twinkling from the sanctuary ceiling above the lectern. Its white, translucent glass cover and satin-finished aluminum frame against the light tan ceiling seemed out of place.

Fearing more stern looks from my father, I patiently waited until bedtime to ask my mother about the star. Her reply was, Oh, that’s Susan’s Star, as though she was a relative. Susan was a missionary in Africa until 1920 when she returned to Fayette in retirement. She died in June 1940, seven months after you were born. Reverend John Clinton and Mr. Lysle Wooldridge, our local blacksmith, designed and created the star. Sunday school classes donated the money to pay for the star. It was put up in the church right before Christmas in 1937. Susan lived to see her star take its high place to watch over our congregation.

As an eight-year-old, there were still some questions leaping into my mind. Who was this Susan? What was a missionary? What did a missionary do, and why did she want to go to Africa? How could she just leave her parents behind and go to a place as far away as Africa?

Soon after that 1948 evening, I forgot about my questions and Susan. It was sixty years later during a visit to Fayette, Iowa, that my mother’s friend Merle Sternberg suggested I learn more about Susan Angeline Collins. I was intrigued as I studied this single woman who decided to leave the security of home and support system and travel to a continent about which little was known. I could no longer forget about Susan. I was hooked, knowing I had to learn about her life story.

While growing up near Fayette, I didn’t perceive the uniqueness of the town. As an adult, I finally realized that Susan and other African Americans worshipped freely in our predominately white congregation nestled in the heart of the Midwest and in Northeast Iowa. This was not typical in the late 1800s and into the 1900s. What had set the stage for this to occur?

Many more questions filled my mind. Why did our mostly white congregation honor this African American woman? What called her to travel to West Central Africa, a direct distance approximately 7,500 miles from Fayette? What dangers did she face? How long and exactly where was she in Africa? Why did she make this personal sacrifice? How could she do this as a single female?

I began the quest to learn about Susan on a spring afternoon in 2009. I was originally looking for a Bible that had belonged to Susan and was described in an archived document I had discovered in the Upper Iowa University Library. The smell of mold filled the air as I entered the United Methodist Women’s room located in the northwest corner of the basement in the Fayette United Methodist Church. That smell became stronger when I excitedly flung open the doors of a walnut cupboard containing the organization’s supplies. I was there at the suggestion of the church secretary.

Books, small boxes, office supplies, napkins, and paper cups filled the shelves. Quickly, I searched the top two shelves. No Bible there. The third shelf contained hymnals and Bibles about the size of the one I’d seen Susan holding in a 1937 picture with Bishop G. Bromley Oxnan, when he visited her at the farm where she was living with childhood friends. I skipped the hymnals and systematically opened each Bible, hoping to see Susan’s name or some identifying feature, with no success, only frustration as the minutes slipped past!

On the back of the fourth shelf and nearly out of sight, I spied a smaller volume six inches long and one and a half inches thick. My breath caught as I reached slowly to touch the volume. Was I holding history? Would the Bible tell me stories of Susan? What tangible evidence of her life would I find?

The back spine was missing except for a thin, fragile section near the bottom. There I saw Christian Herald imprinted in gold letters. Heavy black thread, doubled and stitched through the front and back covers in a crisscross pattern, held the book together.

Was this it? What an adrenaline rush! Was this it? Had this volume belonged to Susan? With care, I extracted it from among the other books. Slowly and gingerly, I opened the cover, turned a page, and saw clearly written on the white cover page: Susan Collins, Quessua, Africa, May 21, 1917. It was a match! Her handwriting matched the signature on a picture she had autographed and given childhood friends, the Graham siblings. My treasure is that I personally have this photo.

At that moment, I quivered, realizing I was holding a book Susan had held. I turned the next page and discovered it was the New Testament Susan used during her last three years in Africa while teaching the children she loved and for whom she labored.

Leafing through the testament, I discovered pencil-marked passages dated from May 4, 1920, through May 11, 1928. Perhaps those passages gave special meaning to her on those dates as she continued her daily Bible study after returning home to Fayette. I found tucked throughout the volume a Suid Afrika stamp, a dried three-leaf clover, two common mallow leaves, and a 4.5-by-3.5-inch drawing of a pink rose. I speculated whether the rose represented an expression of Susan’s artistic skills or that of a student or friend. What did these items mean to Susan? Why did she keep them?

Would my search tell me why Susan wrote the names Ervin, Addie, Julia, and Harriet at the back of her New Testament? The mold had permeated my nose when I finally finished examining the volume.

The next morning, my eyes were crusty from the mold I had encountered. Just as I arrived at the church, the cupola bell topping Upper Iowa University’s Alexander-Dickman Hall chimed eight times. My basement room search continued. I quickly scanned minutes of the local Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society and the Woman’s Home Missionary Society from October 2, 1891, to October 4, 1918. Susan’s work in Africa was briefly and sporadically described. My hunt through a file cabinet in a first-floor storeroom supplied old church bulletins and membership records pinpointing dates of some of Susan’s activities after her return to the States until her death.

The gathering room provided a small treasure trove of pictures Susan had shared with Reverend John Clinton from her Angolan years. Several showed Susan with the children she loved. I noticed her hair was parted in the middle and pulled conservatively back into a bun. Another picture revealed Susan sitting sidesaddle on a mule and wearing a dark skirt, a white, long-sleeved blouse, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a dark band encircling the crown.

I continued looking for remnants of Susan’s life, even returning to the dank basement room housing two large bookshelves. They provided nothing. Then I recalled an oak and glass bookcase near the elevator at the back of the sanctuary. I paged through each of the books, hoping to find more surviving traces of Susan. Upon reaching the lowest of the four shelves, I began to think my time had been wasted. How wrong I was! I found two of Susan’s treasures, The Picture Bible and the Kimbundu Gospels, containing her name on a fly page, Susan Collins, Quessua, Malange, Angola, Africa, Dec. 1915. What could I find out about Quessua and the people who spoke the Kimbundu language? Were there other artifacts of this woman’s life in Northeast Iowa and Africa waiting for discovery? Where would they lead me?

My venture had begun! The questions were overwhelming. How did Susan’s life mirror other African Americans of her time, and how did migration patterns and social, economic, and religious changes influence her? Why would a single black woman decide to go to Africa as a missionary, surrounded by uncertainty and danger? What were her fears as she left the predictability of life in the Midwest? Why would she leave family and friends? Did she receive a calling from God? Was she lured to Africa by a sense of adventure? Did she not know what she was getting into? Was she driven by a need to leave Iowa to find greater opportunities and a place where she could make a difference? Did she escape her employment barriers? Was she a pioneer or a follower? This search led me to discover a full-blown adventure, a tragedy, and other lost links in Susan’s life. Susan’s story provides the opportunity for self-reflection, awareness of what can be accomplished when one is courageous, and the value of family, church, and community support.

Others need to know about Susan’s accomplishments. There was a spark in her showing the world she was exceptional and represented the best qualities in people. Reading her story will inspire those of faith. Susan and other early women missionaries lived with multiple dangers but went forward at the risk of their lives. I want her life story to be told so she will not simply vanish into the musty pages of history with no value attributed to her life as a pioneering African American educator and missionary in Africa. Susan contributed to the betterment and spiritual and intellectual life of many, especially young girls and women. She opened up the lives of people in Africa and America while demonstrating the value of faith, education, and love—but most of all love.

I could no longer forget about Susan, picturing her as a courageous woman and a brave pioneer ready to take on new challenges. Then I wondered how I would feel as I discovered more about her life. Because we both grew to womanhood on farms located within miles of each other east of Fayette, I felt some affinity for her even though we are of different generations.

Now that I have researched, studied, and contemplated Susan’s life, sharing her story seems even more imperative than when I began my work in 2009. Her story offers encouragement for today. In this time of racial and ethnic strife amid rising tensions, Susan’s story exemplifies what can happen when people are accepted in a community and allowed to thrive regardless of race, gender, and creed. Her life illustrates how birth into a humble family need not limit having a joyful and bountiful life. It reveals how love given and received freely multiplies. Susan’s story conveys overcoming obstacles at a time when there were fewer protective laws for African Americans. She demonstrates navigating a system where white males were in charge, but she pushed forward to help those who were disenfranchised. Susan found a way to respond to her call against numerous obstacles and circumstances. With a hallelujah heart, she persisted, attained her dream of becoming a missionary and serving her people, and was lauded for her years of outstanding service. Susan is a part of the Methodist’s women story of reaching girls and women throughout the world.

Susan Angeline Collins went through doors when open, often traveling to remote places. I couldn’t always ascertain if she alone shoved them open or if she required assistance. Join me and discover Susan’s life story for yourself.

Time Line: Life and Missionary Career of Susan Angeline Collins

1

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Susan’s Formative Years

Susan’s Parents’ Early Lives: Indentured Servitude in Illinois

Explore with me Susan’s parents’ early lives and the dangers they and other African Americans experienced during the early decades of the 1800s. Imagine how their years of hard physical work influenced Susan’s life.

Stories about people’s lives are often deeply embedded in a community’s oral history. One such story Fayette residents believed was that Susan’s parents, Isaac and Sarah Joiner Collins, had been slaves. I wanted to determine if that was true and the circumstances of their early lives. Susan’s obituary revealed she was born near Edwardsville, Illinois, a clue that led me to the Illinois Servitude and Emancipation Records. Those records documented Isaac had been indentured to Low Jackson as a child and had completed his term of service to Jackson on May 12, 1845, in Madison County, Illinois.¹ Edwardsville is the county seat. Her mother, who had seven older siblings, was a servant freed from indenture on September 17, 1839, at age fifteen in adjoining St. Clair County.² Isam Joiner and his wife likely came to Illinois from either Virginia or Tennessee. Sarah (a.k.a. Sally) and Isaac were married on January 4, 1844, in Madison County.³

Isaac’s Civil War enlistment papers listed his birth in Waik (a.k.a. Wake), North Carolina.⁴ When and how did he get to Madison County? I wondered. County records document he was brought there with a boy named Dick in 1816 by Low Jackson, who purchased land in the American Bottom along the Mississippi River. The May 31, 1816, Madison County, Illinois, Court and Indenture Records transcript provided the following details. This day personally came Low Jackson of Madison County & Wood River Township and Registered agreeable the Statute in such case made and provided—Two negro boys one by the name of Isaac, seven years old the first day of March in the year of our Lord 1815, & the other by the name of Dick, six years old on the thirty first day of December in the year of our Lord 1815. Before me Josias Randle, CCC, MC.⁵ I postulate Isaac and Dick were brothers or very close friends because Susan had a younger brother named Richard.

Digging deeper, I discovered this frontier county was established in 1812—eight years after Lewis and Clark’s men wintered at the mouth of the Wood River along low-lying land near the Mississippi River. In this wild and undeveloped place, Native Americans roamed the land hunting deer, wild turkey, squirrels, ducks, and other game. There was still hostility even though the French and Indian War had ended in February 1763. Resenting white encroachment, the Indians defended their territory along the river. Four white women and numerous children were killed by a small band of native people in what became locally known as the Wood River Massacre. Unfortunately, this incident increased the animosity between the settlers and Native Americans, causing the territorial government to offer a fifty-dollar bounty for killing any native who came to a white settlement with the intent to murder.⁶

When considering conditions likely affecting Isaac’s and Sarah’s lives, I found attitudes toward slavery were becoming less stringent in Illinois than in North Carolina as more free staters moved into Illinois. But dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations still existed for African Americans in Wood River Township, where Isaac worked on Low Jackson’s farm.

Slavery in Illinois dates back to 1720, when African slaves were brought to work in coal mines and to clear land for agricultural purposes.⁷ Even though the Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery, many African Americans like Isaac and Sarah worked as indentured servants for a stated period of time.⁸ It isn’t known if Susan’s parents were treated any differently than the slaves living in the South. Likely, Fayette residents didn’t understand the distinction, thus identifying Susan’s parents as slaves.

When Isaac and other young African Americans in the heartland were growing to manhood, the slavery issue was being passionately debated in Congress. The conversations resulted from the different views Southern planters and Northern industrialists held about their labor needs. A law passed in 1805 stating the length of servitude in Indiana Territory, of which Illinois was a part, ultimately provided the reason for Isaac’s emancipation. This law stated, Slaves who were under the age of fifteen at the time of their arrival in the territory were to be indentured servants, males until they reached the age of thirty-five and females until they became thirty-two.⁹ Isaac was released at age thirty-five.

Isaac, however, was positively affected when Illinois enacted a series of black codes after becoming a state in 1818. These codes provided legal protection to African Americans, allowing the continuation of indentured servitude but prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude.¹⁰ Three years prior to Susan’s birth, Illinois was still experiencing issues related to slavery. When the Illinois Constitution was revised in 1848, slavery and involuntary servitude were eliminated except when a black person had been convicted of a crime. Additionally, Article XIV of the revised constitution prohibited free blacks from immigrating into the state and didn’t allow slave owners to set their slaves free after bringing them to Illinois. As late as 1853, the state legislature decreed it a crime to bring African Americans into the state.¹¹ These laws and codes were repealed after the Union Civil War victory ending all aspects of slavery in Illinois.¹² Isaac and Sarah benefitted from these laws, but dangers were present if they traveled too far from where they were known.

African Americans freed from their servitude before the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act by the United States Congress were often at risk. They lived in fear of slave catchers who came north motivated by greed to track down, capture, and take runaway slaves south, even though no specific person was looking for them. Other times, marshals arrested free African Americans, as illustrated in the January 1853 case of an Alton, Illinois, woman. Amanda Kicherd, who the Collins family likely knew, was married only a few weeks to Alfred Chavers when she was taken into custody. After her capture, the citizens of the community raised the $1,200 and demanded her freedom, and she was returned to her husband.¹³ Likely, Susan’s parents and other Northern free African Americans aided fugitive slaves—with many immigrating to Canada, Africa, and Caribbean countries.

Such was the fractious political world into which Susan was born on July 3, 1851,¹⁴ joining three older sisters: Mary, age six;¹⁵ Martha Indiana, age four;¹⁶ and Maranda, age two.¹⁷ Her brother, William, was born in 1854 while the family was living near Edwardsville.¹⁸

Even though Isaac and Sarah were freed from their servitude, life was hard for them. Finding work was difficult in a state that had trouble accepting them as equal citizens. Presumably, Isaac continued to work for Low Jackson as a farm laborer, receiving minimal remuneration for the back-breaking toil farming entailed. Imagine him on a summer day with beads of sweat pouring off his brow, guiding a horse-drawn, one-bottom plow and feeling the newly turned, moist black earth beneath his feet. Or later in the season, think of him swinging a scythe through the tall grass, shocking oats, and husking corn. He may have dreamed of owning his own land as he trudged up and down the fields where much of his time was spent.

Susan would have learned early in life that a farm family’s work is never done. She probably watched her father planting crops and cutting plentiful oak trees for fence posts and firewood to cook and heat. And if Jackson didn’t provide a house, Isaac and the neighbors may have built a cabin from oak logs. Possibly Susan’s older sisters trudged along with Isaac when he hunted the abundant wild turkey, squirrel, and deer that fattened themselves eating acorns.

Even with five young children, Sarah would have been expected to have a vegetable garden. Likely, one of Susan’s first memories as she ran barefooted outside the cabin was her mother hoeing weeds as she pushed wisps of hair under her wide-brimmed sunbonnet. Perhaps it was these memories that created Susan’s lifetime joy in gardening, a skill she shared with her students at the Angolan missions.

Envision Sarah’s garden including straight rows of Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, beans, carrots, and peas with squash, pumpkin, and cucumber vines spreading along the edge. Imagine the older girls helping weed and harvest the garden produce while Sarah picked and preserved wild plums, cherries, strawberries, and blackberries. Collecting black walnuts and hickory nuts was a fall chore involving all of the children. When chilly north winds blew and snow fell, women of this era spun, wove, and made clothing for their families. I imagine Sarah learned these skills working for either the William Bridges or the William Hart families during her indenture period.

While Isaac and Sarah were farming and providing for their growing family, changes swept the country that affected their lives and those of other African Americans. Abolitionist movements gained momentum due to efforts by leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth. The North exploded in anger after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854.¹⁹ Shortly afterward, the Republican Party with anti-South sentiments was formed. On May 29, 1856, five years after Susan’s birth, Abraham Lincoln assisted in the formation of the Republican Party of Illinois. A year later in June, he gave a speech against the Dred Scott decision that ruled Scott must remain a slave. The ruling created a greater division between the North and the South.²⁰ Small farmers in the South sold their land and migrated west and north, taking advantage of land grants. Not all whites wanted free African Americans in the North, and in some states, they were not allowed to attend public schools or vote. Some started their own schools. No records were found revealing whether or not Susan and her older siblings attended school in Illinois.

Freedom to Choose: A Move to Wisconsin

Perhaps some of these conditions contributed to the Collins family’s departure from Illinois after William’s birth and before Richard’s 1858 birth in Wisconsin.²¹ Maybe they heard of opportunities in Wisconsin from runaway slaves escaping north up the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers to African American settlements developing in the Upper Midwest. Possibly Isaac’s conversations with blacks working on the steamboats traveling between St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Paul, Minnesota, revealed the availability of affordable land and educational opportunities for his children.²² Picture Isaac walking to the river on Sunday afternoons and talking with African Americans, along with newly arrived Irish and German immigrants who served in a variety of capacities on the steamboats. Possibly he knew some of the deck crew who operated the pumps, supplied the wood, and fired the boilers or worked as roustabouts carrying cotton, tobacco, and sugar onto and off of the steamboats.

Slaves and free African Americans were integral to the Mississippi steamboat traffic in the mid-1800s. Their work, mostly as deckhands, enabled them to serve as communication conduits between families in the North, to assist escaping slaves, and develop knowledge of the larger world. Even though African Americans rarely rose above the status of deckhands, slaves frequently associated steamboats with freedom. Some of these men later reported that riverboat work was a bright spot in their lives.²³

Possibly Isaac and Sarah aspired to join her cousin John A. Joiner and his wife, Margaret, who had settled with several other African American families in Newark Valley, Wisconsin, located in Adams County near the Wisconsin River.²⁴ They may have wanted to leave the marshy Illinois wetlands that fostered malaria-carrying mosquitoes that might have caused young Mary’s death. There is no Illinois or Wisconsin record of her death, and she is not listed in the 1860 Wisconsin census. It is as if she disappeared with no trace of her existence except in the 1850 Illinois census.

Leaving her siblings and the comfort of the known for the adjustment of the unknown was probably stressful for Sarah. She may have been concerned about the myriad dangers of steamboat travel and keeping her children safe. Moving preparations would have been drudgery for the family. Imagine traveling with a family of four children under eleven years of age, while having limited finances and material goods. In all probability, they went by steamboat up the Mississippi and then the Wisconsin River when they were at their highest during spring flooding. The high water allowed larger boats to go inland to the central portion of Wisconsin.

They had to be deck passengers because African Americans weren’t allowed cabins. Perhaps they stayed at the back deck because it was safer than the front where the boilers frequently exploded. Deck passengers were encouraged to wear coarse clothing in which they could sleep. Boats made numerous stops along the riverbanks to obtain wood for refueling. Men could chop wood and carry it on board to lower the cost of passage.²⁵

Riverboat captains raced their steamboats, often creating disastrous results. To get an edge, they occasionally ordered African American workers to sit on the boilers’ safety valves to build up pressure and gain the advantage of increased speed.²⁶ What a sad commentary, as they jeopardized innocent lives to win a race.

Sarah cared for the children and prepared their meals after obtaining a stove from the captain. Deck passengers brought their food on board.²⁷ Perhaps a typical meal included grits, black-eyed peas, and cured ham hocks.

There were many ways the children could be hurt, such as a deadly fall into the river that became rough and choppy when boats passed. Other risks included fire, contracting cholera, or being pushed overboard by shifting deck cargo.

Predicting their time en route to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, was difficult due to various river obstructions, such as sandbars, snags, sawyers, ice in early spring, and rapids. Travel estimates varied from a few days to two weeks to cover the 455 statue miles between St. Louis and Prairie du Chien. Among the more challenging impediments were the Rock Island and the Des Moines Rapids. Passing through these rapids created a new occupation, rapids pilot, a steamboat captain who specialized in guiding boats through the rocky passages. With the approval of the 1852 Western Rivers Improvement Act, a channel one hundred feet wide and four feet deep was cut near the Rock Island Rapids.²⁸ This work may have been completed by the time the Collins family traveled upriver. After the Civil War, work on the river obstructions began in earnest because good river transportation was needed for commerce, carrying mail and articles of trade, and for those migrating north with hopes for a better life.²⁹

Steamboat captains ruled their domains and often did not travel or allow gambling on Sundays. When docked, passengers were encouraged to attend the church of their choice.³⁰

As the Collins family took this potentially perilous journey north, they had many sights and sounds along the river upon which to feast their eyes and ears. This undoubtedly added to their joy, as most enslaved African Americans were not allowed off the property where they worked. Isaac, Sarah, and their family had the freedom to migrate northward in search of better working and living conditions.

Susan and her siblings may have been alarmed when the boat left the river’s edge and smoke began belching from the stacks, later turning into feathery plumes high in the sky. Perhaps the rugged limestone bluffs along the Mississippi led their eyes skyward toward towering treetops laden with bald eagle nests. Because Native Americans still lived in the area, she may have seen teepees standing in areas where the dark earth sloped down and smaller rivers and creeks entered the mighty river, causing gentle ripples. Juniper trees with their small smoky-blue berries provided cover for wild turkeys inhabiting the area. Deer were startled when the steamboat whistle blared a warning of an approaching boat or sending out a distress signal after hitting a sandbar. Great horned owls could be heard at night as they signaled one another with their deep, soft hoo-h-hoo-hoos. For children with active imaginations, the trees often shrouded in the morning mist may have resembled tall skeletons.

Imagine