At that time part of the river’s story was its lack of water. The lead front-page headline in The Progressive was: “Not much water in the Wisconsin River.” That was during the days before modern electronics. The up-to-the-minute reports about the level of water in the river were not available as now is the case via computers.
Every day the late Agnes Brokaw walked from her nearby home to read the government river level gauge and report her findings. She could recall times when the reading was less than six inches of water but that September the river depth had dropped beneath the last line on the gauge. An old pier from an earlier bridge was completely out of the water and it had been that way for an extended length of time. Village old timers, sitting on an uptown bench, were in agreement – they had never before seen the river so low.
And then, on a Saturday morning, a canoe paddler spotted a muffler pipe protruding from the river about a half-mile down-stream from the lower boat landing. The paddler reported his find to Boscobel authorities and they relayed the information to Muscoda.
The muffler in the river was attached to an Allis Chalmers D-17 model tractor that had been missing from Cooley Motors in Muscoda for several days.
An ironic part of the story is the river was at what was considered an especially low water level – and yet there was a big hole, not far from the river bank, that was deep enough to almost completely hide a tractor for several days.
The theory was that the tractor had been driven into the river and onto a sandbar near the lower boat landing and was on its way to another sandbar in mid-river when it sank.
Who, or how many persons were involved in moving the machine, apparently was not know at the time it sank. But the story certainly confirms the often-given warning – “Don’t trust the river – big sandbars (such as we have had this year) do not mean it’s a safe place to play. So use caution and wear your life-jacket as there may be a deep hole nearby – maybe big enough to sink a tractor.
