Think of Iowa and you think corn. You think soybeans. Perhaps you think cattle, or John Deere and Caterpillar. You do not think clams.
But it wasn’t many years ago that Butch Ballenger of Muscatine received the Iowa Governor’s Export Award-for buying and selling clams.
Clamming has been an Iowa industry for more than a century, but the boom times were long ago. Before the turn of the century clams were hauled from the Mississippi only for their pearls; historian John Madson’s “Up on the River” notes that 27 pearl buyers were registered at the Prairie du Chien Hotel in 1898. By the early 1900s the clams also were supplying material to some 50 button factories in Iowa towns such as Muscatine and Bellevue, and Andalusia and Moline in Illinois. In such demand were clams for these twin uses that, according to Madson, 1,000 full-time fishermen were plying the 167-mile stretch of the Mississippi between Ft. Madison and Sabula, Iowa.
Though the pearl business never died out completely, the button business died with the introduction of more durable plastic buttons, although to this day, outside of long-shuttered, vine-covered factories, piles of shells with three or four perfect “bullet holes” punched by machines through them litter the shoreline and testify to the industry’s vanished vigor.
These days the commercial use of the clam is for its shell again, but as will be explained later, for a different purpose.
Here is one clammer describing the harvesting process: “You crawl on that muddy bottom and feel for clams, because basically you’re workin’ in a closet with the door shut, it’s that dark. But you better know the area too. Can’t let that air hose curl around a branch or something.
“Tugboats is another hazard. You think that motor ain’t strong! Just stand on the bank and watch it draw down the water line five inches. Last week I tried staying under with the 55-pound weights around my waist. Well, I want to tell you that suction pulled me four feet off the bottom. At least! Without the ballast I would have gone right up into that propellor. I would have been feedin’ the fishies from here on down to Grafton.”
There are hazards above the water, too, for if one crew finds a rich bed of shells, a half-dozen other boats invariably anchor in the vicinity, dividing the profits. Therefore, as one diver says, “Clammin’s a cat-and-mouse game. Tomorrow I’ll start out where there’s some shells, lots of ’em, but not the best quality. Then I’ll make some noise. Pretty soon other boats show up and when they see me come aboard with a sack full of clams they drop anchor. But, see, I’m divin’ over a limestone bed-the shells are cloudy when you crack ’em open. No good. And before they can find that out I’ve pulled up and snuck away down river. There’s a couple spots where I can dive for real money.”
Not an easy job
Clamming is generally a two-person operation: one in scuba gear crawls along the bottom, collecting bivalves, while a partner watches the air pump and separates the catch according to grade and species.
From sunrise until late afternoon they work, from Prairie du Chien all the way down to Baton Rouge, as well as most tributaries in between.
By late afternoon some 20 boats, their insides covered with clams, have driven into one of the “shell camps” set up along the Mississippi. Buyer Tom Swann meets divers at his “camp” in the public marina parking lot outside Dallas City, Ill., 10 miles upriver from Ft. Madison, Iowa, while Ballenger favors an abandoned gasoline station near the outskirts of Moline. As soon as a diver shovels clams from a burlap bag, Ballenger will pick up a clam and whack it with a flat iron board. Inspecting the exposed cross section, he may compliment the clammer-if his product is pure white. But if it is stained or interrupted with veins or is cloudy he might say, sarcastically, “These shells are too good for us; take ’em someplace else. We’re not used to such high quality.”
Swann, raised on the river, might be more specific, chiding a diver for finding his catch atop rock piles or in deep water, environments guaranteed to produce less than clear shells.
When a sale has been made, poundage is totaled and divers collect their checks, with three ridge species clams bringing between 25 and 80 cents a pound, the washboard species garnering $2 per. Some of the divers-some are laid-off construction workers or college students, while others are “river people”-swap stories as they wait for boats to be processed.
Jimmy and the big blue
The stories tend to the wild.
Ed: “I hear Jimmy down by Granite City was using his lantern a few nights ago. Saw this clam by a stump but when he reached for it, somethin’ took hold and give his fingers a good bite. Well, he come up, his hand was all right, but the ends of his glove was all chewed off. Brand new, just bought ’em that mornin’. Boy! That riled him. Said, `I’m gonna get that so and so.’ Back down he goes, this time with a knife and wrestled the critter. They say he stayed under ’bout five minutes. S’a blue (catfish). Sixty pounder. Boated him and there was scars all over its back. You know them big blues love to fight.”
Bob: “It ain’t only the big ones. I’ve caught 6-inchers that had nips all over ’em. But don’t that sound like ol’ Jim, gettin’ steamed up about his gloves.”
Ed: “Yeah, one thing if they was worn ones, but he wasn’t gonna let him off for no day-old pair.”
Back at Ballenger’s MississippiValley Shell Company outside Muscatine, the innards are cooked loose from a ton of shells in a huge vat. Along a nearby conveyor the meat is pulled loose and dropped on the ground. Later it will be sold to commercial fishermen for catfish bait, but now the gray mass is sifted by hand for the rare pearl. Most of these small teardrop-shaped pearls will sell for a few hundred dollars, although some years back one sold at auction for $40,000.
The real money for Butch is in the shells, which are shipped in boxcar-sized containers to Japan. There, small sections are cut out, shaped into pellets and implanted in saltwater oysters. After some years of incubation, these small bits of Mississippi clams yield those exquisite cultured pearls that hang expensively from necks around the world.
