Big Bridges, Big River, Big Name Campaigns in 2004, Yesterday in La Crosse

The year 2004 was big for La Crosse in different ways. A presidential election year brought candidates to the city, including the incumbent president, George W. Bush.

That May, the president took a bus ride along the Mississippi for rallies at Prairie du Chien, and then at Logger Field in La Crosse. The ballpark crowd was estimated at about 8000 people. The president returned a week before the election, with an early morning rally at Onalaska’s Omni Center. And the day before the November balloting, Bush’s twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara Bush, spoke at a Republican party office in downtown La Crosse, in the former Wiggert’s store. Just hours after that event, Democratic challenger John Kerry stayed in La Crosse the last night of the campaign, but didn’t have a big public event while in town.

Once the election was over, La Crosse celebrated the opening of a second bridge over the Mississippi. Thanks to the new span, not all of the downtown traffic over the river would go on the aging Cass Street bridge, which opened in 1939. Having two bridges led to the arrangement of traffic going west on the Cass Street span, headed to Minnesota, and cars coming east across the river would travel on the new Cameron bridge. The unique profile of the two different bridges side by side soon became a visual symbol for the city.

During the summer, not long before the second bridge was finished, La Crosse played host to the Grand Excursion, a river voyage involving six cruise boats. It was a recreation of a steamboat trip made 150 years earlier in 1854 by President Millard Fillmore. Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty presided over a riverboat race. coinciding with the start of the 2004 Riverfest. The race between the La Crosse Queen paddlewheeler and the Minnesota boat called the Harriet Bishop was declared a tie. UWL recognized the grand excursion by doing the musical Big River, based on Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, as its Summerstage production in 2004, yesterday in La Crosse.