Oklahoman Fred Newton swims down the Mississippi River near Inver Grove Heights on his way to New Orleans from the Ford Dam in this July 1930 clipping from the St. Paul Dispatch. (Pioneer Press files)
The Mississippi River runs 1,826 miles between the Ford Dam in the Twin Cities and New Orleans.
In 1930, Fred Newton swam every single one of them.
A 27-year-old sign painter from Clinton, Okla., Newton guessed the endeavor would take him about three months. And — maybe — bring him fame and fortune.
“I just picked myself a nice cool job for the summer,” Newton told the St. Paul Dispatch on July 7, the day after he began his swim. “I’m in the water from six to eight hours a day and I’ve put on a tan most folks would envy.”
He made it to New Orleans nearly six months later, on Dec. 29, having endured cold and current — even floating rafts of manure and offal as he passed the South St. Paul stockyards.
He did set a distance record for open-water swimming, but fame and fortune proved elusive.
“Not much came out of it,” said Worth Sparkman, a Clinton native who first learned about Newton’s swim during the COVID-19 pandemic from a brief article in Smithsonian Magazine.
“I thought, ‘I didn’t know anything about that, and I lived there most of my life,’ ” he said. “I Googled (Newton) and there really wasn’t a lot out there.”
Now a reporter for Axios Northwest Arkansas based in Fayetteville, Sparkman is working on a book about Newton and his under-appreciated exploits.
A cross-country swim
It wasn’t unreasonable for Newton to imagine that swimming the length of the Mississippi might make him rich and famous in 1930, Sparkman said. The previous decade had seen America’s ascendant mass media fuel a flurry of headline-grabbing stunts.
Daredevils seeking an early version of viral fame tested their mettle by sitting atop flagpoles for days at a time, going over Niagara Falls in a barrel or walking on the wings of airplanes in flight.
Promoters of the nation’s new interstate highway system sought to capitalize on this trend in the late 1920s, organizing a cross-country foot race along Route 66 dubbed the “Bunion Derby,” which boasted a $25,000 prize — nearly $470,000 in today’s dollars.
Seen in a postcard image, Oklahoman Fred Newton stands next to an automobile with his ambitious goal painted on the door — swimming the Mississippi River from the Twin Cities to New Orleans — in the summer of 1930. (Courtesy of Worth Sparkman)
The race passed right through Clinton, where Newton earned a living painting signs for local businesses.
“He was an artist,” his son Phil said. “He could stand on the inside of a window and paint a sign on it that you could read from the outside.”
While Newton was tempted by the Bunion Derby’s $25,000 purse, his knees had been damaged by an amateur football career, said Sparkman, who has read Newton’s unpublished memoir in the course of his research.
So he devised an alternative: Newton would swim across the country — albeit north-to-south — via the Mississippi River.
“He says in his manuscript that he hoped to earn fame and fortune,” Sparkman said.
Newton enlisted the help of his younger brother and a friend, who agreed to follow along behind him in a rowboat with food and other supplies.
The trio spent three weeks camped on Lake Minnetonka, where Newton trained with two long swims each day in June 1930, according to a report in the Clinton Daily News. They hoped to be in New Orleans by the beginning of October.
‘The timing was unfortunate’
Newton’s epic swim started small on July 6. Entering the water on the Minneapolis side of the Ford Dam, he swam only as far as Union Depot in St. Paul, where local reporters caught wind of this aquatic curiosity.
The Dispatch reported that Newton ate just two meals a day, supplementing his diet with candy handed to him by his companions in the rowboat.
Newton told the newspaper that although he had been vaccinated against all manner of river-borne diseases, he still had one fear as he headed south.
“I’ve had all these serums, but there’s nothing a man can do for an alligator bite that I know of,” Newton told the newspaper.
As he departed the Twin Cities on his second day in the water, Newton encountered a very different obstacle. Refuse from South St. Paul’s stockyards and slaughterhouses flowed directly into the Mississippi, creating rafts of manure and animal remains.
“There were enough islands of this that birds were actually alighting on them and eating the refuse,” Sparkman said.
Newton made it all the way to Hastings that day, but that pace was difficult to maintain. It took him more than 170 days to reach New Orleans, where the water temperature of the Mississippi dips into the low 50s by late December, according to the National Weather Service.
Newton was greeted by a supportive crowd and newsreel cameras as he emerged from the water covered in a thick layer of grease to insulate him from the cold.
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The publicity generated by his success resulted in a series of exhibition swims and speaking engagements, but the Great Depression kept potential financial backers on the sidelines.
“The timing was unfortunate for him,” Sparkman said. “If he had been able to do it in ’29, he might have been better funded.”
It was at one of his exhibition swims in Arkansas that Newton met his future wife. The couple eventually settled with their family in Gainesville, Texas, where Newton went into the insurance business. He died in 1992 at age 89.
“We moved to a little lake outside of town,” Phil Newton said. “He would still swim into his 70s and 80s. Not too much.”
