At 26, Suiter constructed his own boat and moved his family from Ohio to Iowa. He stretched the best strips of white oak using grapevine twisters. Like a kind of Noah, he measured and remeasured the dimensions of his new boat, 25 feet long, 6 foot beam and 16 inches draft for a wife and two children plus all his belongings.

Suiter learned the Rapids from two French-Indian voyageurs, making him the master of navigation for this treacherous stretch of water. When Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, a young engineer officer, and Second Lieutenant Montgomery Meigs were mapping the Rapids in 1829, it was Suiter who showed them the rock chains, cross-currents, narrow channel, water depths, and navigation routes.

On April 21, 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton struck a Rock Island Bridge pier, and the boat and part of the bridge burned. At the resulting trial Suiter testified with Abraham Lincoln, the lawyer for the railroad company, that the bridge was no obstruction to navigation and that a good pilot could get his boat through the span.

In 1864, Suiter hammered a copper spike into a ledge of rock in front of his home in Le Claire. Suiter’s rock became a permanent government benchmark for low water navigation.

Walter Blair's A Raft Pilot’s Log lists Philip Suiter first in the list of “Rapids Pilots who handled Rafts over the Upper, or Rock Island Rapids.” In fact, the next five names listed under Philip Suiter are his descendants.

Philip Suiter was a self-taught river man with energy, determination, curiosity, and a spirit of adventure which helped conquer the treacherous Rock Island Rapids of the Mississippi.