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Title: Life on the Mississippi

Author: Mark Twain

Release date: July 10, 2004 [eBook #245]
Most recently updated: January 28, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/245

Credits: Produced by David Widger. Earliest PG text edition produced by
Graham Allan

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE ON THE
MISSISSIPPI ***

LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI

BY MARK TWAIN

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
The Mississippi is Well worth Reading about.—It is Remarkable.—
Instead of Widening towards its Mouth, it grows Narrower.—It Empties
four hundred and six million Tons of Mud.—It was First Seen in 1542.
—It is Older than some Pages in European History.—De Soto has
the Pull.—Older than the Atlantic Coast.—Some Half-breeds chip
in.—La Salle Thinks he will Take a Hand.

CHAPTER II.
La Salle again Appears, and so does a Cat-fish.—Buffaloes also.
—Some Indian Paintings are Seen on the Rocks.—“The Father of
Waters “does not Flow into the Pacific.—More History and Indians.
—Some Curious Performances—not Early English.—Natchez, or
the Site of it, is Approached.

CHAPTER III.
A little History.—Early Commerce.—Coal Fleets and Timber Rafts.
—We start on a Voyage.—I seek Information.—Some Music.—The
Trouble begins.—Tall Talk.—The Child of Calamity.—Ground
and lofty Tumbling.—The Wash-up.—Business and Statistics.—
Mysterious Band.—Thunder and Lightning.—The Captain speaks.
—Allbright weeps.—The Mystery settled.—Chaff.—I am Discovered.
—Some Art-work proposed.—I give an Account of Myself.—Released.

CHAPTER IV.
The Boys' Ambition.—Village Scenes.—Steamboat Pictures.
—A Heavy Swell.—A Runaway.

CHAPTER V.
A Traveller.—A Lively Talker.—A Wild-cat Victim

CHAPTER VI.

Besieging the Pilot.—Taken along.—Spoiling a Nap.—Fishing for a
Plantation.—“Points” on the River.—A Gorgeous Pilot-house.

CHAPTER VII.
River Inspectors.—Cottonwoods and Plum Point.—Hat-Island Crossing.
—Touch and Go.—It is a Go.—A Lightning Pilot

CHAPTER VIII.
A Heavy-loaded Big Gun.—Sharp Sights in Darkness.—Abandoned to
his Fate.—Scraping the Banks.—Learn him or Kill him.

CHAPTER IX.
Shake the Reef.—Reason Dethroned.—The Face of the Water.
—A Bewitching Scene.-Romance and Beauty.

CHAPTER X.
Putting on Airs.—Taken down a bit.—Learn it as it is.—The River
Rising.

CHAPTER XI.
In thg Tract Business.—Effects of the Rise.—Plantations gone.
—A Measureless Sea.—A Somnambulist Pilot.—Supernatural Piloting.
—Nobody there.—All Saved.

CHAPTER XII.
Low Water.—Yawl sounding.—Buoys and Lanterns.—Cubs and
Soundings.—The Boat Sunk.—Seeking the Wrecked.

CHAPTER XIII.
A Pilot's Memory.—Wages soaring.—A Universal Grasp.—Skill and
Nerve.—Testing a “Cub.”—“Back her for Life.”—A Good Lesson.

CHAPTER XIV.
Pilots and Captains.—High-priced Pilots.—Pilots in Demand.
—A Whistler.—A cheap Trade.—Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Speed.

CHAPTER XV.

New Pilots undermining the Pilots' Association.—Crutches and Wages.
—Putting on Airs.—The Captains Weaken.—The Association Laughs.
—The Secret Sign.—An Admirable System.—Rough on Outsiders.
—A Tight Monopoly.—No Loophole.—The Railroads and the War.

CHAPTER XVI.
All Aboard.—A Glorious Start.—Loaded to Win.—Bands and Bugles.
—Boats and Boats.—Racers and Racing.

CHAPTER XVII.
Cut-offs.—Ditching and Shooting.—Mississippi Changes.—A Wild
Night.—Swearing and Guessing.—Stephen in Debt.—He Confuses
his Creditors.—He makes a New Deal.—Will Pay them Alphabetically.

CHAPTER XVIII.
Sharp Schooling.—Shadows.—I am Inspected.—Where did you get
them Shoes?—Pull her Down.—I want to kill Brown.—I try to run
her.- I am Complimented.

CHAPTER XIX.
A Question of Veracity.—A Little Unpleasantness.—I have an
Audience with the Captain.—Mr. Brown Retires.

CHAPTER XX.
I become a Passenger.—We hear the News.—A Thunderous Crash.
—They Stand to their Posts.—In the Blazing Sun.—A Grewsome
Spectacle.—His Hour has Struck.

CHAPTER XXI.
I get my License.—The War Begins.—I become a Jack-of-all-trades.

CHAPTER XXII.
I try the Alias Business.—Region of Goatees—Boots begin to Appear.
—The River Man is Missing.—The Young Man is Discouraged.—
Specimen Water.—A Fine Quality of Smoke.—A Supreme Mistake.
—We Inspect the Town.—Desolation Way-traffic.—A Wood-yard.

CHAPTER XXIII.
Old French Settlements.—We start for Memphis.—Young Ladies and
Russia-leather Bags.

CHAPTER XXIV.
I receive some Information.—Alligator Boats.—Alligator Talk.
—She was a Rattler to go.—I am Found Out.

CHAPTER XXV.
The Devil's Oven and Table.—A Bombshell falls.—No Whitewash.
—Thirty Years on the River.-Mississippi Uniforms.—Accidents and
Casualties.—Two hundred Wrecks.—A Loss to Literature.—Sunday-
Schools and Brick Masons.

CHAPTER XXVI.
War Talk.—I Tilt over Backwards.—Fifteen Shot-holes.—A Plain
Story.—Wars and Feuds.—Darnell versus Watson.—A Gang and
a Woodpile.—Western Grammar.—River Changes.—New Madrid.
—Floods and Falls.

CHAPTER XXVII.
Tourists and their Note-books.—Captain Hall.—Mrs. Trollope's
Emotions.—Hon. Charles Augustus Murray's Sentiment.—Captain
Marryat's Sensations.—Alexander Mackay's Feelings.
—Mr. Parkman Reports

CHAPTER XXVIII.
Swinging down the River.—Named for Me.—Plum Point again.
—Lights and Snag Boats.—Infinite Changes.—A Lawless River.
—Changes and Jetties.—Uncle Mumford Testifies.—Pegging the
River.—What the Government does.—The Commission.—Men and
Theories.—“Had them Bad.”—Jews and Prices.

CHAPTER XXIX.
Murel's Gang.—A Consummate Villain.—Getting Rid of Witnesses.
—Stewart turns Traitor.—I Start a Rebellion.—I get a New Suit
of Clothes.—We Cover our Tracks.—Pluck and Capacity.—A Good

Samaritan City.—The Old and the New.

CHAPTER XXX.
A Melancholy Picture.—On the Move.—River Gossip.—She Went By
a-Sparklin'.—Amenities of Life.—A World of Misinformation.—
Eloquence of Silence.—Striking a Snag.—Photographically Exact.
—Plank Side-walks.

CHAPTER XXXI.
Mutinous Language.—The Dead-house.—Cast-iron German and Flexible
English.—A Dying Man's Confession.—I am Bound and Gagged.
—I get Myself Free.—I Begin my Search.—The Man with one Thumb.
—Red Paint and White Paper.—He Dropped on his Knees.—Fright
and Gratitude.—I Fled through the Woods.—A Grisly Spectacle.
—Shout, Man, Shout.—A look of Surprise and Triumph.—The Muffled
Gurgle of a Mocking Laugh.—How strangely Things happen.
—The Hidden Money.

CHAPTER XXXII.
Ritter's Narrative.—A Question of Money.—Napoleon.—Somebody
is Serious.—Where the Prettiest Girl used to Live.

CHAPTER XXXIII.
A Question of Division.—A Place where there was no License.—The
Calhoun Land Company.—A Cotton-planter's Estimate.—Halifax
and Watermelons.—Jewelled-up Bar-keepers.

CHAPTER XXXIV.
An Austere Man.—A Mosquito Policy.—Facts dressed in Tights.
—A swelled Left Ear.

CHAPTER XXXV.
Signs and Scars.—Cannon-thunder Rages.—Cave-dwellers.
—A Continual Sunday.—A ton of Iron and no Glass.—The Ardent
is Saved.—Mule Meat—A National Cemetery.—A Dog and a Shell.
—Railroads and Wealth.—Wharfage Economy.—Vicksburg versus The
“Gold Dust.”—A Narrative in Anticipation.

CHAPTER XXXVI.
The Professor Spins a Yarn.—An Enthusiast in Cattle.—He makes a
Proposition.—Loading Beeves at Acapulco.—He was n't Raised to it.
—He is Roped In.—His Dull Eyes Lit Up.—Four Aces, you Ass!
—He does n't Care for the Gores.

CHAPTER XXXVII.
A Terrible Disaster.—The “Gold Dust” explodes her Boilers.
—The End of a Good Man.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Mr. Dickens has a Word.—Best Dwellings and their Furniture.—Albums
and Music.—Pantelettes and Conch-shells.—Sugar-candy Rabbits
and Photographs.—Horse-hair Sofas and Snuffers.—Rag Carpets
and Bridal Chambers.

CHAPTER XXXIX.
Rowdies and Beauty.—Ice as Jewelry.—Ice Manufacture.—More
Statistics.—Some Drummers.—Oleomargarine versus Butter.
—Olive Oil versus Cotton Seed.—The Answer was not Caught.
—A Terrific Episode.—A Sulphurous Canopy.—The Demons of War.
—The Terrible Gauntlet.

CHAPTER XL.
In Flowers, like a Bride.—A White-washed Castle.—A Southern
Prospectus.—Pretty Pictures.—An Alligator's Meal.

CHAPTER XLI.
The Approaches to New Orleans.—A Stirring Street.—Sanitary
Improvements.—Journalistic Achievements.—Cisterns and Wells.

CHAPTER XLII.
Beautiful Grave-yards.—Chameleons and Panaceas.—Inhumation and
Infection.—Mortality and Epidemics.—The Cost of Funerals.

CHAPTER XLIII.

I meet an Acquaintance.—Coffins and Swell Houses.—Mrs. O'Flaherty
goes One Better.—Epidemics and Embamming.—Six hundred for a
Good Case.—Joyful High Spirits.

CHAPTER XLIV.
French and Spanish Parts of the City.—Mr. Cable and the Ancient
Quarter.—Cabbages and Bouquets.—Cows and Children.—The Shell
Road. The West End.—A Good Square Meal.—The Pompano.—The
Broom-
Brigade.—Historical Painting.—Southern Speech.—Lagniappe.

CHAPTER XLV.
“Waw” Talk.—Cock-Fighting.—Too Much to Bear.—Fine Writing.
—Mule Racing.

CHAPTER XLVI.
Mardi-Gras.—The Mystic Crewe.—Rex and Relics.—Sir Walter Scott.
—A World Set Back.—Titles and Decorations.—A Change.

CHAPTER XLVII.
Uncle Remus.—The Children Disappointed.—We Read Aloud.
—Mr. Cable and Jean au Poquelin.—Involuntary Trespass.—The Gilded
Age.—An Impossible Combination.—The Owner Materializes and
Protests.

CHAPTER XLVIII.
Tight Curls and Springy Steps.—Steam-plows.—“No. I.” Sugar.
—A Frankenstein Laugh.—Spiritual Postage.—A Place where there are
no Butchers or Plumbers.—Idiotic Spasms.

CHAPTER XLIX.
Pilot-Farmers.—Working on Shares.—Consequences.—Men who Stick
to their Posts.—He saw what he would do.—A Day after the Fair.

CHAPTER L.
A Patriarch.—Leaves from a Diary.—A Tongue-stopper.—The Ancient
Mariner.—Pilloried in Print.—Petrified Truth.

CHAPTER LI.
A Fresh “Cub” at the Wheel.—A Valley Storm.—Some Remarks on
Construction.—Sock and Buskin.—The Man who never played
Hamlet.—I got Thirsty.—Sunday Statistics.

CHAPTER LII.
I Collar an Idea.—A Graduate of Harvard.—A Penitent Thief.
—His Story in the Pulpit.—Something Symmetrical.—A Literary Artist.
—A Model Epistle.—Pumps again Working.—The “Nub” of the Note.

CHAPTER LIII.
A Masterly Retreat.—A Town at Rest.—Boyhood's Pranks.—Friends
of my Youth.—The Refuge for Imbeciles.—I am Presented with
my Measure.

CHAPTER LIV.
A Special Judgment.—Celestial Interest.—A Night of Agony.
—Another Bad Attack.—I become Convalescent.—I address a
Sunday-school.—A Model Boy.

CHAPTER LV.
A second Generation.—A hundred thousand Tons of Saddles.—A Dark
and Dreadful Secret.—A Large Family.—A Golden-haired Darling.
—The Mysterious Cross.—My Idol is Broken.—A Bad Season of
Chills and Fever.—An Interesting Cave.

CHAPTER LVI.
Perverted History—A Guilty Conscience.—A Supposititious Case.
—A Habit to be Cultivated.—I Drop my Burden.—Difference in Time.

CHAPTER LVII.
A Model Town.—A Town that Comes up to Blow in the Summer.
—The Scare-crow Dean.—Spouting Smoke and Flame.—An Atmosphere
that tastes good.—The Sunset Land.

CHAPTER LVIII.

An Independent Race.—Twenty-four-hour Towns.—Enchanting Scenery.
—The Home of the Plow.—Black Hawk.—Fluctuating Securities.
—A Contrast.—Electric Lights.

CHAPTER LIX.
Indian Traditions and Rattlesnakes.—A Three-ton Word.—Chimney
Rock.—The Panorama Man.—A Good Jump.—The Undying Head.
—Peboan and Seegwun.

CHAPTER LX.
The Head of Navigation.—From Roses to Snow.—Climatic Vaccination.
—A Long Ride.—Bones of Poverty.—The Pioneer of Civilization.
—Jug of Empire.—Siamese Twins.—The Sugar-bush.—He Wins his Bride.
—The Mystery about the Blanket.—A City that is always a Novelty.
—Home again.

APPENDIX.
A
B
C
D

THE 'BODY OF THE NATION'

BUT the basin of the Mississippi is the Body of The Nation. All the other
parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their
relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in
Texas and New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin
contains about 1,250,000 square miles. In extent it is the second great valley
of the world, being exceeded only by that of the Amazon. The valley of the
frozen Obi approaches it in extent; that of La Plata comes next in space, and
probably in habitable capacity, having about eight-ninths of its area; then
comes that of the Yenisei, with about seven-ninths; the Lena, Amoor,
Hoang-ho, Yang-tse-kiang, and Nile, five-ninths; the Ganges, less than one-
half; the Indus, less than one-third; the Euphrates, one-fifth; the Rhine, one-
fifteenth. It exceeds in extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia,
Norway, and Sweden. It would contain austria four times, germany or spain
five times, france six times, the british islands or italy ten times.
Conceptions formed from the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely
shocked when we consider the extent of the valley of the Mississippi; nor
are those formed from the sterile basins of the great rivers of Siberia, the
lofty plateaus of Central Asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon
more adequate. Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every
part of the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population. As
a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the first upon our globe.
EDITOR'S TABLE, HARPER'S MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1863

Chapter 1

The River and Its History

THE Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace
river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the
Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world—four thousand
three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river
in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three
hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six
hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St.
Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and
thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a
drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and
Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the
country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope—a spread of forty-five
degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water
from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and
from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its
drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales,
Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and
Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley,
proper, is exceptionally so.

It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth,
it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the
Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high
water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the 'Passes,'
above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio
the Mississippi's depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually,
reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.
The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable—not in the upper, but in
the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez (three
hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)—about fifty feet. But at Bayou
La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New Orleans only
fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half.
An article in the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat,' based upon reports of
able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six
million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico—which brings to mind
Captain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi—'the Great Sewer.' This
mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and
forty-one feet high.

The mud deposit gradually extends the land—but only gradually; it has
extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have
elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of the scientific
people is, that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease,
and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built
by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any
trouble at all—one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the
youthfullest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.
The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way—its disposition to
make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus
straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself
thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects: they
have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up
sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three
miles below Vicksburg: a recent cutoff has radically changed the position,
and Delta is now two miles above Vicksburg.
Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cut-off.
A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a
man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night,
and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of
the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of
Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could
have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of
him.
The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always
changing its habitat bodily—is always moving bodily sidewise. At Hard
Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy. As a
result, the original site of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but
on the other side of the river, in the State of Mississippi. Nearly the whole
of that one thousand three hundred miles of old mississippi river which la
salle floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry
ground now. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in
other places.

Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at the
mouth, where the Gulfs billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough
in better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet's Island
contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since
then the river has added seven hundred acres to it.
But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities for
the present—I will give a few more of them further along in the book.

Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a word about its
historical history—so to speak. We can glance briefly at its slumbrous first
epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch in
a couple more; at its flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many
succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present
epoch in what shall be left of the book.
The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the
word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and
permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. We do
of course know that there are several comparatively old dates in American
history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct
realization, of the stretch of time which they represent. To say that De Soto,
the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a
remark which states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving
the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing
the colors by their scientific names;—as a result, you get the bald fact of the
sunset, but you don't see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a
picture of it.

The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but when
one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it, he adds
perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the American
dates which is quite respectable for age.
For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less
than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat at Pavia; the
death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, Sans Peur Et Sans Reproche; the
driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by the Turks; and the
placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,—the act which began the
Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola
was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old;
Michael Angelo's paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine
Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the
year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not
yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V.
were at the top of their fame, and each was manufacturing history after his
own peculiar fashion; Margaret of Navarre was writing the 'Heptameron'
and some religious books,—the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit
and indelicacy being sometimes better literature preservers than holiness;
lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and
the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine
gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion was
the passion of their ladies, and classifying their offspring into children of
full rank and children by brevet their pastime.

In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition: the
Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting, and
racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent the
nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in
England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher and
another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation and his
harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the banks of the
Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther's death; eleven years before
the burning of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew slaughter;
Rabelais was not yet published; 'Don Quixote' was not yet written;
Shakespeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse before
Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell.
Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which
considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and
gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.

De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his
priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the soldiers to
multiply the river's dimensions by ten—the Spanish custom of the day—
and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. On the
contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite that
amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a
term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One may 'sense'
the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: After
De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century
elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a
century, then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more
than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi. In our day
we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a
marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one
that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly
expeditions thither: one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt
for each other.

For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements
on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication with
the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering,
enslaving and converting them; higher up, the English were trading beads
and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and
whiskey, 'for lagniappe;' and in Canada the French were schooling them in a
rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole
populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy furs
of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must have heard
of the great river of the far west; and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,—
so vaguely and indefinitely, that its course, proportions, and locality were
hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have
fired curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur. Apparently
nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was
curious about it; so, for a century and a half the Mississippi remained out of
the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for
a river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value
it or even take any particular notice of it.
But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of seeking out that
river and exploring it. It always happens that when a man seizes upon a
neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up
all around. It happened so in this instance.

Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the
river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations?
Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered
a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi
emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from
Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into
the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.

Chapter 2

The River and Its Explorers

LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were
graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory. Chief among
them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build forts, and stake
out continents, and hand the same over to the king, and pay the expenses
himself; receiving, in return, some little advantages of one sort or another;
among them the monopoly of buffalo hides. He spent several years and
about all of his money, in making perilous and painful trips between
Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois, before he at last
succeeded in getting his expedition in such a shape that he could strike for
the Mississippi.
And meantime other parties had had better fortune. In 1673 Joliet the
merchant, and Marquette the priest, crossed the country and reached the
banks of the Mississippi. They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from
Green Bay, in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Marquette
had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that if
the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would name it
Conception, in her honor. He kept his word. In that day, all explorers
traveled with an outfit of priests. De Soto had twenty-four with him. La
Salle had several, also. The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of
clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass;
they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time
phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.'

On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and their
five subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the
Mississippi. Mr. Parkman says: 'Before them a wide and rapid current
coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in
forests.' He continues: 'Turning southward, they paddled down the stream,
through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.'
A big cat-fish collided with Marquette's canoe, and startled him; and
reasonably enough, for he had been warned by the Indians that he was on a
foolhardy journey, and even a fatal one, for the river contained a demon
'whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would engulf them
in the abyss where he dwelt.' I have seen a Mississippi cat-fish that was
more than six feet long, and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds; and if
Marquette's fish was the fellow to that one, he had a fair right to think the
river's roaring demon was come.
'At length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great
prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce
and stupid look of the old bulls as they stared at the intruders through the
tangled mane which nearly blinded them.'
The voyagers moved cautiously: 'Landed at night and made a fire to cook
their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again, paddled some

way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the watch till
morning.'

They did this day after day and night after night; and at the end of two
weeks they had not seen a human being. The river was an awful solitude,
then. And it is now, over most of its stretch.
But at the close of the fortnight they one day came upon the footprints of
men in the mud of the western bank—a Robinson Crusoe experience which
carries an electric shiver with it yet, when one stumbles on it in print. They
had been warned that the river Indians were as ferocious and pitiless as the
river demon, and destroyed all comers without waiting for provocation; but
no matter, Joliet and Marquette struck into the country to hunt up the
proprietors of the tracks. They found them, by and by, and were hospitably
received and well treated—if to be received by an Indian chief who has
taken off his last rag in order to appear at his level best is to be received
hospitably; and if to be treated abundantly to fish, porridge, and other game,
including dog, and have these things forked into one's mouth by the
ungloved fingers of Indians is to be well treated. In the morning the chief
and six hundred of his tribesmen escorted the Frenchmen to the river and
bade them a friendly farewell.

On the rocks above the present city of Alton they found some rude and
fantastic Indian paintings, which they describe. A short distance below 'a
torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the
Mississippi, boiling and surging and sweeping in its course logs, branches,
and uprooted trees.' This was the mouth of the Missouri, 'that savage river,'
which 'descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of
barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentle sister.'
By and by they passed the mouth of the Ohio; they passed cane-brakes;
they fought mosquitoes; they floated along, day after day, through the deep
silence and loneliness of the river, drowsing in the scant shade of makeshift
awnings, and broiling with the heat; they encountered and exchanged
civilities with another party of Indians; and at last they reached the mouth
of the Arkansas (about a month out from their starting-point), where a tribe
of war-whooping savages swarmed out to meet and murder them; but they

appealed to the Virgin for help; so in place of a fight there was a feast, and
plenty of pleasant palaver and fol-de-rol.
They had proved to their satisfaction, that the Mississippi did not empty
into the Gulf of California, or into the Atlantic. They believed it emptied
into the Gulf of Mexico. They turned back, now, and carried their great
news to Canada.
But belief is not proof. It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the proof.
He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at last got
his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681. In the dead of winter
he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented the tontine, his
lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a following of eighteen Indians
brought from New England, and twenty-three Frenchmen. They moved in
procession down the surface of the frozen river, on foot, and dragging their
canoes after them on sledges.

At Peoria Lake they struck open water, and paddled thence to the
Mississippi and turned their prows southward. They plowed through the
fields of floating ice, past the mouth of the Missouri; past the mouth of the
Ohio, by-and-by; 'and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed on
the 24th of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs,' where they halted
and built Fort Prudhomme.

'Again,' says Mr. Parkman, 'they embarked; and with every stage of their
adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was more and
more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of spring. The hazy
sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers,
betokened the reviving life of nature.'
Day by day they floated down the great bends, in the shadow of the dense
forests, and in time arrived at the mouth of the Arkansas. First, they were
greeted by the natives of this locality as Marquette had before been greeted
by them—with the booming of the war drum and the flourish of arms. The
Virgin composed the difficulty in Marquette's case; the pipe of peace did the
same office for La Salle. The white man and the red man struck hands and
entertained each other during three days. Then, to the admiration of the
savages, La Salle set up a cross with the arms of France on it, and took
possession of the whole country for the king—the cool fashion of the time
—while the priest piously consecrated the robbery with a hymn. The priest
explained the mysteries of the faith 'by signs,' for the saving of the savages;
thus compensating them with possible possessions in Heaven for the certain
ones on earth which they had just been robbed of. And also, by signs, La
Salle drew from these simple children of the forest acknowledgments of
fealty to Louis the Putrid, over the water. Nobody smiled at these colossal
ironies.

These performances took place on the site of the future town of
Napoleon, Arkansas, and there the first confiscation-cross was raised on the
banks of the great river. Marquette's and Joliet's voyage of discovery ended
at the same spot—the site of the future town of Napoleon. When De Soto
took his fleeting glimpse of the river, away back in the dim early days, he
took it from that same spot—the site of the future town of Napoleon,
Arkansas. Therefore, three out of the four memorable events connected with
the discovery and exploration of the mighty river, occurred, by accident, in
one and the same place. It is a most curious distinction, when one comes to
look at it and think about it. France stole that vast country on that spot, the
future Napoleon; and by and by Napoleon himself was to give the country
back again!—make restitution, not to the owners, but to their white
American heirs.
The voyagers journeyed on, touching here and there; 'passed the sites,
since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf,' and visited an
imposing Indian monarch in the Teche country, whose capital city was a
substantial one of sun-baked bricks mixed with straw—better houses than
many that exist there now. The chiefs house contained an audience room
forty feet square; and there he received Tonty in State, surrounded by sixty

old men clothed in white cloaks. There was a temple in the town, with a
mud wall about it ornamented with skulls of enemies sacrificed to the sun.

The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians, near the site of the present city
of that name, where they found a 'religious and political despotism, a
privileged class descended from the sun, a temple and a sacred fire.' It must
have been like getting home again; it was home with an advantage, in fact,
for it lacked Louis XIV.
A few more days swept swiftly by, and La Salle stood in the shadow of
his confiscating cross, at the meeting of the waters from Delaware, and
from Itaska, and from the mountain ranges close upon the Pacific, with the
waters of the Gulf of Mexico, his task finished, his prodigy achieved. Mr.
Parkman, in closing his fascinating narrative, thus sums up:
'On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous
accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi,
from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf; from the
woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains
—a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies,
watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed
beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble
human voice, inaudible at half a mile.'

Chapter 3

Frescoes from the Past

APPARENTLY the river was ready for business, now. But no, the
distribution of a population along its banks was as calm and deliberate and
time-devouring a process as the discovery and exploration had been.

Seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, before the river's borders
had a white population worth considering; and nearly fifty more before the
river had a commerce. Between La Salle's opening of the river and the time
when it may be said to have become the vehicle of anything like a regular
and active commerce, seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of
England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV. and Louis
XV. had rotted and died, the French monarchy had gone down in the red
tempest of the revolution, and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to
be talked about. Truly, there were snails in those days.

The river's earliest commerce was in great barges—keelboats,
broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans,
changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back by hand.
A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months. In time this
commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes of rough and hardy
men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like
stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-
under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one,
elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt
at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in
the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often
picturesquely magnanimous.
By and by the steamboat intruded. Then for fifteen or twenty years, these
men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the steamers did all
of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their boats in New
Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers.
But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed that
they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then keelboating died a
permanent death. The keelboatman became a deck hand, or a mate, or a
pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-berths were not open to him, he
took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft constructed in the
forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi.
In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end to end
was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed by hand, and
employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been trying to
describe. I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used to
glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,—an acre or so of white, sweet-
smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more, three or
four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for storm-quarters,
—and I remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews,
the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors; for we used
to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a
ride.

By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now-departed
and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in, in this place, a chapter
from a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts, during the past
five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more.
The book is a story which details some passages in the life of an ignorant
village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town drunkard of my time out west,
there. He has run away from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting
good widow who wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of
him; and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped. They have
found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high water and dead summer time),
and are floating down the river by night, and hiding in the willows by day,
—bound for Cairo,—whence the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the
free States. But in a fog, they pass Cairo without knowing it. By and by
they begin to suspect the truth, and Huck Finn is persuaded to end the
dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge raft which they have seen in
the distance ahead of them, creeping aboard under cover of the darkness,
and gathering the needed information by eavesdropping:—
But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is impatient
to find a thing out. We talked it over, and by and by Jim said it was such a
black night, now, that it wouldn't be no risk to swim down to the big raft
and crawl aboard and listen—they would talk about Cairo, because they
would be calculating to go ashore there for a spree, maybe, or anyway they
would send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat or something. Jim
had a wonderful level head, for a nigger: he could most always start a good
plan when you wanted one.

I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river, and struck
out for the raft's light. By and by, when I got down nearly to her, I eased up
and went slow and cautious. But everything was all right—nobody at the
sweeps. So I swum down along the raft till I was most abreast the camp fire
in the middle, then I crawled aboard and inched along and got in amongst
some bundles of shingles on the weather side of the fire. There was thirteen
men there—they was the watch on deck of course. And a mighty rough-
looking lot, too. They had a jug, and tin cups, and they kept the jug moving.
One man was singing—roaring, you may say; and it wasn't a nice song—for
a parlor anyway. He roared through his nose, and strung out the last word of
every line very long. When he was done they all fetched a kind of Injun
war-whoop, and then another was sung. It begun:—

'There was a woman in our towdn,
In our towdn did dwed'l (dwell,)
She loved her husband dear-i-lee,
But another man twysteas wed'l.
Singing too, riloo, riloo, riloo,
Ri-too, riloo, rilay—
She loved her husband dear-i-lee,
But another man twyste as wed'l.

And so on—fourteen verses. It was kind of poor, and when he was going
to start on the next verse one of them said it was the tune the old cow died
on; and another one said, 'Oh, give us a rest.' And another one told him to
take a walk. They made fun of him till he got mad and jumped up and
begun to cuss the crowd, and said he could lame any thief in the lot.
They was all about to make a break for him, but the biggest man there
jumped up and says—
'Set whar you are, gentlemen. Leave him to me; he's my meat.'

Then he jumped up in the air three times and cracked his heels together
every time. He flung off a buckskin coat that was all hung with fringes, and
says, 'You lay thar tell the chawin-up's done;' and flung his hat down, which
was all over ribbons, and says, 'You lay thar tell his sufferin's is over.'
Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and
shouted out—

'Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-
bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I'm the
man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane,
dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the
small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a
bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of
rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks
with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand
back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink,
and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me,
gentlemen!—and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself
loose!'
All the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head and looking
fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little circle, tucking up his wrist-
bands, and now and then straightening up and beating his breast with his
fist, saying, 'Look at me, gentlemen!' When he got through, he jumped up
and cracked his heels together three times, and let off a roaring 'Whoo-oop!
I'm the bloodiest son of a wildcat that lives!'
Then the man that had started the row tilted his old slouch hat down over
his right eye; then he bent stooping forward, with his back sagged and his
south end sticking out far, and his fists a-shoving out and drawing in in
front of him, and so went around in a little circle about three times, swelling
himself up and breathing hard. Then he straightened, and jumped up and
cracked his heels together three times, before he lit again (that made them
cheer), and he begun to shout like this—

'Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow's a-
coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working! whoo-
oop! I'm a child of sin, don't let me get a start! Smoked glass, here, for all!

Don't attempt to look at me with the naked eye, gentlemen! When I'm
playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine,
and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the
lightning, and purr myself to sleep with the thunder! When I'm cold, I bile
the Gulf of Mexico and bathe in it; when I'm hot I fan myself with an
equinoctial storm; when I'm thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a
sponge; when I range the earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks! Whoo-
oop! Bow your neck and spread! I put my hand on the sun's face and make
it night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; I
shake myself and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me through leather
—don't use the naked eye! I'm the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron
bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle
moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life!
The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my enclosed
property, and I bury my dead on my own premises!' He jumped up and
cracked his heels together three times before he lit (they cheered him
again), and as he come down he shouted out: 'Whoo-oop! bow your neck
and spread, for the pet child of calamity's a-coming!'
Then the other one went to swelling around and blowing again—the first
one—the one they called Bob; next, the Child of Calamity chipped in again,
bigger than ever; then they both got at it at the same time, swelling round
and round each other and punching their fists most into each other's faces,
and whooping and jawing like Injuns; then Bob called the Child names, and
the Child called him names back again: next, Bob called him a heap
rougher names and the Child come back at him with the very worst kind of
language; next, Bob knocked the Child's hat off, and the Child picked it up
and kicked Bob's ribbony hat about six foot; Bob went and got it and said
never mind, this warn't going to be the last of this thing, because he was a
man that never forgot and never forgive, and so the Child better look out,
for there was a time a-coming, just as sure as he was a living man, that he
would have to answer to him with the best blood in his body. The Child said
no man was willinger than he was for that time to come, and he would give
Bob fair warning, now, never to cross his path again, for he could never rest
till he had waded in his blood, for such was his nature, though he was
sparing him now on account of his family, if he had one.
Both of them was edging away in different directions, growling and
shaking their heads and going on about what they was going to do; but a

little black-whiskered chap skipped up and says—
'Come back here, you couple of chicken-livered cowards, and I'll thrash
the two of ye!'

And he done it, too. He snatched them, he jerked them this way and that,
he booted them around, he knocked them sprawling faster than they could
get up. Why, it warn't two minutes till they begged like dogs—and how the
other lot did yell and laugh and clap their hands all the way through, and
shout 'Sail in, Corpse-Maker!' 'Hi! at him again, Child of Calamity!' 'Bully
for you, little Davy!' Well, it was a perfect pow-wow for a while. Bob and
the Child had red noses and black eyes when they got through. Little Davy
made them own up that they were sneaks and cowards and not fit to eat
with a dog or drink with a nigger; then Bob and the Child shook hands with
each other, very solemn, and said they had always respected each other and
was willing to let bygones be bygones. So then they washed their faces in
the river; and just then there was a loud order to stand by for a crossing, and

some of them went forward to man the sweeps there, and the rest went aft
to handle the after-sweeps.
I laid still and waited for fifteen minutes, and had a smoke out of a pipe
that one of them left in reach; then the crossing was finished, and they
stumped back and had a drink around and went to talking and singing again.
Next they got out an old fiddle, and one played and another patted juba, and
the rest turned themselves loose on a regular old-fashioned keel-boat break-
down. They couldn't keep that up very long without getting winded, so by
and by they settled around the jug again.

They sung 'jolly, jolly raftman's the life for me,' with a rousing chorus,
and then they got to talking about differences betwixt hogs, and their
different kind of habits; and next about women and their different ways: and
next about the best ways to put out houses that was afire; and next about
what ought to be done with the Injuns; and next about what a king had to
do, and how much he got; and next about how to make cats fight; and next
about what to do when a man has fits; and next about differences betwixt
clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones. The man they called Ed said the
muddy Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of

the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you
would have about a half to three-quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom,
according to the stage of the river, and then it warn't no better than Ohio
water—what you wanted to do was to keep it stirred up—and when the
river was low, keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way
it ought to be.
The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness
in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his
stomach if he wanted to. He says—
'You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. Trees won't grow worth
chucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow
upwards of eight hundred foot high. It's all on account of the water the
people drunk before they laid up. A Cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil
any.'
And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with Mississippi
water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is low,
you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east side of the
Mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you get out a
quarter of a mile from shore and pass the line, it is all thick and yaller the
rest of the way across. Then they talked about how to keep tobacco from
getting moldy, and from that they went into ghosts and told about a lot that
other folks had seen; but Ed says—
'Why don't you tell something that you've seen yourselves? Now let me
have a say. Five years ago I was on a raft as big as this, and right along here
it was a bright moonshiny night, and I was on watch and boss of the
stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man named Dick
Allbright, and he come along to where I was sitting, forrard—gaping and
stretching, he was—and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed
his face in the river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe, and
had just got it filled, when he looks up and says—
'“Why looky-here,” he says, “ain't that Buck Miller's place, over yander
in the bend.”
'“Yes,” says I, “it is—why.” He laid his pipe down and leant his head on
his hand, and says—
'“I thought we'd be furder down.” I says—

'“I thought it too, when I went off watch”—we was standing six hours on
and six off—“but the boys told me,” I says, “that the raft didn't seem to
hardly move, for the last hour,” says I, “though she's a slipping along all
right, now,” says I. He give a kind of a groan, and says—
'“I've seed a raft act so before, along here,” he says, “'pears to me the
current has most quit above the head of this bend durin' the last two years,”
he says.
'Well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off and around on
the water. That started me at it, too. A body is always doing what he sees
somebody else doing, though there mayn't be no sense in it. Pretty soon I
see a black something floating on the water away off to stabboard and
quartering behind us. I see he was looking at it, too. I says—

'“What's that?” He says, sort of pettish,—
'“Tain't nothing but an old empty bar'l.”
'“An empty bar'l!” says I, “why,” says I, “a spy-glass is a fool to your
eyes. How can you tell it's an empty bar'l?” He says—
'“I don't know; I reckon it ain't a bar'l, but I thought it might be,” says he.
'“Yes,” I says, “so it might be, and it might be anything else, too; a body
can't tell nothing about it, such a distance as that,” I says.
'We hadn't nothing else to do, so we kept on watching it. By and by I says
—
'“Why looky-here, Dick Allbright, that thing's a-gaining on us, I believe.”
'He never said nothing. The thing gained and gained, and I judged it must
be a dog that was about tired out. Well, we swung down into the crossing,
and the thing floated across the bright streak of the moonshine, and, by
George, it was bar'l. Says I—
'“Dick Allbright, what made you think that thing was a bar'l, when it was
a half a mile off,” says I. Says he—
'“I don't know.” Says I—
'“You tell me, Dick Allbright.” He says—
'“Well, I knowed it was a bar'l; I've seen it before; lots has seen it; they
says it's a haunted bar'l.”
'I called the rest of the watch, and they come and stood there, and I told
them what Dick said. It floated right along abreast, now, and didn't gain any
more. It was about twenty foot off. Some was for having it aboard, but the
rest didn't want to. Dick Allbright said rafts that had fooled with it had got
bad luck by it. The captain of the watch said he didn't believe in it. He said
he reckoned the bar'l gained on us because it was in a little better current
than what we was. He said it would leave by and by.
'So then we went to talking about other things, and we had a song, and
then a breakdown; and after that the captain of the watch called for another
song; but it was clouding up, now, and the bar'l stuck right thar in the same
place, and the song didn't seem to have much warm-up to it, somehow, and
so they didn't finish it, and there warn't any cheers, but it sort of dropped

flat, and nobody said anything for a minute. Then everybody tried to talk at
once, and one chap got off a joke, but it warn't no use, they didn't laugh, and
even the chap that made the joke didn't laugh at it, which ain't usual. We all
just settled down glum, and watched the bar'l, and was oneasy and
oncomfortable. Well, sir, it shut down black and still, and then the wind
begin to moan around, and next the lightning begin to play and the thunder
to grumble. And pretty soon there was a regular storm, and in the middle of
it a man that was running aft stumbled and fell and sprained his ankle so
that he had to lay up. This made the boys shake their heads. And every time
the lightning come, there was that bar'l with the blue lights winking around
it. We was always on the look-out for it. But by and by, towards dawn, she
was gone. When the day come we couldn't see her anywhere, and we warn't
sorry, neither.

'But next night about half-past nine, when there was songs and high jinks
going on, here she comes again, and took her old roost on the stabboard
side. There warn't no more high jinks. Everybody got solemn; nobody
talked; you couldn't get anybody to do anything but set around moody and

look at the bar'l. It begun to cloud up again. When the watch changed, the
off watch stayed up, 'stead of turning in. The storm ripped and roared
around all night, and in the middle of it another man tripped and sprained
his ankle, and had to knock off. The bar'l left towards day, and nobody see it
go.
'Everybody was sober and down in the mouth all day. I don't mean the
kind of sober that comes of leaving liquor alone—not that. They was quiet,
but they all drunk more than usual—not together—but each man sidled off
and took it private, by himself.
'After dark the off watch didn't turn in; nobody sung, nobody talked; the
boys didn't scatter around, neither; they sort of huddled together, forrard;
and for two hours they set there, perfectly still, looking steady in the one
direction, and heaving a sigh once in a while. And then, here comes the bar'l
again. She took up her old place. She staid there all night; nobody turned in.
The storm come on again, after midnight. It got awful dark; the rain poured
down; hail, too; the thunder boomed and roared and bellowed; the wind
blowed a hurricane; and the lightning spread over everything in big sheets
of glare, and showed the whole raft as plain as day; and the river lashed up
white as milk as far as you could see for miles, and there was that bar'l
jiggering along, same as ever. The captain ordered the watch to man the
after sweeps for a crossing, and nobody would go—no more sprained
ankles for them, they said. They wouldn't even walk aft. Well then, just then
the sky split wide open, with a crash, and the lightning killed two men of
the after watch, and crippled two more. Crippled them how, says you? Why,
sprained their ankles!

'The bar'l left in the dark betwixt lightnings, towards dawn. Well, not a
body eat a bite at breakfast that morning. After that the men loafed around,
in twos and threes, and talked low together. But none of them herded with
Dick Allbright. They all give him the cold shake. If he come around where
any of the men was, they split up and sidled away. They wouldn't man the
sweeps with him. The captain had all the skiffs hauled up on the raft,
alongside of his wigwam, and wouldn't let the dead men be took ashore to
be planted; he didn't believe a man that got ashore would come back; and he
was right.
'After night come, you could see pretty plain that there was going to be
trouble if that bar'l come again; there was such a muttering going on. A
good many wanted to kill Dick Allbright, because he'd seen the bar'l on
other trips, and that had an ugly look. Some wanted to put him ashore.
Some said, let's all go ashore in a pile, if the bar'l comes again.
'This kind of whispers was still going on, the men being bunched
together forrard watching for the bar'l, when, lo and behold you, here she
comes again. Down she comes, slow and steady, and settles into her old
tracks. You could a heard a pin drop. Then up comes the captain, and says:
—
'“Boys, don't be a pack of children and fools; I don't want this bar'l to be
dogging us all the way to Orleans, and you don't; well, then, how's the best
way to stop it? Burn it up,—that's the way. I'm going to fetch it aboard,” he
says. And before anybody could say a word, in he went.
'He swum to it, and as he come pushing it to the raft, the men spread to
one side. But the old man got it aboard and busted in the head, and there
was a baby in it! Yes, sir, a stark naked baby. It was Dick Allbright's baby;
he owned up and said so.
'“Yes,” he says, a-leaning over it, “yes, it is my own lamented darling, my
poor lost Charles William Allbright deceased,” says he,—for he could curl
his tongue around the bulliest words in the language when he was a mind
to, and lay them before you without a jint started, anywheres. Yes, he said
he used to live up at the head of this bend, and one night he choked his
child, which was crying, not intending to kill it,—which was prob'ly a lie,—
and then he was scared, and buried it in a bar'l, before his wife got home,
and off he went, and struck the northern trail and went to rafting; and this
was the third year that the bar'l had chased him. He said the bad luck always

begun light, and lasted till four men was killed, and then the bar'l didn't
come any more after that. He said if the men would stand it one more night,
—and was a-going on like that,—but the men had got enough. They started
to get out a boat to take him ashore and lynch him, but he grabbed the little
child all of a sudden and jumped overboard with it hugged up to his breast
and shedding tears, and we never see him again in this life, poor old
suffering soul, nor Charles William neither.'

'Who was shedding tears?' says Bob; 'was it Allbright or the baby?'
'Why, Allbright, of course; didn't I tell you the baby was dead. Been dead
three years—how could it cry?'
'Well, never mind how it could cry—how could it keep all that time?'
says Davy. 'You answer me that.'
'I don't know how it done it,' says Ed. 'It done it though—that's all I know
about it.'
'Say—what did they do with the bar'l?' says the Child of Calamity.
'Why, they hove it overboard, and it sunk like a chunk of lead.'
'Edward, did the child look like it was choked?' says one.
'Did it have its hair parted?' says another.
'What was the brand on that bar'l, Eddy?' says a fellow they called Bill.
'Have you got the papers for them statistics, Edmund?' says Jimmy.
'Say, Edwin, was you one of the men that was killed by the lightning.'
says Davy.
'Him? O, no, he was both of 'em,' says Bob. Then they all haw-hawed.
'Say, Edward, don't you reckon you'd better take a pill? You look bad—
don't you feel pale?' says the Child of Calamity.
'O, come, now, Eddy,' says Jimmy, 'show up; you must a kept part of that
bar'l to prove the thing by. Show us the bunghole—do—and we'll all
believe you.'
'Say, boys,' says Bill, 'less divide it up. Thar's thirteen of us. I can swaller
a thirteenth of the yarn, if you can worry down the rest.'

Ed got up mad and said they could all go to some place which he ripped
out pretty savage, and then walked off aft cussing to himself, and they
yelling and jeering at him, and roaring and laughing so you could hear them
a mile.
'Boys, we'll split a watermelon on that,' says the Child of Calamity; and
he come rummaging around in the dark amongst the shingle bundles where
I was, and put his hand on me. I was warm and soft and naked; so he says
'Ouch!' and jumped back.
'Fetch a lantern or a chunk of fire here, boys—there's a snake here as big
as a cow!'
So they run there with a lantern and crowded up and looked in on me.
'Come out of that, you beggar!' says one.
'Who are you?' says another.

'What are you after here? Speak up prompt, or overboard you go.
'Snake him out, boys. Snatch him out by the heels.'
I began to beg, and crept out amongst them trembling. They looked me
over, wondering, and the Child of Calamity says—
'A cussed thief! Lend a hand and less heave him overboard!'
'No,' says Big Bob, 'less get out the paint-pot and paint him a sky blue all
over from head to heel, and then heave him over!'
'Good, that 's it. Go for the paint, Jimmy.'
When the paint come, and Bob took the brush and was just going to
begin, the others laughing and rubbing their hands, I begun to cry, and that
sort of worked on Davy, and he says—
''Vast there! He 's nothing but a cub. 'I'll paint the man that tetches him!'

So I looked around on them, and some of them grumbled and growled,
and Bob put down the paint, and the others didn't take it up.
'Come here to the fire, and less see what you're up to here,' says Davy.
'Now set down there and give an account of yourself. How long have you
been aboard here?'
'Not over a quarter of a minute, sir,' says I.
'How did you get dry so quick?'
'I don't know, sir. I'm always that way, mostly.'
'Oh, you are, are you. What's your name?'
I warn't going to tell my name. I didn't know what to say, so I just says—
'Charles William Allbright, sir.'

Then they roared—the whole crowd; and I was mighty glad I said that,
because maybe laughing would get them in a better humor.

When they got done laughing, Davy says—
'It won't hardly do, Charles William. You couldn't have growed this much
in five year, and you was a baby when you come out of the bar'l, you know,
and dead at that. Come, now, tell a straight story, and nobody'll hurt you, if
you ain't up to anything wrong. What is your name?'
'Aleck Hopkins, sir. Aleck James Hopkins.'
'Well, Aleck, where did you come from, here?'
'From a trading scow. She lays up the bend yonder. I was born on her.
Pap has traded up and down here all his life; and he told me to swim off
here, because when you went by he said he would like to get some of you to
speak to a Mr. Jonas Turner, in Cairo, and tell him—'
'Oh, come!'
'Yes, sir; it's as true as the world; Pap he says—'
'Oh, your grandmother!'
They all laughed, and I tried again to talk, but they broke in on me and
stopped me.
'Now, looky-here,' says Davy; 'you're scared, and so you talk wild.
Honest, now, do you live in a scow, or is it a lie?'
'Yes, sir, in a trading scow. She lays up at the head of the bend. But I
warn't born in her. It's our first trip.'
'Now you're talking! What did you come aboard here, for? To steal?'
'No, sir, I didn't.—It was only to get a ride on the raft. All boys does that.'
'Well, I know that. But what did you hide for?'
'Sometimes they drive the boys off.'
'So they do. They might steal. Looky-here; if we let you off this time,
will you keep out of these kind of scrapes hereafter?'
''Deed I will, boss. You try me.'
'All right, then. You ain't but little ways from shore. Overboard with you,
and don't you make a fool of yourself another time this way.—Blast it, boy,
some raftsmen would rawhide you till you were black and blue!'
I didn't wait to kiss good-bye, but went overboard and broke for shore.
When Jim come along by and by, the big raft was away out of sight around

the point. I swum out and got aboard, and was mighty glad to see home
again.
The boy did not get the information he was after, but his adventure has
furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and keelboatman which I
desire to offer in this place.
I now come to a phase of the Mississippi River life of the flush times of
steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full examination—the
marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there. I believe there has been
nothing like it elsewhere in the world.

Chapter 4

The Boys' Ambition

WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my
comrades in our village {footnote [1. Hannibal, Missouri]} on the west
bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had
transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a
circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first
negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that
kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good,
God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its
turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.

Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and
another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day was glorious

with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not only
the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I can picture
that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in
the sunshine of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so;
one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-
bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched
over their faces, asleep—with shingle-shavings enough around to show
what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the
sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or
three lonely little freight piles scattered about the 'levee;' a pile of 'skids' on
the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in
the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but
nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the
great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-
wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side;
the 'point' above the town, and the 'point' below, bounding the river-glimpse
and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and
lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those
remote 'points;' instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and
prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, 'S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin'!' and the scene
changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of
drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and
all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving.

Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common
center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the
coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And the
boat is rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and
pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of
some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, a glass and
'gingerbread', perched on top of the 'texas' deck behind them; the paddle-
boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat's
name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and
ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from
the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the
upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell,
calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are
rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys—a husbanded grandeur created
with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped
on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an
envied deckhand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in
his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks, the captain
lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the
water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to
get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and to discharge freight,
all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates

facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with
no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys.
After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard
asleep by the skids once more.

My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed the
power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that offended
him. This was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but the desire to
be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless. I first wanted to be a cabin-
boy, so that I could come out with a white apron on and shake a tablecloth
over the side, where all my old comrades could see me; later I thought I

would rather be the deckhand who stood on the end of the stage-plank with
the coil of rope in his hand, because he was particularly conspicuous. But
these were only day-dreams,—they were too heavenly to be contemplated
as real possibilities. By and by one of our boys went away. He was not
heard of for a long time. At last he turned up as apprentice engineer or
'striker' on a steamboat. This thing shook the bottom out of all my Sunday-
school teachings. That boy had been notoriously worldly, and I just the
reverse; yet he was exalted to this eminence, and I left in obscurity and
misery. There was nothing generous about this fellow in his greatness. He
would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at
our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and scrub it, where we could
all see him and envy him and loathe him. And whenever his boat was laid
up he would come home and swell around the town in his blackest and
greasiest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a
steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his talk,
as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could not
understand them. He would speak of the 'labboard' side of a horse in an
easy, natural way that would make one wish he was dead. And he was
always talking about 'St. Looy' like an old citizen; he would refer casually
to occasions when he 'was coming down Fourth Street,' or when he was
'passing by the Planter's House,' or when there was a fire and he took a turn
on the brakes of 'the old Big Missouri;' and then he would go on and lie
about how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that day.
Two or three of the boys had long been persons of consideration among us
because they had been to St. Louis once and had a vague general
knowledge of its wonders, but the day of their glory was over now. They
lapsed into a humble silence, and learned to disappear when the ruthless
'cub'-engineer approached. This fellow had money, too, and hair oil. Also an
ignorant silver watch and a showy brass watch chain. He wore a leather belt
and used no suspenders. If ever a youth was cordially admired and hated by
his comrades, this one was. No girl could withstand his charms. He 'cut out'
every boy in the village. When his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil
contentment among us such as we had not known for months. But when he
came home the next week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all
battered up and bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered over by
everybody, it seemed to us that the partiality of Providence for an
undeserving reptile had reached a point where it was open to criticism.

This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily
followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's son
became an engineer. The doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud

clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four
sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became
pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of
trivial wages, had a princely salary—from a hundred and fifty to two
hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two months of his
wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now some of us were left
disconsolate. We could not get on the river—at least our parents would not
let us.
So by and by I ran away. I said I never would come home again till I was
a pilot and could come in glory. But somehow I could not manage it. I went
meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like sardines at
the long St. Louis wharf, and very humbly inquired for the pilots, but got
only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks. I had to make
the best of this sort of treatment for the time being, but I had comforting
daydreams of a future when I should be a great and honored pilot, with
plenty of money, and could kill some of these mates and clerks and pay for
them.

Chapter 5

I Want to be a Cub-pilot

MONTHS afterward the hope within me struggled to a reluctant death,
and I found myself without an ambition. But I was ashamed to go home. I
was in Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new career. I had been
reading about the recent exploration of the river Amazon by an expedition
sent out by our government. It was said that the expedition, owing to
difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a part of the country lying about
the head-waters, some four thousand miles from the mouth of the river. It
was only about fifteen hundred miles from Cincinnati to New Orleans,
where I could doubtless get a ship. I had thirty dollars left; I would go and
complete the exploration of the Amazon. This was all the thought I gave to
the subject. I never was great in matters of detail. I packed my valise, and
took passage on an ancient tub called the 'Paul Jones,' for New Orleans. For
the sum of sixteen dollars I had the scarred and tarnished splendors of 'her'
main saloon principally to myself, for she was not a creature to attract the
eye of wiser travelers.
When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad
Ohio, I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a
traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an
exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which
I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a glorified
condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look
down and pity the untraveled with a compassion that had hardly a trace of
contempt in it. Still, when we stopped at villages and wood-yards, I could
not help lolling carelessly upon the railings of the boiler deck to enjoy the
envy of the country boys on the bank. If they did not seem to discover me, I
presently sneezed to attract their attention, or moved to a position where

they could not help seeing me. And as soon as I knew they saw me I gaped
and stretched, and gave other signs of being mightily bored with traveling.

I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind and the sun
could strike me, because I wanted to get the bronzed and weather-beaten
look of an old traveler. Before the second day was half gone I experienced a
joy which filled me with the purest gratitude; for I saw that the skin had
begun to blister and peel off my face and neck. I wished that the boys and
girls at home could see me now.

We reached Louisville in time—at least the neighborhood of it. We stuck
hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river, and lay there four days.
I was now beginning to feel a strong sense of being a part of the boat's
family, a sort of infant son to the captain and younger brother to the
officers. There is no estimating the pride I took in this grandeur, or the
affection that began to swell and grow in me for those people. I could not
know how the lordly steamboatman scorns that sort of presumption in a
mere landsman. I particularly longed to acquire the least trifle of notice
from the big stormy mate, and I was on the alert for an opportunity to do
him a service to that end. It came at last. The riotous powwow of setting a
spar was going on down on the forecastle, and I went down there and stood
around in the way—or mostly skipping out of it—till the mate suddenly
roared a general order for somebody to bring him a capstan bar. I sprang to
his side and said: 'Tell me where it is—I'll fetch it!'

If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the Emperor of
Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate
was. He even stopped swearing. He stood and stared down at me. It took
him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again. Then he
said impressively: 'Well, if this don't beat hell!' and turned to his work with
the air of a man who had been confronted with a problem too abstruse for
solution.

I crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day. I did not go to
dinner; I stayed away from supper until everybody else had finished. I did
not feel so much like a member of the boat's family now as before.
However, my spirits returned, in installments, as we pursued our way down
the river. I was sorry I hated the mate so, because it was not in (young)
human nature not to admire him. He was huge and muscular, his face was
bearded and whiskered all over; he had a red woman and a blue woman
tattooed on his right arm,—one on each side of a blue anchor with a red
rope to it; and in the matter of profanity he was sublime. When he was
getting out cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and hear. He
felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the world feel it, too.
When he gave even the simplest order, he discharged it like a blast of
lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal of profanity thundering after
it. I could not help contrasting the way in which the average landsman
would give an order, with the mate's way of doing it. If the landsman should
wish the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probably say:
'James, or William, one of you push that plank forward, please;' but put the
mate in his place and he would roar out: 'Here, now, start that gang-plank
for'ard! Lively, now! what're you about! Snatch it! SNATCH it! There!
there! Aft again! aft again! don't you hear me. Dash it to dash! are you
going to sleep over it! 'Vast heaving. 'Vast heaving, I tell you! Going to
heave it clear astern? Where're you going with that barrel! For'ard with it
'fore I make you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-dashed split between a
tired mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!'

I wished I could talk like that.
When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn
off, I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected with the
boat—the night watchman. He snubbed my advances at first, but I presently
ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe; and that softened him. So he
allowed me to sit with him by the big bell on the hurricane deck, and in
time he melted into conversation. He could not well have helped it, I hung
with such homage on his words and so plainly showed that I felt honored by
his notice. He told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we
glided by them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars, and
by and by got to talking about himself. He seemed over-sentimental for a
man whose salary was six dollars a week—or rather he might have seemed
so to an older person than I. But I drank in his words hungrily, and with a
faith that might have moved mountains if it had been applied judiciously.

What was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin? What
was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse, and his
profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness rather than
strength in his conversation? He was a wronged man, a man who had seen
trouble, and that was enough for me. As he mellowed into his plaintive
history his tears dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from
sympathy.

He said he was the son of an English nobleman—either an earl or an
alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both; his father,
the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and so
while he was still a little boy he was sent to 'one of them old, ancient
colleges'—he couldn't remember which; and by and by his father died and
his mother seized the property and 'shook' him as he phrased it. After his
mother shook him, members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted
used their influence to get him the position of 'loblolly-boy in a ship;' and
from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality

and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with incredible
adventures; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed and so crammed
with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and unconscious personal
villainies, that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering,
worshipping.
It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar,
ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds
of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its
marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this
yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me, until he had come to
believe it himself.

Chapter 6

A Cub-pilot's Experience

WHAT with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some other
delays, the poor old 'Paul Jones' fooled away about two weeks in making
the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans. This gave me a chance to get
acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me how to steer the boat,
and thus made the fascination of river life more potent than ever for me.
It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken
deck passage—more's the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me on
a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to me the day after we should
arrive. But he probably died or forgot, for he never came. It was doubtless
the former, since he had said his parents were wealthy, and he only traveled
deck passage because it was cooler.{footnote [1. 'Deck' Passage, i.e.
steerage passage.]}

I soon discovered two things. One was that a vessel would not be likely
to sail for the mouth of the Amazon under ten or twelve years; and the other
was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my pocket would not suffice for
so imposing an exploration as I had planned, even if I could afford to wait
for a ship. Therefore it followed that I must contrive a new career. The 'Paul
Jones' was now bound for St. Louis. I planned a siege against my pilot, and
at the end of three hard days he surrendered. He agreed to teach me the
Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis for five hundred dollars,
payable out of the first wages I should receive after graduating. I entered
upon the small enterprise of 'learning' twelve or thirteen hundred miles of
the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life. If I
had really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not
have had the courage to begin. I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to
keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a
trick, since it was so wide.

The boat backed out from New Orleans at four in the afternoon, and it
was 'our watch' until eight. Mr. Bixby, my chief, 'straightened her up,'
plowed her along past the sterns of the other boats that lay at the Levee, and
then said, 'Here, take her; shave those steamships as close as you'd peel an
apple.' I took the wheel, and my heart-beat fluttered up into the hundreds;
for it seemed to me that we were about to scrape the side off every ship in
the line, we were so close. I held my breath and began to claw the boat
away from the danger; and I had my own opinion of the pilot who had
known no better than to get us into such peril, but I was too wise to express
it. In half a minute I had a wide margin of safety intervening between the
'Paul Jones' and the ships; and within ten seconds more I was set aside in
disgrace, and Mr. Bixby was going into danger again and flaying me alive
with abuse of my cowardice. I was stung, but I was obliged to admire the

easy confidence with which my chief loafed from side to side of his wheel,
and trimmed the ships so closely that disaster seemed ceaselessly imminent.
When he had cooled a little he told me that the easy water was close ashore
and the current outside, and therefore we must hug the bank, up-stream, to
get the benefit of the former, and stay well out, down-stream, to take
advantage of the latter. In my own mind I resolved to be a down-stream
pilot and leave the up-streaming to people dead to prudence.
Now and then Mr. Bixby called my attention to certain things. Said he,
'This is Six-Mile Point.' I assented. It was pleasant enough information, but
I could not see the bearing of it. I was not conscious that it was a matter of
any interest to me. Another time he said, 'This is Nine-Mile Point.' Later he
said, 'This is Twelve-Mile Point.' They were all about level with the water's
edge; they all looked about alike to me; they were monotonously
unpicturesque. I hoped Mr. Bixby would change the subject. But no; he
would crowd up around a point, hugging the shore with affection, and then
say: 'The slack water ends here, abreast this bunch of China-trees; now we
cross over.' So he crossed over. He gave me the wheel once or twice, but I
had no luck. I either came near chipping off the edge of a sugar plantation,
or I yawed too far from shore, and so dropped back into disgrace again and
got abused.

The watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed. At
midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the night watchman
said—
'Come! turn out!'

And then he left. I could not understand this extraordinary procedure; so I
presently gave up trying to, and dozed off to sleep. Pretty soon the
watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff. I was annoyed. I
said:—
'What do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of the
night for. Now as like as not I'll not get to sleep again to-night.'
The watchman said—
'Well, if this an't good, I'm blest.'
The 'off-watch' was just turning in, and I heard some brutal laughter from
them, and such remarks as 'Hello, watchman! an't the new cub turned out
yet? He's delicate, likely. Give him some sugar in a rag and send for the
chambermaid to sing rock-a-by-baby to him.'

About this time Mr. Bixby appeared on the scene. Something like a
minute later I was climbing the pilot-house steps with some of my clothes
on and the rest in my arms. Mr. Bixby was close behind, commenting. Here
was something fresh—this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to
go to work. It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all. I
knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never happened to reflect
that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them. I began to fear
that piloting was not quite so romantic as I had imagined it was; there was
something very real and work-like about this new phase of it.
It was a rather dingy night, although a fair number of stars were out. The
big mate was at the wheel, and he had the old tub pointed at a star and was
holding her straight up the middle of the river. The shores on either hand
were not much more than half a mile apart, but they seemed wonderfully far
away and ever so vague and indistinct. The mate said:—
'We've got to land at Jones's plantation, sir.'
The vengeful spirit in me exulted. I said to myself, I wish you joy of your
job, Mr. Bixby; you'll have a good time finding Mr. Jones's plantation such
a night as this; and I hope you never will find it as long as you live.
Mr. Bixby said to the mate:—
'Upper end of the plantation, or the lower?'
'Upper.'
'I can't do it. The stumps there are out of water at this stage: It's no great
distance to the lower, and you'll have to get along with that.'
'All right, sir. If Jones don't like it he'll have to lump it, I reckon.'
And then the mate left. My exultation began to cool and my wonder to
come up. Here was a man who not only proposed to find this plantation on
such a night, but to find either end of it you preferred. I dreadfully wanted
to ask a question, but I was carrying about as many short answers as my
cargo-room would admit of, so I held my peace. All I desired to ask Mr.
Bixby was the simple question whether he was ass enough to really imagine
he was going to find that plantation on a night when all plantations were
exactly alike and all the same color. But I held in. I used to have fine
inspirations of prudence in those days.

Mr. Bixby made for the shore and soon was scraping it, just the same as
if it had been daylight. And not only that, but singing—
'Father in heaven, the day is declining,' etc.
It seemed to me that I had put my life in the keeping of a peculiarly
reckless outcast. Presently he turned on me and said:—
'What's the name of the first point above New Orleans?'
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't
know.
'Don't know?'
This manner jolted me. I was down at the foot again, in a moment. But I
had to say just what I had said before.
'Well, you're a smart one,' said Mr. Bixby. 'What's the name of the next
point?'

Once more I didn't know.
'Well, this beats anything. Tell me the name of any point or place I told
you.'
I studied a while and decided that I couldn't.
'Look here! What do you start out from, above Twelve-Mile Point, to
cross over?'
'I—I—don't know.'
'You—you—don't know?' mimicking my drawling manner of speech.
'What do you know?'
'I—I—nothing, for certain.'
'By the great Caesar's ghost, I believe you! You're the stupidest
dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses! The idea of you
being a pilot—you! Why, you don't know enough to pilot a cow down a
lane.'
Oh, but his wrath was up! He was a nervous man, and he shuffled from
one side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot. He would boil a
while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again.
'Look here! What do you suppose I told you the names of those points
for?'
I tremblingly considered a moment, and then the devil of temptation
provoked me to say:—
'Well—to—to—be entertaining, I thought.'
This was a red rag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing
the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran over the
steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-
hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was: because he
was brim full, and here were subjects who would talk back. He threw open
a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had
heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen's curses drifted, the
higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew.
When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine

through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother
with. Presently he said to me in the gentlest way—
'My boy, you must get a little memorandum book, and every time I tell
you a thing, put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot, and
that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.'

That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded
with anything but blank cartridges. However, I did not feel discouraged
long. I judged that it was best to make some allowances, for doubtless Mr.
Bixby was 'stretching.' Presently he pulled a rope and struck a few strokes
on the big bell. The stars were all gone now, and the night was as black as
ink. I could hear the wheels churn along the bank, but I was not entirely
certain that I could see the shore. The voice of the invisible watchman
called up from the hurricane deck—
'What's this, sir?'
'Jones's plantation.'

I said to myself, I wish I might venture to offer a small bet that it isn't.
But I did not chirp. I only waited to see. Mr. Bixby handled the engine bells,
and in due time the boat's nose came to the land, a torch glowed from the
forecastle, a man skipped ashore, a darky's voice on the bank said, 'Gimme
de k'yarpet-bag, Mars' Jones,' and the next moment we were standing up the
river again, all serene. I reflected deeply awhile, and then said—but not
aloud—'Well, the finding of that plantation was the luckiest accident that
ever happened; but it couldn't happen again in a hundred years.' And I fully
believed it was an accident, too.
By the time we had gone seven or eight hundred miles up the river, I had
learned to be a tolerably plucky up-stream steersman, in daylight, and
before we reached St. Louis I had made a trifle of progress in night-work,
but only a trifle. I had a note-book that fairly bristled with the names of
towns, 'points,' bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.; but the information was to
be found only in the notebook—none of it was in my head. It made my
heart ache to think I had only got half of the river set down; for as our
watch was four hours off and four hours on, day and night, there was a long
four-hour gap in my book for every time I had slept since the voyage began.

My chief was presently hired to go on a big New Orleans boat, and I
packed my satchel and went with him. She was a grand affair. When I stood
in her pilot-house I was so far above the water that I seemed perched on a
mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me, that
I wondered how I could ever have considered the little 'Paul Jones' a large
craft. There were other differences, too. The 'Paul Jones's' pilot-house was a
cheap, dingy, battered rattle-trap, cramped for room: but here was a
sumptuous glass temple; room enough to have a dance in; showy red and
gold window-curtains; an imposing sofa; leather cushions and a back to the
high bench where visiting pilots sit, to spin yarns and 'look at the river;'

bright, fanciful 'cuspadores' instead of a broad wooden box filled with
sawdust; nice new oil-cloth on the floor; a hospitable big stove for winter; a
wheel as high as my head, costly with inlaid work; a wire tiller-rope; bright
brass knobs for the bells; and a tidy, white-aproned, black 'texas-tender,' to
bring up tarts and ices and coffee during mid-watch, day and night. Now
this was 'something like,' and so I began to take heart once more to believe
that piloting was a romantic sort of occupation after all. The moment we
were under way I began to prowl about the great steamer and fill myself
with joy. She was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room; when I looked
down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel;
she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom
door; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed chandeliers; the clerk's
office was elegant, the bar was marvelous, and the bar-keeper had been
barbered and upholstered at incredible cost. The boiler deck (i.e. the second
story of the boat, so to speak) was as spacious as a church, it seemed to me;
so with the forecastle; and there was no pitiful handful of deckhands,
firemen, and roustabouts down there, but a whole battalion of men. The
fires were fiercely glaring from a long row of furnaces, and over them were
eight huge boilers! This was unutterable pomp. The mighty engines—but
enough of this. I had never felt so fine before. And when I found that the
regiment of natty servants respectfully 'sir'd' me, my satisfaction was
complete.

Chapter 7

A Daring Deed

WHEN I returned to the pilot-house St. Louis was gone and I was lost.
Here was a piece of river which was all down in my book, but I could make
neither head nor tail of it: you understand, it was turned around. I had seen
it when coming up-stream, but I had never faced about to see how it looked
when it was behind me. My heart broke again, for it was plain that I had got
to learn this troublesome river both ways.
The pilot-house was full of pilots, going down to 'look at the river.' What
is called the 'upper river' (the two hundred miles between St. Louis and
Cairo, where the Ohio comes in) was low; and the Mississippi changes its
channel so constantly that the pilots used to always find it necessary to run
down to Cairo to take a fresh look, when their boats were to lie in port a
week; that is, when the water was at a low stage. A deal of this 'looking at
the river' was done by poor fellows who seldom had a berth, and whose
only hope of getting one lay in their being always freshly posted and
therefore ready to drop into the shoes of some reputable pilot, for a single
trip, on account of such pilot's sudden illness, or some other necessity. And
a good many of them constantly ran up and down inspecting the river, not
because they ever really hoped to get a berth, but because (they being
guests of the boat) it was cheaper to 'look at the river' than stay ashore and
pay board. In time these fellows grew dainty in their tastes, and only
infested boats that had an established reputation for setting good tables. All
visiting pilots were useful, for they were always ready and willing, winter
or summer, night or day, to go out in the yawl and help buoy the channel or
assist the boat's pilots in any way they could. They were likewise welcome
because all pilots are tireless talkers, when gathered together, and as they
talk only about the river they are always understood and are always

interesting. Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the
river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.

We had a fine company of these river-inspectors along, this trip. There
were eight or ten; and there was abundance of room for them in our great
pilot-house. Two or three of them wore polished silk hats, elaborate shirt-
fronts, diamond breast-pins, kid gloves, and patent-leather boots. They were
choice in their English, and bore themselves with a dignity proper to men of
solid means and prodigious reputation as pilots. The others were more or
less loosely clad, and wore upon their heads tall felt cones that were
suggestive of the days of the Commonwealth.
I was a cipher in this august company, and felt subdued, not to say torpid.
I was not even of sufficient consequence to assist at the wheel when it was
necessary to put the tiller hard down in a hurry; the guest that stood nearest
did that when occasion required—and this was pretty much all the time,
because of the crookedness of the channel and the scant water. I stood in a
corner; and the talk I listened to took the hope all out of me. One visitor
said to another—
'Jim, how did you run Plum Point, coming up?'

'It was in the night, there, and I ran it the way one of the boys on the
“Diana” told me; started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on the
false point, and held on the cabin under Plum Point till I raised the reef—
quarter less twain—then straightened up for the middle bar till I got well
abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern on
the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point, and came
through a-booming—nine and a half.'
'Pretty square crossing, an't it?'
'Yes, but the upper bar 's working down fast.'
Another pilot spoke up and said—
'I had better water than that, and ran it lower down; started out from the
false point—mark twain—raised the second reef abreast the big snag in the
bend, and had quarter less twain.'
One of the gorgeous ones remarked—
'I don't want to find fault with your leadsmen, but that's a good deal of
water for Plum Point, it seems to me.'
There was an approving nod all around as this quiet snub dropped on the
boaster and 'settled' him. And so they went on talk-talk-talking. Meantime,
the thing that was running in my mind was, 'Now if my ears hear aright, I
have not only to get the names of all the towns and islands and bends, and
so on, by heart, but I must even get up a warm personal acquaintanceship
with every old snag and one-limbed cotton-wood and obscure wood pile
that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more
than that, I must actually know where these things are in the dark, unless
these guests are gifted with eyes that can pierce through two miles of solid
blackness; I wish the piloting business was in Jericho and I had never
thought of it.'
At dusk Mr. Bixby tapped the big bell three times (the signal to land),
and the captain emerged from his drawing-room in the forward end of the
texas, and looked up inquiringly. Mr. Bixby said—
'We will lay up here all night, captain.'
'Very well, sir.'
That was all. The boat came to shore and was tied up for the night. It
seemed to me a fine thing that the pilot could do as he pleased, without
asking so grand a captain's permission. I took my supper and went

immediately to bed, discouraged by my day's observations and experiences.
My late voyage's note-booking was but a confusion of meaningless names.
It had tangled me all up in a knot every time I had looked at it in the
daytime. I now hoped for respite in sleep; but no, it reveled all through my
head till sunrise again, a frantic and tireless nightmare.

Next morning I felt pretty rusty and low-spirited. We went booming
along, taking a good many chances, for we were anxious to 'get out of the
river' (as getting out to Cairo was called) before night should overtake us.
But Mr. Bixby's partner, the other pilot, presently grounded the boat, and we
lost so much time in getting her off that it was plain that darkness would
overtake us a good long way above the mouth. This was a great misfortune,
especially to certain of our visiting pilots, whose boats would have to wait

for their return, no matter how long that might be. It sobered the pilot-house
talk a good deal. Coming up-stream, pilots did not mind low water or any
kind of darkness; nothing stopped them but fog. But down-stream work was
different; a boat was too nearly helpless, with a stiff current pushing behind
her; so it was not customary to run down-stream at night in low water.
There seemed to be one small hope, however: if we could get through the
intricate and dangerous Hat Island crossing before night, we could venture
the rest, for we would have plainer sailing and better water. But it would be
insanity to attempt Hat Island at night. So there was a deal of looking at
watches all the rest of the day, and a constant ciphering upon the speed we
were making; Hat Island was the eternal subject; sometimes hope was high
and sometimes we were delayed in a bad crossing, and down it went again.
For hours all hands lay under the burden of this suppressed excitement; it
was even communicated to me, and I got to feeling so solicitous about Hat
Island, and under such an awful pressure of responsibility, that I wished I
might have five minutes on shore to draw a good, full, relieving breath, and
start over again. We were standing no regular watches. Each of our pilots
ran such portions of the river as he had run when coming up-stream,
because of his greater familiarity with it; but both remained in the pilot
house constantly.
An hour before sunset, Mr. Bixby took the wheel and Mr. W——stepped
aside. For the next thirty minutes every man held his watch in his hand and
was restless, silent, and uneasy. At last somebody said, with a doomful sigh
—

'Well, yonder's Hat Island—and we can't make it.' All the watches closed
with a snap, everybody sighed and muttered something about its being 'too
bad, too bad—ah, if we could only have got here half an hour sooner!' and
the place was thick with the atmosphere of disappointment. Some started to
go out, but loitered, hearing no bell-tap to land. The sun dipped behind the
horizon, the boat went on. Inquiring looks passed from one guest to
another; and one who had his hand on the door-knob and had turned it,
waited, then presently took away his hand and let the knob turn back again.
We bore steadily down the bend. More looks were exchanged, and nods of
surprised admiration—but no words. Insensibly the men drew together
behind Mr. Bixby, as the sky darkened and one or two dim stars came out.
The dead silence and sense of waiting became oppressive. Mr. Bixby pulled
the cord, and two deep, mellow notes from the big bell floated off on the
night. Then a pause, and one more note was struck. The watchman's voice
followed, from the hurricane deck—
'Labboard lead, there! Stabboard lead!'
The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and were
gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck.
'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three!... Quarter-less three!... Half twain!...
Quarter twain!... M-a-r-k twain!... Quarter-less—'
Mr. Bixby pulled two bell-ropes, and was answered by faint jinglings far
below in the engine room, and our speed slackened. The steam began to

whistle through the gauge-cocks. The cries of the leadsmen went on—and it
is a weird sound, always, in the night. Every pilot in the lot was watching
now, with fixed eyes, and talking under his breath. Nobody was calm and
easy but Mr. Bixby. He would put his wheel down and stand on a spoke,
and as the steamer swung into her (to me) utterly invisible marks—for we
seemed to be in the midst of a wide and gloomy sea—he would meet and
fasten her there. Out of the murmur of half-audible talk, one caught a
coherent sentence now and then—such as—
'There; she's over the first reef all right!'
After a pause, another subdued voice—
'Her stern's coming down just exactly right, by George!'
'Now she's in the marks; over she goes!'
Somebody else muttered—
'Oh, it was done beautiful—beautiful!'
Now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted with the
current. Not that I could see the boat drift, for I could not, the stars being all
gone by this time. This drifting was the dismalest work; it held one's heart
still. Presently I discovered a blacker gloom than that which surrounded us.
It was the head of the island. We were closing right down upon it. We
entered its deeper shadow, and so imminent seemed the peril that I was
likely to suffocate; and I had the strongest impulse to do something,
anything, to save the vessel. But still Mr. Bixby stood by his wheel, silent,
intent as a cat, and all the pilots stood shoulder to shoulder at his back.
'She'll not make it!' somebody whispered.
The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it was
down to—
'Eight-and-a-half!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... Seven-and—'
Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer—
'Stand by, now!'
'Aye-aye, sir!'

'Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! Six-and—'
We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing,
shouted through the tube, 'NOW, let her have it—every ounce you've got!'
then to his partner, 'Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!' The boat
rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex of disaster
a single tremendous instant, and then over she went! And such a shout as
went up at Mr. Bixby's back never loosened the roof of a pilot-house
before!

There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby was a hero that night;
and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked about
by river men.
Fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying the great
steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that
not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind reefs, and
then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging

foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass almost within arm's
reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would snatch the hull timbers
from under her if she should strike it, and destroy a quarter of a million
dollars' worth of steam-boat and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a
hundred and fifty human lives into the bargain.
The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby, uttered
in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. He said—
'By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!'

Chapter 8

Perplexing Lessons

At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my
head full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiously
inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut
my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out
more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a
boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those little gaps. But of
course my complacency could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle
into the air, before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down
again. One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler—
'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?'
He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of
protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any
particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and
then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives.

I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of
ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and even
remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone. That word 'old' is
merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I waited. By and by
he said—
'My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is all there
is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and
gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the
day-time.'
'How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?'
'How do you follow a hall at home in the dark. Because you know the
shape of it. You can't see it.'
'Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling
variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know
the shape of the front hall at home?'
'On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did
know the shapes of the halls in his own house.'

'I wish I was dead!'
'Now I don't want to discourage you, but—'
'Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.'
'You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. A
clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the
shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of
timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and
you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the
watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to
be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but
you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you
are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very
different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All
shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd
run them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat
right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well
that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way
for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of
these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a
shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived.
Well, then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river in
different ways. You see—'
'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river
according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried to
carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.'
'No! you only learn the shape of the river, and you learn it with such
absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's in your head,
and never mind the one that's before your eyes.'
'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it. Will it
keep the same form and not go fooling around?'

Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W—— came in to take the watch,
and he said—
'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all that country
clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are caving and
the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why, you wouldn't know
the point above 40. You can go up inside the old sycamore-snag, now.
{footnote [1. It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain
that 'inside' means between the snag and the shore.—M.T.]}
So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing
shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty
apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn
more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was,

that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four
hours.
That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river
custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. While the
relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner, the retiring
pilot, would say something like this—
'I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale's Point; had quarter
twain with the lower lead and mark twain {footnote [Two fathoms. 'Quarter
twain' is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet. 'Mark three' is
three fathoms.]} with the other.'
'Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip. Meet any boats?'
'Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the bar,
and I couldn't make her out entirely. I took her for the “Sunny South”—
hadn't any skylights forward of the chimneys.'
And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner {footnote
['Partner' is a technical term for 'the other pilot'.]} would mention that we
were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were abreast of such-and-such a
man's wood-yard or plantation. This was courtesy; I supposed it was
necessity. But Mr. W—— came on watch full twelve minutes late on this
particular night,—a tremendous breach of etiquette; in fact, it is the
unpardonable sin among pilots. So Mr. Bixby gave him no greeting
whatever, but simply surrendered the wheel and marched out of the pilot-
house without a word. I was appalled; it was a villainous night for
blackness, we were in a particularly wide and blind part of the river, where
there was no shape or substance to anything, and it seemed incredible that
Mr. Bixby should have left that poor fellow to kill the boat trying to find out
where he was. But I resolved that I would stand by him any way. He should
find that he was not wholly friendless. So I stood around, and waited to be
asked where we were. But Mr. W—— plunged on serenely through the
solid firmament of black cats that stood for an atmosphere, and never
opened his mouth. Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan
that would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under
obligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth and
privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a
steamboat. I presently climbed up on the bench; I did not think it was safe
to go to sleep while this lunatic was on watch.

However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time, because the
next thing I was aware of was the fact that day was breaking, Mr. W——
gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again. So it was four o'clock and all well
—but me; I felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at
once.

Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessed that it
was to do Mr. W—— a benevolence,—tell him where he was. It took five
minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing to filter into Mr. Bixby's
system, and then I judge it filled him nearly up to the chin; because he paid
me a compliment—and not much of a one either. He said,

'Well, taking you by-and-large, you do seem to be more different kinds of
an ass than any creature I ever saw before. What did you suppose he wanted
to know for?'
I said I thought it might be a convenience to him.
'Convenience D-nation! Didn't I tell you that a man's got to know the
river in the night the same as he'd know his own front hall?'
'Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it is the front hall;
but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark and not tell me
which hall it is; how am I to know?'
'Well you've got to, on the river!'
'All right. Then I'm glad I never said anything to Mr. W—— '
'I should say so. Why, he'd have slammed you through the window and
utterly ruined a hundred dollars' worth of window-sash and stuff.'
I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made me
unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybody who had the name
of being careless, and injuring things.

I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding
and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was
the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected
far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously
photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to
succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the
exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! If
there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the
cape, I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest,
and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it! No
prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my
mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful as if it
had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics. Nothing
ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had borne
when I went up. I mentioned these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby. He said—
'That's the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes didn't change every
three seconds they wouldn't be of any use. Take this place where we are
now, for instance. As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can
boom right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits at the top and
forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboard in a hurry, or I'll bang this
boat's brains out against a rock; and then the moment one of the prongs of
the V swings behind the other, I've got to waltz to larboard again, or I'll
have a misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson out of
this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand. If that hill didn't
change its shape on bad nights there would be an awful steamboat grave-
yard around here inside of a year.'
It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all the
different ways that could be thought of,—upside down, wrong end first,
inside out, fore-and-aft, and 'thortships,'—and then know what to do on
gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set about it. In the course of
time I began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency
moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed, and ready to start it
to the rear again. He opened on me after this fashion—
'How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-the-
Wall, trip before last?'
I considered this an outrage. I said—

'Every trip, down and up, the leadsmen are singing through that tangled
place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do you reckon I can
remember such a mess as that?'
'My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the exact
spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in
everyone of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis and New
Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip
mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're
not often twice alike. You must keep them separate.'
When I came to myself again, I said—
'When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead, and then I
won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to retire from this
business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush; I'm only fit for a roustabout. I
haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength
enough to carry them around, unless I went on crutches.'
'Now drop that! When I say I'll learn {footnote ['Teach' is not in the river
vocabulary.]} a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on it, I'll learn
him or kill him.'

Chapter 9

Continued Perplexities

THERE was no use in arguing with a person like this. I promptly put
such a strain on my memory that by and by even the shoal water and the
countless crossing-marks began to stay with me. But the result was just the
same. I never could more than get one knotty thing learned before another
presented itself. Now I had often seen pilots gazing at the water and
pretending to read it as if it were a book; but it was a book that told me
nothing. A time came at last, however, when Mr. Bixby seemed to think me
far enough advanced to bear a lesson on water-reading. So he began—

'Do you see that long slanting line on the face of the water? Now, that's a
reef. Moreover, it's a bluff reef. There is a solid sand-bar under it that is
nearly as straight up and down as the side of a house. There is plenty of
water close up to it, but mighty little on top of it. If you were to hit it you
would knock the boat's brains out. Do you see where the line fringes out at
the upper end and begins to fade away?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Well, that is a low place; that is the head of the reef. You can climb over
there, and not hurt anything. Cross over, now, and follow along close under
the reef—easy water there—not much current.'
I followed the reef along till I approached the fringed end. Then Mr.
Bixby said—
'Now get ready. Wait till I give the word. She won't want to mount the
reef; a boat hates shoal water. Stand by—wait—WAIT—keep her well in
hand. NOW cramp her down! Snatch her! snatch her!'
He seized the other side of the wheel and helped to spin it around until it
was hard down, and then we held it so. The boat resisted, and refused to
answer for a while, and next she came surging to starboard, mounted the
reef, and sent a long, angry ridge of water foaming away from her bows.
'Now watch her; watch her like a cat, or she'll get away from you. When
she fights strong and the tiller slips a little, in a jerky, greasy sort of way, let
up on her a trifle; it is the way she tells you at night that the water is too
shoal; but keep edging her up, little by little, toward the point. You are well
up on the bar, now; there is a bar under every point, because the water that
comes down around it forms an eddy and allows the sediment to sink. Do
you see those fine lines on the face of the water that branch out like the ribs
of a fan. Well, those are little reefs; you want to just miss the ends of them,
but run them pretty close. Now look out—look out! Don't you crowd that
slick, greasy-looking place; there ain't nine feet there; she won't stand it.
She begins to smell it; look sharp, I tell you! Oh blazes, there you go! Stop
the starboard wheel! Quick! Ship up to back! Set her back!

The engine bells jingled and the engines answered promptly, shooting
white columns of steam far aloft out of the 'scape pipes, but it was too late.
The boat had 'smelt' the bar in good earnest; the foamy ridges that radiated
from her bows suddenly disappeared, a great dead swell came rolling
forward and swept ahead of her, she careened far over to larboard, and went
tearing away toward the other shore as if she were about scared to death.
We were a good mile from where we ought to have been, when we finally
got the upper hand of her again.
During the afternoon watch the next day, Mr. Bixby asked me if I knew
how to run the next few miles. I said—
'Go inside the first snag above the point, outside the next one, start out
from the lower end of Higgins's wood-yard, make a square crossing and—'

'That's all right. I'll be back before you close up on the next point.'
But he wasn't. He was still below when I rounded it and entered upon a
piece of river which I had some misgivings about. I did not know that he
was hiding behind a chimney to see how I would perform. I went gaily
along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never left the boat in my sole
charge such a length of time before. I even got to 'setting' her and letting the
wheel go, entirely, while I vaingloriously turned my back and inspected the
stem marks and hummed a tune, a sort of easy indifference which I had
prodigiously admired in Bixby and other great pilots. Once I inspected
rather long, and when I faced to the front again my heart flew into my
mouth so suddenly that if I hadn't clapped my teeth together I should have
lost it. One of those frightful bluff reefs was stretching its deadly length
right across our bows! My head was gone in a moment; I did not know
which end I stood on; I gasped and could not get my breath; I spun the
wheel down with such rapidity that it wove itself together like a spider's
web; the boat answered and turned square away from the reef, but the reef
followed her! I fled, and still it followed, still it kept—right across my
bows! I never looked to see where I was going, I only fled. The awful crash
was imminent—why didn't that villain come! If I committed the crime of
ringing a bell, I might get thrown overboard. But better that than kill the
boat. So in blind desperation I started such a rattling 'shivaree' down below
as never had astounded an engineer in this world before, I fancy. Amidst the
frenzy of the bells the engines began to back and fill in a furious way, and
my reason forsook its throne—we were about to crash into the woods on the
other side of the river. Just then Mr. Bixby stepped calmly into view on the
hurricane deck. My soul went out to him in gratitude. My distress vanished;
I would have felt safe on the brink of Niagara, with Mr. Bixby on the
hurricane deck. He blandly and sweetly took his tooth-pick out of his mouth
between his fingers, as if it were a cigar—we were just in the act of
climbing an overhanging big tree, and the passengers were scudding astern
like rats—and lifted up these commands to me ever so gently—
'Stop the starboard. Stop the larboard. Set her back on both.'
The boat hesitated, halted, pressed her nose among the boughs a critical
instant, then reluctantly began to back away.
'Stop the larboard. Come ahead on it. Stop the starboard. Come ahead on
it. Point her for the bar.'

I sailed away as serenely as a summer's morning. Mr. Bixby came in and
said, with mock simplicity—
'When you have a hail, my boy, you ought to tap the big bell three times
before you land, so that the engineers can get ready.'
I blushed under the sarcasm, and said I hadn't had any hail.

'Ah! Then it was for wood, I suppose. The officer of the watch will tell
you when he wants to wood up.'
I went on consuming and said I wasn't after wood.
'Indeed? Why, what could you want over here in the bend, then? Did you
ever know of a boat following a bend up-stream at this stage of the river?'
'No sir,—and I wasn't trying to follow it. I was getting away from a bluff
reef.'
'No, it wasn't a bluff reef; there isn't one within three miles of where you
were.'
'But I saw it. It was as bluff as that one yonder.'
'Just about. Run over it!'
'Do you give it as an order?'
'Yes. Run over it.'
'If I don't, I wish I may die.'
'All right; I am taking the responsibility.' I was just as anxious to kill the
boat, now, as I had been to save her before. I impressed my orders upon my
memory, to be used at the inquest, and made a straight break for the reef. As
it disappeared under our bows I held my breath; but we slid over it like oil.
'Now don't you see the difference? It wasn't anything but a wind reef. The
wind does that.'
'So I see. But it is exactly like a bluff reef. How am I ever going to tell
them apart?'
'I can't tell you. It is an instinct. By and by you will just naturally know
one from the other, but you never will be able to explain why or how you
know them apart'
It turned out to be true. The face of the water, in time, became a
wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated
passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its
most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it
was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to
tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a
page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread
without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could
find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a

book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so
unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every reperusal. The passenger who
could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its
surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but
to the pilot that was an italicized passage; indeed, it was more than that, it
was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation
points at the end of it; for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there
that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the
faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous
to a pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw
nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun and shaded
by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but
the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter.
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to
know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I
knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I
had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored
to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the
majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I
witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river
was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into
gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in
one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the
surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as
an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was
covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced;
the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell
from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone
like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved
a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor
that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected
images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and
near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing
moment, with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The
world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But
as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories
and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon
the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them.
Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it
without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this
fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that
floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting
mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's
steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those
tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the
lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that
troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the
shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located

himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats;
that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and
then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night
without the friendly old landmark.
No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the
value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it
could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since
those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush
in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some
deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to
him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at
all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her
unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder
whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?

Chapter 10

Completing My Education

WHOSOEVER has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which
have preceded this may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with
piloting as a science. It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am
not quite done yet. I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way,
what a wonderful science it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and
therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-
water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and
therefore one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another
matter when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the
Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags
are always hunting up new quarters, whose sandbars are never at rest,
whose channels are for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions
must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single
light-house or a single buoy; for there is neither light nor buoy to be found
anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous river.
{footnote [True at the time referred to; not true now (1882).]} I feel
justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that I feel sure
no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloted a
steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject. If the
theme were hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently with the reader;
but since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take up a considerable
degree of room with it.
When I had learned the name and position of every visible feature of the
river; when I had so mastered its shape that I could shut my eyes and trace
it from St. Louis to New Orleans; when I had learned to read the face of the
water as one would cull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when
I had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless array of soundings

and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them, I judged that my education
was complete: so I got to tilting my cap to the side of my head, and wearing
a tooth-pick in my mouth at the wheel. Mr. Bixby had his eye on these airs.
One day he said—

'What is the height of that bank yonder, at Burgess's?'
'How can I tell, sir. It is three-quarters of a mile away.'
'Very poor eye—very poor. Take the glass.'
I took the glass, and presently said—'I can't tell. I suppose that that bank
is about a foot and a half high.'

'Foot and a half! That's a six-foot bank. How high was the bank along
here last trip?'
'I don't know; I never noticed.'
'You didn't? Well, you must always do it hereafter.'
'Why?'
'Because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you. For
one thing, it tells you the stage of the river—tells you whether there's more
water or less in the river along here than there was last trip.'
'The leads tell me that.' I rather thought I had the advantage of him there.
'Yes, but suppose the leads lie? The bank would tell you so, and then
you'd stir those leadsmen up a bit. There was a ten-foot bank here last trip,
and there is only a six-foot bank now. What does that signify?'
'That the river is four feet higher than it was last trip.'
'Very good. Is the river rising or falling?'
'Rising.'
'No it ain't.'
'I guess I am right, sir. Yonder is some drift-wood floating down the
stream.'
'A rise starts the drift-wood, but then it keeps on floating a while after the
river is done rising. Now the bank will tell you about this. Wait till you
come to a place where it shelves a little. Now here; do you see this narrow
belt of fine sediment That was deposited while the water was higher. You
see the driftwood begins to strand, too. The bank helps in other ways. Do
you see that stump on the false point?'

'Ay, ay, sir.'
'Well, the water is just up to the roots of it. You must make a note of that.'
'Why?'
'Because that means that there's seven feet in the chute of 103.'
'But 103 is a long way up the river yet.'
'That's where the benefit of the bank comes in. There is water enough in
103 now, yet there may not be by the time we get there; but the bank will
keep us posted all along. You don't run close chutes on a falling river, up-
stream, and there are precious few of them that you are allowed to run at all
down-stream. There's a law of the United States against it. The river may be
rising by the time we get to 103, and in that case we'll run it. We are
drawing—how much?'
'Six feet aft,—six and a half forward.'

'Well, you do seem to know something.'
'But what I particularly want to know is, if I have got to keep up an
everlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred miles,
month in and month out?'
'Of course!'
My emotions were too deep for words for a while. Presently I said—'
And how about these chutes. Are there many of them?'
'I should say so. I fancy we shan't run any of the river this trip as you've
ever seen it run before—so to speak. If the river begins to rise again, we'll
go up behind bars that you've always seen standing out of the river, high
and dry like the roof of a house; we'll cut across low places that you've
never noticed at all, right through the middle of bars that cover three
hundred acres of river; we'll creep through cracks where you've always
thought was solid land; we'll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five
miles of river off to one side; we'll see the hind-side of every island
between New Orleans and Cairo.'
'Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more river as I
already know.'
'Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.'
'Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I went into this
business.'
'Yes, that is true. And you are yet. But you'll not be when you've learned
it.'
'Ah, I never can learn it.'
'I will see that you do.'
By and by I ventured again—
'Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the river—
shapes and all—and so I can run it at night?'
'Yes. And you've got to have good fair marks from one end of the river to
the other, that will help the bank tell you when there is water enough in
each of these countless places—like that stump, you know. When the river
first begins to rise, you can run half a dozen of the deepest of them; when it
rises a foot more you can run another dozen; the next foot will add a couple
of dozen, and so on: so you see you have to know your banks and marks to

a dead moral certainty, and never get them mixed; for when you start
through one of those cracks, there's no backing out again, as there is in the
big river; you've got to go through, or stay there six months if you get
caught on a falling river. There are about fifty of these cracks which you
can't run at all except when the river is brim full and over the banks.'
'This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.'
'Cheerful enough. And mind what I've just told you; when you start into
one of those places you've got to go through. They are too narrow to turn
around in, too crooked to back out of, and the shoal water is always up at
the head; never elsewhere. And the head of them is always likely to be
filling up, little by little, so that the marks you reckon their depth by, this
season, may not answer for next.'
'Learn a new set, then, every year?'
'Exactly. Cramp her up to the bar! What are you standing up through the
middle of the river for?'
The next few months showed me strange things. On the same day that we
held the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the
river. The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs,
broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away. It
required the nicest steering to pick one's way through this rushing raft, even
in the day-time, when crossing from point to point; and at night the
difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then a huge log, lying
deep in the water, would suddenly appear right under our bows, coming
head-on; no use to try to avoid it then; we could only stop the engines, and
one wheel would walk over that log from one end to the other, keeping up a
thundering racket and careening the boat in a way that was very
uncomfortable to passengers. Now and then we would hit one of these
sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the center, with a full head of steam,
and it would stun the boat as if she had hit a continent. Sometimes this log
would lodge, and stay right across our nose, and back the Mississippi up
before it; we would have to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from
the obstruction. We often hit white logs, in the dark, for we could not see
them till we were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at
night. A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone.
Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious timber-
rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi, coal barges from Pittsburgh,

little trading scows from everywhere, and broad-horns from 'Posey County,'
Indiana, freighted with 'fruit and furniture'—the usual term for describing it,
though in plain English the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and
pumpkins. Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returned
with usury. The law required all such helpless traders to keep a light
burning, but it was a law that was often broken. All of a sudden, on a murky
night, a light would hop up, right under our bows, almost, and an agonized
voice, with the backwoods 'whang' to it, would wail out—
'Whar'n the —— you goin' to! Cain't you see nothin', you dash-dashed
aig-suckin', sheep-stealin', one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!'

Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces
would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator as if under a
lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and deck-hands would send
and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity, one of our wheels would
walk off with the crashing fragments of a steering-oar, and down the dead
blackness would shut again. And that flatboatman would be sure to go into
New Orleans and sue our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning

all the time, when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and
lie and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck.

Once, at night, in one of those forest-bordered crevices (behind an island)
which steamboatmen intensely describe with the phrase 'as dark as the
inside of a cow,' we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit,
furniture, and all, but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we

just caught the sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious
damage, unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a
moment. These people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we
backed and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it—
both sexes and various ages—and cursed us till everything turned blue.
Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we
borrowed a steering oar of him in a very narrow place.

Chapter 11

The River Rises

DURING this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance.
We were running chute after chute,—a new world to me,—and if there was
a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet a
broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a still
worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water. And then
there would be no end of profane cordialities exchanged.
Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way
cautiously along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly be broken by
yells and a clamor of tin pans, and all in instant a log raft would appear
vaguely through the webby veil, close upon us; and then we did not wait to
swap knives, but snatched our engine bells out by the roots and piled on all
the steam we had, to scramble out of the way! One doesn't hit a rock or a
solid log craft with a steamboat when he can get excused.
You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always carried a
large assortment of religious tracts with them in those old departed
steamboating days. Indeed they did. Twenty times a day we would be
cramping up around a bar, while a string of these small-fry rascals were
drifting down into the head of the bend away above and beyond us a couple
of miles. Now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come fighting
its laborious way across the desert of water. It would 'ease all,' in the
shadow of our forecastle, and the panting oarsmen would shout, 'Gimme a
pa-a-per!' as the skiff drifted swiftly astern. The clerk would throw over a
file of New Orleans journals. If these were picked up without comment, you
might notice that now a dozen other skiffs had been drifting down upon us
without saying anything. You understand, they had been waiting to see how
No. 1 was going to fare. No. 1 making no comment, all the rest would bend
to their oars and come on, now; and as fast as they came the clerk would

heave over neat bundles of religious tracts, tied to shingles. The amount of
hard swearing which twelve packages of religious literature will command
when impartially divided up among twelve raftsmen's crews, who have
pulled a heavy skiff two miles on a hot day to get them, is simply
incredible.

As I have said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the
time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were
hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before; we
were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I
had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that
of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our
nose was almost at the very spot. Some of these chutes were utter solitudes.
The dense, untouched forest overhung both banks of the crooked little
crack, and one could believe that human creatures had never intruded there
before. The swinging grape-vines, the grassy nooks and vistas glimpsed as
we swept by, the flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the
tops of dead trunks, and all the spendthrift richness of the forest foliage,

were wasted and thrown away there. The chutes were lovely places to steer
in; they were deep, except at the head; the current was gentle; under the
'points' the water was absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that
where the tender willow thickets projected you could bury your boat's
broadside in them as you tore along, and then you seemed fairly to fly.

Behind other islands we found wretched little farms, and wretcheder little
log-cabins; there were crazy rail fences sticking a foot or two above the
water, with one or two jeans-clad, chills-racked, yellow-faced male
miserables roosting on the top-rail, elbows on knees, jaws in hands,
grinding tobacco and discharging the result at floating chips through
crevices left by lost teeth; while the rest of the family and the few farm-
animals were huddled together in an empty wood-flat riding at her
moorings close at hand. In this flat-boat the family would have to cook and

eat and sleep for a lesser or greater number of days (or possibly weeks),
until the river should fall two or three feet and let them get back to their
log-cabin and their chills again—chills being a merciful provision of an all-
wise Providence to enable them to take exercise without exertion. And this
sort of watery camping out was a thing which these people were rather
liable to be treated to a couple of times a year: by the December rise out of
the Ohio, and the June rise out of the Mississippi. And yet these were kindly
dispensations, for they at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead
now and then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by. They
appreciated the blessing, too, for they spread their mouths and eyes wide
open and made the most of these occasions. Now what could these banished
creatures find to do to keep from dying of the blues during the low-water
season!
Once, in one of these lovely island chutes, we found our course
completely bridged by a great fallen tree. This will serve to show how
narrow some of the chutes were. The passengers had an hour's recreation in
a virgin wilderness, while the boat-hands chopped the bridge away; for
there was no such thing as turning back, you comprehend.
From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have
no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense forest
that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm or wood-
yard opening at intervals, and so you can't 'get out of the river' much easier
than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from Baton Rouge to New
Orleans it is a different matter. The river is more than a mile wide, and very
deep—as much as two hundred feet, in places. Both banks, for a good deal
over a hundred miles, are shorn of their timber and bordered by continuous
sugar plantations, with only here and there a scattering sapling or row of
ornamental China-trees. The timber is shorn off clear to the rear of the
plantations, from two to four miles. When the first frost threatens to come,
the planters snatch off their crops in a hurry. When they have finished
grinding the cane, they form the refuse of the stalks (which they call
bagasse) into great piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar
countries the bagasse is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar mills. Now
the piles of damp bagasse burn slowly, and smoke like Satan's own kitchen.
An embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the
Mississippi all the way down that lower end of the river, and this

embankment is set back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a
hundred feet, according to circumstances; say thirty or forty feet, as a
general thing. Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of smoke
from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is over the
banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at midnight and see how she
will feel. And see how you will feel, too! You find yourself away out in the
midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself in
the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment,
and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don't. The
plantations themselves are transformed by the smoke, and look like a part of
the sea. All through your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery
of uncertainty. You hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know.
All that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the
bank and destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore.
And you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against the
embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the small
comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do. One of
the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation one night, at
such a time, and had to stay there a week. But there was no novelty about it;
it had often been done before.

I thought I had finished this chapter, but I wish to add a curious thing,
while it is in my mind. It is only relevant in that it is connected with
piloting. There used to be an excellent pilot on the river, a Mr. X., who was

a somnambulist. It was said that if his mind was troubled about a bad piece
of river, he was pretty sure to get up and walk in his sleep and do strange
things. He was once fellow-pilot for a trip or two with George Ealer, on a
great New Orleans passenger packet. During a considerable part of the first
trip George was uneasy, but got over it by and by, as X. seemed content to
stay in his bed when asleep. Late one night the boat was approaching
Helena, Arkansas; the water was low, and the crossing above the town in a
very blind and tangled condition. X. had seen the crossing since Ealer had,
and as the night was particularly drizzly, sullen, and dark, Ealer was
considering whether he had not better have X. called to assist in running the
place, when the door opened and X. walked in. Now on very dark nights,
light is a deadly enemy to piloting; you are aware that if you stand in a
lighted room, on such a night, you cannot see things in the street to any
purpose; but if you put out the lights and stand in the gloom you can make
out objects in the street pretty well. So, on very dark nights, pilots do not
smoke; they allow no fire in the pilot-house stove if there is a crack which
can allow the least ray to escape; they order the furnaces to be curtained
with huge tarpaulins and the sky-lights to be closely blinded. Then no light
whatever issues from the boat. The undefinable shape that now entered the
pilot-house had Mr. X.'s voice. This said—
'Let me take her, George; I've seen this place since you have, and it is so
crooked that I reckon I can run it myself easier than I could tell you how to
do it.'

'It is kind of you, and I swear _I_ am willing. I haven't got another drop
of perspiration left in me. I have been spinning around and around the
wheel like a squirrel. It is so dark I can't tell which way she is swinging till
she is coming around like a whirligig.'
So Ealer took a seat on the bench, panting and breathless. The black
phantom assumed the wheel without saying anything, steadied the waltzing
steamer with a turn or two, and then stood at ease, coaxing her a little to this
side and then to that, as gently and as sweetly as if the time had been
noonday. When Ealer observed this marvel of steering, he wished he had
not confessed! He stared, and wondered, and finally said—
'Well, I thought I knew how to steer a steamboat, but that was another
mistake of mine.'
X. said nothing, but went serenely on with his work. He rang for the
leads; he rang to slow down the steam; he worked the boat carefully and
neatly into invisible marks, then stood at the center of the wheel and peered
blandly out into the blackness, fore and aft, to verify his position; as the
leads shoaled more and more, he stopped the engines entirely, and the dead
silence and suspense of 'drifting' followed when the shoalest water was
struck, he cracked on the steam, carried her handsomely over, and then

began to work her warily into the next system of shoal marks; the same
patient, heedful use of leads and engines followed, the boat slipped through
without touching bottom, and entered upon the third and last intricacy of the
crossing; imperceptibly she moved through the gloom, crept by inches into
her marks, drifted tediously till the shoalest water was cried, and then,
under a tremendous head of steam, went swinging over the reef and away
into deep water and safety!
Ealer let his long-pent breath pour out in a great, relieving sigh, and said
—
'That's the sweetest piece of piloting that was ever done on the
Mississippi River! I wouldn't believed it could be done, if I hadn't seen it.'
There was no reply, and he added—
'Just hold her five minutes longer, partner, and let me run down and get a
cup of coffee.'
A minute later Ealer was biting into a pie, down in the 'texas,' and
comforting himself with coffee. Just then the night watchman happened in,
and was about to happen out again, when he noticed Ealer and exclaimed—
'Who is at the wheel, sir?'
'X.'

'Dart for the pilot-house, quicker than lightning!'
The next moment both men were flying up the pilot-house companion
way, three steps at a jump! Nobody there! The great steamer was whistling
down the middle of the river at her own sweet will! The watchman shot out
of the place again; Ealer seized the wheel, set an engine back with power,
and held his breath while the boat reluctantly swung away from a 'towhead'
which she was about to knock into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico!
By and by the watchman came back and said—
'Didn't that lunatic tell you he was asleep, when he first came up here?'
'No.'
'Well, he was. I found him walking along on top of the railings just as
unconcerned as another man would walk a pavement; and I put him to bed;
now just this minute there he was again, away astern, going through that
sort of tight-rope deviltry the same as before.'
'Well, I think I'll stay by, next time he has one of those fits. But I hope
he'll have them often. You just ought to have seen him take this boat
through Helena crossing. I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he
can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when he is
sound asleep, what couldn't he do if he was dead!'

Chapter 12

Sounding

WHEN the river is very low, and one's steamboat is 'drawing all the
water' there is in the channel,—or a few inches more, as was often the case
in the old times,—one must be painfully circumspect in his piloting. We
used to have to 'sound' a number of particularly bad places almost every trip
when the river was at a very low stage.

Sounding is done in this way. The boat ties up at the shore, just above the
shoal crossing; the pilot not on watch takes his 'cub' or steersman and a
picked crew of men (sometimes an officer also), and goes out in the yawl—

provided the boat has not that rare and sumptuous luxury, a regularly-
devised 'sounding-boat'—and proceeds to hunt for the best water, the pilot
on duty watching his movements through a spy-glass, meantime, and in
some instances assisting by signals of the boat's whistle, signifying 'try
higher up' or 'try lower down;' for the surface of the water, like an oil-
painting, is more expressive and intelligible when inspected from a little
distance than very close at hand. The whistle signals are seldom necessary,
however; never, perhaps, except when the wind confuses the significant
ripples upon the water's surface. When the yawl has reached the shoal
place, the speed is slackened, the pilot begins to sound the depth with a pole
ten or twelve feet long, and the steersman at the tiller obeys the order to
'hold her up to starboard;' or, 'let her fall off to larboard;'{footnote [The term
'larboard' is never used at sea now, to signify the left hand; but was always
used on the river in my time]} or 'steady—steady as you go.'
When the measurements indicate that the yawl is approaching the
shoalest part of the reef, the command is given to 'ease all!' Then the men
stop rowing and the yawl drifts with the current. The next order is, 'Stand
by with the buoy!' The moment the shallowest point is reached, the pilot
delivers the order, 'Let go the buoy!' and over she goes. If the pilot is not
satisfied, he sounds the place again; if he finds better water higher up or
lower down, he removes the buoy to that place. Being finally satisfied, he
gives the order, and all the men stand their oars straight up in the air, in line;
a blast from the boat's whistle indicates that the signal has been seen; then
the men 'give way' on their oars and lay the yawl alongside the buoy; the
steamer comes creeping carefully down, is pointed straight at the buoy,
husbands her power for the coming struggle, and presently, at the critical
moment, turns on all her steam and goes grinding and wallowing over the
buoy and the sand, and gains the deep water beyond. Or maybe she doesn't;
maybe she 'strikes and swings.' Then she has to while away several hours
(or days) sparring herself off.
Sometimes a buoy is not laid at all, but the yawl goes ahead, hunting the
best water, and the steamer follows along in its wake. Often there is a deal
of fun and excitement about sounding, especially if it is a glorious summer
day, or a blustering night. But in winter the cold and the peril take most of
the fun out of it.

A buoy is nothing but a board four or five feet long, with one end turned
up; it is a reversed school-house bench, with one of the supports left and the
other removed. It is anchored on the shoalest part of the reef by a rope with
a heavy stone made fast to the end of it. But for the resistance of the turned-
up end of the reversed bench, the current would pull the buoy under water.
At night, a paper lantern with a candle in it is fastened on top of the buoy,
and this can be seen a mile or more, a little glimmering spark in the waste
of blackness.
Nothing delights a cub so much as an opportunity to go out sounding.
There is such an air of adventure about it; often there is danger; it is so
gaudy and man-of-war-like to sit up in the stern-sheets and steer a swift
yawl; there is something fine about the exultant spring of the boat when an
experienced old sailor crew throw their souls into the oars; it is lovely to see
the white foam stream away from the bows; there is music in the rush of the
water; it is deliciously exhilarating, in summer, to go speeding over the
breezy expanses of the river when the world of wavelets is dancing in the
sun. It is such grandeur, too, to the cub, to get a chance to give an order; for
often the pilot will simply say, 'Let her go about!' and leave the rest to the
cub, who instantly cries, in his sternest tone of command, 'Ease starboard!
Strong on the larboard! Starboard give way! With a will, men!' The cub
enjoys sounding for the further reason that the eyes of the passengers are
watching all the yawl's movements with absorbing interest if the time be
daylight; and if it be night he knows that those same wondering eyes are
fastened upon the yawl's lantern as it glides out into the gloom and dims
away in the remote distance.
One trip a pretty girl of sixteen spent her time in our pilot-house with her
uncle and aunt, every day and all day long. I fell in love with her. So did
Mr. Thornburg's cub, Tom G——. Tom and I had been bosom friends until
this time; but now a coolness began to arise. I told the girl a good many of
my river adventures, and made myself out a good deal of a hero; Tom tried
to make himself appear to be a hero, too, and succeeded to some extent, but
then he always had a way of embroidering. However, virtue is its own
reward, so I was a barely perceptible trifle ahead in the contest. About this
time something happened which promised handsomely for me: the pilots
decided to sound the crossing at the head of 21. This would occur about
nine or ten o'clock at night, when the passengers would be still up; it would
be Mr. Thornburg's watch, therefore my chief would have to do the

sounding. We had a perfect love of a sounding-boat—long, trim, graceful,
and as fleet as a greyhound; her thwarts were cushioned; she carried twelve
oarsmen; one of the mates was always sent in her to transmit orders to her
crew, for ours was a steamer where no end of 'style' was put on.
We tied up at the shore above 21, and got ready. It was a foul night, and
the river was so wide, there, that a landsman's uneducated eyes could
discern no opposite shore through such a gloom. The passengers were alert
and interested; everything was satisfactory. As I hurried through the engine-
room, picturesquely gotten up in storm toggery, I met Tom, and could not
forbear delivering myself of a mean speech—
'Ain't you glad you don't have to go out sounding?'
Tom was passing on, but he quickly turned, and said—
'Now just for that, you can go and get the sounding-pole yourself. I was
going after it, but I'd see you in Halifax, now, before I'd do it.'
'Who wants you to get it? I don't. It's in the sounding-boat.'
'It ain't, either. It's been new-painted; and it's been up on the ladies' cabin
guards two days, drying.'
I flew back, and shortly arrived among the crowd of watching and
wondering ladies just in time to hear the command:
'Give way, men!'
I looked over, and there was the gallant sounding-boat booming away, the
unprincipled Tom presiding at the tiller, and my chief sitting by him with
the sounding-pole which I had been sent on a fool's errand to fetch. Then
that young girl said to me—
'Oh, how awful to have to go out in that little boat on such a night! Do
you think there is any danger?'

I would rather have been stabbed. I went off, full of venom, to help in the
pilot-house. By and by the boat's lantern disappeared, and after an interval a
wee spark glimmered upon the face of the water a mile away. Mr.
Thornburg blew the whistle, in acknowledgment, backed the steamer out,
and made for it. We flew along for a while, then slackened steam and went
cautiously gliding toward the spark. Presently Mr. Thornburg exclaimed—
'Hello, the buoy-lantern's out!'

He stopped the engines. A moment or two later he said—
'Why, there it is again!'
So he came ahead on the engines once more, and rang for the leads.
Gradually the water shoaled up, and then began to deepen again! Mr.
Thornburg muttered—
'Well, I don't understand this. I believe that buoy has drifted off the reef.
Seems to be a little too far to the left. No matter, it is safest to run over it
anyhow.'
So, in that solid world of darkness we went creeping down on the light.
Just as our bows were in the act of plowing over it, Mr. Thornburg seized
the bell-ropes, rang a startling peal, and exclaimed—
'My soul, it's the sounding-boat!'
A sudden chorus of wild alarms burst out far below—a pause—and then
the sound of grinding and crashing followed. Mr. Thornburg exclaimed—
'There! the paddle-wheel has ground the sounding-boat to lucifer
matches! Run! See who is killed!'
I was on the main deck in the twinkling of an eye. My chief and the third
mate and nearly all the men were safe. They had discovered their danger
when it was too late to pull out of the way; then, when the great guards
overshadowed them a moment later, they were prepared and knew what to
do; at my chiefs order they sprang at the right instant, seized the guard, and
were hauled aboard. The next moment the sounding-yawl swept aft to the
wheel and was struck and splintered to atoms. Two of the men and the cub
Tom, were missing—a fact which spread like wildfire over the boat. The
passengers came flocking to the forward gangway, ladies and all, anxious-
eyed, white-faced, and talked in awed voices of the dreadful thing. And
often and again I heard them say, 'Poor fellows! poor boy, poor boy!'
By this time the boat's yawl was manned and away, to search for the
missing. Now a faint call was heard, off to the left. The yawl had
disappeared in the other direction. Half the people rushed to one side to
encourage the swimmer with their shouts; the other half rushed the other
way to shriek to the yawl to turn about. By the callings, the swimmer was
approaching, but some said the sound showed failing strength. The crowd
massed themselves against the boiler-deck railings, leaning over and staring

into the gloom; and every faint and fainter cry wrung from them such words
as, 'Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow! is there no way to save him?'
But still the cries held out, and drew nearer, and presently the voice said
pluckily—
'I can make it! Stand by with a rope!'
What a rousing cheer they gave him! The chief mate took his stand in the
glare of a torch-basket, a coil of rope in his hand, and his men grouped
about him. The next moment the swimmer's face appeared in the circle of
light, and in another one the owner of it was hauled aboard, limp and
drenched, while cheer on cheer went up. It was that devil Tom.

The yawl crew searched everywhere, but found no sign of the two men.
They probably failed to catch the guard, tumbled back, and were struck by

the wheel and killed. Tom had never jumped for the guard at all, but had
plunged head-first into the river and dived under the wheel. It was nothing;
I could have done it easy enough, and I said so; but everybody went on just
the same, making a wonderful to do over that ass, as if he had done
something great. That girl couldn't seem to have enough of that pitiful 'hero'
the rest of the trip; but little I cared; I loathed her, any way.
The way we came to mistake the sounding-boat's lantern for the buoy-
light was this. My chief said that after laying the buoy he fell away and
watched it till it seemed to be secure; then he took up a position a hundred
yards below it and a little to one side of the steamer's course, headed the
sounding-boat up-stream, and waited. Having to wait some time, he and the
officer got to talking; he looked up when he judged that the steamer was
about on the reef; saw that the buoy was gone, but supposed that the
steamer had already run over it; he went on with his talk; he noticed that the
steamer was getting very close on him, but that was the correct thing; it was
her business to shave him closely, for convenience in taking him aboard; he
was expecting her to sheer off, until the last moment; then it flashed upon
him that she was trying to run him down, mistaking his lantern for the
buoy-light; so he sang out, 'Stand by to spring for the guard, men!' and the
next instant the jump was made.

Chapter 13

A Pilot's Needs

BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is, make
plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters, some of the peculiar
requirements of the science of piloting. First of all, there is one faculty
which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute
perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He
cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it; for
this is eminently one of the 'exact' sciences. With what scorn a pilot was
looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble
phrase 'I think,' instead of the vigorous one 'I know!' One cannot easily
realize what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve
hundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness. If you will take
the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its
features patiently until you know every house and window and door and
lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that
you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at
random in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then
have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's
knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you
will go on until you know every street crossing, the character, size, and
position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of
those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must
know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will
take half of the signs in that long street, and change their places once a
month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark
nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any
mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's peerless memory
by the fickle Mississippi.

I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world.
To know the Old and New Testaments by heart, and be able to recite them
glibly, forward or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book and
recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass
of knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot's massed
knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facility in the handling of
it. I make this comparison deliberately, and believe I am not expanding the
truth when I do it. Many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not.
And how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work; how
placidly effortless is its way; how unconsciously it lays up its vast stores,
hour by hour, day by day, and never loses or mislays a single valuable
package of them all! Take an instance. Let a leadsman cry, 'Half twain! half
twain! half twain! half twain! half twain!' until it become as monotonous as
the ticking of a clock; let conversation be going on all the time, and the
pilot be doing his share of the talking, and no longer consciously listening
to the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of half twains let a
single 'quarter twain!' be interjected, without emphasis, and then the half
twain cry go on again, just as before: two or three weeks later that pilot can
describe with precision the boat's position in the river when that quarter
twain was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks, and
side-marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to take the boat there and
put her in that same spot again yourself! The cry of 'quarter twain' did not
really take his mind from his talk, but his trained faculties instantly
photographed the bearings, noted the change of depth, and laid up the
important details for future reference without requiring any assistance from
him in the matter. If you were walking and talking with a friend, and
another friend at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel
sound A, for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R, thus,
A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis, you would not
be able to state, two or three weeks afterward, that the R had been put in,
nor be able to tell what objects you were passing at the moment it was done.
But you could if your memory had been patiently and laboriously trained to
do that sort of thing mechanically.

Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and piloting will
develop it into a very colossus of capability. But only in the matters it is
daily drilled in. A time would come when the man's faculties could not help
noticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could not help holding
on to them with the grip of a vise; but if you asked that same man at noon
what he had had for breakfast, it would be ten chances to one that he could
not tell you. Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you
will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

At the time that wages soared so high on the Missouri River, my chief,
Mr. Bixby, went up there and learned more than a thousand miles of that
stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing. When he had seen
each division once in the daytime and once at night, his education was so
nearly complete that he took out a 'daylight' license; a few trips later he took
out a full license, and went to piloting day and night—and he ranked A 1,
too.
Mr. Bixby placed me as steersman for a while under a pilot whose feats
of memory were a constant marvel to me. However, his memory was born
in him, I think, not built. For instance, somebody would mention a name.
Instantly Mr. Brown would break in—
'Oh, I knew him. Sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with a little scar on the
side of his throat, like a splinter under the flesh. He was only in the
Southern trade six months. That was thirteen years ago. I made a trip with
him. There was five feet in the upper river then; the “Henry Blake”
grounded at the foot of Tower Island drawing four and a half; the “George
Elliott” unshipped her rudder on the wreck of the “Sunflower”—'

'Why, the “Sunflower” didn't sink until—'
'I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2nd of
December; Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first
clerk; and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these things a
week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the “Sunflower.”
Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year, and
died of the lockjaw on the 15th. His brother died two years after 3rd of
March,—erysipelas. I never saw either of the Hardys,—they were
Alleghany River men,—but people who knew them told me all these things.
And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the

same, and his first wife's name was Jane Shook—she was from New
England—and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It was in the blood.
She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton before she was
married.'
And so on, by the hour, the man's tongue would go. He could not forget
any thing. It was simply impossible. The most trivial details remained as
distinct and luminous in his head, after they had lain there for years, as the
most memorable events. His was not simply a pilot's memory; its grasp was
universal. If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven
years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from
memory. And then without observing that he was departing from the true
line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurl in a long-drawn
parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter; and you were lucky
indeed if he did not take up that writer's relatives, one by one, and give you
their biographies, too.
Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are of
the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance
from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with
tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore. Moreover, he
cannot stick to his subject. He picks up every little grain of memory he
discerns in his way, and so is led aside. Mr. Brown would start out with the
honest intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog. He
would be 'so full of laugh' that he could hardly begin; then his memory
would start with the dog's breed and personal appearance; drift into a
history of his owner; of his owner's family, with descriptions of weddings
and burials that had occurred in it, together with recitals of congratulatory
verses and obituary poetry provoked by the same: then this memory would
recollect that one of these events occurred during the celebrated 'hard
winter' of such and such a year, and a minute description of that winter
would follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death,
and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to. Pork
and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder would suggest
cows and horses; cows and horses would suggest the circus and certain
celebrated bare-back riders; the transition from the circus to the menagerie
was easy and natural; from the elephant to equatorial Africa was but a step;
then of course the heathen savages would suggest religion; and at the end of
three or four hours' tedious jaw, the watch would change, and Brown would

go out of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard
years before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace. And the
original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog, after all
this waiting and hungering.

A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities which he
must also have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a
cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the merest trifle of
pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot he cannot be
unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one cannot quite say
the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must start
with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot.
The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time, but it does
not reach a high and satisfactory condition until some time after the young

pilot has been 'standing his own watch,' alone and under the staggering
weight of all the responsibilities connected with the position. When an
apprentice has become pretty thoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes
clattering along so fearlessly with his steamboat, night or day, that he
presently begins to imagine that it is his courage that animates him; but the
first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his own devices he finds out
it was the other man's. He discovers that the article has been left out of his
own cargo altogether. The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a
moment; he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them;
all his knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minutes he is as white as
a sheet and scared almost to death. Therefore pilots wisely train these cubs
by various strategic tricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly. A
favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon the candidate.

Mr. Bixby served me in this fashion once, and for years afterward I used
to blush even in my sleep when I thought of it. I had become a good
steersman; so good, indeed, that I had all the work to do on our watch, night
and day; Mr. Bixby seldom made a suggestion to me; all he ever did was to
take the wheel on particularly bad nights or in particularly bad crossings,
land the boat when she needed to be landed, play gentleman of leisure nine-
tenths of the watch, and collect the wages. The lower river was about bank-
full, and if anybody had questioned my ability to run any crossing between
Cairo and New Orleans without help or instruction, I should have felt
irreparably hurt. The idea of being afraid of any crossing in the lot, in the

day-time, was a thing too preposterous for contemplation. Well, one
matchless summer's day I was bowling down the bend above island 66,
brimful of self-conceit and carrying my nose as high as a giraffe's, when
Mr. Bixby said—
'I am going below a while. I suppose you know the next crossing?'
This was almost an affront. It was about the plainest and simplest
crossing in the whole river. One couldn't come to any harm, whether he ran
it right or not; and as for depth, there never had been any bottom there. I
knew all this, perfectly well.
'Know how to run it? Why, I can run it with my eyes shut.'
'How much water is there in it?'
'Well, that is an odd question. I couldn't get bottom there with a church
steeple.'
'You think so, do you?'
The very tone of the question shook my confidence. That was what Mr.
Bixby was expecting. He left, without saying anything more. I began to
imagine all sorts of things. Mr. Bixby, unknown to me, of course, sent
somebody down to the forecastle with some mysterious instructions to the
leadsmen, another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers, and
then Mr. Bixby went into hiding behind a smoke-stack where he could
observe results. Presently the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck;
next the chief mate appeared; then a clerk. Every moment or two a straggler
was added to my audience; and before I got to the head of the island I had
fifteen or twenty people assembled down there under my nose. I began to
wonder what the trouble was. As I started across, the captain glanced aloft
at me and said, with a sham uneasiness in his voice—
'Where is Mr. Bixby?'
'Gone below, sir.'

But that did the business for me. My imagination began to construct
dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keep the run
of them. All at once I imagined I saw shoal water ahead! The wave of
coward agony that surged through me then came near dislocating every
joint in me. All my confidence in that crossing vanished. I seized the bell-
rope; dropped it, ashamed; seized it again; dropped it once more; clutched it

tremblingly one again, and pulled it so feebly that I could hardly hear the
stroke myself. Captain and mate sang out instantly, and both together—
'Starboard lead there! and quick about it!'
This was another shock. I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel; but I
would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see new dangers on
that side, and away I would spin to the other; only to find perils
accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again. Then came the
leadsman's sepulchral cry—
'D-e-e-p four!'
Deep four in a bottomless crossing! The terror of it took my breath away.
'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three... Quarter less three!... Half twain!'
This was frightful! I seized the bell-ropes and stopped the engines.
'Quarter twain! Quarter twain! Mark twain!'
I was helpless. I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking
from head to foot, and I could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out
so far.
'Quarter less twain! Nine and a half!'
We were drawing nine! My hands were in a nerveless flutter. I could not
ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube and shouted to
the engineer—
'Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal
soul out of her!'

I heard the door close gently. I looked around, and there stood Mr. Bixby,
smiling a bland, sweet smile. Then the audience on the hurricane deck sent
up a thundergust of humiliating laughter. I saw it all, now, and I felt meaner
than the meanest man in human history. I laid in the lead, set the boat in her
marks, came ahead on the engines, and said—
'It was a fine trick to play on an orphan, wasn't it? I suppose I'll never
hear the last of how I was ass enough to heave the lead at the head of 66.'
'Well, no, you won't, maybe. In fact I hope you won't; for I want you to
learn something by that experience. Didn't you know there was no bottom in
that crossing?'
'Yes, sir, I did.'
'Very well, then. You shouldn't have allowed me or anybody else to shake
your confidence in that knowledge. Try to remember that. And another

thing: when you get into a dangerous place, don't turn coward. That isn't
going to help matters any.'
It was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned. Yet about the
hardest part of it was that for months I so often had to hear a phrase which I
had conceived a particular distaste for. It was, 'Oh, Ben, if you love me,
back her!'

Chapter 14

Rank and Dignity of Piloting

IN my preceding chapters I have tried, by going into the minutiae of the
science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step to a comprehension of
what the science consists of; and at the same time I have tried to show him
that it is a very curious and wonderful science, too, and very worthy of his
attention. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for I
loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a
measureless pride in it. The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the
only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the
earth. Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people;
parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency; the editor of a
newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind
him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of
his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth,
regardless of his parish's opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled
servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify'
before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and
worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot
had none. The captain could stand upon the hurricane deck, in the pomp of
a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders while the vessel
backed into the stream, and then that skipper's reign was over.

The moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the
sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her exactly as
he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the bank
whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements were
entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody, he
promptly resented even the merest suggestions. Indeed, the law of the
United States forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly
considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat
than anybody could tell him. So here was the novelty of a king without a
keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a
fiction of words. I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer
serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain

standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere. His
interference, in that particular instance, might have been an excellent thing,
but to permit it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. It
will easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he
was a great personage in the old steamboating days. He was treated with
marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the
officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated
to the passengers, too. I think pilots were about the only people I ever knew
who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of
traveling foreign princes. But then, people in one's own grade of life are not
usually embarrassing objects.

By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of
commands. It 'gravels' me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of a
request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order. In those
old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New Orleans and
back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five days, on an

average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves of St.
Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work, except
the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up town, and receive the
same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The moment the boat touched
the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and they were not likely to be
seen again till the last bell was ringing and everything in readiness for
another voyage.
When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he took
pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred dollars a month on the
Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain to keep such a pilot in idleness,
under full pay, three months at a time, while the river was frozen up. And
one must remember that in those cheap times four hundred dollars was a
salary of almost inconceivable splendor. Few men on shore got such pay as
that, and when they did they were mightily looked up to. When pilots from
either end of the river wandered into our small Missouri village, they were
sought by the best and the fairest, and treated with exalted respect. Lying in
port under wages was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and
appreciated; especially if they belonged in the Missouri River in the heyday
of that trade (Kansas times), and got nine hundred dollars a trip, which was
equivalent to about eighteen hundred dollars a month. Here is a
conversation of that day. A chap out of the Illinois River, with a little stern-
wheel tub, accosts a couple of ornate and gilded Missouri River pilots—
'Gentlemen, I've got a pretty good trip for the upcountry, and shall want
you about a month. How much will it be?'
'Eighteen hundred dollars apiece.'
'Heavens and earth! You take my boat, let me have your wages, and I'll
divide!'

I will remark, in passing, that Mississippi steamboatmen were important
in landsmen's eyes (and in their own, too, in a degree) according to the
dignity of the boat they were on. For instance, it was a proud thing to be of
the crew of such stately craft as the 'Aleck Scott' or the 'Grand Turk.' Negro
firemen, deck hands, and barbers belonging to those boats were
distinguished personages in their grade of life, and they were well aware of
that fact too. A stalwart darkey once gave offense at a negro ball in New
Orleans by putting on a good many airs. Finally one of the managers
bustled up to him and said—
'Who is you, any way? Who is you? dat's what I wants to know!'

The offender was not disconcerted in the least, but swelled himself up
and threw that into his voice which showed that he knew he was not putting
on all those airs on a stinted capital.
'Who is I? Who is I? I let you know mighty quick who I is! I want you
niggers to understan' dat I fires de middle do'{footnote [Door]} on de
“Aleck Scott!”'
That was sufficient.
The barber of the 'Grand Turk' was a spruce young negro, who aired his
importance with balmy complacency, and was greatly courted by the circle
in which he moved. The young colored population of New Orleans were
much given to flirting, at twilight, on the banquettes of the back streets.
Somebody saw and heard something like the following, one evening, in one
of those localities. A middle-aged negro woman projected her head through
a broken pane and shouted (very willing that the neighbors should hear and
envy), 'You Mary Ann, come in de house dis minute! Stannin' out dah
foolin' 'long wid dat low trash, an' heah's de barber offn de “Gran' Turk”
wants to conwerse wid you!'

My reference, a moment ago, to the fact that a pilot's peculiar official
position placed him out of the reach of criticism or command, brings
Stephen W—— naturally to my mind. He was a gifted pilot, a good fellow,
a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him. He had a most
irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously easy-going and
comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity, and even the most
august wealth. He always had work, he never saved a penny, he was a most
persuasive borrower, he was in debt to every pilot on the river, and to the
majority of the captains. He could throw a sort of splendor around a bit of
harum-scarum, devil-may-care piloting, that made it almost fascinating—
but not to everybody. He made a trip with good old Captain Y——once,
and was 'relieved' from duty when the boat got to New Orleans. Somebody
expressed surprise at the discharge. Captain Y—— shuddered at the mere
mention of Stephen. Then his poor, thin old voice piped out something like
this:—
'Why, bless me! I wouldn't have such a wild creature on my boat for the
world—not for the whole world! He swears, he sings, he whistles, he yells
—I never saw such an Injun to yell. All times of the night—it never made
any difference to him. He would just yell that way, not for anything in
particular, but merely on account of a kind of devilish comfort he got out of
it. I never could get into a sound sleep but he would fetch me out of bed, all
in a cold sweat, with one of those dreadful war-whoops. A queer being—
very queer being; no respect for anything or anybody. Sometimes he called
me “Johnny.” And he kept a fiddle, and a cat. He played execrably. This
seemed to distress the cat, and so the cat would howl. Nobody could sleep
where that man—and his family—was. And reckless. There never was
anything like it. Now you may believe it or not, but as sure as I am sitting
here, he brought my boat a-tilting down through those awful snags at Chicot
under a rattling head of steam, and the wind a-blowing like the very nation,
at that! My officers will tell you so. They saw it. And, sir, while he was a-
tearing right down through those snags, and I a-shaking in my shoes and
praying, I wish I may never speak again if he didn't pucker up his mouth
and go to whistling! Yes, sir; whistling “Buffalo gals, can't you come out
tonight, can't you come out to-night, can't you come out to-night;” and

doing it as calmly as if we were attending a funeral and weren't related to
the corpse. And when I remonstrated with him about it, he smiled down on
me as if I was his child, and told me to run in the house and try to be good,
and not be meddling with my superiors!'

Once a pretty mean captain caught Stephen in New Orleans out of work
and as usual out of money. He laid steady siege to Stephen, who was in a
very 'close place,' and finally persuaded him to hire with him at one
hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, just half wages, the captain
agreeing not to divulge the secret and so bring down the contempt of all the
guild upon the poor fellow. But the boat was not more than a day out of
New Orleans before Stephen discovered that the captain was boasting of his
exploit, and that all the officers had been told. Stephen winced, but said
nothing. About the middle of the afternoon the captain stepped out on the
hurricane deck, cast his eye around, and looked a good deal surprised. He
glanced inquiringly aloft at Stephen, but Stephen was whistling placidly,
and attending to business. The captain stood around a while in evident

discomfort, and once or twice seemed about to make a suggestion; but the
etiquette of the river taught him to avoid that sort of rashness, and so he
managed to hold his peace. He chafed and puzzled a few minutes longer,
then retired to his apartments. But soon he was out again, and apparently
more perplexed than ever. Presently he ventured to remark, with deference
—
'Pretty good stage of the river now, ain't it, sir?'
'Well, I should say so! Bank-full is a pretty liberal stage.'
'Seems to be a good deal of current here.'
'Good deal don't describe it! It's worse than a mill-race.'
'Isn't it easier in toward shore than it is out here in the middle?'
'Yes, I reckon it is; but a body can't be too careful with a steamboat. It's
pretty safe out here; can't strike any bottom here, you can depend on that.'
The captain departed, looking rueful enough. At this rate, he would
probably die of old age before his boat got to St. Louis. Next day he
appeared on deck and again found Stephen faithfully standing up the middle
of the river, fighting the whole vast force of the Mississippi, and whistling
the same placid tune. This thing was becoming serious. In by the shore was
a slower boat clipping along in the easy water and gaining steadily; she
began to make for an island chute; Stephen stuck to the middle of the river.
Speech was wrung from the captain. He said—
'Mr. W——, don't that chute cut off a good deal of distance?'
'I think it does, but I don't know.'
'Don't know! Well, isn't there water enough in it now to go through?'
'I expect there is, but I am not certain.'
'Upon my word this is odd! Why, those pilots on that boat yonder are
going to try it. Do you mean to say that you don't know as much as they
do?'
'They! Why, they are two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pilots! But don't you
be uneasy; I know as much as any man can afford to know for a hundred
and twenty-five!'
The captain surrendered.
Five minutes later Stephen was bowling through the chute and showing
the rival boat a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of heels.

Chapter 15

The Pilots' Monopoly

ONE day, on board the 'Aleck Scott,' my chief, Mr. Bixby, was crawling
carefully through a close place at Cat Island, both leads going, and
everybody holding his breath. The captain, a nervous, apprehensive man,
kept still as long as he could, but finally broke down and shouted from the
hurricane deck—
'For gracious' sake, give her steam, Mr. Bixby! give her steam! She'll
never raise the reef on this headway!'
For all the effect that was produced upon Mr. Bixby, one would have
supposed that no remark had been made. But five minutes later, when the
danger was past and the leads laid in, he burst instantly into a consuming
fury, and gave the captain the most admirable cursing I ever listened to. No
bloodshed ensued; but that was because the captain's cause was weak; for
ordinarily he was not a man to take correction quietly.

Having now set forth in detail the nature of the science of piloting, and
likewise described the rank which the pilot held among the fraternity of
steamboatmen, this seems a fitting place to say a few words about an
organization which the pilots once formed for the protection of their guild.
It was curious and noteworthy in this, that it was perhaps the compactest,
the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed
among men.
For a long time wages had been two hundred and fifty dollars a month;
but curiously enough, as steamboats multiplied and business increased, the
wages began to fall little by little. It was easy to discover the reason of this.
Too many pilots were being 'made.' It was nice to have a 'cub,' a steersman,
to do all the hard work for a couple of years, gratis, while his master sat on
a high bench and smoked; all pilots and captains had sons or nephews who
wanted to be pilots. By and by it came to pass that nearly every pilot on the
river had a steersman. When a steersman had made an amount of progress
that was satisfactory to any two pilots in the trade, they could get a pilot's
license for him by signing an application directed to the United States

Inspector. Nothing further was needed; usually no questions were asked, no
proofs of capacity required.
Very well, this growing swarm of new pilots presently began to
undermine the wages, in order to get berths. Too late—apparently—the
knights of the tiller perceived their mistake. Plainly, something had to be
done, and quickly; but what was to be the needful thing. A close
organization. Nothing else would answer. To compass this seemed an
impossibility; so it was talked, and talked, and then dropped. It was too
likely to ruin whoever ventured to move in the matter. But at last about a
dozen of the boldest—and some of them the best—pilots on the river
launched themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances. They got a
special charter from the legislature, with large powers, under the name of
the Pilots' Benevolent Association; elected their officers, completed their
organization, contributed capital, put 'association' wages up to two hundred
and fifty dollars at once—and then retired to their homes, for they were
promptly discharged from employment. But there were two or three
unnoticed trifles in their by-laws which had the seeds of propagation in
them. For instance, all idle members of the association, in good standing,
were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per month. This began to
bring in one straggler after another from the ranks of the new-fledged pilots,
in the dull (summer) season. Better have twenty-five dollars than starve; the
initiation fee was only twelve dollars, and no dues required from the
unemployed.
Also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could draw
twenty-five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their children.
Also, the said deceased would be buried at the association's expense. These
things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten pilots in the
Mississippi Valley. They came from farms, they came from interior villages,
they came from everywhere. They came on crutches, on drays, in
ambulances,—any way, so they got there. They paid in their twelve dollars,
and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month, and
calculate their burial bills.

By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class ones,
were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out of it and
laughing at it. It was the laughing-stock of the whole river. Everybody
joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent. of their
wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the association,
whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and no one would
employ them. Everybody was derisively grateful to the association for
taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and leaving the whole field to
the excellent and the deserving; and everybody was not only jocularly
grateful for that, but for a result which naturally followed, namely, the
gradual advance of wages as the busy season approached. Wages had gone
up from the low figure of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and
twenty-five, and in some cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great
fun to enlarge upon the fact that this charming thing had been accomplished

by a body of men not one of whom received a particle of benefit from it.
Some of the jokers used to call at the association rooms and have a good
time chaffing the members and offering them the charity of taking them as
steersmen for a trip, so that they could see what the forgotten river looked
like. However, the association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the
contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was 'out of luck,' and added
him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable, for they were
good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed before. As business
freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars—
the association figure—and became firmly fixed there; and still without
benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired. The hilarity at
the association's expense burst all bounds, now. There was no end to the fun
which that poor martyr had to put up with.
However, it is a long lane that has no turning. Winter approached,
business doubled and trebled, and an avalanche of Missouri, Illinois and
Upper Mississippi River boats came pouring down to take a chance in the
New Orleans trade. All of a sudden pilots were in great demand, and were
correspondingly scarce. The time for revenge was come. It was a bitter pill
to have to accept association pilots at last, yet captains and owners agreed
that there was no other way. But none of these outcasts offered! So there
was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed: they must be sought out and asked
for their services. Captain —— was the first man who found it necessary to
take the dose, and he had been the loudest derider of the organization. He
hunted up one of the best of the association pilots and said—
'Well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a little while, so I'll give
in with as good a grace as I can. I've come to hire you; get your trunk
aboard right away. I want to leave at twelve o'clock.'
'I don't know about that. Who is your other pilot?'
'I've got I. S——. Why?'
'I can't go with him. He don't belong to the association.'
'What!'
'It's so.'
'Do you mean to tell me that you won't turn a wheel with one of the very
best and oldest pilots on the river because he don't belong to your
association?'

'Yes, I do.'
'Well, if this isn't putting on airs! I supposed I was doing you a
benevolence; but I begin to think that I am the party that wants a favor
done. Are you acting under a law of the concern?'
'Yes.'
'Show it to me.'
So they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary soon
satisfied the captain, who said—
'Well, what am I to do? I have hired Mr. S—— for the entire season.'
'I will provide for you,' said the secretary. 'I will detail a pilot to go with
you, and he shall be on board at twelve o'clock.'
'But if I discharge S——, he will come on me for the whole season's
wages.'
'Of course that is a matter between you and Mr. S——, captain. We
cannot meddle in your private affairs.'

The captain stormed, but to no purpose. In the end he had to discharge S
——, pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot in his
place. The laugh was beginning to turn the other way now. Every day,
thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged captain
discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity, and installed a
hated association man in his berth. In a very little while, idle non-
associationists began to be pretty plenty, brisk as business was, and much as
their services were desired. The laugh was shifting to the other side of their
mouths most palpably. These victims, together with the captains and
owners, presently ceased to laugh altogether, and began to rage about the
revenge they would take when the passing business 'spurt' was over.
Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners and crews of boats
that had two non-association pilots. But their triumph was not very long-
lived. For this reason: It was a rigid rule of the association that its members
should never, under any circumstances whatever, give information about the
channel to any 'outsider.' By this time about half the boats had none but
association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders. At the first
glance one would suppose that when it came to forbidding information
about the river these two parties could play equally at that game; but this
was not so. At every good-sized town from one end of the river to the other,
there was a 'wharf-boat' to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier. Freight was
stored in it for transportation; waiting passengers slept in its cabins. Upon
each of these wharf-boats the association's officers placed a strong box
fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but one—
the United States mail service. It was the letter-bag lock, a sacred
governmental thing. By dint of much beseeching the government had been
persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. Every association man
carried a key which would open these boxes. That key, or rather a peculiar
way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked for river
information by a stranger—for the success of the St. Louis and New
Orleans association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen
neighboring steamboat trades—was the association man's sign and diploma
of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing a similar
key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his question was
politely ignored.

From the association's secretary each member received a package of
more or less gorgeous blanks, printed like a billhead, on handsome paper,
properly ruled in columns; a bill-head worded something like this—

These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage progressed, and
deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes. For instance, as soon as the first
crossing, out from St. Louis, was completed, the items would be entered
upon the blank, under the appropriate headings, thus—
'St. Louis. Nine and a half (feet). Stern on court-house, head on dead
cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef, then pull up

square.' Then under head of Remarks: 'Go just outside the wrecks; this is
important. New snag just where you straighten down; go above it.'
The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box (after adding to it the
details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis) took out and read
half a dozen fresh reports (from upward-bound steamers) concerning the
river between Cairo and Memphis, posted himself thoroughly, returned
them to the box, and went back aboard his boat again so armed against
accident that he could not possibly get his boat into trouble without
bringing the most ingenious carelessness to his aid.
Imagine the benefits of so admirable a system in a piece of river twelve
or thirteen hundred miles long, whose channel was shifting every day! The
pilot who had formerly been obliged to put up with seeing a shoal place
once or possibly twice a month, had a hundred sharp eyes to watch it for
him, now, and bushels of intelligent brains to tell him how to run it. His
information about it was seldom twenty-four hours old. If the reports in the
last box chanced to leave any misgivings on his mind concerning a
treacherous crossing, he had his remedy; he blew his steam-whistle in a
peculiar way as soon as he saw a boat approaching; the signal was answered
in a peculiar way if that boat's pilots were association men; and then the two
steamers ranged alongside and all uncertainties were swept away by fresh
information furnished to the inquirer by word of mouth and in minute
detail.

The first thing a pilot did when he reached New Orleans or St. Louis was
to take his final and elaborate report to the association parlors and hang it
up there,—after which he was free to visit his family. In these parlors a
crowd was always gathered together, discussing changes in the channel, and
the moment there was a fresh arrival, everybody stopped talking till this
witness had told the newest news and settled the latest uncertainty. Other
craftsmen can 'sink the shop,' sometimes, and interest themselves in other
matters. Not so with a pilot; he must devote himself wholly to his
profession and talk of nothing else; for it would be small gain to be perfect
one day and imperfect the next. He has no time or words to waste if he
would keep 'posted.'
But the outsiders had a hard time of it. No particular place to meet and
exchange information, no wharf-boat reports, none but chance and
unsatisfactory ways of getting news. The consequence was that a man
sometimes had to run five hundred miles of river on information that was a
week or ten days old. At a fair stage of the river that might have answered;
but when the dead low water came it was destructive.
Now came another perfectly logical result. The outsiders began to ground
steamboats, sink them, and get into all sorts of trouble, whereas accidents
seemed to keep entirely away from the association men. Wherefore even the

owners and captains of boats furnished exclusively with outsiders, and
previously considered to be wholly independent of the association and free
to comfort themselves with brag and laughter, began to feel pretty
uncomfortable. Still, they made a show of keeping up the brag, until one
black day when every captain of the lot was formally ordered to
immediately discharge his outsiders and take association pilots in their
stead. And who was it that had the dashing presumption to do that? Alas, it
came from a power behind the throne that was greater than the throne itself.
It was the underwriters!
It was no time to 'swap knives.' Every outsider had to take his trunk
ashore at once. Of course it was supposed that there was collusion between
the association and the underwriters, but this was not so. The latter had
come to comprehend the excellence of the 'report' system of the association
and the safety it secured, and so they had made their decision among
themselves and upon plain business principles.
There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp of the
outsiders now. But no matter, there was but one course for them to pursue,
and they pursued it. They came forward in couples and groups, and
proffered their twelve dollars and asked for membership. They were
surprised to learn that several new by-laws had been long ago added. For
instance, the initiation fee had been raised to fifty dollars; that sum must be
tendered, and also ten per cent. of the wages which the applicant had
received each and every month since the founding of the association. In
many cases this amounted to three or four hundred dollars. Still, the
association would not entertain the application until the money was present.
Even then a single adverse vote killed the application. Every member had to
vote 'Yes' or 'No' in person and before witnesses; so it took weeks to decide
a candidacy, because many pilots were so long absent on voyages.
However, the repentant sinners scraped their savings together, and one by
one, by our tedious voting process, they were added to the fold. A time
came, at last, when only about ten remained outside. They said they would
starve before they would apply. They remained idle a long while, because of
course nobody could venture to employ them.

By and by the association published the fact that upon a certain date the
wages would be raised to five hundred dollars per month. All the branch
associations had grown strong, now, and the Red River one had advanced
wages to seven hundred dollars a month. Reluctantly the ten outsiders
yielded, in view of these things, and made application. There was another
new by-law, by this time, which required them to pay dues not only on all
the wages they had received since the association was born, but also on
what they would have received if they had continued at work up to the time
of their application, instead of going off to pout in idleness. It turned out to
be a difficult matter to elect them, but it was accomplished at last. The most
virulent sinner of this batch had stayed out and allowed 'dues' to accumulate

against him so long that he had to send in six hundred and twenty-five
dollars with his application.
The association had a good bank account now, and was very strong.
There was no longer an outsider. A by-law was added forbidding the
reception of any more cubs or apprentices for five years; after which time a
limited number would be taken, not by individuals, but by the association,
upon these terms: the applicant must not be less than eighteen years old,
and of respectable family and good character; he must pass an examination
as to education, pay a thousand dollars in advance for the privilege of
becoming an apprentice, and must remain under the commands of the
association until a great part of the membership (more than half, I think)
should be willing to sign his application for a pilot's license.
All previously-articled apprentices were now taken away from their
masters and adopted by the association. The president and secretary detailed
them for service on one boat or another, as they chose, and changed them
from boat to boat according to certain rules. If a pilot could show that he
was in infirm health and needed assistance, one of the cubs would be
ordered to go with him.
The widow and orphan list grew, but so did the association's financial
resources. The association attended its own funerals in state, and paid for
them. When occasion demanded, it sent members down the river upon
searches for the bodies of brethren lost by steamboat accidents; a search of
this kind sometimes cost a thousand dollars.
The association procured a charter and went into the insurance business,
also. It not only insured the lives of its members, but took risks on
steamboats.
The organization seemed indestructible. It was the tightest monopoly in
the world. By the United States law, no man could become a pilot unless
two duly licensed pilots signed his application; and now there was nobody
outside of the association competent to sign. Consequently the making of
pilots was at an end. Every year some would die and others become
incapacitated by age and infirmity; there would be no new ones to take their
places. In time, the association could put wages up to any figure it chose;
and as long as it should be wise enough not to carry the thing too far and
provoke the national government into amending the licensing system,
steamboat owners would have to submit, since there would be no help for it.

The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between the
association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed.
Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it
themselves. When the pilots' association announced, months beforehand,
that on the first day of September, 1861, wages would be advanced to five
hundred dollars per month, the owners and captains instantly put freights up
a few cents, and explained to the farmers along the river the necessity of it,
by calling their attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be
established. It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem
to detect it. It looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a
bushel of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact
that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal more
than necessary to cover the new wages.

So, straightway the captains and owners got up an association of their
own, and proposed to put captains' wages up to five hundred dollars, too,
and move for another advance in freights. It was a novel idea, but of course
an effect which had been produced once could be produced again. The new

association decreed (for this was before all the outsiders had been taken into
the pilots' association) that if any captain employed a non-association pilot,
he should be forced to discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred
dollars. Several of these heavy fines were paid before the captains'
organization grew strong enough to exercise full authority over its
membership; but that all ceased, presently. The captains tried to get the
pilots to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under a
non-association captain; but this proposition was declined. The pilots saw
that they would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow,
and so they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances.
As I have remarked, the pilots' association was now the compactest
monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible. And yet
the days of its glory were numbered. First, the new railroad stretching up
through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to Northern railway centers,
began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers; next the war came
and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating industry during several
years, leaving most of the pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all
the time; then the treasurer of the St. Louis association put his hand into the
till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the
railroads intruding everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the
war was over, but carry freights; so straightway some genius from the
Atlantic coast introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down
to New Orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the
twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science of
piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past!

Chapter 16

Racing Days

IT was always the custom for the boats to leave New Orleans between
four and five o'clock in the afternoon. From three o'clock onward they
would be burning rosin and pitch pine (the sign of preparation), and so one
had the picturesque spectacle of a rank, some two or three miles long, of
tall, ascending columns of coal-black smoke; a colonnade which supported
a sable roof of the same smoke blended together and spreading abroad over
the city. Every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack-staff, and
sometimes a duplicate on the verge staff astern. Two or three miles of mates
were commanding and swearing with more than usual emphasis; countless
processions of freight barrels and boxes were spinning athwart the levee
and flying aboard the stage-planks, belated passengers were dodging and
skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle
companion way alive, but having their doubts about it; women with
reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with husbands freighted
with carpet-sacks and crying babies, and making a failure of it by losing
their heads in the whirl and roar and general distraction; drays and baggage-
vans were clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry, every now and then
getting blocked and jammed together, and then during ten seconds one
could not see them for the profanity, except vaguely and dimly; every
windlass connected with every forehatch, from one end of that long array of
steamboats to the other, was keeping up a deafening whiz and whir,
lowering freight into the hold, and the half-naked crews of perspiring
negroes that worked them were roaring such songs as 'De Las' Sack! De
Las' Sack!'—inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos of turmoil
and racket that was driving everybody else mad.

By this time the hurricane and boiler decks of the steamers would be
packed and black with passengers. The 'last bells' would begin to clang, all
down the line, and then the powwow seemed to double; in a moment or two
the final warning came,—a simultaneous din of Chinese gongs, with the
cry, 'All dat ain't goin', please to git asho'!'—and behold, the powwow
quadrupled! People came swarming ashore, overturning excited stragglers
that were trying to swarm aboard. One more moment later a long array of
stage-planks was being hauled in, each with its customary latest passenger

clinging to the end of it with teeth, nails, and everything else, and the
customary latest procrastinator making a wild spring shoreward over his
head.

Now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream, leaving wide
gaps in the serried rank of steamers. Citizens crowd the decks of boats that
are not to go, in order to see the sight. Steamer after steamer straightens
herself up, gathers all her strength, and presently comes swinging by, under
a tremendous head of steam, with flag flying, black smoke rolling, and her
entire crew of firemen and deck-hands (usually swarthy negroes) massed
together on the forecastle, the best 'voice' in the lot towering from the midst
(being mounted on the capstan), waving his hat or a flag, and all roaring a
mighty chorus, while the parting cannons boom and the multitudinous
spectators swing their hats and huzza! Steamer after steamer falls into line,
and the stately procession goes winging its flight up the river.
In the old times, whenever two fast boats started out on a race, with a big
crowd of people looking on, it was inspiring to hear the crews sing,
especially if the time were night-fall, and the forecastle lit up with the red
glare of the torch-baskets. Racing was royal fun. The public always had an
idea that racing was dangerous; whereas the opposite was the case—that is,
after the laws were passed which restricted each boat to just so many
pounds of steam to the square inch. No engineer was ever sleepy or careless
when his heart was in a race. He was constantly on the alert, trying gauge-
cocks and watching things. The dangerous place was on slow, plodding
boats, where the engineers drowsed around and allowed chips to get into the
'doctor' and shut off the water supply from the boilers.

In the 'flush times' of steamboating, a race between two notoriously fleet
steamers was an event of vast importance. The date was set for it several
weeks in advance, and from that time forward, the whole Mississippi Valley
was in a state of consuming excitement. Politics and the weather were
dropped, and people talked only of the coming race. As the time
approached, the two steamers 'stripped' and got ready. Every encumbrance
that added weight, or exposed a resisting surface to wind or water, was
removed, if the boat could possibly do without it. The 'spars,' and
sometimes even their supporting derricks, were sent ashore, and no means
left to set the boat afloat in case she got aground. When the 'Eclipse' and the
'A. L. Shotwell' ran their great race many years ago, it was said that pains
were taken to scrape the gilding off the fanciful device which hung between
the 'Eclipse's' chimneys, and that for that one trip the captain left off his kid
gloves and had his head shaved. But I always doubted these things.

If the boat was known to make her best speed when drawing five and a
half feet forward and five feet aft, she was carefully loaded to that exact
figure—she wouldn't enter a dose of homoeopathic pills on her manifest
after that. Hardly any passengers were taken, because they not only add
weight but they never will 'trim boat.' They always run to the side when
there is anything to see, whereas a conscientious and experienced
steamboatman would stick to the center of the boat and part his hair in the
middle with a spirit level.
No way-freights and no way-passengers were allowed, for the racers
would stop only at the largest towns, and then it would be only 'touch and
go.' Coal flats and wood flats were contracted for beforehand, and these
were kept ready to hitch on to the flying steamers at a moment's warning.
Double crews were carried, so that all work could be quickly done.
The chosen date being come, and all things in readiness, the two great
steamers back into the stream, and lie there jockeying a moment, and
apparently watching each other's slightest movement, like sentient
creatures; flags drooping, the pent steam shrieking through safety-valves,
the black smoke rolling and tumbling from the chimneys and darkening all
the air. People, people everywhere; the shores, the house-tops, the
steamboats, the ships, are packed with them, and you know that the borders
of the broad Mississippi are going to be fringed with humanity thence
northward twelve hundred miles, to welcome these racers.
Presently tall columns of steam burst from the 'scape-pipes of both
steamers, two guns boom a good-bye, two red-shirted heroes mounted on
capstans wave their small flags above the massed crews on the forecastles,
two plaintive solos linger on the air a few waiting seconds, two mighty
choruses burst forth—and here they come! Brass bands bray Hail
Columbia, huzza after huzza thunders from the shores, and the stately
creatures go whistling by like the wind.

Those boats will never halt a moment between New Orleans and St.
Louis, except for a second or two at large towns, or to hitch thirty-cord
wood-boats alongside. You should be on board when they take a couple of
those wood-boats in tow and turn a swarm of men into each; by the time
you have wiped your glasses and put them on, you will be wondering what
has become of that wood.
Two nicely matched steamers will stay in sight of each other day after
day. They might even stay side by side, but for the fact that pilots are not all
alike, and the smartest pilots will win the race. If one of the boats has a
'lightning' pilot, whose 'partner' is a trifle his inferior, you can tell which one
is on watch by noting whether that boat has gained ground or lost some
during each four-hour stretch. The shrewdest pilot can delay a boat if he has

not a fine genius for steering. Steering is a very high art. One must not keep
a rudder dragging across a boat's stem if he wants to get up the river fast.
There is a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a
boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in. But
of course this was at rare intervals. Ferryboats used to lose valuable trips
because their passengers grew old and died, waiting for us to get by. This
was at still rarer intervals. I had the documents for these occurrences, but
through carelessness they have been mislaid. This boat, the 'John J. Roe,'
was so slow that when she finally sunk in Madrid Bend, it was five years
before the owners heard of it. That was always a confusing fact to me, but it
is according to the record, any way. She was dismally slow; still, we often
had pretty exciting times racing with islands, and rafts, and such things.
One trip, however, we did rather well. We went to St. Louis in sixteen days.
But even at this rattling gait I think we changed watches three times in Fort
Adams reach, which is five miles long. A 'reach' is a piece of straight river,
and of course the current drives through such a place in a pretty lively way.
That trip we went to Grand Gulf, from New Orleans, in four days (three
hundred and forty miles); the 'Eclipse' and 'Shotwell' did it in one. We were
nine days out, in the chute of 63 (seven hundred miles); the 'Eclipse' and
'Shotwell' went there in two days. Something over a generation ago, a boat
called the 'J. M. White' went from New Orleans to Cairo in three days, six
hours, and forty-four minutes. In 1853 the 'Eclipse' made the same trip in
three days, three hours, and twenty minutes.{footnote [Time disputed. Some
authorities add 1 hour and 16 minutes to this.]} In 1870 the 'R. E. Lee' did it
in three days and one hour. This last is called the fastest trip on record. I
will try to show that it was not. For this reason: the distance between New
Orleans and Cairo, when the 'J. M. White' ran it, was about eleven hundred
and six miles; consequently her average speed was a trifle over fourteen
miles per hour. In the 'Eclipse's' day the distance between the two ports had
become reduced to one thousand and eighty miles; consequently her
average speed was a shade under fourteen and three-eighths miles per hour.
In the 'R. E. Lee's' time the distance had diminished to about one thousand
and thirty miles; consequently her average was about fourteen and one-
eighth miles per hour. Therefore the 'Eclipse's' was conspicuously the
fastest time that has ever been made.

Chapter 17

Cut-offs and Stephen

THESE dry details are of importance in one particular. They give me an
opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi's oddest peculiarities,—
that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long,
pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into
an average section of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred
miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same
being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide
intervals. The two hundred-mile stretch from Cairo northward to St. Louis
is by no means so crooked, that being a rocky country which the river
cannot cut much.
The water cuts the alluvial banks of the 'lower' river into deep horseshoe
curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to get ashore at one
extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or three quarters
of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple of hours while your steamer
was coming around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take
you aboard again. When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose
plantation is back in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has only to
watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some
dark night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short time a
miracle has happened: to wit, the whole Mississippi has taken possession of
that little ditch, and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank
(quadrupling its value), and that other party's formerly valuable plantation
finds itself away out yonder on a big island; the old watercourse around it
will soon shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of it, and down
goes its value to a fourth of its former worth. Watches are kept on those
narrow necks, at needful times, and if a man happens to be caught cutting a

ditch across them, the chances are all against his ever having another
opportunity to cut a ditch.

Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business. Once there
was a neck opposite Port Hudson, Louisiana, which was only half a mile
across, in its narrowest place. You could walk across there in fifteen
minutes; but if you made the journey around the cape on a raft, you traveled
thirty-five miles to accomplish the same thing. In 1722 the river darted
through that neck, deserted its old bed, and thus shortened itself thirty-five
miles. In the same way it shortened itself twenty-five miles at Black Hawk
Point in 1699. Below Red River Landing, Raccourci cut-off was made
(forty or fifty years ago, I think). This shortened the river twenty-eight
miles. In our day, if you travel by river from the southernmost of these three
cut-offs to the northernmost, you go only seventy miles. To do the same
thing a hundred and seventy-six years ago, one had to go a hundred and
fifty-eight miles!—shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance.
At some forgotten time in the past, cut-offs were made above Vidalia,
Louisiana; at island 92; at island 84; and at Hale's Point. These shortened
the river, in the aggregate, seventy-seven miles.

Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at
Hurricane Island; at island 100; at Napoleon, Arkansas; at Walnut Bend;
and at Council Bend. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, sixty-
seven miles. In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend, which
shortened the river ten miles or more.
Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve
hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It
was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one
thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven
miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three
miles at present.
Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and 'let
on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a
given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what
has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had

such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor 'development of
species,' either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague—vague.
Please observe:—
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi
has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of
a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who
is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,' just a
million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was
upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out
over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any
person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower
Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New
Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably
along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is
something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of
conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I have been
speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts to move. The water cleaves
the banks away like a knife. By the time the ditch has become twelve or
fifteen feet wide, the calamity is as good as accomplished, for no power on
earth can stop it now. When the width has reached a hundred yards, the
banks begin to peel off in slices half an acre wide. The current flowing
around the bend traveled formerly only five miles an hour; now it is
tremendously increased by the shortening of the distance. I was on board
the first boat that tried to go through the cut-off at American Bend, but we
did not get through. It was toward midnight, and a wild night it was—
thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain. It was estimated that the current in
the cut-off was making about fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twelve or
thirteen was the best our boat could do, even in tolerably slack water,
therefore perhaps we were foolish to try the cut-off. However, Mr. Brown
was ambitious, and he kept on trying. The eddy running up the bank, under
the 'point,' was about as swift as the current out in the middle; so we would
go flying up the shore like a lightning express train, get on a big head of
steam, and 'stand by for a surge' when we struck the current that was
whirling by the point. But all our preparations were useless. The instant the
current hit us it spun us around like a top, the water deluged the forecastle,
and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep his feet. The

next instant we were away down the river, clawing with might and main to
keep out of the woods. We tried the experiment four times. I stood on the
forecastle companion way to see. It was astonishing to observe how
suddenly the boat would spin around and turn tail the moment she emerged
from the eddy and the current struck her nose. The sounding concussion and
the quivering would have been about the same if she had come full speed
against a sand-bank. Under the lightning flashes one could see the
plantation cabins and the goodly acres tumble into the river; and the crash
they made was not a bad effort at thunder. Once, when we spun around, we
only missed a house about twenty feet, that had a light burning in the
window; and in the same instant that house went overboard. Nobody could
stay on our forecastle; the water swept across it in a torrent every time we
plunged athwart the current. At the end of our fourth effort we brought up in
the woods two miles below the cut-off; all the country there was
overflowed, of course. A day or two later the cut-off was three-quarters of a
mile wide, and boats passed up through it without much difficulty, and so
saved ten miles.

The old Raccourci cut-off reduced the river's length twenty-eight miles.
There used to be a tradition connected with it. It was said that a boat came
along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow the usual way,

the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made. It was a grisly,
hideous night, and all shapes were vague and distorted. The old bend had
already begun to fill up, and the boat got to running away from mysterious
reefs, and occasionally hitting one. The perplexed pilots fell to swearing,
and finally uttered the entirely unnecessary wish that they might never get
out of that place. As always happens in such cases, that particular prayer
was answered, and the others neglected. So to this day that phantom
steamer is still butting around in that deserted river, trying to find her way
out. More than one grave watchman has sworn to me that on drizzly, dismal
nights, he has glanced fearfully down that forgotten river as he passed the
head of the island, and seen the faint glow of the specter steamer's lights
drifting through the distant gloom, and heard the muffled cough of her
'scape-pipes and the plaintive cry of her leadsmen.

In the absence of further statistics, I beg to close this chapter with one
more reminiscence of 'Stephen.'
Most of the captains and pilots held Stephen's note for borrowed sums,
ranging from two hundred and fifty dollars upward. Stephen never paid one
of these notes, but he was very prompt and very zealous about renewing
them every twelve months.
Of course there came a time, at last, when Stephen could no longer
borrow of his ancient creditors; so he was obliged to lie in wait for new men
who did not know him. Such a victim was good-hearted, simple natured
young Yates (I use a fictitious name, but the real name began, as this one
does, with a Y). Young Yates graduated as a pilot, got a berth, and when the
month was ended and he stepped up to the clerk's office and received his

two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp new bills, Stephen was there! His
silvery tongue began to wag, and in a very little while Yates's two hundred
and fifty dollars had changed hands. The fact was soon known at pilot
headquarters, and the amusement and satisfaction of the old creditors were
large and generous. But innocent Yates never suspected that Stephen's
promise to pay promptly at the end of the week was a worthless one. Yates
called for his money at the stipulated time; Stephen sweetened him up and
put him off a week. He called then, according to agreement, and came away
sugar-coated again, but suffering under another postponement. So the thing
went on. Yates haunted Stephen week after week, to no purpose, and at last
gave it up. And then straightway Stephen began to haunt Yates! Wherever
Yates appeared, there was the inevitable Stephen. And not only there, but
beaming with affection and gushing with apologies for not being able to
pay. By and by, whenever poor Yates saw him coming, he would turn and
fly, and drag his company with him, if he had company; but it was of no
use; his debtor would run him down and corner him. Panting and red-faced,
Stephen would come, with outstretched hands and eager eyes, invade the
conversation, shake both of Yates's arms loose in their sockets, and begin—

'My, what a race I've had! I saw you didn't see me, and so I clapped on all
steam for fear I'd miss you entirely. And here you are! there, just stand so,
and let me look at you! just the same old noble countenance.' [To Yates's
friend:] 'Just look at him! Look at him! Ain't it just good to look at him!
ain't it now? Ain't he just a picture! Some call him a picture; I call him a
panorama! That's what he is—an entire panorama. And now I'm reminded!
How I do wish I could have seen you an hour earlier! For twenty-four hours
I've been saving up that two hundred and fifty dollars for you; been looking
for you everywhere. I waited at the Planter's from six yesterday evening till
two o'clock this morning, without rest or food; my wife says, “Where have
you been all night?” I said, “This debt lies heavy on my mind.” She says,
“In all my days I never saw a man take a debt to heart the way you do.” I
said, “It's my nature; how can I change it?” She says, “Well, do go to bed

and get some rest.” I said, “Not till that poor, noble young man has got his
money.” So I set up all night, and this morning out I shot, and the first man
I struck told me you had shipped on the “Grand Turk” and gone to New
Orleans. Well, sir, I had to lean up against a building and cry. So help me
goodness, I couldn't help it. The man that owned the place come out
cleaning up with a rag, and said he didn't like to have people cry against his
building, and then it seemed to me that the whole world had turned against
me, and it wasn't any use to live any more; and coming along an hour ago,
suffering no man knows what agony, I met Jim Wilson and paid him the
two hundred and fifty dollars on account; and to think that here you are,
now, and I haven't got a cent! But as sure as I am standing here on this
ground on this particular brick,—there, I've scratched a mark on the brick to
remember it by,—I'll borrow that money and pay it over to you at twelve
o'clock sharp, tomorrow! Now, stand so; let me look at you just once more.'
And so on. Yates's life became a burden to him. He could not escape his
debtor and his debtor's awful sufferings on account of not being able to pay.
He dreaded to show himself in the street, lest he should find Stephen lying
in wait for him at the corner.
Bogart's billiard saloon was a great resort for pilots in those days. They
met there about as much to exchange river news as to play. One morning
Yates was there; Stephen was there, too, but kept out of sight. But by and
by, when about all the pilots had arrived who were in town, Stephen
suddenly appeared in the midst, and rushed for Yates as for a long-lost
brother.
'Oh, I am so glad to see you! Oh my soul, the sight of you is such a
comfort to my eyes! Gentlemen, I owe all of you money; among you I owe
probably forty thousand dollars. I want to pay it; I intend to pay it every last
cent of it. You all know, without my telling you, what sorrow it has cost me
to remain so long under such deep obligations to such patient and generous
friends; but the sharpest pang I suffer—by far the sharpest—is from the
debt I owe to this noble young man here; and I have come to this place this
morning especially to make the announcement that I have at last found a
method whereby I can pay off all my debts! And most especially I wanted
him to be here when I announced it. Yes, my faithful friend,—my
benefactor, I've found the method! I've found the method to pay off all my
debts, and you'll get your money!' Hope dawned in Yates's eye; then

Stephen, beaming benignantly, and placing his hand upon Yates's head,
added, 'I am going to pay them off in alphabetical order!'

Then he turned and disappeared. The full significance of Stephen's
'method' did not dawn upon the perplexed and musing crowd for some two
minutes; and then Yates murmured with a sigh—
'Well, the Y's stand a gaudy chance. He won't get any further than the C's
in this world, and I reckon that after a good deal of eternity has wasted

away in the next one, I'll still be referred to up there as “that poor, ragged
pilot that came here from St. Louis in the early days!”

Chapter 18

I Take a Few Extra Lessons

DURING the two or two and a half years of my apprenticeship, I served
under many pilots, and had experience of many kinds of steamboatmen and
many varieties of steamboats; for it was not always convenient for Mr.
Bixby to have me with him, and in such cases he sent me with somebody
else. I am to this day profiting somewhat by that experience; for in that
brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about
all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction,
biography, or history. The fact is daily borne in upon me, that the average
shore-employment requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this
sort of an education. When I say I am still profiting by this thing, I do not
mean that it has constituted me a judge of men—no, it has not done that; for
judges of men are born, not made. My profit is various in kind and degree;
but the feature of it which I value most is the zest which that early
experience has given to my later reading. When I find a well-drawn
character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest
in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.
The figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of that
vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer 'Pennsylvania'—the man
referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome.
He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced,
ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant.
I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart. No matter
how good a time I might have been having with the off-watch below, and
no matter how high my spirits might be when I started aloft, my soul
became lead in my body the moment I approached the pilot-house.

I still remember the first time I ever entered the presence of that man.
The boat had backed out from St. Louis and was 'straightening down;' I
ascended to the pilot-house in high feather, and very proud to be semi-
officially a member of the executive family of so fast and famous a boat.
Brown was at the wheel. I paused in the middle of the room, all fixed to
make my bow, but Brown did not look around. I thought he took a furtive
glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but as not even this notice was
repeated, I judged I had been mistaken. By this time he was picking his way
among some dangerous 'breaks' abreast the woodyards; therefore it would
not be proper to interrupt him; so I stepped softly to the high bench and
took a seat.
There was silence for ten minutes; then my new boss turned and
inspected me deliberately and painstakingly from head to heel for about—
as it seemed to me—a quarter of an hour. After which he removed his
countenance and I saw it no more for some seconds; then it came around
once more, and this question greeted me—
'Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?'
'Yes, sir.'
After this there was a pause and another inspection. Then—

'What's your name?'
I told him. He repeated it after me. It was probably the only thing he ever
forgot; for although I was with him many months he never addressed
himself to me in any other way than 'Here!' and then his command
followed.
'Where was you born?'
'In Florida, Missouri.'
A pause. Then—
'Dern sight better staid there!'
By means of a dozen or so of pretty direct questions, he pumped my
family history out of me.
The leads were going now, in the first crossing. This interrupted the
inquest. When the leads had been laid in, he resumed—
'How long you been on the river?'

I told him. After a pause—
'Where'd you get them shoes?'
I gave him the information.
'Hold up your foot!'
I did so. He stepped back, examined the shoe minutely and
contemptuously, scratching his head thoughtfully, tilting his high sugar-loaf
hat well forward to facilitate the operation, then ejaculated, 'Well, I'll be dod
derned!' and returned to his wheel.

What occasion there was to be dod derned about it is a thing which is still
as much of a mystery to me now as it was then. It must have been all of
fifteen minutes—fifteen minutes of dull, homesick silence—before that
long horse-face swung round upon me again—and then, what a change! It
was as red as fire, and every muscle in it was working. Now came this
shriek—

'Here!—You going to set there all day?'
I lit in the middle of the floor, shot there by the electric suddenness of the
surprise. As soon as I could get my voice I said, apologetically:—'I have
had no orders, sir.'
'You've had no orders! My, what a fine bird we are! We must have
orders! Our father was a gentleman—owned slaves—and we've been to
school. Yes, we are a gentleman, too, and got to have orders! orders, is it?
Orders is what you want! Dod dern my skin, i'll learn you to swell yourself
up and blow around here about your dod-derned orders! G'way from the
wheel!' (I had approached it without knowing it.)
I moved back a step or two, and stood as in a dream, all my senses
stupefied by this frantic assault.
'What you standing there for? Take that ice-pitcher down to the texas-
tender-come, move along, and don't you be all day about it!'
The moment I got back to the pilot-house, Brown said—
'Here! What was you doing down there all this time?'
'I couldn't find the texas-tender; I had to go all the way to the pantry.'
'Derned likely story! Fill up the stove.'
I proceeded to do so. He watched me like a cat. Presently he shouted—

'Put down that shovel! Deadest numskull I ever saw—ain't even got sense
enough to load up a stove.'
All through the watch this sort of thing went on. Yes, and the subsequent
watches were much like it, during a stretch of months. As I have said, I
soon got the habit of coming on duty with dread. The moment I was in the
presence, even in the darkest night, I could feel those yellow eyes upon me,
and knew their owner was watching for a pretext to spit out some venom on
me. Preliminarily he would say—
'Here! Take the wheel.'
Two minutes later—
'Where in the nation you going to? Pull her down! pull her down!'
After another moment—

'Say! You going to hold her all day? Let her go—meet her! meet her!'
Then he would jump from the bench, snatch the wheel from me, and
meet her himself, pouring out wrath upon me all the time.
George Ritchie was the other pilot's cub. He was having good times now;
for his boss, George Ealer, was as kindhearted as Brown wasn't. Ritchie had
steeled for Brown the season before; consequently he knew exactly how to
entertain himself and plague me, all by the one operation. Whenever I took
the wheel for a moment on Ealer's watch, Ritchie would sit back on the
bench and play Brown, with continual ejaculations of 'Snatch her! snatch
her! Derndest mud-cat I ever saw!' 'Here! Where you going now? Going to
run over that snag?' 'Pull her down! Don't you hear me? Pull her down!'
'There she goes! Just as I expected! I told you not to cramp that reef. G'way
from the wheel!'
So I always had a rough time of it, no matter whose watch it was; and
sometimes it seemed to me that Ritchie's good-natured badgering was pretty
nearly as aggravating as Brown's dead-earnest nagging.
I often wanted to kill Brown, but this would not answer. A cub had to
take everything his boss gave, in the way of vigorous comment and
criticism; and we all believed that there was a United States law making it a
penitentiary offense to strike or threaten a pilot who was on duty. However,
I could imagine myself killing Brown; there was no law against that; and
that was the thing I used always to do the moment I was abed. Instead of
going over my river in my mind as was my duty, I threw business aside for
pleasure, and killed Brown. I killed Brown every night for months; not in
old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones;—ways that
were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastliness of
situation and environment.

Brown was always watching for a pretext to find fault; and if he could
find no plausible pretext, he would invent one. He would scold you for
shaving a shore, and for not shaving it; for hugging a bar, and for not
hugging it; for 'pulling down' when not invited, and for not pulling down
when not invited; for firing up without orders, and for waiting for orders. In
a word, it was his invariable rule to find fault with everything you did; and
another invariable rule of his was to throw all his remarks (to you) into the
form of an insult.
One day we were approaching New Madrid, bound down and heavily
laden. Brown was at one side of the wheel, steering; I was at the other,
standing by to 'pull down' or 'shove up.' He cast a furtive glance at me every
now and then. I had long ago learned what that meant; viz., he was trying to
invent a trap for me. I wondered what shape it was going to take. By and by
he stepped back from the wheel and said in his usual snarly way—
'Here!—See if you've got gumption enough to round her to.'
This was simply bound to be a success; nothing could prevent it; for he
had never allowed me to round the boat to before; consequently, no matter
how I might do the thing, he could find free fault with it. He stood back
there with his greedy eye on me, and the result was what might have been
foreseen: I lost my head in a quarter of a minute, and didn't know what I

was about; I started too early to bring the boat around, but detected a green
gleam of joy in Brown's eye, and corrected my mistake; I started around
once more while too high up, but corrected myself again in time; I made
other false moves, and still managed to save myself; but at last I grew so
confused and anxious that I tumbled into the very worst blunder of all—I
got too far down before beginning to fetch the boat around. Brown's chance
was come.

His face turned red with passion; he made one bound, hurled me across
the house with a sweep of his arm, spun the wheel down, and began to pour
out a stream of vituperation upon me which lasted till he was out of breath.
In the course of this speech he called me all the different kinds of hard

names he could think of, and once or twice I thought he was even going to
swear—but he didn't this time. 'Dod dern' was the nearest he ventured to the
luxury of swearing, for he had been brought up with a wholesome respect
for future fire and brimstone.
That was an uncomfortable hour; for there was a big audience on the
hurricane deck. When I went to bed that night, I killed Brown in seventeen
different ways—all of them new.

Chapter 19

Brown and I Exchange Compliments

Two trips later, I got into serious trouble. Brown was steering; I was
'pulling down.' My younger brother appeared on the hurricane deck, and
shouted to Brown to stop at some landing or other a mile or so below.
Brown gave no intimation that he had heard anything. But that was his way:
he never condescended to take notice of an under clerk. The wind was
blowing; Brown was deaf (although he always pretended he wasn't), and I
very much doubted if he had heard the order. If I had two heads, I would
have spoken; but as I had only one, it seemed judicious to take care of it; so
I kept still.
Presently, sure enough, we went sailing by that plantation. Captain
Klinefelter appeared on the deck, and said—
'Let her come around, sir, let her come around. Didn't Henry tell you to
land here?'
'No, sir!'
'I sent him up to do, it.'
'He did come up; and that's all the good it done, the dod-derned fool. He
never said anything.'
'Didn't you hear him?' asked the captain of me.
Of course I didn't want to be mixed up in this business, but there was no
way to avoid it; so I said—
'Yes, sir.'
I knew what Brown's next remark would be, before he uttered it; it was—
'Shut your mouth! you never heard anything of the kind.'
I closed my mouth according to instructions. An hour later, Henry
entered the pilot-house, unaware of what had been going on. He was a

thoroughly inoffensive boy, and I was sorry to see him come, for I knew
Brown would have no pity on him. Brown began, straightway—
'Here! why didn't you tell me we'd got to land at that plantation?'
'I did tell you, Mr. Brown.'
'It's a lie!'
I said—
'You lie, yourself. He did tell you.'
Brown glared at me in unaffected surprise; and for as much as a moment
he was entirely speechless; then he shouted to me—
'I'll attend to your case in half a minute!' then to Henry, 'And you leave
the pilot-house; out with you!'
It was pilot law, and must be obeyed. The boy started out, and even had
his foot on the upper step outside the door, when Brown, with a sudden
access of fury, picked up a ten-pound lump of coal and sprang after him; but
I was between, with a heavy stool, and I hit Brown a good honest blow
which stretched-him out.

I had committed the crime of crimes—I had lifted my hand against a pilot
on duty! I supposed I was booked for the penitentiary sure, and couldn't be
booked any surer if I went on and squared my long account with this person
while I had the chance; consequently I stuck to him and pounded him with
my fists a considerable time—I do not know how long, the pleasure of it
probably made it seem longer than it really was;—but in the end he
struggled free and jumped up and sprang to the wheel: a very natural
solicitude, for, all this time, here was this steamboat tearing down the river
at the rate of fifteen miles an hour and nobody at the helm! However, Eagle

Bend was two miles wide at this bank-full stage, and correspondingly long
and deep; and the boat was steering herself straight down the middle and
taking no chances. Still, that was only luck—a body might have found her
charging into the woods.

Perceiving, at a glance, that the 'Pennsylvania' was in no danger, Brown
gathered up the big spy-glass, war-club fashion, and ordered me out of the
pilot-house with more than Comanche bluster. But I was not afraid of him
now; so, instead of going, I tarried, and criticized his grammar; I reformed
his ferocious speeches for him, and put them into good English, calling his
attention to the advantage of pure English over the bastard dialect of the
Pennsylvanian collieries whence he was extracted. He could have done his
part to admiration in a cross-fire of mere vituperation, of course; but he was
not equipped for this species of controversy; so he presently laid aside his
glass and took the wheel, muttering and shaking his head; and I retired to
the bench. The racket had brought everybody to the hurricane deck, and I
trembled when I saw the old captain looking up from the midst of the
crowd. I said to myself, 'Now I am done for!'—For although, as a rule, he

was so fatherly and indulgent toward the boat's family, and so patient of
minor shortcomings, he could be stern enough when the fault was worth it.
I tried to imagine what he would do to a cub pilot who had been guilty of
such a crime as mine, committed on a boat guard-deep with costly freight
and alive with passengers. Our watch was nearly ended. I thought I would
go and hide somewhere till I got a chance to slide ashore. So I slipped out
of the pilot-house, and down the steps, and around to the texas door—and
was in the act of gliding within, when the captain confronted me! I dropped
my head, and he stood over me in silence a moment or two, then said
impressively—
'Follow me.'

I dropped into his wake; he led the way to his parlor in the forward end
of the texas. We were alone, now. He closed the after door; then moved
slowly to the forward one and closed that. He sat down; I stood before him.
He looked at me some little time, then said—
'So you have been fighting Mr. Brown?'
I answered meekly—
'Yes, sir.'
'Do you know that that is a very serious matter?'
'Yes, sir.'

'Are you aware that this boat was plowing down the river fully five
minutes with no one at the wheel?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Did you strike him first?'
'Yes, sir.'
'What with?'
'A stool, sir.'
'Hard?'
'Middling, sir.'
'Did it knock him down?'
'He—he fell, sir.'
'Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?'
'Yes, sir.'
'What did you do?'
'Pounded him, sir.'
'Pounded him?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Did you pound him much?—that is, severely?'
'One might call it that, sir, maybe.'
'I'm deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that. You have
been guilty of a great crime; and don't you ever be guilty of it again, on this
boat. But—lay for him ashore! Give him a good sound thrashing, do you
hear? I'll pay the expenses. Now go—and mind you, not a word of this to
anybody. Clear out with you!—you've been guilty of a great crime, you
whelp!'
I slid out, happy with the sense of a close shave and a mighty
deliverance; and I heard him laughing to himself and slapping his fat thighs
after I had closed his door.
When Brown came off watch he went straight to the captain, who was
talking with some passengers on the boiler deck, and demanded that I be
put ashore in New Orleans—and added—
'I'll never turn a wheel on this boat again while that cub stays.'

The captain said—
'But he needn't come round when you are on watch, Mr. Brown.
'I won't even stay on the same boat with him. One of us has got to go
ashore.'
'Very well,' said the captain, 'let it be yourself;' and resumed his talk with
the passengers.

During the brief remainder of the trip, I knew how an emancipated slave
feels; for I was an emancipated slave myself. While we lay at landings, I
listened to George Ealer's flute; or to his readings from his two bibles, that
is to say, Goldsmith and Shakespeare; or I played chess with him—and
would have beaten him sometimes, only he always took back his last move
and ran the game out differently.

Chapter 20

A Catastrophe

WE lay three days in New Orleans, but the captain did not succeed in
finding another pilot; so he proposed that I should stand a daylight watch,
and leave the night watches to George Ealer. But I was afraid; I had never
stood a watch of any sort by myself, and I believed I should be sure to get
into trouble in the head of some chute, or ground the boat in a near cut
through some bar or other. Brown remained in his place; but he would not
travel with me. So the captain gave me an order on the captain of the 'A. T.
Lacey,' for a passage to St. Louis, and said he would find a new pilot there
and my steersman's berth could then be resumed. The 'Lacey' was to leave a
couple of days after the 'Pennsylvania.'

The night before the 'Pennsylvania' left, Henry and I sat chatting on a
freight pile on the levee till midnight. The subject of the chat, mainly, was
one which I think we had not exploited before—steamboat disasters. One

was then on its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water which was to
make the steam which should cause it, was washing past some point fifteen
hundred miles up the river while we talked;—but it would arrive at the right
time and the right place. We doubted if persons not clothed with authority
were of much use in cases of disaster and attendant panic; still, they might
be of some use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fell within our
experience we would at least stick to the boat, and give such minor service
as chance might throw in the way. Henry remembered this, afterward, when
the disaster came, and acted accordingly.
The 'Lacey' started up the river two days behind the 'Pennsylvania.' We
touched at Greenville, Mississippi, a couple of days out, and somebody
shouted—
'The “Pennsylvania” is blown up at Ship Island, and a hundred and fifty
lives lost!'
At Napoleon, Arkansas, the same evening, we got an extra, issued by a
Memphis paper, which gave some particulars. It mentioned my brother, and
said he was not hurt.
Further up the river we got a later extra. My brother was again
mentioned; but this time as being hurt beyond help. We did not get full
details of the catastrophe until we reached Memphis. This is the sorrowful
story—

It was six o'clock on a hot summer morning. The 'Pennsylvania' was
creeping along, north of Ship Island, about sixty miles below Memphis on a
half-head of steam, towing a wood-flat which was fast being emptied.
George Ealer was in the pilot-house-alone, I think; the second engineer and
a striker had the watch in the engine room; the second mate had the watch
on deck; George Black, Mr. Wood, and my brother, clerks, were asleep, as
were also Brown and the head engineer, the carpenter, the chief mate, and
one striker; Captain Klinefelter was in the barber's chair, and the barber was
preparing to shave him. There were a good many cabin passengers aboard,
and three or four hundred deck passengers—so it was said at the time—and
not very many of them were astir. The wood being nearly all out of the flat
now, Ealer rang to 'come ahead' full steam, and the next moment four of the
eight boilers exploded with a thunderous crash, and the whole forward third
of the boat was hoisted toward the sky! The main part of the mass, with the
chimneys, dropped upon the boat again, a mountain of riddled and chaotic
rubbish—and then, after a little, fire broke out.

Many people were flung to considerable distances, and fell in the river;
among these were Mr. Wood and my brother, and the carpenter. The
carpenter was still stretched upon his mattress when he struck the water
seventy-five feet from the boat. Brown, the pilot, and George Black, chief
clerk, were never seen or heard of after the explosion. The barber's chair,
with Captain Klinefelter in it and unhurt, was left with its back overhanging
vacancy—everything forward of it, floor and all, had disappeared; and the
stupefied barber, who was also unhurt, stood with one toe projecting over
space, still stirring his lather unconsciously, and saying, not a word.

When George Ealer saw the chimneys plunging aloft in front of him, he
knew what the matter was; so he muffled his face in the lapels of his coat,
and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protection in its place so
that no steam could get to his nose or mouth. He had ample time to attend to
these details while he was going up and returning. He presently landed on
top of the unexploded boilers, forty feet below the former pilot-house,
accompanied by his wheel and a rain of other stuff, and enveloped in a
cloud of scalding steam. All of the many who breathed that steam, died;
none escaped. But Ealer breathed none of it. He made his way to the free air
as quickly as he could; and when the steam cleared away he returned and
climbed up on the boilers again, and patiently hunted out each and every
one of his chessmen and the several joints of his flute.

By this time the fire was beginning to threaten. Shrieks and groans filled
the air. A great many persons had been scalded, a great many crippled; the
explosion had driven an iron crowbar through one man's body—I think they
said he was a priest. He did not die at once, and his sufferings were very
dreadful. A young French naval cadet, of fifteen, son of a French admiral,

was fearfully scalded, but bore his tortures manfully. Both mates were badly
scalded, but they stood to their posts, nevertheless. They drew the wood-
boat aft, and they and the captain fought back the frantic herd of frightened
immigrants till the wounded could be brought there and placed in safety
first.
When Mr. Wood and Henry fell in the water, they struck out for shore,
which was only a few hundred yards away; but Henry presently said he
believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!), and therefore
would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded. So they parted,
and Henry returned.
By this time the fire was making fierce headway, and several persons
who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging piteously for help. All
efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless; so the buckets were presently
thrown aside and the officers fell-to with axes and tried to cut the prisoners
out. A striker was one of the captives; he said he was not injured, but could
not free himself; and when he saw that the fire was likely to drive away the
workers, he begged that some one would shoot him, and thus save him from
the more dreadful death. The fire did drive the axmen away, and they had to
listen, helpless, to this poor fellow's supplications till the flames ended his
miseries.

The fire drove all into the wood-flat that could be accommodated there; it
was cut adrift, then, and it and the burning steamer floated down the river
toward Ship Island. They moored the flat at the head of the island, and
there, unsheltered from the blazing sun, the half-naked occupants had to
remain, without food or stimulants, or help for their hurts, during the rest of
the day. A steamer came along, finally, and carried the unfortunates to
Memphis, and there the most lavish assistance was at once forthcoming. By
this time Henry was insensible. The physicians examined his injuries and
saw that they were fatal, and naturally turned their main attention to patients
who could be saved.

Forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a great
public hall, and among these was Henry. There the ladies of Memphis came
every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies of all kinds, and
there they remained and nursed the wounded. All the physicians stood
watches there, and all the medical students; and the rest of the town
furnished money, or whatever else was wanted. And Memphis knew how to
do all these things well; for many a disaster like the 'Pennsylvania's' had
happened near her doors, and she was experienced, above all other cities on
the river, in the gracious office of the Good Samaritan.'
The sight I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to me.
Two long rows of prostrate forms—more than forty, in all—and every face
and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton. It was a gruesome spectacle.
I watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy experience it
was. There was one daily incident which was peculiarly depressing: this
was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart. It was done in order that
the morale of the other patients might not be injuriously affected by seeing
one of their number in the death-agony. The fated one was always carried
out with as little stir as possible, and the stretcher was always hidden from
sight by a wall of assistants; but no matter: everybody knew what that
cluster of bent forms, with its muffled step and its slow movement meant;
and all eyes watched it wistfully, and a shudder went abreast of it like a
wave.

I saw many poor fellows removed to the 'death-room,' and saw them no
more afterward. But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than once.
His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed in linseed oil
and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human. He was often
out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave and shout and
sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion, his disordered
imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into a forecastle,
and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and he would come to a
sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves, hump yourselves, you
petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to be all day getting that
hatful of freight out?' and supplement this explosion with a firmament-
obliterating irruption or profanity which nothing could stay or stop till his
crater was empty. And now and then while these frenzies possessed him, he
would tear off handfuls of the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It

was horrible. It was bad for the others, of course—this noise and these
exhibitions; so the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But, in
his mind or out of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed
by that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it. He
suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines and
in his water—so he ceased from putting either to his lips. Once, when he
had been without water during two sweltering days, he took the dipper in
his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid, and the misery of his thirst,
tempted him almost beyond his strength; but he mastered himself and threw
it away, and after that he allowed no more to be brought near him. Three
times I saw him carried to the death-room, insensible and supposed to be
dying; but each time he revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be
taken back. He lived to be mate of a steamboat again.
But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive.
Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes that go to
constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated judgment and
trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the newspapers had said in the
beginning, his hurts were past help. On the evening of the sixth day his
wandering mind busied itself with matters far away, and his nerveless
fingers 'picked at his coverlet.' His hour had struck; we bore him to the
death-room, poor boy.

Chapter 21

A Section in My Biography

IN due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged. I dropped
into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent work gave
place to steady and protracted engagements. Time drifted smoothly and
prosperously on, and I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow
the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was
ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my
occupation was gone.
I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada;
next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner, in California; next, a
reporter in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich
Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next, an
instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, I became a
scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New
England.
In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years
that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a pilot-
house.
Let us resume, now.

Chapter 22

I Return to My Muttons

AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the
river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I
resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer
to 'take him down,' and started westward about the middle of April.
As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing, I took some
thought as to methods of procedure. I reflected that if I were recognized, on
the river, I should not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy
around, as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it was the custom of
steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the
most picturesque and admirable lies, and put the sophisticated friend off
with dull and ineffectual facts: so I concluded, that, from a business point of
view, it would be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names.
The idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother; for although Smith,
Jones, and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion
to remember them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are
wanted. How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new alias in mind? This
is a great mystery. I was innocent; and yet was seldom able to lay my hand
on my new name when it was needed; and it seemed to me that if I had had
a crime on my conscience to further confuse me, I could never have kept
the name by me at all.
We left per Pennsylvania Railroad, at 8 A.M. April 18.
'EVENING. Speaking of dress. Grace and picturesqueness drop gradually
out of it as one travels away from New York.'
I find that among my notes. It makes no difference which direction you
take, the fact remains the same. Whether you move north, south, east, or
west, no matter: you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have

come, by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that time
lacking in the costumes of the new passengers,—I do not mean of the
women alone, but of both sexes. It may be that carriage is at the bottom of
this thing; and I think it is; for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen in
the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best tailors and
dressmakers of New York; yet this has no perceptible effect upon the grand
fact: the educated eye never mistakes those people for New-Yorkers. No,
there is a godless grace, and snap, and style about a born and bred New-
Yorker which mere clothing cannot effect.
'APRIL 19. This morning, struck into the region of full goatees—
sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally.'

It was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and uncomely
fashion; it was like running suddenly across a forgotten acquaintance whom
you had supposed dead for a generation. The goatee extends over a wide
extent of country; and is accompanied by an iron-clad belief in Adam and
the biblical history of creation, which has not suffered from the assaults of
the scientists.

'AFTERNOON. At the railway stations the loafers carry both hands in
their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore, that one hand was
sometimes out of doors,—here, never. This is an important fact in
geography.'
If the loafers determined the character of a country, it would be still more
important, of course.
'Heretofore, all along, the station-loafer has been often observed to
scratch one shin with the other foot; here, these remains of activity are
wanting. This has an ominous look.'
By and by, we entered the tobacco-chewing region. Fifty years ago, the
tobacco-chewing region covered the Union. It is greatly restricted now.
Next, boots began to appear. Not in strong force, however. Later—away
down the Mississippi—they became the rule. They disappeared from other

sections of the Union with the mud; no doubt they will disappear from the
river villages, also, when proper pavements come in.
We reached St. Louis at ten o'clock at night. At the counter of the hotel I
tendered a hurriedly-invented fictitious name, with a miserable attempt at
careless ease. The clerk paused, and inspected me in the compassionate way
in which one inspects a respectable person who is found in doubtful
circumstances; then he said—
'It's all right; I know what sort of a room you want. Used to clerk at the
St. James, in New York.'

An unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career. We started to the
supper room, and met two other men whom I had known elsewhere. How
odd and unfair it is: wicked impostors go around lecturing under my Nom
De Guerre and nobody suspects them; but when an honest man attempts an
imposture, he is exposed at once.
One thing seemed plain: we must start down the river the next day, if
people who could not be deceived were going to crop up at this rate: an
unpalatable disappointment, for we had hoped to have a week in St. Louis.
The Southern was a good hotel, and we could have had a comfortable time
there. It is large, and well conducted, and its decorations do not make one
cry, as do those of the vast Palmer House, in Chicago. True, the billiard-
tables were of the Old Silurian Period, and the cues and balls of the Post-
Pliocene; but there was refreshment in this, not discomfort; for there is rest
and healing in the contemplation of antiquities.

The most notable absence observable in the billiard-room, was the
absence of the river man. If he was there he had taken in his sign, he was in
disguise. I saw there none of the swell airs and graces, and ostentatious
displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it, which used to

distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crowd in the bygone
days, in the thronged billiard-rooms of St. Louis. In those times, the
principal saloons were always populous with river men; given fifty players
present, thirty or thirty-five were likely to be from the river. But I suspected
that the ranks were thin now, and the steamboatmen no longer an
aristocracy. Why, in my time they used to call the 'barkeep' Bill, or Joe, or
Tom, and slap him on the shoulder; I watched for that. But none of these
people did it. Manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished
away in these twenty-one years.
When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers,
crying. Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Dexter,
Ferguson, Bascom, nor Thompson; but he answered to either of these that a
body found handy in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he
perceived that you meant him. He said—
'What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water?—drink this
slush?'
'Can't you drink it?'
'I could if I had some other water to wash it with.'
Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not
affected this water's mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries
would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent, bank-
caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre of land in
solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. If you will let your
glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as
Genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the
other good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly
wholesome. The one appeases hunger; the other, thirst. But the natives do
not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. When they
find an inch of mud in the bottom of a glass, they stir it up, and then take
the draught as they would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to
this batter, but once used to it he will prefer it to water. This is really the
case. It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for
all other purposes, except baptizing.
Next morning, we drove around town in the rain. The city seemed but
little changed. It was greatly changed, but it did not seem so; because in St.
Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can't persuade a new thing to look

new; the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your
hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size, since I was a resident
of it, and was now become a city of 400,000 inhabitants; still, in the solid
business parts, it looked about as it had looked formerly. Yet I am sure there
is not as much smoke in St. Louis now as there used to be. The smoke used
to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over the town, and hide the
sky from view. This shelter is very much thinner now; still, there is a
sufficiency of smoke there, I think. I heard no complaint.
However, on the outskirts changes were apparent enough; notably in
dwelling-house architecture. The fine new homes are noble and beautiful
and modern. They stand by themselves, too, with green lawns around them;
whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks, and
are all of one pattern, with windows all alike, set in an arched frame-work
of twisted stone; a sort of house which was handsome enough when it was
rarer.
There was another change—the Forest Park. This was new to me. It is
beautiful and very extensive, and has the excellent merit of having been
made mainly by nature. There are other parks, and fine ones, notably Tower
Grove and the Botanical Gardens; for St. Louis interested herself in such
improvements at an earlier day than did the most of our cities.
The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million
dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it. It was bitter
now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis, this solid
expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand into dim,
measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowed that
opportunity to go by. Why I should have allowed it to go by seems, of
course, foolish and inexplicable to-day, at a first glance; yet there were
reasons at the time to justify this course.
A Scotchman, Hon. Charles Augustus Murray, writing some forty-five or
fifty years ago, said—'The streets are narrow, ill paved and ill lighted.'
Those streets are narrow still, of course; many of them are ill paved yet; but
the reproach of ill lighting cannot be repeated, now. The 'Catholic New
Church' was the only notable building then, and Mr. Murray was
confidently called upon to admire it, with its 'species of Grecian portico,
surmounted by a kind of steeple, much too diminutive in its proportions,
and surmounted by sundry ornaments' which the unimaginative Scotchman

found himself 'quite unable to describe;' and therefore was grateful when a
German tourist helped him out with the exclamation—'By —, they look
exactly like bed-posts!' St. Louis is well equipped with stately and noble
public buildings now, and the little church, which the people used to be so
proud of, lost its importance a long time ago. Still, this would not surprise
Mr. Murray, if he could come back; for he prophesied the coming greatness
of St. Louis with strong confidence.
The further we drove in our inspection-tour, the more sensibly I realized
how the city had grown since I had seen it last; changes in detail became
steadily more apparent and frequent than at first, too: changes uniformly
evidencing progress, energy, prosperity.

But the change of changes was on the 'levee.' This time, a departure from
the rule. Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid
mile of wide-awake ones! This was melancholy, this was woeful. The
absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard-saloon
was explained. He was absent because he is no more. His occupation is
gone, his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd, he
grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous. Half a dozen lifeless
steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro fatigued with whiskey
stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts

of commerce used to contend!{footnote [Capt. Marryat, writing forty-five
years ago says: 'St. Louis has 20,000 inhabitants. The river abreast of the
town is crowded with steamboats, lying in two or three tiers.']} Here was
desolation, indeed.

'The old, old sea, as one in tears,
Comes murmuring, with foamy lips,
And knocking at the vacant piers,
Calls for his long-lost multitude of ships.'

The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it well and
completely. The mighty bridge, stretching along over our heads, had done
its share in the slaughter and spoliation. Remains of former steamboatmen
told me, with wan satisfaction, that the bridge doesn't pay. Still, it can be no

sufficient compensation to a corpse, to know that the dynamite that laid him
out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be.
The pavements along the river front were bad: the sidewalks were rather
out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud. All this was familiar and
satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays, and struggling throngs of men,
and mountains of freight, were gone; and Sabbath reigned in their stead.
The immemorial mile of cheap foul doggeries remained, but business was
dull with them; the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed,
and in their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes, some
drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep. St. Louis is a great and
prosperous and advancing city; but the river-edge of it seems dead past
resurrection.
Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years,
it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was
dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. Of course it is not
absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump
twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrasted with what it was in its
prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating may be called dead.
It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing the freight-trip to
New Orleans to less than a week. The railroads have killed the steamboat
passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats
consumed a week in doing; and the towing-fleets have killed the through-
freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river
at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition was out of the
question.
Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers. This is in the
hands—along the two thousand miles of river between St. Paul and New
Orleans—-of two or three close corporations well fortified with capital; and
by able and thoroughly business-like management and system, these make a
sufficiency of money out of what is left of the once prodigious
steamboating industry. I suppose that St. Louis and New Orleans have not
suffered materially by the change, but alas for the wood-yard man!

He used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked merchandise
stretched from the one city to the other, along the banks, and he sold
uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail; but all the scattering
boats that are left burn coal now, and the seldomest spectacle on the
Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile. Where now is the once wood-yard man?

Chapter 23

Traveling Incognito

MY idea was, to tarry a while in every town between St. Louis and New
Orleans. To do this, it would be necessary to go from place to place by the
short packet lines. It was an easy plan to make, and would have been an
easy one to follow, twenty years ago—but not now. There are wide intervals
between boats, these days.
I wanted to begin with the interesting old French settlements of St.
Genevieve and Kaskaskia, sixty miles below St. Louis. There was only one
boat advertised for that section—a Grand Tower packet. Still, one boat was
enough; so we went down to look at her. She was a venerable rack-heap,
and a fraud to boot; for she was playing herself for personal property,
whereas the good honest dirt was so thickly caked all over her that she was
righteously taxable as real estate. There are places in New England where
her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre. The
soil on her forecastle was quite good—the new crop of wheat was already
springing from the cracks in protected places. The companionway was of a
dry sandy character, and would have been well suited for grapes, with a
southern exposure and a little subsoiling. The soil of the boiler deck was
thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes. A colored boy was
on watch here—nobody else visible. We gathered from him that this calm
craft would go, as advertised, 'if she got her trip;' if she didn't get it, she
would wait for it.
'Has she got any of her trip?'
'Bless you, no, boss. She ain't unloadened, yit. She only come in dis
mawnin'.'

He was uncertain as to when she might get her trip, but thought it might
be to-morrow or maybe next day. This would not answer at all; so we had to
give up the novelty of sailing down the river on a farm. We had one more
arrow in our quiver: a Vicksburg packet, the 'Gold Dust,' was to leave at 5
P.M. We took passage in her for Memphis, and gave up the idea of stopping
off here and there, as being impracticable. She was neat, clean, and
comfortable. We camped on the boiler deck, and bought some cheap
literature to kill time with. The vender was a venerable Irishman with a

benevolent face and a tongue that worked easily in the socket, and from him
we learned that he had lived in St. Louis thirty-four years and had never
been across the river during that period. Then he wandered into a very
flowing lecture, filled with classic names and allusions, which was quite
wonderful for fluency until the fact became rather apparent that this was not
the first time, nor perhaps the fiftieth, that the speech had been delivered.
He was a good deal of a character, and much better company than the sappy
literature he was selling. A random remark, connecting Irishmen and beer,
brought this nugget of information out of him—

They don't drink it, sir. They can't drink it, sir. Give an Irishman lager for
a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the
beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him,
sir.'
At eight o'clock, promptly, we backed out and crossed the river. As we
crept toward the shore, in the thick darkness, a blinding glory of white
electric light burst suddenly from our forecastle, and lit up the water and the
warehouses as with a noon-day glare. Another big change, this—no more
flickering, smoky, pitch-dripping, ineffectual torch-baskets, now: their day
is past. Next, instead of calling out a score of hands to man the stage, a
couple of men and a hatful of steam lowered it from the derrick where it
was suspended, launched it, deposited it in just the right spot, and the whole
thing was over and done with before a mate in the olden time could have
got his profanity-mill adjusted to begin the preparatory services. Why this
new and simple method of handling the stages was not thought of when the
first steamboat was built, is a mystery which helps one to realize what a
dull-witted slug the average human being is.

We finally got away at two in the morning, and when I turned out at six,
we were rounding to at a rocky point where there was an old stone
warehouse—at any rate, the ruins of it; two or three decayed dwelling-
houses were near by, in the shelter of the leafy hills; but there were no
evidences of human or other animal life to be seen. I wondered if I had
forgotten the river; for I had no recollection whatever of this place; the
shape of the river, too, was unfamiliar; there was nothing in sight,
anywhere, that I could remember ever having seen before. I was surprised,
disappointed, and annoyed.
We put ashore a well-dressed lady and gentleman, and two well-dressed,
lady-like young girls, together with sundry Russia-leather bags. A strange
place for such folk! No carriage was waiting. The party moved off as if they
had not expected any, and struck down a winding country road afoot.
But the mystery was explained when we got under way again; for these
people were evidently bound for a large town which lay shut in behind a
tow-head (i.e., new island) a couple of miles below this landing. I couldn't

remember that town; I couldn't place it, couldn't call its name. So I lost part
of my temper. I suspected that it might be St. Genevieve—and so it proved
to be. Observe what this eccentric river had been about: it had built up this
huge useless tow-head directly in front of this town, cut off its river
communications, fenced it away completely, and made a 'country' town of
it. It is a fine old place, too, and deserved a better fate. It was settled by the
French, and is a relic of a time when one could travel from the mouths of
the Mississippi to Quebec and be on French territory and under French rule
all the way.

Presently I ascended to the hurricane deck and cast a longing glance
toward the pilot-house.

Chapter 24

My Incognito is Exploded

AFTER a close study of the face of the pilot on watch, I was satisfied
that I had never seen him before; so I went up there. The pilot inspected me;
I re-inspected the pilot. These customary preliminaries over, I sat down on
the high bench, and he faced about and went on with his work. Every detail
of the pilot-house was familiar to me, with one exception,—a large-
mouthed tube under the breast-board. I puzzled over that thing a
considerable time; then gave up and asked what it was for.
'To hear the engine-bells through.'
It was another good contrivance which ought to have been invented half
a century sooner. So I was thinking, when the pilot asked—
'Do you know what this rope is for?'
I managed to get around this question, without committing myself.
'Is this the first time you were ever in a pilot-house?'
I crept under that one.
'Where are you from?'
'New England.'
'First time you have ever been West?'
I climbed over this one.
'If you take an interest in such things, I can tell you what all these things
are for.'
I said I should like it.
'This,' putting his hand on a backing-bell rope, 'is to sound the fire-alarm;
this,' putting his hand on a go-ahead bell, 'is to call the texas-tender; this

one,' indicating the whistle-lever, 'is to call the captain'—and so he went on,
touching one object after another, and reeling off his tranquil spool of lies.

I had never felt so like a passenger before. I thanked him, with emotion,
for each new fact, and wrote it down in my note-book. The pilot warmed to
his opportunity, and proceeded to load me up in the good old-fashioned
way. At times I was afraid he was going to rupture his invention; but it
always stood the strain, and he pulled through all right. He drifted, by easy
stages, into revealments of the river's marvelous eccentricities of one sort
and another, and backed them up with some pretty gigantic illustrations. For
instance—
'Do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder? well,
when I first came on the river, that was a solid ridge of rock, over sixty feet
high and two miles long. All washed away but that.' [This with a sigh.]
I had a mighty impulse to destroy him, but it seemed to me that killing, in
any ordinary way, would be too good for him.

Once, when an odd-looking craft, with a vast coal-scuttle slanting aloft
on the end of a beam, was steaming by in the distance, he indifferently drew
attention to it, as one might to an object grown wearisome through
familiarity, and observed that it was an 'alligator boat.'
'An alligator boat? What's it for?'
'To dredge out alligators with.'
'Are they so thick as to be troublesome?'
'Well, not now, because the Government keeps them down. But they used
to be. Not everywhere; but in favorite places, here and there, where the
river is wide and shoal-like Plum Point, and Stack Island, and so on—
places they call alligator beds.'
'Did they actually impede navigation?'

'Years ago, yes, in very low water; there was hardly a trip, then, that we
didn't get aground on alligators.'
It seemed to me that I should certainly have to get out my tomahawk.
However, I restrained myself and said—
'It must have been dreadful.'
'Yes, it was one of the main difficulties about piloting. It was so hard to
tell anything about the water; the damned things shift around so—never lie
still five minutes at a time. You can tell a wind-reef, straight off, by the look
of it; you can tell a break; you can tell a sand-reef—that's all easy; but an
alligator reef doesn't show up, worth anything. Nine times in ten you can't
tell where the water is; and when you do see where it is, like as not it ain't
there when you get there, the devils have swapped around so, meantime. Of
course there were some few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly
as well as they could of any other kind, but they had to have natural talent
for it; it wasn't a thing a body could learn, you had to be born with it. Let
me see: there was Ben Thornburg, and Beck Jolly, and Squire Bell, and
Horace Bixby, and Major Downing, and John Stevenson, and Billy Gordon,
and Jim Brady, and George Ealer, and Billy Youngblood—all A-1 alligator
pilots. They could tell alligator water as far as another Christian could tell
whiskey. Read it?—Ah, couldn't they, though! I only wish I had as many
dollars as they could read alligator water a mile and a half off. Yes, and it
paid them to do it, too. A good alligator pilot could always get fifteen
hundred dollars a month. Nights, other people had to lay up for alligators,
but those fellows never laid up for alligators; they never laid up for
anything but fog. They could smell the best alligator water it was said; I
don't know whether it was so or not, and I think a body's got his hands full
enough if he sticks to just what he knows himself, without going around
backing up other people's say-so's, though there's a plenty that ain't
backward about doing it, as long as they can roust out something wonderful
to tell. Which is not the style of Robert Styles, by as much as three fathom
—maybe quarter-less.'

[My! Was this Rob Styles?—This mustached and stately figure?-A slim
enough cub, in my time. How he has improved in comeliness in five-and-
twenty year and in the noble art of inflating his facts.] After these musings,
I said aloud—
'I should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn't have done much
good, because they could come back again right away.'
'If you had had as much experience of alligators as I have, you wouldn't
talk like that. You dredge an alligator once and he's convinced. It's the last
you hear of him. He wouldn't come back for pie. If there's one thing that an
alligator is more down on than another, it's being dredged. Besides, they
were not simply shoved out of the way; the most of the scoopful were
scooped aboard; they emptied them into the hold; and when they had got a
trip, they took them to Orleans to the Government works.'
'What for?'
'Why, to make soldier-shoes out of their hides. All the Government shoes
are made of alligator hide. It makes the best shoes in the world. They last
five years, and they won't absorb water. The alligator fishery is a
Government monopoly. All the alligators are Government property—just
like the live-oaks. You cut down a live-oak, and Government fines you fifty
dollars; you kill an alligator, and up you go for misprision of treason—
lucky duck if they don't hang you, too. And they will, if you're a Democrat.
The buzzard is the sacred bird of the South, and you can't touch him; the
alligator is the sacred bird of the Government, and you've got to let him
alone.'

'Do you ever get aground on the alligators now?'
'Oh, no! it hasn't happened for years.'
'Well, then, why do they still keep the alligator boats in service?'
'Just for police duty—nothing more. They merely go up and down now
and then. The present generation of alligators know them as easy as a
burglar knows a roundsman; when they see one coming, they break camp
and go for the woods.'

After rounding-out and finishing-up and polishing-off the alligator
business, he dropped easily and comfortably into the historical vein, and
told of some tremendous feats of half-a-dozen old-time steamboats of his
acquaintance, dwelling at special length upon a certain extraordinary
performance of his chief favorite among this distinguished fleet—and then
adding—

'That boat was the “Cyclone,”—last trip she ever made—she sunk, that
very trip—captain was Tom Ballou, the most immortal liar that ever I
struck. He couldn't ever seem to tell the truth, in any kind of weather. Why,
he would make you fairly shudder. He was the most scandalous liar! I left
him, finally; I couldn't stand it. The proverb says, “like master, like man;”
and if you stay with that kind of a man, you'll come under suspicion by and
by, just as sure as you live. He paid first-class wages; but said I, What's
wages when your reputation's in danger? So I let the wages go, and froze to
my reputation. And I've never regretted it. Reputation's worth everything,
ain't it? That's the way I look at it. He had more selfish organs than any
seven men in the world—all packed in the stern-sheets of his skull, of
course, where they belonged. They weighed down the back of his head so
that it made his nose tilt up in the air. People thought it was vanity, but it
wasn't, it was malice. If you only saw his foot, you'd take him to be
nineteen feet high, but he wasn't; it was because his foot was out of
drawing. He was intended to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if his foot was
made first, but he didn't get there; he was only five feet ten. That's what he
was, and that's what he is. You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to
the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.
That “Cyclone” was a rattler to go, and the sweetest thing to steer that ever
walked the waters. Set her amidships, in a big river, and just let her go; it
was all you had to do. She would hold herself on a star all night, if you let
her alone. You couldn't ever feel her rudder. It wasn't any more labor to
steer her than it is to count the Republican vote in a South Carolina election.
One morning, just at daybreak, the last trip she ever made, they took her
rudder aboard to mend it; I didn't know anything about it; I backed her out
from the wood-yard and went a-weaving down the river all serene. When I
had gone about twenty-three miles, and made four horribly crooked
crossings—'
'Without any rudder?'
'Yes—old Capt. Tom appeared on the roof and began to find fault with
me for running such a dark night—'
'Such a dark night?—Why, you said—'
'Never mind what I said,—'twas as dark as Egypt now, though pretty
soon the moon began to rise, and—'

'You mean the sun—because you started out just at break of—look here!
Was this before you quitted the captain on account of his lying, or—'
'It was before—oh, a long time before. And as I was saying, he—'
'But was this the trip she sunk, or was—'
'Oh, no!—months afterward. And so the old man, he—'
'Then she made two last trips, because you said—'
He stepped back from the wheel, swabbing away his perspiration, and
said—

'Here!' (calling me by name), 'you take her and lie a while—you're
handier at it than I am. Trying to play yourself for a stranger and an
innocent!—why, I knew you before you had spoken seven words; and I
made up my mind to find out what was your little game. It was to draw me

out. Well, I let you, didn't I? Now take the wheel and finish the watch; and
next time play fair, and you won't have to work your passage.'
Thus ended the fictitious-name business. And not six hours out from St.
Louis! but I had gained a privilege, any way, for I had been itching to get
my hands on the wheel, from the beginning. I seemed to have forgotten the
river, but I hadn't forgotten how to steer a steamboat, nor how to enjoy it,
either.

Chapter 25

From Cairo to Hickman

THE scenery, from St. Louis to Cairo—two hundred miles—is varied
and beautiful. The hills were clothed in the fresh foliage of spring now, and
were a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing between. Our
trip began auspiciously, with a perfect day, as to breeze and sunshine, and
our boat threw the miles out behind her with satisfactory despatch.

We found a railway intruding at Chester, Illinois; Chester has also a
penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on. At Grand Tower, too, there
was a railway; and another at Cape Girardeau. The former town gets its
name from a huge, squat pillar of rock, which stands up out of the water on
the Missouri side of the river—a piece of nature's fanciful handiwork—and
is one of the most picturesque features of the scenery of that region. For
nearer or remoter neighbors, the Tower has the Devil's Bake Oven—so
called, perhaps, because it does not powerfully resemble anybody else's
bake oven; and the Devil's Tea Table—this latter a great smooth-surfaced
mass of rock, with diminishing wine-glass stem, perched some fifty or sixty
feet above the river, beside a beflowered and garlanded precipice, and
sufficiently like a tea-table to answer for anybody, Devil or Christian. Away
down the river we have the Devil's Elbow and the Devil's Race-course, and
lots of other property of his which I cannot now call to mind.
The Town of Grand Tower was evidently a busier place than it had been
in old times, but it seemed to need some repairs here and there, and a new
coat of whitewash all over. Still, it was pleasant to me to see the old coat
once more. 'Uncle' Mumford, our second officer, said the place had been
suffering from high water, and consequently was not looking its best now.
But he said it was not strange that it didn't waste white-wash on itself, for
more lime was made there, and of a better quality, than anywhere in the
West; and added—'On a dairy farm you never can get any milk for your
coffee, nor any sugar for it on a sugar plantation; and it is against sense to
go to a lime town to hunt for white-wash.' In my own experience I knew the
first two items to be true; and also that people who sell candy don't care for
candy; therefore there was plausibility in Uncle Mumford's final
observation that 'people who make lime run more to religion than
whitewash.' Uncle Mumford said, further, that Grand Tower was a great
coaling center and a prospering place.

Cape Girardeau is situated on a hillside, and makes a handsome
appearance. There is a great Jesuit school for boys at the foot of the town by
the river. Uncle Mumford said it had as high a reputation for thoroughness
as any similar institution in Missouri! There was another college higher up
on an airy summit—a bright new edifice, picturesquely and peculiarly
towered and pinnacled—a sort of gigantic casters, with the cruets all
complete. Uncle Mumford said that Cape Girardeau was the Athens of
Missouri, and contained several colleges besides those already mentioned;
and all of them on a religious basis of one kind or another. He directed my
attention to what he called the 'strong and pervasive religious look of the
town,' but I could not see that it looked more religious than the other hill

towns with the same slope and built of the same kind of bricks. Partialities
often make people see more than really exists.
Uncle Mumford has been thirty years a mate on the river. He is a man of
practical sense and a level head; has observed; has had much experience of
one sort and another; has opinions; has, also, just a perceptible dash of
poetry in his composition, an easy gift of speech, a thick growl in his voice,
and an oath or two where he can get at them when the exigencies of his
office require a spiritual lift. He is a mate of the blessed old-time kind; and
goes gravely damning around, when there is work to the fore, in a way to
mellow the ex-steamboatman's heart with sweet soft longings for the
vanished days that shall come no more. 'Git up there you! Going to be all
day? Why d'n't you say you was petrified in your hind legs, before you
shipped!'
He is a steady man with his crew; kind and just, but firm; so they like
him, and stay with him. He is still in the slouchy garb of the old generation
of mates; but next trip the Anchor Line will have him in uniform—a natty
blue naval uniform, with brass buttons, along with all the officers of the line
—and then he will be a totally different style of scenery from what he is
now.
Uniforms on the Mississippi! It beats all the other changes put together,
for surprise. Still, there is another surprise—that it was not made fifty years
ago. It is so manifestly sensible, that it might have been thought of earlier,
one would suppose. During fifty years, out there, the innocent passenger in
need of help and information, has been mistaking the mate for the cook, and
the captain for the barber—and being roughly entertained for it, too. But his
troubles are ended now. And the greatly improved aspect of the boat's staff
is another advantage achieved by the dress-reform period.
Steered down the bend below Cape Girardeau. They used to call it
'Steersman's Bend;' plain sailing and plenty of water in it, always; about the
only place in the Upper River that a new cub was allowed to take a boat
through, in low water.
Thebes, at the head of the Grand Chain, and Commerce at the foot of it,
were towns easily rememberable, as they had not undergone conspicuous
alteration. Nor the Chain, either—in the nature of things; for it is a chain of
sunken rocks admirably arranged to capture and kill steamboats on bad
nights. A good many steamboat corpses lie buried there, out of sight; among

the rest my first friend the 'Paul Jones;' she knocked her bottom out, and
went down like a pot, so the historian told me—Uncle Mumford. He said
she had a gray mare aboard, and a preacher. To me, this sufficiently
accounted for the disaster; as it did, of course, to Mumford, who added—
'But there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such a matter,
and call it superstition. But you will always notice that they are people who
have never traveled with a gray mare and a preacher. I went down the river
once in such company. We grounded at Bloody Island; we grounded at
Hanging Dog; we grounded just below this same Commerce; we jolted
Beaver Dam Rock; we hit one of the worst breaks in the 'Graveyard' behind
Goose Island; we had a roustabout killed in a fight; we burnt a boiler; broke
a shaft; collapsed a flue; and went into Cairo with nine feet of water in the
hold—may have been more, may have been less. I remember it as if it were
yesterday. The men lost their heads with terror. They painted the mare blue,
in sight of town, and threw the preacher overboard, or we should not have
arrived at all. The preacher was fished out and saved. He acknowledged,
himself, that he had been to blame. I remember it all, as if it were
yesterday.'

That this combination—of preacher and gray mare—should breed
calamity, seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is
fortified by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason. I
myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends
against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but persisted in his
purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the same day—it may have
been the next, and some say it was, though I think it was the same day—he
got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was borne to his home a corpse.
This is literally true.
No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away. I
do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in, except that it

was between St. Louis and Cairo somewhere. It was a bad region—all
around and about Hat Island, in early days. A farmer who lived on the
Illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine steamboats had left their bones
strung along within sight from his house. Between St. Louis and Cairo the
steamboat wrecks average one to the mile;—two hundred wrecks,
altogether.
I could recognize big changes from Commerce down. Beaver Dam Rock
was out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious 'break;' it
used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it. A big
island that used to be away out in mid-river, has retired to the Missouri
shore, and boats do not go near it any more. The island called Jacket Pattern
is whittled down to a wedge now, and is booked for early destruction.
Goose Island is all gone but a little dab the size of a steamboat. The perilous
'Graveyard,' among whose numberless wrecks we used to pick our way so
slowly and gingerly, is far away from the channel now, and a terror to
nobody. One of the islands formerly called the Two Sisters is gone entirely;
the other, which used to lie close to the Illinois shore, is now on the
Missouri side, a mile away; it is joined solidly to the shore, and it takes a
sharp eye to see where the seam is—but it is Illinois ground yet, and the
people who live on it have to ferry themselves over and work the Illinois
roads and pay Illinois taxes: singular state of things!

Near the mouth of the river several islands were missing—washed away.
Cairo was still there—easily visible across the long, flat point upon whose
further verge it stands; but we had to steam a long way around to get to it.

Night fell as we were going out of the 'Upper River' and meeting the floods
of the Ohio. We dashed along without anxiety; for the hidden rock which
used to lie right in the way has moved up stream a long distance out of the
channel; or rather, about one county has gone into the river from the
Missouri point, and the Cairo point has 'made down' and added to its long
tongue of territory correspondingly. The Mississippi is a just and equitable
river; it never tumbles one man's farm overboard without building a new
farm just like it for that man's neighbor. This keeps down hard feelings.
Going into Cairo, we came near killing a steamboat which paid no
attention to our whistle and then tried to cross our bows. By doing some
strong backing, we saved him; which was a great loss, for he would have
made good literature.
Cairo is a brisk town now; and is substantially built, and has a city look
about it which is in noticeable contrast to its former estate, as per Mr.
Dickens's portrait of it. However, it was already building with bricks when I
had seen it last—which was when Colonel (now General) Grant was
drilling his first command there. Uncle Mumford says the libraries and
Sunday-schools have done a good work in Cairo, as well as the brick
masons. Cairo has a heavy railroad and river trade, and her situation at the
junction of the two great rivers is so advantageous that she cannot well help
prospering.
When I turned out, in the morning, we had passed Columbus, Kentucky,
and were approaching Hickman, a pretty town, perched on a handsome hill.
Hickman is in a rich tobacco region, and formerly enjoyed a great and
lucrative trade in that staple, collecting it there in her warehouses from a
large area of country and shipping it by boat; but Uncle Mumford says she
built a railway to facilitate this commerce a little more, and he thinks it
facilitated it the wrong way—took the bulk of the trade out of her hands by
'collaring it along the line without gathering it at her doors.'

Chapter 26

Under Fire

TALK began to run upon the war now, for we were getting down into the
upper edge of the former battle-stretch by this time. Columbus was just
behind us, so there was a good deal said about the famous battle of
Belmont. Several of the boat's officers had seen active service in the
Mississippi war-fleet. I gathered that they found themselves sadly out of
their element in that kind of business at first, but afterward got accustomed
to it, reconciled to it, and more or less at home in it. One of our pilots had
his first war experience in the Belmont fight, as a pilot on a boat in the
Confederate service. I had often had a curiosity to know how a green hand
might feel, in his maiden battle, perched all solitary and alone on high in a
pilot house, a target for Tom, Dick and Harry, and nobody at his elbow to
shame him from showing the white feather when matters grew hot and
perilous around him; so, to me his story was valuable—it filled a gap for me
which all histories had left till that time empty.

THE PILOT'S FIRST BATTLE

He said—
It was the 7th of November. The fight began at seven in the morning. I
was on the 'R. H. W. Hill.' Took over a load of troops from Columbus.
Came back, and took over a battery of artillery. My partner said he was

going to see the fight; wanted me to go along. I said, no, I wasn't anxious, I
would look at it from the pilot-house. He said I was a coward, and left.
That fight was an awful sight. General Cheatham made his men strip
their coats off and throw them in a pile, and said, 'Now follow me to hell or
victory!' I heard him say that from the pilot-house; and then he galloped in,
at the head of his troops. Old General Pillow, with his white hair, mounted
on a white horse, sailed in, too, leading his troops as lively as a boy. By and
by the Federals chased the rebels back, and here they came! tearing along,
everybody for himself and Devil take the hindmost! and down under the
bank they scrambled, and took shelter. I was sitting with my legs hanging
out of the pilot-house window. All at once I noticed a whizzing sound
passing my ear. Judged it was a bullet. I didn't stop to think about anything,
I just tilted over backwards and landed on the floor, and staid there. The
balls came booming around. Three cannon-balls went through the chimney;
one ball took off the corner of the pilot-house; shells were screaming and
bursting all around. Mighty warm times—I wished I hadn't come.

I lay there on the pilot-house floor, while the shots came faster and faster.
I crept in behind the big stove, in the middle of the pilot-house. Presently a
minie-ball came through the stove, and just grazed my head, and cut my
hat. I judged it was time to go away from there. The captain was on the roof
with a red-headed major from Memphis—a fine-looking man. I heard him
say he wanted to leave here, but 'that pilot is killed.' I crept over to the
starboard side to pull the bell to set her back; raised up and took a look, and
I saw about fifteen shot holes through the window panes; had come so
lively I hadn't noticed them. I glanced out on the water, and the spattering
shot were like a hailstorm. I thought best to get out of that place. I went
down the pilot-house guy, head first—not feet first but head first—slid
down—before I struck the deck, the captain said we must leave there. So I
climbed up the guy and got on the floor again. About that time, they
collared my partner and were bringing him up to the pilot-house between
two soldiers. Somebody had said I was killed. He put his head in and saw
me on the floor reaching for the backing bells. He said, 'Oh, hell, he ain't
shot,' and jerked away from the men who had him by the collar, and ran
below. We were there until three o'clock in the afternoon, and then got away
all right.
The next time I saw my partner, I said, 'Now, come out, be honest, and
tell me the truth. Where did you go when you went to see that battle?' He
says, 'I went down in the hold.'

All through that fight I was scared nearly to death. I hardly knew
anything, I was so frightened; but you see, nobody knew that but me. Next
day General Polk sent for me, and praised me for my bravery and gallant
conduct. I never said anything, I let it go at that. I judged it wasn't so, but it
was not for me to contradict a general officer.
Pretty soon after that I was sick, and used up, and had to go off to the Hot
Springs. When there, I got a good many letters from commanders saying
they wanted me to come back. I declined, because I wasn't well enough or
strong enough; but I kept still, and kept the reputation I had made.
A plain story, straightforwardly told; but Mumford told me that that pilot
had 'gilded that scare of his, in spots;' that his subsequent career in the war
was proof of it.

We struck down through the chute of Island No. 8, and I went below and
fell into conversation with a passenger, a handsome man, with easy carriage
and an intelligent face. We were approaching Island No. 10, a place so
celebrated during the war. This gentleman's home was on the main shore in
its neighborhood. I had some talk with him about the war times; but
presently the discourse fell upon 'feuds,' for in no part of the South has the
vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring
families, than in this particular region. This gentleman said—
'There's been more than one feud around here, in old times, but I reckon
the worst one was between the Darnells and the Watsons. Nobody don't

know now what the first quarrel was about, it's so long ago; the Darnells
and the Watsons don't know, if there's any of them living, which I don't
think there is. Some says it was about a horse or a cow—anyway, it was a
little matter; the money in it wasn't of no consequence—none in the world
—both families was rich. The thing could have been fixed up, easy enough;
but no, that wouldn't do. Rough words had been passed; and so, nothing but
blood could fix it up after that. That horse or cow, whichever it was, cost
sixty years of killing and crippling! Every year or so somebody was shot,
on one side or the other; and as fast as one generation was laid out, their
sons took up the feud and kept it a-going. And it's just as I say; they went on
shooting each other, year in and year out—making a kind of a religion of it,
you see—till they'd done forgot, long ago, what it was all about. Wherever a
Darnell caught a Watson, or a Watson caught a Darnell, one of 'em was
going to get hurt—only question was, which of them got the drop on the
other. They'd shoot one another down, right in the presence of the family.
They didn't hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet, they
puffed and begun. Men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men. A man
shot a boy twelve years old—happened on him in the woods, and didn't
give him no chance. If he had 'a' given him a chance, the boy'd 'a' shot him.
Both families belonged to the same church (everybody around here is
religious); through all this fifty or sixty years' fuss, both tribes was there
every Sunday, to worship. They lived each side of the line, and the church
was at a landing called Compromise. Half the church and half the aisle was
in Kentucky, the other half in Tennessee. Sundays you'd see the families
drive up, all in their Sunday clothes, men, women, and children, and file up
the aisle, and set down, quiet and orderly, one lot on the Tennessee side of
the church and the other on the Kentucky side; and the men and boys would
lean their guns up against the wall, handy, and then all hands would join in
with the prayer and praise; though they say the man next the aisle didn't
kneel down, along with the rest of the family; kind of stood guard. I don't
know; never was at that church in my life; but I remember that that's what
used to be said.

'Twenty or twenty-five years ago, one of the feud families caught a young
man of nineteen out and killed him. Don't remember whether it was the
Darnells and Watsons, or one of the other feuds; but anyway, this young
man rode up—steamboat laying there at the time—and the first thing he
saw was a whole gang of the enemy. He jumped down behind a wood-pile,
but they rode around and begun on him, he firing back, and they galloping
and cavorting and yelling and banging away with all their might. Think he
wounded a couple of them; but they closed in on him and chased him into
the river; and as he swum along down stream, they followed along the bank
and kept on shooting at him; and when he struck shore he was dead. Windy
Marshall told me about it. He saw it. He was captain of the boat.
'Years ago, the Darnells was so thinned out that the old man and his two
sons concluded they'd leave the country. They started to take steamboat just
above No. 10; but the Watsons got wind of it; and they arrived just as the
two young Darnells was walking up the companion-way with their wives on
their arms. The fight begun then, and they never got no further—both of
them killed. After that, old Darnell got into trouble with the man that run

the ferry, and the ferry-man got the worst of it—and died. But his friends
shot old Darnell through and through—filled him full of bullets, and ended
him.'
The country gentleman who told me these things had been reared in ease
and comfort, was a man of good parts, and was college bred. His loose
grammar was the fruit of careless habit, not ignorance. This habit among
educated men in the West is not universal, but it is prevalent—prevalent in
the towns, certainly, if not in the cities; and to a degree which one cannot
help noticing, and marveling at. I heard a Westerner who would be
accounted a highly educated man in any country, say 'never mind, it don't
make no difference, anyway.' A life-long resident who was present heard it,
but it made no impression upon her. She was able to recall the fact
afterward, when reminded of it; but she confessed that the words had not
grated upon her ear at the time—a confession which suggests that if
educated people can hear such blasphemous grammar, from such a source,
and be unconscious of the deed, the crime must be tolerably common—so
common that the general ear has become dulled by familiarity with it, and is
no longer alert, no longer sensitive to such affronts.
No one in the world speaks blemishless grammar; no one has ever
written it—no one, either in the world or out of it (taking the Scriptures for
evidence on the latter point); therefore it would not be fair to exact
grammatical perfection from the peoples of the Valley; but they and all
other peoples may justly be required to refrain from knowingly and
purposely debauching their grammar.

I found the river greatly changed at Island No. 10. The island which I
remembered was some three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide,
heavily timbered, and lay near the Kentucky shore—within two hundred
yards of it, I should say. Now, however, one had to hunt for it with a spy-
glass. Nothing was left of it but an insignificant little tuft, and this was no
longer near the Kentucky shore; it was clear over against the opposite shore,
a mile away. In war times the island had been an important place, for it
commanded the situation; and, being heavily fortified, there was no getting
by it. It lay between the upper and lower divisions of the Union forces, and
kept them separate, until a junction was finally effected across the Missouri
neck of land; but the island being itself joined to that neck now, the wide
river is without obstruction.
In this region the river passes from Kentucky into Tennessee, back into
Missouri, then back into Kentucky, and thence into Tennessee again. So a
mile or two of Missouri sticks over into Tennessee.

The town of New Madrid was looking very unwell; but otherwise
unchanged from its former condition and aspect. Its blocks of frame-houses
were still grouped in the same old flat plain, and environed by the same old
forests. It was as tranquil as formerly, and apparently had neither grown nor
diminished in size. It was said that the recent high water had invaded it and

damaged its looks. This was surprising news; for in low water the river
bank is very high there (fifty feet), and in my day an overflow had always
been considered an impossibility. This present flood of 1882 Will doubtless
be celebrated in the river's history for several generations before a deluge of
like magnitude shall be seen. It put all the unprotected low lands under
water, from Cairo to the mouth; it broke down the levees in a great many
places, on both sides of the river; and in some regions south, when the flood
was at its highest, the Mississippi was seventy miles wide! a number of lives
were lost, and the destruction of property was fearful. The crops were
destroyed, houses washed away, and shelterless men and cattle forced to
take refuge on scattering elevations here and there in field and forest, and
wait in peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national
and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue
them. The properties of multitudes of people were under water for months,
and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor had not
been promptly afforded.{footnote [For a detailed and interesting description
of the great flood, written on board of the New Orleans Times-Democrat's
relief-boat, see Appendix A]} The water had been falling during a
considerable time now, yet as a rule we found the banks still under water.

Chapter 27

Some Imported Articles

WE met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sight at
once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi. The
loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive—and depressing.
League after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide
along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with
seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and
break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the
night comes, and again the day—and still the same, night after night and
day after day—majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose,
tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy—symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven
pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless!
Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to come to America,
from England; scattering ones at first, then a sort of procession of them—a
procession which kept up its plodding, patient march through the land
during many, many years. Each tourist took notes, and went home and
published a book—a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable,
kind; but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors. A
glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of its aspects the
Mississippi has undergone no change since those strangers visited it, but
remains to-day about as it was then. The emotions produced in those
foreign breasts by these aspects were not all formed on one pattern, of
course; they had to be various, along at first, because the earlier tourists
were obliged to originate their emotions, whereas in older countries one can
always borrow emotions from one's predecessors. And, mind you, emotions
are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole
cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. Captain
Basil Hall. R.N., writing fifty-five years ago, says—

'Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wished to
behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all the trouble I had
experienced in coming so far; and stood looking at the river flowing past till
it was too dark to distinguish anything. But it was not till I had visited the
same spot a dozen times, that I came to a right comprehension of the
grandeur of the scene.'

Following are Mrs. Trollope's emotions. She is writing a few months
later in the same year, 1827, and is coming in at the mouth of the
Mississippi—
'The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this
mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters, and mingling with the
deep blue of the Mexican Gulf. I never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as
this entrance of the Mississippi. Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn
images of another Borgia from its horrors. One only object rears itself
above the eddying waters; this is the mast of a vessel long since wrecked in
attempting to cross the bar, and it still stands, a dismal witness of the
destruction that has been, and a boding prophet of that which is to come.'

Emotions of Hon. Charles Augustus Murray (near St. Louis), seven years
later—
'It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a hundred
miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature, that you
begin to understand all his might and majesty. You see him fertilizing a
boundless valley, bearing along in his course the trophies of his thousand
victories over the shattered forest—here carrying away large masses of soil
with all their growth, and there forming islands, destined at some future
period to be the residence of man; and while indulging in this prospect, it is
then time for reflection to suggest that the current before you has flowed
through two or three thousand miles, and has yet to travel one thousand
three hundred more before reaching its ocean destination.'
Receive, now, the emotions of Captain Marryat, R.N. author of the sea
tales, writing in 1837, three years after Mr. Murray—
'Never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a
century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected from
the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi. The stream itself
appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been committed. It is not
like most rivers, beautiful to the sight, bestowing fertility in its course; not
one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can you wander
upon its banks, or trust yourself without danger to its stream. It is a furious,
rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few of those who are
received into its waters ever rise again, {footnote [There was a foolish
superstition of some little prevalence in that day, that the Mississippi would
neither buoy up a swimmer, nor permit a drowned person's body to rise to
the surface.]} or can support themselves long upon its surface without
assistance from some friendly log. It contains the coarsest and most
uneatable of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and as you descend,
its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the panther basks at its
edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man. Pouring its impetuous
waters through wild tracks covered with trees of little value except for
firewood, it sweeps down whole forests in its course, which disappear in
tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the stream now loaded with the
masses of soil which nourished their roots, often blocking up and changing
for a time the channel of the river, which, as if in anger at its being opposed,
inundates and devastates the whole country round; and as soon as it forces

its way through its former channel, plants in every direction the uprooted
monarchs of the forest (upon whose branches the bird will never again
perch, or the raccoon, the opossum, or the squirrel climb) as traps to the
adventurous navigators of its waters by steam, who, borne down upon these
concealed dangers which pierce through the planks, very often have not
time to steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the bottom. There are
no pleasing associations connected with the great common sewer of the
Western America, which pours out its mud into the Mexican Gulf, polluting
the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth. It is a river of
desolation; and instead of reminding you, like other beautiful rivers, of an
angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you imagine it a devil,
whose energies have been only overcome by the wonderful power of
steam.'
It is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to handling a pen; still,
as a panorama of the emotions sent weltering through this noted visitor's
breast by the aspect and traditions of the 'great common sewer,' it has a
value. A value, though marred in the matter of statistics by inaccuracies; for
the catfish is a plenty good enough fish for anybody, and there are no
panthers that are 'impervious to man.'
Later still comes Alexander Mackay, of the Middle Temple, Barrister at
Law, with a better digestion, and no catfish dinner aboard, and feels as
follows—
'The Mississippi! It was with indescribable emotions that I first felt
myself afloat upon its waters. How often in my schoolboy dreams, and in
my waking visions afterwards, had my imagination pictured to itself the
lordly stream, rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless region
to which it has given its name, and gathering into itself, in its course to the
ocean, the tributary waters of almost every latitude in the temperate zone!
Here it was then in its reality, and I, at length, steaming against its tide. I
looked upon it with that reverence with which everyone must regard a great
feature of external nature.'
So much for the emotions. The tourists, one and all, remark upon the
deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river. Captain Basil
Hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says—
'Sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without
seeing a single habitation. An artist, in search of hints for a painting of the

deluge, would here have found them in abundance.'
The first shall be last, etc. just two hundred years ago, the old original
first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists, pioneer, head of the
procession, ended his weary and tedious discovery-voyage down the
solemn stretches of the great river—La Salle, whose name will last as long
as the river itself shall last. We quote from Mr. Parkman—
'And now they neared their journey's end. On the sixth of April, the river
divided itself into three broad channels. La Salle followed that of the west,
and D'Autray that of the east; while Tonty took the middle passage. As he
drifted down the turbid current, between the low and marshy shores, the
brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew fresh with the salt
breath of the sea. Then the broad bosom of the great Gulf opened on his
sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born
of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life.'
Then, on a spot of solid ground, La Salle reared a column 'bearing the
arms of France; the Frenchmen were mustered under arms; and while the
New England Indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence,
they chanted the Te Deum, The Exaudiat, and the Domine Salvum Fac
Regem.'
Then, whilst the musketry volleyed and rejoicing shouts burst forth, the
victorious discoverer planted the column, and made proclamation in a loud
voice, taking formal possession of the river and the vast countries watered
by it, in the name of the King. The column bore this inscription—
LOUIS LE GRAND, ROY DE FRANCE ET DE NAVARRE, REGNE;
LE NEUVIEME AVRIL, 1682.
New Orleans intended to fittingly celebrate, this present year, the
bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event; but when the time came,
all her energies and surplus money were required in other directions, for the
flood was upon the land then, making havoc and devastation everywhere.

Chapter 28

Uncle Mumford Unloads

ALL day we swung along down the river, and had the stream almost
wholly to ourselves. Formerly, at such a stage of the water, we should have
passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of big coal barges; also occasional
little trading-scows, peddling along from farm to farm, with the peddler's
family on board; possibly, a random scow, bearing a humble Hamlet and
Co. on an itinerant dramatic trip. But these were all absent. Far along in the
day, we saw one steamboat; just one, and no more. She was lying at rest in
the shade, within the wooded mouth of the Obion River. The spy-glass
revealed the fact that she was named for me—or he was named for me,
whichever you prefer. As this was the first time I had ever encountered this
species of honor, it seems excusable to mention it, and at the same time call
the attention of the authorities to the tardiness of my recognition of it.

Noted a big change in the river, at Island 21. It was a very large island,
and used to be out toward mid-stream; but it is joined fast to the main shore
now, and has retired from business as an island.
As we approached famous and formidable Plum Point, darkness fell, but
that was nothing to shudder about—in these modern times. For now the
national government has turned the Mississippi into a sort of two-thousand-
mile torchlight procession. In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of
every crossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp. You are
never entirely in the dark, now; there is always a beacon in sight, either
before you, or behind you, or abreast. One might almost say that lamps
have been squandered there. Dozens of crossings are lighted which were
not shoal when they were created, and have never been shoal since;
crossings so plain, too, and also so straight, that a steamboat can take
herself through them without any help, after she has been through once.
Lamps in such places are of course not wasted; it is much more convenient
and comfortable for a pilot to hold on them than on a spread of formless
blackness that won't stay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same
time, for she can of course make more miles with her rudder amidships than
she can with it squared across her stern and holding her back.

But this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent.
It, and some other things together, have knocked all the romance out of it.
For instance, the peril from snags is not now what it once was. The
government's snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these matter-of-fact

days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted out all the old clusters which
made many localities so formidable; and they allow no new ones to collect.
Formerly, if your boat got away from you, on a black night, and broke for
the woods, it was an anxious time with you; so was it also, when you were
groping your way through solidified darkness in a narrow chute; but all that
is changed now—you flash out your electric light, transform night into day
in the twinkling of an eye, and your perils and anxieties are at an end.
Horace Bixby and George Ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out
the courses by compass; they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and
have patented the whole. With these helps, one may run in the fog now,
with considerable security, and with a confidence unknown in the old days.

With these abundant beacons, the banishment of snags, plenty of daylight
in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed, and a chart and
compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a good stage of water, is now
nearly as safe and simple as driving stage, and is hardly more than three
times as romantic.

And now in these new days, these days of infinite change, the Anchor
Line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger wages
of the two. This was going far, but they have not stopped there. They have
decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post, and stand his watch clear
through, whether the boat be under way or tied up to the shore. We, that
were once the aristocrats of the river, can't go to bed now, as we used to do,
and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are lugged aboard; no, we must sit
in the pilot-house; and keep awake, too. Verily we are being treated like a
parcel of mates and engineers. The Government has taken away the
romance of our calling; the Company has taken away its state and dignity.
Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with the exception
that now there were beacons to mark the crossings, and also a lot of other
lights on the Point and along its shore; these latter glinting from the fleet of
the United States River Commission, and from a village which the officials
have built on the land for offices and for the employees of the service. The
military engineers of the Commission have taken upon their shoulders the
job of making the Mississippi over again—a job transcended in size by only
the original job of creating it. They are building wing-dams here and there,
to deflect the current; and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other
dikes to make it stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi,
they are felling the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the purpose of
shaving the bank down to low-water mark with the slant of a house roof,
and ballasting it with stones; and in many places they have protected the
wasting shores with rows of piles. One who knows the Mississippi will
promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River
Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that

lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go
there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot
bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and
laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for
the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all
that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that
they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the
unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads,
with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which
seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to
prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and say
the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and
undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right
and reasonable conduct.
I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters; and I
give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore to be relied on
as being full and correct; except that I have here and there left out remarks
which were addressed to the men, such as 'where in blazes are you going
with that barrel now?' and which seemed to me to break the flow of the
written statement, without compensating by adding to its information or its
clearness. Not that I have ventured to strike out all such interjections; I have
removed only those which were obviously irrelevant; wherever one
occurred which I felt any question about, I have judged it safest to let it
remain.

UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONS
Uncle Mumford said—
'As long as I have been mate of a steamboat—thirty years—I have
watched this river and studied it. Maybe I could have learnt more about it at
West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be what are you sucking your
fingers there for ?—collar that kag of nails! Four years at West Point, and

plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a good deal, I reckon, but it
won't learn him the river. You turn one of those little European rivers over
to this Commission, with its hard bottom and clear water, and it would just
be a holiday job for them to wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it
down, and boss it around, and make it go wherever they wanted it to, and
stay where they put it, and do just as they said, every time. But this ain't that
kind of a river. They have started in here with big confidence, and the best
intentions in the world; but they are going to get left. What does
Ecclesiastes vii. 13 say? Says enough to knock their little game galley-west,
don't it? Now you look at their methods once. There at Devil's Island, in the
Upper River, they wanted the water to go one way, the water wanted to go
another. So they put up a stone wall. But what does the river care for a stone
wall? When it got ready, it just bulged through it. Maybe they can build
another that will stay; that is, up there—but not down here they can't. Down
here in the Lower River, they drive some pegs to turn the water away from
the shore and stop it from slicing off the bank; very well, don't it go straight
over and cut somebody else's bank? Certainly. Are they going to peg all the
banks? Why, they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper.
They are pegging Bulletin Tow-head now. It won't do any good. If the river
has got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose, sure, pegs or no pegs.
Away down yonder, they have driven two rows of piles straight through the
middle of a dry bar half a mile long, which is forty foot out of the water
when the river is low. What do you reckon that is for? If I know, I wish I
may land in—hump yourself, you son of an undertaker!—out with that coal-
oil, now, lively, lively! And just look at what they are trying to do down
there at Milliken's Bend. There's been a cut-off in that section, and
Vicksburg is left out in the cold. It's a country town now. The river strikes in
below it; and a boat can't go up to the town except in high water. Well, they
are going to build wing-dams in the bend opposite the foot of 103, and
throw the water over and cut off the foot of the island and plow down into
an old ditch where the river used to be in ancient times; and they think they
can persuade the water around that way, and get it to strike in above
Vicksburg, as it used to do, and fetch the town back into the world again.
That is, they are going to take this whole Mississippi, and twist it around
and make it run several miles up stream. Well you've got to admire men that
deal in ideas of that size and can tote them around without crutches; but you
haven't got to believe they can do such miracles, have you! And yet you

ain't absolutely obliged to believe they can't. I reckon the safe way, where a
man can afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the same time buy
enough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they win.
Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now—spending loads of
money on her. When there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten
thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows, there wasn't a
lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags were thicker than
bristles on a hog's back; and now when there's three dozen steamboats and
nary barge or raft, Government has snatched out all the snags, and lit up the
shores like Broadway, and a boat's as safe on the river as she'd be in heaven.
And I reckon that by the time there ain't any boats left at all, the
Commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and dredged out, and
fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make navigation just simply
perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and all the days will be Sundays,
and all the mates will be Sunday-school su——what-in-the-nation-you-
fooling-around-there-for, you sons of unrighteousness, heirs of perdition!
going to be a year getting that hogshead ashore?'
During our trip to New Orleans and back, we had many conversations
with river men, planters, journalists, and officers of the River Commission
—with conflicting and confusing results. To wit:—
1. Some believed in the Commission's scheme to arbitrarily and
permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel, preserve threatened
shores, etc.
2. Some believed that the Commission's money ought to be spent only on
building and repairing the great system of levees.
3. Some believed that the higher you build your levee, the higher the
river's bottom will rise; and that consequently the levee system is a mistake.
4. Some believed in the scheme to relieve the river, in flood-time, by
turning its surplus waters off into Lake Borgne, etc.
5. Some believed in the scheme of northern lake-reservoirs to replenish
the Mississippi in low-water seasons.

Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these
theories you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon the
hypothesis that he does not believe in that theory; and after you have had
experience, you do not take this course doubtfully, or hesitatingly, but with
the confidence of a dying murderer—converted one, I mean. For you will
have come to know, with a deep and restful certainty, that you are not going
to meet two people sick of the same theory, one right after the other. No,
there will always be one or two with the other diseases along between. And
as you proceed, you will find out one or two other things. You will find out
that there is no distemper of the lot but is contagious; and you cannot go
where it is without catching it. You may vaccinate yourself with deterrent
facts as much as you please—it will do no good; it will seem to 'take,' but it
doesn't; the moment you rub against any one of those theorists, make up
your mind that it is time to hang out your yellow flag.

Yes, you are his sure victim: yet his work is not all to your hurt—only
part of it; for he is like your family physician, who comes and cures the
mumps, and leaves the scarlet-fever behind. If your man is a Lake-Borgne-
relief theorist, for instance, he will exhale a cloud of deadly facts and
statistics which will lay you out with that disease, sure; but at the same time
he will cure you of any other of the five theories that may have previously
got into your system.
I have had all the five; and had them 'bad;' but ask me not, in mournful
numbers, which one racked me hardest, or which one numbered the biggest
sick list, for I do not know. In truth, no one can answer the latter question.
Mississippi Improvement is a mighty topic, down yonder. Every man on the
river banks, south of Cairo, talks about it every day, during such moments
as he is able to spare from talking about the war; and each of the several
chief theories has its host of zealous partisans; but, as I have said, it is not
possible to determine which cause numbers the most recruits.
All were agreed upon one point, however: if Congress would make a
sufficient appropriation, a colossal benefit would result. Very well; since
then the appropriation has been made—possibly a sufficient one, certainly
not too large a one. Let us hope that the prophecy will be amply fulfilled.
One thing will be easily granted by the reader; that an opinion from Mr.
Edward Atkinson, upon any vast national commercial matter, comes as near
ranking as authority, as can the opinion of any individual in the Union.
What he has to say about Mississippi River Improvement will be found in
the Appendix.{footnote [See Appendix B.]}
Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lightning-flash, the
importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words, with the same
purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain. Here is a case of the
sort—paragraph from the 'Cincinnati Commercial'—
'The towboat “Jos. B. Williams” is on her way to New Orleans with a tow
of thirty-two barges, containing six hundred thousand bushels (seventy-six
pounds to the bushel) of coal exclusive of her own fuel, being the largest
tow ever taken to New Orleans or anywhere else in the world. Her freight
bill, at 3 cents a bushel, amounts to $18,000. It would take eighteen hundred
cars, of three hundred and thirty-three bushels to the car, to transport this
amount of coal. At $10 per ton, or $100 per car, which would be a fair price
for the distance by rail, the freight bill would amount to $180,000, or

$162,000 more by rail than by river. The tow will be taken from Pittsburg to
New Orleans in fourteen or fifteen days. It would take one hundred trains of
eighteen cars to the train to transport this one tow of six hundred thousand
bushels of coal, and even if it made the usual speed of fast freight lines, it
would take one whole summer to put it through by rail.'

When a river in good condition can enable one to save $162,000 and a
whole summer's time, on a single cargo, the wisdom of taking measures to
keep the river in good condition is made plain to even the uncommercial
mind.

Chapter 29

A Few Specimen Bricks

WE passed through the Plum Point region, turned Craighead's Point, and
glided unchallenged by what was once the formidable Fort Pillow,
memorable because of the massacre perpetrated there during the war.
Massacres are sprinkled with some frequency through the histories of
several Christian nations, but this is almost the only one that can be found
in American history; perhaps it is the only one which rises to a size
correspondent to that huge and somber title. We have the 'Boston Massacre,'
where two or three people were killed; but we must bunch Anglo-Saxon
history together to find the fellow to the Fort Pillow tragedy; and doubtless
even then we must travel back to the days and the performances of Coeur
de Lion, that fine 'hero,' before we accomplish it.
More of the river's freaks. In times past, the channel used to strike above
Island 37, by Brandywine Bar, and down towards Island 39. Afterward,
changed its course and went from Brandywine down through Vogelman's
chute in the Devil's Elbow, to Island 39—part of this course reversing the
old order; the river running up four or five miles, instead of down, and
cutting off, throughout, some fifteen miles of distance. This in 1876. All
that region is now called Centennial Island.
There is a tradition that Island 37 was one of the principal abiding places
of the once celebrated 'Murel's Gang.' This was a colossal combination of
robbers, horse-thieves, negro-stealers, and counterfeiters, engaged in
business along the river some fifty or sixty years ago. While our journey
across the country towards St. Louis was in progress we had had no end of
Jesse James and his stirring history; for he had just been assassinated by an
agent of the Governor of Missouri, and was in consequence occupying a
good deal of space in the newspapers. Cheap histories of him were for sale
by train boys. According to these, he was the most marvelous creature of his

kind that had ever existed. It was a mistake. Murel was his equal in
boldness; in pluck; in rapacity; in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery,
and in general and comprehensive vileness and shamelessness; and very
much his superior in some larger aspects. James was a retail rascal; Murel,
wholesale. James's modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight than the
planning of raids upon cars, coaches, and country banks; Murel projected
negro insurrections and the capture of New Orleans; and furthermore, on
occasion, this Murel could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation. What
are James and his half-dozen vulgar rascals compared with this stately old-
time criminal, with his sermons, his meditated insurrections and city-
captures, and his majestic following of ten hundred men, sworn to do his
evil will!

Here is a paragraph or two concerning this big operator, from a now
forgotten book which was published half a century ago—
He appears to have been a most dexterous as well as consummate villain.
When he traveled, his usual disguise was that of an itinerant preacher; and it
is said that his discourses were very 'soul-moving'—interesting the hearers
so much that they forgot to look after their horses, which were carried away
by his confederates while he was preaching. But the stealing of horses in
one State, and selling them in another, was but a small portion of their
business; the most lucrative was the enticing slaves to run away from their
masters, that they might sell them in another quarter. This was arranged as
follows; they would tell a negro that if he would run away from his master,
and allow them to sell him, he should receive a portion of the money paid
for him, and that upon his return to them a second time they would send
him to a free State, where he would be safe.

The poor wretches complied with this request, hoping to obtain money
and freedom; they would be sold to another master, and run away again, to
their employers; sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or four
times, until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by them; but as,
after this, there was fear of detection, the usual custom was to get rid of the
only witness that could be produced against them, which was the negro
himself, by murdering him, and throwing his body into the Mississippi.
Even if it was established that they had stolen a negro, before he was
murdered, they were always prepared to evade punishment; for they
concealed the negro who had run away, until he was advertised, and a
reward offered to any man who would catch him. An advertisement of this
kind warrants the person to take the property, if found. And then the negro
becomes a property in trust, when, therefore, they sold the negro, it only

became a breach of trust, not stealing; and for a breach of trust, the owner
of the property can only have redress by a civil action, which was useless,
as the damages were never paid. It may be inquired, how it was that Murel
escaped Lynch law under such circumstances This will be easily understood
when it is stated that he had more than a thousand sworn confederates, all
ready at a moment's notice to support any of the gang who might be in
trouble. The names of all the principal confederates of Murel were obtained
from himself, in a manner which I shall presently explain. The gang was
composed of two classes: the Heads or Council, as they were called, who
planned and concerted, but seldom acted; they amounted to about four
hundred. The other class were the active agents, and were termed strikers,
and amounted to about six hundred and fifty. These were the tools in the
hands of the others; they ran all the risk, and received but a small portion of
the money; they were in the power of the leaders of the gang, who would
sacrifice them at any time by handing them over to justice, or sinking their
bodies in the Mississippi. The general rendezvous of this gang of miscreants
was on the Arkansas side of the river, where they concealed their negroes in
the morasses and cane-brakes.

The depredations of this extensive combination were severely felt; but so
well were their plans arranged, that although Murel, who was always active,
was everywhere suspected, there was no proof to be obtained. It so
happened, however, that a young man of the name of Stewart, who was
looking after two slaves which Murel had decoyed away, fell in with him
and obtained his confidence, took the oath, and was admitted into the gang
as one of the General Council. By this means all was discovered; for
Stewart turned traitor, although he had taken the oath, and having obtained
every information, exposed the whole concern, the names of all the parties,
and finally succeeded in bringing home sufficient evidence against Murel,
to procure his conviction and sentence to the Penitentiary (Murel was

sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment); so many people who were
supposed to be honest, and bore a respectable name in the different States,
were found to be among the list of the Grand Council as published by
Stewart, that every attempt was made to throw discredit upon his assertions
—his character was vilified, and more than one attempt was made to
assassinate him. He was obliged to quit the Southern States in consequence.
It is, however, now well ascertained to have been all true; and although
some blame Mr. Stewart for having violated his oath, they no longer
attempt to deny that his revelations were correct. I will quote one or two
portions of Murel's confessions to Mr. Stewart, made to him when they
were journeying together. I ought to have observed, that the ultimate
intentions of Murel and his associates were, by his own account, on a very
extended scale; having no less an object in view than raising the blacks
against the whites, taking possession of, and plundering new orleans, and
making themselves possessors of the territory. The following are a few
extracts:—

'I collected all my friends about New Orleans at one of our friends'
houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got all our
plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the rebellion at every
hazard, and make as many friends as we could for that purpose. Every
man's business being assigned him, I started to Natchez on foot, having sold
my horse in New Orleans,—with the intention of stealing another after I
started. I walked four days, and no opportunity offered for me to get a
horse. The fifth day, about twelve, I had become tired, and stopped at a
creek to get some water and rest a little. While I was sitting on a log,
looking down the road the way that I had come, a man came in sight riding
on a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him, I was determined to

have his horse, if he was in the garb of a traveler. He rode up, and I saw
from his equipage that he was a traveler. I arose and drew an elegant rifle
pistol on him and ordered him to dismount. He did so, and I took his horse
by the bridle and pointed down the creek, and ordered him to walk before
me. He went a few hundred yards and stopped. I hitched his horse, and then
made him undress himself, all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to
turn his back to me. He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me have
time to pray before I die,' I told him I had no time to hear him pray. He
turned around and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of
the head.

I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the
creek. I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and

thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to
examine. I sunk the pocket-book and papers and his hat, in the creek. His
boots were brand-new, and fitted me genteelly; and I put them on and sunk
my old shoes in the creek, to atone for them. I rolled up his clothes and put
them into his portmanteau, as they were brand-new cloth of the best quality.
I mounted as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and directed my course for
Natchez in much better style than I had been for the last five days.
'Myself and a fellow by the name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses
and started for Georgia. We got in company with a young South Carolinian
just before we got to Cumberland Mountain, and Crenshaw soon knew all
about his business. He had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but
when he got there pork was dearer than he calculated, and he declined
purchasing. We concluded he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I
understood his idea. Crenshaw had traveled the road before, but I never
had; we had traveled several miles on the mountain, when he passed near a
great precipice; just before we passed it Crenshaw asked me for my whip,
which had a pound of lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he rode up by
the side of the South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the
head and tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered
his pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars. Crenshaw said he
knew a place to hide him, and he gathered him under his arms, and I by his
feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow of the precipice, and
tumbled him into it, and he went out of sight; we then tumbled in his saddle,
and took his horse with us, which was worth two hundred dollars.
'We were detained a few days, and during that time our friend went to a
little village in the neighborhood and saw the negro advertised (a negro in
our possession), and a description of the two men of whom he had been
purchased, and giving his suspicions of the men. It was rather squally times,
but any port in a storm: we took the negro that night on the bank of a creek
which runs by the farm of our friend, and Crenshaw shot him through the
head. We took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek.

'He had sold the other negro the third time on Arkansaw River for
upwards of five hundred dollars; and then stole him and delivered him into
the hand of his friend, who conducted him to a swamp, and veiled the tragic
scene, and got the last gleanings and sacred pledge of secrecy; as a game of
that kind will not do unless it ends in a mystery to all but the fraternity. He
sold the negro, first and last, for nearly two thousand dollars, and then put
him for ever out of the reach of all pursuers; and they can never graze him
unless they can find the negro; and that they cannot do, for his carcass has
fed many a tortoise and catfish before this time, and the frogs have sung this
many a long day to the silent repose of his skeleton.'
We were approaching Memphis, in front of which city, and witnessed by
its people, was fought the most famous of the river battles of the Civil War.
Two men whom I had served under, in my river days, took part in that fight:

Mr. Bixby, head pilot of the Union fleet, and Montgomery, Commodore of
the Confederate fleet. Both saw a great deal of active service during the
war, and achieved high reputations for pluck and capacity.

As we neared Memphis, we began to cast about for an excuse to stay
with the 'Gold Dust' to the end of her course—Vicksburg. We were so
pleasantly situated, that we did not wish to make a change. I had an errand

of considerable importance to do at Napoleon, Arkansas, but perhaps I
could manage it without quitting the 'Gold Dust.' I said as much; so we
decided to stick to present quarters.

The boat was to tarry at Memphis till ten the next morning. It is a
beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the river.
The streets are straight and spacious, though not paved in a way to incite
distempered admiration. No, the admiration must be reserved for the town's
sewerage system, which is called perfect; a recent reform, however, for it
was just the other way, up to a few years ago—a reform resulting from the
lesson taught by a desolating visitation of the yellow-fever. In those awful
days the people were swept off by hundreds, by thousands; and so great was
the reduction caused by flight and by death together, that the population was
diminished three-fourths, and so remained for a time. Business stood nearly
still, and the streets bore an empty Sunday aspect.
Here is a picture of Memphis, at that disastrous time, drawn by a German
tourist who seems to have been an eye-witness of the scenes which he
describes. It is from Chapter VII, of his book, just published, in Leipzig,
'Mississippi-Fahrten, von Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg.'—
'In August the yellow-fever had reached its extremest height. Daily,
hundreds fell a sacrifice to the terrible epidemic. The city was become a

mighty graveyard, two-thirds of the population had deserted the place, and
only the poor, the aged and the sick, remained behind, a sure prey for the
insidious enemy. The houses were closed: little lamps burned in front of
many—a sign that here death had entered. Often, several lay dead in a
single house; from the windows hung black crape. The stores were shut up,
for their owners were gone away or dead.
'Fearful evil! In the briefest space it struck down and swept away even
the most vigorous victim. A slight indisposition, then an hour of fever, then
the hideous delirium, then—the Yellow Death! On the street corners, and in
the squares, lay sick men, suddenly overtaken by the disease; and even
corpses, distorted and rigid. Food failed. Meat spoiled in a few hours in the
fetid and pestiferous air, and turned black.
'Fearful clamors issue from many houses; then after a season they cease,
and all is still: noble, self-sacrificing men come with the coffin, nail it up,
and carry it away, to the graveyard. In the night stillness reigns. Only the
physicians and the hearses hurry through the streets; and out of the distance,
at intervals, comes the muffled thunder of the railway train, which with the
speed of the wind, and as if hunted by furies, flies by the pest-ridden city
without halting.'
But there is life enough there now. The population exceeds forty
thousand and is augmenting, and trade is in a flourishing condition. We
drove about the city; visited the park and the sociable horde of squirrels
there; saw the fine residences, rose-clad and in other ways enticing to the
eye; and got a good breakfast at the hotel.
A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi: has a
great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops; and manufactories
of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil; and is shortly to have cotton mills
and elevators.
Her cotton receipts reached five hundred thousand bales last year—an
increase of sixty thousand over the year before. Out from her healthy
commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway; and a sixth is being
added.
This is a very different Memphis from the one which the vanished and
unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put into their books
long time ago. In the days of the now forgotten but once renowned and
vigorously hated Mrs. Trollope, Memphis seems to have consisted mainly

of one long street of log-houses, with some outlying cabins sprinkled
around rearward toward the woods; and now and then a pig, and no end of
mud. That was fifty-five years ago. She stopped at the hotel. Plainly it was
not the one which gave us our breakfast. She says—
'The table was laid for fifty persons, and was nearly full. They ate in
perfect silence, and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner was over
literally before ours was begun; the only sounds heard were those produced
by the knives and forks, with the unceasing chorus of coughing, etc.'
'Coughing, etc.' The 'etc.' stands for an unpleasant word there, a word
which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes prints. You
will find it in the following description of a steamboat dinner which she ate
in company with a lot of aristocratic planters; wealthy, well-born, ignorant
swells they were, tinselled with the usual harmless military and judicial
titles of that old day of cheap shams and windy pretense—

'The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious
rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange
uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the
contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses;
the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade
seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of
cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that
we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old
world; and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of
enjoyment.'

Chapter 30

Sketches by the Way

IT was a big river, below Memphis; banks brimming full, everywhere,
and very frequently more than full, the waters pouring out over the land,
flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior; and in places, to a
depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about, of men's hard work gone to ruin, and
all to be done over again, with straitened means and a weakened courage. A
melancholy picture, and a continuous one;—hundreds of miles of it.
Sometimes the beacon lights stood in water three feet deep, in the edge of
dense forests which extended for miles without farm, wood-yard, clearing,
or break of any kind; which meant that the keeper of the light must come in
a skiff a great distance to discharge his trust,—and often in desperate
weather. Yet I was told that the work is faithfully performed, in all
weathers; and not always by men, sometimes by women, if the man is sick
or absent. The Government furnishes oil, and pays ten or fifteen dollars a
month for the lighting and tending. A Government boat distributes oil and
pays wages once a month.

The Ship Island region was as woodsy and tenantless as ever. The island
has ceased to be an island; has joined itself compactly to the main shore,
and wagons travel, now, where the steamboats used to navigate. No signs
left of the wreck of the 'Pennsylvania.' Some farmer will turn up her bones
with his plow one day, no doubt, and be surprised.
We were getting down now into the migrating negro region. These poor
people could never travel when they were slaves; so they make up for the
privation now. They stay on a plantation till the desire to travel seizes them;
then they pack up, hail a steamboat, and clear out. Not for any particular
place; no, nearly any place will answer; they only want to be moving. The
amount of money on hand will answer the rest of the conundrum for them.
If it will take them fifty miles, very well; let it be fifty. If not, a shorter
flight will do.
During a couple of days, we frequently answered these hails. Sometimes
there was a group of high-water-stained, tumble-down cabins, populous
with colored folk, and no whites visible; with grassless patches of dry
ground here and there; a few felled trees, with skeleton cattle, mules, and
horses, eating the leaves and gnawing the bark—no other food for them in
the flood-wasted land. Sometimes there was a single lonely landing-cabin;
near it the colored family that had hailed us; little and big, old and young,

roosting on the scant pile of household goods; these consisting of a rusty
gun, some bed-ticks, chests, tinware, stools, a crippled looking-glass, a
venerable arm-chair, and six or eight base-born and spiritless yellow curs,
attached to the family by strings. They must have their dogs; can't go
without their dogs. Yet the dogs are never willing; they always object; so,
one after another, in ridiculous procession, they are dragged aboard; all four
feet braced and sliding along the stage, head likely to be pulled off; but the
tugger marching determinedly forward, bending to his work, with the rope
over his shoulder for better purchase. Sometimes a child is forgotten and
left on the bank; but never a dog.

The usual river-gossip going on in the pilot-house. Island No. 63—an
island with a lovely 'chute,' or passage, behind it in the former times. They
said Jesse Jamieson, in the 'Skylark,' had a visiting pilot with him one trip—
a poor old broken-down, superannuated fellow—left him at the wheel, at
the foot of 63, to run off the watch. The ancient mariner went up through
the chute, and down the river outside; and up the chute and down the river
again; and yet again and again; and handed the boat over to the relieving
pilot, at the end of three hours of honest endeavor, at the same old foot of
the island where he had originally taken the wheel! A darkey on shore who
had observed the boat go by, about thirteen times, said, 'clar to gracious, I
wouldn't be s'prised if dey's a whole line o' dem Sk'ylarks!'
Anecdote illustrative of influence of reputation in the changing of
opinion. The 'Eclipse' was renowned for her swiftness. One day she passed
along; an old darkey on shore, absorbed in his own matters, did not notice
what steamer it was. Presently someone asked—
'Any boat gone up?'

'Yes, sah.'
'Was she going fast?'
'Oh, so-so—loafin' along.'
'Now, do you know what boat that was?'
'No, sah.'
'Why, uncle, that was the “Eclipse.”'
'No! Is dat so? Well, I bet it was—cause she jes' went by here a-sparklin'!'
Piece of history illustrative of the violent style of some of the people
down along here, During the early weeks of high water, A's fence rails
washed down on B's ground, and B's rails washed up in the eddy and landed
on A's ground. A said, 'Let the thing remain so; I will use your rails, and you
use mine.' But B objected—wouldn't have it so. One day, A came down on
B's ground to get his rails. B said, 'I'll kill you!' and proceeded for him with

his revolver. A said, 'I'm not armed.' So B, who wished to do only what was
right, threw down his revolver; then pulled a knife, and cut A's throat all
around, but gave his principal attention to the front, and so failed to sever
the jugular. Struggling around, A managed to get his hands on the discarded
revolver, and shot B dead with it—and recovered from his own injuries.
Further gossip;—after which, everybody went below to get afternoon
coffee, and left me at the wheel, alone, Something presently reminded me
of our last hour in St. Louis, part of which I spent on this boat's hurricane
deck, aft. I was joined there by a stranger, who dropped into conversation
with me—a brisk young fellow, who said he was born in a town in the
interior of Wisconsin, and had never seen a steamboat until a week before.
Also said that on the way down from La Crosse he had inspected and
examined his boat so diligently and with such passionate interest that he
had mastered the whole thing from stem to rudder-blade. Asked me where I
was from. I answered, New England. 'Oh, a Yank!' said he; and went
chatting straight along, without waiting for assent or denial. He
immediately proposed to take me all over the boat and tell me the names of
her different parts, and teach me their uses. Before I could enter protest or
excuse, he was already rattling glibly away at his benevolent work; and
when I perceived that he was misnaming the things, and inhospitably
amusing himself at the expense of an innocent stranger from a far country, I
held my peace, and let him have his way. He gave me a world of
misinformation; and the further he went, the wider his imagination
expanded, and the more he enjoyed his cruel work of deceit. Sometimes,
after palming off a particularly fantastic and outrageous lie upon me, he was
so 'full of laugh' that he had to step aside for a minute, upon one pretext or
another, to keep me from suspecting. I staid faithfully by him until his
comedy was finished. Then he remarked that he had undertaken to 'learn'
me all about a steamboat, and had done it; but that if he had overlooked
anything, just ask him and he would supply the lack. 'Anything about this
boat that you don't know the name of or the purpose of, you come to me and
I'll tell you.' I said I would, and took my departure; disappeared, and
approached him from another quarter, whence he could not see me. There
he sat, all alone, doubling himself up and writhing this way and that, in the
throes of unappeasable laughter. He must have made himself sick; for he
was not publicly visible afterward for several days. Meantime, the episode
dropped out of my mind.

The thing that reminded me of it now, when I was alone at the wheel, was
the spectacle of this young fellow standing in the pilot-house door, with the
knob in his hand, silently and severely inspecting me. I don't know when I
have seen anybody look so injured as he did. He did not say anything—
simply stood there and looked; reproachfully looked and pondered. Finally
he shut the door, and started away; halted on the texas a minute; came

slowly back and stood in the door again, with that grieved look in his face;
gazed upon me awhile in meek rebuke, then said—
'You let me learn you all about a steamboat, didn't you?'
'Yes,' I confessed.
'Yes, you did—didn't you?'
'Yes.'
'You are the feller that—that—'
Language failed. Pause—impotent struggle for further words—then he
gave it up, choked out a deep, strong oath, and departed for good. Afterward
I saw him several times below during the trip; but he was cold—would not
look at me. Idiot, if he had not been in such a sweat to play his witless
practical joke upon me, in the beginning, I would have persuaded his
thoughts into some other direction, and saved him from committing that
wanton and silly impoliteness.
I had myself called with the four o'clock watch, mornings, for one cannot
see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi. They are enchanting.
First, there is the eloquence of silence; for a deep hush broods everywhere.
Next, there is the haunting sense of loneliness, isolation, remoteness from
the worry and bustle of the world. The dawn creeps in stealthily; the solid
walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast stretches of the river open up
and reveal themselves; the water is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little
wreaths of white mist, there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of
leaf; the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying. Then a bird pipes
up, another follows, and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of
music. You see none of the birds; you simply move through an atmosphere
of song which seems to sing itself. When the light has become a little
stronger, you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable. You
have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see
it paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape, a
mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring;
the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles
away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly
separable from the sky above it and about it. And all this stretch of river is a
mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving
shores and the receding capes pictured in it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft
and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink

flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will
yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth
remembering.
We had the Kentucky Bend country in the early morning—scene of a
strange and tragic accident in the old times, Captain Poe had a small stern-
wheel boat, for years the home of himself and his wife. One night the boat
struck a snag in the head of Kentucky Bend, and sank with astonishing
suddenness; water already well above the cabin floor when the captain got
aft. So he cut into his wife's state-room from above with an ax; she was
asleep in the upper berth, the roof a flimsier one than was supposed; the
first blow crashed down through the rotten boards and clove her skull.

This bend is all filled up now—result of a cut-off; and the same agent has
taken the great and once much-frequented Walnut Bend, and set it away
back in a solitude far from the accustomed track of passing steamers.
Helena we visited, and also a town I had not heard of before, it being of
recent birth—Arkansas City. It was born of a railway; the Little Rock,
Mississippi River and Texas Railroad touches the river there. We asked a
passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was. 'Well,' said he,
after considering, and with the air of one who wishes to take time and be
accurate, 'It's a hell of a place.' A description which was photographic for
exactness. There were several rows and clusters of shabby frame-houses,
and a supply of mud sufficient to insure the town against a famine in that
article for a hundred years; for the overflow had but lately subsided. There
were stagnant ponds in the streets, here and there, and a dozen rude scows
were scattered about, lying aground wherever they happened to have been
when the waters drained off and people could do their visiting and shopping
on foot once more. Still, it is a thriving place, with a rich country behind it,
an elevator in front of it, and also a fine big mill for the manufacture of
cotton-seed oil. I had never seen this kind of a mill before.
Cotton-seed was comparatively valueless in my time; but it is worth $12
or $13 a ton now, and none of it is thrown away. The oil made from it is
colorless, tasteless, and almost if not entirely odorless. It is claimed that it
can, by proper manipulation, be made to resemble and perform the office of
any and all oils, and be produced at a cheaper rate than the cheapest of the
originals. Sagacious people shipped it to Italy, doctored it, labeled it, and
brought it back as olive oil. This trade grew to be so formidable that Italy
was obliged to put a prohibitory impost upon it to keep it from working
serious injury to her oil industry.
Helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the Mississippi. Her
perch is the last, the southernmost group of hills which one sees on that side
of the river. In its normal condition it is a pretty town; but the flood (or
possibly the seepage) had lately been ravaging it; whole streets of houses
had been invaded by the muddy water, and the outsides of the buildings
were still belted with a broad stain extending upwards from the foundations.
Stranded and discarded scows lay all about; plank sidewalks on stilts four
feet high were still standing; the board sidewalks on the ground level were
loose and ruinous,—a couple of men trotting along them could make a blind

man think a cavalry charge was coming; everywhere the mud was black and
deep, and in many places malarious pools of stagnant water were standing.
A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating infliction
to a fire.
We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday: two full hours'
liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight. In the back streets but few
white people were visible, but there were plenty of colored folk—mainly
women and girls; and almost without exception upholstered in bright new
clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut—a glaring and hilarious
contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles.

Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population—which is
placed at five thousand. The country about it is exceptionally productive.
Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty thousand bales
annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has a foundry, oil
mills, machine shops and wagon factories—in brief has $1,000,000
invested in manufacturing industries. She has two railways, and is the
commercial center of a broad and prosperous region. Her gross receipts of
money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the New Orleans 'Times-
Democrat' at $4,000,000.

Chapter 31

A Thumb-print and What Came of It

WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas. So I began to think about my
errand there. Time, noonday; and bright and sunny. This was bad—not best,
anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand. The more
I thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me—now in one form, now
in another. Finally, it took the form of a distinct question: is it good
common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little sacrifice of
comfort and inclination, you can have night for it, and no inquisitive eyes
around. This settled it. Plain question and plain answer make the shortest
road out of most perplexities.

I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create
annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed
best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon. Their
disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous. Their main

argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface, in
such cases, since the beginning of time: 'But you decided and agreed to
stick to this boat, etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise thing, one is
thereby bound to go ahead and make two unwise things of it, by carrying
out that determination.
I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good
success: under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show
them that I had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to
blame for it, I presently drifted into its history—substantially as follows:
Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria. In
November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's pension, 1a, Karlstrasse;
but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the house of a widow
who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her two young children
used to drop in every morning and talk German to me—by request. One
day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments
where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide
that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly
place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight,
stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows—all
of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white
shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows;
and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and
buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands.
Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was
a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a
watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and
ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of
death, shall make a movement—for any, even the slightest, movement will
twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel
drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty
night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by
the sudden clamor of that awful summons! So I inquired about this thing;
asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the restored corpse
came and did what it could to make his last moments easy. But I was
rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and
so mournful a place; and went my way with a humbled crest.

Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she
exclaimed—
'Come with me! I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know.
He has been a night-watchman there.'
He was a living man, but he did not look it. He was abed, and had his
head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless, his deep-
sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was talon-like, it was
so bony and long-fingered. The widow began her introduction of me. The
man's eyes opened slowly, and glittered wickedly out from the twilight of
their caverns; he frowned a black frown; he lifted his lean hand and waved
us peremptorily away. But the widow kept straight on, till she had got out
the fact that I was a stranger and an American. The man's face changed at
once; brightened, became even eager—and the next moment he and I were
alone together.

I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English;
thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest.

This consumptive and I became good friends. I visited him every day,
and we talked about everything. At least, about everything but wives and
children. Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and three
things always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light
glimmered in the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its
place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever
saw his lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for that
day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing that I
said; took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly did not know, by either
sight or hearing, when I left the room.
When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two
months, he one day said, abruptly—
'I will tell you my story.'
A DYING MAN S CONFESSION
Then he went on as follows:—
I have never given up, until now. But now I have given up. I am going to
die. I made up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon, too. You
say you are going to revisit your river, by-and-bye, when you find
opportunity. Very well; that, together with a certain strange experience
which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you my history—for
you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for my sake you will stop there, and
do a certain thing for me—a thing which you will willingly undertake after
you shall have heard my narrative.
Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being long.
You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to settle in
that lonely region in the South. But you do not know that I had a wife. My
wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely good and blameless
and gentle! And our little girl was her mother in miniature. It was the
happiest of happy households.
One night—it was toward the close of the war—I woke up out of a
sodden lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted
with chloroform! I saw two men in the room, and one was saying to the
other, in a hoarse whisper, 'I told her I would, if she made a noise, and as for
the child—'
The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice—

'You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them; or I wouldn't
have come.'
'Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up; you
done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you; come, help
rummage.'

Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes; they
had a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticed that the gentler robber had
no thumb on his right hand. They rummaged around my poor cabin for a
moment; the head bandit then said, in his stage whisper—
'It's a waste of time—he shall tell where it's hid. Undo his gag, and revive
him up.'
The other said—
'All right—provided no clubbing.'
'No clubbing it is, then—provided he keeps still.'
They approached me; just then there was a sound outside; a sound of
voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their breath and listened; the

sounds came slowly nearer and nearer; then came a shout—
'Hello, the house! Show a light, we want water.'
'The captain's voice, by G—!' said the stage-whispering ruffian, and both
robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting off their bull's-eye as they
ran.
The strangers shouted several times more, then rode by—there seemed to
be a dozen of the horses—and I heard nothing more.
I struggled, but could not free myself from my bonds. I tried to speak, but
the gag was effective; I could not make a sound. I listened for my wife's
voice and my child's—listened long and intently, but no sound came from
the other end of the room where their bed was. This silence became more
and more awful, more and more ominous, every moment. Could you have
endured an hour of it, do you think? Pity me, then, who had to endure three.
Three hours—? it was three ages! Whenever the clock struck, it seemed as
if years had gone by since I had heard it last. All this time I was struggling
in my bonds; and at last, about dawn, I got myself free, and rose up and
stretched my stiff limbs. I was able to distinguish details pretty well. The
floor was littered with things thrown there by the robbers during their
search for my savings. The first object that caught my particular attention
was a document of mine which I had seen the rougher of the two ruffians
glance at and then cast away. It had blood on it! I staggered to the other end
of the room. Oh, poor unoffending, helpless ones, there they lay, their
troubles ended, mine begun!
Did I appeal to the law—I? Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the King
drink for him? Oh, no, no, no—I wanted no impertinent interference of the
law. Laws and the gallows could not pay the debt that was owing to me! Let
the laws leave the matter in my hands, and have no fears: I would find the
debtor and collect the debt. How accomplish this, do you say? How
accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when I had neither seen the robbers'
faces, nor heard their natural voices, nor had any idea who they might be?
Nevertheless, I was sure—quite sure, quite confident. I had a clue—a clue
which you would not have valued—a clue which would not have greatly
helped even a detective, since he would lack the secret of how to apply it. I
shall come to that, presently—you shall see. Let us go on, now, taking
things in their due order. There was one circumstance which gave me a slant
in a definite direction to begin with: Those two robbers were manifestly

soldiers in tramp disguise; and not new to military service, but old in it—
regulars, perhaps; they did not acquire their soldierly attitude, gestures,
carriage, in a day, nor a month, nor yet in a year. So I thought, but said
nothing. And one of them had said, 'the captain's voice, by G—!'—the one
whose life I would have. Two miles away, several regiments were in camp,
and two companies of U.S. cavalry. When I learned that Captain Blakely, of
Company C had passed our way, that night, with an escort, I said nothing,
but in that company I resolved to seek my man. In conversation I studiously
and persistently described the robbers as tramps, camp followers; and
among this class the people made useless search, none suspecting the
soldiers but me.
Working patiently, by night, in my desolated home, I made a disguise for
myself out of various odds and ends of clothing; in the nearest village I
bought a pair of blue goggles. By-and-bye, when the military camp broke
up, and Company C was ordered a hundred miles north, to Napoleon, I
secreted my small hoard of money in my belt, and took my departure in the
night. When Company C arrived in Napoleon, I was already there. Yes, I
was there, with a new trade—fortune-teller. Not to seem partial, I made
friends and told fortunes among all the companies garrisoned there; but I
gave Company C the great bulk of my attentions. I made myself limitlessly
obliging to these particular men; they could ask me no favor, put upon me
no risk, which I would decline. I became the willing butt of their jokes; this
perfected my popularity; I became a favorite.
I early found a private who lacked a thumb—what joy it was to me! And
when I found that he alone, of all the company, had lost a thumb, my last
misgiving vanished; I was sure I was on the right track. This man's name
was Kruger, a German. There were nine Germans in the company. I
watched, to see who might be his intimates; but he seemed to have no
especial intimates. But I was his intimate; and I took care to make the
intimacy grow. Sometimes I so hungered for my revenge that I could hardly
restrain myself from going on my knees and begging him to point out the
man who had murdered my wife and child; but I managed to bridle my
tongue. I bided my time, and went on telling fortunes, as opportunity
offered.

My apparatus was simple: a little red paint and a bit of white paper. I
painted the ball of the client's thumb, took a print of it on the paper, studied
it that night, and revealed his fortune to him next day. What was my idea in
this nonsense? It was this: When I was a youth, I knew an old Frenchman
who had been a prison-keeper for thirty years, and he told me that there was
one thing about a person which never changed, from the cradle to the grave
—the lines in the ball of the thumb; and he said that these lines were never
exactly alike in the thumbs of any two human beings. In these days, we
photograph the new criminal, and hang his picture in the Rogues' Gallery
for future reference; but that Frenchman, in his day, used to take a print of

the ball of a new prisoner's thumb and put that away for future reference.
He always said that pictures were no good—future disguises could make
them useless; 'The thumb's the only sure thing,' said he; 'you can't disguise
that.' And he used to prove his theory, too, on my friends and acquaintances;
it always succeeded.

I went on telling fortunes. Every night I shut myself in, all alone, and
studied the day's thumb-prints with a magnifying-glass. Imagine the
devouring eagerness with which I pored over those mazy red spirals, with
that document by my side which bore the right-hand thumb-and-finger-
marks of that unknown murderer, printed with the dearest blood—to me—
that was ever shed on this earth! And many and many a time I had to repeat
the same old disappointed remark, 'will they never correspond!'
But my reward came at last. It was the print of the thumb of the forty-
third man of Company C whom I had experimented on—Private Franz
Adler. An hour before, I did not know the murderer's name, or voice, or
figure, or face, or nationality; but now I knew all these things! I believed I

might feel sure; the Frenchman's repeated demonstrations being so good a
warranty. Still, there was a way to make sure. I had an impression of
Kruger's left thumb. In the morning I took him aside when he was off duty;
and when we were out of sight and hearing of witnesses, I said,
impressively—
'A part of your fortune is so grave, that I thought it would be better for
you if I did not tell it in public. You and another man, whose fortune I was
studying last night,—Private Adler,—have been murdering a woman and a
child! You are being dogged: within five days both of you will be
assassinated.'
He dropped on his knees, frightened out of his wits; and for five minutes
he kept pouring out the same set of words, like a demented person, and in
the same half-crying way which was one of my memories of that murderous
night in my cabin—

'I didn't do it; upon my soul I didn't do it; and I tried to keep him from
doing it; I did, as God is my witness. He did it alone.'
This was all I wanted. And I tried to get rid of the fool; but no, he clung
to me, imploring me to save him from the assassin. He said—
'I have money—ten thousand dollars—hid away, the fruit of loot and
thievery; save me—tell me what to do, and you shall have it, every penny.
Two-thirds of it is my cousin Adler's; but you can take it all. We hid it when
we first came here. But I hid it in a new place yesterday, and have not told
him—shall not tell him. I was going to desert, and get away with it all. It is
gold, and too heavy to carry when one is running and dodging; but a woman
who has been gone over the river two days to prepare my way for me is
going to follow me with it; and if I got no chance to describe the hiding-
place to her I was going to slip my silver watch into her hand, or send it to
her, and she would understand. There's a piece of paper in the back of the
case, which tells it all. Here, take the watch—tell me what to do!'
He was trying to press his watch upon me, and was exposing the paper
and explaining it to me, when Adler appeared on the scene, about a dozen
yards away. I said to poor Kruger—
'Put up your watch, I don't want it. You shan't come to any harm. Go,
now; I must tell Adler his fortune. Presently I will tell you how to escape
the assassin; meantime I shall have to examine your thumbmark again. Say
nothing to Adler about this thing—say nothing to anybody.'
He went away filled with fright and gratitude, poor devil. I told Adler a
long fortune—purposely so long that I could not finish it; promised to come
to him on guard, that night, and tell him the really important part of it—the
tragical part of it, I said—so must be out of reach of eavesdroppers. They
always kept a picket-watch outside the town—mere discipline and
ceremony—no occasion for it, no enemy around.

Toward midnight I set out, equipped with the countersign, and picked my
way toward the lonely region where Adler was to keep his watch. It was so
dark that I stumbled right on a dim figure almost before I could get out a
protecting word. The sentinel hailed and I answered, both at the same
moment. I added, 'It's only me—the fortune-teller.' Then I slipped to the
poor devil's side, and without a word I drove my dirk into his heart! Ya
wohl, laughed I, it was the tragedy part of his fortune, indeed! As he fell
from his horse, he clutched at me, and my blue goggles remained in his
hand; and away plunged the beast dragging him, with his foot in the stirrup.
I fled through the woods, and made good my escape, leaving the
accusing goggles behind me in that dead man's hand.
This was fifteen or sixteen years ago. Since then I have wandered
aimlessly about the earth, sometimes at work, sometimes idle; sometimes
with money, sometimes with none; but always tired of life, and wishing it
was done, for my mission here was finished, with the act of that night; and
the only pleasure, solace, satisfaction I had, in all those tedious years, was
in the daily reflection, 'I have killed him!'

Four years ago, my health began to fail. I had wandered into Munich, in
my purposeless way. Being out of money, I sought work, and got it; did my
duty faithfully about a year, and was then given the berth of night
watchman yonder in that dead-house which you visited lately. The place
suited my mood. I liked it. I liked being with the dead—liked being alone
with them. I used to wander among those rigid corpses, and peer into their
austere faces, by the hour. The later the time, the more impressive it was; I
preferred the late time. Sometimes I turned the lights low: this gave
perspective, you see; and the imagination could play; always, the dim
receding ranks of the dead inspired one with weird and fascinating fancies.
Two years ago—I had been there a year then—I was sitting all alone in the
watch-room, one gusty winter's night, chilled, numb, comfortless; drowsing
gradually into unconsciousness; the sobbing of the wind and the slamming
of distant shutters falling fainter and fainter upon my dulling ear each
moment, when sharp and suddenly that dead-bell rang out a blood-curdling
alarum over my head! The shock of it nearly paralyzed me; for it was the
first time I had ever heard it.
I gathered myself together and flew to the corpse-room. About midway
down the outside rank, a shrouded figure was sitting upright, wagging its
head slowly from one side to the other—a grisly spectacle! Its side was
toward me. I hurried to it and peered into its face. Heavens, it was Adler!

Can you divine what my first thought was? Put into words, it was this: 'It
seems, then, you escaped me once: there will be a different result this time!'
Evidently this creature was suffering unimaginable terrors. Think what it
must have been to wake up in the midst of that voiceless hush, and, look out
over that grim congregation of the dead! What gratitude shone in his skinny
white face when he saw a living form before him! And how the fervency of
this mute gratitude was augmented when his eyes fell upon the life-giving
cordials which I carried in my hands! Then imagine the horror which came
into this pinched face when I put the cordials behind me, and said
mockingly—
'Speak up, Franz Adler—call upon these dead. Doubtless they will listen
and have pity; but here there is none else that will.'
He tried to speak, but that part of the shroud which bound his jaws, held
firm and would not let him. He tried to lift imploring hands, but they were

crossed upon his breast and tied. I said—
'Shout, Franz Adler; make the sleepers in the distant streets hear you and
bring help. Shout—and lose no time, for there is little to lose. What, you
cannot? That is a pity; but it is no matter—it does not always bring help.
When you and your cousin murdered a helpless woman and child in a cabin
in Arkansas—my wife, it was, and my child!—they shrieked for help, you
remember; but it did no good; you remember that it did no good, is it not
so? Your teeth chatter—then why cannot you shout? Loosen the bandages
with your hands—then you can. Ah, I see—your hands are tied, they cannot
aid you. How strangely things repeat themselves, after long years; for my
hands were tied, that night, you remember? Yes, tied much as yours are now
—how odd that is. I could not pull free. It did not occur to you to untie me;
it does not occur to me to untie you. Sh—! there's a late footstep. It is
coming this way. Hark, how near it is! One can count the footfalls—one—
two—three. There—it is just outside. Now is the time! Shout, man, shout!
—it is the one sole chance between you and eternity! Ah, you see you have
delayed too long—it is gone by. There—it is dying out. It is gone! Think of
it—reflect upon it—you have heard a human footstep for the last time. How
curious it must be, to listen to so common a sound as that, and know that
one will never hear the fellow to it again.'

Oh, my friend, the agony in that shrouded face was ecstasy to see! I
thought of a new torture, and applied it—assisting myself with a trifle of
lying invention—
'That poor Kruger tried to save my wife and child, and I did him a
grateful good turn for it when the time came. I persuaded him to rob you;
and I and a woman helped him to desert, and got him away in safety.' A
look as of surprise and triumph shone out dimly through the anguish in my
victim's face. I was disturbed, disquieted. I said—
'What, then—didn't he escape?'
A negative shake of the head.
'No? What happened, then?'
The satisfaction in the shrouded face was still plainer. The man tried to
mumble out some words—could not succeed; tried to express something
with his obstructed hands—failed; paused a moment, then feebly tilted his
head, in a meaning way, toward the corpse that lay nearest him.
'Dead?' I asked. 'Failed to escape?—caught in the act and shot?'
Negative shake of the head.

'How, then?'
Again the man tried to do something with his hands. I watched closely,
but could not guess the intent. I bent over and watched still more intently.
He had twisted a thumb around and was weakly punching at his breast with
it. 'Ah—stabbed, do you mean?'
Affirmative nod, accompanied by a spectral smile of such peculiar
devilishness, that it struck an awakening light through my dull brain, and I
cried—
'Did I stab him, mistaking him for you?—for that stroke was meant for
none but you.'
The affirmative nod of the re-dying rascal was as joyous as his failing
strength was able to put into its expression.
'O, miserable, miserable me, to slaughter the pitying soul that, stood a
friend to my darlings when they were helpless, and would have saved them
if he could! miserable, oh, miserable, miserable me!'
I fancied I heard the muffled gurgle of a mocking laugh. I took my face
out of my hands, and saw my enemy sinking back upon his inclined board.
He was a satisfactory long time dying. He had a wonderful vitality, an
astonishing constitution. Yes, he was a pleasant long time at it. I got a chair
and a newspaper, and sat down by him and read. Occasionally I took a sip
of brandy. This was necessary, on account of the cold. But I did it partly
because I saw, that along at first, whenever I reached for the bottle, he
thought I was going to give him some. I read aloud: mainly imaginary
accounts of people snatched from the grave's threshold and restored to life
and vigor by a few spoonsful of liquor and a warm bath. Yes, he had a long,
hard death of it—three hours and six minutes, from the time he rang his
bell.
It is believed that in all these eighteen years that have elapsed since the
institution of the corpse-watch, no shrouded occupant of the Bavarian dead-
houses has ever rung its bell. Well, it is a harmless belief. Let it stand at
that.
The chill of that death-room had penetrated my bones. It revived and
fastened upon me the disease which had been afflicting me, but which, up
to that night, had been steadily disappearing. That man murdered my wife
and my child; and in three days hence he will have added me to his list. No

matter—God! how delicious the memory of it!—I caught him escaping
from his grave, and thrust him back into it.
After that night, I was confined to my bed for a week; but as soon as I
could get about, I went to the dead-house books and got the number of the
house which Adler had died in. A wretched lodging-house, it was. It was my
idea that he would naturally have gotten hold of Kruger's effects, being his
cousin; and I wanted to get Kruger's watch, if I could. But while I was sick,
Adler's things had been sold and scattered, all except a few old letters, and
some odds and ends of no value. However, through those letters, I traced
out a son of Kruger's, the only relative left. He is a man of thirty now, a
shoemaker by trade, and living at No. 14 Konigstrasse, Mannheim—
widower, with several small children. Without explaining to him why, I
have furnished two-thirds of his support, ever since.
Now, as to that watch—see how strangely things happen! I traced it
around and about Germany for more than a year, at considerable cost in
money and vexation; and at last I got it. Got it, and was unspeakably glad;
opened it, and found nothing in it! Why, I might have known that that bit of
paper was not going to stay there all this time. Of course I gave up that ten
thousand dollars then; gave it up, and dropped it out of my mind: and most
sorrowfully, for I had wanted it for Kruger's son.
Last night, when I consented at last that I must die, I began to make
ready. I proceeded to burn all useless papers; and sure enough, from a batch
of Adler's, not previously examined with thoroughness, out dropped that
long-desired scrap! I recognized it in a moment. Here it is—I will translate
it:
'Brick livery stable, stone foundation, middle of town, corner of Orleans
and Market. Corner toward Court-house. Third stone, fourth row. Stick
notice there, saying how many are to come.'
There—take it, and preserve it. Kruger explained that that stone was
removable; and that it was in the north wall of the foundation, fourth row
from the top, and third stone from the west. The money is secreted behind
it. He said the closing sentence was a blind, to mislead in case the paper
should fall into wrong hands. It probably performed that office for Adler.
Now I want to beg that when you make your intended journey down the
river, you will hunt out that hidden money, and send it to Adam Kruger,
care of the Mannheim address which I have mentioned. It will make a rich

man of him, and I shall sleep the sounder in my grave for knowing that I
have done what I could for the son of the man who tried to save my wife
and child—albeit my hand ignorantly struck him down, whereas the
impulse of my heart would have been to shield and serve him.

Chapter 32

The Disposal of a Bonanza

'SUCH was Ritter's narrative,' said I to my two friends. There was a
profound and impressive silence, which lasted a considerable time; then
both men broke into a fusillade of exciting and admiring ejaculations over
the strange incidents of the tale; and this, along with a rattling fire of
questions, was kept up until all hands were about out of breath. Then my
friends began to cool down, and draw off, under shelter of occasional
volleys, into silence and abysmal reverie. For ten minutes now, there was
stillness. Then Rogers said dreamily—
'Ten thousand dollars.'
Adding, after a considerable pause—
'Ten thousand. It is a heap of money.'
Presently the poet inquired—
'Are you going to send it to him right away?'
'Yes,' I said. 'It is a queer question.'
No reply. After a little, Rogers asked, hesitatingly:
'All of it?—That is—I mean—'
'Certainly, all of it.'
I was going to say more, but stopped—was stopped by a train of thought
which started up in me. Thompson spoke, but my mind was absent, and I
did not catch what he said. But I heard Rogers answer—
'Yes, it seems so to me. It ought to be quite sufficient; for I don't see that
he has done anything.'
Presently the poet said—

'When you come to look at it, it is more than sufficient. Just look at it—
five thousand dollars! Why, he couldn't spend it in a lifetime! And it would
injure him, too; perhaps ruin him—you want to look at that. In a little while
he would throw his last away, shut up his shop, maybe take to drinking,
maltreat his motherless children, drift into other evil courses, go steadily
from bad to worse—'

'Yes, that's it,' interrupted Rogers, fervently, 'I've seen it a hundred times
—yes, more than a hundred. You put money into the hands of a man like
that, if you want to destroy him, that's all; just put money into his hands, it's
all you've got to do; and if it don't pull him down, and take all the
usefulness out of him, and all the self-respect and everything, then I don't
know human nature—ain't that so, Thompson? And even if we were to give
him a third of it; why, in less than six months—'

'Less than six weeks, you'd better say!' said I, warming up and breaking
in. 'Unless he had that three thousand dollars in safe hands where he
couldn't touch it, he would no more last you six weeks than—'

'Of course he wouldn't,' said Thompson; 'I've edited books for that kind
of people; and the moment they get their hands on the royalty—maybe it's
three thousand, maybe it's two thousand—'
'What business has that shoemaker with two thousand dollars, I should
like to know?' broke in Rogers, earnestly. 'A man perhaps perfectly
contented now, there in Mannheim, surrounded by his own class, eating his
bread with the appetite which laborious industry alone can give, enjoying
his humble life, honest, upright, pure in heart; and blest!—yes, I say blest!
blest above all the myriads that go in silk attire and walk the empty artificial

round of social folly—but just you put that temptation before him once! just
you lay fifteen hundred dollars before a man like that, and say—'
'Fifteen hundred devils!' cried I, 'five hundred would rot his principles,
paralyze his industry, drag him to the rumshop, thence to the gutter, thence
to the almshouse, thence to ——'
'Why put upon ourselves this crime, gentlemen?' interrupted the poet
earnestly and appealingly. 'He is happy where he is, and as he is. Every
sentiment of honor, every sentiment of charity, every sentiment of high and
sacred benevolence warns us, beseeches us, commands us to leave him
undisturbed. That is real friendship, that is true friendship. We could follow
other courses that would be more showy; but none that would be so truly
kind and wise, depend upon it.'

After some further talk, it became evident that each of us, down in his
heart, felt some misgivings over this settlement of the matter. It was
manifest that we all felt that we ought to send the poor shoemaker
something. There was long and thoughtful discussion of this point; and we
finally decided to send him a chromo.
Well, now that everything seemed to be arranged satisfactorily to
everybody concerned, a new trouble broke out: it transpired that these two
men were expecting to share equally in the money with me. That was not
my idea. I said that if they got half of it between them they might consider
themselves lucky. Rogers said—
'Who would have had any if it hadn't been for me? I flung out the first
hint—but for that it would all have gone to the shoemaker.'
Thompson said that he was thinking of the thing himself at the very
moment that Rogers had originally spoken.
I retorted that the idea would have occurred to me plenty soon enough,
and without anybody's help. I was slow about thinking, maybe, but I was
sure.

This matter warmed up into a quarrel; then into a fight; and each man got
pretty badly battered. As soon as I had got myself mended up after a
fashion, I ascended to the hurricane deck in a pretty sour humor. I found
Captain McCord there, and said, as pleasantly as my humor would permit—
'I have come to say good-bye, captain. I wish to go ashore at Napoleon.'
'Go ashore where?'
'Napoleon.'
The captain laughed; but seeing that I was not in a jovial mood, stopped
that and said—
'But are you serious?'
'Serious? I certainly am.'
The captain glanced up at the pilot-house and said—
'He wants to get off at Napoleon!'
'Napoleon?'
'That's what he says.'
'Great Caesar's ghost!'
Uncle Mumford approached along the deck. The captain said—
'Uncle, here's a friend of yours wants to get off at Napoleon!'
'Well, by —?'
I said—
'Come, what is all this about? Can't a man go ashore at Napoleon if he
wants to?'
'Why, hang it, don't you know? There isn't any Napoleon any more.
Hasn't been for years and years. The Arkansas River burst through it, tore it
all to rags, and emptied it into the Mississippi!'
'Carried the whole town away?-banks, churches, jails, newspaper-offices,
court-house, theater, fire department, livery stable everything ?'
'Everything. just a fifteen-minute job.' or such a matter. Didn't leave hide
nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a shanty and one
brick chimney. This boat is paddling along right now, where the dead-center
of that town used to be; yonder is the brick chimney-all that's left of
Napoleon. These dense woods on the right used to be a mile back of the

town. Take a look behind you—up-stream—now you begin to recognize
this country, don't you?'
'Yes, I do recognize it now. It is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of;
by a long shot the most wonderful—and unexpected.'
Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rogers had arrived, meantime, with satchels and
umbrellas, and had silently listened to the captain's news. Thompson put a
half-dollar in my hand and said softly—
'For my share of the chromo.'
Rogers followed suit.

Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between
unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good big
self-complacent town twenty years ago. Town that was county-seat of a
great and important county; town with a big United States marine hospital;
town of innumerable fights—an inquest every day; town where I had used
to know the prettiest girl, and the most accomplished in the whole
Mississippi Valley; town where we were handed the first printed news of
the 'Pennsylvania's' mournful disaster a quarter of a century ago; a town no
more—swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a
fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney!

Chapter 33

Refreshments and Ethics

IN regard to Island 74, which is situated not far from the former
Napoleon, a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of men
and made them a vanity and a jest. When the State of Arkansas was
chartered, she controlled 'to the center of the river'—a most unstable line.
The State of Mississippi claimed 'to the channel'—another shifty and
unstable line. No. 74 belonged to Arkansas. By and by a cut-off threw this
big island out of Arkansas, and yet not within Mississippi. 'Middle of the
river' on one side of it, 'channel' on the other. That is as I understand the
problem. Whether I have got the details right or wrong, this fact remains:
that here is this big and exceedingly valuable island of four thousand acres,
thrust out in the cold, and belonging to neither the one State nor the other;
paying taxes to neither, owing allegiance to neither. One man owns the
whole island, and of right is 'the man without a country.'
Island 92 belongs to Arkansas. The river moved it over and joined it to
Mississippi. A chap established a whiskey shop there, without a Mississippi
license, and enriched himself upon Mississippi custom under Arkansas
protection (where no license was in those days required).
We glided steadily down the river in the usual privacy—steamboat or
other moving thing seldom seen. Scenery as always: stretch upon stretch of
almost unbroken forest, on both sides of the river; soundless solitude. Here
and there a cabin or two, standing in small openings on the gray and
grassless banks—cabins which had formerly stood a quarter or half-mile
farther to the front, and gradually been pulled farther and farther back as the
shores caved in. As at Pilcher's Point, for instance, where the cabins had
been moved back three hundred yards in three months, so we were told; but
the caving banks had already caught up with them, and they were being
conveyed rearward once more.

Napoleon had but small opinion of Greenville, Mississippi, in the old
times; but behold, Napoleon is gone to the cat-fishes, and here is Greenville
full of life and activity, and making a considerable flourish in the Valley;
having three thousand inhabitants, it is said, and doing a gross trade of
$2,500,000 annually. A growing town.
There was much talk on the boat about the Calhoun Land Company, an
enterprise which is expected to work wholesome results. Colonel Calhoun,
a grandson of the statesman, went to Boston and formed a syndicate which
purchased a large tract of land on the river, in Chicot County, Arkansas—
some ten thousand acres—for cotton-growing. The purpose is to work on a
cash basis: buy at first hands, and handle their own product; supply their
negro laborers with provisions and necessaries at a trifling profit, say 8 or
10 per cent.; furnish them comfortable quarters, etc., and encourage them to
save money and remain on the place. If this proves a financial success, as
seems quite certain, they propose to establish a banking-house in
Greenville, and lend money at an unburdensome rate of interest—6 per
cent. is spoken of.
The trouble heretofore has been—I am quoting remarks of planters and
steamboatmen—that the planters, although owning the land, were without
cash capital; had to hypothecate both land and crop to carry on the business.

Consequently, the commission dealer who furnishes the money takes some
risk and demands big interest—usually 10 per cent., and 2{half} per cent.
for negotiating the loan. The planter has also to buy his supplies through the
same dealer, paying commissions and profits. Then when he ships his crop,
the dealer adds his commissions, insurance, etc. So, taking it by and large,
and first and last, the dealer's share of that crop is about 25 per
cent.'{footnote ['But what can the State do where the people are under
subjection to rates of interest ranging from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also
under the necessity of purchasing their crops in advance even of planting, at
these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all their supplies at 100 per cent.
profit?'—Edward Atkinson.]}

A cotton-planter's estimate of the average margin of profit on planting, in
his section: One man and mule will raise ten acres of cotton, giving ten
bales cotton, worth, say, $500; cost of producing, say $350; net profit, $150,
or $15 per acre. There is also a profit now from the cotton-seed, which

formerly had little value—none where much transportation was necessary.
In sixteen hundred pounds crude cotton four hundred are lint, worth, say,
ten cents a pound; and twelve hundred pounds of seed, worth $12 or $13
per ton. Maybe in future even the stems will not be thrown away. Mr.
Edward Atkinson says that for each bale of cotton there are fifteen hundred
pounds of stems, and that these are very rich in phosphate of lime and
potash; that when ground and mixed with ensilage or cotton-seed meal
(which is too rich for use as fodder in large quantities), the stem mixture
makes a superior food, rich in all the elements needed for the production of
milk, meat, and bone. Heretofore the stems have been considered a
nuisance.
Complaint is made that the planter remains grouty toward the former
slave, since the war; will have nothing but a chill business relation with
him, no sentiment permitted to intrude, will not keep a 'store' himself, and
supply the negro's wants and thus protect the negro's pocket and make him
able and willing to stay on the place and an advantage to him to do it, but
lets that privilege to some thrifty Israelite, who encourages the thoughtless
negro and wife to buy all sorts of things which they could do without—buy
on credit, at big prices, month after month, credit based on the negro's share
of the growing crop; and at the end of the season, the negro's share belongs
to the Israelite,' the negro is in debt besides, is discouraged, dissatisfied,
restless, and both he and the planter are injured; for he will take steamboat
and migrate, and the planter must get a stranger in his place who does not
know him, does not care for him, will fatten the Israelite a season, and
follow his predecessor per steamboat.

It is hoped that the Calhoun Company will show, by its humane and
protective treatment of its laborers, that its method is the most profitable for
both planter and negro; and it is believed that a general adoption of that
method will then follow.

And where so many are saying their say, shall not the barkeeper testify?
He is thoughtful, observant, never drinks; endeavors to earn his salary, and
would earn it if there were custom enough. He says the people along here in
Mississippi and Louisiana will send up the river to buy vegetables rather
than raise them, and they will come aboard at the landings and buy fruits of
the barkeeper. Thinks they 'don't know anything but cotton;' believes they
don't know how to raise vegetables and fruit—'at least the most of them.'
Says 'a nigger will go to H for a watermelon' ('H' is all I find in the
stenographer's report—means Halifax probably, though that seems a good
way to go for a watermelon). Barkeeper buys watermelons for five cents up
the river, brings them down and sells them for fifty. 'Why does he mix such
elaborate and picturesque drinks for the nigger hands on the boat?' Because
they won't have any other. 'They want a big drink; don't make any
difference what you make it of, they want the worth of their money. You
give a nigger a plain gill of half-a-dollar brandy for five cents—will he
touch it? No. Ain't size enough to it. But you put up a pint of all kinds of

worthless rubbish, and heave in some red stuff to make it beautiful—red's
the main thing—and he wouldn't put down that glass to go to a circus.'

All the bars on this Anchor Line are rented and owned by one firm. They
furnish the liquors from their own establishment, and hire the barkeepers
'on salary.' Good liquors? Yes, on some of the boats, where there are the
kind of passengers that want it and can pay for it. On the other boats? No.
Nobody but the deck hands and firemen to drink it. 'Brandy? Yes, I've got
brandy, plenty of it; but you don't want any of it unless you've made your
will.' It isn't as it used to be in the old times. Then everybody traveled by
steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else. 'Now
most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don't drink.' In the old times
the barkeeper owned the bar himself, 'and was gay and smarty and talky and
all jeweled up, and was the toniest aristocrat on the boat; used to make
$2,000 on a trip. A father who left his son a steamboat bar, left him a
fortune. Now he leaves him board and lodging; yes, and washing, if a shirt a
trip will do. Yes, indeedy, times are changed. Why, do you know, on the
principal line of boats on the Upper Mississippi, they don't have any bar at
all! Sounds like poetry, but it's the petrified truth.'

Chapter 34

Tough Yarns

STACK island. I remembered Stack Island; also Lake Providence,
Louisiana—which is the first distinctly Southern-looking town you come
to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hung with venerable
gray beards of Spanish moss; 'restful, pensive, Sunday aspect about the
place,' comments Uncle Mumford, with feeling—also with truth.

A Mr. H. furnished some minor details of fact concerning this region
which I would have hesitated to believe if I had not known him to be a
steamboat mate. He was a passenger of ours, a resident of Arkansas City,
and bound to Vicksburg to join his boat, a little Sunflower packet. He was
an austere man, and had the reputation of being singularly unworldly, for a
river man. Among other things, he said that Arkansas had been injured and
kept back by generations of exaggerations concerning the mosquitoes here.
One may smile, said he, and turn the matter off as being a small thing; but
when you come to look at the effects produced, in the way of
discouragement of immigration, and diminished values of property, it was
quite the opposite of a small thing, or thing in any wise to be coughed down
or sneered at. These mosquitoes had been persistently represented as being
formidable and lawless; whereas 'the truth is, they are feeble, insignificant
in size, diffident to a fault, sensitive'—and so on, and so on; you would
have supposed he was talking about his family. But if he was soft on the
Arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough on the mosquitoes of Lake
Providence to make up for it—'those Lake Providence colossi,' as he finely
called them. He said that two of them could whip a dog, and that four of
them could hold a man down; and except help come, they would kill him
—'butcher him,' as he expressed it. Referred in a sort of casual way—and
yet significant way—to 'the fact that the life policy in its simplest form is
unknown in Lake Providence—they take out a mosquito policy besides.' He
told many remarkable things about those lawless insects. Among others,
said he had seen them try to vote. Noticing that this statement seemed to be
a good deal of a strain on us, he modified it a little: said he might have been
mistaken, as to that particular, but knew he had seen them around the polls
'canvassing.'

There was another passenger—friend of H.'s—who backed up the harsh
evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailed some stirring adventures
which he had had with them. The stories were pretty sizable, merely pretty
sizable; yet Mr. H. was continually interrupting with a cold, inexorable
'Wait—knock off twenty-five per cent. of that; now go on;' or, 'Wait—you
are getting that too strong; cut it down, cut it down—you get a leetle too
much costumery on to your statements: always dress a fact in tights, never

in an ulster;' or, 'Pardon, once more: if you are going to load anything more
on to that statement, you want to get a couple of lighters and tow the rest,
because it's drawing all the water there is in the river already; stick to facts
—just stick to the cold facts; what these gentlemen want for a book is the
frozen truth—ain't that so, gentlemen?' He explained privately that it was
necessary to watch this man all the time, and keep him within bounds; it
would not do to neglect this precaution, as he, Mr. H., 'knew to his sorrow.'
Said he, 'I will not deceive you; he told me such a monstrous lie once, that it
swelled my left ear up, and spread it so that I was actually not able to see
out around it; it remained so for months, and people came miles to see me
fan myself with it.'

Chapter 35

Vicksburg During the Trouble

WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream; but we
cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it, like Osceola,
St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless water—also a big
island—in front of Vicksburg now. You come down the river the other side

of the island, then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water: in
low water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it.
Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg's tremendous war
experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon balls, cave-refuges in
the clay precipices, etc. The caves did good service during the six weeks'
bombardment of the city—May 8 to July 4, 1863. They were used by the
non-combatants—mainly by the women and children; not to live in
constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They were mere holes,
tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then branched Y shape,
within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps—but
wait; here are some materials out of which to reproduce it:—
Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand non-
combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world—walled solidly in, the
frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries; hence, no buying
and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro; no God-speeding a
parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide
news to be read at breakfast, mornings—a tedious dull absence of such
matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats smoking into
view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward the town—for none
came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the
railway station, no struggling over bewildered swarms of passengers by
noisy mobs of hackmen—all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel,
sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a
hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar
and racket of drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them
to do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three
o'clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp of a
sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of hearing of this
lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in a moment come
ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the
crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring bomb-shells, and a rain of
iron fragments descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets:
streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim figures of
frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed toward the cave
dungeons—encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'Rats, to
your holes!' and laugh.

The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron
rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops;
silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues; by-
and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder, and
reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing, bodies follow heads,
and jaded, half smothered creatures group themselves about, stretch their
cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh air, gossip with
the neighbors from the next cave; maybe straggle off home presently, or
take a lounge through the town, if the stillness continues; and will scurry to
the holes again, by-and-bye, when the war-tempest breaks forth once more.
There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers—merely the
population of a village—would they not come to know each other, after a
week or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate
experiences of one would be of interest to all?

Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost
anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg? Could
you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the
imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger who did
experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why it might
not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is an experience
which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties; novelties which are
in such sharp contrast with all this person's former experiences that they
take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination and memory. By
tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strange and stirring voyage
over with him; make him see it all and feel it all. But if he wait? If he make
ten voyages in succession—what then? Why, the thing has lost color, snap,

surprise; and has become commonplace. The man would have nothing to
tell that would quicken a landsman's pulse.
Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants—a
man and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way, those people told
it without fire, almost without interest.
A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues
eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the
novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into
the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the possibility of
their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone. What
the man said was to this effect:—

'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week—to us,
anyway. We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays,
and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night,
by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron. At first we
used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards. The

first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along. When
she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or three weeks afterwards,
when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a
big shell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of the
iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head.
Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again! Was
getting used to things already, you see. We all got so that we could tell a
good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it
was a light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk; and a man would
say, 'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of it,
and go on talking—if there wasn't any danger from it. If a shell was
bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;—uncomfortable,
yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let go, we went on talking again, if
nobody hurt—maybe saying, 'That was a ripper!' or some such
commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we would see a
shell poising itself away high in the air overhead. In that case, every fellow
just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again, gents!' and shoved. Often and
often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking as cheerful as
you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells; and I've seen
them stop still when they were uncertain about what a shell was going to
do, and wait and make certain; and after that they sa'ntered along again, or
lit out for shelter, according to the verdict. Streets in some towns have a
litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying
around. Ours hadn't; they had iron litter. Sometimes a man would gather up
all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his neighborhood, and pile
them into a kind of monument in his front yard—a ton of it, sometimes. No
glass left; glass couldn't stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out.
Windows of the houses vacant—looked like eye-holes in a skull. Whole
panes were as scarce as news.

'We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye
pretty good turnouts. I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit
quiet—no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then—and all the more so on
account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and
pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.
Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful
queer combination—along at first. Coming out of church, one morning, we
had an accident—the only one that happened around me on a Sunday. I was
just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for a while, and
saying, 'Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we've got hold of a

pint of prime wh—.' Whiskey, I was going to say, you know, but a shell
interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man's arm off, and left it dangling in my
hand. And do you know the thing that is going to stick the longest in my
memory, and outlast everything else, little and big, I reckon, is the mean
thought I had then? It was 'the whiskey is saved.' And yet, don't you know,
it was kind of excusable; because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had
only just that little; never had another taste during the siege.
'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and
close. Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no
turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have made a
candle burn in it. A child was born in one of those caves one night, Think of
that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.
'Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we had
a dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight; eight belonged
there. Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I don't
know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever rightly
their old selves after the siege. They all died but three of us within a couple
of years. One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in and
stopped it up. It was lively times, for a while, digging out. Some of us came
near smothering. After that we made two openings—ought to have thought
of it at first.
'Mule meat. No, we only got down to that the last day or two. Of course
it was good; anything is good when you are starving.

This man had kept a diary during—six weeks? No, only the first six days.
The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third, one—loosely
written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two the fifth and sixth days;
seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific Vicksburg having now become
commonplace and matter of course.
The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the general
reader than that of any other of the river-towns. It is full of variety, full of
incident, full of the picturesque. Vicksburg held out longer than any other
important river-town, and saw warfare in all its phases, both land and water
—the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse, the bombardment, sickness,
captivity, famine.
The most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here. Over the great
gateway is this inscription:—

“HERE REST IN PEACE 16,600 WHO DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY
IN THE YEARS 1861 TO 1865.”
The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide
prospect of land and river. They are tastefully laid out in broad terraces,
with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment in the way of
semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,' and in one part is a piece of native wild-
wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm. Everything
about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national Government. The
Government's work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity,

thoroughness, neatness. The Government does its work well in the first
place, and then takes care of it.
By winding-roads—which were often cut to so great a depth between
perpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels—we drove out a
mile or two and visited the monument which stands upon the scene of the
surrender of Vicksburg to General Grant by General Pemberton. Its metal
will preserve it from the hackings and chippings which so defaced its
predecessor, which was of marble; but the brick foundations are crumbling,
and it will tumble down by-and-bye. It overlooks a picturesque region of
wooded hills and ravines; and is not unpicturesque itself, being well
smothered in flowering weeds. The battered remnant of the marble
monument has been removed to the National Cemetery.
On the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed
us, with pride, an unexploded bomb-shell which has lain in his yard since
the day it fell there during the siege.
'I was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin' heah; de dog he went for
de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it; but I didn't; I says, “Jes' make you'seff
at home heah; lay still whah you is, or bust up de place, jes' as you's a mind
to, but I's got business out in de woods, I has!”'
Vicksburg is a town of substantial business streets and pleasant
residences; it commands the commerce of the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers;
is pushing railways in several directions, through rich agricultural regions,
and has a promising future of prosperity and importance.
Apparently, nearly all the river towns, big and little, have made up their
minds that they must look mainly to railroads for wealth and upbuilding,
henceforth. They are acting upon this idea. The signs are, that the next
twenty years will bring about some noteworthy changes in the Valley, in the
direction of increased population and wealth, and in the intellectual
advancement and the liberalizing of opinion which go naturally with these.
And yet, if one may judge by the past, the river towns will manage to find
and use a chance, here and there, to cripple and retard their progress. They
kept themselves back in the days of steamboating supremacy, by a system
of wharfage-dues so stupidly graded as to prohibit what may be called small
retail traffic in freights and passengers. Boats were charged such heavy
wharfage that they could not afford to land for one or two passengers or a
light lot of freight. Instead of encouraging the bringing of trade to their