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Life on the Mississippi
BY
MARK TWAIN
AUTHOR OF "THE INNOCENTS ABROAD," "ROUGHING IT, "THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER," ETC.
WITH MORE THAN 300 ILLUSTRATIONS
Mississippi Steamboat of Fifty Years Ago.
[Sold by Subscription only.]
BOSTON
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY
1883
WEk?^THCA«0l^
Copyright, 1874 and 1875, By H. O. Houghton and Company.
Copyright, 1883, By Samuel L. Clemens.
All rights reserved.
H X BY ^g
9 I S. L. CLEMENS.
Mark Twain.
[trade mark.]
University Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge
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 the La Plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about f of its area; then comes that of the Yenisei, with about ^ ; the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tse-kiang, and Nile, f ; the Ganges, less than \ ; the Indus, less than \; the Euphrates, \; the Rhine, -fa. It exceeds in extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden. // 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.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
The Mississippi is Well worth Reading about. — It is Remarkable. — In- stead'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 21
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 31
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 Dis- covered. — Some Art-work proposed. — I give an Account of Myself. — Released 40
CHAPTER IV.
The Boys' Ambition. — Village Scenes — Steamboat Pictures. — A
Heavy Swell. — A Runaway 62
CHAPTER V. A Traveller. — A Lively Talker. — A Wild-cat Victim 70
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER VI.
Besieging the Pilot. — Taken along.— Spoiling a Nap. — Fishing for a
Plantation. — " Points " on the River. — A Gorgeous Pilot-house . . 79
CHAPTER VII.
River Inspectors. — Cottonwoods and Plum Point. — Hat-Island Cross- ing. — Touch and Go. — It is a Go. — A Lightning Pilot .... 91
CHAPTER VIII.
A Heavy-loaded Big Gun. — Sharp Sights in Darkness. — Abandoned to
his Fate. — Scraping the Banks. — Learn him or Kill him .... 102
CHAPTER IX.
Shake the Reef. — Reason Dethroned. — The Face of the Water. —
A Bewitching Scene. — Romance and Beauty 112
CHAPTER X.
Putting on Airs. — Taken down a bit. — Learn it as it is. — The River
Rising 122
CHAPTER XL
In the Tract Business. — Effects of the Rise. — Plantations gone. — A Measureless Sea. — A Somnambulist Pilot. — Supernatural Piloting. — Nobody there. — All Saved - 132
CHAPTER XII.
Low Water. — Yawl sounding. — Buoys and Lanterns. — Cubs and
Soundings. — The Boat Sunk. — Seeking the Wrecked 143
CHAPTER XIII.
A Pilot's Memory. — Wages soaring. — A Universal Grasp. — Skill and Nerve. — Testing a " Cub." — "Back her for Life." — A Good Les- son 152
CHAPTER XIV.
Pilots and Captains. — High-priced Pilots. — Pilots in Demand. — A
Whistler. — A cheap Trade. — Two-liundred-and-fif ty-dollar Speed . 166
CONTENTS.
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 176
CHAPTER XVI.
All Aboard. — A Glorious Start. — Loaded to Win. — Bands and Bugles.
— ' Boats and Boats. — Racers and Racing . 193
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 Alpha- betically 205
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 217
CHAPTER XIX.
A Question of Veracity. — A Little Unpleasantness. — I have an Audi- ence with the Captain. — Mr. Brown Retires 227
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 236
. CHAPTER XXI. I get my License. — The War Begins. — I become a Jack-of-all-trades . 246
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 . 247
10 CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Old French Settlements. — We start for Memphis. — Young Ladies and
Russia-leather Bags 258
CHAPTER XXIV.
I receive some Information. — Alligator Boats. — Alligator Talk. — She
was a Rattler to go. — I am Found Out .' . . . 264
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 273
CHAPTER XXVI. War Talk. — I Tilt over Backwards. — Fifteen Shot-holes. — A Plain Story. — Wars and Feuds. — Darnell ve7-sus Watson. — A Gang and a Woodpile. — Western Grammar. — River Changes. — New Madrid.
— Floods and Falls 281
CHAPTER XXVII. Tourists and their Note-hooks. — Captain Hall. — Mrs. Trollope's Emo- tions. — Hon. Charles Augustus Murray's Sentiment. — Captain Marryat's Sensations. — Alexander Mackay's Feelings. — Mr. Park- man Reports 292
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 298
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 311
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 325
CONTENTS. 11
CHAPTER XXXI.
Mutinous Language. — The Dead-house. — Cast-iron German and Flex- ible 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 Tri- umph. — The Muffled Gurgle of a Mocking Laugh. — How strangely 'firings happen. — The Hidden Money 337
CHAPTER XXXII.
Ritter's Narrative. — A Question of Money. — Napoleon. — Somebody
is Serious. — Where the Prettiest Girl used to Live 357
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 364
CHAPTER XXXIV.
An Austere Man. — A Mosquito Policy. — Facts dressed in Tights. — A
swelled Left Ear 372
CHAPTER XXXV.
Signs and Scars. — Cannon-thunder Rages. — Cave-dwellers, — A Con- tinual Sunday. — A ton of Iron and no Glass. — The Ardent is Saved.
— Mule Meat — A National Cemetery. — A Dog and a Shell. — Rail- roads and Wealth. — Wharfage Economy. — Vicksburg versus The
" Gold Dust." — A Narrative in Anticipation 375
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 387
CHAPTER XXXVII.
A Terrible Disaster. — The " Gold Dust " explodes her Boilers. — The
End of a Good Man 397
12 CONTENTS.
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 399
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Rowdies and Beauty. — Ice as Jewelry. — Ice Manufacture. — More Sta- tistics.— 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 .408
CHAPTER XL.
In Flowers, like a Bride. — A White-washed Castle. — A Southern Pros- pectus.— Pretty Pictures. — An Alligator's Meal 416
CHAPTER XLI.
The Approaches to New Orleans. — A Stirring Street. — Sanitary Im- provements. — Journalistic Achievements. — Cisterns and Wells . . 422
CHAPTER XLH.
Beautiful Grave-yards. — Chameleons and Panaceas. — Inhumation and
Infection. — Mortality and Epidemics. — The Cost of Funerals . . 430
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 436
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 Pom- pano. — The Broom-Brigade. — Historical Painting. — Southern Speech. — Lagniappe 442
CHAPTER XLV.
" Wa w " Talk. — Cock-Fighting. — Too Much to Bear. —Fine Writing.
— Mule Racing 454
CONTENTS. 13
CHAPTER XLVI. Mardi-Gras. — The Mystic Crewe. — Rex and Relics. — Sir Walter Scott.
— A World Set Back. — Titles and Decorations. — A Change . . 465
CHAPTER XL VII. Uncle Remus. — The Children Disappointed. — We Read Aloud. — Mr. Cable and Jean ah Poquelin. — Involuntary Trespass. — The Gilded Age. — An Impossible Combination. — The Owner Materializes — and Protests 471
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 . 475
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 . 486
CHAPTER L. A Patriarch. — Leaves from a Diary. — A Tongue-stopper. — The An- cient Mariner. — Pilloried in Print. — Petrified Truth 493
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 500
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 509
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 523
CHAPTER LIV. A Special Judgment. — Celestial Interest. — A Night of Agony. — An- other Bad Attack. — I become Convalescent. — I address a Sunday- school. — A Model Boy 530
14 CONTENTS.
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 540
CHAPTER LVI. Perverted History. — A Guilty Conscience. — A Supposititious Case. — A
Habit to be Cultivated. — I Drop my Burden. — Difference in Time . 548
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 555
CHAPTER LVIII. An Independent Race. — Twenty-four-hour Towns. — Enchanting Sce- nery. — The Home of the Plow. — Black Hawk. — Fluctuating Se- curities. — A Contrast. — Electric Lights 564
CHAPTER LIX.
Indian Traditions and Rattlesnakes. — A Three-ton Word. — Chimney Rock. — The Panorama Man. — A Good Jump. — The Undying Head.
— Peboan and Seegwun 573
CHAPTER LX. The Head of Navigation. — From Roses to Snow. — Climatic Vaccina- tion. — A Long Ride. — Bones of Poverty. — The Pioneer of Civiliza- tion.— 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 582
APPENDIX.
A 505
B 605
C 608
D 612
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
1. The " Baton Rouge " Frontispiece
2. Mississippi Steamboat op Fifty Years Ago Titlepage
3. View on the River 21
4. A High-water Sketch 22
5. La Salle Canoeing 24
6. De Soto Sees It 25
7. Classifying their Offspring 27
8. Burial of De Soto 28
9. Canadian Indians 29
10. Crossing the Lakes 32
11. Anchored in the Stream 33
12. Hospitably Received 34
13. La Salle on the Ice 38
14. Consecrating the Robbery 37
15. The Temple Wall 38
16. Early Navigation 40
17. A Lumber Rapt 42
18. I Swum along the Raft 43
19. He Jumped up in the Air 45
20. Went around in a Circle 46
21. He Knocked them Sprawling - 48
22. »An Old-fashioned Breakdown 49
23. The Mysterious Barrel , 51
24. Soon there was a Regular Storm 53
25. The Lightning Killed Two Men 55
26. Grabbed the Little Child .56
27. Ed got up Mad .57
28. Who are you ?..... 58
29. Charles William Allbright, Sir .60
30. Overboard .61
31. Our Permanent Ambition .62
32. Water-Street Clerks .63
33. All Go Hurrying to the Wharf 64
34. The Town Drunkard Asleep Once More 66
35. A Shining Hero 68
36. Day Dreams 69
37. Bored with Travelling 71
38. Tell Me where it is — I 'll fetch it 73
39. Sublime in Profanity 75
40. His Tears Dripped upon the Lantern 77
41. The Chalk Pipe . 78
42. He Easily Borrowed Six Dollars 80
16 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
43. Besieging the Pilot 81
44. This is Nine-mile Point 82
45. Come ! turn out 83
46. A Minute Later .... 84
47. You 're a Smart One ... 86
48. Get a Memorandum Book ... 87
49. A Sumptuous Temple 89
50. River Inspectors 92
51. A Tangled Knot 94
52. Insensibly they Drew Together 96
53. Stand By, now ! 98
54. Over She Goes ! 99
55. Shoulder to Shoulder 101
56. Loading and Firing 102
57. Changing Watch 105
58. All Well but Me 107
59. Learning the River 109
60. Learn Me or Kill Me Ill
61. That 's a Reef 113
62. Set Her Back 114
63. Mr. Blxby Stepped into View 117
64. I Stood Like One Bewitched 120
65. Sunset Views 121
66. Wearing a Toothpick 123
67. Do You see that Stump ? 124
68. The Orator of the Scow 127
69. Drifting Logs 129
70. Gambling down Below 131
71. Tract Distributing 133
72. Yellow-faced Miserable* 135
73. On a Shoreless Sea 137
74. The Phantom Assumed the Wheel 139
75. Nobody there 140
76. Dark Piloting 142
77. Sounding 143
78. Oh, how Awful! • 147
79. Hauled Aboard 150
80. On Soundings 151
81. A City Street 153
82. Let a Leadsman cry, " Half Twain '. " 155
83. On, I Knew Him ! 156
84. So Full of Laugh ! 157
85. Scared to Death 160
86. Where is Mr. Bixby ? 161
87. If You Love Me, Back Her! 164
88. Back her, back her ! 165
89. Very Brief Authority 167
90. Treated with Marked Deference 168
91. You Take My Boat 170
92. No Foolin'! 171
93. Went to Whistling 173
94. Burst into a Fury 177
95. Resurrected Pilots 179
96. The Captain Stormed 182
97. The Sign of Membership 183
98. Posting His Report 1S6
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 17
99. Added to the Fold 188
100. A Justifiable Advance 190
101. Tow-boat Supremacy 192
102. Steamboat Time 195
103. Drowsy Engineers 197
104. Brass Bands Bray 199
105. (The Parting Chorus 201
106. Race op the Lee and the Natchez ; 204
107. Dangerous Ditching 206
108. A Scientist 207
109. Deluged and Careened 209
110. The Spectre Steamer 211
111. My, What a Race 1 'ye Had ! . 213
112. Beaming Benignantly 215
113. The Debt-Payer 216
114. Pilot Brown 218
115. Are You Horace Bigsby's Cub ? 21!)
116. Hold up Your Foot 220
117. Take That Ice-Pitcher 221
118. Poll Her Down 222
119. I Killed Brown Every Night 224
120. Hurled Me Across the House 225
121. Killing Brown 220
122. I Hit Brown a Good Honest Blow 229
123. The Racket Had brought Everybody to the Deck 231
124. So You have been Fighting ! 232
125. An Emancipated Slave 234
126. Music and Games 235
127. Henry and I sat Chatting 237
128. Emptying the Wood-flat 238
129. The Explosion — A Startled Barber 239
130. Ealer Saves His Flute 240
131. The Fire Drove the Axemen Away 242
132. The Hospital Ward 244
133. The Land of full Goatees 248
134. Station Loafers 249
135. Under an Alias 250
136. Do You Drink this Slush? 251
137. Sound-asleep Steamboats 254
138. Dead past Resurrection 255
139. The Wood-yard Man 257
140. Waiting for a Trip 259
141. The Electric Light 260
142. A Landing 261
143. A Close Inspection . 262
144. Empty Wharves : Wharf Hands " Full " 263
145. Showing the Bells 265
146. An Alligator Boat 266
147. Alligator Pilots ... 267
148. The Sacred Bird 269
149. Counting the Vote 270
150. Here, You Take Her 272
151. Grand Tower 273
152. A Dairy Farm 275
153. Threw the Preacher Overboard 277
154. Illinois Ground 279
2
18 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
155. His Maiden Battle 281
156. Mighty Warm Times 282
157. Where did Yon See that Fight ? 284
158. Darnell vs. Watson 285
159. They Kept on Shooting 287
160. Island No. 10 289
161. Flood on the River 290
162. Inundation Scenes 291
163. A Dismal Witness 293
164. The Lonely River .297
165. The Steamer " Mark Twain " 298
166. A Government Lamp 299
167. Snags 300
168. Running in a Fog 301
169. Uncle Mumford 305
170. Talking over the Situation 308
171. The Tow 310
172. A Soul-moving Villain 312
173. Selling the Negro 313
174. Concealed in the Brake 314
175. A Man came in Sight 316
176. I Shot Him through the Head 317
177. Another Victim 319
178. Pleasantly Situated 320
179. Memphis — A Landing Stage 322
180. Natives at Dinner 324
181. A Light-keeper 325
182. Negro Travellers 327
183. Any Boat gone up? * 328
184. A World of Misinformation 330
185. A Fatal Blow 332
186. Elaborate Style 333
187. Napoleon in 1871 337
188. The Man's Eyes opened slowly 340
189. They rummaged the Cabin 342
190. On the Right Track 345
191. Thumb-Prints 346
192. He dropped on his Knees 347
193. The Tragedy 349
194. In the Morgue 350
195. I sat down by him 353
196. The Shadow of Doom 356
197. We began to cool off 358
198. Ain't that so, Thompson? 359
199. He is Happy where He is 360
200. Warmed up into a Quarrel 361
201. Napoleon as it is 363
202. Caving Banks 365
203. The Commission Dealer 367
204. The Israelite 368
205. The Barkeeper 369
206. A Plain Gill 370
207. A " Watirmcluon " 371
208. Mosquitoes 372
209. A Bad Ear 373
210. Fanning Himself 374
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 19
211. Vicksburg 375
212. Thb River was Undisturbed 377
213. The Cave Dwellers 378
214. Bringing the Children 380
215. Wait and Make Certain 381
216. Mule Meat 383
217. Native Wild-woods 384
218. My Promenade 388
219. A Short Stout Bag 390
220. The Door was A-crack 392
221. Five Hundred Better 393
222. Been Laying for you Duffers 395
223. A Winning Hand 396
224. An Explosion 398
225. An Interior 401
226. Cleansing Themselves 405
227. Soap and Brushes 407
228. Natchez 409
229. Drummers 411
230. Smell Them, Taste Them 413
231. On- and Oleo 415
232. Columbia Female Institute 417
233. The Graceful Palmetto 420
234. High Water 422
235. The Wharves 423
236. Canal Street 425
237. West End 428
238. The Cemetery 430
239. Immortelles . 431
240. Chameleons 432
241. Relics 434
242. Funeral Wreaths 435
243. He Chuckled 436
244. Why, Just Look at it ! 437
245. Ambition 439
246. An Explanation 440
247. The St. Charles Hotel 443
248. The Shell Road 445
249. Spanish Fort 446
250. The Broom Brigade 447
251. " Whah You was ? " 449
252. For Lagniappe 45i
253. Lagniappe 453
254. " Waw " Talk 455
255. Cock-pit 457
256. Guests 460
257. Absence of Harmony 462
258. Collision 463
259. Mardi-Gras . . . » 466
260. Chivalry 468
261. Uncle Remus 472
262. We Read Aloud 473
263. A River Landing 474
264. The Captain 477
265. Pilot Town 480
266. Smoke and Gosstp 48]
20 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
267. Thb Interview 484
268. Boat-travellers 485
269. Over the Breastboard 488
270. Thornborgh's Cub 490
271. He Cldng to a Cotton-bale 491
272. A Chill Fell There 495
273. Sellers's Monument 498
274. The Night Approach 499
275. I am Anxious About the Time 501
276. Stage-struck , 504
277. Look here, Have You got that Drink yet? 506
278. Tools op the Trade 508
279. Williams Plies His Trade 511
280. He Pulled some Leather 512
281. The Crisis 513
282. Mission Work 516
283. Williams 519
284. The Days of Long Ago 525
285. A Practical Joke 528
286. Fools for St. Louis 529
287. I sat up in Bed Quaking 531
288. All Right, Dutchy — Go Ahead 534
289. We all Flew Home 536
290. Random Rubbish 539
291. The Consecrated Knife 543
292. A Cheap and Pitiful Ruin 545
293. A Bad Case op Shakes 546
294. Shaken Down 547
295. I Tamper with My Conscience 550
296. My Burden is Lifted 553
297. Bad Dreams 554
298. Henry Clay Dean 557
399. The House Began to Break into Applause 559
300. A Former Resident 562
301. An Independent Race 564
302. The Man With a Trade-mark 567
303. Majestic Bluffs 569
304. " Nuth'n," says Smith 570
305. Steamer at Night 572
306. Queen's Bluff 573
307. Chimney Rock 575
308. The Maiden's Rock 576
309. The Lecturer 578
310. St. Paul 582
311. An Early Postmaster 585
312. The First Arrival 587
SiB. Minneapolis and the Falls of St. Anthony 588
314. The Mixture 591
315. An Arkansas River Post Office «. 593
316. Indian Ornaments 624
LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
CHAPTER I.
THE EIVERAND 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 jour- ney it uses up one thousand three hun- dred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It dis- charges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred
9-7
A VERY WET RIVER.
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.
w^^^^-ly^ij
It is a remarkable river in this : that in- stead of widening to- ward 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,
MUCH MUD. 23
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 Marry at' 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 youthfulest 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.
24
CUT-OFFS.
The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg : a recent cut-off 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-off1. 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
HISTORICAL HISTORY.
25
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 Gulf's 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 succeed-
26 DATES AND DATA.
ing 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 Tmd 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 his- tory, 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 astro- nomical 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 Judg- ment 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
LORDS AND LADIES.
27
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 for- gotten, 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 gentle- men who could fight better than they could spell, while religion was the passion of their ladies, and the classifying their offspring into children of full rank and children by
brevet their pastime. In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly bloom- ing condition : the _____ Council of Trent
was being
/
CLASSIFYING THEIR OFFSPRING."
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
28
DEATH OF DE SOTO.
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 ; Shakspeare 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
BURIAL OF DE SOTO.
shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respect- able 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 con- trary, their narratives when they reached home, did not
THE SECOND VISITOR.
29
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 Shakspeare 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
CANADIAN INDIANS.
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
30 A LONG SILENCE.
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 throw- ing in civilization and whiskey, "for lagniappe j"1 and in Canada the French were schooling them in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole popu- lations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clus- ters 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 Mis- sissippi 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 th'e suppo- sition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.
1 See page 450.
CHAPTER II.
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 conti- nents, 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 suc- ceeded 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
i 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 travelled with an outfit of priests. Be 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 pre- pared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to " explain hell to the salvages."
32
JOLIET AND MARQUETTE.
On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Mar- quette 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 faint- est trace of man."
CROSSING THE LAKES.
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
AN AWFUL SOLITUDE.
33
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
ANCHORED IN THE STREAM.
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
3
34
INDIAN HOSPITALITY.
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 re-
ceived by an Indian chief who has taken lAi.lll off his
" HOSPITABLY RECEIVED.
last rag in order to appear at his level best is to be received hos- pitably : 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 Mis-
THE VOYAGES CONTINUED. 35
sissippi, 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 canebrakes ; 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 broil- ing 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 start- ing-point), where a tribe of war-whooping savages swarmed out to meet and murder them ; but they appealed to the Vir- gin 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 Missis- sippi 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 mis- fortune 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 fol- lowing 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 ploughed 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
86
THE ARKANSAS REACHED.
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."
LA SALLE ON THE ICE.
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 hy 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
PIOUS ROBBERY.
37
admiration of the savages, La Salle set up a cross with the arms of France on it, and took possession of the whole coun- try 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 pos-
CONSECRATING THE KOEBERY.
sible possessions in Heaven for the certain ones on earth which they had just been robbei 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
38
THE FUTURE NAPOLEON.
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
THE TEMPLE WALL
of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas. Therefore, three out of the four memorable events connected with the discovery and ex- ploration 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
GHASTLY ORNAMENTS. 39
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 chief's 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 moun- tain 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 stu- pendous accession. The fertile plains of Texas ; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry bor- ders 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 thou- sand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the sceptre of the Sultan of Versailles ; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile."
CHAPTER III.
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.
EABLY NAVIGATION.
'^SwSfe
Seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, be- fore the river's borders had a white population worth considering; and nearly fifty more before the river had a commerce. Between La Salle's open- ing 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
COMMERCE BEGINS. 41
England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV. and Louis XV. had rotted and died, the French mon- archy 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 — keel- boats, 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, trust- worthy, 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 up-stream 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 com- merce ; 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
42
MIGHTY RAFTS.
characters whom I have been trying to describe. I remem- ber 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.
dl^^fe
£..l^j'Q,t<^LTr,
A LUMBER RAFT.
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, respect- able boy of him ; and with him a slave of the widow's has
AN UNPUBLISHED CHAPTER.
43
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 sus- pense 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 would n't be no risk
"I SWUM ALONG THE BAFT."
to swim down to the big raft and crawl aboard and listen, — they would talk about Cairo, because they would be calcu- lating 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
44 "GIVE US A REST."
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 1 crawled aboard and inched along and got in amongst some bundles of shin- gles on the weather side of the fire. There was thirteen men there — they was the watch on deck of course. And a mighty rouEjh- 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 twyste as wed'l.
Singing too, riloo, riloo, riloo,
Ri-too, riloo, rilay - - - e, 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 lam 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 sufferins 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,
THE CORPSE-MAKER CROWS.
45
copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw ! — Look at me ! I 'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desola- tion ! 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 ro- bust health, and a bushel of rattle- snakes 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 end 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
46
"THE CHILD OF CALAMITY."
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 to- gether 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, gentle- men ! When I 'm playful I use the meridians of longi- tude 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-
WENT AROUND IN A CIRCLE.
THEY BOTH WEAKEN. 47
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 calam- ity '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 lan- guage ; 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 war n't going to be the last of this thing, because he w'as 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 '11 thrash the two of ye ! "
48
LITTLE DAVY STEPS IN.
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 war n'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-
Ml?)> . !)<-'!
HE KNOCKED THEM SPRAWLING.
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 was 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
AFTER THE BATTLE.
49
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,
AN OLD-FASHIONED BREAK-DOWN.
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 raftsman'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
4
50 ED'S ADVENTURES.
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 war n't no better then 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 nutri- tiousness 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 shucks 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 did n't like to mix with Mississippi water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is low, you '11 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 mouldy, and from that they went into ghosts and told about a lot that other folks had seen ; but Ed saj^s : —
" 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
SOMETHING QUEER.
51
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 hard- ly 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, —
THE MYSTERIOUS BARBEL.
52 A HAUNTED BARREL.
" ' 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 had n'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 a 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 hanted 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 did n't gain any more. It was about twenty foot off. Some was for having it aboard, but the rest did n'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 did n't believe in it. He said he reckoned the bar'l gained on us because it was in a little better cur- rent 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 did n't finish it, and there war n'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 war n't no use, they did n't laugh, and even the chap that made the joke did n'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
IT BEINGS A STORM.
53
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
" SOON THERE WAS A REGULAR STORM."
look-out for it. But by and by, towards dawn, she was gone. When the day come we could n't see her anywhere, and we war n'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 war n't no more high jinks. Every- body got solemn ; nobody talked ; you could n't get anybody to do
54 THE BARREL PURSUES.
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 did n't turn in ; nobody sung, nobody talked ; the boys did n'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 would n'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 would n't man the sweeps with him. The captain had all the skiffs hauled up on the raft, alongside of his wigwam, and would n't let the dead men be took ashore to be planted ; he did n't believe a man that got ashore would come back ; and he was risdit.
KILLED BY LIGHTNING.
55
" 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 lan-
THE LIGHTNING KILLED TWO MEN.
50
ALLBRIGHT ATONES.
guage when he was a mind to, and lay them hefore you without a jint started, anywheres. Yes, lie 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 al- ways begun light, and lasted till four men was killed, and then the bar'l did n't come any more after that. He said if the men w'ould 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 sud- den and jumped over- board with it hugged up to his breast and shed- ding tears, and we never see him again in this life, poor old suffer- ing 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."
GRABBED THE LITTLE CHILD.
ED GETS MAD.
57
" 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
58
SNAKE OR BOY?
part of that bar'l to prove the thing by. Show us the bunghole — do — and we '11 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
WHO ARE YOU?"
and jeering at him, and roaring and laughing so you could hear them a mile.
" Boys, we '11 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
"SNAKE HIM OUT." 59
" 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 '11 paint the man that fetches him ! "
So I looked around on them, and some of them grumbled and growled, and Bob put down the paint, and the others did n'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 war n't going to tell my name. I did n'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 '11 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
60
SOME LIVELY LYING.
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.
" CHARLES WILLIAM ALLBBJGHT, SLR."
" 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 war n't born in her. It 's our first trip."
" Now you 're talking ! What did you come aboard here, for ? To steal ? "
*
OFF AND OVERBOARD. 61
" No, sir, I did n'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. Over- board 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 did n'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 marvellous science of piloting, as dis- played there. I believe there has been nothing like it else- where in the world.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BOYS' AMBITION.
WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent am- bition among my comrades in our village 2 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.
"OUR PERMANENT AMBITION."
When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to be- come clowns ; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life ; now and
1 Hannibal, Missouri.
A DROWSY TOWN.
63
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 ward from these
another down- Keokuk. Before 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 my- self now, just as it was then : the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morn- ing ; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so ; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bot- tomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep — with shingle-shav- ings 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
WATER-STREET CLERKS.
64
STEAMBOAT COMIN' !
tliree 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 mag- nificent 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
"all go hurrying to the wharf."
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
UNDER WAY AGAIN. 65
iii a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common centre, the wharf. Assembled there, the peo- ple fasten their eyes upon the coining boat as upon a won- der 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, all 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 fur- nace 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 deck-hand stands pic- turesquely 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 min- utes 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
66
WORLDLY SUCCESS.
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 table-cloth over the side, where all my old comrades could see me ; later I thought I would rather
be the deck-hand who stood on the end of the stage- plank with the coil of rope in his hand, because he was particularly con- spicuous. But these were only day-dreams, — they were too heavenly to be contemplated as real possibili- ties. 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 " the town drunkard asleep once more." engineer or " strik- er " 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 man- age to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and scrub
A CUB ENGINEER. 67
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 greas- iest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a steamboatman ; and he used all sorts of steam- boat 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 u 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 com- rades, 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, stained at and wondered over by everybody, it seemed to us that the par- tiality 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
68
THE STEAMBOAT FEVEE.
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 bar-keeper 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 I said I never would come home again till T 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
A SHINIXfi hetco.
ran away.
A RUNAWAY.
69
wharf, and very humbly inquired for the pilots, but got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks. 1 had to make the best of this sort of treatment for the time being, but I had comforting day-dreams 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 V.
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 Cincin- nati, 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 prin- cipally to myself, for she was not a creature to attract the eye of wiser travellers.
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 traveller ! 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
A MIGHTY TRAVELLER.
71
f-
me, and I was able to look down and pity the untravelled 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 stretch- /
ed, and gave oth- er signs of being mightily bored with travelling.
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 wea- ther-beaten look of an old traveller. 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
BORED WITH TRAVELLING.
72 THE MATE ASTOUNDED.
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 steamboat- man 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 oppor- tunity 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 '11 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 instalments, 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 lie was getting out cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and hear. He felt all the
"tell me where it is — i'll fetch it!"
SUBLIME PROFANITY.
75
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.
SUBLIME IS PROFANITY.
If the landsman should wish the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probaoly say : " James, or Wil- liam, 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 !
76 A NEW FRIEND.
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 ! forard with it 'fore I make you swal- low it, you dash-dash-dash-c?a.s/jed! 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 hum- blest 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 hurri- cane 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 hun- grily, 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 1 cried, too, from sympathy. He said he was the son of an English nobleman — either an earl or an alderman, he could not re- member which, but believed was both ; his father, the noble- man, 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
A SCION OF NOBILITY.
77
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 position
"HIS TEA.RS DRIPPED UPON THE LANTERN."
lolly-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 adven- tures ; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and unconscious personal villanies, that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping.
78
SADLY UNDECEIVED.
It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untravelled 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.
I
CHAPTER VI.
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 writh 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 travelled deck passage because it was cooler.1
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 impos- ing an exploration as I had planned, even if I could afford to wait for a ship. Therefore it followed that I must con- trive 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
1 " Deck " passage — i. e., steerage passage.
80
BESIEGING THE PILOT.
hundred dollars, payable out of the first wages I should receive after graduating. I entered upon the small enter- prise of " learning" twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time
of life. If I had what I was about faculties, I should
really known to require of my not have had the courage to begin. I sup- posed 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 Or- leans at four in the after- noon, and it w as " o u r watch " until eight. Mr. Bixby , my chief, " straight- ened 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 peej 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
HE EASILY BORROWED SIX DOLLARS.
i
CLOSE SHAVING.
81
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 cease- lessly 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
6
BESIEGING THE PILOT.
82
NINE-MILE POINT.
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 unpic- turesque. I hoped Mr. Bixby would change the subject.
But no ; he would crowd up around a point, hugging the shore with affec- tion, and then
THIS IS NINE-MILE POINT."
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 : —
DON'T BOTHER ME.
83
" Come ! turn out ! "
And then he left. I could not understand this extraordi- nary 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
" COME ! TURN OUT !
bothering around here in the middle of the night for ? Now as like as not I '11 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 }^et? He's deli- cate, 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. Some- thing 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 some-
84
A NIGHT WATCH.
thing 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 imag- ined 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 '11 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.
■d m
"a minute later.'
JONES'S PLANTATION. 85
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 '11 have to get along with that."
"All right, sir. If Jones don't like it he '11 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 did n't know.
" Don't know t "
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 did n't know.
86
THE CATECHISM.
" Well, this beats anything. Tell me the name of any point or place 1 told you."
I studied a while and decided that I could n'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 maii-
" YOU 'RE A SMART ONE."
ner 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 ynu 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
THEY TALK BACK.
87
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 ir- ruption followed as I never had heard before, the scowmen's curses drifted,
GET A MEMORANDUM BOOK."
The fainter and farther away 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
88 A TOUGH ALPHABET.
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 witli 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 " stretch- ing." 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 is n'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 fore- castle, 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 a while, and then said, — but not aloud, — Well, the finding of that plantation was the luckiest accident that ever happened ; but it could n't happen again in a hundred years. And I fully believed it was an acci- dent, too.
By the time we had gone seven or eight hundred miles up the river, I had learned to be a tolerably plucky upstream 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 note-book — 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
MY NEXT TRIP.
89
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 T 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,
A SUMPTUOUS TEMPLE.
90 PALATIAL QUARTERS.
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 " some- thing 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 1 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 state-room door ; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed chandeliers ; the clerk's office was elegant, the bar was marvellous, and the bar-keeper had been bar- bered and upholstered at incredible cost. The boiler deck (i.e., the second story of the boat, so to speak), was as spa- cious as a church, it seemed to me ; so with the forecastle ; and there was no pitiful handful of deck-hands, firemen, and roust-abouts 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 1 found that the regi- ment of natty servants respectfully " sir'd " me, my satisfac- tion was complete.
CHAPTER VII.
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 trouble- some 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.
92
RIVER INSPECTORS.
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
" RIVER INSPECTORS."
because all pilots are tireless talk- ers, 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-inspeefcors along, this trip. There were eight or ten ; and there was abun- dance of room for them in our great pilot-house. Two or three of them wore polished silk hats, elaborate shirt-fronts, diamond breastpins, 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
TOO MUCH WATER. 93
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 orna- ments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles ; and more than that, I must actually know where these things
94
DISCOURAGED.
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 im- mediately to bed, discouraged by my day's observations and ex- periences. 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 revelled 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 getting her off that it was plain the darkness would overtake us a good long way above the mouth. This was a great misfortune, especially to certain
" A TANGLED KNOT.
HAT ISLAND CROSSING. 95
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 familiar- ity 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
96
AN EXCITING SCENE.
land. Tb'e 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
INSENSIBLY THEY DREW TOGETHER.
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 dis- tance, and were gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck.
"M-a-r-k three! .... M-a-r-k three! .... Quarter-less-
WILL HE MAKE IT? 97
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 suffo- cate; and I had the strongest impulse to do something, any- thing, 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 —
7
98
OVER SHE GOES!"
"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! /Sfo-and" —
We touched bottom ! Instant- ly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ring- i n g, 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
" STAND "BY, NOW ! "
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 marvellous 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
OVER SHE GOES.
A LIGHTNING PILOT.
101
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 steamboat and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hun- dred 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 VIII.
PERPLEXING LESSONS.
AT the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had man- aged 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 n a m e s without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a boat d o w n t o New Or- leans 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 some-
LOADING AND FIRING.
THINGS TO BE LEARNED. 103
thing 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 opin- ion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I did n'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 put and gone. But mind you, it has n'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 ? Be- cause 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 is n't any getting around it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you did n't know the shape of a shore per- fectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid
104 SHAPES AND COLORS.
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 is n'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 '11 try it ; but after I have learned it can I depend on it ? Will it keep the same form and not go fool- ing around ? "
Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W came in to
take the watch, and he said, —
" Bixby, you '11 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 would n't know the
ETERNAL CHANGES.
105
point above 40. You can go up inside the old sycamore snag, now." J
So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore chang- ing 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
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.
106 THE UNPARDONABLE SIN.
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 twain1 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 could n't make her out entirely. I took her for the ' Sunny South ' — had n't any skylights forward of the chimneys."
And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner2 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 villanous night for blackness, we were in a particularly wide and blind part of the river, where there was no shape or substance to any- thing, 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
1 Two fathoms. Quarter twain is 2| fathoms, 13* feet. Mark three is three fathoms.
2 "Partner" is technical for " the other pilot."
A VOLUNTEER WATCH.
107
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 skin- ful of dry bones and all ing to ache
Mr. Bixby what I had there for. I was to do ol en ce, — It took five preposter- filter into then I judge it filled him nearly up to the chin ; because he
"ALL WELL — BUT ME.
of them try-
at once.
asked me
stayed up confessed that it
Mr. W a benev-
tell him where he was. minutes for the entire ousness of the thing to Mr. Bixby's system, and
108 DAMAGE AVOIDED.
paid me a compliment — and not much of a one either. Pie 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 ! Did n'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
DISSOLVING VIEWS.
109
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
LEARNING THE RIVER.
coming down-stream 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 did n't change every three seconds they would n'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 star- board in a hurry, or I '11 bang this boat's brains out against a rock ; and then the moment one of the prongs of the V
110 A TANGLED WEB.
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 " thort- ships," — 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 every one 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 '11 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
LEARN OR DIE.
Ill
wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless I went on crutches."
" Now drop that ! When I say I '11 learn 1 a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on it, I '11 learn him or kill him."
1 " Teach " is not in the river vocabulary.
CHAPTER IX.
CONTINUED PERPLEXITIES.
' I ^HERE 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 gaz- ing 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
A REEF AHEAD.
113
Now cramp her
by — wait — wait — keep her well in hand 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
THAT S A REEF.
sent a long, angry ridge of water foaming away from her bows.
" Now watch her ; watch her like a cat, or she '11 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
114
RUNNING THE REEF.
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
sec 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
"set her back.
LEFT TO MYSELF. 115
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 for- ward and swept ahead of her, she careened far over to lar- board, 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 '11 be back before you close up on the next point."
But he was n'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 gayly 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 stern 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 had n'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
116 ON THE VERGE OF RUIN.
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 did n't that villain come ! If I committed the crime of ring- ing 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. overhang- ing 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 star- board. 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."
SAVED FROM MYSELF.
117
I blushed under the sarcasm, and said I had n't had any hail.
"Ah ! Then it was for wood, I suppose. The officer of the watch will
tell you when =3=l\
he wants to wood up."
I went on con- suming, and said I was n't af- ter 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 was n't try- ing to follow it. I was getting away from a bluff reef."
" No, it was n'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
MB. B. STEPPED INTO VIEW.
1.18 A WONDERFUL BOOK.
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 was n'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 hun- dred 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 sparklingly renewed with every re-perusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its sur- face (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
AN ENCHANTING SCENE. 119
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 alpha- bet, 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 radi- ating lines, ever so delicately traced ; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre 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 beeen re-
120
SIGNS AND WONDERS.
peated, 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 tum-
bling " 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
A PROFESSIONAL VIEW.
121
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 rip- ples above some deadly disease ? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and sym- bols of hidden decay ? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or does n't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself ? And does n't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade ?
CHAPTER X.
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 com- paratively 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 sand- bars are never at rest, whose channels are forever 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 villanous river.1 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,
1 True at the time referred to ; not true now (1882).
PUTTING ON AIRS.
123
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 toothpick 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 did n't ? Well, you must always do it hereafter."
" Why ? "
" Because you '11 have to know a good many things that
"WEARING A TOOTHPICK.
124
RISING OR FALLING.
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. Yon- der 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 line sediment ? That was deposited while the water was higher. You see the drift-wood begins to strand, too. The bank helps in other ways. Do you see that stump on the false point ? " " Ay, ay, sir."
DO YOTJ SEE THAT STUMP?"
EVERLASTING MEASURING. 125
" 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 '11 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. Pres- ently 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 '11 go up behind bars that you 've always seen standing out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house ; we '11 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 '11 creep through cracks where you 've always thought was solid land ; we '11 dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river off to one side ; we '11 see the hind-side of every island between New Orleans and Cairo."
126 A NEW LESSON.
" 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 '11 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 atliight ?"
" 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 acid 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."
THE ORATOR OF THE SCOW.
MEETING A RISE.
129
" 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 in- creased ; 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 centre, 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
9
130 ANTAGONIZING WAIL.
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 dis- tinct 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 pro- digious timber-rafts from the head waters of the Missis- sippi, 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 aggran- dized 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 burn- ing, 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 burn- ing 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,"
TAKING THEIR CHANCES.
131
we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit, fur- niture, and all, but that they happened to be fiddling down below and we just caught the sound of the music in time to
" GAMBLING DOWN BELOW."
sheer off, doing no seri- ous damage, unfortu- nately, 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 coal- boatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we bor- rowed a steering-oar of him in a very narrow place. *
CHAPTER XL
THE RIVEE 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 particu- larly cramped place in a chute, we would be prett}7" 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 an 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 does n't hit a rock or a solid log raft 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,
TRACT DISTRIBUTING.
133
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 any-
"tbact distributing:'
thing. You understand, they 1 ""%:- — -rv_. 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 reli- gious 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.
184 A NEW WORLD.
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 reel 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 flatboat 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
NEW PEOPLE.
185
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
"yellow-faced miserables."
enabled the poor things to rise from the dead now and then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by. They appre- ciated^ 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 !
136 THE LOWER RIVER.
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
A SHORELESS SEA.
137
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 them- selves 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
ON A SHORELESS SEA.
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 somnambu-
138 A BAD NIGHT.
list. 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 have n'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,
A PHANTOM PILOT.
139
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,
THE PHANTOM ASSUMED THE "WHEEL."
he wished he had not con- fessed ! He stared, and won- dered, 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 centre 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
140
A SUCCESSFUL CARRY.
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, heed- ful use of leads and engines followed, the boat slipped through without touching bot- tom, and en- tered upon the third and last intri-
" NOBODY THERE.
cacy of the crossing ; imperceptibly she moved through the gloom, crept by inches into her marks, drifted tediously till
NOBODY THERE. 141
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 would n't believed it could be done, if I had n't seen if."
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, —
" Did n'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 '11 stay by, next time he has one of those
142
IE HE WAS DEAD!"
fits. But I hope he '11 have them often. You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena crossing. 1 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 could nH he do if he was dead ! "
CHAPTER XII.
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 place? almost every trip when the river was at a very low stage.
144 SOUNDING.
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 assist- ing 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 rip- ples 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 ; " 1 or " steady — steady as you go."
When the measurements indicate that the yawl is approach- ing 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