1883
LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
by Mark Twain
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
THE "BODY OF THE NATION"
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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 eight-ninths of its
area; then comes that of the Yenisei, with about seven-ninths; the
Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tse-kiang, and Nile, five-ninths; the
Ganges, less than one-half; the Indus, less than one-third; the
Euphrates, one-fifth; the Rhine, one-fifteenth. It exceeds in extent
the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden. It would
contain Austria four times, Germany or Spain five times, France six
times, the British Islands or Italy ten times. Conceptions formed from
the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely shocked when we consider
the extent of the valley of the Mississippi; nor are those formed from
the sterile basins of the great rivers of Siberia, the lofty
plateaus of Central Asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon
more adequate. Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render
every part of the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense
population. As a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the
first upon our globe.- EDITOR'S TABLE, Harper's Magazine, February,
1863.
CHAPTER I
THE RIVER AND ITS HISTORY
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THE Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace
river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering
the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world-
four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is
also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its
journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the
same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and
seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St.
Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred
and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so
vast a drainage-basin; it draws its water-supply from twenty-eight
states and territories; from Delaware on the Atlantic seaboard, and
from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope- a
spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives
and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers
that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are
navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as
great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland,
France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and
almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley,
proper, is exceptionally so.
It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward
its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the
junction of the Ohio to a point half-way down to the sea, the width
averages a mile in high water; thence to the sea the width steadily
diminishes, until, at the "Passes," above the mouth, it is but
little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi's
depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching
one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.
The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable not in the upper,
but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to
Natchez (three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)- about fifty
feet. But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet;
at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and
one-half.
An article in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, based upon reports
of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred
and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico- which brings to
mind Captain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi- "the Great
Sewer." This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and
two hundred and forty-one feet high.
The mud deposit gradually extends the land- but only gradually; it
has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years
which have elapsed since the river took its place in history.
The belief of the scientific people is that the mouth used to be
at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred
miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river.
This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at
all- one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the
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. 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-off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and
jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the state of
Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man
finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within
the boundaries and subject to the laws of the state of Louisiana! Such
a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have
transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of
him.
The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cutoffs alone: it
is always changing its habitat bodily- is always moving bodily
sidewise. At Hard Times, Louisiana, the river is two miles west of the
region it used to occupy. As a result, the original site of that
settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of
the river, in the state of Mississippi. Nearly the whole of that one
thousand three hundred miles of old Mississippi River which La Salle
floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry
ground now. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the
left of it in other places.
Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at the
mouth, where the 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 succeeding chapters; and then talk about its
comparatively tranquil present epoch in what shall be left of the
book.
The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use,
the word "new" in connection with our country, that we early get and
permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about
it. We do of course know that there are several comparatively old
dates in American history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no
just idea, no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which
they represent. To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever
saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states
a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the
dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing
the colors by their scientific names- as a result, you get the bald
fact of the sunset, but you don't see the sunset. It would have been
better to paint a picture of it.
The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us;
but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts
around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that
this is one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age.
For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man,
less than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat
at Pavia; the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, sans peur et sans
reproche; the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by
the Turks; and the placarding of the Ninety-five Propositions- the act
which began the Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of the
river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits
was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo's paint was not yet dry on
the "Last Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not
yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was
a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin,
Benvenuto Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V. were at the top of their
fame, and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar
fashion; Margaret of Navarre was writing the "Heptameron" and some
religious books- the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and
indelicacy being sometimes better literature-preservers than holiness;
lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full
feather, and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of
titled fine gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell,
while religion was the passion of their ladies, and the classifying
their offspring into children of full rank and children by brevet
their pastime. In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly
blooming condition: the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish
Inquisition was roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free
hand; elsewhere on the Continent the nations were being persuaded to
holy living by the sword and fire; in England, Henry VIII. had
suppressed the monasteries, burned Fisher and another bishop or two,
and was getting his English Reformation and his harem effectively
started. When De Soto stood on the banks of the Mississippi, it was
still two years before Luther's death; eleven years before the burning
of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew slaughter;
Rabelais had not yet published; Don Quixote was not yet written;
Shakespeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse
before Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell.
Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact
which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our
country, and gives her a most respectable outside aspect of
rustiness and antiquity.
De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by
his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the
soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten- the Spanish custom
of the day- and thus move other adventurers to go at once and
explore it. On the contrary, their narratives, when they reached home,
did not excite that amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left
unvisited by whites during a term of years which seems incredible in
our energetic days. One may "sense" the interval to his mind, after
a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: after De Soto glimpsed the
river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then
Shakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then
died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half
a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi. In our day we
don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a
marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to
the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start
fifteen costly expeditions thither; one to explore the creek, and
the other fourteen to hunt for each other.
For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white
settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate
communication with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were
robbing, slaughtering, enslaving, and converting them; higher up,
the English were trading beads and blankets to them for a
consideration, and throwing in civilization and whisky, "for
lagniappe"; * and in Canada the French were schooling them in a
rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole
populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy
furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must
have heard of the great river of the Far West; and indeed, they did
hear of it vaguely- so vaguely and indefinitely that its course,
proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. The mere
mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and
compelled exploration; but this did not occur. Apparently nobody
happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious
about it; so, for a century and a half the Mississippi remained out of
the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not
hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for one;
consequently, he did not value it or even take any particular notice
of it.
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* See Chapter XLIV.
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But at last, La Salle, the Frenchman, conceived the idea of
seeking out that river and exploring it. It always happens that when a
man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with
the same notion crop up all around. It happened so in this instance.
Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want
the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding
generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought
they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be
believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and
therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the
supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of
Virginia.
CHAPTER II
THE RIVER AND ITS EXPLORERS
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LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were
graciously accorded him by Louis XIV. of inflated memory. Chief
among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build
forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over to the king,
and pay the expenses himself; receiving, in return, some little
advantages of one sort or another; among them the monopoly of
buffalo-hides. He spent several years, and about all of his money,
in making perilous and painful trips between Montreal and a fort which
he had built on the Illinois, before he at last succeeded in getting
his expedition in such a shape that he could strike for the
Mississippi.
And meantime other parties had had better fortune. In 1673, Joliet
the merchant, and Marquette the priest, crossed the country and
reached the banks of the Mississippi. They went by way of the Great
Lakes; and from Green Bay, in canoes, by the way of Fox River and
the Wisconsin. Marquette had solemnly contracted, on the feast of
the Immaculate Conception, that if the Virgin would permit him to
discover the great river, he would name it Conception, in her honor.
He kept his word. In that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit
of priests. De Soto had twenty-four with him. La Salle had several,
also. The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes,
but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass;
they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chronicles of the time
phrased it, to "explain hell to the salvages."
On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and
their five subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the
Mississippi. Mr. Parkman says: "Before them a wide and rapid current
coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped
thick in forests." He continues: "Turning southward, they paddled down
the stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of
man."
A big catfish collided with Marquette's canoe, and startled him; and
reasonably enough, for he had been warned by the Indians that he was
on a fool-hardy 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 catfish that was more than six feet long, and weighed
two hundred and fifty pounds; and if Marquette's fish was the fellow
to that one, he had a fair right to think the river's roaring demon
was come.
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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.
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The voyagers moved cautiously:
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Landed at night and made a fire to cook their evening meal; then
extinguished it, embarked again, paddled some way farther, and
anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the watch till morning.
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They did this day after day and night after night; and at the end of
two weeks they had not seen a human being. The river was an awful
solitude, then. And it is now, over most of its stretch.
But at the close of the fortnight they one day came upon the
footprints of men in the mud of the western bank- a Robinson Crusoe
experience which carries an electric shiver with it yet, when one
stumbles on it in print. They had been warned that the river Indians
were as ferocious and pitiless as the river demon, and destroyed all
comers without waiting for provocation; but no matter, Joliet and
Marquette struck into the country to hunt up the proprietors of the
tracks. They found them by and by, and were hospitably received and
well treated- if to be received by an Indian chief who has taken off
his last rag in order to appear at his level best is to be received
hospitably; and if to be treated abundantly to fish, porridge, and
other game, including dog, and have these things forked into one's
mouth by the ungloved fingers of Indians, is to be well treated. In
the morning the chief and six hundred of his tribesmen escorted the
Frenchmen to the river and bade them a friendly farewell.
On the rocks above the present city of Alton they found some rude
and fantastic Indian paintings, which they describe. A short
distance below "a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the
calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and surging and sweeping
in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees." This was the
mouth of the Missouri, "that savage river," which "descending from its
mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism, poured its turbid
floods into the bosom of its gentle sister."
By and by they passed the mouth of the Ohio; they passed 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 broiling with the heat; they
encountered and exchanged civilities with another party of Indians;
and at last they reached the mouth of the Arkansas (about a month
out from their starting-point), where a tribe of war-whooping
savages swarmed out to meet and murder them; but they appealed to
the Virgin for help; so in place of a fight there was a feast, and
plenty of pleasant palaver and fol-de-rol.
They had proved to their satisfaction that the Mississippi did not
empty into the Gulf of California or into the Atlantic. They
believed it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. They turned back now, and
carried their great news to Canada.
But belief is not proof. It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the
proof. He was provokingly delayed by one misfortune after another, but
at last got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681. In
the dead of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who
invented the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois,
with a following of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and
twenty-three Frenchmen. They moved in procession down the surface of
the frozen river, on foot. and dragging their canoes after them on
sledges.
At Peoria Lake they struck open water, and paddled thence to the
Mississippi and turned their prows southward. They plowed through
the fields of floating ice, past the mouth of the Missouri; past the
mouth of the Ohio, by and by; "and, gliding by the wastes of bordering
swamp, landed on the 24th of February near the Third Chickasaw
Bluffs," where they halted and built Fort Prudhomme.
"Again," says Mr. Parkman, "they embarked; and with every stage of
their adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was
more and more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of
spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender
foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of nature."
Day by day they floated down the great bends, in the shadow of the
dense forests, and in time arrived at the mouth of the Arkansas. First
they were greeted by the natives of this locality as Marquette had
before been greeted by them- with the booming of the war-drum and a
flourish of arms. The Virgin composed the difficulty in Marquette's
case; the pipe of peace did the same office for La Salle. The white
man and the red man struck hands and entertained each other during
three days. Then, to the admiration of the savages, La Salle set up
a cross with the arms of France on it, and took possession of the
whole country for the king- the cool fashion of the time- while the
priest piously consecrated the robbery with a hymn. The priest
explained the mysteries of the faith "by signs," for the saving of the
savages; thus compensating them with possible possessions in heaven
for the certain ones on earth which they had just been robbed of.
And also, by signs, La Salle drew from these simple children of the
forest acknowledgments of realty to Louis the Putrid, over the
water. Nobody smiled at these colossal ironies.
These performances took place on the site of the future town of
Napoleon, Arkansas, and there the first confiscation cross was
raised on the banks of the great river. Marquette's and Joliet's
voyage of discovery ended at the same spot- the site of the future
town of Napoleon. When De Soto took his fleeting glimpse of the river,
away back in the dim early days, he took it from that same spot- the
site of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas. Therefore, three out of
the four memorable events connected with the discovery and exploration
of the mighty river occurred, by accident, in one and the same
place. It is a most curious distinction, when one comes to look at
it and think about it. France stole that vast country on that spot,
the future Napoleon; and by and by Napoleon himself was to give the
country back again- make restitution, not to the owners, but to
their white American heirs.
The voyagers journeyed on, touching here and there; "passed the
sites, since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf"; and
visited an imposing Indian monarch in the Teche country, whose capital
city was a substantial one of sun-baked bricks mixed with straw-
better houses than many that exist there now. The 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
depotism, a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple, and a
sacred fire." It must have been like getting home again; it was 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 a meeting of the waters from Delaware,
and from Itasca, and from the mountain ranges close upon the
Pacific, with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, his task finished, his
prodigy achieved. Mr. Parkman, in closing his fascinating narrative,
thus sums up:
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On that day the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous
accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the
Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of
the Gulf; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks
of the Rocky Mountains- a region of savannas and forests,
sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers,
ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the
Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice,
inaudible at half a mile.
CHAPTER III
FRESCOS FROM THE PAST
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APPARENTLY the river was ready for business, now. But no; the
distribution of a population along its banks was as calm and
deliberate and time-devouring a process as the discovery and
exploration had been.
Seventy years elapsed after the exploration before the river's
borders had a white population worth considering; and nearly fifty
more before the river had a commerce. Between La Salle's opening of
the river and the time when it may be said to have become the
vehicle of anything like a regular and active commerce, seven
sovereigns had occupied the throne of England, America had become an
independent nation, Louis XIV. and Louis XV. had rotted and died,
the French monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the
Revolution, and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked
about. Truly, there were snails in those days.
The river's earliest commerce was in great barges- keelboats,
broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New
Orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled
back by hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months.
In time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes
of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific
hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers
in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy
fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly,
foul-witted, profane, prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end
of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in
the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and
often picturesquely magnanimous.
By and by the steamboat intruded. Then, for fifteen or twenty years,
these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the
steamers did all of the 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 commerce; and then
keelboating died a permanent death. The keelboatman became a
deck-hand, or a mate, or a pilot on the steamer; and when
steamer-berths were not open to him, he took a berth on a Pittsburg
coal-flat, or on a pine raft constructed in the forests up toward
the sources of the Mississippi.
In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end
to end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber-rafts, all managed by
hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been
trying to describe. I remember the annual processions of mighty
rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy- an acre or so
of white, sweet-smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen
men or more, three or four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast
level space for storm-quarters-and I remember the rude ways and the
tremendous talk of their big crews, the ex-keelboatmen and their
admiringly patterning successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or
a third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a ride.
By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now
departed and hardly remembered raft life, I will throw in, in this
place, a chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and
starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish
in the course of five or six more. The book is a story which details
some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son
of the town drunkard of my time out West, there. He has run away
from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who
wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and with
him a slave of the widow's has also escaped. They have found a
fragment of a lumber-raft (it is high water and dead summer-time), and
are floating down the river by night, and hiding in the willows by
day- bound for Cairo, whence the negro will seek freedom in the
heart of the free states. But, in a fog, they pass Cairo without
knowing it. By and by they begin to suspect the truth, and Huck Finn
is persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge
raft which they have seen in the distance ahead of them, creeping
aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering the needed
information by eavesdropping:
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But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is
impatient to find a thing out. We talked it over, and by and by Jim
said it was such a black night, now, that it wouldn't be no risk to
swim down to the big raft and crawl aboard and listen- they would talk
about Cairo, because they would be calculating to go ashore there
for a spree, maybe; or anyway they would send boats ashore to buy
whisky or fresh meat or something. Jim had a wonderful level head, for
a nigger: he could most always start a good plan when you wanted one.
I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river, and
struck out for the raft's light. By and by, when I got down nearly
to her, I eased up and went slow and cautious. But everything was
all right- nobody at the sweeps. So I swum down along the raft till
I was most abreast the camp-fire in the middle, then I crawled
aboard and inched along and got in among some bundles of shingles on
the weather side of the fire. There was thirteen men there- they was
the watch on deck of course. And a mighty rough-looking lot, too. They
had a jug, and tin cups, and they kept the jug moving. One man was
singing- roaring, you may say; and it wasn't a nice song- for a
parlor, anyway. He roared through his nose, and strung out the last
word of every line very long. When he was done they all fetched a kind
of Injun war-whoop, and then another was sung. It begun:
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"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 sufferin's is over."
Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again,
and shouted out:
"Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted,
copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! Look at me!
I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by
a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera,
nearly related to the smallpox on the mother's side! Look at me! I
take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whisky for breakfast when
I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body
when I'm ailing. I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I
squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me
room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails
of the dying is music to my ear. Cast your eye on me, gentlemen! and
lay low and hold your breath, for I'm 'bout to turn myself loose!"
All the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head and
looking fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little circle,
tucking up his wristbands, and now and then straightening up and
beating his breast with his fist, saying, "Look at me, gentlemen!"
When he got through, he jumped up and cracked his heels together three
times, and let off a roaring "Whoo-oop! I'm the bloodiest son of a
wildcat that lives!"
Then the man that had started the row tilted his old slouch hat down
over his right eye; then he bent stooping forward, with his back
sagged and his south end sticking out far, and his fists a-shoving out
and drawing in in front of him, and so went around in a little
circle about three times, swelling himself up and breathing hard. Then
he straightened, and jumped up and cracked his heels together three
times before he lit again (that made them cheer), and he began to
shout like this:
"Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow's
a-coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working!
whoo-oop! I'm a child of sin, don't let me get a start! Smoked
glass, here, for all! Don't attempt to look at me with the naked
eye, gentlemen! When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude
and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for
whales! I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to
sleep with the thunder! When I'm cold, I bile the Gulf of Mexico and
bathe in it; when I'm hot I fan myself with an equinoctial storm; when
I'm thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge; when I
range the earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks! Whoo-oop! Bow
your neck and spread! I put my hand on the sun's face and make it
night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the
seasons; I shake myself and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me
through leather- don't use the naked eye! I'm the man with a petrified
heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is
the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the
serious business of my life! The boundless vastness of the great
American desert is my inclosed property, and I bury my dead on my
own premises!" He jumped up and cracked his heels together three times
before he lit (they cheered him again), and as he come down he shouted
out: "Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the Pet Child of
Calamity's a-coming!"
Then the other one went to swelling around and blowing again- the
first one- the one they called Bob; next, the Child of Calamity
chipped in again, bigger than ever; then they both got at it at the
same time, swelling round and round each other and punching their
fists most into each other's faces, and whooping and jawing like
Injuns; then Bob called the Child names, and the Child called him
names back again; next, Bob called him a heap rougher names, and the
Child come back at him with the very worst kind of language; next, Bob
knocked the Child's hat off, and the Child picked it up and kicked
Bob's ribbony hat about six foot; Bob went and got it and said never
mind, this warn't going to be the last of this thing, because he was a
man that never forgot and never forgive, and so the Child better
look out, for there was a time a-coming, just as sure as he was a
living man, that he would have to answer to him with the best blood in
his body. The Child said no man was willinger than he for that time to
come, and he would give Bob fair warning, now, never to cross his path
again, for he could never rest till he had waded in his blood, for
such was his nature, though he was sparing him now on account of his
family, if he had one.
Both of them was edging away in different directions, growling and
shaking their heads and going on about what they was going to do;
but a little black-whiskered chap skipped up and says:
"Come back here, you couple of chicken-livered cowards, and I'll
thrash the two of ye!"
And he done it, too. He snatched them, he jerked them this way and
that, he booted them around, he knocked them sprawling faster than
they could get up. Why, it warn't two minutes till they begged like
dogs- and how the other lot did yell and laugh and clap their hands
all the way through, and shout, "Sail in, Corpse-Maker!" "Hi! at him
again, Child of Calamity!" "Bully for you, little Davy!" Well, it
was a perfect pow-wow for a while. Bob and the Child had red noses and
black eyes when they got through. Little Davy made them own up that
they 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 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 lay still and waited for fifteen minutes, and had a smoke out of a
pipe that one of them left in reach; then the crossing was finished,
and they stumped back and had a drink around and went to talking and
singing again. Next they got out an old fiddle, and one played, and
another patted juba, and the rest turned themselves loose on a regular
old-fashioned keelboat breakdown. 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 different ways; and next about the best ways to put out houses
that was afire; and next about what ought to be done with the
Injuns; and next about what a king had to do, and how much he got; and
next about how to make cats fight; and next about what to do when a
man has fits; and next about differences betwixt clear-water rivers
and muddy-water ones. The man they called Ed said the muddy
Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of
the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water
settle, you would have about a half to three-quarters of an inch of
mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river, and then it
warn't no better than Ohio water- what you wanted to do was to keep it
stirred up- and when the river was low, keep mud on hand to put in and
thicken the water up the way it ought to be.
The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was
nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water
could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to. He says:
"You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. Trees won't grow
worth 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 didn't like to mix with
Mississippi water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise
when the Ohio is low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the
way down the east side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or
more, and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore and
pass the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way
across. Then they talked about how to keep tobacco from getting moldy,
and from that they went into ghosts and told about a lot that other
folks had seen; but Ed says:
"Why don't you tell something that you've seen yourselves? Now let
me have a say. Five years ago I was on a raft as big as this, and
right along here it was a bright moonshiny night, and I was on watch
and boss of the stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man
named Dick Allbright, and he come along to where I was sitting,
forrard- gaping and stretching, he was- and stooped down on the edge
of the raft and washed his face in the river, and come and set down by
me and got out his pipe, and had just got it filled, when he looks
up and says:
"'Why looky-here,' he says, 'ain't that Buck Miller's place, over
yander in the bend?'
"'Yes,' says I, 'it is-why?' He laid his pipe down and leaned his
head on his hand, and says:
"'I thought we'd be furder down.' I says:
"'I thought it, too, when I went off watch'- we was standing six
hours on and six off- 'but the boys told me,' I says, 'that the raft
didn't seem to hardly move, for the last hour,' says I, 'though
she's a-slipping along all right now,' says I. He give a kind of a
groan, and says:
"'I've seed a raft act so before, along here,' he says, ''pears to
me the current has most quit above the head of this bend durin' the
last two years,' he says.
"Well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off and
around on the water. That started me at it, too. A body is always
doing what he sees somebody else doing, though there mayn't be no
sense in it. Pretty soon I see a black something floating on the water
away off to stabboard and quartering behind us. I see he was looking
at it, too. I says:
"'What's that?' He says, sort of pettish:
"''Tain't nothing but an old empty bar'l.'
"'An empty bar'l!' says I, 'why,' says I, 'a spy-glass is a fool
to your eyes. How can you tell it's an empty bar'l?' He says:
"'I don't know; I reckon it ain't a bar'l, but I thought it might
be,' says he.
"'Yes,' I says, 'so it might be, and it might be anything else, too;
a body can't tell nothing about it, such a distance as that,' I says.
"We hadn't nothing else to do, so we kept on watching it. By and
by I says:
"'Why, looky-here, Dick Allbright, that thing's a-gaining on us, I
believe.'
"He never said nothing. The thing gained and gained, and I judged it
must be a dog that was about tired out. Well, we swung down into the
crossing, and the thing floated across the bright streak of the
moonshine, and by George, it was a bar'l. Says I:
"'Dick Allbright, what made you think that thing was a bar'l, when
it was half a mile off?' says I. Says he:
"'I don't know.' Says I:
"'You tell me, Dick Allbright.' Says he:
"'Well, I knowed it was a bar'l; I've seen it before; lots has
seen it; they says it's a ha'nted bar'l.'
"I called the rest of the watch, and they come and stood there,
and I told them what Dick said. It floated right along abreast, now,
and didn't gain any more. It was about twenty foot off. Some was for
having it aboard, but the rest didn't want to. Dick Allbright said
rafts that had fooled with it had got bad luck by it. The captain of
the watch said he didn't believe in it. He said he reckoned the
bar'l gained on us because it was in a little better current than what
we was. He said it would leave by and by.
"So then we went to talking about other things, and we had a song,
and then a breakdown; and after that the captain of the watch called
for another song; but it was clouding up now, and the bar'l stuck
right thar in the same place, and the song didn't seem to have much
warm-up to it, somehow, and so they didn't finish it, and there warn't
any cheers, but it sort of dropped flat, and nobody said anything
for a minute. Then everybody tried to talk at once, and one chap got
off a joke, but it warn't no use, they didn't laugh, and even the chap
that made the joke didn't laugh at it, which ain't usual. We all
just settled down glum, and watched the bar'l, and was oneasy and
oncomfortable. Well, sir, it shut down black and still, and then the
wind began to moan around, and next the lightning began 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
lookout for it. But by and by, toward dawn, she was gone. When the day
come we couldn't see her anywhere, and we warn't sorry, either.
"But next night about half past nine, when there was songs and
high jinks going on, here she comes again, and took her old roost on
the stabboard side. There warn't no more high jinks. Everybody got
solemn; nobody talked; you couldn't get anybody to do anything but set
around moody and look at the bar'l. It begun to cloud up again. When
the watch changed, the off watch stayed up, 'stead of turning in.
The storm ripped and roared around all night, and in the middle of
it another man tripped and sprained his ankle, and had to knock off.
The bar'l left toward day, and nobody see it go.
"Everybody was sober and down in the mouth all day. I don't mean the
kind of sober that comes of leaving liquor alone- not that. They was
quiet, but they all drunk more than usual- not together, but each
man sidled off and took it private, by himself.
"After dark the off watch didn't turn in; nobody sung, nobody
talked; the boys didn't scatter around, neither; they sort of
huddled together, forrard; and for two hours they set there, perfectly
still, looking steady in the one direction, and heaving a sigh once in
a while. And then, here comes the bar'l again. She took up her old
place. She stayed there all night; nobody turned in. The storm come on
again, after midnight. It got awful dark; the rain poured down;
hail, too; the thunder boomed and roared and bellowed; the wind blowed
a hurricane; and the lightning spread over everything in big sheets of
glare, and showed the whole raft as plain as day; and the river lashed
up white as milk as far as you could see for miles, and there was that
bar'l jiggering along, same as ever. The captain ordered the watch
to man the after sweeps for a crossing, and nobody would go- no more
sprained ankles for them, they said. They wouldn't even walk aft.
Well, then, just then the sky split wide open, with a crash, and the
lightning killed two men of the after watch, and crippled two more.
Crippled them how, say you? Why, sprained their ankles!
"The bar'l left in the dark betwixt lightnings, toward dawn. Well,
not a body eat a bite at breakfast that morning. After that the men
loafed around, in twos and threes, and talked low together. But none
of them herded with Dick Allbright. They all give him the cold
shake. If he come around where any of the men was, they split up and
sidled away. They wouldn't man the sweeps with him. The captain had
all the skiffs hauled up on the raft, alongside of his wigwam, and
wouldn't let the dead men be took ashore to be planted; he didn't
believe a man that got ashore would come back; and he was right.
"After night come, you could see pretty plain that there was going
to be trouble if that bar'l come again; there was such a muttering
going on. A good many wanted to kill Dick Allbright, because he'd seen
the bar'l on other trips, and that had an ugly look. Some wanted to
put him ashore. Some said: 'Let's all go ashore in a pile, if the
bar'l comes again.'
"This kind of whispers was still going on, the men being bunched
together forrard watching for the bar'l, when lo and behold you!
here she comes again. Down she comes, slow and steady, and settles
into her old tracks. You could 'a' heard a pin drop. Then up comes the
captain, and says:
"'Boys, don't be a pack of children and fools; I don't want this
bar'l to be dogging us all the way to Orleans, and you don't: Well,
then, how's the best way to stop it? Burn it up- that's the way. I'm
going to fetch it aboard,' he says. And before anybody could say a
word, in he went.
"He swum to it, and as he come pushing it to the raft, the men
spread to one side. But the old man got it aboard and busted in the
head, and there was a baby in it! Yes, sir; a stark-naked baby. It was
Dick Allbright's baby; he owned up and said so.
"'Yes,' he says, a-leaning over it, 'yes, it is my own lamented
darling, my poor lost Charles William Allbright deceased,' says he-
for he could curl his tongue around the bulliest words in the language
when he was a mind to, and lay them before you without a jint
started anywheres. Yes, he said, he used to live up at the head of
this bend, and one night he choked his child, which was crying, not
intending to kill it- which was prob'ly a lie- and then he was scared,
and buried it in a bar'l, before his wife got home, and off he went,
and struck the northern trail and went to rafting; and this was the
third year that the bar'l had chased him. He said the bad luck
always begun light, and lasted till four men was killed, and then
the bar'l didn't come any more after that. He said if the men would
stand it one more night- and was a-going on like that- but the men had
got enough. They started to get out a boat to take him ashore and
lynch him, but he grabbed the little child all of a sudden and
jumped overboard with it, hugged up to his breast and shedding
tears, and we never see him again in this life, poor old suffering
soul, nor Charles William neither."
"Who was shedding tears?" says Bob; "was it Allbright or the baby?"
"Why, Allbright, of course; didn't I tell you the baby was dead?
Been dead three years- how could it cry?"
"Well, never mind how it could cry- how could it keep all that
time?" says Davy. "You answer me that."
"I don't know how it done it." says Ed. "It done it, though-
that's all I know about it."
"Say- what did they do with the bar'l?" says the Child of Calamity.
"Why, they hove it overboard, and it sunk like a chunk of lead."
"Edward, did the child look like it was choked?" says one.
"Did it have its hair parted?" says another.
"What was the brand on that bar'l, Eddy?" says a fellow they
called Bill.
"Have you got the papers for them statistics, Edmund?" says Jimmy.
"Say, Edwin, was you one of the men that was killed by the
lightning?" says Davy.
"Him? Oh, 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.
"Oh, come, now, Eddy," says Jimmy, "show up; you must 'a' kept
part of that bar'l to prove the thing by. Show us the bung-hole- do-
and we'll all believe you."
"Say, boys," says Bill, "less divide it up. Thar's thirteen of us. I
can swaller a thirteenth of the yarn, if you can worry down the rest."
Ed got up mad and said they could all go to some place which he
ripped out pretty savage, and then walked off aft, cussing to himself,
and they yelling and jeering at him, and roaring and laughing so you
could hear them a mile.
"Boys, we'll split a watermelon on that," says the Child of
Calamity; and he came rummaging around in the dark amongst the shingle
bundles where I was, and put his hand on me. I was warm and soft and
naked; so he says "Ouch!" and jumped back.
"Fetch a lantern or a chunk of fire here, boys- there's a snake here
as big as a cow!" So they run there with a lantern, and crowded up and
looked in on me.
"Come out of that, you beggar!" says one.
"Who are you?" says another.
"What are you after here? Speak up prompt, or overboard you go."
"Snake him out, boys. Snatch him out by the heels."
I began to beg, and crept out amongst them trembling. "They looked
me over, wondering, and the Child of Calamity says:
"A cussed thief! Lend a hand and less heave him overboard!"
"No," says Big Bob, "less get out paint-pot and paint him a sky-blue
over from head to heel, and then heave him over."
"Good! that's it. Go for the paint, Jimmy."
When the paint come, and Bob took the brush and was just going to
begin, the others laughing and rubbing their hands, I begun to cry,
and that sort of worked on Davy, and he says:
"'Vast there. He's nothing but a cub. I'll paint the man that teches
him!"
So I looked around on them, and some of them grumbled and growled,
and Bob put down the paint, and the others didn't take it up.
"Come here to the fire, and less see what you're up to here," says
Davy. "Now set down there and give an account of yourself. How long
have you been aboard here?"
"Not over a quarter of a minute, sir," says I.
"How did you get dry so quick?"
"I don't know, sir. I'm always that way, mostly."
"Oh, you are, are you? What's your name?"
I warn't going to tell my name. I didn't know what to say, so I just
says:
"Charles William Allbright, sir."
Then they roared- the whole crowd; and I was mighty glad I said
that, because, maybe, laughing would get them in a better humor.
When they got done laughing, Davy says:
"It won't hardly do, Charles William. You couldn't have growed
this much in five year, and you was a baby when you come out of the
bar'l, you know, and dead at that. Come, now, tell a straight story,
and nobody'll hurt you, if you ain't up to anything wrong. What is
your name?"
"Aleck Hopkins, sir. Aleck James Hopkins."
"Well, Aleck, where did you come from, here?"
"From a trading-scow. She lays up the bend yonder. I was born on
her. Pap has traded up and down here all his life; and he told me to
swim off here, because when you went by he said he would like to get
some of you to speak to a Mr. Jonas Turner, in Cairo, and tell him-"
"Oh, come!"
"Yes, sir, it's as true as the world. Pap he says-"
"Oh, your grandmother!" They all laughed, and I tried again to talk,
but they broke in on me and stopped me.
"Now, looky-here," says Davy; "you're scared, and so you talk
wild. Honest, now, do you live in a scow, or is it a lie?"
"Yes, sir, in a trading-scow. She lays up at the head of the bend.
But I warn't born in her. It's our first trip."
"Now you're talking! What did you come aboard here for? To steal?"
"No, sir, I didn't. It was only to get a ride on the raft. All
boys does that."
"Well, I know that. But what did you hide for?"
"Sometimes they drive the boys off."
"So they do. They might steal. Looky-here; if we let you off this
time, will you keep out of these kind of scrapes hereafter?"
"'Deed I will, boss. You try me."
"All right, then. You ain't but little ways from shore. Overboard
with you, and don't you make a fool of yourself another time this way.
Blast it, boy, some raftsmen would rawhide you till you were black and
blue!"
I didn't wait to kiss good-by, but went overboard and broke for
shore. When Jim come along by and by, the big raft was away out of
sight around the point. I swum out and got aboard, and was mighty glad
to see home again.
-
The boy did not get the information he was after, but his
adventure has furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and
keelboatman which I desire to offer in this place.
I now come to a phase of the Mississippi River life of the flush
times of steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full
examination-the marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there. I
believe there has been nothing like it elsewhere in the world.
CHAPTER IV
THE BOYS' AMBITION
-
WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my
comrades in our village * on the west bank of the Mississippi River.
That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other
sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it
left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show
that ever came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind
of life; now and then we had a hope that, if we lived and were good,
God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each
in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.
-
* Hannibal, Missouri.
-
Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis,
and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day was
glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty
thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After
all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as
it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's
morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so: one or two clerks
sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their
splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the walls, chins on
breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep- with shingle-shavings
enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs
loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon
rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered
about the "levee"; a pile of "skids" on the slope of the stone-paved
wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them;
two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen
to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great
Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its
mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the
other side; the "point" above the town, and the "point" below,
bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and
withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film
of dark smoke appears above one of those remote "points"; instantly
a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice,
lifts up the cry, "S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin'!" and the scene changes!
The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of
drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution,
and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays,
carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common
center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes
upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first
time. And the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and
sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys,
with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful
pilot-house, 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 furnace doors are open and the fires glaring
bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands
by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the
blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys- a
husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch-pine just before
arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the
broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied
deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in
his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks; the
captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they
turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest.
Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and
to take in freight and to discharge freight, all at one and the same
time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all
with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag
on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys.
After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard
asleep by the skids once more.
My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed
the power of life and death over all men, and could hang anybody
that offended him. This was distinction enough for me as a general
thing; but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding,
nevertheless. I first wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that I could come
out with a white apron on and shake a 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 conspicuous. But these
were only day-dreams- they were too heavenly to be contemplated as
real possibilities. By and by one of our boys went away. He was not
heard of for a long time. At last he turned up as apprentice
engineer or "striker" on a steamboat. This thing shook the bottom
out of all my Sunday-school teachings. That boy had been notoriously
worldly, and I just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this
eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery. There was nothing
generous about this fellow in his greatness. He would always manage to
have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and
he would sit on the inside guard and scrub it, where we all could
see him and envy him and loathe him. And whenever his boat was laid up
he would come home and swell around the town in his blackest and
greasiest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a
steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his
talk, as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could
not understand them. He would speak of the "labboard" side of a
horse in an easy, natural way that would make one wish he was dead.
And he was always talking about "St. Looy" like an old citizen; he
would refer casually to occasions when he was "coming down Fourth
Street," or when he was "passing by the Planter's House," or when
there was a fire and he took a turn on the brakes of "the old Big
Missouri"; and then he would go on and lie about how many towns the
size of ours were burned down there that day. Two or three of the boys
had long been persons of consideration among us because they had
been to St. Louis once and had a vague general knowledge of its
wonders, but the day of their glory was over now. They lapsed into a
humble silence, and learned to disappear when the ruthless
"cub"-engineer approached. This fellow had money, too, and hair-oil.
Also an ignorant silver watch and a showy brass watch-chain. He wore a
leather belt and used no suspenders. If ever a youth was cordially
admired and hated by his comrades, this one was. No girl could
withstand his charms. He "cut out" every boy in the village. When
his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment among
us such as we had not known for months. But when he came home the next
week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all battered up and
bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered over by everybody, it
seemed to us that the partiality of Providence for an undeserving
reptile had reached a point where it was open to criticism.
This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily
followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's
son became an engineer. The doctor's and the postmaster's sons
became "mud clerks"; the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a
barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons
of the county judge, became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of
all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely
salary- from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a
month, and no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a
preacher's salary for a year. Now some of us were left disconsolate.
We could not get on the river- at least our parents would not let us.
So, by and by, I ran away. I said I would never come home again till
I was a pilot and could come in glory. But somehow I could not
manage it. I went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed
together like sardines at the long St. Louis wharf, and humbly
inquired for the pilots, but got only a cold shoulder and short
words from mates and clerks. I had to make the best of this sort of
treatment for the time being, but I had comforting 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 Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new
career. I had been reading about the recent exploration of the river
Amazon by an expedition sent out by our government. It was said that
the expedition, owing to difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a
part of the country lying about the headwaters, some four thousand
miles from the mouth of the river. It was only about fifteen hundred
miles from Cincinnati to New Orleans, where I could doubtless get a
ship. I had thirty dollars left; I would go and complete the
exploration of the Amazon. This was all the thought I gave to the
subject. I never was great in matters of detail. I packed my valise,
and took passage on an ancient tub called the Paul Jones, for New
Orleans. For the sum of sixteen dollars I had the scarred and
tarnished splendors of "her" main saloon principally to myself, for
she was not a creature to attract the eye of wiser travelers.
When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio,
I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a
traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an
exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant
climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was
in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out
of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untraveled with a
compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it. Still, when we
stopped at villages and wood-yards, I could not help lolling
carelessly upon the railings of the boiler-deck to enjoy the envy of
the country boys on the bank. If they did not seem to discover me, I
presently sneezed to attract their attention, or moved to a position
where they could not help seeing me. And as soon as I knew they saw me
I gaped and stretched, and gave other signs of being mightily bored
with traveling.
I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind and the
sun could strike me, because I wanted to get the bronzed and
weather-beaten look of an old traveler. Before the second day was half
gone I experienced a joy which filled me with the purest gratitude;
for I saw that the skin had begun to blister and peel off my face
and neck. I wished that the boys and girls at home could see me now.
We reached Louisville in time- at least the neighborhood of it. We
stuck hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river, and lay
there four days. I was now beginning to feel a strong sense of being a
part of the boat's family, a sort of infant son to the captain and
younger brother to the officers. There is no estimating the pride I
took in this grandeur, or the affection that began to swell and grow
in me for those people. I could not know how the lordly steamboatman
scorns that sort of presumption in a mere landsman. I particularly
longed to acquire the least trifle of notice from the big stormy mate,
and I was on the alert for an opportunity to do him a service to
that end. It came at last. The riotous pow-wow of setting a spar was
going on down on the forecastle, and I went down there and stood
around in the way- or mostly skipping out of it- till the mate
suddenly roared a general order for somebody to bring him a capstan
bar. I sprang to his side and said: "Tell me where it is- I'll fetch
it!"
If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the
Emperor of Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than
the mate was. He even stopped swearing. He stood and stared down at
me. It took him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains
together again. Then he said impressively: "Well, if this don't beat
h__l!" 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 he was getting out cargo at a
landing, I was always where I could see and hear. He felt all the
majesty of his great position, and made the world feel it, too. When
he gave even the simplest order, he discharged it like a blast of
lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal of profanity thundering
after it. I could not help contrasting the way in which the average
landsman would give an order with the mate's way of doing it. If the
landsman should wish the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he
would probably say: "James, or William, one of you push that plank
forward, please"; but put the mate in his place, and he would roar
out: "Here, now, start that gang-plank for'ard! Lively, now! What're
you about! Snatch it! snatch it! There! there! Aft again! aft again!
Don't you hear me? Dash it to dash! are you going to sleep over it!
'Vast heaving. 'Vast heaving, I tell you! Going to heave it clear
astern? WHERE 're you going with that barrel! for'ard with it 'fore
I make you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-dashed split between a tired
mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!"
I wished I could talk like that.
When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn
off, I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected
with the boat- the night watchman. He snubbed my advances at first,
but I presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe, and that
softened him. So he allowed me to sit with him by the big bell on
the hurricane-deck, and in time he melted into conversation. He
could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on his words
and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice. He told me
the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided by them in the
solemnity of the night, under the winking stars, and by and by got
to talking about himself. He seemed over-sentimental for a man whose
salary was six dollars a week- or rather he might have seemed so to an
older person than I. But I drank in his words hungrily, and with a
faith that might have moved mountains if it had been applied
judiciously. What was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and
fragrant with gin? What was it to me that his grammar was bad, his
construction worse, and his profanity so void of art that it was an
element of weakness rather than strength in his conversation? He was a
wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me.
As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the
lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy. He said he was
the son of an English nobleman- either an earl or an alderman, he
could not remember which, but believed was both; his father, the
nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and
so while he was still a little boy he was sent to "one of them old,
ancient colleges"- he couldn't remember which; and by and by his
father died and his mother seized the property and "shook" him, as
he phrased it. After his mother shook him, members of the nobility
with whom he was acquainted used their influence to get him the
position of "loblolly-boy in a ship"; and from that point my
watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality and branched
out into a narrative that bristled all along with incredible
adventures; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed, and so
crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most enaging and unconscious
personal villainies, that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering,
wondering, worshiping.
It was a sore blight to find out afterward that he was a low,
vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled
native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature
and appropriated its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends
of the mess into this yarn, and then gone on telling it to
fledglings like me, until he had come to believe it himself.
CHAPTER 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 with a youth who had
taken deck passage- more's the pity; for he easily borrowed six
dollars of me on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to
me the day after we should arrive. But he probably died or forgot,
for he never came. It was doubtless the former, since he had said his
parents were wealthy, and he only traveled deck passage because it
was cooler. *
-
* "Deck" passage- i.e., steerage passage.
-
I soon discovered two things. One was that a vessel would not be
likely to sail for the mouth of the Amazon under ten or twelve
years; and the other was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my
pocket would not suffice for so impossible an exploration as I had
planned, even if I could afford to wait for a ship. Therefore it
followed that I must contrive a new career. The Paul Jones was now
bound for St. Louis. I planned a siege against my pilot, and at the
end of three hard days he surrendered. He agreed to teach me the
Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis for five hundred
dollars, payable out of the first wages I should receive after
graduating. I entered upon the small enterprise of "learning" twelve
or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy
confidence of my time of life. If I had really known what I was
about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to
begin. I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in
the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a
trick, since it was so wide.
The boat backed out from New Orleans at four in the afternoon, and
it was "our watch" until eight. Mr. Bixby, my chief, "straightened her
up," plowed her along past the sterns of the other boats that lay at
the Levee, and then said, "Here, take her; shave those steamships as
close as you'd peel an apple." I took the wheel, and my heartbeat
fluttered up into the hundreds; for it seemed to me that we were about
to scrape the side off every ship in the line, we were so close. I
held my breath and began to claw the boat away from the danger; and
I had my own opinion of the pilot who had known no better than to
get us into such peril, but I was too wise to express it. In half a
minute I had a wide margin of safety intervening between the Paul
Jones and the ships; and within ten seconds more I was set aside in
disgrace, and Mr. Bixby was going into danger again and flaying me
alive with abuse of my cowardice. I was stung, but I was obliged to
admire the easy confidence with which my chief loafed from side to
side of his wheel, and trimmed the ships so closely that disaster
seemed ceaselessly imminent. When he had cooled a little he told me
that the easy water was close ashore and the current outside, and
therefore we must hug the bank, up-stream, to get the benefit of the
former, and stay well out, down-stream, to take advantage of the
latter. In my own mind I resolved to be a down-stream pilot and
leave the up-streaming to people dead to prudence.
Now and then Mr. Bixby called my attention to certain things. Said
he, "This is Six-Mile Point." I assented. It was pleasant enough
information, but I could not see the bearing of it. I was not
conscious that it was a matter of any interest to me. Another time
he said, "This is Nine-Mile Point." Later he said, "This is
Twelve-Mile Point." They were all about level with the water's edge;
they all looked about alike to me; they were monotonously
unpicturesque. I hoped Mr. Bixby would change the subject. But no;
he would crowd up around a point, hugging the shore with affection,
and then say: "The slack water ends here, abreast this bunch of
China trees; now we cross over." So he crossed over. He gave me the
wheel once or twice, but I had no luck. I either came near chipping
off the edge of a sugar-plantation, or I yawed too far from shore, and
so dropped back into disgrace again and got abused.
The watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed.
At midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the night
watchman said:
"Come, turn out!"
And then he left. I could not understand this extraordinary
procedure; so I presently gave up trying to, and dozed off to sleep.
Pretty soon the watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff. I
was annoyed. I said:
"What do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of the
night for? Now, as like as not, I'll not get to sleep again to-night."
The watchman said:
"Well, if this ain't good, I'm blessed."
The "off-watch" was just turning in, and I heard some brutal
laughter from them, and such remarks as "Hello, watchman! ain't the
new cub turned out yet? He's delicate, likely. Give him some sugar
in a rag, and send for the chambermaid to sing 'Rock-a-by Baby,' to
him."
About this time Mr. Bixby appeared on the scene. Something like a
minute later I was climbing the pilot-house steps with some of my
clothes on and the rest in my arms. Mr. Bixby was close behind,
commenting. Here was something fresh- this thing of getting up in
the middle of the night to go to work. It was a detail in piloting
that had never occurred to me at all. I knew that boats ran all night,
but somehow I had never happened to reflect that somebody had to get
up out of a warm bed to run them. I began to fear that piloting was
not quite so romantic as I had imagined it was; there was something
very real and worklike about this new phase of it.
It was a rather dingy night, although a fair number of stars were
out. The big mate was at the wheel, and he had the old tub pointed
at a star and was holding her straight up the middle of the river. The
shores on either hand were not much more than half a mile apart, but
they seemed wonderfully far away and ever so vague and indistinct. The
mate said:
"We've got to land at Jones's plantation, sir."
The vengeful spirit in me exulted. I said to myself, "I wish you joy
of your job, Mr. Bixby; you'll have a good time finding Mr. Jones's
plantation such a night as this; and I hope you never will find it
as long as you live."
Mr. Bixby said to the mate:
"Upper end of the plantation, or the lower?"
"Upper."
"I can't do it. The stumps there are out of water at this stage.
It's no great distance to the lower, and you'll have to get along with
that."
"All right, sir. If Jones don't like it, he'll have to lump it, I
reckon."
And then the mate left. My exultation began to cool and my wonder to
come up. Here was a man who not only proposed to find this
plantation on such a night, but to find either end of it you
preferred. I dreadfully wanted to ask a question, but I was carrying
about as many short answers as my cargo-room would admit of, so I held
my peace. All I desired to ask Mr. Bixby was the simple question
whether he was ass enough to really imagine he was going to find
that plantation on a night when all plantations were exactly alike and
all of the same color. But I held in. I used to have fine inspirations
of prudence in those days.
Mr. Bixby made for the shore and soon was scraping it, just the same
as if it had been daylight. And not only that, but singing:
-
"Father in heaven, the day is declining," etc.
-
It seemed to me that I had put my life in the keeping of a
peculiarly reckless outcast. Presently he turned on me and said:
"What's the name of the first point above New Orleans?"
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I
didn't know.
"Don't know?"
This manner jolted me. I was down at the foot again, in a moment.
But I had to say just what I had said before.
"Well, you're a smart one!" said Mr. Bixby. What's the name of the
next point?"
Once more I didn't know.
"Well, this beats anything. Tell me the name of any point or place I
told you."
I studied awhile and decided that I couldn't.
"Look here! What do you start out from, above Twelve-Mile Point,
to cross over?"
"I- I- don't know."
"You- you- don't know?" mimicking my drawling manner of speech.
"What do you know?"
"I- I- nothing, for certain."
"By the great Caesar's ghost, I believe you! You're the stupidest
dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses! The idea
of you being a pilot- you! Why, you don't know enough to pilot a cow
down a lane."
Oh, but his wrath was up! He was a nervous man, and he shuffled from
one side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot. He would
boil awhile 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 judged 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 brimful, and here were
subjects who could talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his
head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard
before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen's curses drifted, the
higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives
grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a
seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb
your mother with. Presently he said to me in the gentlest way:
"My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book; and every time I
tell you a thing, put it down right away. There's only one way to be a
pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know
it just like A B C."
That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded
with anything but blank cartridges. However, I did not feel
discouraged long. I judged that it was best to make some allowances,
for doubtless Mr. Bixby was "stretching." Presently he pulled a rope
and struck a few strokes on the big bell. The stars were all gone now,
and the night was as black as ink. I could hear the wheels churn along
the bank, but I was not entirely certain that I could see the shore.
The voice of the invisible watchman called up from the hurricane-deck:
"What's this, sir?"
"Jones's plantation."
I said to myself, "I wish I might venture to offer a small bet
that it isn't." But I did not chirp. I only waited to see. Mr. Bixby
handled the engine-bells, and in due time the boat's nose came to
the land, a torch glowed from the forecastle, a man skipped ashore,
a darky's voice on the bank said: "Gimme de k'yarpet-bag, Mass'
Jones," and the next moment we were standing up the river again, all
serene. I reflected deeply awhile, and then said- but not aloud-
"Well, the finding of that plantation was the luckiest accident that
ever happened; but it couldn't happen again in a hundred years." And I
fully believed it was an accident, too.
By the time we had gone seven or eight hundred miles up the river, I
had learned to be a tolerably plucky up-stream steersman, in daylight;
and before we reached St. Louis I had made a trifle of progress in
night work, but only a trifle. I had a note-book that fairly
bristled with the names of towns, "points," bars, islands, bends,
reaches, etc.; but the information was to be found only in the
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 was a long four-hour
gap in my book for every time I had slept since the voyage began.
My chief was presently hired to go on a big New Orleans boat, and
I packed my satchel and went with him. She was a grand affair. When
I stood in her pilot-house I was so far above the water that I
seemed perched on a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away,
fore and aft, below me, that I wondered how I could ever have
considered the little Paul Jones a large craft. There were other
differences, too. The Paul Jones's pilot-house was a cheap, dingy,
battered rattletrap, 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 "cuspidores," instead of a broad wooden
box filled with sawdust; nice new oilcloth on the floor; a
hospitable big stove for winter; a wheel as high as my head, costly
with inlaid work; a wire tiller-rope; bright brass knobs for the
bells; and a tidy, white-aproned, black "texas-tender," to bring up
tarts and ices and coffee during mid-watch, day and night. Now this
was "something like"; and so I began to take heart once more to
believe that piloting was a romantic sort of occupation after all. The
moment we were under way I began to prowl about the great steamer
and fill myself with joy. She was as clean and as dainty as a
drawing-room; when I looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was
like gazing through a splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some
gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom door; she glittered with no
end of prism-fringed chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant,
the bar was marvelous, and the barkeeper had been barbered and
upholstered at incredible cost. The boiler-deck (i.e., the second
story of the boat, so to speak) was as spacious as a church, it seemed
to me; so with the forecastle; and there was no pitiful handful of
deck-hands, firemen, and roustabouts down there, but a whole battalion
of men. The fires were fiercely glaring from a long row of furnaces,
and over them were eight huge boilers! This was unutterable pomp.
The mighty engines- but enough of this. I had never felt so fine
before. And when I found that the regiment of natty servants
respectfully "sir'd" me, my satisfaction was complete.
CHAPTER 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 troublesome river
both ways.
The pilot-house was full of pilots, going down to "look at the
river." What is called the "upper river" (the two hundred miles
between St. Louis and Cairo, where the Ohio comes in) was low; and the
Mississippi changes its channel so constantly that the pilots used
to always find it necessary to run down to Cairo to take a fresh look,
when their boats were to lie in port a week; that is, when the water
was at a low stage. A deal of this "looking at the river" was done
by poor fellows who seldom had a berth, and whose only hope of getting
one lay in their being always freshly posted and therefore ready to
drop into the shoes of some reputable pilot, for a single trip, on
account of such pilot's sudden illness, or some other necessity. And a
good many of them constantly ran up and down inspecting the river, not
because they ever really hoped to get a berth, but because (they being
guests of the boat) it was cheaper to "look at the river" than stay
ashore and pay board. In time these fellows grew dainty in their
tastes, and only infested boats that had an established reputation for
setting good tables. All visiting pilots were useful, for they were
always ready and willing, winter or summer, night or day, to go out in
the yawl and help buoy the channel or assist the boat's pilots in
any way they could. They were likewise welcomed because all pilots are
tireless talkers, when gathered together, and as they talk only
about the river they are always understood and are always interesting.
Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river,
and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.
We had a fine company of these river inspectors along this trip.
There were eight or ten, and there was abundance of room for them in
our great pilot-house. Two or three of them wore polished silk hats,
elaborate shirt-fronts, diamond 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 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 cottonwood in
the bend, then got my stern on the cottonwood, 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 cottonwood and obscure wood-pile that ornaments the banks
of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, I must
actually know where these things are in the dark, unless these
guests are gifted with eyes that can pierce through two miles of solid
blackness. I wish the piloting business was in Jericho and I had never
thought of it.
At dusk Mr. Bixby tapped the big bell three times (the signal to
land), and the captain emerged from his drawing-room in the forward
end of the "texas," and looked up inquiringly. Mr. Bixby said: "We
will lay up here all night, captain."
"Very well, sir."
That was all. The boat came to shore and was tied up for the
night. It seemed to me a fine thing that the pilot could do as he
pleased, without asking so grand a captain's permission. I took my
supper and went immediately to bed, discouraged by my day's
observations and experiences. My late voyage's note-booking was but
a confusion of meaningless names. It had tangled me all up in a knot
every time I had looked at it in the daytime. I now hoped for
respite in sleep; but no, it reveled all through my head till
sunrise again, a frantic and tireless nightmare.
Next morning I felt pretty rusty and low-spirited. We went booming
along, taking a good many chances, for we were anxious to "get out
of the river" (as getting out to Cairo was called) before night should
overtake us. But Mr. Bixby's partner, the other pilot, presently
grounded the boat, and we lost so much time 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 of our
visiting pilots, whose boats would have to wait for their return, no
matter how long that might be. It sobered the pilot-house talk a
good deal. Coming up-stream, pilots did not mind low water or any kind
of darkness; nothing stopped them but fog. But down-stream work was
different; a boat was too nearly helpless, with a stiff current
pushing behind her; so it was not customary to run down-stream at
night in low water.
There seemed to be one small hope, however: if we could get
through the intricate and dangerous Hat Island crossing before
night, we could venture the rest, for we would have plainer sailing
and better water. But it would be insanity to attempt Hat Island at
night. So there was a deal of looking at watches all the rest of the
day, and a constant ciphering upon the speed we were making; Hat
Island was the eternal subject; sometimes hope was high and
sometimes we were delayed in a bad crossing, and down it went again.
For hours all hands lay under the burden of this suppressed
excitement; it was even communicated to me, and I got to feeling so
solicitous about Hat Island, and under such an awful pressure of
responsibility, that I wished I might have five minutes on shore to
draw a good, full, relieving breath, and start over again. We were
standing no regular watches. Each of our pilots ran such portions of
the river as he had run when coming up-stream, because of his
greater familiarity with it; but both remained in the pilot-house
constantly. An hour before sunset Mr. Bixby took the wheel, and Mr. W.
stepped aside. For the next thirty minutes every man held his watch in
his hand and was restless, silent, and uneasy. At last somebody
said, with a doomful sigh:
"Well, yonder's Hat Island- and we can't make it."
All the watches closed with a snap, everybody sighed and muttered
something about its being "too bad, too bad- ah, if we could only have
got here half an hour sooner!" and the place was thick with the
atmosphere of disappointment. Some started to go out, but loitered,
hearing no bell-tap to land. The sun dipped behind the horizon, the
boat went on. Inquiring looks passed from one guest to another; and
one who had his hand on the door-knob and had turned it, waited,
then presently took away his hand and let the knob turn back again. We
bore steadily down the bend. More looks were exchanged, and nods of
surprised admiration- but no words. Insensibly the men drew together
behind Mr. Bixby, as the sky darkened and one or two dim stars came
out. The dead silence and sense of waiting became oppressive. Mr.
Bixby pulled the cord, and two deep, mellow notes from the big bell
floated off on the night. Then a pause, and one more note was
struck. The watchman's voice followed, from the hurricane-deck:
"Labboard lead, there! Stabboard lead!"
The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and
were gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane-deck.
"M-a-r-k three! M-a-r-k three! Quarter-less-three! Half twain!
Quarter twain! M-a-r-k twain! Quarter-less-"
Mr. Bixby pulled two bell-ropes, and was answered by faint jinglings
far below in the engine-room, and our speed slackened. The steam began
to whistle through the gauge-cocks. The cries of the leadsmen went on-
and it is a weird sound, always, in the night. Every pilot in the
lot was watching now, with fixed eyes, and talking under his breath.
Nobody was calm and easy but Mr. Bixby. He would put his wheel down
and stand on a spoke, and as the steamer swung into her (to me)
utterly invisible marks- for we seemed to be in the midst of a wide
and gloomy sea- he would meet and fasten her there. Out of the
murmur of half-audible talk, one caught a coherent sentence now and
then- such as:
"There; she's over the first reef all right!"
After a pause, another subdued voice:
"Her stern's coming down just exactly right, by George!"
"Now she's in the marks; over she goes!"
Somebody else muttered:
"Oh, it was done beautiful- beautiful!"
Now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted with the
current. Not that I could see the boat drift, for I could not, the
stars being all gone by this time. This drifting was the dismalest
work; it held one's heart still. Presently I discovered a blacker
gloom than that which surrounded us. It was the head of the island. We
were closing right down upon it. We entered its deeper shadow, and
so imminent seemed the peril that I was likely to suffocate; and I had
the strongest impulse to do something, anything, to save the vessel.
But still Mr. Bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat, and
all the pilots stood shoulder to shoulder at his back.
"She'll not make it!" somebody whispered.
The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it
was down to:
"Eight-and-a-half! E-i-g-h-t feet! E-i-g-h-t feet! Seven-and-"
Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking-tube to the engineer:
"Stand by, now!"
"Ay, ay, sir!"
"Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! Six-and-"
We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing,
shouted through the tube, "Now, let her have it- every ounce you've
got!" then to his partner, "Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch
her!" The boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon
the apex of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she
went! And such a shout as went up at Mr. Bixby's back never loosened
the roof of a pilot-house before!
There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby was a hero that
night; and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased
to be talked about by river-men.
Fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying the
great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should
know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and
blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to
brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she
must pass almost within arm's reach of a sunken and invisible wreck
that would snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike
it, and destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steamboat and
cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives
into the bargain.
The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby,
uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. He said:
"By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!"
CHAPTER VIII
PERPLEXING LESSONS
-
AT the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack
my head full of islands, towns, bars, "points," and bends; and a
curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I
could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names
without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I
began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I
could make her skip those little gaps. But of course my complacency
could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air,
before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down again.
One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler:
"What is the shape of Walnut Bend?"
He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of
protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it
had any particular shape. My gun-powdery chief went off with a bang,
of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of
adjectives.
I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of
ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and even
remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone. That word
"old" is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I
waited. By and by he said:
"My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It
is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else
is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the
night that it has in the daytime."
"How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?"
"How do you follow a hall at home in the dark? You can't see it."
"Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling
variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as
I know the shape of the front hall at home?"
"On my honor, you've got to know them better than any man ever did
know the shapes of the halls in his own house."
"I wish I was dead!"
"Now I don't want to discourage you, but-"
"Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time."
"You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around
it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that, if you
didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly, you would claw away from
every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it
for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death
every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from
shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You
can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where
it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it.
Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different
shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a star-light night. All
shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too;
and you'd run them for straight lines, only you know better. You
boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight
wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there),
and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray
mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray
mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray
mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well,
then, different kinds of moonlight change the shape of the river in
different ways. You see-"
"Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of
the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways?
If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me
stoop-shouldered."
"No! you only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with
such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape
that's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes."
"Very well, I'll try it; but, after I have learned it, can I
depend on it? Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?"
Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W. came in to take the watch, and
he said:
"Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island, and all that
country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are
caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything, Why,
you wouldn't know the point above 40. You can go up inside the old
sycamore snag, now." *
-
* It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain
that "inside" means between the snag and the shore.- M. T.
-
So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing
shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty
apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got
to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the
other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way
every twenty-four hours.
That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient
river custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch
changed. While the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his
cigar, his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this:
"I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale's Point;
had quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain * with the
other."
-
* Two fathoms. Quarter twain is 2 1/4 fathoms, 13 1/2 feet, Mark
three is three fathoms.
-
"Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip. Meet any
boats?"
"Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the
bar, and I couldn't make her out entirely. I took her for the Sunny
South- hadn't any skylights forward of the chimneys."
And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner *
would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were
abreast of such-and-such a man's woodyard or plantation. This was
courtesy; I supposed it was necessity. But Mr. W. came on watch full
twelve minutes late on this particular night- a tremendous breach of
etiquette; in fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots. So Mr.
Bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered the
wheel and marched out of the pilot-house without a word. I was
appalled; it was a villainous night for blackness, we were in a
particularly wide and blind part of the river, where there was no
shape or substance to anything, and it seemed incredible that Mr.
Bixby should have left that poor fellow to kill the boat, trying to
find out where he was. But I resolved that I would stand by him
anyway. He should find that he was not wholly friendless. So I stood
around, and waited to be asked where we were. But Mr. W. plunged on
serenely through the solid firmament of black cats that stood for an
atmosphere, and never opened his mouth. "Here is a proud devil!"
thought I; "here is a limb of Satan that would rather send us all to
destruction than put himself under obligations to me, because I am not
yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and
lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat." I presently
climbed up on the bench; I did not think it was safe to go to sleep
while this lunatic was on watch.
-
* "Partner" is technical for "the other pilot."
-
However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time, because
the next thing I was aware of was the fact that day was breaking,
Mr. W. gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again. So it was four
o'clock and all well- but me; I felt like a skinful of dry bones,
and all of them trying to ache at once.
Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessed
that it was to do Mr. W. a benevolence- tell him where he was. It took
five minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing to filter
into Mr. Bixby's system, and then I judge it filled him nearly up to
the chin; because he paid me a compliment- and not much of a one
either. He said:
"Well, taking you by and large, you do seem to be more different
kinds of an ass than any creature I ever saw |
