THE MISSISSIPPI AND TRIBUTARY RIVERS--THE CHANGING PHASES OF THEIR
SHIPPING--RIVER NAVIGATION AS A NATION-BUILDING FORCE--THE VALUE OF SMALL
STREAMS--WORK OF THE OHIO COMPANY--AN EARLY PROPELLER--THE FRENCH FIRST ON
THE MISSISSIPPI--THE SPANIARDS AT NEW ORLEANS--EARLY METHODS OF
NAVIGATION--THE FLATBOAT, THE BROADHORN, AND THE KEELBOAT--LIFE OF THE
RIVERMEN--PIRATES AND BUCCANEERS--LAFITTE AND THE BARATARIANS--THE GENESIS
OF THE STEAMBOATS--CAPRICIOUS RIVER--FLUSH TIMES IN NEW ORLEANS--RAPID
MULTIPLICATION OF STEAMBOATS--RECENT FIGURES ON RIVER SHIPPING--COMMODORE
WHIPPLE'S EXPLOIT--THE MEN WHO STEERED THE STEAMBOATS--THEIR TECHNICAL
EDUCATION--THE SHIPS THEY STEERED--FIRES AND EXPLOSIONS--HEROISM OF THE
PILOTS--THE RACERS.
It is the ordinary opinion, and one expressed too often in publications
which might be expected to speak with some degree of accuracy, that river
transportation in the United States is a dying industry. We read every now
and then of the disappearance of the magnificent Mississippi River
steamers, and the magazines not infrequently treat their readers to
glowing stories of what is called the "flush" times on the Mississippi,
when the gorgeousness of the passenger accommodations, the lavishness of
the table, the prodigality of the gambling, and the mingled magnificence
and outlawry of life on the great packets made up a picturesque and
romantic phase of American life. It is true that much of the
picturesqueness and the romance has departed long since. The great river
no longer bears on its turbid bosom many of the towering castellated
boats built to run, as the saying was, on a heavy dew, but still carrying
their tiers upon tiers of ivory-white cabins high in air. The time is past
when the river was the great passenger thoroughfare from St. Louis to New
Orleans. Some few packets still ply upon its surface, but in the main the
passenger traffic has been diverted to the railroads which closely
parallel its channel on either side. The American travels much, but he
likes to travel fast, and for passenger traffic, except on a few routes
where special conditions obtain, the steamboat has long since been
outclassed by the railroads.
Yet despite the disappearance of its spectacular conditions the water
traffic on the rivers of the Mississippi Valley is greater now than at any
time in its history. Its methods only have changed. Instead of gorgeous
packets crowded with a gay and prodigal throng of travelers for pleasure,
we now find most often one dingy, puffing steamboat, probably with no
passenger accommodations at all, but which pushes before her from
Pittsburg to New Orleans more than a score of flatbottomed, square-nosed
scows, aggregating perhaps more than an acre of surface, and heavy laden
with coal. Such a tow--for "tow" it is in the river vernacular, although
it is pushed--will transport more in one trip than would suffice to load
six heavy freight trains. Not infrequently the barges or scows will number
more than thirty, carrying more than 1000 tons each, or a cargo exceeding
in value $100,000. During the season when navigation is open on the Ohio
and its tributaries, this traffic is pursued without interruption. Through
it and through the local business on the lower Mississippi, and the
streams which flow into it, there is built up a tonnage which shows the
freight movement, at least, on the great rivers, to exceed, even in these
days of railroads, anything recorded in their history.
No physical characteristic of the United States has contributed so greatly
to the nationalization of the country and its people, as the topography of
its rivers. From the very earliest days they have been the pathways along
which proceeded exploration and settlement. Our forefathers, when they
found the narrow strip of land along the Atlantic coast which they had at
first occupied, becoming crowded, according to their ideas at the time,
began working westward, following the river gaps. Up the Hudson and
westward by the Mohawk, up the Susquehanna and the Potomac, carrying
around the falls that impeded the course of those streams, trudging over
the mountains, and building flatboats at the headwaters of the Ohio, they
made their way west. Some of the most puny streams were utilized for
water-carriers, and the traveler of to-day on certain of the railroads
through western New York and Pennsylvania, will be amazed to see the
remnants of canals, painfully built in the beds of brawling streams, that
now would hardly float an Indian birch-bark canoe. In their time these
canals served useful purposes. The stream was dammed and locked every few
hundred yards, and so converted into a placid waterway with a flight of
mechanical steps, by which the boats were let down to, or raised up from
tidewater. To-day nothing remains of most of these works of engineering,
except masses of shattered masonry. For the railroads, using the river's
bank, and sometimes even part of the retaining walls of the canals for
their roadbeds, have shrewdly obtained and swiftly employed authority to
destroy all the fittings of these waterways which might, perhaps, at some
time, offer to their business a certain rivalry.
The corporation known as the Ohio Company, with a great purchase of land
from Congress in 1787, by keen advertising, and the methods of the modern
real-estate boomer, started the tide of emigration and the fleet of boats
down the Ohio. The first craft sent out by this corporation was named,
appropriately enough, the "Mayflower." She drifted from Pittsburg to a
spot near the mouth of the Muskingum river. Soon the immigrants began to
follow by scores, and then by thousands. Mr. McMaster has collected some
contemporary evidence of their numbers. One man at Fort Pitt saw fifty
flatboats set forth between the first of March and the middle of April,
1787. Between October, 1786, and May, 1787--the frozen season when boats
were necessarily infrequent--the adjutant at Fort Harmer counted one
hundred and seventy-seven flat-boats, and estimated they carried
twenty-seven hundred settlers. A shabby and clumsy fleet it was, indeed,
with only enough seamanship involved to push off a sand-bar, but it was a
great factor in the upbuilding of the nation. And a curious fact is that
the voyagers on one of these river craft hit upon the principle of the
screw-propeller, and put it to effective use. The story is told in the
diary of Manasseh Cutler, a member of the Ohio Company, who writes:
"Assisted by a number of people, we went to work and constructed a machine
in the form of a screw, with short blades, and placed it in the stern of
the boat, which we turned with a crank. It succeeded to perfection, and I
think it a very useful discovery." But the discovery was forgotten for
nearly three-quarters of a century, until John Ericsson rediscovered and
utilized it.
Once across the divide, the early stream of immigration took its way down
the Ohio River to the Mississippi. There it met the outposts of French
power, for the French burst open that great river, following their
missionaries, Marquette and Joliet, down from its headwaters in
Wisconsin, or pressing up from their early settlements at New Orleans.
Doubtless, if it had not been that the Mississippi afforded the most
practicable, and the most useful highway from north to south, the young
American people would have had a French State to the westward of them
until they had gone much further on the path toward national manhood. But
the navigation of the Mississippi and its tributaries was so rich a prize,
that it stimulated alike considerations of individual self-interest and
national ambition. From the day when the first flatboat made its way from
the falls of the Ohio to New Orleans, it was the fixed determination of
all people living by the great river, or using it as a highway for
commerce, that from its headwaters to its mouth it should be a purely
American stream. It was in this way that the Mississippi and its
tributaries proved to be, as I have said, a great influence in developing
the spirit of coherent nationality among the people of the young nation.
Indeed, no national Government could be of much value to the farmers and
trappers of Kentucky and Tennessee that did not assure them the right to
navigate the Mississippi to its mouth, and find there a place to
trans-ship their goods into ocean-going vessels. From the Atlantic
seaboard they were shut off by a wall, that for all purpose of export
trade was impenetrable. The swift current of the rivers beat back their
vessels, the towering ranges of the Alleghanies mocked at their efforts at
road building. From their hills flowed the water that filled the Father of
Waters and his tributaries. Nature had clearly designed this for their
outlet. As James Madison wrote: "The Mississippi is to them everything. It
is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable waters of
the Atlantic coast formed into one stream." Yet, when the first trader,
in 1786, drifted with his flatboat from Ohio down to New Orleans, thus
entering the confines of Spanish territory, he was seized and imprisoned,
his goods were taken from him, and at last he was turned loose, penniless,
to plod on foot the long way back to his home, telling the story of his
hardships as he went along. The name of that man was Thomas Amis, and
after his case became known in the great valley, it ceased to be a matter
of doubt that the Americans would control the Mississippi. He was in a
sense the forerunner of Jefferson and Jackson, for after his time no
intelligent statesman could doubt that New Orleans must be ours, nor any
soldier question the need for defending it desperately against any foreign
power. The story of the way in which Gen. James Wilkinson, by intrigue and
trickery, some years later secured a partial relaxation of Spanish
vigilance, can not be told here, though his plot had much to do with
opening the great river.
[Illustration: FLATBOATS MANNED WITH RIFLEMEN]
The story of navigation on the Mississippi River, is not without its
elements of romance, though it does not approach in world interest the
story of the achievements of the New England mariners on all the oceans of
the globe. Little danger from tempest was encountered here. The natural
perils to navigation were but an ignoble and unromantic kind--the shifting
sand-bar and the treacherous snag. Yet, in the early days, when the
flatboats were built at Cincinnati or Pittsburg, with high parapets of
logs or heavy timber about their sides, and manned not only with men to
work the sweeps and hold the steering oar, but with riflemen, alert of
eye, and unerring of aim, to watch for the lurking savage on the banks,
there was peril in the voyage that might even affect the stout nerves of
the hardy navigator from New Bedford or Nantucket. For many long years in
the early days of our country's history, the savages of the Mississippi
Valley were always hostile, continually enraged. The French and the
English, bent upon stirring up antagonism to the growing young nation, had
their agents persistently at work awakening Indian hostility, and, indeed,
it is probable that had this not been the case, the rough and lawless
character of the American pioneers, and their entire indifference to the
rights of the Indians, whom they were bent on displacing, would have
furnished sufficient cause for conflict.
First of the craft to follow the Indian canoes and the bateaux of the
French missionaries down the great rivers, was the flatboat--a homely and
ungraceful vessel, but yet one to which the people of the United States
owe, perhaps, more of real service in the direction of building up a great
nation than they do to Dewey's "Olympia," or Schley's "Brooklyn." A
typical flatboat of the early days of river navigation was about
fifty-five feet long by sixteen broad. It was without a keel, as its name
would indicate, and drew about three feet of water. Amidships was built a
rough deck-house or cabin, from the roof of which extended on either side,
two long oars, used for directing the course of the craft rather than for
propulsion, since her way was ever downward with the current, and
dependent upon it. These great oars seemed to the fancy of the early
flatboat men, to resemble horns, hence the name "broadhorns," sometimes
applied to the boats. Such a boat the settler would fill with household
goods and farm stock, and commit himself to the current at Pittsburg. From
the roof of the cabin that housed his family, cocks crew and hens cackled,
while the stolid eyes of cattle peered over the high parapet of logs built
about the edge for protection against the arrow or bullet of the wandering
redskin. Sometimes several families would combine to build one ark.
Drifting slowly down the river--the voyage from Pittsburg to the falls of
the Ohio, where Louisville now stands, requiring with the best luck, a
week or ten days--the shore on either hand would be closely scanned for
signs of unusual fertility, or for the opening of some small stream
suggesting a good place to "settle." When a spot was picked out the boat
would be run aground, the boards of the cabin erected skilfully into a
hut, and a new outpost of civilization would be established. As these
settlements multiplied, and the course of emigration to the west and
southwest increased, river life became full of variety and gaiety. In some
years more than a thousand boats were counted passing Marietta. Several
boats would lash together and make the voyage to New Orleans, which
sometimes occupied months, in company. There would be frolics and dances,
the notes of the violin--an almost universal instrument among the flatboat
men--sounded across the waters by night to the lonely cabins on the
shores, and the settlers not infrequently would put off in their skiffs to
meet the unknown voyagers, ask for the news from the east, and share in
their revels. Floating shops were established on the Ohio and its
tributaries--flatboats, with great cabins fitted with shelves and stocked
with cloth, ammunition, tools, agricultural implements, and the
ever-present whisky, which formed a principal staple of trade along the
rivers. Approaching a clump of houses on the bank, the amphibious
shopkeeper would blow lustily upon a horn, and thereupon all the
inhabitants would flock down to the banks to bargain for the goods that
attracted them. As the population increased the floating saloon and the
floating gambling house were added to the civilized advantages the river
bore on its bosom. Trade was long a mere matter of barter, for currency
was seldom seen in these outlying settlements. Skins and agricultural
products were all the purchasers had to give, and the merchant starting
from Pittsburg with a cargo of manufactured goods, would arrive at New
Orleans, perhaps three months later, with a cabin filled with furs and a
deck piled high with the products of the farm. Here he would dispose of
his cargo, perhaps for shipment to Europe, sell his flatboat for the
lumber in it, and begin his painful way back again to the head of
navigation.
The flatboat never attempted to return against the stream. For this
purpose keel-boats or barges were used, great hulks about the size of a
small schooner, and requiring twenty-five men at the poles to push one
painfully up stream. Three methods of propulsion were employed. The
"shoulder pole," which rested on the bottom, and which the boatman pushed,
walking from bow to stern as he did so; tow-lines, called cordelles, and
finally the boat was drawn along by pulling on overhanging branches. The
last method was called "bushwhacking." These became in time the regular
packets of the rivers, since they were not broken up at the end of the
voyage and required trained crews for their navigation. The bargemen were
at once the envy and terror of the simple folk along the shores. A wild,
turbulent class, ready to fight and to dance, equally enraptured with the
rough scraping of a fiddle by one of their number, or the sound of the
war-whoop, which promised the only less joyous diversion of a fight, they
aroused all the inborn vagrant tendencies of the riverside boys, and to
run away with a flatboat became, for the Ohio or Indiana lad, as much of
an ambition as to run away to sea was for the boy of New England. It will
be remembered that Abraham Lincoln for a time followed the calling of a
flatboatman, and made a voyage to New Orleans, on which he first saw
slaves, and later invented a device for lifting flatboats over sand-bars,
the model for which is still preserved at Washington, though the industry
it was designed to aid is dead. Pigs, flour, and bacon, planks and
shingles, ploughs, hoes, and spades, cider and whisky, were among the
simple articles dealt in by the owners of the barges. Their biggest market
was New Orleans, and thither most of their food staples were carried, but
for agricultural implements and whisky there was a ready sale all along
the route. Tying up to trade, or to avoid the danger of night navigation,
the boatmen became the heroes of the neighborhood. Often they invited all
hands down to their boat for a dance, and by flaring torches to the notes
of accordion and fiddle, the evening would pass in rude and harmless
jollity, unless too many tin cups or gourds of fiery liquor excited the
always ready pugnacity of the men. They were ready to brag of their valor,
and to put their boasts to the test. They were "half horse, half
alligator," according to their own favorite expression, equally prepared
with knife or pistol, fist, or the trained thumb that gouged out an
antagonist's eye, unless he speedily called for mercy. "I'm a Salt River
roarer!" bawled one in the presence of a foreign diarist. "I can outrun,
outjump, throw down, drag out and lick any man on the river! I love
wimmen, and I'm chock full of fight!" In every crew the "best" man was
entitled to wear a feather or other badge, and the word "best" had no
reference to moral worth, but merely expressed his demonstrated ability to
whip any of his shipmates. They had their songs, too, usually sentimental,
as the songs of rough men are, that they bawled out as they toiled at the
sweeps or the pushpoles. Some have been preserved in history:
"It's oh! As I was walking out,
One morning in July,
I met a maid who axed my trade.
'A flatboatman,' says I.
"And it's oh! She was so neat a maid
That her stockings and her shoes
She toted in her lily-white hands,
For to keep them from the dews."
[Illustration: "THE EVENING WOULD PASS IN RUDE AND HARMLESS JOLLITY."]
Just below the mouth of the Wabash on the Ohio was the site of
Shawneetown, which marked the line of division between the Ohio and the
Mississippi trade. Here goods and passengers were debarked for Illinois,
and here the Ohio boatmen stopped before beginning their return trip.
Because of the revels of the boatmen, who were paid off there, the place
acquired a reputation akin to that which Port Said, at the northern
entrance to the Suez Canal, now holds. It held a high place in river song
and story.
"Some row up, but we row down,
All the way to Shawneetown.
Pull away, pull away,"
was a favorite chorus.
Natchez, Tennessee, held a like unsavory reputation among the Mississippi
River boatmen, for there was the great market in which were exchanged
northern products for the cotton, yams, and sugar of the rich lands of the
South.
For food on the long voyage, the boatmen relied mostly on their rifles,
but somewhat on the fish that might be brought up from the depths of the
turbid stream, and the poultry and mutton which they could secure from the
settlers by barter, or not infrequently, by theft. Wild geese were
occasionally shot from the decks, while a few hours' hunt on shore would
almost certainly bring reward in the shape of wild turkey or deer. A
somewhat archaic story among river boatmen tells of the way in which
"Mike Fink," a famous character among them, secured a supply of mutton.
Seeing a flock of sheep grazing near the shore, he ran his boat near them,
and rubbed the noses of several with Scotch snuff. When the poor brutes
began to caper and sneeze in dire discomfort, the owner arrived on the
scene, and asked anxiously what could ail them. The bargeman, as a
traveled person, was guide, philosopher, and friend to all along the
river, and so, when informed that his sheep were suffering from black
murrain, and that all would be infected unless those already afflicted
were killed, the farmer unquestioningly shot those that showed the strange
symptoms, and threw the bodies into the river, whence they were presently
collected by the astute "Mike," and turned into fair mutton for himself
and passengers. Such exploits as these added mightily to the repute of the
rivermen for shrewdness, and the farmer who suffered received scant
sympathy from his neighbors.
But the boatmen themselves had dangers to meet, and robbers to evade or to
outwit. At any time the lurking Indian on the banks might send a
death-dealing arrow or bullet from some thicket, for pure love of
slaughter. For a time it was a favorite ruse of hostiles, who had secured
a white captive, to send him alone to the river's edge, under threat of
torture, there to plead with outstretched hands for aid from the passing
raft. But woe to the mariner who was moved by the appeal, for back of the
unfortunate, hidden in the bushes, lay ambushed savages, ready to leap
upon any who came ashore on the errand of mercy, and in the end neither
victim nor decoy escaped the fullest infliction of redskin barbarity.
There were white outlaws along the rivers, too; land pirates ready to rob
and murder when opportunity offered, and as the Spanish territory about
New Orleans was entered, the dangers multiplied. The advertisement of a
line of packets sets forth:
"No danger need be apprehended from the enemy, as every person whatever
will be under cover, made proof against rifle or musket balls, and
convenient portholes for firing out of. Each of the boats are armed with
six pieces, carrying a pound ball, also a number of muskets, and amply
supplied with ammunition, strongly manned with choice hands, and masters
of approved knowledge."
The English of the advertisement is not of the most luminous character,
yet it suffices to tell clearly enough to any one of imagination, the
story of some of the dangers that beset those who drifted from Ohio to New
Orleans.
The lower reaches of the Mississippi River bore among rivermen, during the
early days of the century, very much such a reputation as the Spanish Main
bore among the peaceful mariners of the Atlantic trade. They were the
haunts of pirates and buccaneers, mostly ordinary cheap freebooters,
operating from the shore with a few skiffs, or a lugger, perhaps, who
would dash out upon a passing vessel, loot it, and turn it adrift. But one
gang of these river pirates so grew in power and audacity, and its leaders
so ramified their associations and their business relations, as for a time
to become a really influential factor in the government of New Orleans,
while for a term of years they even put the authority of the United States
at nought. The story of the brothers Lafitte and their nest of criminals
at Barataria, is one of the most picturesque in American annals. On a
group of those small islands crowned with live-oaks and with fronded
palms, in that strange waterlogged country to the southwest of the
Crescent City, where the sea, the bayou, and the marsh fade one into the
other until the line of demarkation can scarcely be traced, the Lafittes
established their colony. There they built cabins and storehouses, threw
up-earthworks, and armed them with stolen cannon. In time the plunder of
scores of vessels filled the warehouses with the goods of all nations, and
as the wealth of the colony grew its numbers increased. To it were
attracted the adventurous spirits of the creole city. Men of Spanish and
of French descent, negroes, and quadroons, West Indians from all the
islands scattered between North and South America, birds of prey, and
fugitives from justice of all sorts and kinds, made that a place of
refuge. They brought their women and children, and their slaves, and the
place became a small principality, knowing no law save Lafitte's will.
With a fleet of small schooners the pirates would sally out into the Gulf
and plunder vessels of whatever sort they might encounter. The road to
their hiding-place was difficult to follow, either in boats or afoot, for
the tortuous bayous that led to it were intertwined in an almost
inextricable maze, through which, indeed, the trained pilots of the colony
picked their way with ease, but along which no untrained helmsman could
follow them. If attack were made by land, the marching force was
confronted by impassable rivers and swamps; if by boats, the invaders
pressing up a channel which seemed to promise success, would find
themselves suddenly in a blind alley, with nothing to do save to retrace
their course. Meanwhile, for the greater convenience of the pirates, a
system of lagoons, well known to them, and easily navigated in luggers,
led to the very back door of New Orleans, the market for their plunder. Of
the brothers Lafitte, one held state in the city as a successful merchant,
a man not without influence with the city government, of high standing in
the business community, and in thoroughly good repute. Yet he was, in
fact, the agent for the pirate colony, and the goods he dealt in were
those which the picturesque ruffians of Barataria had stolen from the
vessels about the mouth of the Mississippi River. The situation persisted
for nearly half a score of years. If there were merchants, importers and
shipowners in New Orleans who suffered by it, there were others who
profited by it, and it has usually been the case that a crime or an
injustice by which any considerable number of people profit, becomes a
sort of vested right, hard to disturb. And, indeed, the Baratarians were
not without a certain rude sense of patriotism and loyalty to the United
States, whose laws they persistently violated. For when the second war
with Great Britain was declared and Packenham was dispatched to take New
Orleans, the commander of the British fleet made overtures to Lafitte and
his men, promising them a liberal subsidy and full pardon for all past
offenses, if they would but act as his allies and guide the British
invaders to the most vulnerable point in the defenses of the Crescent
City. The offer was refused, and instead, the chief men of the pirate
colony went straightway to New Orleans to put Jackson on his guard, and
when the opposing forces met on the plains of Chalmette, the very center
of the American line was held by Dominique Yon, with a band of his swarthy
Baratarians, with howitzers which they themselves had dragged from their
pirate stronghold to train upon the British. Many of us, however
law-abiding, will feel a certain sense that the romance of history would
have been better served, if after this act of patriotism, the pirates had
been at least peacefully dispersed. But they were wedded to their
predatory life, returned with renewed zeal to their piracies, and were
finally destroyed by the State forces and a United States naval
expedition, which burned their settlement, freed their slaves, razed their
fortifications, confiscated their cannon, killed many of their people,
and dispersed the rest among the swamps and forests of southern Louisiana.
In 1809 a New York man, by name Nicholas J. Roosevelt, set out from
Pittsburg in a flatboat of the usual type, to make the voyage to New
Orleans. He carried no cargo of goods for sale, nor did he convey any band
of intended settlers, yet his journey was only second in importance to the
ill-fated one, in which the luckless Amis proved that New Orleans must be
United States territory, or the wealth of the great interior plateau would
be effectively bottled up. For Roosevelt was the partner of Fulton and
Livingston in their new steamboat enterprise, having himself suggested the
vertical paddle-wheel, which for more than a half a century was the
favorite means of utilizing steam power for the propulsion of boats. He
was firm in the belief that the greatest future for the steamboat was on
the great rivers that tied together the rapidly growing commonwealths of
the middle west, and he undertook this voyage for the purpose of studying
the channel and the current of the rivers, with the view to putting a
steamer on them. Wise men assured him that on the upper river his scheme
was destined to failure. Could a boat laden with a heavy engine be made of
so light a draught as to pass over the shallows of the Ohio? Could it run
the falls at Louisville, or be dragged around them as the flatboats often
were? Clearly not. The only really serviceable type of river craft was the
flatboat, for it would go where there was water enough for a muskrat to
swim in, would glide unscathed over the concealed snag or, thrusting its
corner into the soft mud of some protruding bank, swing around and go on
as well stern first as before. The flatboat was the sum of human ingenuity
applied to river navigation. Even barges were proving failures and
passing into disuse, as the cost of poling them upstream was greater than
any profit to be reaped from the voyage. Could a boat laden with thousands
of pounds of machinery make her way northward against that swift current?
And if not, could steamboat men be continually taking expensive engines
down to New Orleans and abandoning them there, as the old-time river men
did their rafts and scows? Clearly not. So Roosevelt's appearance on the
river did not in any way disquiet the flatboatmen, though it portended
their disappearance as a class. Roosevelt, however, was in no wise
discouraged. Week after week he drifted along the Ohio and Mississippi,
taking detailed soundings, studying the course of the current, noting the
supply of fuel along the banks, observing the course of the rafts and
flatboats as they drifted along at the mercy of the tide. Nothing escaped
his attention, and yet it may well be doubted whether the mass of data he
collected was in fact of any practical value, for the great river is the
least understandable of streams. Its channel is as shifting as the mists
above Niagara. Where yesterday the biggest boat on the river, deep laden
with cotton, might pass with safety, there may be to-day a sand-bar
scarcely hidden beneath the tide. Its banks change over night in form and
in appearance. In time of flood it cuts new channels for itself, leaving
in a few days river towns far in the interior, and suddenly giving a water
frontage to some plantation whose owner had for years mourned over his
distance from the river bank. Capricious and irresistible, working
insidiously night and day, seldom showing the progress of its endeavors
until some huge slice of land, acres in extent, crumbles into the flood,
or some gully or cut-off all at once appears as the main channel, the
Mississippi, even now when the Government is at all times on the alert to
hold it in bounds, is not to be lightly learned nor long trusted. In
Roosevelt's time, before the days of the river commission, it must have
been still more difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, the information he
collected, satisfied him that the stream was navigable for steamers, and
his report determined his partners to build the pioneer craft at
Pittsburg. She was completed, "built after the fashion of a ship with
portholes in her side," says a writer of the time, dubbed the "Orleans,"
and in 1812 reached the city on the sodden prairies near the mouth of the
Mississippi, whose name we now take as a synonym for quaintness, but which
at that time had seemingly the best chance to become a rival of London and
Liverpool, of any American town. For just then the great possibilities of
the river highway were becoming apparent. The valley was filling up with
farmers, and their produce sought the shortest way to tide-water. The
streets of the city were crowded with flatboatmen, from Indiana, Ohio, and
Kentucky, and with sailors speaking strange tongues, and gathered from all
the ports of the world. At the broad levee floated the ships of all
nations. All manual work was done by the negro slaves, and already the
planters were beginning to show signs of that prodigal prosperity, which,
in the flush times, made New Orleans the gayest city in the United States.
In 1813 Jackson put the final seal on the title-deeds to New Orleans, and
made the Mississippi forever an American river by defeating the British
just outside the city's walls, and then river commerce grew apace. In 1817
fifteen hundred flatboats and five hundred barges tied up to the levee. By
that time the steamboat had proved her case, for the "New Orleans" had run
for years between Natchez and the Louisiana city, charging a fare of
eighteen dollars for the down, and twenty-five dollars for the up trip,
and earning for her owners twenty thousand dollars profits in one year.
She was snagged and lost in 1814, but by that time others were in the
field, first of all the "Comet," a stern-wheeler of twenty-five tons,
built at Pittsburg, and entering the New Orleans-Natchez trade in 1814.
The "Vesuvius," and the "Ætna."--volcanic names which suggested the
explosive end of too many of the early boats--were next in the field, and
the latter won fame by being the first boat to make the up trip from New
Orleans to Louisville. Another steamboat, the "Enterprise," carried a
cargo of, powder and ball from Pittsburg to General Jackson at New
Orleans, and after some service on southern waters, made the return trip
to Louisville in twenty-five days. This was a great achievement, and
hailed by the people of the Kentucky town as the certain forerunner of
commercial greatness, for at one time there were tied to the bank the
"Enterprise" from New Orleans, the "Despatch" from Pittsburg, and the
"Kentucky Elizabeth" from the upper Kentucky River. Never had the
settlement seemed to be so thoroughly in the heart of the continent.
Thereafter river steamboating grew so fast that by 1819 sixty-three
steamers, of varying tonnage from twenty to three hundred tons, were
plying on the western rivers. Four had been built at New Orleans, one each
at Philadelphia, New York, and Providence, and fifty-six on the Ohio. The
upper reaches of the Mississippi still lagged in the race, for most of the
boats turned off up the Ohio River, into the more populous territory
toward the east. It was not until August, 1817, that the "General Pike,"
the first steamer ever to ascend the Mississippi River above the mouth of
the Ohio, reached St. Louis. No pictures, and but scant descriptions of
this pioneer craft, are obtainable at the present time. From old letters
it is learned that she was built on the model of a barge, with her cabin
situated on the lower deck, so that its top scarcely showed above the
bulwarks. She had a low-pressure engine, which at times proved inadequate
to stem the current, and in such a crisis the crew got out their shoulder
poles and pushed her painfully up stream, as had been the practice so many
years with the barges. At night she tied up to the bank. Only one other
steamer reached St. Louis in the same twelve months. By way of contrast to
this picture of the early beginnings of river navigation on the upper
Mississippi, we may set over some facts drawn from recent official
publications concerning the volume of river traffic, of which St. Louis is
now the admitted center. In 1890 11,000,000 passengers were carried in
steamboats on rivers of the Mississippi system. The Ohio and its
tributaries, according to the census of that year, carried over 15,000,000
tons of freight annually, mainly coal, grain, lumber, iron, and steel. The
Mississippi carries about the same amount of freight, though on its turbid
tide, cotton and sugar, in no small degree, take the place of grain and
the products of the furnaces and mills.
But it was a long time before steam navigation approached anything like
these figures, and indeed, many years passed before the flatboat and the
barge saw their doom, and disappeared. In 1821, ten years after the first
steamboat arrived at New Orleans, there was still recorded in the annals
of the town, the arrival of four hundred and forty-one flatboats, and one
hundred and seventy-four barges. But two hundred and eighty-seven
steamboats also tied up to the levee that year, and the end of the
flatboat days was in sight. Ninety-five of the new type of vessels were in
service on the Mississippi and its tributaries, and five were at Mobile
making short voyages on the Mississippi Sound and out into the Gulf. They
were but poor types of vessels at best. At first the shortest voyage up
the river from New Orleans to Shippingport--then a famous landing, now
vanished from the map--was twenty-two days, and it took ten days to come
down. Within six years the models of the boats and the power of the
engines had been so greatly improved that the up trip was made in twelve
days, and the down in six. Even the towns on the smaller streams tributary
to the great river, had their own fleets. Sixteen vessels plied between
Nashville and New Orleans. The Red River, and even the Missouri, began to
echo to the puffing of the exhaust and the shriek of the steam-whistle.
Indeed, it was not very long before the Missouri River became as important
a pathway for the troops of emigrants making for the great western plains
and in time for the gold fields of California, as the Ohio had been in the
opening days of the century for the pioneers bent upon opening up the
Mississippi Valley. The story of the Missouri River voyage, the landing
place at Westport, now transformed into the great bustling city of Kansas
City, and all the attendant incidents which led up to the contest in
Kansas and Nebraska, forms one of the most interesting, and not the least
important chapters in the history of our national development.
The decade during which the steamboats and the flatboats still struggled
for the mastery, was the most picturesque period of Mississippi River
life. Then the river towns throve most, and waxed turbulent, noisy, and
big, according to the standards of the times. Places which now are mere
names on the map, or have even disappeared from the map altogether, were
great trans-shipping points for goods on the way to the sea. New Madrid,
for example, which nowadays we remember chiefly as being one of the
stubborn obstacles in the way of the Union opening of the river in the
dark days of the Civil War, was in 1826 like a seaport. Flatboats in
groups and fleets came drifting to its levees heavy laden with the
products of the west and south, the output of the northern farms and
mills, and the southern plantations. On the crowded river bank would be
disembarked goods drawn from far-off New England, which had been dragged
over the mountains and sent down the Ohio to the Mississippi; furs from
northern Minnesota or Wisconsin; lumber in the rough, or shaped into
planks, from the mills along the Ohio; whisky from Kentucky, pork and
flour from Illinois, cattle, horses, hemp, fabrics, tobacco, everything
that men at home or abroad, could need or crave, was gathered up by
enterprising traders along three thousand miles of waterway, and brought
hither by clumsy rafts and flatboats, and scarcely less clumsy steamboats,
for distribution up and down other rivers, and shipment to foreign lands.
At New Orleans there was a like deposit of all the products of that rich
valley, an empire in itself. There grain, cotton, lumber, live stock,
furs, the output of the farms and the spoils of the chase, were
transferred to ocean-going ships and sent to foreign markets. Speculative
spirits planned for the day, when this rehandling of cargoes at the
Crescent City would be no longer necessary, but ships would clear from
Louisville or St. Louis to Liverpool or Hamburg direct. A fine type of the
American sailor, Commodore Whipple, who had won his title by good
sea-fighting in the Revolutionary War, gave great encouragement to this
hope, in 1800, by taking the full-rigged ship "St. Clair," with a cargo of
pork and flour, from Marietta, Ohio, down the Ohio, over the falls at
Louisville, thence down the Mississippi, and round by sea to Havana, and
so on to Philadelphia. This really notable exploit--to the success of
which good luck contributed almost as much as good seamanship--aroused
the greatest enthusiasm. The Commodore returned home overland, from
Philadelphia. His progress, slow enough, at best, was checked by ovations,
complimentary addresses, and extemporized banquets. He was _the_ man of
the moment. The poetasters, who were quite as numerous in the early days
of the republic, as the true poets were scarce, signalized his exploit in
verse.
"The Triton crieth,
'Who cometh now from shore?'
Neptune replieth,
''Tis the old Commodore.
Long has it been since I saw him before.
In the year '75 from Columbia he came,
The pride of the Briton, on ocean to tame.
* * * * *
"'But now he comes from western woods,
Descending slow, with gentle floods,
The pioneer of a mighty train,
Which commerce brings to my domain.'"
But Neptune and the Triton had no further occasion to exchange notes of
astonishment upon the appearance of river-built ships on the ocean. The
"St. Clair" was the first and last experiment of the sort. Late in the
nineties, the United States Government tried building a torpedo-boat at
Dubuque for ocean service, but the result was not encouraging.
Year after year the steamboats multiplied, not only on the rivers of the
West, but on those leading from the Atlantic seaboard into the interior.
It may be said justly that the application of steam to purposes of
navigation made the American people face fairly about. Long they had
stood, looking outward, gazing across the sea to Europe, their sole
market, both for buying and for selling. But now the rich lands beyond
the mountains, inviting settlers, and cut up by streams which offered
paths for the most rapid and comfortable method of transportation then
known, commanded their attention. Immigrants no longer stopped in stony
New England, or in Virginia, already dominated by an aristocratic
land-owning class, but pressed on to Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and
Illinois. As the lands filled up, the little steamers pushed their noses
up new streams, seeking new markets. The Cumberland, and the Tennessee,
the Missouri, the Arkansas, the Red, the Tombigbee, and the Chattahoochee
were stirred by the churning wheels, and over-their forests floated the
mournful sough of the high-pressure exhaust.
In 1840, a count kept at Cairo, showed 4566 vessels had passed that point
during the year. By 1848, a "banner" year, in the history of navigation on
the Mississippi, traffic was recorded thus:
25 vessels plying between Louisville, New Orleans and
Cincinnati 8,484 tons
7 between Nashville and New Orleans 2,585 tons
4 between Florence and New Orleans 1,617 tons
4 in St. Louis local trade 1,001 tons
7 in local cotton trade 2,016 tons
River "tramps" and unclassified 23,206 tons
It may be noted that in all the years of the development of the
Mississippi shipping, there was comparatively little increase in the size
of the individual boats. The "Vesuvius," built in 1814, was 480 tons
burthen, 160 feet long, 28.6 feet beam, and drew from five to six feet.
The biggest boats of later years were but little larger.
[Illustration: THE MISSISSIPPI PILOT]
The aristocrat of the Mississippi River steamboat was the pilot. To him
all men deferred. So far as the river service furnished a parallel to the
autocratic authority of the sea-going captain or master, he was it. All
matters pertaining to the navigation of the boat were in his domain, and
right zealously he guarded his authority and his dignity. The captain
might determine such trivial matters as hiring or discharging men, buying
fuel, or contracting for freight; the clerk might lord it over the
passengers, and the mate domineer over the black roustabouts; but the
pilot moved along in a sort of isolated grandeur, the true monarch of all
he surveyed. If, in his judgment the course of wisdom was to tie up to an
old sycamore tree on the bank and remain motionless all night, the boat
tied up. The grumblings of passengers and the disapproval of the captain
availed naught, nor did the captain often venture upon either criticism or
suggestion to the lordly pilot, who was prone to resent such invasion of
his dignity in ways that made trouble. Indeed, during the flush times on
the Mississippi, the pilots were a body of men possessing painfully
acquired knowledge and skill, and so organized as to protect all the
privileges which their attainments should win for them. The ability to
"run" the great river from St. Louis to New Orleans was not lightly won,
nor, for that matter, easily retained, for the Mississippi is ever a
fickle flood, with changing landmarks and shifting channel. In all the
great volume of literature bearing on the story of the river, the
difficulties of its conquest are nowhere so truly recounted as in Mark
Twain's _Life on the Mississippi_, the humorous quality of which does not
obscure, but rather enhances its value as a picturesque and truthful story
of the old-time pilot's life. The pilot began his work in boyhood as a
"cub" to a licensed pilot. His duties ranged from bringing refreshments up
to the pilot-house, to holding the wheel when some straight stretch or
clear, deep channel offered his master a chance to leave his post for a
few minutes. For strain on the memory, his education is comparable only to
the Chinese system of liberal culture, which comprehends learning by rote
some tens of thousands of verses from the works of Confucius and other
philosophers of the far East. Beginning at New Orleans, he had to commit
to memory the name and appearance of every point of land, inlet, river or
bayou mouth, "cut-off," light, plantation and hamlet on either bank of the
river all the way to St. Louis. Then, he had to learn them all in their
opposite order, quite an independent task, as all of us who learned the
multiplication table backward in the days of our youth, will readily
understand. These landmarks it was needful for him to recognize by day and
by night, through fog or driving rain, when the river was swollen by
spring floods, or shrunk in summer to a yellow ribbon meandering through a
Sahara of sand. He had need to recognize at a glance the ripple on the
water that told of a lurking sand-bar and distinguish it from the almost
identical ripple that a brisk breeze would raise. Most perplexing of the
perils that beset river navigation are the "snags," or sunken logs that
often obstruct the channel. Some towering oak or pine, growing in lusty
strength for its half-century or more by the brink of the upper reaches of
one of the Mississippi system would, in time, be undermined by the flood
and fall into the rushing tide. For weeks it would be rolled along the
shallows; its leaves and twigs rotting off, its smaller branches breaking
short, until at last, hundreds of miles, perhaps, below the scene of its
fall, it would lodge fair in the channel. The gnarled and matted mass of
boughs would ordinarily cling like an anchor to the sandy bottom, while
the buoyant trunk, as though struggling to break away, would strain upward
obliquely to within a few inches of the surface of the muddy water,
which--too thick to drink and too thin to plough, as the old saying
went--gave no hint of this concealed peril; but the boat running fairly
upon it, would have her bows stove in and go quickly to the bottom. After
the United States took control of the river and began spending its
millions annually in improving it for navigation and protecting the
surrounding country against its overflows, "snag-boats" were put on the
river, equipped with special machinery for dragging these fallen forest
giants from the channel, so that of late years accidents from this cause
have been rare. But for many years the riverman's chief reliance was that
curious instinct or second sight which enabled the trained pilot to pick
his way along the most tortuous channel in the densest fog, or to find the
landing of some obscure plantation on a night blacker than the blackest of
the roustabouts, who moved lively to the incessant cursing of the mate.
The Mississippi River steamboat of the golden age on the river--the type,
indeed, which still persists--was a triumph of adaptability to the service
for which she was designed. More than this--she was an egregious
architectural sham. She was a success in her light draught, six to eight
feet, at most, and in her prodigious carrying capacity. It was said of one
of these boats, when skilfully loaded by a gang of practical roustabouts,
under the direction of an experienced mate, that the freight she carried,
if unloaded on the bank, would make a pile bigger than the boat herself.
The hull of the vessel was invariably of wood, broad of beam, light of
draught, built "to run on a heavy dew," and with only the rudiments of a
keel. Some freight was stowed in the hold, but the engines were not placed
there, but on the main deck, built almost flush with the water, and
extending unbroken from stem to stern. Often the engines were in pairs, so
that the great paddle-wheels could be worked independently of each other.
The finest and fastest boats were side-wheelers, but a large wheel at the
stern, or two stern wheels, side by side, capable of independent action,
were common modes of propulsion. The escape-pipes of the engine were
carried high aloft, above the topmost of the tiers of decks, and from each
one alternately, when the boat was under way, would burst a gush of steam,
with a sound like a dull puff, followed by a prolonged sigh, which could
be heard far away beyond the dense forests that bordered the river. A row
of posts, always in appearance, too slender for the load they bore,
supported the saloon deck some fifteen feet above the main deck. When
business was good on the river, the space within was packed tight with
freight, leaving barely room enough for passenger gangways, and for the
men feeding the roaring furnaces with pine slabs. A great steamer coming
down to New Orleans from the cotton country about the Red River, loaded to
the water's edge with cotton bales, so that, from the shore, she looked
herself like a monster cotton bale, surmounted by tiers of snowy cabins
and pouring forth steam and smoke from towering pipes, was a sight long to
be remembered. It is a sight, too, that is still common on the lower
river, where the business of gathering up the planter's crop and getting
it to market has not yet passed wholly into the hands of the railroads.
[Illustration: A DECK LOAD OF COTTON]
Above the cargo and the roaring furnaces rose the cabins, two or three
tiers, one atop the other, the topmost one extending only about one-third
of the length of the boat, and called the "Texas." The main saloon
extending the whole length of the boat, save for a bit of open deck at bow
and stern, was in comparison with the average house of the time, palatial.
On either side it was lined by rows of doors, each opening into a
two-berthed stateroom. The decoration was usually ivory white, and on the
main panel of each door was an oil painting of some romantic landscape.
There Chillon brooded over the placid azure of the lake, there storms
broke with jagged lightning in the Andes, there buxom girls trod out the
purple grapes of some Italian vineyard. The builders of each new steamer
strove to eclipse all earlier ones in the brilliancy of these works of
art, and discussion of the relative merits of the paintings on the
"Natchez" and those on the "Baton Rouge" came to be the chief theme of art
criticism along the river. Bright crimson carpet usually covered the floor
of the long, tunnel-like cabin. Down the center were ranged the tables,
about which, thrice a day, the hungry passengers gathered to be fed, while
from the ceiling depended chandeliers, from which hung prismatic pendants,
tinkling pleasantly as the boat vibrated with the throb of her engines. At
one end of the main saloon was the ladies' cabin, discreetly cut off by
crimson curtains; at the other, the bar, which, in a period when copious
libations of alcoholic drinks were at least as customary for men as the
cigar to-day, was usually a rallying point for the male passengers.
Far up above the yellow river, perched on top of the "Texas," or topmost
tier of cabins, was the pilot-house, that honorable eminence of glass and
painted wood which it was the ambition of every boy along the river some
day to occupy. This was a great square box, walled in mainly with glass.
Square across the front of it rose the huge wheel, eight feet in diameter,
sometimes half-sunken beneath the floor, so that the pilot, in moments of
stress, might not only grip it with his hands, but stand on its spokes, as
well. Easy chairs and a long bench made up the furniture of this sacred
apartment. In front of it rose the two towering iron chimneys, joined,
near the top by an iron grating that usually carried some gaudily colored
or gilded device indicative of the line to which the boat belonged.
Amidships, and aft of the pilot-house, rose the two escape pipes, from
which the hoarse, prolonged s-o-o-ugh of the high pressure exhaust burst
at half-minute intervals, carrying to listeners miles away, the news that
a boat was coming.
All this edifice above the hull of the boat, was of the flimsiest
construction, built of pine scantling, liberally decorated with scroll-saw
work, and lavishly covered with paint mixed with linseed oil. Beneath it
were two, four, or six roaring furnaces fed with rich pitch-pine, and open
on every side to drafts and gusts. From the top of the great chimneys
poured volcanic showers of sparks, deluging the inflammable pile with a
fiery rain. The marvel is not that every year saw its quotum of steamers
burned to the water's edge, but, rather, that the quota were
proportionately so small.
At midnight this apparent inflammability was even more striking. Lights
shone from the windows of the long row of cabins, and wherever there was a
chink, or a bit of glass, or a latticed blind, the radiance streamed
forth as though within were a great mass of fire, struggling, in every
way, to escape. Below, the boiler deck was dully illumined by smoky
lanterns; but when one of the great doors of the roaring furnace was
thrown open, that the half-naked black firemen might throw in more
pitch-pine slabs, there shone forth such a fiery glare, that the boat and
the machinery--working in the open, and plain to view--seemed wrapped in a
Vesuvius of flame, and the sturdy stokers and lounging roustabouts looked
like the fiends in a fiery inferno. The danger was not merely apparent,
but very real. During the early days of steamboating, fires and boiler
explosions were of frequent occurrence. A river boat, once ablaze, could
never be saved, and the one hope for the passengers was that it might be
beached before the flames drove them overboard. The endeavor to do this
brought out some examples of magnificent heroism among captains, pilots,
and engineers, who, time and again, stood manfully at their posts, though
scorched by flames, and cut off from any hope of escape, until the boat's
prow was thrust well into the bank, and the passengers were all saved. The
pilots, in the presence of such disaster, were in the sorest straits, and
were, moreover, the ones of the boat's company upon whom most depended the
fate of those on board. Perched at the very top of a large tinder-box, all
avenues of escape except a direct plunge overboard were quickly closed to
them. If they left the wheel the current would inevitably swing the boat's
head downstream, and she would drift, aimlessly, a flaming funeral pyre
for all on board. Many a pilot stood, with clenched teeth, and eyes firm
set upon the distant shore, while the fire roared below and behind him,
and the terrified passengers edged further and further forward as the
flames pressed their way toward the bow, until at last came the grinding
sound under the hull, and the sudden shock that told of shoal water and
safety. Then, those on the lower deck might drop over the side, or swarm
along the windward gangplank to safety, but the pilot too often was hemmed
in by the flames, and perished with his vessel.
[Illustration: FEEDING THE FURNACE]
In the year 1840 alone there were 109 steamboat disasters chronicled, with
a loss of fifty-nine vessels and 205 lives. The high-pressure boilers used
on the river, cheaply built, and for many years not subjected to any
official inspection, contributed more than their share to the list of
accidents. Boiler explosions were so common as to be reckoned upon every
time a voyage was begun. Passengers were advised to secure staterooms aft
when possible, as the forward part of the boat was the more apt to be
shattered if the boiler "went up." Every river town had its citizens who
had survived an explosion, and the stock form into which to put the
humorous quip or story of the time was to have it told by the clerk going
up as he met the captain in the air coming down, with the débris of the
boat flying all about them. As the river boats improved in character,
disasters of this sort became less frequent, and the United States, by
establishing a rigid system of boiler inspection, and compelling engineers
to undergo a searching examination into their fitness before receiving a
license, has done much to guard against them. Yet to-day, we hear all too
frequently of river steamers blown to bits, and all on board lost, though
it is a form of disaster almost unknown on Eastern waters where crowded
steamboats ply the Sound, the Hudson, the Connecticut, and the Potomac,
year after year, with never a disaster. The cheaper material of Western
boats has something to do with this difference, but a certain
happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care spirit, which has characterized the Western
riverman since the days of the broadhorns, is chiefly responsible. Most
often an explosion is the result of gross carelessness--a sleepy engineer,
and a safety-valve "out of kilter," as too many of them often are, have
killed their hundreds on the Western rivers. Sometimes, however, the
almost criminal rashness, of which captains were guilty, in a mad rush for
a little cheap glory, ended in a deafening crash, the annihilation of a
good boat, and the death of scores of her people by drowning, or the awful
torture of inhaling scalding steam. Rivalry between the different boats
was fierce, and now and then at the sight of a competitor making for a
landing where freight and passengers awaited the first boat to land her
gangplank, the alert captain would not unnaturally take some risks to get
there first. Those were the moments that resulted in methods in the engine
room picturesquely described as "feeding the fires with fat bacon and
resin, and having a nigger sit on the safety valve." To such impromptu
races might be charged the most terrifying accidents in the history of the
river.
But the great races, extending sometimes for more than a thousand miles up
the river, and carefully planned for months in advance, were seldom, if
ever, marred by an accident. For then every man on both boats was on the
alert, from pilot down to fuel passer. The boat was trimmed by guidance of
a spirit level until she rode the water at precisely the draft that
assured the best speed. Her hull was scraped and oiled, her machinery
overhauled, and her fuel carefully selected. Picked men made up her crew,
and all the upper works that could be disposed of were landed before the
race, in order to decrease air resistance. It was the current pleasantry
to describe the captain as shaving off his whiskers lest they catch the
breeze, and parting his hair in the middle, that the boat might be the
better trimmed. Few passengers were taken, for they could not be relied
upon to "trim ship," but would be sure to crowd to one side or the other
at a critical moment. Only through freight was shipped--and little of
that--for there would be no stops made from starting-point to goal. Of
course, neither boat could carry all the fuel--pine-wood slabs--needed for
a long voyage, but by careful prearrangement, great "flats" loaded with
wood, awaited them at specified points in midstream. The steamers slowed
to half-speed, the flats were made fast alongside by cables, and nimble
negroes transferred the wood, while the race went on. At every riverside
town the wharves and roofs would be black with people, awaiting the two
rivals, whose appearance could be foretold almost as exactly as that of a
railway train running on schedule time. The firing of rifles and cannon,
the blowing of horns, the waving of flags, greeted the racers from the
shores by day, and great bonfires saluted them by night. At some of the
larger towns they would touch for a moment to throw off mail, or to let a
passenger leap ashore. Then every nerve of captain, pilot, and crew was on
edge with the effort to tie up and get away first. Up in the pilot-house
the great man of the wheel took shrewd advantage of every eddy and back
current; out on the guards the humblest roustabout stood ready for a
life-risking leap to get the hawser to the dock at the earliest instant.
All the operations of the boat had been reduced to an exact science, so
that when the crack packets were pitted against each other in a long race,
their maneuvers would be as exactly matched in point of time consumed as
those of two yachts sailing for the "America's" cup. Side by side, they
would steam for hundreds of miles, jockeying all the way for the most
favorable course. It was a fact that often such boats were so evenly
matched that victory would hang almost entirely on the skill of the pilot,
and where of two pilots on one boat one was markedly inferior, his watch
at the wheel could be detected by the way the rival boat forged ahead.
During the golden days on the river, there were many of these races, but
the most famous of them all was that between the "Robert E. Lee" and the
"Natchez," in 1870. These boats, the pride of all who lived along the
river at that time, raced from New Orleans to St. Louis. At Natchez, 268
miles, they were six minutes apart; at Cairo, 1024 miles, the "Lee" was
three hours and thirty-four minutes ahead. She came in winner by six hours
and thirty-six minutes, but the officers of the "Natchez" claimed that
this was not a fair test of the relative speed of the boats, as they had
been delayed by fog and for repairs to machinery for about seven hours.
Spectacular and picturesque was the riverside life of the great
Mississippi towns in the steamboat days. Mark Twain has described the
scenes along the levee at New Orleans at "steamboat time" in a bit of
word-painting, which brings all the rush and bustle, the confusion,
turmoil and din, clearly to the eye:
"It was always the custom for boats to leave New Orleans between four and
five o'clock in the afternoon. From three o'clock onward, they would be
burning resin and pitch-pine (the sign of preparation) and so one had the
spectacle of a rank, some two or three miles long, of tall, ascending
columns of coal-black smoke, a colonnade which supported a roof of the
same smoke, blending together and spreading abroad over the city. Every
outward-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack-staff, and sometimes a
duplicate on the verge-staff astern. Two or three miles of mates were
commanding and swearing with more than usual emphasis. Countless
processions of freight, barrels, and boxes, were spinning athwart the
levee, and flying aboard the stage-planks. Belated passengers were dodging
and skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle
companion-way alive, but having their doubts about it. Women with
reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with husbands freighted
with carpet sacks and crying babies, and making a failure of it by losing
their heads in the whirl and roar and general distraction. Drays and
baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry, every now
and then getting blocked and jammed together, and then, during ten
seconds, one could not see them for the profanity, except vaguely and
dimly. Every windlass connected with every forehatch from one end of that
long array of steamboats to the other, was keeping up a deafening whiz and
whir, lowering freight into the hold, and the half-naked crews of
perspiring negroes that worked them were roaring such songs as 'De las'
sack! De las' sack!!' inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos of
turmoil and racket that was driving everybody else mad. By this time the
hurricane and boiler decks of the packets would be packed and black with
passengers, the last bells would begin to clang all down the line, and
then the pow-wows seemed to double. In a moment or two the final warning
came, a simultaneous din of Chinese gongs with the cry, 'All dat aint
going, please to get ashore,' and, behold, the pow-wow quadrupled. People
came swarming ashore, overturning excited stragglers that were trying to
swarm aboard. One moment later, a long array of stage-planks was being
hauled in, each with its customary latest passenger clinging to the end of
it, with teeth, nails, and everything else, and the customary latest
procrastinator making a wild spring ashore over his head.
"Now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream, leaving wide
gaps in the serried rank of steamers. Citizens crowd on the decks of boats
that were not to go, in order to see the sight. Steamer after steamer
straightens herself up, gathers all her strength, and presently comes
swinging by, under a tremendous head of steam, with flags flying, smoke
rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deck hands (usually swarthy
negroes) massed together on the forecastle, the best voice in the lot
towering in their midst (being mounted on the capstan) waving his hat or a
flag, all roaring in a mighty chorus, while the parting cannons boom, and
the multitudinous spectators swing their hats and huzza. Steamer after
steamer pulls into the line, and the stately procession goes winging its
flight up the river."
Until 1865 the steamboats controlled the transportation business of all
the territory drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries. But two
causes for their undoing had already begun to work. The long and
fiercely-fought war had put a serious check to the navigation of the
rivers. For long months the Mississippi was barricaded by the Confederate
works at Island Number 10, at New Madrid and at Vicksburg. Even after
Grant and Farragut had burst these shackles navigation was attended with
danger from guerrillas on the banks and trade was dead. When peace brought
the promise of better things, the railroads were there to take advantage
of it. From every side they were pushing their way into New Orleans,
building roadways across the "trembling prairies," and crossing the
water-logged country about the Rigolets on long trestles. They penetrated
the cotton country and the mineral country. They paralleled the Ohio, the
Tennessee, and the Cumberland, as well as the Father of Waters, and the
steamboat lines began to feel the heavy hand of competition. Captains and
clerks found it prudent to abate something of their dignity. Instead of
shippers pleading for deck-room on the boats, the boats' agents had to do
the pleading. Instead of levees crowded with freight awaiting carriage
there were broad, empty spaces by the river's bank, while the railroad
freight-houses up town held the bales of cotton, the bundles of staves,
the hogsheads of sugar, the shingles and lumber. On long hauls the
railroads quickly secured all the North and South business, though indeed,
the hauling of freight down the river for shipment to Europe was ended for
both railroads and steamboats, so far as the products raised north of the
Tennessee line was concerned. For a new water route to the sea had been
opened and wondrously developed. The Great Lakes were the shortest
waterway to the Atlantic, and New York dug its Erie Canal which afforded
an outlet--pinched and straitened, it is true, but still an outlet--for
the cargoes of the lake schooners and the early steamers of the unsalted
seas. Even the commonwealths forming the north bank of the Ohio River
turned their faces away from the stream that had started them on the
pathway to wealth and greatness, and dug canals to Lake Erie, that their
wheat, corn, and other products might reach tidewater by the shortest
route. The great cargoes from Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Louisville, began
to be legends of the past, and the larger boats were put on routes in
Louisiana, or on the Mississippi, from Natchez south, while others were
reduced to mere local voyages, gathering up freight from points tributary
to St. Louis. The glory of the river faded fast, and the final stroke was
dealt it when some man of inventive mind discovered that a little, puffing
tug, costing one-tenth as much as a fine steamboat, could push broad acres
of flatboats, loaded with coal, lumber, or cotton, down the tortuous
stream, and return alone at one-tenth the expense of a heavy steamer. That
was the final stroke to the picturesqueness and the romance of river life.
The volume of freight carried still grows apace, but the glory of
Mississippi steamboat life is gone forever.
**Transcriber's Note: Page 268: change infreqently to infrequently