From 'Life on the Mississippi': copyright 1883, by James R.
Osgood and Company
During this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance.
We were running chute after chute,--a new world to me,--and if there was
a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet
a broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a
still worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water.
And then there would be no end of profane cordialities exchanged.
Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way cautiously
along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly be broken by yells
and a clamor of tin pans, and all in an instant a log raft would appear
vaguely through the webby veil, close upon us; and then we did not wait
to swap knives, but snatched our engine bells out by the roots and piled
on all the steam we had, to scramble out of the way! One doesn't hit a
rock or a solid log raft with a steamboat when he can get excused.
You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always carried a
large assortment of religious tracts with them in those old departed
steamboating days. Indeed they did. Twenty times a day we would be
cramping up around a bar, while a string of these small-fry rascals were
drifting down into the head of the bend away above and beyond us a
couple of miles. Now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come
fighting its laborious way across the desert of water. It would "ease
all," in the shadow of our forecastle, and the panting oarsmen would
shout, "Gimme a pa-a-per!" as the skiff drifted swiftly astern. The
clerk would throw over a file of New Orleans journals. If these were
picked up _without comment_, you might notice that now a dozen other
skiffs had been drifting down upon us without saying anything. You
understand, they had been waiting to see how No. 1 was going to fare.
No. 1 making no comment, all the rest would bend to their oars and come
on now; and as fast as they came the clerk would heave over neat bundles
of religious tracts, tied to shingles. The amount of hard swearing which
twelve packages of religious literature will command when impartially
divided up among twelve raftsmen's crews, who have pulled a heavy skiff
two miles on a hot day to get them, is simply incredible.
As I have said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the
time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were
hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before;
we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend,
which I had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through
chutes like that of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken
wall of timber till our nose was almost at the very spot. Some of these
chutes were utter solitudes. The dense untouched forest over-hung both
banks of the crooked little crack, and one could believe that human
creatures had never intruded there before. The swinging grapevines, the
grassy nooks and vistas, glimpsed as we swept by, the flowering
creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks, and all
the spendthrift richness of the forest foliage, were wasted and thrown
away there. The chutes were lovely places to steer in; they were deep,
except at the head; the current was gentle; under the "points" the water
was absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that where the
tender willow thickets projected you could bury your boat's broadside in
them as you tore along, and then you seemed fairly to fly.
Behind other islands we found wretched little farms and wretcheder
little log cabins; there were crazy rail fences sticking a foot or two
above the water, with one or two jeans-clad, chills-racked, yellow-faced
male miserables roosting on the top rail, elbows on knees, jaws in
hands, grinding tobacco and discharging the result at floating chips
through crevices left by lost teeth; while the rest of the family and
the few farm animals were huddled together in an empty wood flat riding
at her moorings close at hand. In this flatboat the family would have to
cook and eat and sleep for a lesser or greater number of days (or
possibly weeks), until the river should fall two or three feet and let
them get back to their log cabin and their chills again--chills being a
merciful provision of an all-wise Providence to enable them to take
exercise without exertion. And this sort of watery camping out was a
thing which these people were rather liable to be treated to a couple of
times a year: by the December rise out of the Ohio, and the June rise
out of the Mississippi. And yet these were kindly dispensations, for
they at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead now and
then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by. They appreciated the
blessing too, for they spread their mouths and eyes wide open and made
the most of these occasions. Now what _could_ these banished creatures
find to do to keep from dying of the blues during the low-water season!
Once in one of these lovely island chutes we found our course completely
bridged by a great fallen tree. This will serve to show how narrow some
of the chutes were. The passengers had an hour's recreation in a virgin
wilderness while the boat hands chopped the bridge away; for there was
no such thing as turning back, you comprehend.
From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have no
particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense
forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm
or wood-yard opening at intervals, and so you can't "get out of the
river" much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from
Baton Rouge to New Orleans it is a different matter. The river is more
than a mile wide, and very deep--as much as two hundred feet, in places.
Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their
timber and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and
there a scattering sapling or row of ornamental China-trees. The timber
is shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four
miles. When the first frost threatens to come, the planters snatch off
their crops in a hurry. When they have finished grinding the cane, they
form the refuse of the stalks (which they call _bagasse_) into great
piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar countries the bagasse
is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar-mills. Now the piles of
damp bagasse burn slowly, and smoke like Satan's own kitchen.
An embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the
Mississippi all the way down that lower end of the river, and this
embankment is set back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a
hundred feet, according to circumstances; say thirty or forty feet as a
general thing. Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of
smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is
over the banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at midnight and
see how she will feel. And see how you will feel too! You find yourself
away out in the midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades
out and loses itself in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the
thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see a
straggling tree when you don't. The plantations themselves are
transformed by the smoke and look like a part of the sea. All through
your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery of uncertainty.
You hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know. All that you
are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank
_and_ destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore.
And you are sure also that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against
the embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the
small comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do.
One of the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation
one night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week. But there was
no novelty about it: it had often been done before.
I thought I had finished this chapter, but I wish to add a curious thing
while it is in my mind. It is only relevant in that it is connected with
piloting. There used to be an excellent pilot on the river, a Mr. X.,
who was a somnambulist. It was said that if his mind was troubled about
a bad piece of river, he was pretty sure to get up and walk in his sleep
and do strange things. He was once fellow pilot for a trip or two with
George Ealer, on a great New Orleans passenger packet. During a
considerable part of the first trip George was uneasy, but got over it
by-and-by, as X. seemed content to stay in his bed when asleep. Late one
night the boat was approaching Helena, Arkansas; the water was low, and
the crossing above the town in a very blind and tangled condition. X.
had seen the crossing since Ealer had, and as the night was particularly
drizzly, sullen, and dark, Ealer was considering whether he had not
better have X. called to assist in running the place, when the door
opened and X. walked in. Now on very dark nights, light is a deadly
enemy to piloting; you are aware that if you stand in a lighted room on
such a night, you cannot see things in the street to any purpose; but if
you put out the lights and stand in the gloom you can make out objects
in the street pretty well. So on very dark nights pilots do not smoke;
they allow no fire in the pilot-house stove if there is a crack which
can allow the least ray to escape; they order the furnaces to be
curtained with huge tarpaulins and the skylights to be closely blinded.
Then no light whatever issues from the boat. The undefinable shape that
now entered the pilot-house had Mr. X.'s voice. This said:--
"Let me take her, George; I've seen this place since you have, and it is
so crooked that I reckon I can run it myself easier than I could tell
you how to do it."
"It is kind of you, and I swear _I_ am willing. I haven't got another
drop of perspiration left in me. I have been spinning around and around
the wheel like a squirrel. It is so dark I can't tell which way she is
swinging till she is coming around like a whirligig."
So Ealer took a seat on the bench, panting and breathless. The black
phantom assumed the wheel without saying anything, steadied the
waltzing steamer with a turn or two, and then stood at ease, coaxing her
a little to this side and then to that, as gently and as sweetly as if
the time had been noonday. When Ealer observed this marvel of steering,
he wished he had not confessed! He stared and wondered, and finally
said:--
"Well, I thought I knew how to steer a steamboat, but that was another
mistake of mine."
X. said nothing, but went serenely on with his work. He rang for the
leads; he rang to slow down the steam; he worked the boat carefully and
neatly into invisible marks, then stood at the centre of the wheel and
peered blandly out into the blackness, fore and aft, to verify his
position; as the leads shoaled more and more, he stopped the engines
entirely, and the dead silence and suspense of "drifting" followed; when
the shoalest water was struck, he cracked on the steam, carried her
handsomely over, and then began to work her warily into the next system
of shoal marks; the same patient, heedful use of leads and engines
followed, the boat slipped through without touching bottom, and entered
upon the third and last intricacy of the crossing; imperceptibly she
moved through the gloom, crept by inches into her marks, drifted
tediously till the shoalest water was cried, and then, under a
tremendous head of steam, went swinging over the reef and away into deep
water and safety!
Ealer let his long-pent breath pour out in a great relieving sigh, and
said:--
"That's the sweetest piece of piloting that was ever done on the
Mississippi River! I wouldn't believed it could be done, if I hadn't
seen it."