Life On The Mississippi, Complete

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Life On The Mississippi, Complete


'Twenty or twenty-five years ago, one of the feud families caught a
young man of nineteen out and killed him. Don't remember whether it was
the Darnells and Watsons, or one of the other feuds; but anyway, this
young man rode up--steamboat laying there at the time--and the first
thing he saw was a whole gang of the enemy. He jumped down behind a
wood-pile, but they rode around and begun on him, he firing back, and
they galloping and cavorting and yelling and banging away with all their
might. Think he wounded a couple of them; but they closed in on him
and chased him into the river; and as he swum along down stream, they
followed along the bank and kept on shooting at him; and when he struck
shore he was dead. Windy Marshall told me about it. He saw it. He was
captain of the boat.

'Years ago, the Darnells was so thinned out that the old man and his two
sons concluded they'd leave the country. They started to take steamboat
just above No. 10; but the Watsons got wind of it; and they arrived just
as the two young Darnells was walking up the companion-way with their
wives on their arms. The fight begun then, and they never got no
further--both of them killed. After that, old Darnell got into trouble
with the man that run the ferry, and the ferry-man got the worst
of it--and died. But his friends shot old Darnell through and
through--filled him full of bullets, and ended him.'

The country gentleman who told me these things had been reared in ease
and comfort, was a man of good parts, and was college bred. His loose
grammar was the fruit of careless habit, not ignorance. This habit
among educated men in the West is not universal, but it is
prevalent--prevalent in the towns, certainly, if not in the cities; and
to a degree which one cannot help noticing, and marveling at. I heard a
Westerner who would be accounted a highly educated man in any country,
say 'never mind, it DON'T MAKE NO DIFFERENCE, anyway.' A life-long
resident who was present heard it, but it made no impression upon her.
She was able to recall the fact afterward, when reminded of it; but
she confessed that the words had not grated upon her ear at the
time--a confession which suggests that if educated people can hear such
blasphemous grammar, from such a source, and be unconscious of the deed,
the crime must be tolerably common--so common that the general ear has
become dulled by familiarity with it, and is no longer alert, no longer
sensitive to such affronts.

No one in the world speaks blemishless grammar; no one has ever written
it--NO one, either in the world or out of it (taking the Scriptures for
evidence on the latter point); therefore it would not be fair to exact
grammatical perfection from the peoples of the Valley; but they and
all other peoples may justly be required to refrain from KNOWINGLY and
PURPOSELY debauching their grammar.

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

In this region the river passes from Kentucky into Tennessee, back into
Missouri, then back into Kentucky, and thence into Tennessee again. So a
mile or two of Missouri sticks over into Tennessee.

The town of New Madrid was looking very unwell; but otherwise unchanged
from its former condition and aspect. Its blocks of frame-houses were
still grouped in the same old flat plain, and environed by the same
old forests. It was as tranquil as formerly, and apparently had neither
grown nor diminished in size. It was said that the recent high water had
invaded it and damaged its looks. This was surprising news; for in low
water the river bank is very high there (fifty feet), and in my day an
overflow had always been considered an impossibility. This present flood
of 1882 Will doubtless be celebrated in the river's history for several
generations before a deluge of like magnitude shall be seen. It put all
the unprotected low lands under water, from Cairo to the mouth; it broke
down the levees in a great many places, on both sides of the river;
and in some regions south, when the flood was at its highest, the
Mississippi was SEVENTY MILES wide! a number of lives were lost, and the
destruction of property was fearful. The crops were destroyed, houses
washed away, and shelterless men and cattle forced to take refuge on
scattering elevations here and there in field and forest, and wait in
peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national
and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue
them. The properties of multitudes of people were under water for
months, and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor
had not been promptly afforded.{footnote [For a detailed and interesting
description of the great flood, written on board of the New Orleans
TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S relief-boat, see Appendix A]} The water had been
falling during a considerable time now, yet as a rule we found the banks
still under water.




Chapter 27 Some Imported Articles

WE met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sight at once! an
infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi. The loneliness
of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive--and depressing. League
after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide
along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores,
with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface
and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day
goes, the night comes, and again the day--and still the same, night
after night and day after day--majestic, unchanging sameness of
serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy--symbol of eternity,
realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for
by the good and thoughtless!

Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to come to America,
from England; scattering ones at first, then a sort of procession of
them--a procession which kept up its plodding, patient march through the
land during many, many years. Each tourist took notes, and went home and
published a book--a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable,
kind; but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed
progenitors. A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain
of its aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those
strangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then. The
emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects were not
all formed on one pattern, of course; they HAD to be various, along
at first, because the earlier tourists were obliged to originate their
emotions, whereas in older countries one can always borrow emotions
from one's predecessors. And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest
things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier
to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. Captain Basil Hall. R.N.,
writing fifty-five years ago, says--


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


Following are Mrs. Trollope's emotions. She is writing a few months
later in the same year, 1827, and is coming in at the mouth of the
Mississippi--


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


Emotions of Hon. Charles Augustus Murray (near St. Louis), seven years
later--


'It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a hundred
miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature,
that you begin to understand all his might and majesty. You see him
fertilizing a boundless valley, bearing along in his course the trophies
of his thousand victories over the shattered forest--here carrying away
large masses of soil with all their growth, and there forming islands,
destined at some future period to be the residence of man; and while
indulging in this prospect, it is then time for reflection to suggest
that the current before you has flowed through two or three thousand
miles, and has yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before
reaching its ocean destination.'


Receive, now, the emotions of Captain Marryat, R.N. author of the sea
tales, writing in 1837, three years after Mr. Murray--


'Never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a
century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected
from the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi. The
stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been
committed. It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight, bestowing
fertility in its course; not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as
it sweeps along, nor can you wander upon its banks, or trust yourself
without danger to its stream. It is a furious, rapid, desolating
torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few of those who are received
into its waters ever rise again, {footnote [There was a foolish
superstition of some little prevalence in that day, that the Mississippi
would neither buoy up a swimmer, nor permit a drowned person's body to
rise to the surface.]} or can support themselves long upon its surface
without assistance from some friendly log. It contains the coarsest and
most uneatable of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and as
you descend, its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the
panther basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man.
Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered with trees of
little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole forests in its
course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the
stream now loaded with the masses of soil which nourished their roots,
often blocking up and changing for a time the channel of the river,
which, as if in anger at its being opposed, inundates and devastates the
whole country round; and as soon as it forces its way through its former
channel, plants in every direction the uprooted monarchs of the forest
(upon whose branches the bird will never again perch, or the raccoon,
the opossum, or the squirrel climb) as traps to the adventurous
navigators of its waters by steam, who, borne down upon these concealed
dangers which pierce through the planks, very often have not time to
steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the bottom. There are
no pleasing associations connected with the great common sewer of
the Western America, which pours out its mud into the Mexican Gulf,
polluting the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth. It is a
river of desolation; and instead of reminding you, like other beautiful
rivers, of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you
imagine it a devil, whose energies have been only overcome by the
wonderful power of steam.'


It is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to handling a pen;
still, as a panorama of the emotions sent weltering through this noted
visitor's breast by the aspect and traditions of the 'great common
sewer,' it has a value. A value, though marred in the matter of
statistics by inaccuracies; for the catfish is a plenty good enough fish
for anybody, and there are no panthers that are 'impervious to man.'


Later still comes Alexander Mackay, of the Middle Temple, Barrister at
Law, with a better digestion, and no catfish dinner aboard, and feels as
follows--


'The Mississippi! It was with indescribable emotions that I first felt
myself afloat upon its waters. How often in my schoolboy dreams, and in
my waking visions afterwards, had my imagination pictured to itself the
lordly stream, rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless
region to which it has given its name, and gathering into itself, in its
course to the ocean, the tributary waters of almost every latitude in
the temperate zone! Here it was then in its reality, and I, at length,
steaming against its tide. I looked upon it with that reverence with
which everyone must regard a great feature of external nature.'


So much for the emotions. The tourists, one and all, remark upon the
deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river. Captain
Basil Hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says--


'Sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without
seeing a single habitation. An artist, in search of hints for a painting
of the deluge, would here have found them in abundance.'


The first shall be last, etc. just two hundred years ago, the old
original first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists, pioneer, head
of the procession, ended his weary and tedious discovery-voyage down the
solemn stretches of the great river--La Salle, whose name will last as
long as the river itself shall last. We quote from Mr. Parkman--


'And now they neared their journey's end. On the sixth of April, the
river divided itself into three broad channels. La Salle followed that
of the west, and D'Autray that of the east; while Tonty took the middle
passage. As he drifted down the turbid current, between the low and
marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew
fresh with the salt breath of the sea. Then the broad bosom of the
great Gulf opened on his sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless,
voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign
of life.'


Then, on a spot of solid ground, La Salle reared a column 'bearing the
arms of France; the Frenchmen were mustered under arms; and while the
New England Indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence,
they chanted the TE DEUM, THE EXAUDIAT, and the DOMINE SALVUM FAC
REGEM.'

Then, whilst the musketry volleyed and rejoicing shouts burst forth,
the victorious discoverer planted the column, and made proclamation in a
loud voice, taking formal possession of the river and the vast
countries watered by it, in the name of the King. The column bore this
inscription--


LOUIS LE GRAND, ROY DE FRANCE ET DE NAVARRE, REGNE; LE NEUVIEME AVRIL,
1682.


New Orleans intended to fittingly celebrate, this present year, the
bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event; but when the
time came, all her energies and surplus money were required in other
directions, for the flood was upon the land then, making havoc and
devastation everywhere.




Chapter 28 Uncle Mumford Unloads

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

Noted a big change in the river, at Island 21. It was a very large
island, and used to be out toward mid-stream; but it is joined fast to
the main shore now, and has retired from business as an island.

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

But this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large
extent. It, and some other things together, have knocked all the romance
out of it. For instance, the peril from snags is not now what it once
was. The government's snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these
matter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted out
all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and they
allow no new ones to collect. Formerly, if your boat got away from you,
on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an anxious time with
you; so was it also, when you were groping your way through solidified
darkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash out
your electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an
eye, and your perils and anxieties are at an end. Horace Bixby and
George Ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses
by compass; they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and have
patented the whole. With these helps, one may run in the fog now, with
considerable security, and with a confidence unknown in the old days.

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

And now in these new days, these days of infinite change, the Anchor
Line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger
wages of the two. This was going far, but they have not stopped there.
They have decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post, and stand
his watch clear through, whether the boat be under way or tied up to the
shore. We, that were once the aristocrats of the river, can't go to bed
now, as we used to do, and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are
lugged aboard; no, we must sit in the pilot-house; and keep awake, too.
Verily we are being treated like a parcel of mates and engineers. The
Government has taken away the romance of our calling; the Company has
taken away its state and dignity.

Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with the exception
that now there were beacons to mark the crossings, and also a lot of
other lights on the Point and along its shore; these latter glinting
from the fleet of the United States River Commission, and from a village
which the officials have built on the land for offices and for the
employees of the service. The military engineers of the Commission have
taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again
--a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it.
They are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current; and
dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make it stay
there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi, they are felling
the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the purpose of shaving
the bank down to low-water mark with the slant of a house roof, and
ballasting it with stones; and in many places they have protected the
wasting shores with rows of piles. One who knows the Mississippi will
promptly aver--not aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River
Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that
lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go
here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has
sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not
tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put
these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not
their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their
abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and
handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific
man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads,
with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which
seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to
prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and
say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and
undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into
right and reasonable conduct.

I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters; and I
give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore to be
relied on as being full and correct; except that I have here and there
left out remarks which were addressed to the men, such as 'where in
blazes are you going with that barrel now?' and which seemed to me to
break the flow of the written statement, without compensating by adding
to its information or its clearness. Not that I have ventured to
strike out all such interjections; I have removed only those which were
obviously irrelevant; wherever one occurred which I felt any question
about, I have judged it safest to let it remain.


UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONS


Uncle Mumford said--

'As long as I have been mate of a steamboat--thirty years--I have
watched this river and studied it. Maybe I could have learnt more about
it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be WHAT ARE YOU
SUCKING YOUR FINGERS THERE FOR ?--COLLAR THAT KAG OF NAILS! Four years
at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a
good deal, I reckon, but it won't learn him the river. You turn one
of those little European rivers over to this Commission, with its hard
bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday job for them to
wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it down, and boss it around,
and make it go wherever they wanted it to, and stay where they put it,
and do just as they said, every time. But this ain't that kind of a
river. They have started in here with big confidence, and the best
intentions in the world; but they are going to get left. What does
Ecclesiastes vii. 13 say? Says enough to knock THEIR little game
galley-west, don't it? Now you look at their methods once. There at
Devil's Island, in the Upper River, they wanted the water to go one way,
the water wanted to go another. So they put up a stone wall. But what
does the river care for a stone wall? When it got ready, it just bulged
through it. Maybe they can build another that will stay; that is, up
there--but not down here they can't. Down here in the Lower River, they
drive some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from
slicing off the bank; very well, don't it go straight over and cut
somebody else's bank? Certainly. Are they going to peg all the banks?
Why, they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper. They are
pegging Bulletin Tow-head now. It won't do any good. If the river has
got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose, sure, pegs or no pegs.
Away down yonder, they have driven two rows of piles straight through
the middle of a dry bar half a mile long, which is forty foot out of the
water when the river is low. What do you reckon that is for? If I know,
I wish I may land in-HUMP YOURSELF, YOU SON OF AN UNDERTAKER!--OUT
WITH THAT COAL-OIL, NOW, LIVELY, LIVELY! And just look at what they are
trying to do down there at Milliken's Bend. There's been a cut-off in
that section, and Vicksburg is left out in the cold. It's a country town
now. The river strikes in below it; and a boat can't go up to the town
except in high water. Well, they are going to build wing-dams in the
bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cut off the
foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where the river
used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade the water
around that way, and get it to strike in above Vicksburg, as it used
to do, and fetch the town back into the world again. That is, they are
going to take this whole Mississippi, and twist it around and make it
run several miles UP STREAM. Well you've got to admire men that deal in
ideas of that size and can tote them around without crutches; but you
haven't got to believe they can DO such miracles, have you! And yet you
ain't absolutely obliged to believe they can't. I reckon the safe way,
where a man can afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the same
time buy enough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they win.
Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now--spending loads of
money on her. When there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten
thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows, there wasn't
a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags were thicker than
bristles on a hog's back; and now when there's three dozen steamboats
and nary barge or raft, Government has snatched out all the snags, and
lit up the shores like Broadway, and a boat's as safe on the river as
she'd be in heaven. And I reckon that by the time there ain't any boats
left at all, the Commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and
dredged out, and fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make
navigation just simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and
all the days will be Sundays, and all the mates will be Sunday-school
su-WHAT-IN-THE-NATION-YOU-FOOLING-AROUND-THERE-FOR, YOU SONS OF
UNRIGHTEOUSNESS, HEIRS OF PERDITION! GOING TO BE A YEAR GETTING THAT
HOGSHEAD ASHORE?'