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 mouthof the Obion River. The spy-glass revealed the fact that shewas named for me--or HE was named for me, whichever you prefer.
As this was the first time I had ever encountered this speciesof honor, it seems excusable to mention it, and at the same timecall the attention of the authorities to the tardiness of myrecognition 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 mainshore 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 modem times.
For now the national government has turned the Mississippiinto a sort of two-thousand-mile torchlight procession.
In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of everycrossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp.
You are never entirely in the dark, now; there is always a beaconin 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 shoalwhen they were created, and have never been shoal since;crossings so plain, too, and also so straight, that a steamboatcan take herself through them without any help, after she has beenthrough once. Lamps in such places are of course not wasted;it is much more convenient and comfortable for a pilot to holdon them than on a spread of formless blackness that won'tstay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same time,for she can of course make more miles with her rudderamidships than she can with it squared across her stern andholding 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 thesematter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted outall the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and theyallow 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 solidifieddarkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash outyour electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye,and your perils and anxieties are at an end. Horace Bixby and GeorgeRitchie 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 ofdaylight in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed,and a chart and compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a goodstage 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 AnchorLine have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the biggerwages 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 hiswatch 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 arelugged 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 hastaken away its state and dignity.
Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with theexception 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 StatesRiver Commission, and from a village which the officials have builton the land for offices and for the employes of the service.
The military engineers of the Commission have taken upontheir 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 makeit 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 markwith the slant of a house roof, and ballasting it with stones;and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with rowsof 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 thatlawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it,Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shorewhich it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstructionwhich 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 handcuffthat river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific manto keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads,with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippiwhich seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidencenow to prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one wouldpipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the cometsin their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bullythe Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.
I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters;and I give here the result, stenographically reported, and thereforeto be relied on as being full and correct; except that I havehere 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 havejudged it safest to let it remain.
UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONSUncle 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 learntmore about it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be WHATARE YOU SUCKING YOUR FINGERS THERE FOR ?--COLLAR THAT KAG OF NAILS!
Four years at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learna 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 holidayjob 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 herewith 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 wantedto go another. So they put up a stone wall. But what does the rivercare 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 drivesome pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from slicingoff the bank; very well, don't it go straight over and cut somebodyelse'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 rowsof 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 landin-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 downthere 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 townexcept in high water. Well, they are going to build wing-dams inthe bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cutoff the foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch wherethe river used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuadethe 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 cantote them around without crutches; but you haven't got to believethey can DO such miracles, have you! And yet you ain't absolutelyobliged to believe they can't. I reckon the safe way, where a mancan afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the same time buyenough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they win.
Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now--spending loadsof money on her. When there used to be four thousand steamboatsand ten thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows,there wasn't a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snagswere thicker than bristles on a hog's back; and now when there'sthree dozen steamboats and nary barge or raft, Government hassnatched 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 navigationjust simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and allthe days will be Sundays, and all the mates will be Sunday-schoolsu-WHAT-IN-THE-NATION-YOU-FOOLING-AROUND-THERE-FOR, YOU SONSOF UNRIGHTEOUSNESS, HEIRS OF PERDITION ! GOING TO BE A YEAR GETTING THATHOGSHEAD ASHORE ?'
During our trip to New Orleans and back, we had many conversations withriver men, planters, journalists, and officers of the River Commission--with conflicting and confusing results. To wit:-1. Some believed in the Commission's scheme to arbitrarilyand permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel,preserve threatened shores, etc.
2. Some believed that the Commission's money ought to be spentonly on building and repairing the great system of levees.
3. Some believed that the higher you build your levee,the higher the river's bottom will rise; and that consequentlythe levee system is a mistake.
4. Some believed in the scheme to relieve the river, in flood-time,by turning its surplus waters off into Lake Borgne, etc.
5. Some believed in the scheme of northern lake-reservoirs to replenishthe Mississippi in low-water seasons.
Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of thesetheories you may turn to the next man and frame your talk uponthe hypothesis that he does not believe in that theory; and afteryou have had experience, you do not take this course doubtfully,or hesitatingly, but with the confidence of a dying murderer--converted one, I mean. For you will have come to know, with a deepand restful certainty, that you are not going to meet two peoplesick of the same theory, one right after the other. No, there willalways be one or two with the other diseases along between.
And as you proceed, you will find out one or two other things.
You will find out that there is no distemper of the lot butis contagious; and you cannot go where it is without catching it.
You may vaccinate yourself with deterrent facts as much as you please--it will do no good; it will seem to 'take,' but it doesn't;the moment you rub against any one of those theorists, make upyour mind that it is time to hang out your yellow flag.
Yes, you are his sure victim: yet his work is not all to your hurt--only part of it; for he is like your family physician, who comesand cures the mumps, and leaves the scarlet-fever behind.
If your man is a Lake-Borgne-relief theorist, for instance,he will exhale a cloud of deadly facts and statistics which will layyou out with that disease, sure; but at the same time he will cureyou of any other of the five theories that may have previously gotinto your system.
I have had all the five; and had them 'bad;' but ask me not,in mournful numbers, which one racked me hardest, or whichone numbered the biggest sick list, for I do not know.
In truth, no one can answer the latter question.
Mississippi Improvement is a mighty topic, down yonder.
Every man on the river banks, south of Cairo, talks about itevery day, during such moments as he is able to spare fromtalking about the war; and each of the several chief theorieshas its host of zealous partisans; but, as I have said,it is not possible to determine which cause numbersthe most recruits.
All were agreed upon one point, however: if Congress would makea sufficient appropriation, a colossal benefit would result.
Very well; since then the appropriation has been made--possibly a sufficient one, certainly not too large a one.
Let us hope that the prophecy will be amply fulfilled.
One thing will be easily granted by the reader; that an opinion fromMr. Edward Atkinson, upon any vast national commercial matter, comes as nearranking as authority, as can the opinion of any individual in the union.
What he has to say about Mississippi River Improvement will be foundin the Appendix.
Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lightning-flash,the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words,with the same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain.
Here is a case of the sort--paragraph from the 'Cincinnati Commercial'-'The towboat "Jos. B. Williams" is on her way to New Orleans witha tow of thirty-two barges, containing six hundred thousand bushels(seventy-six pounds to the bushel) of coal exclusive of her own fuel,being the largest tow ever taken to New Orleans or anywhere elsein the world. Her freight bill, at 3 cents a bushel, amounts to$18,000. It would take eighteen hundred cars, of three hundred andthirty-three bushels to the car, to transport this amount of coal.
At $10 per ton, or $100 per car, which would be a fair price forthe distance by rail, the freight bill would amount to $180,000,or $162,000 more by rail than by river. The tow will be takenfrom Pittsburg to New Orleans in fourteen or fifteen days.
It would take one hundred trains of eighteen cars to the trainto transport this one tow of six hundred thousand bushels of coal,and even if it made the usual speed of fast freight lines, it wouldtake one whole summer to put it through by rail.'
When a river in good condition can enable one to save $162,000 and a wholesummer's time, on a single cargo, the wisdom of taking measures to keepthe river in good condition is made plain to even the uncommercial mind.
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