Read Life on The Mississippi Online
Authors: Mark Twain
Life on The Mississippi (28 page)
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
.”
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 XXVIII
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 onboard; 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 spyglass 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.
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 lie out toward midstream; 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 pilothouse; 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.
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 learned 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 of 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 7:13 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 Towhead 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 cutoff 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 wingdams 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
upstream
. 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?
”
are you sucking your fingers there for? Collar that kag of nails!
Four years of 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 7:13 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 Towhead 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 cutoff 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 wingdams 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
upstream
. 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?
”
During our trip to New Orleans and back, we had many conversations with river 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 arbitrarily and permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel, preserve threatened shores, etc.
2. Some believed that the Commission’s money ought to be spent only 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 consequently the 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 replenish the Mississippi in low-water seasons.
Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these theories you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon the hypothesis that he does
not
believe in that theory; and after you 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 deep and restful certainty, that you are not going to meet two people sick of the same theory, one right after the other. No, there will always 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 but is 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 up your mind that it is time to hang out your yellow flag.
not
believe in that theory; and after you 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 deep and restful certainty, that you are not going to meet two people sick of the same theory, one right after the other. No, there will always 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 but is 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 up your mind that it is time to hang out your yellow flag.
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