River-Horse: A Voyage Across America (27 page)

People revere Ste. Genevieve as they do a Queen Mum—for her dignity, quaintness, and for having seen so damn much history. Yet in her early days of frontier hardship, residents of rival Kaskaskia, “the little Paris of the Wilderness” now gone downriver, called her Misère (“misery” or “poverty” or “shabbiness”; St. Louis was then popularly Pancour, “short of bread”). We took lodging in the attic of the Main Street Inn, an excellent antebellum house. Our hosts invited us onto the garden porch for wine, popcorn, and conversation. Pilotis, relaxing in the late sun, said, “When this little ol excursion trip isn’t beating our brains out, it gives us one sweet and grand tour.” And the Piper said, “On the river, it’s like there’s no Mondays—every day feels like Saturday.” I said, Except for those Saturdays that feel like a week of Mondays.

T
HE MISSISSIPPI
at Ste. Genevieve was ten feet above flood stage and still rising, and we’d heard that the Missouri, only seventy-five miles away, would crest about the time we reached it, a concern because the Corps of Engineers might “shut down the river”—not its flow but navigation on it. I’d become confident
Nikawa
could handle the flood, but would the necessity of catching the spring rise in the Far West allow us to accommodate regulations two thousand miles east?

As I oiled the engines and refueled, I talked with a man who had arrived a couple of days earlier from Florida, on his way to Chicago in a fifty-foot motor yacht, a boat bigger than its length alone suggests. He had used 450 gallons of diesel to run the 122 miles from Cairo to Ste. Genevieve, at a cost of seven hundred dollars. He said, “That damn current ate my lunch.” I told him we’d come almost two thousand miles from the Atlantic Ocean on only a third more than that. “Sure,” he said, “but you’re in a toy.” The eye of the beholder: I’d considered boats like his the toys.

The weather was about to turn again, and already the wind was reaching twenty miles an hour, but it was generally blowing upriver to give us a push against the current. Every few miles we had to stop and raise the motors to clear the props of drift while
Nikawa
, indeed, bounced like a toy. We took one hard hit that knocked off a piece of propeller first damaged in Lake Chautauqua, but it wasn’t enough to stop us. When people asked, as they often did, “Is it fun?” I remembered the perpetual threats, a sure depressant of that so American thing called fun. I thought, Toys are fun—cross-country river trips are something the hell else.

Above the Ste. Genevieve ferry, rocky bluffs come down to the river along the Missouri shore, and where quarries have not destroyed them, the cliffs are lovely, seated in maples and cottonwoods, topped with cedars and hickories. On the Illinois side a long line of levees protected a bottom cropland of grains and legumes. For more than a thousand miles, the Mississippi from above St. Louis to below New Orleans runs as an engineered conduit with either levees or bluffs penning the river, a circumstance that makes the roll of a flood faster, deeper, meaner. Like the Missouri, the Mississippi can no longer significantly spread high water full of silt into lowlands to diffuse the flow and enrich the soil. Of the hundreds of uses of this river, the Army Corps of Engineers for years tried to operate it for only one—barge navigation. The old steamboats, of course, hauled freight and people when the Mississippi was still nearly a wild river, but then those boats and cargoes were smaller; today, shipping companies speak only about economies of scale, and well they can, since on the broad Mississippi a full fifteen-barge tow can carry as much as 870 semi trucks.

The river has been not just caged, it has also undergone considerable straightening—channelizing—another element adding to the severity of a modern flood. And sometimes the Father of Waters takes things into his own hands. Mark Twain wrote in
Life on the Mississippi:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.

Villages and towns along this portion of the river, unlike on the Ohio or the Allegheny, do not commonly sit right on the edge of the banks; rather, they’re behind a levee or a natural rise, frequently some distance away, so for hours the traveler may have little relief from the miles of willows and maples, shrub and bush, with no main drags—often named Water or Front Street—to offer a pause to body or a boost to imagination. If you want to know you’re passing, say, old glass-making Crystal City, population 4,000, you have to look at a map. Despite these drawbacks to the journeyer, the Mississippi, of all our waterways, has spawned a greater number of river narratives than any other, a happenstance brought about more by the spell of Twain than any magic in the lower Mississippi itself. I had a couple of years earlier traveled it from New Orleans to St. Paul, and below St. Louis the river isn’t by any means one of my favorites, so I moved along that day with a near eagerness to get off it and take on the longest river in America, of which an old pilot once said, “We used to separate the men from the boys at the mouth of the Missouri. The boys went up the Mississippi and the men up the Missouri.”

The day became progressively darker as we banged on north, and by the time we passed the mouth of the Meramec River, the sky had turned oppressive and the industry of St. Louis started showing itself. A fourteen-year-old boy, Auguste Chouteau, began the construction of the city named to honor Louis IX of France and, indirectly, pay regard to the boy’s current king, Louis XV, that self-indulgent, lecherous profligate who inherited the mightiest monarchy in Europe and proceeded to give up much of it while he pursued, among others, Madame Pompadour, a woman whose counsel almost made him into a good king. It was this Louis who purportedly said, “After me, the flood,” words that often have an ironic ring to them in St. Louis. In fact, the day we arrived there, the Mississippi was inching its way up to the foot of the great Gateway Arch, the tallest national monument in America.

Three miles below the heart of the old waterfront where the teenaged Chouteau first put saw to timbers, hammer to pegs, we searched out a moorage Pilotis had recently arranged with the Corps of Engineers on the inside of its big dredge
Potter
and two service barges. Tethered off the bank, the boats formed a narrow chute free of the roiling water on the channel, a safehold further quieted by a driftwood dam beavers had built between the
Potter
and the shore. We were only twenty feet from the open Mississippi, but the chute was gentle enough to shelter a dozen black-crowned night herons giving out their guttural
quok! quok! quok!
at our arrival. I once heard the birds called river ravens, and assuredly the evening fit their dark plumes and mournful quothings.

We phoned a friend to ask for a lift from under the actual shadow of the second-largest brewery in the world to a small pub serving its own cask-conditioned ales and a potently spiced white-bean chili. I called on our musician to play. As he blew his bag full, the windy night began to rattle the windows of the St. Louis Brewery, lightning flashed, and rain got dumped everywhere, but he merely glanced into the blackness and piped away, and women rose to dance to “Garry Owen,” lifting their smooth knees high, hands clapping above their heads, and inspiration flowed like the sky.

When we returned to
Nikawa
, she was low in the stern from rain in the welldeck, and a young man from the Corps lent me an electric bilge-pump to empty her. Off and on the rain came down through the thunder-and-fire-rent night, a storm to extinguish the flames of Hell, and I had no doubt that the great Missouri, which would hold our lives for at least the next six weeks, was announcing itself, already testing our mettle.

VII

[September 10, 1840] For the last 2 or 3 days we were steaming up the Missouri. Being confined to my berth, I saw but little of the scenery, but it appeared to be the same kind the whole way. The river itself is the most peculiar feature: the steamer was continually winding & twisting about among the enormous snags & sawyers and masses of trees & bushes laced together with which the course of this extraordinary stream is constantly interrupted, while in some places the whirlpools, eddies, currents, rapids & sandbanks (covered with thousands of Canada geese) together with the tremendous violence of the waters, form a spectacle the grandeur of which I have never seen at all approached except in the rapids above Niagara. Very often the whole power of the engines was barely sufficient to resist the impetuous fury of the stream and every now & then we would drop down, till, gathering new way, & 
vires acquireus anudo
, we would slowly work past the contested point, which was usually some immense snag which formed a “hell of waters” boiling & hissing around it. We saw few settlements, the villages generally being 2 or 3 miles back from the river with roads leading down to small wharves on the waterside called “landings.” . . . The numbers of boats that go up this immense stream is astonishing considering the difficulties of the navigation & the comparatively wild state of the country.

William Fairholme

Journal of an Expedition to
the Grand Prairies of the Missouri

H
AD HISTORY TAKEN
a slightly different turn, the Missouri would be the longest river in the world. From its
true
source to the Gulf of Mexico, its length was more than five thousand miles before shortening by the Corps of Engineers, a thousand miles longer than the Nile or the Amazon. Because of a few interpretations, arguable ones, the Missouri has not been so recognized, but in the early days of white exploration and settlement many travelers and rivermen considered the Mississippi to be the tributary of the Missouri. Before the engineers and their dams and before dryland farmers and their pumps, the two rivers at their juncture fifteen miles above downtown St. Louis had a similar width and average flow, both figures common measurements to determine a tributary; even today, from its highest waters just north of Yellowstone Park, the Missouri is a couple of hundred miles longer. Nevertheless, the Mississippi claimed the lower river for two key reasons. The first is that the Missouri, in keeping with its character, changes its course at the confluence to assume the more regular overall due-south direction of the Mississippi. A straight line between St. Paul and Baton Rouge shows the deviation of the Mississippi to be never more than about 160 miles east of the mark and twenty-five west; but along a line between, say, Helena, Montana, and the confluence, the Missouri has a deviation of 250 miles on one side and a hundred on the other. In ways beyond distance, the Big Muddy is the most changeable large river in America, perhaps on the continent, a quality inimical to early explorers and merchants.

But the major reason for calling the river below St. Louis the Mississippi is that when names first got set onto maps, it was an almost familiar waterway ready for commerce, while the Missouri was still an unknown thing coming from an unexplored country and only a remote possibility as a route to the western sea and the wealth of the Orient. Explorers found the Mississippi more comprehensible, workable, and even predictable in both its topography and its nature, a river lying conveniently about halfway between coasts, one that could rather tidily set a western boundary to the new nation and provide the longest and most direct natural route north to south, nearly border to border. If you draw a square between the Appalachians and the Rockies and then divide it into equal quarters, you almost have a map of the courses of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri, a basin full of other tributaries once having no compeer on the globe for navigable waters.

Below St. Louis the Mississippi takes on the character of the lower Missouri—color, turbulence, aura, its native life. The pallid sturgeon, for example, inhabits the Mississippi from Louisiana only up to the confluence but then follows the Missouri all the way into eastern Montana. This oldest species of fish in these waters, in other words, recognizes the upper Mississippi as a different river.

To call the Mississippi the Big Muddy, as the press routinely and incorrectly does, is to acknowledge the Missouri as the major river, for that sobriquet properly belongs solely to the latter, as early travelers attest in their accounts, virtually all of them commenting on the heavy sediment. William Clark, for example, wrote in 1804, “The water we Drink, or the Common water of the missourie at this time, contains half a Comn Wine Glass of ooze or mud to every pint.”