River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  We went down to the river Dang and bailed out Nikawa and struck off into the alternations of drizzle and mist, the Missouri full of drift that gave us something to watch since the shores lay hidden behind the gloom. We’d heard more rumors of the river being closed, but I believed if we could reach Kansas City and get beyond the mouth of the Kaw then pouring in tons of floodwater, we would be able to proceed without further legal let or serious fluvial hindrance. Should the rain continue along the upper Missouri Valley, the engineers upstream would have to begin releasing water from the six immense reservoirs nearing record capacities, and when the overflow came down, we’d be driven from the Missouri for days without a chance of reaching the West Coast that year.

  The Lower Missouri, Glasgow to Atchison, 197 river miles

  “What are you going to do if an Army patrol boat stops us?” the Reporter said. I mumbled I’d try to persuade them with the romance of our voyage. “That’s it?” No time for supporting letters from senators, I said. And on we went.

  We passed by without seeing the mouths of the channelized Chariton and Grand rivers, wedded as they were to the wet air. To relieve ourselves of the drudgery of keeping watch for drift bearing down on us, we spoke of things having nothing to do with our situation. Pilotis, who had recently completed a draft of a novel not yet satisfying, said, “I wish I were blessed with the language of Shakespeare, the theme of Tolstoy, the plotting of Dickens, the humor of Twain, the industry of Balzac, the precision of Dickinson, and the swing of Babe Ruth.” Said the Reporter, “If you had the last one, you wouldn’t need the others.” Just then I veered hard to miss a nasty dark log, broken and worn into an uncanny likeness of a shark—tail, eye, dorsal fin—and everyone went silent in the alarm. Then Pilotis added, “And the longevity of Shaw.”

  We passed below the bluffs of Miami, Missouri, where, during highway construction, archaeologists found a mastodon skeleton they dated to be 36,000 years old. Nothing unusual in that, except the bones—lying fifteen feet below the surface in undisturbed loess, a rock-free soil deposited only by wind—had been carefully arranged and with them lay crude stone scrapers and knives, and one cut tusk. Because of the construction, the dig had to be hurried and a later fire destroyed the bones, so the discovery could not be documented fully, a find that might have proven human presence along the Missouri 24,000 years before the currently accepted date.

  A little west of Miami, the Missouri runs about as unbendingly as it can, and we hummed along when the floaters allowed it. A mallard winged past us, and I said on our best days we were crossing the country at half the speed of a duck in flight. Things seemed slow because the weather limited our view and made the misted Missouri an almost featureless and claustrophobic tunnel. But had the sky lifted, the towns still would have been hardly visible, since they are typically too far off a river they no longer depend on.

  Every turn of the lower Missouri bears a name, although straightening it has made some bends almost unidentifiable as curves; I said, Many of the old names are gone with the windings. Pilotis, as intolerant of punning as a preacher’s wife of off-color tales at the Sunday table, tried to stop any follow-ups, the natural fruit of wordplay, by reading names aloud from the chart: Bushwhacker Bend, Teteseau, Tamerlane, Cranberry, Baltimore, Tabo, Sheep Nose, Bootlegger, Sni-a-Bar, Jackass. I knew of no history of the bend names, but such a work would be a gladsome thing, especially to three cramped jacksafloat on a drizzly morning.

  As we approached Waverly, Pilotis said, “Give us a Lafayette County anecdote.” Can’t think of one, I said. “Make it up.” The weather and miles were turning the crew restless. Trying to pull out a true story, I fumbled, There was this woman—“Heard it,” the Reporter said. Then I told an elongated version of this: She wasn’t poor, but she hated to spend money on clothes, so she bought apparel at church thrift shops, and in warm weather she went to bed nude to save on sleepwear. Quite a pretty woman. One business trip required her to share a room, so she found a garage sale and bought a frumpy, speckledy nightgown for thirty-five cents. In the hotel—a fancy one—the nightdress apparently got entangled in the sheets and tossed down the laundry chute. The next day she reported her loss at the front desk; when she later returned to her room, on the bed was her gown, laundered and neatly folded. Pinned inside was a ragged note in a hand barely literate:

  My mariners stared at me. “We ask you to make up a story, and you give us that?” I didn’t make it up, I said, I just changed the location. There was grumbling and shaking of heads. I relate the incident here to try to give a true picture of how things could be on long river days; I had kept them occupied for a couple of miles in expectation of some libidinous turn of events and then for another mile with the complaining. There are sacrifices a skipper must make for the welfare of his crew.

  The mist began to lift, and soon after we passed Lexington. One morning in September of 1861, Union troops entrenched at the edge of the village looked down in astonishment at a peculiar wall of big bales of hemp slowly and mysteriously rolling over the slope toward them. They soon realized that Confederates were levering forward the heavy, water-soaked bundles that even heated cannonballs could not penetrate, men firing from between the crevices with the advance, an immense labor that eventually brought the Southerners close enough to the Union breastworks to engage in hand-to-hand fighting. By midafternoon, the attackers had forced the surrender of the riverview position, one they abandoned ten days later. Wrote Union com mander James Mulligan, “All is destroyed, even the rails and trees, fencing of every kind, bushes and shrubs, nothing left that would hide a chicken.”

  Twelve miles beyond Lexington is the village of Napoleon. The Frenchman’s nineteenth-century legend has left many related names across America, but, for reasons I don’t comprehend, perhaps nowhere more abundantly than in Missouri. Just down the road from the village is his archenemy, Wellington, and halfway between is what’s left of Waterloo. This latter name was working on me in a special way that afternoon because the Army Corps of Engineers has a station at Napoleon, and I was considerably concerned with being put off the river. I took Nikawa to the opposite side and, as best one can on open water, tried to slip invisibly past the outpost. Pilotis, keeping the binoculars on the place, watched for the modern equivalent of a warning shot across our bow, and I complained the miasma had lifted only moments too soon. Once we were again out of sight, the Reporter said, “I think we made it,” but that was still far from assured—a patrol could be waiting for us anywhere upstream. Pilotis: “Here’s one more version of proceeding as the way opens.”

  We reached Fort Osage, established by William Clark two years after his return from the Pacific. Once, and only briefly, the most important trading post in the West, it had a life of less than two decades before it fell into ruin. Almost under the brow of the recently rebuilt fort, we pulled up to a gentle clay bank so the Reporter could leave and the Shooter come aboard. As I backed off the slope, the Reporter called out and held something up. I asked Pilotis what he was yelling, and the Shooter answered, “He has the four-leaf clover.” We’ll get it later, I said and turned upriver. Within two minutes a resounding crack came from the stern. I cut the motors and raised them. A bough, only the size of a girl’s arm, was caught between the bent and chipped props. I looked to shore to hail the Reporter, but he was gone with our clover. No one said a word, not even Pilotis.

  Nikawa limped on, past the Little Blue River, scene of fierce fighting during the Civil War and one of the most westerly of its battles. On beyond Sleepy Branch and around Liberty Bend, the town a few miles north, with an 1833 calaboose oxymoronically called the Liberty Jail, a name Pilotis thought expressive of the human condition; it was there the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, sat incarcerated four and a half months and had more revelations than a televangelist the night before a pledge drive.

  The industrial bottoms of Kansas City, punctuated by big gambling boats, began appearing port and starboard. Through the gray but drying afternoo
n, the city towers rose from the river bluffs like Oz and gave us a remarkable riverscape impossible from any road. We went under seven bridges, including the 1886 Chouteau, the oldest on the river but soon to come down, and then beneath the Hannibal railroad bridge of 1917, which replaced the one of 1869, the first across the Missouri and the span that helped the Town of Kansas become the city of the American heartland.

  Near the mouth of the Kansas River, commonly called the Kaw, Thomas Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery camped for three days in 1804, saw large numbers of Carolina parakeets, a brightly beautiful bird hunted to extinction, and there William Clark, in one of his more solecistic sentences, wrote, “The waters of the Kansas is verry disigreeably tasted to me.” When we entered the mouth of the Kaw, it disagreed with us in a different way: its formidable outrush of floodwater was sending down a small forest and enough human scourings to stock a salvage yard. We found a commercial excursion boat tied to an old barge where we hoped to lay up for the night, along the Kansas side in the Fairfax Bottoms. The owner, Ted Chapman, a burly fellow in his late fifties, directed us to a mooring on the outside of the old tender, an open spot under assault by the fast current and charging, ramming debris.

  Trying to be a prudent mariner while not challenging his experience or abusing his hospitality, I ineffectually refused such an exposed berth, and he insisted, I resisted, insisted, resisted. At last he let us move to a quieter location between the barge and shore and behind his big tourist boat made to look like a sternwheeler. In the forbidding current, we donned life vests and worked tensely to get Nikawa as secure as conditions would allow. Then we climbed onto the tender and walked it to the gangway sagging into the floodwaters. We took off shoes, rolled up britches, and waded the swaying thing to shore. We had accomplished 140 miles, our farthest day yet, and we went off to Eighteenth and Brooklyn, once the nave of Kansas City jazz, for barbecued chicken and a real choice of sauces. Not once during the meal did I forget the way the Kaw, as if hating them, was sweeping trees out into the Missouri.

  Pilotis’s Cosmic View Gets Bad News

  KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI, is the preeminent city on the longest river in America, but you would never know it from talking to the inhabitants, not because of their usual modesty but rather their forgetfulness of the Missouri. In the self-proclaimed City of Fountains there is no spiritual link between them and it and only a distant awareness of its connection to their iced tea, potted geraniums, and baptized babies. Living in such a topographical Land of Nod, they are little different from most other Americans, who nevertheless seem to awaken when properly nudged. One day, perhaps, even their pastors will come to and dare to proclaim God dwelling not only in the hearts of humankind but also in the actual lands and waters from which those fleshly pumps derive. But Kansas City, born of the Missouri, has turned away from its great genetrix more than almost any other river city in America. If you want, for example, just to see the Missouri here, you have to cross a bridge at breakneck speed or take an elevator in a downtown skyscraper.

  The view is important because the river makes one of its two grand changes in direction (the other, near the Canadian border, keeps the Missouri from leaving the country, which it did thousands of years ago when it flowed into Hudson’s Bay). If the river did not turn at Kansas City just where the Kaw enters, it would by a shorter route—were the Ozark Mountains not in the way—enter the sea coincidentally at the place the Mississippi does. To look from atop an office tower is to witness one of the great facts of American topography, a detail that has made a decided difference in the way the West got peopled.

  That Thursday began in one wise and ended in another. Perhaps because I grew up here, I couldn’t escape a bedful of dreams about my recently dead father and my infirm mother’s incapacity to realize he was gone; it was a night of sorry sleep turning every incident into loss. On waking, I recalled the words of a fellow a few days earlier: “The Army’s going to pull you off the river.” Then I remembered our misshapen propellers and nearly empty fuel tanks. For some moments I felt I couldn’t do another mile, believed I was too weak a man to continue, and knew now was the time to admit it. I seemed to hear, Face it, the voyage is finished—you’re flagging, and you’ve come only halfway. Then that last word hit and got me out of bed: halfway. A midpoint in any venture is difficult because that’s the place where days gone and miles done equal those ahead, and the result is equilibrium, stasis, inertia. A rollercoaster nearly stops just before the last drop to the finish. In some ways, the first mile of the second half is the most crucial because it’s the one that propels the traveler down the slope of endurance to destination. While we were still some miles shy of being exactly halfway, I knew I had already emotionally arrived there. So I dragged up onto my feet, doleful, depressed, dejected, disgruntled, dissatisfied, dissipated, discouraged, disheartened, downcast, and otherwise down in the mouth, and I went into the damp, dreary, dismal day drooping, despondent, disconsolate, and damnably in the deep doldrums.

  Pilotis chirped about, whistling, but I couldn’t find a blunt instrument smaller than the bathtub. The Reporter appeared briefly to bring us bagels and the New Haven clover, and then Pilotis and I went down to the river. Nikawa was steady and riding out the malign Kaw, but two entire sycamores had washed in to lodge between the barge and the bank to trap her. Okay, I said, that solves that: a boat that can’t move doesn’t need propellers or gasoline. I sat down and stared at my shoes. Pilotis let things be, but I could almost hear “Rub that clover.”

  Soon our host appeared and said his crew had gone for chainsaws and would take to the johnboat and try cutting up the trees so they could float on downstream; that left me again with broken props and empty tanks. The nearest gasoline on the river was eighty miles away, too far. We’d have to haul some in, a lot of it, and we had no transport and no good containers, a serious oversight. Pilotis mentioned a man I’d met only days before leaving on the trip, a fellow who volunteered help should we need it. Hoping for the unlikely, I phoned Barth Kleinschmidt, actually found him, and he was happy we’d arrived, pleased to help, and, “By the way,” said he, “it’s a big city, but my warehouse happens to be only a couple of blocks from you.” I hung up the receiver and said to Pilotis, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for your cosmic view—we have another coincidence happening here.

  Kleinschmidt arrived in his truck to drive us to the big warehouse full of his business—unclaimed freight—and he helped us comb through the eccentric place stacked with the draff of our times: chef toques, reams of copy paper, deodorant-stick rollerballs, toy swords, carnival tickets, chinchilla pelts, lampshades, microwave ovens, wet suits, a snare drum, football bladders, bookends, a gumball machine, and thirty thousand other things. Within minutes I found some five-gallon containers, and Pilotis said, “I’m only surprised that you didn’t find them already filled.” We took them to a gas station and pumped them full, ate a good lunch, and returned to the river to see the last log drift away from the barge. Pilotis: “We’re down to props. It’s going to be hell or impossible to change them in that water.” Pedro, our host’s mechanic, overheard us, and said, “Come, amigos.” We got in the johnboat and motored up to the stern of Nikawa and, from his boat, replaced the props.

  Twenty minutes later, under a lifting sky and light breeze that pushed away the dampness, we backed Nikawa into the Kaw, let the current turn her, and went again into the Missouri to start our ascent toward the next great bend, the one that would take us nearly into Canada. We pushed up along the Quindaro Bottoms, past the Kansas City water intake sucking in nine thousand gallons a minute to fill their fountains and make it easy for citizens to forget the river. Above the Kaw mouth, the Missouri was much less flood-struck, and we unconcernedly went up among the green hills. Park College sat atop its bluff, marked by the tower I used to visit in 1965 to look at the river and try to write poems about it; the reminiscence gave me confidence that I’d safely passed a point of no return in the heart. Then came Weston, a delightful o
ld tobacco and whiskey town the river moved away from, leaving it high and dry (“Divine justice!” a preacher once stormed). Even with frequent stops to clear brush from the propellers, we moved easily through the peaceful afternoon, a calm enhanced by our having heard that the crest of the flood was now below Kansas City. The Army would not have to close this section.

  We followed a broad curve of river and went under the long Kansas bluff that holds Fort Leavenworth, the preeminent post in the West after it replaced Fort Osage in 1827 and still today the place where the military writes its doctrine and incarcerates the most nefarious federal prisoners. In the first five years of the cantonment, disease and alcohol so troubled it that General Winfield Scott issued an edict:

  Every soldier or ranger who shall be found drunk or insensibly intoxicated after the publication of this order will be compelled, as soon as his strength will permit, to dig his grave at a suitable burying place large enough for his own reception, as such grave cannot fail to be wanted for the drunken man himself or for some drunken companion.

  And it was at Fort Leavenworth that a young officer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote the initial draft of his first novel, This Side of Paradise.

  Dividing Missouri and Kansas, the Missouri River valley is a rather uniform two to three miles wide. Channelizing by engineers, coupled with the inconstant character of the river itself, have filled the bottoms with horseshoe and oxbow lakes, old meanders of the Missouri that create an abundant chain of pollution-cleansing wetlands underneath the Great Central Flyway used spring and fall by millions of migrating birds: bitterns, godwits, dowitchers, phalaropes, terns, grebes, widgeons, buffleheads, coots, herons, rails, soras, plovers, snipes, willets, ibises, sandpipers, dunlins, yellowlegs. Three quarters of American bird species depend on wetlands for rest, food, or nesting, but over the past two centuries Americans have destroyed sixty acres of wetlands every hour.