‘Passenger pigeons,’ Zave said. ‘Always have flown that way, always will.’ Once when the birds were low overhead he fired a musket at them, and they flew in such packed formation that he brought down eleven, and the eating was good.
On they went, two Macnabs, a Campbell and a dog, droving cattle through lonely and forlorn land as their ancestors had done for centuries in the Highlands of Scotland, and at last they arrived in Natchez, that French-Spanish-English-American town of great beauty perched high on its hill above the Mississippi, with its squalid row of half a dozen mean streets down on the flats, where the great boats docked, where the saloons never closed, where boatmen from Kentucky and Tennessee lost in an hour what they had slaved four months to earn.
As they drove their cattle along the main streets, lined with expensive and glamorous houses, Otto knew instinctively that he and his companions were not intended to stop there; threatening stares of passers-by in costly clothes told him that, but he was not prepared for what he found when Finlay and Zave herded their cattle down the steep streets leading to the waterfront. Now they passed into an entirely different world—of sweating black porters, shouting women, steamboats with their engines banked being warped into position, side by side, and bands of musicians playing music endlessly. Natchez-under-the-Hill was its own town of several thousand, and here the commerce of the great river basins—Ohio, Missouri, Mississippi—came temporarily to rest in huge warehouses that groaned with the produce of America.
It was an exciting place, a steaming hodge-podge of black and white, of Virginian and New Yorker, of buyer and seller, of slave and free, and many a man who now owned one of the big white-pillared houses on the hill, with many servants proclaiming his wealth, had started buying fish and timber on the wharfs.
But it was also a frightening place, with knives flashing in the dark, and Zave Campbell showed young Otto the spot where one of the greatest knife fighters of them all, Jim Bowie of Tennessee, had demonstrated his ferocious skill. ‘Bowie had this fierce knife and he allowed hisse’f to be tied to a log, and his enemy, he was lashed down too, and there they fought it out, slashin’ and duckin’, and Bowie cut his man to shreds.’
‘What did he do then?’
‘He asked his brother Rezin to make him an even bigger knife. Foot and a half long, with a heavy guard protectin’ the handle from the blade.’
‘Why did he do that?’
‘He said: “When you’re strapped to a log, you cain’t have a knife that’s too long.” ’
‘Can I see him? Where is he now?’
‘Who knows? They run him out of Tennessee.’
When it came time to arrange for the cattle to move south toward New Orleans, Macnab discovered two painful truths: the cost of taking them by steamboat was prohibitive, and he had wasted his energies bringing them down from Nashville. ‘Man,’ he was told, ‘we find all the cattle we need in New Orleans. They bring ’em in from everywhere.’ And when Finlay pointed out that he intended to take them on to Texas, the speaker guffawed: ‘Hector, come here and tell the man!’
Hector was a dumpy fellow in his forties. He had been to Texas and proposed to return as soon as the two boilers for his sawmill reached Natchez from Pittsburgh, where they had been bolted together and caulked. ‘Cattle to Texas?’ he said. ‘That’s the craziest thing I ever heerd of. Cattle run free all over Texas, millions of ’em. I hire two Mexicans to keep the damned things off’n my place.’
‘Are you telling the truth?’
‘Come here, Buster.’ The sawmill man called everyone Buster, and when he had Finlay seated on one of the pilings of a wharf he explained: ‘Cattle been breedin’ free in Texas since the Creation, or as some say, since the Spaniards arrove. Cattle everywhere. Big … huge horns … best eatin’ beef God ever made, and, Buster, strike me dead if they ain’t all free. You just go out with your lasso …’
‘What’s a lasso?’
‘Mexican-style rope. You form it in a loop, and you won’t believe me when I tell you what a tricky hand can do with that loop.’
‘It’s hard to believe what you say.’
‘Texas is different, Buster, and you got to accept it on faith. If you carry them cattle on to Texas, all you can do is give ’em away. You sure as hell cain’t sell ’em.’
‘What should I do?’
‘I’d sell ’em right here. As beef.’
‘They won’t bring what I paid for them in Nashville.’ He spat. ‘And all that trouble on the Trace.’
The sawmill man clapped him on the shoulder: ‘Buster, sometimes plans go sour. They promised me, solemn, that my boilers would be here six months ago. I’m still waitin’ and I’m still payin’ for my room, such as it is.’
Macnab and Campbell spent five days trying to reach the best deal on the cattle, and Otto was surprised one afternoon to hear them telling a prospective customer that they had thirty-three head to sell, for he knew that his father had left Nashville with thirty and had sold two to stands along the Trace that needed beef. There should be twenty-eight for sale, but what he did not know was that it was physically and morally impossible for a Macnab or a Campbell to pass through territory containing cattle without enlarging his herd. By old established practices, they had acquired an additional five head.
In the end they had to sell at a severe loss, but the transaction was not without its benefits, because the buyer was a man who ran a repair shop for steamboats, a kind of inland ships’ chandlery, and when through casual conversation he discovered how experienced Finlay was in such matters, he pressed him to accept a job serving the big riverboats. At first Finlay demurred, so the man said: ‘Help me and I’ll double the price I offered for your beef.’
This was too gratifying for a trader like Macnab to refuse, for as he explained to Campbell: ‘We make a neat profit on the animals, and we can save money for our start in Texas.’ He went back to the man and said: ‘I’ll take the job, but you must employ my friend Campbell, too. He’s a mighty worker.’
‘I’ve seen Campbell on other trips. He eats big and works little.’ He would not hire the big Kaintuck, but Macnab did find Zave a job sweeping out a saloon, and when the three settled in to Natchez-under-the-Hill as if it had always been their home, Texas grew farther away.
The only problem was Otto. He was eight now, not much taller than before, and the long tradition of the Macnabs required him to get started on his education, but schools were not a major feature of Under-the-Hill. There were some on the upper level, but it was difficult to get to them, and when Finlay inquired, he was told quite bluntly: ‘We do not look kindly upon boys from Under.’
There was, however, a woman on the lower level, now married to a roustabout, who had once taught school in the rowdy town of Paducah when it was still called Pekin, and she said that she could teach Otto reading, writing and numbers up to the rule of three. She was a mournful lady, spending much of each class telling the boy of her more fortunate days in Memphis, where her father sold furniture and coffins, but she developed a real liking for the lad and gave him a rather better education than he might have received in the more fashionable classrooms of the upper level.
It was curious, Otto thought, that the two towns were so separate; a person could live his entire life in one, it seemed, without ever venturing into the other. Under-the-Hill was the bigger, the more flourishing and also much the wilder, but just as he had discovered on the long walk through Maryland that civilization could consist of a cabin in the wilderness throwing light and comfort into the darkness, so now he knew where the good life lay in Natchez: it thrived in those big, clean, white houses atop the hill, and whenever they had the chance, he and Zave would climb the steep streets and walk aimlessly beneath the arching trees, looking at the mansions.
‘You ain’t to think, son, that everybody in there is happy,’ Zave cautioned, and he showed Otto two especially fine houses from which a boy and a girl, desperately and hopelessly in love, had come to Under-the-Hill to commit s
uicide. And he also knew which big one had contained the man who had run away to Pittsburgh, abandoning his wife and two daughters.
‘My father ran—’
‘Don’t tell me about it!’ Campbell thundered, and Otto pondered these complexities.
The year 1830 passed, with Finlay earning substantial wages on the waterfront and with Zave Campbell promoted to bartender, where he could steal from both his boss and his patrons. The trio was prospering financially, but Otto was not advancing in much else, for he had mastered about as much learning as the Paducah woman could dispense and was beginning to lose interest. Also, he was reaching the age when circumstances might throw him in with the rowdy urchins who pestered ship captains when their boats were tied up, and Otto himself worried about this, because everything he had so far observed inclined him toward an orderly life away from the excesses of Under-the-Hill. In that whirlpool even children witnessed murders and shanghaiings and young women committing suicide and endless brawls, and he had no taste for such a life. At age nine he had become more than cautious; he was a little Scots-German conservative set so firmly in his ways that they would probably last a lifetime.
One aspect of life Under-the-Hill he could not adjust to: the presence of so many women. It occurred to him as he looked back upon his travels that he and Finlay, and even Campbell, had always moved where there were no women; on the trails, along the waterfront, in the stands of the Trace, it had been a man’s world. Even in settled Cincinnati when they talked with people who had been in Texas, they had met only one woman, the Arkansas lady who had fled.
But now they were surrounded by young women, and he perceived that even tough men like his father and Zave sometimes wanted to be with them, those very pretty girls with only first names, and although he did not understand fully, he knew it must be all right. What irritated him, though, was that the girls sometimes showed as much interest in him as they did in Zave and his father, pampering him and petting him and offering to cut his hair. They were, he realized, doing this so as to impress Finlay and Zave that they were the motherly type, and he grew quite sick of the attention.
But his irritation was forgotten whenever Zave and one of the young women from the saloon took him down to the waterfront, with rifles to shoot at objects floating down the Mississippi. Then he liked it if Zave’s girl cheered when he hit a bottle and Zave did not, or when with two quick shots made possible by adroit reloading he shattered two bottles.
‘You’re a little sharpshooter,’ a girl said one day as she kissed him, and this he did not protest.
That night he was startled when he overheard his father proposing to a new arrival from Pennsylvania that the man purchase his Texas scrip: ‘Partner, I’ll sell you this for half what I paid, and you can see the figures right here. Twenty thousand acres, one thousand good American dollars.’ The newcomer said he would think it over, carefully, for his heart was set on Texas, and he visualized the twenty thousand acres in terms of the ultra-rich farmland of Lancaster County. He might never find such a bargain again.
Otto was distraught by his father’s proposal, and he discussed it with both his teacher and Zave, and they, too, were appalled. The Paducah woman went boldly to Macnab and said: ‘You have a treasure in your son Otto. Don’t waste him in this sewer.’
‘You’re doing well here. I’m doing well.’
‘I have no choice. You do.’
‘A hundred men have started Under-the-Hill and moved up. And I’m to be the hundred and first. You watch.’
‘And what in hell will you have if you do move up? Take your kid to Texas and make him a man. And take that worthless Campbell with you.’
Zave was even more insistent: ‘Finlay, I’m workin’ here only to save money to get to Texas. This is the cesspool of the world. I just been waitin’ for you to say the word.’
‘You’ve got a good job, Zave. I got a good job.’
‘And Otto, he’s got nothin’. He should be on a horse, on open land … and so should you and me.’
One night, after work, Finlay broached the subject with his son. They were living in one room over Zave’s saloon, where the accumulation of eighteen rootless months lay scattered about. ‘I think, Otto, that in another year we’ll have enough money to buy a house on top. A hardware store, or maybe a general one like we had in Baltimore, with a good German bakery.’
‘People on top ain’t always happy,’ Otto said. ‘Sometimes they do terrible things.’
‘Where’d you hear that?’
‘Zave told me. He showed me where.’
‘What would you like to do?’
Almost defensively the boy drew Betsy to him, cradling her head in his lap, for he was afraid to expose his true longings, but under his father’s pressuring he blurted out like the little boy he still was: ‘I’d like to get aboard one of those steamboats, and stay aboard when the whistle blows, and just sail and sail, and then maybe have a horse on a great big farm where me and Betsy can run forever.’
Next morning the man from Pennsylvania came to Macnab’s shop and said he’d take the scrip, but Finlay said quietly: ‘Yesterday it was for sale. Today it ain’t. My son wants it.’
He never looked back. After giving his employer notice and receiving from him an unexpected bonus, he told Campbell to quit his job at the saloon, paid the teacher more than she expected, and bought three passages on the New Orleans steamer Clara Murphy, which would be putting in to Natchez on Thursday morning, 25 August 1831, on its way south from St. Louis.
Otto was elated that his long-delayed dream of steaming down the river was at last coming true, and while Finlay and Campbell slept amidst the deck cargo, he and Betsy walked back and forth, surveying the mystery of this great river. It was a trip into wonderland, and he never tired of watching strange happenings along the shore: slaves shifting bales of cotton, mules dragging a damaged boat ashore, freshly cut timbers piled sky-high. That morning, still unwilling to sleep lest he miss some dramatic scene, he imagined himself as captain maneuvering the Clara Murphy past treacherous sandbars, docking her at a plantation wharf where white women carrying umbrellas to protect them from the sun strolled aboard. Twice he chanted with the sweating black crew as they worked the boat, and he tried to hide his pleasure when they called him ‘our little riverman.’ He was prepared, at the end of that first glorious day, to be a Mississippi man for the remainder of his life.
On this trip he saw the richness of Louisiana, for it seemed that all the wealth of the state was crowded along the shores of the river, and he perceived that families acquired fine homes with vast lawns only when they owned many slaves. Not once on this long, revealing trip did it occur to him that the slaves might have rights of their own or that their condition in 1831 could be temporary. They were black, different in all respects, and obligated to serve their masters.
New Orleans was totally different from Cincinnati and Natchez. It exuded both prosperity and pleasure and had a relaxed spirit the other towns lacked. It was obviously very old, with strong French and Spanish accents bespeaking earlier settlers, and the mighty levees, raised high to keep the Mississippi out of the streets and homes, awed and impressed Otto. Also, there was a bustle about the city which delighted the boy, and he perceived that whereas the waterfront of Natchez had been unhealthy and unclean, that of New Orleans was vibrant and almost self-policing, as if the excesses tolerated in Under-the-Hill would be forbidden here.
And there was burgeoning commercial activity. In one afternoon of casual exploration among the shippers his father was offered two jobs, but Finlay had learned from his Natchez experience not to take them lest he become entangled permanently in something he intended to engage in only temporarily. ‘Very well,’ one trader with a French name said expansively. ‘You’re the boss. But when you get to Texas and start your plantation, remember me. Louis Ferry, New Orleans. I’ll buy your mules, your cotton, your timber.’
‘Do all those come from Texas?’
‘Look at my yards.
I get three parts from Louisiana, seven parts from Texas.’
‘How do I get my produce here?’
‘Ships run all the time, but they’re expensive. Best way is with mules, herd them up and drove them in. Takes time but it costs nothing.’
‘You keep speaking about mules. Don’t you accept horses?’
‘Rich people buy horses, now and then. U. S. Army buys mules all the time.’
He wrote out his name and address for Macnab, and added: ‘I’ve got a better idea. Put together a big herd of mules, bring them in for a good profit, and then stay with me as my manager of the Texas trade.’
‘Where would I find the money to get the mules?’
Ferry broke into laughter: ‘Man, in Texas the horses run wild. Mustangs they call them. Thousands, thousands—you just go out and rope them and they’re yours.’
‘Yes, but where do I get the mules?’
‘Man, you buy yourself a strong jackass, throw him in with the mares, and let him work himself to death.’
‘What happens to the male horses?’
‘You drive them to New Orleans. I can always use a few.’ When Finlay looked dubious, Ferry cried: ‘You ever see a Texas mustang? I got a yard full of them and wish I had a hundred more.’ He led Macnab to a corral, where for the first time Finlay saw the powerful little horses of the Texas range, much smaller than he had expected, much finer-looking than he had supposed a small horse could be.
‘They run wild?’ He studied them carefully, exercising his eye trained among the great horses of Ireland, then said: ‘They told me in Natchez that cattle run wild too.’
Ferry clapped him vigorously on the shoulder: ‘In Texas everything runs wild. You just reach out and grab.’
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