Wicked River
Page 3
Most of the traffic was heading downriver. There were wooden barges bearing ore from the mines, and flatboats carrying beaver pelts and sheaves of prairie wheat. If the harvest came in late and the river was already icing over, the flatboats would off-load the wheat and store it in the warehouses until the spring thaw. There were also the big rafts floating down from the logging camps. They were guided by steering oars so large they took dozens of men to maneuver. The crews on the rafts were a notorious lot. Whenever they’d hit town, there would inevitably be a drunken riot. Merrick recalled how the fights would spill into the backstreets and the levee after midnight; all the while, the local marshal waited them out, safely perched atop a high post on the dock, a revolver in his hand, watching the action unfold “with the enlightened eye of an expert and the enjoyment of a connoisseur.”
Boats coming up from the lower valley were the most eagerly awaited, because they brought so many essential supplies. The whole town would be on the levee to help unload. There’d be barrels of salt (a prized commodity in the upper valley, so scarce it was often used in place of money), sacks of coffee beans, tuns of cured pork and beef jerky, tubs of rice and axle grease. If the boat arrived at night, torches would be lit up all along the riverfront. People ran everywhere by the flickering light—stacking the barrels, dragging loaded wagons into the warehouses, throwing tarps over the goods that were going to be transshipped farther north. The torches smoked and billowed and flared, shedding a steady drip of pitch and charred wadding into the black water below. And then within the hour the levee would be dark and empty again. Merrick and some of the other local boys would be allowed to stay up until dawn, skylarking among the stacks of cargo, making sure it wasn’t stolen by the ubiquitous river thieves.
Now and then, one of the boys on the levee would be on board when a boat pulled out again. He would have stowed away or else talked the captain into letting him hire on as an apprentice—usually for a couple of dollars a month, starvation wages even then. That was what happened with Merrick. When he was a teenager, he left town and was hired as a mud clerk on a boat doing regular runs up and down the valley. Over the next few years, he worked his way up to apprentice engineer, cub pilot, and eventually full pilot. (Later on he went east, where he became a newspaperman and ultimately a publisher.) He thought it was a fine career, but as far as the town was concerned, that was the end of him. They had a phrase they’d use about such a boy: somebody would ask what had happened to this or that kid who used to hang out on the levee, and the answer would be a headshake, or a hand waved contemptuously in the direction of the Mississippi, and a simple dismissal:
Gone on the river.
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All along its length, on its remotest upper reaches and its most labyrinthine tributaries, people were going on the river. They were sometimes called voyageurs—the word was a survival of the old French culture of the Mississippi, before the Louisiana Purchase. It has a romantic sound, but there was little actual romance associated with being a voyageur. Mostly it meant working the keelboats, barges, and rafts, which was brutal, unremitting, and dangerous labor; or else it meant taking a one-shot trip in a flatboat, loaded down with local goods to sell in the great markets of the river delta. Just about everybody was tempted to try that out at some time or another. It was a simple way of scoring money at a time when most of the river valley was sunk in grinding poverty. One of those who made the trip was Abraham Lincoln: he did his first run on the river in 1831, when he was twenty-two, just out of the family home and striking out on his own. He and some friends, backed by a local businessman, built a flatboat and took it down the Sangamon River to the Illinois, the Illinois to the Mississippi, and the Mississippi all the way down to New Orleans.
What did they carry? It barely mattered. Apples or hemp or whiskey, pigs or turkeys or horses or cattle; maybe there was a local craftsman who made particularly sturdy brooms, or a brewer famous around town for an unusually sweet ale. The delta markets were known to be undiscriminating and insatiable. The voyageurs set out with anything that they could make, grow, barter for, sell on commission, or steal. Ordinarily they set out in the fall, with the pick of the local harvest, or after the thaw in the spring, with whatever miscellaneous load they’d been able to scrounge together over the winter. Sometimes the whole town would gather at the levee for their departure, and the local band would play; sometimes they’d sneak away at dawn, before anybody realized what they’d taken.
The current was a fast jog, nine or ten miles an hour in the deepest channels. It was strong enough to hurry the most heavily laden boat downstream. People didn’t have to do much in the way of fancy boating to keep moving. The Mississippi had no waterfalls south of Minnesota, and only one stretch of dangerous white water, along the Iowa-Illinois border (it was successfully dredged by midcentury). The boats were carried forward, hour after hour, day after day, as the valley unfolded around them in endless cascades. There were countless islets and bluffs, feeder creeks and sloughs, marshes and canebrakes receding into the blue depths of the valley; tributaries came rushing in through ravines; clouds skimmed down so low they clipped the pines atop the ridges; drifts of mist floated off the hillsides and melted across the water. Whole days could go by without the voyageurs seeing anyone onshore, and then it might only be a small, silent figure on the near bank, standing for a moment and solemnly raising a hand as they passed.
But the river had its own dangers. Chief among them were the sandbars. The river was deep—more than a hundred feet for much of its length—but the strong drag of the current along its alluvial bottom built up sandbars in countless numbers. The bars cut the effective depth of the channels to a few feet or sometimes a few inches. A boat that went aground on a bar might be stuck there for days or weeks, until help could be found or the river rose. In seasons of low water, these bars made the river essentially impassable. One military expedition, unwisely setting out in late summer, when the river was at its lowest, recorded that between Minnesota and Illinois they went aground on sandbars more than two hundred times.
Then there were the floating trees. There were hordes of them on the river—saplings and fully mature trees and ancient giants more than a hundred feet tall. They’d collect into impassable bottlenecks on hairpin bends and form bobbing, clunking plateaus in the shallows. Sometimes a couple of dozen of them, or a couple of hundred of them, would form into a clump glued together by the mud and debris that were constantly slipping past in the current. These were known as wooden islands, and they would go careening down the river for hundreds of miles at a stretch, until they built up enough momentum to break out of the channels and collide with whatever happened to be in their path along the shore. Everyone got to know the weird creaking, grinding sound that meant a wooden island was approaching. Any boats that couldn’t be maneuvered out of the way would be pummeled into flinders by its bristling armor of splintered logs.
But the trees were even more dangerous when they were stationary. Many or perhaps most that fell into the river eventually became stuck in the mud. These were known as snags. Snags were so common that a whole specialized vocabulary was developed to categorize them. A tree that was standing straight up on the river bottom, with its branches just under the waterline, was called a planter. A tree that was stuck sideways into a riverbank or a sandbar so that it stretched out at full length under the water was a sleeper. A tree that waved back and forth in the current with a sawing motion was a sawyer. And a tree that bobbed up and down, rising up out of the water and plunging back again, as though it were performing a river baptism, was a preacher. Any of these snags could stave in or capsize a boat that glided blithely across it, and they were everywhere on the river; by one estimate there was a major snag every five hundred feet.
These perils were almost invisible to the unpracticed eye. Most of them showed up only as odd disturbances on the surface, patterns that had to be decoded from the endless fluctuations of the current. A trailing braid in smooth water was
a sure sign of a snag; a quilted ripple was a tangle of submerged logs; a line or fold across the water was an undertow; a persistent swirl of froth was a whirlpool, where a strong tributary flowing quickly into the main current had created a vortex beneath the surface. The voyageurs had to teach themselves all these clues by experience, and the river put a premium on fast learners.
The voyageurs came to call the Mississippi the wicked river. The downriver run was so deceptive and so treacherous that it was said that at least one out of every five boats that set out for the delta wrecked along the way. Every traveler on the river got to know the sight of bodies drifting with the current, or hanging from a floating island, or bobbing among the logs piled up on a river bend—the red shirt that the voyageurs wore, the closest thing the river had to a uniform, could be spotted a mile off, like a distress signal.
The landscape through which the voyageurs passed was still extraordinarily pristine. The most basic traces of human occupation were only sketchily drawn in the valley. There were no main roads or highways; there were barely even any trails. There were no long fences or hedgerows marking out property lines. The countryside hadn’t yet been pierced and plotted into an array of carpet scraps, the way it is now; forest and meadow and swamp and prairie still flowed into each other according to their own logic. The air was uncannily clear. The faintest trace of smoke—a line spiraling up from a cabin on a wooded islet, or a smudge over a remote village—could be seen for miles away, as stark as a forest fire.
At night the view was even more glassy and serene. The hills and bluffs were featureless masses of india ink. There were no lights of towns, sometimes not even when there were towns—streetlights were an innovation still confined to big cities. People mostly stayed in after dark and went to bed early. A light on in a house at midnight was a bad sign: it almost always meant that someone inside was sick. Most nights, the only lights the voyageurs saw were the moon and the stars—and the stars weren’t the meager scattering of pockmarks we now think of as the constellations, but the Milky Way in full flood, veil after jeweled veil, reaching down to the treetops and shimmering on the wrinkled surface of the river. The sharpest eyes might also pick out, in the remotest depths of the night, a few tiny flickers of orange: these were enormous bonfires built on the banks of the river, advertising the wood yards where the steamboats could refuel.
There were no beacons or lighthouses or channel buoys on the river then; there were no official markers of any kind. Here and there someone would occasionally paint a warning or an arrow on a prominent rock to alert voyageurs to danger—but these were often the work of pirates, to trick boats into going aground. Nor were there any reliable maps. In that era, mapmaking, even at its best, was a mixture of supposition, obsolete or garbled information, and pure fantasy; the first rule of travel in the American interior was that only a fool trusted a commercial map.
But the voyageurs didn’t care. What did they need a map for? The land was so wild it was essentially impassable; anyone who didn’t go by the river didn’t go at all. In effect, the river served as its own map. A voyageur who needed to consult it had only to climb the nearest hill. There the route was unfolded, in all its blue-misted splendor: the great dragon tail of the river uncoiling through forested valleys and across the tallgrass prairies and into the vast shrouded swamps, glittering with ten thousand sunflecks, blurred by drifts of drizzle, blazing with reflected herds of brilliant cumulus, on and on toward the horizon. As far as the eye could see, the river was the only road.
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To the tourists, the passing landscape was pure monotony; the British travel writer Frances Trollope wrote that the Mississippi was “dismal,” “wearisome,” “a huge and turbid river with a low and slimy shore,” and complained that there was nothing to the scenery but “forest—forest—forest.” But a voyageur learned to see every stretch of the river as unique. He needed only one glance at the banks to tell where on the thousands of miles of its course he was. Some didn’t even need to raise their eyes to the banks: they could tell their location from the color of the river alone. There were even some connoisseurs who boasted they could do it with their eyes closed, just from how the water tasted.
The river was sky blue near its headwaters, in the white-pine forests of the Far North. The pines came down to the banks, where their roots tangled in a fantastic thorny profusion, and gave the water a clean, pungent tang of pine oil. A little to the south the water became a deep blue-green as the pines gave way to densely overgrown woodlands of oak and elm and maple. The banks grew more lush: in the marshes and along the sloughs and streams were waving fields of cattails and goosefoot and button brush, and below the water’s surface in the shallows were mile-long beds of mussels. The marshes were thronged with squabbling crowds of wading birds. The river was busy with catfish and gar and bowfin and buffalo fish and bluegill and walleye; they were so abundant that people claimed there were places you could cross the river by walking on their backs.
By the time the river reached the sandstone bluffs and prairies of Iowa and Illinois, it had become an olive green with hints of brown. Here and there were long wine-red stains trailing along the shallows; the color was from the tannin that had leached from ancient bogs. By that point the forests on either side had thinned out, and the land had opened up. The river ran for hundreds of miles through the tallgrass prairie. The voyageurs would see nothing but the ruffled grass rising and falling in slow swells all the way out to the horizon. In the spring the prairie was a riot of gorgeous wildflowers, endless washes and shoals of white aster and black-eyed Susan and pink phlox and sky-blue spiderwort. In the summer the grasses were ten feet high and were swarmed by game animals like antelope and deer and bison; there were ragged black clouds of passenger pigeons so numerous that a single swarm could take days to pass overhead. In the autumn the grasses turned brittle and were easily set ablaze; after a thunderstorm there’d be a pall of smoke hanging over the horizon marking the spots where the lightning had started fires. Sometimes at night there was a brilliant line of flame edging down a distant hillside, below a titanic churn of smoke underlit by the glare. Now and then the fires swept down to the riverbank, and the voyageurs would be whisked unwillingly along an interminable billowing curtain of smoke and flame. They would be choking and coughing the whole way, and frantically checking the boat to make sure that the burning cinders and tufts of blown grass weren’t threatening to stampede their livestock or torch their cargo.
At the southern edge of the prairie was the confluence with the Missouri. The Missouri was a furious torrent bright red with the clays of the Great Plains. Its water was sour and gritty, “too thick for soup but too thin to plow”; its current was so strong that for miles south of the junction it flowed beside the Mississippi in the same bed without mingling, a swift, narrow plume of reddish cream next to a wider swath of greeny murk. Gradually they churned together into an odd pale broth that looked like yellow ash stirred into dark oil. The forests closed in again on either bank. These were some of the densest and lushest woodlands in America. The marshes and canebrakes were tangles of starflower, bloodroot, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild ginger, and mayapple; there were matted beds of maygrass, wild bean, sumac, arrowhead, knotweed, little barley, hickory, and goosefoot. The trees were scrub willow and cottonwood, pin oak and green ash, hackberry and persimmon, black willow and sycamore and honey locust and box elder and pawpaw. They towered up in countless pillars more than a hundred feet tall; the leaf canopy was a remote web of green and black reaching almost to the clouds.
Then the Ohio glided in from the east. It was wide and placid, and its blue water was so rich with topsoil that in some lights it looked black. Its taste was velvety; it was said that if you drank enough of it your sweat would be as sweet as dew. It, too, held aloof from the main current for many miles. But gradually it blended in, and the result was a rich, murky, chocolaty gold. This was the characteristic color that travelers came to associate with the Mississippi. It wasn’
t very appetizing to drink; the fastidious travelers in the lower valley made a habit of letting the water stand for at least a half an hour to allow the grit and filth a chance to settle out. The hard-core river people didn’t bother. They’d just scroop a bucket into the current and guzzle it down straight. They liked to claim the river silt was good for you. They called it “the true Mississippi relish.”
Meanwhile, the forests were growing more tropical. Water oaks and water maples were interspersed with catalpas and wild cherries and tupelo gums; there were palmettos unfolding their green spearlike fans and vast stands of gloomy cypresses. Along the water’s edge were endless tessellations of Chinese lotus, and the marshlands were radiant with orchids and passionflowers and hibiscuses. Beavers and otters splashed in the sloughs and creeks, the woods were haunted by wolves and panthers, and the air was a deafening riot of millions of songbirds.
The river unfolded into the delta, as the sloughs and bayous and marshes and swamps thickened. It became at times a pale luminous green like lime soda water. Its taste was reminiscent of bitter mildew. On either side the banks were green-shadowed and marshy. Water moccasins and alligators slithered through the mud; the green was spangled with cross vine and trumpet vine, cinnamon fern and Cherokee rose, silver bell and blue lobelia, lily and hyacinth and hydrangea and yellow jasmine. The river glided on past endless receding processions of cypress trees shrouded in Spanish moss; here and there were silent lagoons in perpetual gloom. The river meandered among orange groves and stands of magnolia so pungent the smell made some travelers sick.