Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  Then the great swamp forests began to dwindle. The banks on either side melted away into indeterminate ooze that deepened and widened into borders of reeds and cattails more than a mile wide. The last solid land broke up into a maze of little peninsulas and islets and isthmuses dense with rustles of sea grass and sedge, swarmed by pelicans. The water shone from thousands of brackish ponds and lagoons and lakes. There was no firm line between the river delta and the salt estuaries. But in the end the last islets fell away, and the great freshwater flood of lime, gold, and brown went streaming serenely out into the blue salt of the Gulf.

  The river grew more crowded the farther south the voyageurs went. In the upper valley, days could pass without the sight of another boat; below St. Louis there were fresh armadas around every turn. The river traffic was a hectic, crowded, jumbled array of keelboats and flatboats, barges and rafts, pirogues and scows, skiffs and canoes and schooners. “The floating life on the water,” one writer called it; he predicted that the people of the Mississippi valley “will ultimately become as famous as the Chinese for having their habitancy in boats.”

  The basic form of river transport was the broadhorn flatboat. This was essentially nothing more than a rectangular wooden box, with a wide, flat bottom and steep sides. It was typically ten to fifteen feet across, thirty to forty feet long, and three or four feet deep. Its planking was fixed to a lumber frame and held together by wooden pins—iron nails were too expensive. The bottom was sealed with caulk or tar or pitch. There was usually a hut with a peaked roof built amidships. At its stern was an enormous steering oar, sometimes just a big tree limb shorn of its leaves and branches. At either end of the bow were two smaller oars, which were mainly used to shove off from sandbars and steer away from the banks. When these oars were raised, they looked like the horns of a steer—thus its name.

  The broadhorn was an ugly, clumsy, primitive boat, almost impossible to maneuver and very easy to wreck. But it had a few crucial advantages: it was cheap, it was easy to build, and it was extremely buoyant. Even when it was loaded down with several tons of cargo, it drew only a couple of feet of water, which meant that it rode high enough to get it over a lot of the sandbars and snags. It was the perfect boat for the first-time voyageur making a one-shot trip to the delta.

  The other boat seen most often on the river, at least in the early years of the century, was the keelboat. This was a big, graceful gondola, sometimes fifty or sixty feet long, partially enclosed by an elegantly sloped roof—keelboats were beautiful boats, many of them, with elaborate handcrafted prows. A keelboat typically carried ten or fifteen tons of cargo and was worked by a crew of at least a dozen men. These crews were necessarily more skilled and professional than those of the flatboats; a keelboat wasn’t the kind of disposable craft whose loss could be shrugged off by its owners. Its crews tended to be proud of their skills—they often considered themselves to be the only true voyageurs on the Mississippi.

  There were many other varieties of boats. Every possible method for moving up and down the current was somewhere being tried, and sometimes brought to a high art form. Canoes of hollowed-out tree trunks, often fifty or seventy-five feet long, were called pirogues; some pirogues were made up of five or six trunks set side by side and nailed together with planking to form a kind of supercatamaran. There were also the traditional birch-bark canoes of the Native Americans, extraordinarily sturdy and angelically light—many people considered them the finest boats ever put on the river. There were great barges bristling with oars and rudders, and there were vast ungainly rafts, cobbled together out of whatever wood was handy and sometimes going downriver in a state of perpetual disintegration. There were shanty boats, houseboats, tugboats, cargo boats, packet boats; there were sleds and skiffs and scows, dugouts, arks, flats, and ferries. And there were irregular and fanciful boats that had no name, built of haphazard materials, of mismatched parts of abandoned boats, of random accretions of flotsam and salvage; some had weird turrets and peaks and railings of ironwork and carved wood like nightmare castles. The writer Timothy Flint described them as “monstrous anomalies, reducible to no specific class of boats, and only illustrating the whimsical archetypes of things that have previously existed in the brain of inventive men, who reject the slavery of being obliged to build in any received form.”

  All the boats were crammed with cargo. A ceaseless torrent of goods was coming downriver. The big rafts carried pine lumber from the North Woods, furs and hides from the Great Plains, and wheat and corn from the prairies. The barges carried copper and lead ore from Wisconsin and Minnesota, and glistening mountains of coal from the mines along the Ohio. The flatboats and keelboats carried pungent barrels of cider and whiskey; they carried coils of hemp rope and stinking wheels of cheese; they carried avalanches of corn ears, apples, cabbage heads, potatoes; they carried complaining flocks of chickens, turkeys, and geese and herds of skittish horses and cattle and pigs. Some carried the North’s most exotic exports, ice and snow, which at their destination were stored in dry wells and deep caves; snow flavored with rose water was always a great treat during a delta summer.

  And they were carrying people—immigrants, itinerant laborers, migrant workers following the seasons. People may have been the most common and the least valuable cargo on the river. They were uncounted, uncataloged, unremembered; nobody cared whether they reached their destination or what happened to them once they arrived. The only people who were kept track of were slaves, because they came with a specific dollar value attached. Thousands of slaves were brought down the river each year. Those who transported them were known as soul drivers. Everyone on the river could recognize the soul drivers’ boats. They had a peculiar place in the impromptu society of the river. People in the lower valley took the existence of slavery for granted and universally regarded the abolitionist movement with contempt—but there was also a widespread belief that the slave trade itself was a dirty business and that the slavers were the lowest of the low. The boats of the soul drivers glided downriver on their own and were shunned by the other river people wherever they laid up for the night.

  Darting among the armadas of the downriver traffic were shifting constellations of smaller boats making short hops from port to port. These were the boats of the river merchants. They went from town to village to plantation, anywhere there was a levee or a dock where they could tie up and display their wares. They could be found on any stretch of the river: dealers in kitchenware and cabinetry and furniture, sellers of books and plows, craftsmen of scythes and brooms and spinning wheels. The river had more than one floating smithy with a working forge. There were floating greenhouses selling exotic plants. There were floating daguerreotype studios, where people could pose for formal portraits. The river had its own tailors and haberdashers, knife sharpeners and tin workers; there were boats that were fully stocked general stores, with polished countertops and neatly stacked shelves displaying bolts of coarse cloth for sale by the yard, barrels of flat-head nails, and the latest newspapers and gazettes from New Orleans and St. Louis. Then there were the showboats, the traveling troupes of actors and musicians and acrobats. There were the doctors with their medicine shows: steam doctors, magnetic doctors, hydrological doctors, milk-sick doctors, homeopaths, vitopaths, mesmerists, baunscheidtists, and sellers of patent medicines. They traveled with musicians and actors, who’d sing and put on burlesque routines to draw the crowd, and once they’d made their sales, they’d be back on the river again before anybody had a chance to examine the contents of the bottles they’d just bought. And there were the gambling boats and the brothel boats—the latter came to be known as gunboats—that would anchor at a discreet distance from towns and villages, and they’d do their business until the landsmen organized a “vigilance committee” to chase them away.

  The most startling sight for many travelers was the houseboats. These were rafts, sometimes eighty or ninety feet long, carrying elaborately constructed and fully furnished houses. The houses were surroun
ded by pens holding horses and sheep and cattle and hogs; haystacks and farm implements were scattered everywhere as though in a farmyard; children were scampering, men were whittling, and women were at the washtub. Sometimes Grandmother was seen sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, placidly knitting, as though she belonged to an Americanized version of Noah’s ark, riding the flood to a new world.

  From just about anywhere on the Mississippi’s great branches, the journey down to the delta was a matter of a few days or a few weeks; the return trip could take the better part of a year. An upriver journey, before the rise of the steamboats, was a nearly impossible proposition. There came to be endless varieties of contrivances to force boats against the current. Most often people hoisted sails. If the wind was against them, they’d break out the oars. Some of the simple paddle-wheel boats were powered by hand-cranked treadmills; others had treadmills powered by horses or cattle. Keelboats were moved against the current by a peculiar technique known as poling. It was a strange and mesmerizing spectacle. The keelboat crew, all wearing the bright red shirts of the voyageurs, would line up on deck on the side of the boat nearest to the shore. Each man carried a long wooden pole tipped with an iron shoe. At a signal from the captain, they’d all lower the poles into the water and plant the shoes in the river mud. Then, gripping the poles as firmly as they could, they’d march in a line toward the stern. As each man reached the stern, he’d raise his pole up and hurry to the back of the line, where he’d plant the shoe in the mud again and resume marching. Slowly, lumberingly, the boat would slide forward beneath their feet.

  Larger boats required grander techniques. The big barges were moved by warping. This involved running heavy ropes or cables through an anchor that was fixed to the shallows, or else looping them around the biggest tree or boulder onshore, and then out to a tugboat in the channel. The tugboat would move downriver with the current, and the rope would be pulled around the pivot to drag the barge upriver. When no tug was available, the rope would simply be run back from the pivot to the barge itself, and the entire crew would draw it in by hand. Sometimes the crew wouldn’t even bother with the rope or the pivot: they’d all just reach out from the barge to grab hold of the bushes on the riverbank, and they’d pull until the boat moved a few feet forward or the bushes were uprooted. This was called bushwhacking.

  The most straightforward, brute-force method of upriver movement was also the most exhausting. It was known as cordelling. The crew would go ashore with a heavy rope that had been tied to the bow, and they would simply drag the boat forward. They thrashed through the underbrush, sank to their knees in the mud of the riverbanks, waded chest-deep through reedy sloughs and swamps, untangled the line from bristling stumps, on and on, sunup to sundown. The rule of thumb for a cordelle’s progress was this: a boat moving downriver with the current could sometimes make ten miles an hour; a boat going upriver by cordelle was lucky to make ten miles a day.

  There were plenty of times when nothing worked. The wind died, and the sails were useless. The current was too strong or the boat was too heavy to be moved with oars. The river bottom in the shallows was so muddy that the iron-shoed poles sank through it like butter. A landslide or a sprawl of fallen timber along the bank made it impossible to go ashore with a line for warping. The shores were swamps a half a mile deep on either side and there was no solid ground for a cordelle. Boats were sometimes stranded for days or weeks, until the wind picked up, the river rose or fell, or a passing steamboat in a rare moment of kindness offered a tow—or until the crew finally abandoned the boat and looked for another way to go on.

  It was no wonder that many voyageurs got down to the delta and then couldn’t face the thought of bringing their boat upriver again. This was another great advantage to flatboats: they weren’t worth anything. They were designed for a one-way trip. Once their goods had been off-loaded and disposed of in the markets of New Orleans, the boats themselves were broken up and sold for scrap. That was how flatboats became known as “the boats that never came back.” The writer James Hall found the life cycle of the flatboat to be a melancholy parable:

  She pursues her voyage, like man on his earthly pilgrimage, to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller of her species ever returns; for, being calculated to stem the current, she is useless after she has reached her destination, except as so much lumber.

  But even if the voyageurs were freed from the deadweight of their boat, they didn’t find their return all that easy. By midcentury, if they were flush, they could buy a cheap passage on one of the steamboats—it was only a few dollars from New Orleans to St. Louis, if they were willing to sleep on deck and work off part of their fare by helping load and unload cargo at the stops along the way. Or they could hire onto one of the big barges returning upriver and spend months cordelling somebody else’s boat through the mud of the riverbanks. Many of them found it simpler to walk. Once their business in New Orleans was done, they’d set out on foot—up the forest trails, along the margins of endless swamps, through the trackless tallgrass prairies: month after month, all the way home.

  That was the calendar time set by the river. A typical voyageur would set out with a load of cargo bound for New Orleans in the spring, arrive there in a few weeks, and then spend the rest of the spring and into the summer and sometimes the fall getting home. He’d rest up all winter—and then, the following spring, build a new flatboat, pick up a fresh load of cargo, and set out downriver again. Abraham Lincoln after he rode this circuit a couple of times said that it taught him what it felt like to be a piece of driftwood.

  The boats ran all day, from dawn till sundown, but only the biggest boats were still on the river after dark. The rafts and barges went barreling on; everybody else looked for some secure place to hole up until morning. A night run in a flatboat or a keelboat was only for the reckless. People might do it if they were desperate, if they had an injured man and thought there might be a town with a doctor somewhere nearby—but they risked being capsized or stove in by an invisible snag, or running fatally aground on a sandbar, or being trapped by a whirlpool, or being swamped or run over by one of the great boats lording over the channels.

  Toward dusk each day the boats began to collect into great archipelagoes off the levees of the port towns. It would happen from New Madrid south to the delta: dozens, sometimes hundreds, of boats clustering together, anchoring, tying up at docks, tossing ropes and cables from boat to boat, assembling into loose, floating cities. Soon cook fires in braziers would light up on the decks, dogs on different boats would bark furiously at each other, horses and livestock would shuffle and thump in their pens, and the sounds of fiddle music and stamping and singing and laughing would float up from a hundred places, mingling with the smoke of the cook fires. As the evening deepened and the lanterns were lit, people began moving from boat to boat, clambering over gunwales, hopping across roofs. They were bartering food, looking for jobs on other boats, passing on gossip, making deals for their cargo, and arranging convoys. It was a common practice to “lash” boats into a shoal of ten or twenty and travel downriver together to defend against the river pirates. The parties quickly grew rowdy. Sooner or later drunken fights began breaking out—it wasn’t unusual for a voyageur to drink himself into a blind, belligerent stupor every single night of his life. Then, around midnight, there’d be a general exodus toward shore.

  Few towns were enthusiastic about welcoming the river people. At St. Louis, there was a night watch with fifty armed men assigned to the dock district, just to make sure that the river people didn’t stray too far from the levee. Many towns actually divided themselves in two, giving over one part to the river: that was how Vicksburg, Mississippi, for instance, held itself aloof from its disorderly riverfront companion Vicksburg Landing. Natchez, Mississippi, was divided by topography: the main town stood on a high bluff and was a decorous, gracious place of pillared porticoes, white church steeples, and brick storefronts; while around the base of the bluff was a s
econd town, a crooked, squalid maze of slums and shanties, many of them built from wood salvaged from wrecked or abandoned flatboats. The official names for the two towns were Natchez and Natchez Landing, but more often they were called Natchez-on-the-Hill and Natchez-Under-the-Hill.

  On summer evenings, it was the custom for the good people of Natchez-on-the-Hill to stroll to the edge of the bluff and take in the view of their fallen sister town and the boat city below. They’d survey the dirty smoke seething up from the chimneys, and the glare in the back alleys from the saloons and taverns, and beyond, on the river, the constellations of glittering lanterns and flickering cook fires swaying in the darkness. They’d listen with a kind of amused distaste to the disorderly music floating up from open doorways; they’d take in, as though they were spectators at a sporting event, the pops of gunfire and the frequent screams, many of them interrupted. They would congratulate themselves on the way they had carried out their quarantine. Not one of them would have ever admitted to being curious about what was going on down below the hill—much less confess to having, now and then, snuck down the bluff to sample the entertainment on offer there for themselves.

  The boat cities hung together at the levees each night until just before dawn. But then, as the last stragglers were drifting in from the riverfront, the assemblies began to stir. The lines and cables between the boats were loosed and coiled up again, the anchors were drawn, breakfasts were frying, and there was a great creaking, thumping, slithering overture of sails raising and oars lowering. At sunrise the signal to depart would come. It was a weird, sonorous boom of a reveille; it came from the huge wooden trumpets known as river horns, sounding out from the flatboats and keelboats and shivering the air for a mile around.