by Lee Sandlin
But then he was never one to keep silent about his problems. His letters east weren’t primarily about his money troubles and his conflicts with his neighbors—in fact, those topics come as something of a welcome break in the main flow of his complaints, which centered on his health. He had evidently never been very vigorous, and the climate of the river valley seems to have turned him into a perpetual invalid. He contracted countless diseases—measles, influenza, smallpox, and an assortment of fevers and infections named and unnamed. All this, he repeatedly pointed out, explained why he was able to spend so little time actually attending to the business of his church. He could not work, he said at one point, because he had “a bilious complaint accompanied by spasm.” “I suffered fever and ague sixty days,” he wrote another time. On another: “I had seventy fits of the ague.”
Eventually he was forced to give up on the church in St. Charles. He and his family spent the next decade wandering up and down the Mississippi. His luck didn’t change for a long while. He wasn’t a fast learner and the basics of life on the river still eluded him. In 1820 he had an all-too-typical experience. He and his wife, Abigail, and their children were traveling from southern Arkansas to Missouri when they made what would now be called a classic newbie mistake—they tried to go upriver against the current during a season of unusually low water.
The trip was a nightmare. They thought it would take a few days; it prolonged itself into weeks. They petered out in exhaustion while they were still in the wilderness country above Memphis, with several hundred miles left to cross. By then they were in bad shape physically. Abigail was pregnant and nearing term, and she was sick with a fever. Soon they all were coming down with the fever and were too weak to move. Their food was running out. They had counted on buying supplies from the boats passing in the opposite direction, but they’d had the bad luck to find themselves in a lull in the downriver traffic: eight days passed without their seeing another boat. At last a flatboat appeared around the bend ahead of them, and Flint hailed it. The crew, seeing how desperate he was, sold him a barrel of salt pork and a barrel of flour for thirty dollars each—extortionist prices he was still furious about when he wrote his memoirs a decade later.
The family spent the following night in a secluded cove. Even though it was November, it was miserably hot and the cove was shrouded by mosquitoes. The next day was no better. By first light it was already sweltering, and by midmorning the signs were everywhere that a big storm was coming. It was then that Abigail went into labor.
The river was still running low and it was impossible to move forward to look for better shelter. The shallows on the eastern shore were a maze of sandbars; the western shore was a huge cypress swamp. The river was deserted. There was no choice but to ride out the storm and hope for the best. Flint lashed the boat to the trees along the eastern bank, and he had his children wrap themselves in blankets and lie down on a wide sandbar to wait. He did what he could to make Abigail comfortable. She was very weak with the fever, and she’d been “salivated”—meaning that she’d been given a large dose of calomel as an expectorant. Calomel is mercurous chloride; so whatever else Abigail had been enduring before, she was now suffering the effects of mercury poisoning.
The storm broke over them toward noon. It was a rage of hail and lightning, followed by torrential rain. Flint’s only comfort was Abigail: she regarded, he said, the prospect of her imminent death with “perfect tranquility.” She was so tranquil, in fact, that she regarded the fate of their children, who were just then huddled in their blankets out on the sandbar, with total indifference. For Flint, a deeply pious and conventional man, this was proof of her sanctity.
As for Flint himself, he was nowhere near as placid. He was terrified to the point of madness; he felt like King Lear on the heath. The storm kept getting more intense hour by hour. Around midafternoon, a sudden, intense gust of wind tore the roof off their boat, and the rain came pouring in. Flint didn’t dare move his wife; he resolved that he would risk carrying her into the forest to look for shelter only if the boat started to tear loose from its moorings and float downriver.
The storm began to spend itself by late afternoon; the clouds broke up and there was a magnificent sunset. The children all came back aboard the boat—they were waterlogged but still alive. Abigail gave birth at eleven that night. The baby girl, Flint could tell at once, was too weak to survive.
The boat remained stuck on the sandbar. After two days, the baby died. Flint emptied out a small trunk to use as a coffin and buried it in the rushes along the bank. The next day, the river began to rise, and the winds returned with it. Flint and his family hoisted their sails and they went on north without further incident. Flint remembered the location exactly: it was “on a high bank opposite to the second Chickasaw bluff.”
Flint would spend the rest of his life, off and on, traveling the river, and he would pass by that spot many times. Invariably he did so with his thoughts on how he was “carrying … my miserable and exhausted frame, with little hope of its renovation, and in the hourly expectation of depositing my own bones on the banks of the Mississippi.”
The death of his child didn’t come as a great shock to Flint. It wouldn’t have been a shock to any parent: the rule of thumb in the river valley was that one in four children died before their first birthday; one in two didn’t make it to their twenty-first. The situation might have been different if Flint’s family had been able to reach a nearby town and find a doctor—but probably not, given the nature of medical care on the frontier in those days. After all, it was a doctor who had given Abigail the mercurous chloride, and another doctor would have most likely succeeded only in killing her along with the baby.
But then, too, Flint had a certain natural callousness. He was curiously unmoved by the suffering and death of other people—even people in his family. It was characteristic of him that in his account of the river journey, he didn’t spare a single thought for what his other children had gone through that night, left to fend for themselves on the sandbar while the storm raged. But in this he was actually a fairly typical inhabitant of the valley: people did not as a rule display a lot of empathy for other people’s problems. The river discouraged it—life on the river was so dangerous, so unpredictable, and so casually violent that it couldn’t help but leave its inhabitants coarsened. Flint doesn’t seem to have been that interested in other people to start with, and the river never taught him to feel otherwise.
So as a minister, his main concern was simple outward obedience to church doctrine; as a father, he viewed the death of his child primarily as an occasion to reflect on his own mortality. This all made the river his natural home.
Over the next several years, Flint took charge of churches in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida. He stayed nowhere long, forced out in each place by poverty or sickness or the opposition of the citizenry. In one town he alienated his neighbors by doing amateur chemistry experiments in his parlor; they thought he was either a necromancer or a counterfeiter, and they couldn’t decide which was worse.
He proselytized everywhere he went. When he met up with Cajuns and Creoles, he addressed them in French. His biographer John Ervin Kirkpatrick noted: “He did not then speak French well enough to preach in it but that he could and did use it to reprove and warn.” The years continually sharpened his inborn knack for the exasperating moral judgment. He once visited a naval garrison in Baton Rouge, where he came across a simple white monument on the esplanade dedicated to the memory of the naval officers who’d died on the river. It was inscribed with a quotation from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man:
Like bubbles on a sea of matter borne,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Flint didn’t recognize the source, misquoted it in his book, and in any case was infuriated by the sentiment. He had no hesitation about outraging his hosts by saying so. Writing about the incident several years later, he didn’t bother to hide his contempt:
It
is a matter of regret, that in a country professedly christian, any inscription should ever find a place on a funeral monument, that bears no allusion to our hope of immortality.
Inevitably his meanderings took him in and out of New Orleans. This was a rich prospect for any missionary: it already had a reputation for being the wickedest city in America. The city was notorious for its brothels, its slave markets, its stores selling occult charms and amulets, its voodoo ceremonies held openly in public squares—all of which would seem calculated to torment a prim soul like Flint. And in fact he did find countless things to complain about. The city, he wrote, was “disgusting.” The saloons and brothels had “such an aspect of beastliness and degradation, as to render them utterly unbearable.” He also didn’t like the weather; it was “debilitating and exhausting.” He thought the fruit produced by the local orchards was “less flavoured, and more insipid” than the fruit of New England. He found the presence of so many Catholics “a painful sensation”—“not … a single Protestant house of worship,” he complained about Louisiana. “We need not cross the ocean to Hindostan to find whole regions destitute of even the forms of christian worship.” (Catholicism did not in his eyes count as Christianity.)
On the other hand, the more of his complaints that one reads, the more one gets the curious feeling that he liked the place. He was uncharacteristically forgiving of its situation—he wrote that “New Orleans is of course exposed to greater varieties of human misery, vice, disease, and want, than any other American town,” but in the end he believed it was probably no more sinful than New York or Boston. He was fascinated by the crowds, the babel of languages, the daily storm of color on the streets. He got in the habit of visiting the great cathedral—a new experience for him, as he’d never been inside a Catholic church before—and he was awed by its great taper-lit interior, perpetually shrouded in silent gloom. “This deep and unalterable repose,” he wrote, “in the midst of noise and life, furnishes a happy illustration of the state of a religious mind, amidst the distractions of the world.” He was also enchanted by the ornateness and peculiarity of the city’s famous cemeteries, so cluttered with fantastic crypts and mausoleums. He particularly liked visiting them at night, after the other visitors had cleared out. Their silent delirium reminded him of “how uncertain is the dream of life.”
He eventually took over a church and a school north of New Orleans, in the small town of Alexandria, Louisiana, on the Red River. It proved to be the happiest time of his life. He loved the town; it was a placid and well-groomed place, gorgeously green with catalpa and China trees. In the summer he and his family moved into a cabin in the pinewoods; there was a glade on the riverbank where several of the other families in town had cabins and lodges, and they all passed the hot days in an idyll of games and picnics. The river was swarming with fish; Flint estimated that he caught two thousand trout, “beautifully mottled with white and gold.” In the serene, leaf-glowing evenings he and his friends “had public chowder-parties, where sixty people sat down under grape-vine arbours.”
But it wouldn’t have been like Flint to be at ease in such contentment. “A kind of sad presentiment used to hang over my mind,” he recalled, “to embitter even this pleasant summer, an impression, that as it was so delightful, it would be the last pleasant one allotted to me on the earth.” In the fall he fell sick again. He convinced himself that it was the end. His family hoped that he might recover his health if he were away from the putrid atmosphere of the delta, so they sent him to visit relatives back east. When he got to Massachusetts, he told people that he “had come home to die.”
Idly, with no particular motive other than to occupy his time before his funeral, he began writing his memoirs. He worked quickly, even hectically, with only a loose plan. The book is cast as a series of letters to a friend—a common device in those days (Jonathan Swift remarked in A Tale of a Tub that he thought it was used by an actual majority of contemporary books). This enabled Flint to be casual, amusing, and digressive—qualities that tended to be missing from his actual letters. He put in whatever occurred to him: natural history, political history, sociology, anecdote, folklore, poetry. He indulged in his private obsessions—he was, as his biographer called him, “morbidly fascinated” with the Great Shakes, which had occurred four years before his arrival in the valley, and he passed on every scrap of news and folklore he’d heard about the quakes. He constantly wandered from his point; he launched into stories and forgot to finish them; he fumbled and weaved and meandered as wildly as the river did. The result was a fascinating double study: as much a vivid (if inadvertent) portrait of a peculiar, bigoted, obnoxious, and curiously endearing man as it was of the chaotic life on the river itself.
He was lucky in his theme: by the 1820s, the increasing tide of migration to the Mississippi valley was catching the interest of people all over America and Europe. Travelers, particularly European travelers, were beginning to think of the Mississippi as an essential tourist destination; travel writers describing their experiences in America were more and more likely to include an epic account of a Mississippi steamboat voyage. But Flint had grown to know the Mississippi far more intimately than any tourist could. As he wrote: “I cannot certainly be classed with those writers of travels, who … are wafted through a country in a steam boat, and assume, on the ground of having thus traversed it, to know all about it.” The title of his book was itself a claim to his status as a real river man. He called it Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi.
The book was published in 1826. It was an immediate success—so much so that it gave Flint a surprising new life. He recovered from his illness—but he found that he no longer wanted to continue his wandering life as a minister. While he was determined to go back west, he didn’t want to risk the climate of the lower valley. So instead he took his family to the rapidly growing new town of Cincinnati on the Ohio. He and his brother opened up a bookstore, and he became a professional writer.
For the next several years, he turned out prose at a furious clip. He wrote novels—mostly about virtuous ministers bearing up with great fortitude under a succession of misfortunes and natural disasters. He translated French novels and works of philosophy (his French had been greatly improved by his years in the delta). He ghostwrote the memoirs of a trapper in the Far West. He wrote a biography of Daniel Boone that was praised by later historians for its scrupulous accuracy (most contemporary biographies about Boone were full of shameless romancing). He wrote and compiled his immense ragbag of a compendium, The History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley. And he founded and edited a magazine called The Western Monthly Review. Each issue ran about fifty pages in minuscule type and contained essays on education, theology, politics, culture, literature, English grammar, and current events—almost all of which were written by Flint himself. His perpetual complaints about his weakness, his exhaustion, and his imminent death came as he labored at his craft like a stevedore.
For better and for worse—mostly worse—he wrote his later books just as he’d written his first one: at a hectic pace, without looking back. “Lack of finish,” his biographer noted, “is one of the greatest evils of the page.… There are so many obvious faults, in plot, sentences, and even in use of words, that one often regrets that he did not spend more time in the revising of his work.” He was also brazen about recycling his own prose: phrases, paragraphs, whole pages from one book will turn up unexpectedly in several others. Much of Recollections was absorbed into his History almost word for word. But then Flint never claimed to be a literary artist. He thought of himself at best as a kind of archivist, recording the life of the river valley for the use of posterity. “We can easily enjoy in anticipation,” he wrote about the back issues of The Western Monthly Review, “the eagerness with which the future historian will repair to them, as a synopsis of most of what has been said and written in the Western Country, touching its own natural, moral, and civ
il history.”
But he did very well in the present time. He grew to be a popular and highly regarded author, and he became a local celebrity in Cincinnati. When the celebrated British writer Frances Trollope stopped there for an extended stay during her American travels, Flint was the person she was most eager to look up—and, as it turned out, the only person there she actually liked. In the travel book she published shortly afterward, titled Domestic Manners of the Americans, she called him “the most agreeable acquaintance I made in Cincinnati, and indeed one of the most talented men I ever met.” She particularly admired Flint’s mild manners, beneath which she was delighted to find “first-rate powers of satire, and even of sarcasm.” She even felt indulgent toward Flint’s ferocious patriotism: “He is the only American I ever listened to, whose unqualified praise of his country did not appear to me somewhat over-strained and ridiculous.”
But Flint didn’t reciprocate these warm sentiments—at least not after her book was published. He felt a profound exasperation with outsiders venting opinions on his own turf, even when the opinions were ones he might otherwise agree with. (He was personally opposed to slavery, for instance, but he loathed the abolitionists because he thought they had no firsthand knowledge of what they were talking about.) Trollope’s harsh judgments on American manners, which in another mood Flint might have endorsed, he found unforgivable. In his magazine he wrote that Trollope’s views were “absolutely without value,” and he later published a sketch where he courteously described her as “a coarse, flippant, and vulgar man-in-petticoats.”