Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  Meanwhile, he had the money and leisure to begin traveling himself. He retired from his magazine and left Cincinnati in early 1834 to return to the lower Mississippi. He resettled in his beloved town of Alexandria, Louisiana. But almost immediately he left on an extended tour of Canada. He enjoyed it enormously: he adored Montreal; he was awestruck by the natural grandeur of Quebec and the St. Lawrence Seaway; he was impressed by the canals (he called them “prodigious works of art”); he even admired the local steamboats, which he said were finer than those on the Mississippi. He then went on to Europe. This didn’t go as well: it wasn’t as interesting as the New World. He wrote that Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were “intrinsically handsomer towns” than any of the great European capitals. He was bored by all the museums and monuments. The European landscapes left him just as cold; after the sight of an American mountain range, the Alps and Apennines were “bald, ragged, revolting.”

  He returned to America and his home in Alexandria. Once again he fell to brooding about the end. “I draw into my shell, abandoned by all others,” he wrote in a letter. In a poem he wrote:

  Fondly I thought that, years ere this, my breast

  Would cease to swell with joy or sorrow.

  In May 1840, Flint and his son James were taking a steamboat trip up the Mississippi from Alexandria. Flint was sixty then; he was, needless to say, in poor health, and he’d retired from professional writing a few years earlier. He and James stopped off on May 7 in Natchez-Under-the-Hill. The town was at that point in the middle of one of its periodic attempts to clean up its image: there were still gambling houses, saloons, and brothels, but there were also dry-goods stores and haberdashers and barbershops, and there was a new hotel, called the Steam Boat Hotel, catering to the upscale river traveler.

  Flint and his son had lunch in the Steam Boat Hotel’s elegant new dining room. It was a hot and humid day, and the tall windows were standing open. The sky was hazy and overcast, and beneath the clatterings and babble of the crowded room Flint could hear the mutterings of an approaching storm. He later described the sound as “a continual rumble of a hundred low thunders all melting together.” At around half past one, the sky grew so dark that the hotel staff had to bring out candles. By then the thunder had grown much louder. But nobody was alarmed. It still seemed to them like a typically stormy spring day in the lower valley.

  After Flint finished his meal, he wandered restlessly through the lobby into a new barroom. It, too, had an impressive set of windows; these overlooked the main street and the levee. The levee was swarming, as it always was on spring afternoons: hundreds of flatboats, barges, and steamboats were gathered in the waters off the docks, all caught up in their routine frenzy of loading and unloading cargo. Beyond was the grand sweep of the river. Natchez had been built on the outer bank of a hairpin turn, and from where Flint was standing, he could look down the river for miles, as it flowed to the southwest between the Louisiana and Mississippi shores.

  The view that afternoon was dominated by a rapidly approaching storm front that had swallowed up most of the sky. As Flint stood at the window, he had an unimpeded sight of “a terrific-looking black cloud, as though a well defined belt of black broad cloth, seeming a mile and a half wide, shooting up the river with fearful velocity.” He looked more closely and saw a weird specter: “At the end it poured out dark wreaths, resembling those of the steam-boat pipe.” He was looking at a tornado that had touched down on the river’s surface to the southwest, about twelve miles downstream, and was moving directly up the center of the channel straight at Natchez.

  Another witness to the events of that day, J. H. Freleigh, the captain of the steamboat Prairie, recounted his experiences for a St. Louis newspaper. He had heard the storm coming, too—“a continual dull roaring,” he said, that was broken at intervals by “sharp heavy claps, attended with the most vivid lightning.” But as the storm came up the river, he remembered, “the distant rolling thunder assumed more the sound of moaning.” Still, he took only the ordinary precautions: he put his men on alert, he had more lines tied to the dock, and he ordered the pilot to the wheel and the engineer to the boiler room. He himself went up on the roof with one of the hands to string out a hawser to the forecastle. He never saw the funnel cloud the way Flint did. Instead the storm came directly overhead in a titanic roar and a wave of blackness. As the steamboat roof began to break up beneath him, he jumped down the gangway to the boiler deck, and there he held on desperately to keep from being sucked into the vortex. The storm shrieked around him for barely a minute and was gone. In those few moments, the roof had been torn loose and carried away; the deckhand who had been working with him had been levitated to the forecastle and dropped uninjured.

  Freleigh climbed up to the forecastle to survey the damage. His boat had been ripped free from all its moorings and had been blown upstream, where it was drifting and pitching in the shallows. The water was still furiously choppy. The forests on the western bank had been leveled; Freleigh said they “were transformed into mere stubble-fields of splinters.” Freleigh’s boat was “a dismantled and useless wreck, floating a shapeless hulk on the boiling and maddened waters.” One of his crew was dead; five or six were severely injured; five were missing and their bodies were never found.

  Meanwhile, Flint had been watching at the hotel window as the storm crossed ashore and engulfed Natchez-Under-the-Hill. As the funnel approached the hotel, Flint finally broke away and went running back to the reading room to find his son James. They had no time to get out before they were hit. All the windows and doors simultaneously blew in. In the fury of the storm, everyone was bolting for the front door. “The rush closed the passage, and kicking, fighting, and cursing ensued,” Flint wrote. “Part were trampled underfoot, and part, such as James and I, thrown over their heads.” They found themselves shouldered into a narrow hallway between the barroom and the reading room. As the building came down around them, Flint remembered, he “expected the next moment to have all my maladies effectually cured.” The walls and pillars closed in, the rains poured over them in torrents, and the last light vanished.

  Then the storm was gone. The funnel skipped up the bluff, crossed through Natchez-on-the-Hill, and raced on into the wilderness country beyond.

  Within a few minutes, people all over Natchez were emerging from their shelters to survey the damage. Natchez-Under-the-Hill had taken a direct hit. The scene there, Captain Freleigh said, was of “horror, devastation, ruin.” A reporter for the local newspaper, the Natchez Daily Free Trader, found that “on the river the ruin of dwellings, stores, steamboats, flatboats was almost entire from the Vidalia ferry to the Mississippi Cotton Press.” Above the bluff, the scene was as bad or worse. In Natchez-on-the-Hill, the Free Trader reported, “scarcely a house, escaped damage or utter ruin.” The towers of the town’s two big churches had been toppled and the roofs caved in; the buildings in the business district had lost their roofs or had collapsed completely; the courthouse was destroyed; the Natchez Theatre was a pile of debris; most of the houses had been brought down. Particularly heartbreaking to the reporter, “the beautiful and splendid villa of Andrew Brown, Esq., at whose place the most gorgeous and splendid fete ever given in this city to the city guests from Vicksburg last year, is totally ruined.” Even the office of the newspaper itself was a shambles (the reporter apologized in advance for any shortfalls in coverage over the next few days). “We are all in confusion,” the reporter concluded, “and surrounded by the destitute, and houseless, the wounded and the dying. Our beautiful city is shattered as if it had been stormed by all the cannon of Austerlitz. Our delightful China trees are all torn up. We are peeled and desolate.” The headline for the story was DREADFUL VISITATION OF PROVIDENCE.

  The best estimate from the rescue parties and vigilance committees was that upwards of three hundred people were dead. There couldn’t be an exact count because most of the casualties were voyageurs and river people who’d been working their boats off the levee.
Nobody had any idea how many boats there had been; most of them had sunk or had been blown to scatterings of flotsam. The Free Trader predicted, “There will be mourning all along the banks of the Wabash, the Salt River, and the Ohio.”

  Almost unnoticeable in the long record of destruction was a report from under the hill. Work gangs of slaves lent by local plantation owners were excavating the ruins of the Steam Boat Hotel. Eleven bodies had been recovered so far, and a few people had been found alive, including the landlord and his wife—and also “Timothy Flint, the historian and geographer, and his son from Natchitoches, La.”

  Flint was characteristically detailed and copious about his situation: “I found myself alive though much bruised and crushed, and a nail had gone through my hat and grazed my temple, so as to cause some bleeding.” About his son, he said only that he lost his hat. About the death and destruction in the town, he said it was “sickening,” but no more. As ever, he wasn’t one to dwell on other people’s sorrows.

  His own sufferings continued in the aftermath of the storm. “The weather turned very cold, the night I began to ascend the river,” he wrote, “and my long drenching and exposure, with my previous sickness, gave me severe chills.” But he continued his journey; then he crossed the prairie to the Great Lakes and rode a steamboat to the East Coast, where he paid a visit to his brother. His chills worsened along the way. He’d had his inevitable presentiment by then; his letter describing the Natchez tornado, written that summer, ends in the same spirit as so many of his others:

  I had not thought when I began, that I could scrawl so much. Take it, not for what it is worth, but for what it has cost me. You will, probably, be one of my last correspondents.

  This time he was right; the letter is the final writing of his that survives. He died at the end of that summer, at his brother’s home in Salem, Massachusetts. The most suitable epitaph might be a remark of perhaps unintended self-description he made in Recollections:

  Man is every where a dissatisfied and complaining animal; and if he had a particle of unchanged humanity in him, would find reasons for complaining and repining in paradise.

  PART TWO

  “DO YOU LIVE ON THE RIVER?”

  5

  The Desire of an Ignorant Westerner

  THE MIGRATION TO THE RIVER VALLEY was the wonder of the age. New settlers were arriving in a ceaseless torrent. They were coming across the Alleghenies through the Cumberland Gap; they were riding keelboats and flatboats and arks down the Ohio; they were taking steamboat passages across the Great Lakes; they were voyaging by sailing ship down the Atlantic seaboard around the Florida peninsula up through the Gulf to the river delta and New Orleans. Travelers reported that their entire way to the river valley, along the only passable main roads beyond the Alleghenies—the Old Wilderness Road and the Natchez Trace—they were never out of sight of other wagons.

  The migration began with the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, and it became a major phenomenon after the War of 1812. “The old America,” one traveler wrote in 1816, “seems to be breaking up and flowing westward.” The scale of the movement was hard for people to comprehend. At the beginning of the century, there may have been a couple of hundred thousand people scattered along the length of the Mississippi; by the time of the Civil War, there were tens of millions.

  Few if any doubts were expressed about this immense transfer of people—some sentimental regret about the necessity of removing the Native Americans, none at all about the obliteration of the wilderness. The taming of the land was a self-evident good. A typical expression of this feeling can be seen in a best seller from the 1830s, The Indian Captivity of O. M. Spencer. It describes the terrifying experience from the author’s childhood when for several months he was held hostage by an Indian tribe in the wild country of Ohio, and it concludes with the reassuring moral that such things could never happen again, because the river valley had grown so thoroughly civilized in the meantime:

  Nearly forty years have since passed away; our rivers teem with commerce; their banks are covered with farms, with houses, villages, towns, and cities; the wilderness has been converted into fruitful fields; temples to God are erected where once stood the Indian wigwam, and the praises of the Most High resound where formerly the screams of the panther or the yell of the savage only were heard. O, “what hath God wrought!”

  The same language can be found in the descriptive pamphlet that accompanied one of the great Mississippi panoramas:

  In America the country itself is ever on the change, and in another half century those who view this portrait of the Mississippi will not be able to recognize one twentieth part of its details. Where the forest now overshadows the earth, and affords shelter to the wild beast, corn fields, orchards, towns and villages will give a new face to the scene, and tell of industry and enterprise, which will stimulate to new and untiring efforts. Places of small population will have swelled their limits, and there will be seen cities where are now beheld hamlets—mansions in the place of huts, and streets where the foot path and deer track are now only visible.

  But this description is cast in the future tense—evidently God wasn’t working fast enough. And in fact that was the common experience of the settlers. They didn’t reach the river valley and find the orderly, stable, developed civilization that O. M. Spencer described; they found an ad hoc and jerry-rigged scaffolding for a civilization yet to be constructed.

  By the time the largest waves of settlers arrived, the river valley had already been carved up into states, counties, and municipalities. But these were notional arrangements on maps and bills and legal briefs; they didn’t have much practical effect. The mechanism of government was feeble and attenuated, and it tended to break down at the simplest obstacles. The courts and government offices of the frontier were a hopeless morass—what one writer described as “a gulf of land-claims, settlement-rights, preemption-rights, Spanish grants, confirmed claims, unconfirmed claims, and New Madrid claims.” The simplest legal action routinely meant an eternity of bureaucratic frustration. One of the first pioneers, Christiana Holmes Tillson, described a typical encounter with the frontier government. She and her family were homesteading in western Illinois near the Mississippi, and her husband went to the state capitol at Edwardsville to register their claim. He found that the office of the recorder of deeds was so buried in unsorted paperwork that the clerks couldn’t tell him when, or even if, his documents would ever be filed. But the man in charge of the office, a Mr. Randall, offered a solution: “Mr. Randall proposed that he should enter the office as clerk and write until his deeds were recorded.” Tillson accepted the deal; the backlog was eliminated and his deeds were duly recorded. It only took a year and a half.

  The story was unusual in one respect: it had a happy ending. Most people were left to flounder. This was one reason the people of the river valley so quickly developed a reputation for truculent independence. “The desire of an ignorant westerner to stand up for his ‘rights,’ as he called them,” Christina Tillson observed, “was the predominant feeling of his nature.” It was a necessary form of self-defense, even of survival, in a place where so many of the elements of a functioning society were absent. There were no schools, no hospitals, few roads, only the most rudimentary arrangements for public sanitation, an erratic and unpredictable mail service, a welter of free-floating paper that passed for currency, and little or nothing in the way of law enforcement. People were guided by their own sense of their natural “rights” because in most cases they had absolutely nothing else to go on.

  Even morality and propriety were improvised. The American heartland would eventually develop a reputation for suffocating primness—and while this was a real phenomenon, it was something that developed slowly, over many decades, and only in reaction to the prevailing moral anarchy of the early years of the frontier. Excessive propriety didn’t really become the dominant mode in the river valley until around the time of the Civil War. Before then, immorality (by the rest of America’
s standards) was taken for granted. Prostitution was so common as practically to be the fundamental structural element of society. In fact, no clear line was drawn between it and marriage. In many of the logging and mining towns, the ratio of men to women was twenty to one; a woman who wanted to establish her respectability, and yet still retain her income, would arrange to marry several of her regular clients simultaneously. After the wedding ceremonies were over, she would spend nights with each of her husbands on a prearranged schedule, or else would live with them all communally. Prostitutes were considered in some army garrisons to be essential military personnel: they lived full-time in the barracks, and were listed on the payroll as seamstresses or laundresses, or sometimes were recorded as officers’ wives. The opulent brothels of St. Louis and New Orleans were famous tourist destinations; they advertised openly in newspapers, they held fundraisers with the most celebrated local politicians in attendance, and the local churches only objected to them when they scheduled fancy costume balls on the Sabbath.

  The traditional forces of morality were in perpetual disarray. Waves of preachers and missionaries came spreading through the river valley; even the most dismal logging camp could afford to build at least one church. But these clergymen routinely wasted their righteousness on hairsplitting debates over doctrinal purity. Some churches were ready to go to war over the biblical validity of river baptisms. Earthly law was just as erratically enforced. By midcentury, only St. Louis and New Orleans had professional police departments, and they were notoriously feeble, incompetent, and corrupt. About the police in New Orleans before the Civil War, the writer Henry Castellanos observed that “a more worthless and contemptible body of men never assumed the functions of office in any other city.” But New Orleans was still better off than most communities. Villages and even large towns rarely had more than one full-time sheriff or marshal. He had the authority to deputize more men in an emergency, but ordinarily he had to enforce the law on his own, by any means necessary—which primarily meant through intimidation and violence. It wasn’t uncommon for sheriffs to be career criminals or highwaymen themselves. Their employers often felt they were the only men tough enough for the job.