Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  The whole city was caught up in the drama. Both parties agreed to postpone the duel for a few weeks, until after the congressional election. This gave time for the suspense to build. On the appointed morning, thousands of people gathered at the levee to watch Pettis and Biddle and their seconds depart for the dueling ground. The crowds lined the streets; they shouldered each other aside in the downtown windows; they perched on the rooftops. There were cheers when the boat bearing the duelists pushed off into the river.

  The boat’s destination was a wooded islet in the Mississippi just off St. Louis. This was where Missouri gentlemen habitually fought their duels. The islet offered privacy—duels, after all, were supposed to be discreet affairs handled among gentlemen, not vulgar public spectacles. It also offered, or was at least believed to offer, a certain amount of legal cover: although dueling was rarely prosecuted, it was illegal according to both Missouri and Illinois law, and since the islet was in the river between the two states, it might technically be considered outside the jurisdiction of either. So many duels had been fought there that it had come to be known as Bloody Island.

  When Pettis and Biddle reached Bloody Island, they took their places in a clear glade screened from the shore by a stand of trees. This was the traditional dueling ground. In fact, everything up until then had been traditional—they had both been punctiliously following the Code Duello. The issuing and acceptance of the challenge had been orthodox. The terms of their encounter had also been set out and agreed to in formally correct terms: an exchange of pistol fire at a specified distance. (The modern image of a duel, where both parties begin back to back, walk away from each other, and turn and fire, seems to have largely been a Hollywood invention.) On the dueling ground, they correctly proceeded to the formal gesture of reconciliation. It was offered and refused. They were now ready to begin.

  This was the point at which the duel revealed its unusual nature—the little detail that guaranteed it would become famous. In the course of accepting the challenge, Biddle had insisted that they fight not at ten or twenty paces, as was generally accepted as appropriate, but at five paces. He claimed that it was necessary because of his poor eyesight. That was probably a lie; he was a frequent and expert duelist and nobody had ever noticed anything wrong with his eyes. It’s more likely that he was trying to set a preposterous condition on the duel so as to panic Pettis into chickening out. But if it was a bluff, it didn’t work. Pettis had accepted the terms. This meant that when the two men raised their pistols to fire, the barrels were close enough to touch.

  In the European tradition, there had always been a certain tacit understanding that the duelists didn’t actually have to try to kill each other. The point was simply to demonstrate that a gentleman had the courage to die for his honor if he had to. Once that was established, the offending party could apologize and the offended party could accept, without either one looking like a coward. The gentlemen of the river valley scorned all this as craven. If two gentlemen were going to fight a duel at all, they were going to do it for real. So nobody had tried to dissuade Biddle and Pettis from carrying out their absurd duel, even though the terms amounted to mutual suicide. Their seconds had in fact discreetly approached another gentleman, the most famous gentleman in the territory, Senator Thomas Hart Benton (great-uncle of the painter)—the only man who could have forced the two to call it off or at least modify its terms through the sheer authority of his prestige. But Benton wholeheartedly approved. He is reported to have said, “There will be no child’s play in the meeting.”

  So the two men faced each other. There was a count of three, and they fired simultaneously. As Pettis fired, he ducked into a crouch—possibly he was panicking in the end, or else he might have come up with this maneuver as a clever last-ditch gimmick to keep himself from being killed. In any case, it was useless. He was shot in the chest, and the shot passed clear through his body. Meanwhile, his shot struck Biddle in the stomach.

  Before they were carried away from the dueling ground, each man forgave the other. That was also traditional—not only did it reassert their honor, but it also served as an additional hedge in case either man survived to be charged with murder. But the precaution turned out to be unnecessary. They barely lingered on for a few days; each died in horrible agony. Their friends all came by to console and praise them. Pettis was particularly concerned that his last-second crouch would be considered cowardly. He was comforted when everyone assured him that his honor was intact. Senator Benton said they were “the bravest of the brave.” Newspapers eulogized their willingness to put death before dishonor. Pettis’s funeral was later said to have drawn the largest crowd in St. Louis’s history.

  Dueling wasn’t something that happened only between enemies. Anywhere in the valley, it was seen as perfectly appropriate between close friends. This is the way it played out in the life of the famous Mississippi attorney and politician Henry Stuart Foote. One of his lifelong friends was a fellow attorney, the celebrated prosecutor S. S. Prentiss. They were, Foote writes, friendly rivals in court and good companions in their off-hours for decades—except, of course, for those times when they tried to kill each other.

  Their duels arose because of their professional competitiveness. Both men were lawyers of the classic school: that is, they were known as much for their showmanship as for their jurisprudence. The gallery of the courtroom in Vicksburg was always packed when they gave their closing arguments. With good reason: this was, after all, an age where public speakers of all sorts—preachers, attorneys, politicians, medicine men—were expected to offer as many rhetorical thrills as a Shakespearean actor. Foote and Prentiss always delivered.

  One time it got out of hand. They found themselves on opposite sides in a murder trial. During the trial there was a moment where Foote thought Prentiss had impugned him unnecessarily. In his memoirs, Foote doesn’t spell out exactly what Prentiss said—evidently it was some needling personal witticism made during an exchange of objections. Foote did say that he felt the insult “had been sufficiently retaliated by me at the time.” But when he thought it over later, the feeling of sufficiency wore off. After the trial ended, he challenged Prentiss to a duel.

  It was a mistake, he admitted in his memoirs: Prentiss was a much better shot than he was. They fought with pistols at dawn in a meadow outside of Vicksburg. Foote shot to kill, but he missed; Prentiss’s shot left Foote badly wounded in the shoulder. Foote as the aggrieved party declared that his honor was now satisfied. Even before they’d left the dueling ground to find a doctor, they had followed the code and made up their quarrel. They swore to each other that they were friends again for life.

  A few weeks later, their reconciliation came undone. According to Foote, he had heard that Prentiss’s friends were passing around some kind of nasty gossip about the duel. He doesn’t say what the gossip was exactly—only that they “spoke disparagingly of my conduct on the occasion.” Foote was enraged, and wrote Prentiss a stiff note “demanding whether he had given his sanction to this act of injustice.” Prentiss immediately wrote back to say that he hadn’t. Probably this should have satisfied Foote, but he was so rankled by the perceived slight to his reputation that he published the two letters. Prentiss then publicly claimed to have been insulted by the whole exchange: “He placed such an interpretation upon my letter to him as gave him much offense,” Foote recalled. “He proposed reopening the fight, which we did on exceedingly desperate terms.”

  It sounds like some sort of schoolyard squabble, not the behavior of two of the most respected attorneys in the Mississippi valley. And yet they were now bound by honor to return to their dueling ground. In the second duel, Foote missed again. Prentiss shot him in the hip. The wound was so bad that Foote almost died. He took months to recuperate; he was still on crutches when he came into the courtroom for the first time afterward to contend with Prentiss again.

  They met over the case of one of the most notorious thieves and murderers in the river valley. Prentiss was pr
osecuting; Foote was defending pro bono—he may have volunteered just to spite Prentiss. The defendant was a man named Alonzo Phelps. Phelps was a mysterious and sinister figure: a highwayman who had long been haunting the wilderness along the river north of Vicksburg. This was inaccessible country, a region of steep, lushly overgrown hills and countless winding ravines; even locals got lost in it. Despite frequent manhunts by large groups of regulators, Phelps had remained hidden in its depths for more than a decade. It was said that he never set foot in a human habitation and lived off squirrels and other small animals caught and eaten raw—because a campfire would have given away his position.

  Phelps was a rare sort of highwayman: he almost always let his victims go alive. He reserved his murderous rage for the vigilance committees and the regulators. He is supposed to have killed eight regulators who tried to bring him in. He was also notorious for his stream of abusive and threatening letters to members of the local vigilance committees, demanding that they leave him alone. No one knew how the letters were sent—they would simply show up in mailboxes out of thin air. One of Vicksburg’s leading committee members got a long succession of these letters, and they grew to be so menacing that he at last hired, on his own dime, an unusually large band of regulators and trackers to find and bring in Phelps, no matter what the cost. It took them weeks of systematic searching, but they finally cornered him in the remotest interior of the wilderness region, and they brought him into Vicksburg in chains.

  At his trial the courtroom was packed. Everybody wanted to see the strange apparition who had terrorized them for so long. Seated in the courtroom under armed guard, Phelps proved to be tall, handsome, tanned, and muscular; but he had peculiar, snake-curling bloodred hair and a perpetually ferocious expression. Foote found him a brilliant man, “a ripe and accurate scholar,” well versed in classical literature, which he read in the original—“when taken prisoner,” Foote wrote, “a few weeks subsequent to the perpetration of his last murder, [he] had, as I personally know, a much-worn pocket-copy of Horace in his possession.”

  Prentiss presented an ironclad case at the trial. In his summation he spoke at great length, conjuring up Phelps’s decade of terror with his grandest sallies of vividness, scorn, and impassioned eloquence. (At one point he called Phelps “the Rob Roy of the Mississippi.”) The longer Prentiss went on, the more Phelps’s face swelled and empurpled into a mask of rage. Foote recalled:

  Seeming presently to grow desperate, he bent forward a little and whispered in my ear: “Tell me whether I stand any chance of acquittal, and tell me frankly; for if my case is hopeless, I will snatch a gun from the guard nearest me and send Mr. Prentiss to hell before I shall myself go there.”

  It was a bad moment for Foote. He later wrote, “Never was I more embarrassed in my life.” What would happen if he told Phelps the truth—that conviction was an absolute certainty? Phelps would grab for the gun, Prentiss would most likely be killed, and Phelps would then be shot dead by the guards. But was that such a bad outcome? Foote would have had his revenge on Prentiss for the two duels without lifting a finger. And yet, Foote hesitated. “If he should slay him, he would deprive of life one whom I could not help loving and admiring much, despite the unkind relations then existing between us.” Then, too, there was the question of whether he could get away with it: “Were Prentiss assassinated by the hands of this fiendish ruffian, immediately, too, after this whispering intercourse with me, who, of all that vast crowd, would hold me guiltless?” The conclusion was inevitable.

  I may have been wrong, but frankness constrains me to confess that I whispered back to Phelps, “you are not in the least danger; we shall have no difficulty whatever in preventing your conviction, and shall presently introduce a motion for a new trial, or in arrest of judgment, which will save you from all further annoyance.”

  “I may have been wrong”—meaning, presumably, that he was troubled by the thought that he lied to his client. Or else he meant that he still regretted not telling Phelps to go ahead and damn the consequences.

  In any case, Phelps acquiesced and did nothing. He remained placid as the jury found him guilty on all counts and the judge sentenced him to death. He didn’t seem to resent that Foote had lied to him, even after (as Foote himself knew perfectly well would happen) the motions for a suspended sentence and a new trial went nowhere. He went to prison without a fuss and spent his time before his execution working furiously on his memoirs.

  Just before Phelps was scheduled to be hanged, he wrote to the governor asking for a reprieve. He didn’t want a full pardon; he was still only midway through his memoirs and he needed a couple of weeks more to finish them. The request was denied. Phelps made no complaint when he heard the news; he simply returned to his work at an even more frantic speed. Foote visited him at the end of that day and guessed that by dinnertime he’d written thirty more pages.

  That same evening, after Foote left, Phelps had two visitors: the jailer and a priest. During their visit, Phelps revealed another way he’d been passing his time. He’d been working out a method for sawing through his manacles.

  He abruptly reared up from his bench and threw the chains aside. The priest immediately bolted. Phelps advanced on the jailer and beat him unconscious with a makeshift weapon: a heavy lead inkwell (on loan from Foote) that he’d wrapped in a sock. Then he armed himself with the jailer’s knife and pistol. He picked up the jailer’s unconscious body, held the knife to his throat, and started dragging him toward the prison gate.

  The noise of the fight had caused a commotion in the prison yard. But everyone gave way when they saw Phelps emerge from the cell with his hostage; even the toughest of the other prisoners were intimidated by Phelps. The guards didn’t hesitate to throw open the gates. A crowd had gathered outside—some had been waiting for the hanging, and others were running up to find out what the noise was about. They all fell back as Phelps advanced from the yard into the wide evening air.

  The prison stood at the edge of a bluff where a steep grassy slope descended toward the Mississippi. Phelps started down the slope while the crowd followed warily at a distance. Then somebody threw a rock at Phelps’s back. It glanced off him without slowing him down. More rocks followed; then brickbats, bottles, and shards of wood. Phelps lumbered on silently. About midway down the slope, one of the brickbats finally staggered him. He let his hostage sag limply to the ground and turned around to face the crowd. The sheriff was cautiously coming toward him with pistols drawn. Phelps lowered his hands and told him to fire. The sheriff killed him with one shot.

  Afterward Phelps’s unfinished memoir was turned over to Foote. It contained confessions to several murders Phelps hadn’t yet been suspected of committing, as well as an elaborate defense of his criminal career. It built up to a long and furious denunciation of slavery and a call for all slaves to be emancipated immediately. If this was not done, Phelps wrote, he was debating whether he should take direct action himself. Foote summarized: “He mentions, in his rude and coarse phraseology, his inclination to break forth from the prison in which he was confined, for the purpose of bringing about an insurrection of the slaves. He discusses the expedience of the measure very freely; but finally relinquishes the project, from considerations of humanity.”

  Phelps’s manuscript was never published. In Foote’s own memoirs, written after the Civil War, he was vague about what happened to it. At one point he claims he no longer had it because he did send it out for publication, but this may be his memory failing him, because there’s no record now of such a book existing. Another passage implies that he destroyed it. This is more likely. Not only was Phelps’s memoir unpublishable—publicly advocating abolition was a felony in Mississippi—but if Foote had been found in possession of such an incendiary manuscript, it’s likely he himself would have gone to prison.

  The Phelps incident did have one positive consequence for Foote. After it was over, he and Prentiss reconciled. They remained close friends for another fifteen years, u
ntil Prentiss’s death. They never fought another duel—at least not with each other. Prentiss had a long career as a prosecutor. Foote went into politics: he became governor of Mississippi and a U.S. senator. He was one of the authors of the Compromise of 1850, legislating the spread of slavery into the new states of the Union, which was sometimes said to have staved off for a decade the outbreak of the Civil War.

  7

  The Roar of Niagara

  THE MOST CELEBRATED PHRASE to describe the typical river man was “half horse, half alligator.” There’s no record of who coined the phrase or who was first called it—sooner or later it was used about every prominent man on the river, up to and including Abraham Lincoln. But the figure it was most associated with was a voyageur named Mike Fink. Stories about Mike Fink were told all over the valley. He was famous for what one writer described as “his wild freaks and daredevil sprees.” “He war,” as one story in frontier dialect put it, “a helliferocious fellow, and made an awful fine shot.… There ar’nt a man from Pittsburgh to New Orleans but what’s heard of Mike Fink, and there aint a boatman on the river, to this day, but what strives to imitate him.”

  The Mike Fink stories were a kind of primordial example of literary realism. At least, they weren’t set in the absurdist universe where most tall tales unfold; they took place in what was recognizably the real Mississippi River valley, the world of keelboats and flatboats, of frontiersmen and Native Americans, of bluffs and points and chutes and levees. The only fantastic element in them was Fink himself. In the archetypical Fink story, he was floating down the Mississippi in a keelboat when he picked up his rifle for no reason at all and shot at somebody onshore. His target might be an Indian brave on a hilltop, or a slave boy carrying a bucket along a plantation road. In an instant, the victim would have his earlobe sliced off by the bullet, or a spur on his heel blasted away with surgical precision. Fink’s boat glided on; before the victim or the bystanders could react, Fink was around the river bend, leaving nothing behind but the sound of his laughter.