Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  He died accursed of God and the black, flaming vultures of hell began to encircle him on every side! His conscience woke from its long sleep, and roared like ten thousand peals of thunder! When the fiends of hell dragged him into the eternal gulf, he roared and screamed and yelled like a devil! When, while Indians, Pagans, and Mohammedans stood amazed and upbraided him, falling like Lucifer, from the meridian blaze of the Gospel and the threshold of heaven, sinking into the liquid, boiling waves of hell, the accursed sinners of Tyre and Sidon and Sodom and Gomorrah sprang to the right and left and made way for him to pass them and fall lower down even to the deepest cavern in the flaming abyss!

  The response of the crowd to this sermon, one witness wrote, “was like the roar of Niagara.”

  As the days passed, the crowds got so big and clamorous that the preacher couldn’t be heard across the whole assembly, so multiple preachers began sermonizing simultaneously at different points on the meeting grounds. At one camp meeting James Finley counted seven ministers at one time haranguing everyone in earshot—“some on stumps, others in wagons, and one … was standing on a tree which had, in falling, lodged against another.” As the preachers ranted without letup, the crowd was driven into a kind of collective ecstasy. In the night, as the torches and bonfires flared around the meeting ground and the darkness of the trackless forests closed in, people behaved as if possessed by something new and unfathomable. As Finley wrote: “A strange supernatural power seemed to pervade the entire mass of mind there collected.” Finley felt it happening to him: “My heart beat tumultuously, my knees trembled, my lip quivered, and I felt as though I must fall to the ground.” His immediate response was to run away. He found himself racing frantically off from the campground and stumbling alone deep in the forest. There, he wrote, “I strove to rally and man up my courage.” He returned to find that the scene was growing even more frenzied; that same power, the irresistible urge to fall to the ground, was overtaking hundreds in the crowd, while all around them other people were screaming.

  What Finley was witnessing was known as the falling exercise. It was a kind of violent fainting spell that would come over people at the height of their religious transports. The Reverend Barton Stone, who participated in many camp meetings, described it in his autobiography: “The falling exercise was very common among all classes, the saints and sinners of every age and of every grade, from the philosopher to the clown. The subject of this exercise would, generally, with a piercing scream, fall like a log on the floor, earth or mud, and appear as dead.” They might remain that way for minutes, or for hours; at some meetings, areas were set aside where the fallers could be laid out and not be trodden on. When they revived, they would often sob uncontrollably, or scream out for God and proclaim the glory of the gospel in what Stone described as “language almost superhuman.… I have heard them agonizing in tears and strong crying for mercy to be shown to sinners, and speaking like angels to all around.”

  Those who didn’t become fallers might instead experience the jerks. This was a convulsive movement that would begin in the arms, shoulders, or legs and then spread through the whole body. “When the head alone was affected,” Stone said, “it would be jerked backward and forward, or from side to side, so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. When the whole system was affected, I have seen the person stand in one place and jerk backward and forward in quick succession, their head nearly touching the floor behind and before.” The wandering preacher Lorenzo Dow wrote that he saw one camp meeting where they had prepared the ground ahead of time for the jerks: “Fifty to one hundred saplings left breast high … for the people to jerk by.… They had kicked up the earth as a horse stamping flies.” When people recovered from the jerks, Stone reported, they could not account for what had happened to them, “but some have told me that those were among the happiest seasons of their lives.”

  Related to the jerks was the rolling exercise. People would start by twisting their heads from side to side and rapidly nodding and snapping their heads back. Then they would hurl themselves to the ground and begin rolling over and over in the mud and dirt like dogs. Sometimes they writhed and screamed as though they were being stabbed with hot pokers. Then they would bounce up and down and shake convulsively as if they were flying apart.

  Others performed the dancing exercise, a weird, somber sequence of steps and retreats. While smiles of radiant supernatural bliss played across their faces, the dancers would keep it up for hours, sometimes very rapidly and sometimes with an unearthly slow-motion grace, until they dropped from exhaustion. There was also the laughing exercise (“The subject appeared rapturously solemn, and his laughter excited solemnity in saints and sinners”) and the singing exercise, which Stone said was “more unaccountable than anything else I ever saw. The subject in a very happy state of mind would sing most melodiously, not from the mouth or nose, but entirely in the breast, the sounds issuing thence. Such music silenced everything and attracted the attention of all. It was most heavenly.” Then there were those who would grunt and bark and howl like dogs. Others would, as Finley did, begin to run wildly, shoving people aside, trampling on the fallers, racing deep into the forest until they tripped or slid or dropped in exhaustion. Many in the crowd got roaring drunk—and the drunks at their most extreme were hard to tell apart from the fallers and the jerkers and the howlers. Others gave in to the general mood of riot and began fighting and beating each other up over nothing. But what made the camp meetings truly infamous were the orgies.

  The meetings were always intensely erotic experiences. In the pervasive atmosphere of extreme excitement, people weren’t all that careful to make a distinction between religious ecstasy and sexual hunger. The campgrounds were notoriously good places for prostitutes to do business; among the tents of the hawkers and peddlers around the margins of the camp would often be full-service brothels. But at the height of their religious transports, many campgoers would simply go off into the woods together, day or night, in complicated and impromptu combinations. According to one scandalized report from a vigilance committee, a woman at one camp meeting invited six men to meet with her in the woods at the same time. It was a standard joke that the local population invariably spiked nine months after any meeting. Those children were known throughout the river valley as camp meeting babies.

  The rumors of what went on around the margins of the grounds were what eventually led to the taming of the camp meeting tradition. Toward midcentury, vigilance committees began to police their local meetings; gradually the events became more staid and tedious. Preachers were still expected to be wildly dramatic—it was often said that a preacher who didn’t end a sermon by falling to the ground and rolling around in a fit was simply being lazy. But more and more, the congregations tended to listen with polite attention and only gave in to the falls and the other exercises at controlled and ritualized intervals. The religious authorities that dominated American churches later in the century regarded the boredom of the new camp meetings as one of their greatest moral triumphs.

  8

  The Cosmopolitan Tide

  THE FIRST STEAMBOAT CAME DOWN the Mississippi in 1811—in fact, it was swamped and almost sank in the backwash of the Great Shakes. By the end of that decade, around a dozen steamboats were on the river system. In the 1830s, the steamboat population was estimated to be around five hundred. By the time of the Civil War, it was four thousand.

  There was a simple explanation for the ascendancy of the steamboats: they could move upriver almost as easily as they did down. This gave them a decisive advantage over every other form of river transport. They rendered the old, ornate, impractical keelboats obsolete—no need for bushwhacking or cordelling when the steamboats could churn their way up against the strongest current. Keelboats disappeared from the river by the 1840s. By the 1850s, even the flatboat population was in decline. The only serious competition the steamboats had left was the great rafts and barges—they survived because the steamboats did
n’t have their bulk carrying capacity.

  The rise of the steamboats also wrecked the old river etiquette. The river had never been policed, but there had always been a logic to its traffic flow, one dictated by practical necessity: the downriver traffic ran in the channels, while the upriver traffic stuck to the shallows. The steamboats put an end to all that. They cut in and out of the channels no matter which direction they were traveling. Their pilots were notoriously indifferent to the chaos they could leave in their wake. The steamboats routinely swamped the smaller boats as they passed; often they ran right over them and blasted them to splinters. And if the boat people were injured or drowned, if their boats were destroyed and all their possessions were sunk, there was no recourse. It wasn’t uncommon for the boat people, when they saw a steamboat approaching—particularly one with a reputation as a channel hog—to bring out their rifles and take shots at the pilothouse.

  The steamboats were glamorous—everyone agreed on that. The sight of these gigantic white-tiered wedding cakes grandly gliding up the channels, pennants flying and smokestacks churning, never failed to dazzle the watchers onshore. In many towns along the river, the arrival of a steamboat was practically a public holiday. The boys of the town would be in a frenzy of excitement at the sight. They’d often paddle their canoes out to the levee, where they would caper and deliberately capsize, in hopes that the ladies and gentlemen watching from the cabin deck would laugh and throw them pennies. If the steamboat stayed docked long enough to allow the passengers to go for a stroll, the boys would pester them with souvenir trinkets, with Indian arrowheads and pieces of ancient French flintlocks they’d dug up along the riverbanks. They’d also—as George Merrick recalled—show off their exhaustive knowledge of steamboat design:

  Was she a side-wheel or stern-wheel? Was she large or small? Had she trimmings on her smokestack, or about the pilot house, and if so of what description? Had she a “Texas,” or no “Texas”? Were the outside blinds painted white, red, or green? What was the sound of her whistle and bell?

  The steamboats generally ran three kinds of routes. There were the packet boats that shuttled between two ports on a regular schedule. There were the transients that did one-shot hops to wherever their largest load of cargo was bound. And then there were the great lines that covered long swaths of the river and made countless stops along the way. A company that ran a major line might at any given time have ten or twelve boats in transit somewhere in the river system.

  Passage on a line from New Orleans to the upper valley cost around a hundred dollars, which included a bed in the cabin and three meals a day. Fifty dollars more paid for a private stateroom. (For contrast, a crewman might earn fifty dollars a month; apprentices were lucky to be paid twenty.) Poorer passengers had a cheap alternative available: they could sleep outside on deck and take their chances with the weather. Those who did so were called deckers. For around five dollars, deckers bought the right to whatever space they could find among the barrels and hogsheads and crates and the pens of lamenting livestock; they could work down the fare or pay for meals by helping the crew load or unload cargo at each stop.

  The boats were generally designed to carry about 250 passengers, plus crew and cargo. But they were routinely oversold. A boat on a popular line was likely to have at least four hundred passengers on board between the most heavily trafficked ports—fifty to a hundred people in the interior cabin and the staterooms, a couple of hundred deckers, and another hundred or so people who were making short hops and day trips. This endlessly shifting throng through the public rooms and the decks was a source of constant fascination to many travelers. Herman Melville, in his novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, described the scene:

  As among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlour men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotallers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.

  For Melville, the crowd made the steamboat the soul of the river: “Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.”

  The interior cabin was a dream of luxuriousness. It had gleaming brass railings and tasseled arras and porcelain doorknobs; there were framed oil paintings on the walls and doors; the dining rooms had sparkling chandeliers and stained-glass skylights that cast colored motes across the carpeted floors. But at close contact the glamour wore off. The cabin sometimes seemed to be occupied by livestock worse than that found on deck—as Frances Trollope wrote about the typical steamboat cabin, “I would infinitely prefer sharing the apartment of a party of well-conditioned pigs.”

  Trollope found the cabin at its worst at mealtime. The steamboats would lay on a lavish banquet at every meal, and the ladies and gentlemen would descend on it like a locust swarm, devour it loudly without a word of small talk, and then bolt from the table fifteen minutes later. Trollope remembered a “total want of any of the courtesies of the table,” and was particularly appalled by “the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses,” and “the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth.”

  Other travelers were horrified by the behavior in the public rooms. The British geologist George Featherstonhaugh recalled “noise, confusion, spitting, smoking, cursing, and swearing, drawn from the most remorseless pages of blasphemy.” The French traveler Marie de Grandfort was offended by the whistling—at the boat’s theatrical performances, the audience would express its approval with a chorus of wolf whistles, which she found inconceivably vulgar. But even worse, she thought, was another habit: whittling.

  Provided with a large or a small knife, they lay hands on the first bit of stray wood that falls in their way, or the branch of a tree, or a cane, or an umbrella left in a corner. If they are deprived of these, they attack the furniture; they pitilessly cut into counters, window sills, doors, chairs, sofas, billiard tables, church pews; in fact, nothing nothing is sacred against their knife-blades. The railings of the guards on certain boats on the Mississippi have been transformed into gigantic saws by this Yankee process.

  The one thing everybody agreed on about steamboat travel was that it was loud. The river and the passing landscape were almost uncannily silent. “The prevailing character of the Mississippi,” one traveler wrote, “is that of solemn gloom.” But the steamboat was a great puffing, cranking, grinding, hooting, rattling contraption; people in the cabin could barely sleep at night because of what another traveler described as “the constant whizzing of the steampipe, and the ceaseless rumble of the machinery and paddle-wheels.” But the noise of the passengers themselves was loud enough to drown all that out. The main deck, Melville observed, was like “some Constantinople arcade or bazaar.” The people were in a continual uproar. There were furious political arguments—Frances Trollope said that “the respective claims of Adams and Jackson to the presidency were argued wi
th more oaths and vehemence than it has ever been my lot to hear.” There were the inevitable drunken fights; there were countless touts and hawkers; there were hustlers pitching land deals and charitable trusts and patent medicines; there were singers and fiddlers and actors and buskers at their trade. To the strangers caught up in the crowd, everybody seemed perpetually boorish, rude, rowdy, exuberant, quarrelsome, and drunk.

  They all had one great recreation: gambling. The passengers played dice games and card games in endless varieties—rondo and keno and faro, roulette and chuck-a-luck, monte and euchre, rouge et noir and seven-up and old sledge. It was quite probable that at any given moment, every single steamboat on the river had at least one high-stakes game going in the interior cabin and several penny-ante games on deck.

  Most often they played poker. Poker was the trademark game of the Mississippi. It had been invented by some anonymous genius in New Orleans sometime around 1820; within the decade it had spread everywhere from the delta to the North Woods. The principal games then were draw poker and stud poker, in essentially the same forms they’re played now (although in their first versions, four kings and an ace beat a straight flush). The memory of their origin lingers to this day: the last card dealt in a hand is still called the river card, and betting on it is still “living by the river”; if you lose, it is sometimes said that you have “drowned at the river” or else simply that you have been “rivered.”