by Lee Sandlin
But the gamblers didn’t need poker or any other formal game. They’d bet on anything at all. On the steamboats, they’d bet on the speed of their passage, and the afternoon’s weather, and the depth of the river bottom at the next sounding. In the port towns, they’d stagger off roaring drunk to hit up the casinos and gambling houses; if they couldn’t find a good game, they’d make any bet they could with a local, even a footrace to the end of the levee. One professional gambler, George Devol, bet a hundred dollars once on whether a fish for sale in a New Orleans market was a catfish or a pike.
They’d bet on anything; they cheated at everything. The professional gamblers routinely used marked cards, either ones they’d marked themselves or decks they’d bought commercially (these were blandly advertised as “advantage decks”), and they had dozens of dizzying ways of stacking clean decks (it was then known as stocking a deck). The gamblers’ fancy suits were as tricky as a magician’s false-bottomed box. There were whole decks concealed in the sleeves and vests, fanned out in sequence and memorized so that the necessary card could be discreetly fetched to fill a hand. The gamblers also wore mirrored rings and jewels, and they took their snuff from mirrored snuffboxes; they flashed and twinkled and glittered as they played, and every stray reflection off a silver pitcher or a glass behind the bar gave them a glimpse of their opponents’ cards.
When they weren’t cheating, they were conning. The presence of con men on every steamboat was a given: guidebooks even warned tourists to beware of any stranger striking up a conversation, because it was almost certainly going to be a con. There were con men soliciting subscriptions to orphanages and schools; there were hustlers trading in land claims and in benefits for resettled Native Americans. But probably the most vigorous and inventive of the hustlers were the medicine men. They had an endless array of products for sale: Clark’s Famous Anti-Bilious Pills, Great Worm Lozenges, Carmody’s Tonic Pills, Radway’s Ready Relief for Toothache, Wolcott’s Instant Pain Annihilator, Derby Condition Powder, Piso’s Cure for Consumption, and (a particular favorite in New Orleans) Dr. Vandeveer’s Medicated Gin and Genuine Scheedam Schnapps, which was advertised as “a wholesome beverage, and an invaluable family medicine, particularly beneficial in all cases of Dysentery, Dyspepsia, Diarrhea, Rhumatism, Gout and Fever.” It was, the bottle said, “peculiarly adapted to the use of females and children.” As a satirical poem of the time put it:
For us, new countries are the best,
Hence we perch down in this far West;
This is, despite of your attacks,
A famous stamping ground of quacks.
The poem was “Letter from a Thompsonian Doctor” by James M’Chonochie. Thompsonian doctors—the steam doctors—were a big presence on the river. On the steamboats they couldn’t hustle their famous saunas and hot baths; instead they had whole traveling stores of herbal remedies. Their placards read, “If you wish genuine poisons, call at a Genuine Mineral Drug Store; but if you wish genuine Botanic Medicine, call at a genuine Anti-Poisoning Botanic Drug Store.” Since orthodox doctors actually were feeding people poisons then (primarily arsenic and mercury), the Thompsonians had a point; in fact, they would have been the most valuable health providers on the frontier if their treatments had only worked. Unfortunately what they were selling were random herbal mixtures, in vials labeled with cryptic numbers, that left people either untreated or worse off than before. Their general efficacy was all too justly summed up by M’Chonochie:
Our numbers Six, and One Two Three,
Are drugs of sovereign potency,
They cure complaints of every name—
At least, we say so—’tis the same;
The grave will not disgorge its dead
To chase our slumbers from our bed.
The con men, of whatever persuasion, generally called themselves sharpers; everybody else they called suckers and greenhorns—there was no greater insult on the river than to refer to somebody as green. The sharpers were so plentiful that they had to work out a quick-and-dirty way of sorting out who was who, so they didn’t waste time trying to con each other. That was how they came to use a kind of shorthand code, a password; when they met a stranger on deck, they’d immediately ask, in a tone of idle curiosity:
“Do you live on the river?”
Among the landsmen, the talk wasn’t of sharpers and greenhorns but of green thumbs and black thumbs. The green thumbs were the farmers and the builders, the ones who were actually doing the work of planting and cultivating and civilizing the valley; the black thumbs were the river people. But not just the boatmen and the voyageurs and the gamblers: the black thumbs were anybody who made their money by way of the river, because on the river there was no honest business. It was a place, one travel writer observed, where “the very order of civilized society was reversed, and a disorganization of principle, of men and manners, prevailed, to which, or approaching to which, I had never seen a parallel in the whole of my former experience.”
The rule in any commercial transaction was that each party was out to cheat the other. People routinely lied and stole with impunity; they took for granted that commerce was indistinguishable from swindling. False weights, ersatz or fraudulent goods, and bait-and-switch sales were the norm. The first thing that apprentices learned on steamboats was how to judge the true weight of a load of wood, because the employees of every wood yard along the river would do everything possible to cheat the steamboats of their fuel. They were particularly fond of hollowing out the interior of a woodpile (which was sold by volume) and hoping the trick wasn’t discovered until the boat had pulled back into the river again.
The phantasmal nature of business on the river was best reflected in the money used to conduct it. Honest money was the major issue of the river economy. The only currency generally trusted was specie—the gold and silver coinage of the U.S. Mint. But specie was a rare commodity, partly because people tended to hoard it, but also because the valley’s economy was growing so fast that the demand for coin tremendously exceeded the supply. Without specie, most transactions involved barter or some equally rare commodity—coffee or salt, for instance, which were both so scarce in the upper valley that they were more prized than gold.
As a last resort, people could use the paper currency issued by private banks. This was known as commercial money, and it came in a rainbow of dubious and peculiar forms. There were bills known as greenbacks and redbacks and bluebacks, blue pup and red horse, rag tag and stump tail. People across the valley skirmished through deals involving paper money with the same fantastic ingenuity shown by the arbitrageurs and derivatives traders of the modern world. Word might come into a river town by way of a steamboat that a particularly well-known form of commercial money was now trading at substantially below face value in New Orleans or St. Louis; all over town, people holding it would immediately rush to spend it, preferably at stores where the clerks hadn’t yet heard the news. But if they got hold of specie, they would keep it until they could make a deal to sell it. Specie routinely traded for much higher than face.
Knowing what varieties of money could be trusted was an unending hassle. Paper issued by banks of uncertain solvency or legality was generally called wildcat money. It was a major challenge to avoid taking wildcat money—or, if you had it, to lay it off on somebody else as fast as possible. Meanwhile, the paper from known and respected banks was rated almost as highly as specie. This naturally led to another problem: it spawned hordes of counterfeits. Counterfeiting came to be regarded on the river as a particularly heinous crime. Anybody suspected of passing counterfeit money was immediately arrested, brought before a lynching court, and flogged; anybody found in possession of blank paper that could possibly be used to print fakes was branded; anybody who had plates etched with currency patterns would most likely be put to death.
The long-range movement of the steamboats greatly facilitated the spread of wildcat and counterfeit currency, adding to the constant tension between the river and the shor
e. By midcentury, periodicals known as detectors had sprung up to help businessmen on both sides assess the legitimacy of the paper currently in circulation and identify the telltale marks of known counterfeits. The most trusted detector on the river was The Western Bank Note Reporter and Counterfeit Detector, a weekly periodical published in St. Louis and distributed by steamboat. Every store and business in the large towns had a subscription; well-prepared traveling businessmen invariably brought a copy along to potential sales. Sooner or later all transactions would come down to a long, suspicious session of scrutiny and negotiation and reconsultation with the current issue of the detector, as the notes were passed around, examined, questioned, argued about, and fought over.
Melville describes such a scene in The Confidence-Man. Two characters, with the aid of a detector, exhaustively inspect something that “looks to be a three-dollar bill on the Vicksburgh Trust and Insurance Banking Company.” As they argue, the elusiveness of the bill in front of them starts to make the whole concept of the genuine seem like a will-o’-the-wisp:
“The Detector says, among fifty other things, that, if a good bill, it must have, thickened here and there into the substance of the paper, little wavy spots of red; and it says they must have a kind of silky feel, being made by the lint of a red silk handkerchief stirred up in the papermaker’s vat—the paper being made to order for the company.”
“Well, and is—”
“Stay. But then it adds, that sign is not always to be relied on; for some good bills get so worn, the red marks get rubbed out. And that’s the case with my bill here—see how old it is—or else it’s a counterfeit, or else—I don’t see right—or else—dear, dear me—I don’t know what else to think.” … “Stay, now, here’s another sign. It says that, if the bill is good, it must have in one corner, mixed in with the vignette, the figure of a goose, very small, indeed, all but microscopic; and, for added precaution, like the figure of Napoleon outlined by the tree, not observable, even if magnified, unless the attention is directed to it. Now, pore over it as I will, I can’t see this goose.”
“Can’t see the goose? why, I can; and a famous goose it is.” …
“Then throw that Detector away, I say again; it only makes you purblind; don’t you see what a wild-goose chase it has led you? The bill is good. Throw the Detector away.”
9
A Pile of Shavings
WHEN TRAVELERS ARRIVED at the Mississippi by way of the Gulf of Mexico, the first sign of human habitation they came to was a town of sorts known as the Balize. It was a ramshackle cluster of half-collapsed wooden shanties and lean-tos standing knee-deep in the brackish water of the estuary and linked by a jerry-rigged tangle of rotting piers and pontoons. It served as a station for the river pilots who would take over the wheel of the tall ships for the last tricky leg of their journey through the delta upriver to New Orleans. The population consisted of around a hundred pilots, maybe fifty or so of their wives and children, and twenty or thirty prostitutes. Frances Trollope called it “by far the most miserable station that I ever saw made the dwelling of man.”
There were better places ahead. Early in the nineteenth century St. Louis was a vision of loveliness: a small cluster of ornate stucco buildings in the Spanish and French styles standing on a high bluff at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri. There were towns like Alexandria and Keokuk, Davenport and Dubuque—towns like collections of white clapboard dollhouses, with skylines of spiky church steeples and picturesque scatterings of steamboats and flatboats bobbing on the blue waters below. Their streets were laid out in neat checkerboards. Their business districts had brick storefronts. Many residences had windows of glass—a reliable mark of middle-class prosperity (the basic frontier cabin window was a sheet of parchment paper rubbed with bear grease to make it translucent). Some towns even had statues of their founders in their public squares.
But such places were never the norm. The average river town, as seen from the deck of a steamboat, was a graceless, muddy, purely functional place—no more than a huddle of shoddy buildings knocked together out of the local lumber, standing at one of the innumerable river junctions. It served as a supply depot or a transshipment point for the river traffic, and it was inevitably dominated by a row of hulking warehouses along the levee. The only retail business of note was a general store, where boatmen could stock up on basic supplies—dried meats, beans, flour and sugar, bolts of coarse fabric, tubs of lye soap—and which always stank from the open barrels of vinegar and kerosene. Behind the levee, on the straggling backstreets, there was inevitably a bunch of saloons, and up the back stairs behind any one of them was certain to be a brothel.
Travelers found these places wearying and depressing. “I thought all the little towns and villages we passed,” Frances Trollope wrote of her steamboat trip upriver, “wretched-looking in the extreme.” They seemed to merge into one enormous shantytown that stretched all the way from the delta to St. Louis and beyond. They were dreary, anonymous, filthy, and disease-ridden—and they were firetraps.
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—the only book that any literate person in the river valley was sure to have read—is about a man’s desperate search for a town where the buildings are fireproof. Most readers take this as an allegory, and with good reason: the hero is named Christian, he lives in the City of Destruction, and the fireproof refuge he ultimately finds is the Celestial City. But the readers on the Mississippi felt Christian’s dilemma on a much more visceral level. Their towns really were at the edge of fiery ruin; the threat of death in a blazing inferno was a daily terror. But there was no journeying to a safer place. The city that wouldn’t burn was as remote as heaven.
Every building in the average river town was made of wood; stone and brick construction didn’t become common until much later in the century. The buildings were heaped on top of each other with little planning and were built to no particular standard. The result was a maze of shanties set at irregular and unpredictable angles, strewn with spidery staircases and connected by rickety walkways. The heating, when there was any, was provided by woodstoves with spindly flues that exhaled still-glowing cinders that would fall into neighboring yards and blow through nearby windows. One unlucky spark and in moments the whole edifice was in flames.
There were so many fires in the river towns that people refused to believe they could have an innocent explanation. Stories were constantly circulating about mysterious gangs of incendiaries at work in the river valley who were setting the fires for some occult purpose of their own. The most common theory, particularly in the years leading up to the Civil War, was that they were disgruntled slaves and infiltrating abolitionists trying to foment a revolution. But these gangs proved to be elusive spirits—never caught, never even identified. Only once did the people of Natchez corner somebody they believed to be a member: a local loudmouth who’d been heard offering to bet that a particular downtown block would be on fire within a week. The man was almost put to death. But the townspeople concluded at the last minute that he wasn’t an incendiary at all, merely a drunken fool.
What made the threat of fires particularly nightmarish was the absence of professional firemen. Towns had volunteer night watches, and all able-bodied men were required by local ordinance to respond whenever the night watch raised the alarm. Some towns did have fire engines—horse-drawn wagons equipped with ladders and buckets and hand pumps. But these rarely went to good use. After a major fire in St. Louis in 1825, a newspaper report found “buckets broken and without handles, and not half enough of these; the engines unfit for service; everyone gaping at the fire instead of forming a line to convey water.”
St. Louis eventually became the first city on the river to hire and train a professional fire department. The local authorities had no choice. Fires were becoming a major threat to the city’s survival. By the 1840s St. Louis was the largest city in the American interior: a maze of wood shanties and factories, infamous for the inferno of heat on its streets in
the summer and the storms of fiery cinders blown down from the smokestacks that blackened the snow all winter. Frederick Marryat wrote that St. Louis “approaches the nearest to the Black Hole of Calcutta of any city that I have sojourned in.” Some longtime residents called it “the city built above Hell.”
But it was also a rich and progressive city; some boosters claimed that it would inevitably replace Washington, D.C., as the capital of the new American empire. It was particularly renowned for its levee, a long promenade where more than a hundred steamboats arrived and departed each day. On May 17, 1849, a small fire broke out at the levee’s north end, on a steamboat called the White Cloud. The night watch spotted it almost immediately. But by then it was already too late. The steamboat was built entirely of white pine, and, as the official history of the St. Louis Fire Department later noted, once on fire anything made of white pine “is as impossible to save as a pile of shavings.”
There was barely even a need for the night watch to sound the alarm: the boat burned so fiercely that the glare could be seen all over the city. The fire department hurtled to the docks in their nine fire engines. They found that there was little they could do. The fire had already reached the White Cloud’s waterline and the boat was a dead loss. But that was not the end of it. The moorings burned through, and the burning wreck drifted downriver with the current and began bumping against the other steamboats lined up along the levee. They, too, caught fire; their moorings also burned, and they were set loose. They in turn started fires on other boats, and soon there were twenty-three steamboats burning.