Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  The fires reached the Sultana’s waterline and began to gutter out. This made those in the water more frantic. As long as the boat had been burning, the glare cast across the water had faintly illuminated the forests along the shores and had given the swimmers a target to aim at, but once the flames vanished, they were lost in complete darkness. One survivor said mildly, “We could not tell which way to go and it was a very lonesome place to be in.” Some of the survivors managed to thrash and lunge their way out of the current into the shallows and strike out toward what they thought was dry land—only to find when they arrived that the banks were overrun and the waters stretched on out of sight. Here and there were what looked like clumps of gnarled bushes poking above the river surface, and the swimmers grabbed on to them gratefully—but when they pushed their feet down into the water, feeling for solid ground, they found only more of the shapeless river murk: the bushes they were clinging to were treetops. Other swimmers managed to bump into the rooftops of farmhouses and drag themselves out of the water; some were able to break through the roofs into the attics, where they collapsed in exhaustion onto the sacks and barrels stored there. Still others did at last succeed in reaching firm land, only to be faced with a danger as bad as what they’d just escaped. The banks north of Memphis were being patrolled by Union troops who had no idea what had happened to the Sultana; when the men began straggling ashore, some of the patrols thought they were Confederate infiltrators and began firing at them.

  The majority of those still alive, together with the corpses and the countless clusters of debris, were being carried downriver. Among the living a strange new terror was spreading. Some of them couldn’t put a name to it. Chester Berry, who’d caught hold of a snag in the river, recalled: “I was out of my head and imagined that some terrible danger threatened me”—some danger, that is, worse than what he was currently going through. But several of the survivors were able to be more specific: they were tormented by the fear that, as they were thrashing through the water, they would be attacked by the Sultana’s pet alligator. “I guess everyone that was on the ‘Sultana’ knew something about the monstrous alligator that was on the boat,” remembered one soldier, Ben G. Davis. “It was nine and one-half feet long. While the boat was burning the alligator troubled me almost as much as the fire.” Another, Ira B. Horner, wrote: “Although I felt that I would not drown at the same time I did not feel comfortable from the fact that there was an alligator seven and one-half feet long keeping me company.” Some soldiers became convinced that they had actually gotten a glimpse of the alligator, and they were driven into a suicidal panic. One survivor recalled how a horse swimming downstream rested his nose on a log that several men were clinging to; the men mistook this dim, snorting silhouette for the alligator and all dived away into the water.

  As it happened, the fear of the alligator was misplaced. During the worst of the fire, a soldier named William Lugenbeal had been searching belowdecks for something he could throw overboard; when he’d found that the rooms had all been stripped already—“every loose board, door, window and shutter was taken to swim on”—he’d thought of the crate the alligator was kept in. It was exactly the right size and shape for a lifeboat. The only problem was the alligator itself—but Lugenbeal made quick work of that: “I got [the crate] out of the closet and took him out and ran the bayonet through him three times.” Then he lugged the crate to the bow, threw it overboard, and jumped in after it. He grabbed hold of it once it bobbed back to the surface, and he began kicking his way out of the mêlée around the wreck. He remembered: “When a man would get close enough I would kick him off, then turn quick as I could and kick someone else to keep them from getting hold of me. They would call out ‘don’t kick, for I am drowning,’ but if they had got hold of me we would both have drowned.”

  By then hundreds of people were drowning. Of those who were alive when they’d gone into the water, many were unconscious or in shock or had been scalded by the blast and were too disoriented to understand what was happening; some were so badly injured they were helpless; some simply couldn’t swim. But most were succumbing to hypothermia. The river had been flooded by meltwater from its northern tributaries and it was deadly cold. Some were surviving only by clinging desperately to the bodies of drowned horses and mules, because they still had some lingering warmth. Others were bunching themselves together into tight clusters, which gradually fell apart as their strength weakened and some of them helplessly let go. The current was irresistibly pulling everyone away from each other. Their voices grew weaker and more remote, and gradually fell silent.

  The river swept them onward into pitch darkness. The sky was starless, and rain was falling in thin, hissing cascades. Then in the distance ahead a hazy glow appeared. It was Memphis, looming on its high bluff through the drizzle and the river mist. As the current carried them closer, the men began shouting and screaming for help. They wailed and banged their shards of driftwood and flotsam together, and they shrieked at the top of their lungs. They were terrified that they’d be whisked past the city and back out into the night again. Many of them sobbed with relief when they heard the city answer.

  Boat whistles and church bells were ringing out from the riverfront. The boat city off the levee was breaking up and putting out into the water: steamboats, packet boats, flatboats, rafts, and canoes. Elsewhere up and down the river were voyageurs and raftsmen who had seen the pillar of fire and smoke rising above the hills, and as the first gray of the dawn light spread along the river, they, too, set out to look for survivors.

  Over the course of the next several hours, the rescuers took seven hundred people alive out of the river. They were found everywhere, clinging to flotsam, perched on drowned treetops, and waving from half-submerged farmhouse roofs—wounded, injured, scalded, exhausted, corpse-blue with hypothermia. One man was rescued ten miles downriver from Memphis. A rescuer remembered, “We found men almost dead, hanging to the trees about two miles out into the river, and among those that I rescued was one man so badly scalded that when I took hold of his arms to help him into the boat the skin and flesh came off his arms like a cooked beet.” One survivor, Perry S. Summerville, remembered that when he was taken out of the water, he couldn’t stand up; he was wounded, he was scalded, and he was spitting up blood. “Was rescued at Memphis,” he wrote, “by a colored man who picked me up in a canoe and took me to a boat to get warm. After I had been there a few minutes a young man was brought in who was so badly scalded that his skin slipped off from the shoulders to the hands.” The scalded man paced around the room, unable to sit still or lie down, before he finally collapsed and died.

  About two hundred of the rescued died over the next few days—of their injuries, of exposure, or of the medical care they received after they’d been brought ashore. (The only treatment available then for severe burns, for example, was to cover them in oil and flour and wrap them in gauze.) The rest of the survivors, some five hundred of them, left Memphis just as soon as they were able to travel. They got aboard other steamboats—it was still the quickest way out of the South. Many of them, once they reached Cairo, stepped onto the docks and declared that they would never set foot on a boat again.

  From Cairo they caught trains bound north and east. The farther away from the river they got, the less anyone cared about the Sultana. Its loss was barely mentioned in the Eastern newspapers. This was the worst naval disaster in American history (more people died on the Sultana than would die on the Titanic), but there was a general sense back east that it was, after all, just another sunken frontier steamboat. And besides, everyone was still in mourning for Lincoln. In town after town, the returning veterans arrived expecting to find cheering crowds and celebratory storms of red, white, and blue bunting but instead discovered nothing but somber-faced citizens and silent streets hung with long, listless streamers of black crêpe.

  No final count was ever established of the lives lost. Only a few of the dead were recovered; the rest were carried off by the
river. A couple of days after the explosion, a gunboat coming upriver was met by a drifting mass of what the crew assumed to be fallen trees: as they got closer, they saw that it was a flotilla of hundreds of bodies. The gunboat had to be deliberately beached on a sandbar to avoid running them over. No attempt was made to collect them; they were permitted to glide past untouched, and soon vanished around a river bend. They ended up the way the river’s dead always did—buried in the river mud or devoured by the alligators and the other carrion eaters of the lower valley.

  The wreck of the Sultana was sunk about twenty feet down in a channel along the Arkansas shore, around seven miles north of Memphis. Over the next few years, the river shifted course, and the channel was emptied of its current. The great banks caved in, and the bottom was covered over by wash after wash of mud and silt deposited from upstream. Eventually the last traces of the channel and its islets were swallowed up. The soil grew rooted with meadow grasses and wildflowers and trees; then the land was cleared and cultivated, and the Sultana rested deep beneath the soybean fields of Arkansas.

  PART FIVE

  THE GOOD AND THE THOUGHTLESS

  16

  The Last of the Floating Life

  IN 1882, MARK TWAIN TOOK A steamboat ride on the Mississippi. There would have been nothing unusual about such a trip in the old days—Twain had once been a steamboat pilot and had made countless runs up and down the river. But that had been before the war; now he was middle-aged and the celebrated author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and this was the first time he’d been on the river in more than twenty years.

  He began at St Louis. The first sight of the famous levee came as a shock. The warehouses were all shuttered; the docks were deserted; where there had been a hundred packed steamboats arriving and departing each day there were now only a lingering handful. “This was melancholy, this was woful,” he wrote. “Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves.… Here was desolation, indeed.”

  When he asked the few remaining crews what had happened, they all looked straight up. They weren’t gazing at the heavens; they were glaring at the new bridge. “The mighty bridge, stretching along over our heads,” Twain wrote, “had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation.” It was the first bridge across the lower river: its construction had begun after the war and had taken seven years to complete. It was being hailed all over the world as one of the wonders of the modern age—and it had ruined the steamboat business. With the lower river successfully spanned, the railroad networks on opposite sides were finally connected, and rail had become a safe, quick, and reliable alternative to the steamboats. There was really no reason any longer for the river to be used for transport at all. Within a few years, essentially everybody and everything that moved in the river valley went by rail. By the time of Twain’s visit, the big steamboat lines had all gone bankrupt and the few remaining boats were running mostly empty.

  “Mississippi steamboating,” Twain wrote, “was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature.”

  Twain took one of the still-running steamboats downriver to New Orleans. The Mississippi wasn’t the river he remembered, either—but at least that was something he’d been expecting. He’d never lost his old river man’s habit of perpetually redrawing the map of the river in his mind. Twenty years meant a lot of shifting and twisting and writhing; almost all the old familiar landmarks had been altered or obliterated. Everywhere Twain went, he ticked off the places he remembered and noted how they’d been remade: “Beaver Dam Rock was out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious ‘break;’ it used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it. A big island that used to be away out in mid-river, has retired to the Missouri shore, and boats do not go near it any more. The island called Jacket Pattern is whittled down to a wedge now, and is booked for early destruction. Goose Island is all gone but a little dab the size of a steamboat.”

  And so on, and on, down every bend and twist: new cutoffs, new oxbow lakes, channels that had filled in, islets that had sprouted up or had melted away. The “great and once much-frequented” Walnut Bend was now “set … away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track of passing steamers.” The famous Graveyard south of the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri, “among whose numberless wrecks we used to pick our way so slowly and gingerly,” was, he found, “far away from the channel now, and a terror to nobody.” He was most surprised by his first sight of Vicksburg. The town was standing on its bluff the way it always had, and around it on the hills, the “signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg’s tremendous war-experiences.” But the river had shifted, and Vicksburg no longer had a riverfront. A cutoff had formed near the spot where the Yankees had tried to dig their canal, and the bend before Vicksburg Landing had emptied out. The cutoff, Twain observed, had made Vicksburg into “a country town.”

  All this was the normal routine of river life. Other changes were more dismaying. Twain’s original plan had been to stop off at all the towns he remembered from his youth to see how they’d altered over time. But he quickly dropped that idea: there was no point. Even from the steamboat rail, he could see enough. Town after town, the scene was the same as he’d found in St. Louis. The rowdy riverfront districts were silent and the levees were empty. Behind them, the decorous towns on the bluffs were themselves growing dismal and shabby—all of them, Twain noted, could have used a fix-up and a good coat of whitewash. Several of the towns he best remembered were simply gone—burned down and not rebuilt, flooded out and left abandoned.

  And there was another reason to stay in the boat: the riverbanks were dangerous. There were armed camps of squatters in the derelict riverfronts. Many of them were farmers who’d lost their homesteads after the war ended (peace had brought a catastrophic collapse in agricultural prices); others were veterans, many suffering severe psychic trauma from battle, who’d found themselves unable to fit in back at home or anywhere else. Some of the squatters were organizing into hunting parties that were terrorizing the river towns like the land pirates of the old days. It was as though the river valley were reverting back to the worst times of the Crow’s Nest.

  But the greatest shock for Twain was the solitude. Not just the steamboats but all the old river traffic was gone: the flatboats and the keelboats, the pirogues and shanty boats and arks. “All day we swung along down the river,” he wrote, “and had the stream almost wholly to ourselves. Formerly, at such a stage of the water, we should have passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of big coal barges; also occasional little trading-scows, peddling along from farm to farm, with the pedler’s family on board; possibly, a random scow, bearing a humble Hamlet and Co. on an itinerant dramatic trip. But these were all absent.” Just once did he come across a scene that reminded him of the great days. His steamboat encountered an enormous convoy of lumber rafts heading downriver from the northern valley. But as he looked more closely, the disillusionment set in. The rafts were not “floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet, orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them anywhere.”

  The rest of the voyage glided by in eerie silence. There were no longer any glittering boat cities gathered in the evenings before the levees, no lashed boats making their way down the channels by first light, no steamboats furiously racing each other upriver and casting lesser boats aside like kindling—just more of the empty river down each bend.

  We met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sight at once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi. The loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive—and depressing. League after league, and st
ill league after league, it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls, its almost un-tenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes, and again the day—and still the same, night after night and day after day,—majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy,—symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless!

  Twain wasn’t alone on his river journey. There were other passengers on board: “river men, planters, journalists, and officers of the River Commission”—a thinned-out, modern version of the great riotous throngs of the prewar days. Twain spent a lot of idle time chatting with them. He was continually surprised to discover that they didn’t share his despondency about what had happened to the river. In fact, they were bubbling over with optimism. As the half-empty boat made its way down past the deserted shores, on the deck and in the common rooms there was nothing but upbeat talk about the grand future of the river valley. “Mississippi Improvement is a mighty topic, down yonder,” Twain wrote. “Every man on the river banks, south of Cairo, talks about it every day, during such moments as he is able to spare from talking about the war.”

  The most outlandish proposals for remaking the river were being soberly discussed. There were plans to regulate the river current as though with a giant faucet; to build artificial lakes and rivers in order to drain off the floodwaters; to use the Great Lakes as reservoirs for replenishing the current whenever it ran low. The possibilities were dizzying and endlessly contradictory. “Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these theories,” Twain wrote, “you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon the hypothesis that he does not believe in that theory.” Twain began to think that “Mississippi Improvement” was an incurable epidemic of competing and irreconcilable proposals. “You will have come to know, with a deep and restful certainty, that you are not going to meet two people sick of the same theory, one right after the other,” he wrote. “You may vaccinate yourself with deterrent facts as much as you please—it will do no good; it will seem to ‘take,’ but it doesn’t; the moment you rub against any one of those theorists, make up your mind that it is time to hang out your yellow flag.”