by Lee Sandlin
The Mississippi panorama retained its popularity for several years. Banvard was careful to keep it fresh. During the Civil War he repainted large sections of it to include the latest news from the Mississippi River campaigns; when he exhibited it in 1863, he drew big crowds all over again—people were eager to get a look at the grand events they’d been reading about, the ironclad battles and the surrender of New Orleans and the siege of Vicksburg. But after the war was over, Banvard put the panorama in storage. He didn’t show it again for more than a decade.
Its next recorded display was in 1881. By then Banvard’s fortunes had taken a steep dive. The museum and an assortment of other big-budget ventures had failed, and he was going broke. If he’d hoped to make back some money with a revival of the panorama, he was disappointed. The vogue for panoramas had faded, and the Mississippi itself wasn’t of much interest to people then. The frontier had moved on west, and the river was no longer the edge of the world; it was just an immense obstacle the railroads had to cross. Banvard’s panorama was viewed as no more than an interesting historical curiosity. Soon afterward, Banvard’s luck ran out. His museum was closed down for good and his mansion repossessed. Banvard fled New York to escape his creditors.
He went west—first back to the Mississippi valley. But he, too, found it to be of little interest any longer. It was much the same as Twain described: empty, shabby, overregulated, tamed. So he kept on going, up the Missouri into the freshly settled territories beyond. He followed the outer tendrils of the new railroads until he reached the Glacial Lakes region of South Dakota. There he came to rest in Watertown, a railroad stop on the Big Sioux River, about a hundred miles north of Sioux Falls. Banvard was in his late sixties then, but he soon started a new career as a construction contractor.
He didn’t wholly give up on his theatrical art. A couple of years after he arrived in Watertown, he presented to the locals his new work. It wasn’t a panorama this time: it was a moving diorama that re-created the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, at the end of the Civil War. The premiere was a big event. Everyone in town showed up at the local hall to see it. It proved to be a wonderfully elaborate and cunning piece of work—but the real highlight of the show was Banvard himself. He narrated, pulled curtains back and forth, raised and lowered flats with windlasses, rang bells, blew whistles, and set off firecrackers. The people of Watertown were amused no end. He briefly toured with it around the Glacial Lakes until everyone in the region had seen it. Then he put the diorama away and retired from the entertainment business for good.
He lived with his wife and his children and grandchildren in a big house on the outskirts of town. Down in the basement was the one possession he’d managed to salvage from the wreck of his fortunes back east—the Mississippi panorama. But he never put it on display in Watertown. Later one of his grandsons remembered playing on it as a child: it was a titanic roll twenty feet long and six feet thick, perpetually hidden under a tarpaulin, as silent and ominous as a sleeping dragon.
Banvard died in 1891. Shortly after the funeral, the family got rid of the panorama. They said that nobody cared about it anymore and it was just taking up space. Besides, it could no longer be shown: after so many years of storage in that dank basement, the canvas had rotted and the images were unrecognizable. So it was carted off to the town dump.
But that may not have been the end of it. Decades later, after the Second World War, a historian named John Francis McDermott wrote a book about the panoramas, and he solicited the people of Watertown for their memories of Banvard. The editor of the local newspaper, Richard Albrook, wrote to McDermott with a story he had heard when he was young. According to Albrook, somebody had found the panorama in the dump and had rescued it; the salvageable vistas all along its length had been cut out and had been used to decorate the walls of a local building. But that was all that Albrook remembered. He couldn’t say what building it was: he’d forgotten, or maybe he’d never learned in the first place, and he’d never seen the building himself. McDermott wasn’t able to find out anything more, either; nobody else he contacted remembered hearing anything like Albrook’s story. He ended his book with the question of the panorama’s fate still open.
The question remains open to this day. No trace of the Banvard panorama has ever been found. Watertown today is a city of twenty thousand people, and there has been a century’s worth of new construction downtown. But many of its original buildings are still standing. It’s at least possible that the panorama survives in one of them, unsuspected by the current occupants, hidden under layers of lath and plaster and paint and wallpaper. It might even turn up again someday. An ancient wall might be knocked down, and a scrap of painted canvas might come to light: a glimpse of wide water, a burning steamboat, a lone human figure posed on a distant bluff—an authentic souvenir of the wicked river, the way it had been in the old times.
A Note on Sources
My first and largest debts are to three anthologies: A Treasury of Mississippi River Folklore: Ballads, Traditions and Folkways of the Mid-American River Country, edited by B. A. Botkin (Crown, 1955); The Mississippi River Reader, edited by Wright Morris (Anchor Books, 1962); and Before Mark Twain: A Sampler of Old, Old Times on the Mississippi, edited by John Francis McDermott (Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). Without these any further exploration of the river culture would have been impossible.
PART I: THE RIVER RISING
Chapter One: Gone on the River
For the geography, topography, and natural history of the river, I’ve primarily used The Navigator; Containing Directions for Navigating the Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers, with an Ample Account of These Much Admired Waters, by Zadok Cramer (eighth edition; Cramer, Spear, and Eichbaum, 1814); and The History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley, by Timothy Flint (third edition; E. H. Flint, 1833). I’ve also made heavy use of the volumes of the Works Progress Administration’s American Guide Series devoted to the Mississippi river valley states. Descriptions of the “floating life” of the river derive from Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi, by Timothy Flint (Cummings, Hilliard, 1826); Letters from the West, Containing Sketches of Scenery, Manners, and Customs, by James Hall (Henry Colburn, 1828); Delineations of American Scenery and Manners, by John James Audubon (E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1832); Fifty Years on the Mississippi, or Gould’s History of River Navigation, by Emerson Gould (Nixon-Jones, 1889); Old Times on the Upper Mississippi: The Recollections of a Steamboat Pilot from 1854 to 1863, by George Byron Merrick (Arthur H. Clark, 1909); and A Traffic History of the Mississippi River System, by Frank Haigh Dixon (National Waterways Commission Document No. 11; U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909).
Chapter Two: Old Devil River
For river meanders and helicoidal flow, see River Mechanics, by Pierre Y. Julien (Cambridge University Press, 2002). The flooding of the river is described in countless sources, perhaps most vividly in John Audubon’s Mississippi River Journal (reprinted in Writings and Drawings, Library of America, 1999). The 1805 tornado is described in The Pioneer History of Illinois, by John Reynolds (Fergus, 1887). Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s “A Storm Scene on the Mississippi” is collected in his book The Hive of “The Bee-Hunter”: A Repository of Sketches (Appleton, 1854).
Chapter Three: The Comet’s Tail
The story of the Crow’s Nest and the New Madrid earthquakes is based on the accounts in Timothy Flint’s Recollections and Emerson Gould’s Fifty Years (see chapter 1), as well as Natural and Statistical View, with an Appendix Containing Observations on the Late Earthquakes, by Daniel Drake (Looker and Wallace, 1815); Travels in the Interior of America, in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811, by John Bradbury (Smith and Galway, 1817); View of the Valley of the Mississippi, or The Emigrant’s and Traveller’s Guide to the West, by Robert Baird (H. S. Tanner, 1834); The Rambler in North America, by Charles Joseph Latrobe (Seeley and Burnside, 1835); The New Madrid Eart
hquake, by Myron L. Fuller (U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 494; U.S. Government Printing Office, 1912); and The New Madrid Earthquakes, by James Lal Penick Jr. (revised edition; University of Missouri Press, 1981).
Chapter Four: Like Bubbles on a Sea
For Timothy Flint’s life, I’ve used Timothy Flint: Pioneer, Missionary, Author, Editor, 1780–1840, by John Ervin Kirkpatrick (Arthur H. Clark, 1911); and Timothy Flint, by James K. Folsom (Twayne, 1965). The account of the Natchez tornado is based on the newspaper reports reprinted in Early American Tornadoes, 1586–1870 (History of American Weather), edited by David M. Ludlum (American Meteorological Society, 1970).
PART II: “DO YOU LIVE ON THE RIVER?”
Chapter Five: The Desire of an Ignorant Westerner
For the general account of the westward migration, I’ve used Notes on a Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois, by Morris Birkbeck (Ridgway, 1818); A Woman’s Story of Pioneer Illinois, by Christiana Holmes Tillson (Lakeside Press, 1919); and the memoirs and travel books excerpted in The Opening of the West (Documentary History of the United States), edited by Jack M. Sosin (Harper and Row, 1969). The actions of the committees and the courts of Judge Lynch are described in detail in Frontier Law and Order: Ten Essays, by Philip D. Jordan (University of Nebraska Press, 1970). The story of James Ford derives from Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement, by William Courtney Watts (Putnam, 1897); and The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock, by Otto A. Rothert (A. H. Clark, 1924).
Chapter Six: Bloody Island
William Johnson’s diary has been published as William Johnson’s Natchez: The Antebellum Diary of a Free Negro, edited by William Ransom Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis (Louisiana State University Press, 1951). I’ve also consulted the biographical sketch by the diary’s editors, The Barber of Natchez (Louisiana State University Press, 1954); as well as The Unhurried Years: Memories of the Old Natchez Region, by Pierce Butler (Louisiana State University Press, 1948). For dueling in the lower valley, I’ve used The Field of Honor: Being a Complete and Comprehensive History of Duelling, by Ben C. Truman (Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1884). The Biddle-Pettis duel is described in many books and has accumulated a number of curious details in the retelling (according to Truman, for instance, the guns used were the actual ones from the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton). The version offered here is based mostly on the account in Personal Recollections of Many Prominent People Whom I Have Known, Especially of Those Relating to the History of St. Louis, by John F. Darby (G. I. Jones, 1880); A Centennial History of Missouri: The Center State, 1820–1921, by Walter B. Stevens (S. J. Clarke, 1921); and the detailed modern summary in Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri, by Dick Steward (University of Missouri Press, 2000). The stories of Alonzo Phelps and the Foote-Prentiss duels are in Henry Stuart Foote’s memoir, The Bench and Bar of the South and Southwest (Soule, Thomas, and Wentworth, 1876).
Chapter Seven: The Roar of Niagara
The Mike Fink stories are collected in Half Horse, Half Alligator: The Growth of the Mike Fink Legend, edited by Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine (University of Chicago Press, 1956). For the Davy Crockett almanacs, I’ve used the facsimile reprints in The Tall Tales of Davy Crockett: The Second Nashville Series of Crockett Almanacs, 1839–1841, edited by Michael A. Lofaro (University of Tennessee Press, 1987); and Davy Crockett’s Riproarious Shemales and Sentimental Sisters: Women’s Tall Tales from the Crockett Almanacs, 1835–1856, edited by Michael A. Lofaro (Stackpole Books, 2001). Many of the Annie Christmas stories are summarized in The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, by Herbert Asbury (Knopf, 1936), though it isn’t clear whether Asbury realizes, or cares, that Annie Christmas is a modern construct. (The story of the invention of Annie Christmas is told in Botkin’s Treasury; see headnote above.) The oddity of Lincoln’s conversation is noted in many memoirs; these examples are from David Porter (see chapter 14). Stories of prodigious drinking were universal on the frontier; the picnic is from William Johnson’s diary (see chapter 6). The description of the camp meetings derives from An Excursion Through the United States and Canada During the Years 1822–23, by William Newnham Blane (Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1824); Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher (Philips and Hunt, 1856); Autobiography of Rev. James B. Finley, or Pioneer Life in the West (Methodist Book Concern, 1858); History of Cosmopolite, or The Writings of Rev. Lorenzo Dow, Containing His Experience and Travels in Europe and America, Up to Near His Fiftieth Year (Anderson, Gates, and Wright, 1859); A Short History of the Life of Barton W. Stone, Written by Himself, Designed Principally for His Children and Christian Friends, reprinted in The Cane Ridge Meeting-House, by James R. Rogers (Standard, 1910); and two modern histories, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845, by Dickson D. Bruce Jr. (University of Tennessee Press, 1974), and The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion’s Harvest Time, by Charles A. Johnson (Southern Methodist University Press, 1955).
Chapter Eight: The Cosmopolitan Tide
The description of the steamboats is based primarily on Emerson Gould (see chapter 1) and Robert Baird (see chapter 3), as well as Domestic Manners of the Americans, by Frances Trollope (Whittaker, 1832); Narrative of a Tour in North America, by Henry Tudor (Duncan, 1834); Men and Manners in America, by Thomas Hamilton (Blackwood, 1843); Excursion Through the Slave States, from Washington on the Potomac to the Frontier of Mexico, by George Featherstonhaugh (Harper and Brothers, 1844); and The New World, by Marie de Grandfort, translated by Edward C. Wharton (Sherman, Wharton, 1855). The life of the sharpers (and their question, “Do you live on the river?”) is from Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, by George H. Devol (Devol and Haines, 1887). For information about Thompsonian medicine and on other assorted quackeries and frauds, I’m indebted to American Medicine in Transition, 1840–1910, by John S. Haller (University of Illinois Press, 1981). The maneuverings with paper money and counterfeit detectors described here can be found in William Johnson’s diary (see chapter 6) and in E. F. Ware’s memoir and regimental history, The Lyon Campaign in Missouri, Being a History of the First Iowa Infantry (Crane, 1907), and in Philip D. Jordan’s Frontier Law and Order (see chapter 5—and for green thumbs and black thumbs as well).
Chapter Nine: A Pile of Shavings
The description of conditions of urban life along the Mississippi derives from Frances Trollope (see chapter 8); A Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions, by Frederick Marryat (Baudry’s European Library, 1839); the excerpted texts and the topographical plates collected in Cities of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development, by John W. Reps (University of Missouri, 1994); and the modern history The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830, by Richard C. Wade (Harvard University Press, 1959). The account of the St. Louis fire is from The Makers of St. Louis: A Brief Sketch of the Growth of a Great City, edited by William Marion Reedy (Mirror, 1906). The epidemics of the river valley are described in Autobiographical Sketches and Recollections During a Thirty-five Years’ Residence in New Orleans, by Theodore Clapp (Tompkins, 1863). There is more on the cholera outbreak during the Black Hawk War in Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, LL.D., Written by Himself (Sheldon, 1864).
Chapter Ten: The Coasts of Dark Destruction
The description of New Orleans is based on The Journal of Latrobe, by Benjamin Latrobe (Appleton, 1905); The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, by Fredrika Bremer (Harper, 1858); A Journey Through the United States and Part of Canada, by Robert Everest (Woodfall and Kinder, 1855); Rambles and Scrambles in North and South America, by Edward Sullivan (Bentley, 1852); Scenes in the South and Other Miscellaneous Pieces, by James Creecy (Lippincott, 1860); Life and Liberty in America, or Sketches of a Tour in the United States and Canada in 1857–8, by Charles Mackay (Harper, 1859); and America Revisited, from the Bay of New York to the Gulf of Mexico, by George Augustus Sala (Vizetelly, 1886). Stories of the voodoo ceremonies are from Ne
w Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life, by Henry C. Castellanos (L. Graham, 1905); and New Orleans: The Place and the People, by Grace Elizabeth King (Macmillan, 1917). I’ve also relied on a series of modern books on New Orleans reprinted by Pelican Press in Baton Rouge, particularly Fabulous New Orleans, by Lyle Saxon; Voodoo in New Orleans, The Voodoo Queen, and Mardi Gras as It Was, by Robert Tallant; and End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850–1860, by Robert C. Reinders. The remark about the Jabberwock is in the Works Progress Administration’s guide to New Orleans.
PART III: THE COURSE OF EMPIRE
Chapter Eleven: The Mound Builders
The best survey of nineteenth-century theories and fantasies about the Mound Builder civilization is Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth, by Robert Silverberg (New York Graphic Society, 1968). I’ve also used Behemoth: A Legend of the Mound-Builders, by Cornelius Mathews (Langley, 1839); Traditions of De-Coo-Dah and Antiquarian Researches: Comprising Extensive Explorations, Surveys, and Excavations of the Wonderful and Mysterious Earthen Remains of the Mound-Builders in America, by William Pidgeon (Horace Thayer, 1858); The Prehistoric World, or Vanished Races, by E. A. Allen (Ferguson, Allen, and Rader, 1885); and The Ancient Earthworks and Temples of the American Indians, by Lindesey Brine (Farmer and Sons, 1894). For Cole’s Course of Empire, I’ve used The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, by Louis L. Noble (Sheldon, Blakeman, 1856).