by Sally Denton
Mrs. Blime provided her with sumptuous guest quarters, and Jean Rio, accustomed as she was to a lavish lifestyle, was stupefied by the opulence. “For breakfast they take coffee boiled in milk,” she wrote,
with eggs, ham, hung beef, dried fish, salads, hot soda cakes, bread and butter. For dinner we had boiled redfish, stewed pigs’ feet, rumsteaks, wild goose (rabbits and squirrels too are commonly eaten) with vegetables, pickles, and salad. Two tumblers are put to each plate, and wine and brandy are placed on the table and each takes which they please. The idea of pouring either in wine glasses they laugh at—even ladies will drink off a tumbler of port as if it was water. Pies, tarts, cheesecakes, candy, fruit, and ice cream are brought on table after the meats are removed. French brandy poured into a glass and most bountifully sweetened with pulverized sugar finishes the meal. Tea as a meal they know nothing about, but at seven o’clock they take supper, which is quite as luxurious an affair as the dinner. By ten o’clock everyone is in bed and the streets are deserted.
Her hostess explained that while most of New Orleans’s white inhabitants were Frenchmen, they were nearly all married to Englishwomen, and she suggested that Jean Rio could fashion a nice life for herself there rather than continuing on to this mysterious Zion. If Jean Rio entertained the notion at all, her extant diary does not reflect it.
Desirous to oblige her guest, Mrs. Blime agreed to Jean Rio’s wish to visit a slave market, and early the next morning arranged to attend the auction held in the city’s Customs House. Women were prohibited from entering the “slave market for males,” so Jean Rio satisfied herself with that for women.
It is a large hall, well lighted, with seats all around on which were girls of every shade of color, from ten or twelve to thirty years of age. To my utter astonishment they were singing as merrily as larks. I expressed my surprise to Mrs. Blime. “Ah,” she said, “though I as an Englishwoman detest the very idea of slavery, yet I do believe that many of the slaves here have ten times the comforts of the laborers in our own country, with not half the labor. I have been thirteen years in this country, and although I have never owned a slave or ever intend to do so, still I do not look upon slavery with the horror that I once did. There are hundreds of slaves here who would not accept their freedom if it was offered to them. For this reason: they would then have no protection, as the laws afford little or none to people of color.” I could not help thinking that my friend’s feelings had become somewhat blunted, if not hardened, by long residence in a slave state.
They returned to the Blime estate and engaged in a lively dialogue on the issue. Jean Rio learned that the conditions for slaves had changed dramatically since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and that African slaves had received far better treatment when New Orleans was a French colony than after the Americans took control. Jean Rio was confounded by the nuances. “From further conversation,” she wrote in her diary that night,
I found that if a free man marries a slave, all the children of that marriage are the property of the owner of the mother. But if a free woman marries a slave, the children are free. I was shown a gentleman of color who is what we should call “managing clerk” in one of the largest stores in this city. He is the property of a rich proprietor in the neighborhood. He pays his master $500 annually and his salary is $1,000. He is married to a free woman, quite a light mulatto, by whom he has a family. They live in a very handsome house, which is the property of the wife, as a slave is not allowed to possess real estate. They keep a carriage and four servants, and this is by no means a singular case. It is a common occurrence for masters to hire out their slaves in this way at a salary of from fifty to seventy dollars per month, out of which they pay their masters an agreed-upon sum. The rest is their own.
Struggling to understand an arrangement clearly more complex than she had gathered from the British literature on the subject, she remained unconvinced of its benign aspects as presented by her hostess. “In spite of all of this,” she wrote of the apologia, “the system is a horrible one to English minds. Well might Sterne [an apparent reference to Laurence Sterne, the English clergyman and author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman] say, ‘Oh, Slavery, disguise thyself as thou wilt, thou art a bitter drought.’ ” Like many of her British compatriots, Jean Rio thought slavery a crime against humanity as well as a sin against God—a cruel and antiquated system that had been abolished throughout the British dominions nearly twenty years earlier.
With melancholy, she left Mrs. Blime to join her family still ensconced on the anchored George W. Bourne. “I should have greatly preferred spending a few more days with this truly amiable, generous lady and her family,” she wrote. Loaded with “presents consisting of the delicacies of the climate accompanied with several bottles of French brandy and claret,” she returned to the ship that had been her home since January. “We agreed on, and separated with, I believe, a mutual feeling that we should meet no more on earth.” Such partings were now taken in stride, so accustomed had Jean Rio become to the string of good-byes in her life. But years later she would remember her brief stay in New Orleans with a wistful curiosity. What if she had stayed?
CHAPTER FIVE
Snags and Sawyers
ON MARCH 23, 1851, the steamboat Concordia pulled alongside the ship and the Saints’ trunks and other luggage were transferred to the boat that would carry Jean Rio’s party 1,250 miles up the Mississippi to St. Louis, Missouri. It would take four men to carry the piano up the ramp, and, as always when the instrument was transported, Jean Rio watched with concern. All the other passengers from the ocean crossing—including the five converts for whom Jean Rio had bought passage—had left New Orleans immediately upon their arrival, not having the resources to sightsee there. They were en route to a Mormon way station in Alexandria, Missouri, a base camp for setting out for Council Bluffs. Now, after Josiah’s death at sea, Jean Rio’s group numbered eleven— she and her six children, her son Henry’s young wife, and her three in-laws on her husband’s side.
The 499-ton side-wheel paddleboat had been built in Cincinnati four years earlier and was commanded by Captain William Cable. Jean Rio made a point of befriending the captain, from whom she was determined to glean all the necessary and useful information for the forthcoming journey. The flat-bottomed wooden vessel had its engines and boilers on the deck. The “firemen who have an uninterrupted view of the country” constantly stoked open holes on either side with fuel. Descending to the “hurricane” deck, she came upon a five-foot-wide open gallery filled with chairs to accommodate the passengers. A low railing barely above the water’s edge surrounded this deck. “On the inner side of the gallery is a row of cabins,” she wrote, “with two doors each—one opening onto the gallery, the other into the saloon, which is 150 feet in length by 30 feet in width.” The ladies’ cabin was separate, and “splendidly furnished with sofas, rocking chairs, work tables, and a piano. The floor, as well as the saloon’s, is covered with Brussels carpeting.” There was also “a smoking room for the gentlemen,” equipped with numerous card tables for gambling. A contemporary of Jean Rio’s, the English artist Frederick Hawkins Piercy, described the steamers as “floating palaces, open to, and for the use of, all who can pay, negroes excepted.” Piercy continued, “A colored man, however well educated or wealthy, dare not show his nose in the saloon, he must confine himself to the deck, with the deck hands.”
A staircase ascended to the upper deck, where the officers’ cabins and the pilothouse were located. “The one forward encloses the steering wheel. Here stands the pilot completely secluded from the wind and weather,” wrote Jean Rio. The pilot communicated with the engineers and laborers below by means of bell signals.
The captain explained the mechanism of the ship to Jean Rio, showing her two ropes attached to the wheel and then to a lever that moved the rudder. “The whole arrangement is very simple and the elevated position of the pilot, forty feet above the lower deck, enables him to see and avoid the collision wi
th snags, which are plentiful still though the government has done much toward clearing them away,” she wrote. Snag boats routinely patrolled the river, sending divers down to cut the debris from the river bottom. Like icebergs in the ocean, the “snags and sawyers” posed a great risk to the steamboats. “A snag is a large tree which has either been uprooted by a hurricane or loosened by an inundation, and at last been blown into the river.” The heaviest part of the tree sinks to the bottom and becomes fixed in the mud in an upright position. As the foliage decays the naked trunk remains above the surface of the water. A sawyer is far more dangerous, she learned, for it is the same as a snag except that the top of the tree remains invisible below the surface. Steamboats hitting a sawyer could sink within minutes.
“I have run away from the upper deck, which is not a very pleasant place except in cloudy weather . . . although on a moonlit night the view is delightful, at least to such an admirer of wild scenery as I.” In a headwind, the upper deck was covered with hot cinders. “They burn wood, not coal, and when the steam gets low or they want to pass a steamer in advance of them, the firemen throw on resin by shovelfuls.” As an official mail carrier, the Concordia was the fastest boat on the river, gliding past enormous sugar plantations and tropical groves on both shores.
Within five days Jean Rio and her company had arrived in St. Louis. She was fortunate to have the financial wherewithal that allowed her to linger and truly observe a part of her new country, as she had done in New Orleans. Now she was determined to experience St. Louis, the exciting frontier outfitting post for all of the expeditions heading west in the expansionist fever of the moment. Besides which, she knew her group would be more comfortable ensconced in a home in St. Louis than sleeping on the ground at the overcrowded base camp. She calculated the time it would take her to rendezvous with the Saints at Council Bluffs before they began their long wagon-train journey to Utah, and then rented a large house, where she intended to remain for several weeks. She hired a team of men to bring her party’s numerous personal effects there, including the unwieldy crated piano.
With two parlors, two bedrooms, and an outhouse “answering all the purposes of kitchen and washhouse,” the temporary residence was a welcome respite after the months on the water. “The next discovery I made,” Jean Rio wrote, “was that I wanted a cooking stove, which I purchased with all the utensils belonging for fourteen dollars.” Her children immediately scouted the neighborhood for playmates, enjoying themselves “finely in their rambles about the town and the open country beyond.” She stocked her kitchen from the many markets that opened at four a.m. every day. “All kinds of meat, poultry, and fish are very cheap. The fresh meat is good, but not so large and fat as in the English markets. Vegetables and fruit are abundant and of great variety.”
She was amazed by the ever-changing weather. “This, I am told, is the general character of American springtime.” On one day there could be a heavy fall of snow and freezing temperatures necessitating fires in all the fireplaces, and the very next day she would “throw open the windows.”
Of particular interest to her in bustling St. Louis were the dozens of churches of every denomination, all “magnificent buildings” and all sporting steeples. “The Catholics have three churches, each surmounted with a large gilded cross, the Presbyterians three, the Baptists four, the Episcopalians and Independents several each,” she noted. Then there are the Methodist and Lutheran and Swedish churches, so that religions are as plentiful as can be wished. The poor sons of Africa, too, have a little church to pray and praise the Lord in, but it is only lately that their masters have allowed them this privilege.” She attended several services, primarily to hear the music, and found the orchestral bands and tenor soloists up to professional standards.
On Palm Sunday she went to Mass at a Catholic church, marveling at the rich velvet and satin coverings of the altar and at the carved walnut rails polished to a deep sheen. “On each side are seats for the scholars and Nuns of the adjoining convents. Strange-looking beings, these last. They wear black woolen shawls reaching down to the hem of their coarse black Camelot gowns, a close bonnet made of black glazed cambric, and black crepe veils reaching to the knees.” The priests too donned long black gowns with a hemp cord around the waist upon which hung a rosary and crucifix. The vestments, customs, tapers, incense, Latin hymns, confessional boxes, holy water, and religious icons were foreign to her; they had been absent from the Church of England since the Protestant Reformation. She found the confessionals gloomy and mysterious, cloaked with dark green curtains and ornamented with “finely executed oil paintings but horrible to look at, being all of them representations of the martyrdom of different Saints.”
Over the next two or three weeks she reviewed the list of required provisions itemized by Mormon leaders, and set out to acquire them. She purchased four wagons and eight yoke of young oxen, or sixteen animals, for the wagon-train journey across the plains, a steer for beef, and two dairy cows so that her children would have fresh milk and cheese along the way. The church list included one thousand pounds of flour, a musket or rifle for each male over the age of twelve, one pound of gunpowder, four pounds of lead, one pound of tea, five pounds of coffee, one hundred pounds of sugar, ten pounds of rice, numerous spices, cooking utensils, tents for sleeping, furnishings for the wagons, twenty-five pounds of salt, thirty pounds of dried apples and peaches, twenty-five pounds of grain, twenty pounds of soap, fifteen pounds of iron and steel, pulleys and ropes for river crossings, farming and mechanical tools, fishhooks and line for all in the party, and sundry additional items. One of the wagons was specially built to carry her square grand piano and delicate finery, the wagon itself covered with tar to protect it from the rain and dirt.
She then bought passage on yet another steamboat, the Financier, which would take her and her family, along with her wagons, livestock, and supplies, up the Mississippi to Alexandria. From there they would travel overland across Iowa to meet the company of Saints who would join them on the trek to the Salt Lake Valley. Two barges were attached to the steamboat, one for the cattle and one for the wagons. Waiving their rights to berths on board, Jean Rio and her family members decided they should make their beds in the wagons instead of trying to sleep with the constant jerking “always caused by the action of machinery.”
When she awoke in the morning and drew aside the curtain at the front of her wagon, she found herself facing an immense wall of rock hundreds of feet in height and topped with lush greenery. “I cannot describe the grandeur of the scenery; it was almost appalling,” she wrote. “In some places it seemed as if the pressure of a finger would have sent it toppling down; the rocky shores are so perpendicular that our boat could safely run in close enough for us to pluck the blossoms off the trees which grow at their base and in the crevices.” Every few miles they would come to a town built on the riverbank. In between the settlements were small farms of approximately sixty acres, with cattle, sheep, and pigs grazing in the fields and chickens running free. “The man and his elder children would in most cases look at us as we passed, sometimes waving their hands to us by way of a salute, while the wife would stand at the door, mostly with a child in her arms. We passed hundreds of these farms.”
That afternoon an inebriated passenger walked past Jean Rio and fell overboard into the river. The boat stopped, and every effort was made to save him. As the man struggled, he threw his wallet onto the deck. Soon afterward he drowned. In the wallet was the man’s address in Hannibal, Missouri, along with $275 he had earned from transporting produce from Missouri to New Orleans. The captain, who retrieved the wallet, assured Jean Rio that the money would be “restored to the relatives of the deceased.”
The incident cast a pall over Jean Rio for the remainder of the trip, and she felt glad when the boat arrived in Alexandria on the evening of April 18. “A bad landing it was for our poor cattle, for the brutality of the men belonging to the boat was most shameful, and many of the poor beasts suffered much in c
onsequence.” It seemed to take forever to unload, and she felt it a small miracle that all their luggage had arrived intact.
The men in her party—her oldest sons and her brothers-in-law—learned the art of teaming, yoking the recalcitrant oxen to the wagons. None had ever worked with such animals, and their nervousness was communicated to the balky, widehorned livestock. When the men had managed to corral the unruly oxen and harness them to the wagons, the small company of what the locals called “greenhorns” drove the animals to a nearby open space of ground in Missouri, situated directly across the river from Warsaw, Illinois. Here, four months after leaving England, they made their first encampment. They gathered firewood, which was plentiful in the area, put their kettles on, and “sat down to a comfortable cup of tea.” The men then took the cattle to a large enclosure and fed them hay they had purchased upon disembarking from the Financier. With the help of her daughter-in-law, Eliza, and sister-in-law Mary Ann, Jean Rio made up beds in the wagons for the night. By now, the “quickening” that signaled early pregnancy for Eliza—swollen breasts and morning nausea—had turned to “showing,” and the prospect of a first grandchild being born in Zion increased Jean Rio’s hopes and expectations. When the men returned from the corral, the small group formed a circle and, Jean Rio wrote, “offered up our thanksgiving to the God of Heaven for bringing us here in safety through unseen and unknown dangers.” They all sensed that the real adventure was only beginning.
The trials of the Mississippi River behind her, Jean Rio sat down with a lantern to write of this “Father of Waters,” as the Indians named it. “I have traveled in this river 1,630 miles and I will say that so much splendid scenery, both wild and beautiful, I never expected to look upon.” Now, on the eve of the overland journey, she became pensive. She did not anticipate much pleasure in the days, weeks, months, even years ahead. “We must expect a life of toil, fatigue, and many privations to which we are unaccustomed. Still, when I call to mind the various scenes through which we have passed and the thousands of miles we have traveled . . . and the manifold instances of preserving mercy we have received at the hands of our Heavenly Father, I doubt not that I shall still, if I remain faithful, enjoy the same protection upon the land as I have upon the waters.”