American Notes for General Circulation

by Dickens, Chales

  had painted the Red Man well; and so would I, he knew, if I would

  go home with him and hunt buffaloes, which he was quite anxious I

  should do. When I told him that supposing I went, I should not be

  very likely to damage the buffaloes much, he took it as a great

  joke and laughed heartily.

  He was a remarkably handsome man; some years past forty, I should

  judge; with long black hair, an aquiline nose, broad cheek-bones, a

  sunburnt complexion, and a very bright, keen, dark, and piercing

  eye. There were but twenty thousand of the Choctaws left, he said,

  and their number was decreasing every day. A few of his brother

  chiefs had been obliged to become civilised, and to make themselves

  acquainted with what the whites knew, for it was their only chance

  of existence. But they were not many; and the rest were as they

  always had been. He dwelt on this: and said several times that

  unless they tried to assimilate themselves to their conquerors,

  they must be swept away before the strides of civilised society.

  When we shook hands at parting, I told him he must come to England,

  as he longed to see the land so much: that I should hope to see

  him there, one day: and that I could promise him he would be well

  received and kindly treated. He was evidently pleased by this

  assurance, though he rejoined with a good-humoured smile and an

  arch shake of his head, that the English used to be very fond of

  the Red Men when they wanted their help, but had not cared much for

  them, since.

  He took his leave; as stately and complete a gentleman of Nature's

  making, as ever I beheld; and moved among the people in the boat,

  another kind of being. He sent me a lithographed portrait of

  himself soon afterwards; very like, though scarcely handsome

  enough; which I have carefully preserved in memory of our brief

  acquaintance.

  There was nothing very interesting in the scenery of this day's

  journey, which brought us at midnight to Louisville. We slept at

  the Galt House; a splendid hotel; and were as handsomely lodged as

  though we had been in Paris, rather than hundreds of miles beyond

  the Alleghanies.

  The city presenting no objects of sufficient interest to detain us

  on our way, we resolved to proceed next day by another steamboat,

  the Fulton, and to join it, about noon, at a suburb called

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  Portland, where it would be delayed some time in passing through a

  canal.

  The interval, after breakfast, we devoted to riding through the

  town, which is regular and cheerful: the streets being laid out at

  right angles, and planted with young trees. The buildings are

  smoky and blackened, from the use of bituminous coal, but an

  Englishman is well used to that appearance, and indisposed to

  quarrel with it. There did not appear to be much business

  stirring; and some unfinished buildings and improvements seemed to

  intimate that the city had been overbuilt in the ardour of 'goinga-

  head,' and was suffering under the re-action consequent upon such

  feverish forcing of its powers.

  On our way to Portland, we passed a 'Magistrate's office,' which

  amused me, as looking far more like a dame school than any police

  establishment: for this awful Institution was nothing but a little

  lazy, good-for-nothing front parlour, open to the street; wherein

  two or three figures (I presume the magistrate and his myrmidons)

  were basking in the sunshine, the very effigies of languor and

  repose. It was a perfect picture of justice retired from business

  for want of customers; her sword and scales sold off; napping

  comfortably with her legs upon the table.

  Here, as elsewhere in these parts, the road was perfectly alive

  with pigs of all ages; lying about in every direction, fast

  asleep.; or grunting along in quest of hidden dainties. I had

  always a sneaking kindness for these odd animals, and found a

  constant source of amusement, when all others failed, in watching

  their proceedings. As we were riding along this morning, I

  observed a little incident between two youthful pigs, which was so

  very human as to be inexpressibly comical and grotesque at the

  time, though I dare say, in telling, it is tame enough.

  One young gentleman (a very delicate porker with several straws

  sticking about his nose, betokening recent investigations in a

  dung-hill) was walking deliberately on, profoundly thinking, when

  suddenly his brother, who was lying in a miry hole unseen by him,

  rose up immediately before his startled eyes, ghostly with damp

  mud. Never was pig's whole mass of blood so turned. He started

  back at least three feet, gazed for a moment, and then shot off as

  hard as he could go: his excessively little tail vibrating with

  speed and terror like a distracted pendulum. But before he had

  gone very far, he began to reason with himself as to the nature of

  this frightful appearance; and as he reasoned, he relaxed his speed

  by gradual degrees; until at last he stopped, and faced about.

  There was his brother, with the mud upon him glazing in the sun,

  yet staring out of the very same hole, perfectly amazed at his

  proceedings! He was no sooner assured of this; and he assured

  himself so carefully that one may almost say he shaded his eyes

  with his hand to see the better; than he came back at a round trot,

  pounced upon him, and summarily took off a piece of his tail; as a

  caution to him to be careful what he was about for the future, and

  never to play tricks with his family any more.

  We found the steamboat in the canal, waiting for the slow process

  of getting through the lock, and went on board, where we shortly

  afterwards had a new kind of visitor in the person of a certain

  Kentucky Giant whose name is Porter, and who is of the moderate

  height of seven feet eight inches, in his stockings.

  There never was a race of people who so completely gave the lie to

  history as these giants, or whom all the chroniclers have so

  cruelly libelled. Instead of roaring and ravaging about the world,

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  constantly catering for their cannibal larders, and perpetually

  going to market in an unlawful manner, they are the meekest people

  in any man's acquaintance: rather inclining to milk and vegetable

  diet, and bearing anything for a quiet life. So decidedly are

  amiability and mildness their characteristics, that I confess I

  look upon that youth who distinguished himself by the slaughter of

  these inoffensive persons, as a false-hearted brigand, who,

  pretending to philanthropic motives, was secretly influenced only

  by the wealth stored up within their castles, and the hope of

  plunder. And I lean the more to this opinion from finding that

  even the historian of those exploits, with all his partiality for

  his hero, is fain to admit that the slaughtered monsters in

  question were of a very innocent and simple turn; extremely

&nbs
p; guileless and ready of belief; lending a credulous ear to the most

  improbable tales; suffering themselves to be easily entrapped into

  pits; and even (as in the case of the Welsh Giant) with an excess

  of the hospitable politeness of a landlord, ripping themselves

  open, rather than hint at the possibility of their guests being

  versed in the vagabond arts of sleight-of-hand and hocus-pocus.

  The Kentucky Giant was but another illustration of the truth of

  this position. He had a weakness in the region of the knees, and a

  trustfulness in his long face, which appealed even to five-feet

  nine for encouragement and support. He was only twenty-five years

  old, he said, and had grown recently, for it had been found

  necessary to make an addition to the legs of his inexpressibles.

  At fifteen he was a short boy, and in those days his English father

  and his Irish mother had rather snubbed him, as being too small of

  stature to sustain the credit of the family. He added that his

  health had not been good, though it was better now; but short

  people are not wanting who whisper that he drinks too hard.

  I understand he drives a hackney-coach, though how he does it,

  unless he stands on the footboard behind, and lies along the roof

  upon his chest, with his chin in the box, it would be difficult to

  comprehend. He brought his gun with him, as a curiosity.

  Christened 'The Little Rifle,' and displayed outside a shop-window,

  it would make the fortune of any retail business in Holborn. When

  he had shown himself and talked a little while, he withdrew with

  his pocket-instrument, and went bobbing down the cabin, among men

  of six feet high and upwards, like a light-house walking among

  lamp-posts.

  Within a few minutes afterwards, we were out of the canal, and in

  the Ohio river again.

  The arrangements of the boat were like those of the Messenger, and

  the passengers were of the same order of people. We fed at the

  same times, on the same kind of viands, in the same dull manner,

  and with the same observances. The company appeared to be

  oppressed by the same tremendous concealments, and had as little

  capacity of enjoyment or light-heartedness. I never in my life did

  see such listless, heavy dulness as brooded over these meals: the

  very recollection of it weighs me down, and makes me, for the

  moment, wretched. Reading and writing on my knee, in our little

  cabin, I really dreaded the coming of the hour that summoned us to

  table; and was as glad to escape from it again, as if it had been a

  penance or a punishment. Healthy cheerfulness and good spirits

  forming a part of the banquet, I could soak my crusts in the

  fountain with Le Sage's strolling player, and revel in their glad

  enjoyment: but sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward

  off thirst and hunger as a business; to empty, each creature, his

  Yahoo's trough as quickly as he can, and then slink sullenly away;

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  to have these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere

  greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the

  grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of these

  funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my life.

  There was some relief in this boat, too, which there had not been

  in the other, for the captain (a blunt, good-natured fellow) had

  his handsome wife with him, who was disposed to be lively and

  agreeable, as were a few other lady-passengers who had their seats

  about us at the same end of the table. But nothing could have made

  head against the depressing influence of the general body. There

  was a magnetism of dulness in them which would have beaten down the

  most facetious companion that the earth ever knew. A jest would

  have been a crime, and a smile would have faded into a grinning

  horror. Such deadly, leaden people; such systematic plodding,

  weary, insupportable heaviness; such a mass of animated indigestion

  in respect of all that was genial, jovial, frank, social, or

  hearty; never, sure, was brought together elsewhere since the world

  began.

  Nor was the scenery, as we approached the junction of the Ohio and

  Mississippi rivers, at all inspiriting in its influence. The trees

  were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and flat; the

  settlements and log cabins fewer in number: their inhabitants more

  wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet. No songs of

  birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and

  shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless

  glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous

  objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and

  slowly as the time itself.

  At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot

  so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the

  forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full

  of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat

  and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is

  inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague,

  and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and

  speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many

  people's ruin. A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot

  away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and

  teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful

  shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and

  die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and

  eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy

  monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre,

  a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one

  single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is

  this dismal Cairo.

  But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of

  rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him!

  An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running

  liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current

  choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest

  trees: now twining themselves together in great rafts, from the

  interstices of which a sedgy, lazy foam works up, to float upon the

  water's top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled

  roots showing like matted hair; now glancing singly by like giant

  leeches; and now writhing round and round in the vortex of some

  small whirlpool, like wounded snakes. The banks low, the trees

  dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few

  and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather

  very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of

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  the boat, mud and slime on everything: nothing pleasant in its

  aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night up
on

  the dark horizon.

  For two days we toiled up this foul stream, striking constantly

  against the floating timber, or stopping to avoid those more

  dangerous obstacles, the snags, or sawyers, which are the hidden

  trunks of trees that have their roots below the tide. When the

  nights are very dark, the look-out stationed in the head of the

  boat, knows by the ripple of the water if any great impediment be

  near at hand, and rings a bell beside him, which is the signal for

  the engine to be stopped: but always in the night this bell has

  work to do, and after every ring, there comes a blow which renders

  it no easy matter to remain in bed.

  The decline of day here was very gorgeous; tingeing the firmament

  deeply with red and gold, up to the very keystone of the arch above

  us. As the sun went down behind the bank, the slightest blades of

  grass upon it seemed to become as distinctly visible as the

  arteries in the skeleton of a leaf; and when, as it slowly sank,

  the red and golden bars upon the water grew dimmer, and dimmer yet,

  as if they were sinking too; and all the glowing colours of

  departing day paled, inch by inch, before the sombre night; the

  scene became a thousand times more lonesome and more dreary than

  before, and all its influences darkened with the sky.

  We drank the muddy water of this river while we were upon it. It

  is considered wholesome by the natives, and is something more

  opaque than gruel. I have seen water like it at the Filter-shops,

  but nowhere else.

  On the fourth night after leaving Louisville, we reached St. Louis,

  and here I witnessed the conclusion of an incident, trifling enough

  in itself, but very pleasant to see, which had interested me during

  the whole journey.

  There was a little woman on board, with a little baby; and both

  little woman and little child were cheerful, good-looking, brighteyed,

  and fair to see. The little woman had been passing a long

  time with her sick mother in New York, and had left her home in St.

  Louis, in that condition in which ladies who truly love their lords

  desire to be. The baby was born in her mother's house; and she had

  not seen her husband (to whom she was now returning), for twelve

  months: having left him a month or two after their marriage.

  Well, to be sure, there never was a little woman so full of hope,