ers fruits and dainties and delicacies of all kinds and there they remained and nursed the wounded all the physicians stood watches there and all the medical students and the rest of the town furnished money or whatever else was wanted and Memphis knew how to do all these things well for many a disaster like the Pennsylvania's had happened near her doors and she was experienced above all other cities on the river in the gracious office of the Good Samaritan the site I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to me two long rows of prostrate forms more than 40 and all and every face and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton it was a gruesome spectacle I watched there six days and nights and a very melancholy experience it was there was one daily incident which was peculiarly depressing this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart it was done in order that the morale of the other patients might not be injuriously affected by seeing one of their number in the death agony the fated one was always carried out with as little stir as possible and the stretcher was always hidden from sight by a wall of assistance but no matter everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms with its muffled step and its slow movement meant and all eyes watched it wistfully and a shutter went a breast of it like a wave I saw many poor fellows removed to the death room and saw them no more afterward but I saw our chief mate carried scissor more than once his hurts were frightful especially his scalds he was closed in linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist and resembled nothing human he was often out of his mind and then his pains would make him rave and shout and sometimes shriek then after a period of numb exhaustion his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into a folk soul and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew and he would come to a sitting posture and shout hump yourselves hump yourselves you petrofactions snail bellies paul there is going to be all day getting that hat full of straight out and supplement this explosion with affirmament obliterating eruption or profanity which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty and now and then while these frenzies possessed him he would tear off handfuls of the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view it was horrible it was bad for the others of course this noise and these exhibitions so the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him but in his mind or out of it he would not take it he said his wife had been killed by that treacherous drug and he would die before he would take it he suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines and in his water so he ceased from putting either to his lips once when he had been without water during two sweltering days he took the dipper in his hand and the sight of the limpid fluid and the misery of his thirst tempted him almost beyond his strength but he mastered himself and threw it away and after that he allowed no more to be brought near him three times I saw him carry to the death room insensible and supposed to be dying but each time he revived cursed his attendance and demanded to be taken back he lived to be made of a steamboat again but he was the only one who went to the death room and returned alive Dr. Peyton a principal physician and rich in all the attributes that go to constitute high and flawless character did all that educated judgment and train skill could do for Henry but as the newspapers had said in the beginning his hurts were passed help on the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away and his nervous fingers picked at his coverlet his hour had struck we bore him to the death room poor boy end of chapter 20 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain chapter 21 a section in my biography in due course I got my license I was a pilot now full-fledged I dropped into casual employment no misfortunes resulting intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements time drifted smoothly and prosperously on and I supposed and hoped that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days and die at the wheel when my mission was ended but by and by the war came commerce was suspended my occupation was gone I had to seek another livelihood so I became a silver miner in Nevada next a newspaper reporter next a gold miner in california next a reporter in san francisco next a special correspondent in the sandwich islands next a roving correspondent in europe and the east next an instructional torchbearer on the lecture platform and finally I became a scribbler of books an immovable fixture among the other rocks of new england and so few words have I disposed of the 21 slow drifting years that have come and gone since I last left from the windows of a pilot house let us resume now end of chapter 21 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain chapter 22 I return to my muttons after 21 years absence I felt a very strong desire to see the river again and the steamboats and such of the boys as might be left so I resolved to go out there I enlisted a poet for company and a stenographer to take him down and started westward about the middle of april as I proposed to make notes with a view to printing I took some thought as to methods of procedure I reflected that if I were recognized on the river I should not be as free to go and come talk inquire and spy around as I should be if unknown I remember that it was the custom of steamboat men in the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies and put the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts so I concluded that from a business point of view it would be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names the idea was certainly good but it bred infinite bother for although Smith Jones and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted how do criminals manage to keep a brand new alias in mind this is a great mystery I was innocent and yet was seldom able to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed and it seemed to me that if I had had a crime on my conscience to further confuse me I could never have kept the name by me at all we left per Pennsylvania Railroad at 8 a.m. April 18 evening speaking of dress grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it as one travels away from New York I find that among my notes it makes no difference which direction you take the fact remains the same whether you move north south east or west no matter you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers I do not mean of the women alone but of both sexes it may be that carriage is at the bottom of this thing and I think it is for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen in the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best tailors and dress makers of New York yet this has no perceptible effect upon the grand fact the educated I never mistake those people for New Yorkers no there is a godless grace and snap and style about a born and bred New Yorker which mere clothing cannot affect April 19 this morning struck into the region of full goatees sometimes accompanied by a moustache but only occasionally it was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and uncommonly fashion it was like running suddenly across a forgotten acquaintance whom you had supposed dead for a generation the goatee extends over a wide extent of country and is accompanied by an iron clad belief in Adam and the biblical history of creation which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists afternoon at the railway stations the loafers carry both hands in their bridges pockets it was observable here to four that one hand was sometimes out of doors here never this is an important fact in geography if the loafers determined the character of the country it would be still more important of course here to four all along the station loafer has been often observed to scratch one shin with the other foot here these remains of activity are wanting this was an ominous look and by we entered the tobacco chewing region fifty years ago the tobacco chewing region covered the union it is greatly restricted now next boots began to appear not in strong force however later away down the mississippi they became the rule they disappeared from other sections of the union with mud no doubt they will disappear from the river villages also when proper pavements come in we reached st louis at ten o'clock night at the counter of the hotel i tendered a hurriedly invented fictitious name with a miserable attempt at careless ease the clerk paused and inspected me in the compassionate way in which one inspects a respectable person who is found in doubtful circumstances then he said it's all right i know what sort of a room you want used to clerk at the saint chains in new york an unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career we started to the supper room and met two other men whom i had known elsewhere how odd and unfair it is wicked imposters go around lecturing under my norm to get and nobody suspects them but when an honest man attempts an imposter he is exposed at once one thing seemed plain we must start down the river the next day if people who could not be deceived we're going to crop up at this rate an unpalatable disappointment for we had hoped to have a week in st louis the sudden was a good hotel and we could have had a comfortable time there it is large and well conducted and its decorations do not make one cry as do those of the vast palmer house in chicago true the billiard tables were of the old salurian period and the cues and balls of the post plyosine but there was refreshment in this not discomfort for there is rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities the most notable absence observable in the billiard room was the absence of the river man if he was there he had taken in his sign he was in disguise i saw there none of the swell airs and graces and ostentatious displays of money and pompous squanderings of it which used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry land crowd in the bygone days in the thronged billiard rooms of st louis in those times the principal saloons were always populous with river men given fifty players present thirty or thirty five were likely to be from the river but i suspected that the ranks were thin now and the steamboat men no longer an aristocracy i in my time they used to call the barkeep bill or joe or tom and flap him on the shoulder i watched for that but none of these people did it manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished away in these twenty one years when i went up to my room i found there the young man called rogers crying rogers was not his name now there was jones brown dexter fergusson baskin or tomson but he answered to either of these that a body found handy in an emergency or to any other name in fact if he perceived that you meant him he said what is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water drink this slush can't you drink it i could if i had some other water to wash it with here's a thing which had not changed a score of years had not affected this water's mulatto complexion in the least a score of centuries would succeed no better perhaps it comes out of the turbulent bank paving Missouri and every tumbler full of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution i got this fact from the bishop of the diocese if you will let your glass stand half an hour you can separate the land from the water as easy as genesis and then you will find them both good the one good to eat the other good to drink the land is very nourishing the water is thoroughly wholesome the one appeases hunger the other thirst but the natives do not take them separately but together as nature mixed them when they find an inch of mud in the bottom of the glass they stir it up and then take the draft as they would rule it is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter but once used to it he will prefer it to water this is really the case it is good for steamboating and good to drink but it is worthless for all other purposes except baptizing next morning we drove around town in the rain the city seemed but little changed it was greatly changed but it did not seem so because in st louis as in london and pittsburgh you can't persuade a new thing to look new the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it the place had just about doubled its size since i was a resident of it and was now become a city of 400 thousand inhabitants still in the solid business parts it looked about as it had looked formally yet i am sure there is not as much smoke in st louis now as there used to be the smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over the town and hide the sky from view this shelter is very much thinner now still there is a sufficiency of smoke there i think i heard no complaint however on the outskirts changes were apparent enough notably in dwelling house architecture the fine new homes are noble and beautiful and modern they stand by themselves too with green bonds around them whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks and are all of one pattern with windows all alike set in an arched framework of twisted stone a sort of house which was handsome enough when it was rarer there was another change the forest park this was new to me it is beautiful and very extensive and has the excellent merit of having been made mainly by nature there are other parks and fine ones notably power grove and the botanical gardens for st louis interested herself in such improvements at an earlier day than did the most of our cities the first time i ever saw st louis i could have bought it for six million dollars and it was the mistake of my life that i did not do it it was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis the solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand into dim measure defying distances and remember that i had allowed that opportunity to go by why i should have allowed it to go by seems of course foolish and inexplicable today at a first glance yet there were reasons at the time to justify this course a scotchman honorable charles augustus murray writing some forty five or fifty years ago said the streets are narrow ill paved and ill lighted those streets are narrow still of course many of them are ill paved yet but the reproach of ill lighting cannot be repeated now the catholic new church was the only notable building then and mr murray was confidently called upon to admire it with its species of greece in portico surmounted by a kind of steeple much too diminutive in its proportions and surmounted by sundry ornaments which the unimaginative scotchman found himself quite unable to describe and therefore was grateful when a german tourist helped him out with the exclamation by they look exactly like bedposts st louis is well equipped with stately and noble public buildings now in a little church which the people used to be so proud of lost its importance a long time ago still this would not surprise mr murray if he could come back for he prophesied the coming greatness of st louis with strong confidence the further we drove in our inspection tour the more sensibly i realized how the city had grown since i had seen it last changes in detail became steadily more apparent and frequent than at first two changes uniformly evidencing progress energy prosperity but the change of changes was on the levy this time a departure from the rule half a dozen sound asleep steamboats where i used to see a solid mile of wide awake ones this was melancholy this was woeful the absence of the pervading and jockened steamboat man from the billiard saloon was explained he was absent because he is no more his occupation is gone his power has passed away he is absorbed into the common herd he grinds at the mill a shorn sampson an inconspicuous half a dozen lifeless steamboats a mile of empty wharves a negro fatigued was whiskey stretched to sleep in a wide and soundless vacancy where the seared hosts of commerce used to contend footnote captain mariat writing 45 years ago says st louis has 20 000 inhabitants the river abreast of the town is crowded with steamboats lying in two or three tiers here was desolation indeed the old old sea as one in tears comes murmuring with foamy lips and knocking at the vacant peers calls for his long-lost multitude of ships the tow boat and the railroad had done their work and done it well and completely the mighty bridge stretching along over our heads had done each share in the slaughter and spoliation remains of former steamboat men told me with one satisfaction that the bridge doesn't pay still it can be no sufficient compensation to a corpse to know that the dynamite that laid him out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be the pavements along the riverfront were bad the sidewalks were rather out of repair there was a rich abundance of mud all this was familiar and satisfying but the ancient armies of drays and struggling throngs of men and mountains of freight were gone and sabbath reigned in their stead the immemorial mile of cheap foul doggies remained but business was dull with them the multitudes of poison swelling irish men had departed and in their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes some drinking some drunk some nodding others asleep saint louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city but the river edge of it seems dead past resurrection mississippi steamboating was born about 1812 at the end of 30 years it had grown into mighty proportions and in less than 30 more it was dead a strangely short life for so majestic a creature of course it is not absolutely dead neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump 22 feet on level ground but as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor mississippi steamboating may be called dead it killed the old-fashioned keelboating by reducing the freight trip to norlands to less than a week the railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing and the towing fleets have killed the through freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer loads of stuff down the river at a time at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition was out of the question freight and passenger way traffic remains to the steamers this is in the hands along the 2000 miles of river between st paul and norlands of two or three close corporations well fortified with capital and by able and thoroughly business like management and system these make a sufficiency of money out of what is left of the once prodigious steamboating industry i suppose that st lewis and norlands have not suffered materially by the change but a laugh for the woodyard man he used to fringe the river all the way his close ranked merchandise stretched from the one city to the other along the banks and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now and the seldomest spectacle in the mississippi today is a wood pile where now is the once woodyard man end of chapter 22 this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit libra vox.org life on the mississippi by mark twain chapter 23 traveling incognito my idea was to tarry a while in every town between st louis and new orleans to do this it would be necessary to go from place to place by the short packed lines it was an easy plan to make and would have been an easy one to follow 20 years ago but not now there are wide intervals between boats these days i wanted to begin with the interesting old french settlements of saint javiev and cascus kia 60 miles below st louis there was only one boat advertised for that section a grand tower packet still one boat was enough so we went down to look at her she was a venerable rack heap and a fraud to boot for she was playing herself for personal property whereas the good honest dirt was so thickly caked all over her that she was righteously taxable as real estate there are places in new england where her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre the soil on her folks so was quite good the new crop of wheat was already springing from the cracks in protected places the companion way was of a dry sandy character and would have been well suited for grapes with a southern exposure and a little subsoiling the soil of the boiler deck was thin and rocky but good enough for grazing purposes a colored boy was on watch here nobody else visible we gathered from him that this calm craft would go as advertised if she got her trip if she didn't get it she would wait for it has she got any of her trip bless you know boss she ain't unloaded yet she only come in this morning he was uncertain as to when she might get her trip but thought it might be tomorrow or maybe next day this would not answer at all so we had to give up the novelty of sailing down the river on a farm we had one more arrow in our quiver a vicksburg packet the gold dust was to leave at five p.m. we took passage in her for Memphis and gave up the idea of stopping off here and there as being impracticable she was neat clean and comfortable we camped on the boiler deck and bought some cheap literature to kill time with the vendor was a venerable Irish man with a benevolent faith and a tongue that worked easily in the socket and from him we learned that he had lived in st. Louis thirty four years and had never been across the river during that period then he wandered into a very flowing lecture filled with classic names and illusions which was quite wonderful for fluency until the fact became rather apparent that this was not the first time nor perhaps the fiftieth time that the speech had been delivered he was a good deal of a character and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling a random remark connecting Irish men and beer brought this nugget of information out of him they don't drink it sir they can't drink it sir give an Irish man lager for a month and he's a dead man an Irish man is lined with copper and the beer corrodes it but whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him sir at eight o'clock promptly we backed out and crossed the river as we crept toward the shore in the thick darkness a blinding glory of white electric light burst suddenly from our folksal and lit up the water and the warehouses as with a noonday glare another big change this no more flickering smoky pitch dripping ineffectual torch baskets now their day is passed next instead of calling out a score of hands to man the stage a couple of men and a hat full of steam lowered it from the Derek where it was suspended launched it deposited in just the right spot and the whole thing was over and done with before a mate in the olden time could have got his profanity mill adjusted to begin the preparatory services why this new and simple method of handling the stages was not thought of when the first steamboat was built is a mystery which helps one to realize what a dull witted slug the average human being is we finally got away at two in the morning and when i turned out at six we were rounding two at a rocky point where there was an old stone warehouse at any rate the ruins of it two or three decayed dwelling houses were nearby in the shelter of the leafy hills but there were no evidences of human or other animal life to be seen i wondered if i had forgotten the river or i had no recollection whatever of this place the shape of the river too was unfamiliar there was nothing in sight anywhere i could remember ever having seen before i was surprised disappointed and annoyed we put ashore a well-dressed lady and gentleman and two well-dressed lady-like young girls together with sundry russian leather bags a strange place for such folk no carriage was waiting the party moved off as if they had not expected any and struck down a winding country road afoot but the mystery was explained when we got underway again for these people were evidently bound for a large town which lay shut in behind a tow-head i.e. new island a couple of miles below this landing i couldn't remember that town i couldn't place it couldn't call its name so i lost part of my temper i suspected it might be saint jenovive and so it proved to be observe what this eccentric river had been about it had built up this huge useless tow-head directly in front of this town cut off its river communications fenced it away completely and made a country town of it it is a final place too and deserved a better fate it was settled by the french and is a relic of a time when one could travel from the miles of the mississippi to kebek and be on french territory and under french rule all the way presently i ascended to the hurricane deck and cast a longing glance toward the pilot house end of chapter 23 this is a libravox recording all libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit libravox.org life on the mississippi by mark twain chapter 24 my incognito is exploded after a close study of the face of the pilot on watch i was satisfied that i had never seen him before so i went up there the pilot inspected me i reinspected the pilot these customary preliminaries over i sat down on the high bench and he faced about and went on with his work every detail of the pilot house was familiar to me with one exception a large mouth tube under the best board i puzzled over that thing at considerable time then gave up and asked what it was for to hear the engine bell through it was another good contrivance which ought to have been invented half a century sooner so i was thinking when the pilot asked do you know what this rope is for i managed to get around this question without committing myself is this the first time you were ever in a pilot house i crept under that one where are you from new england first time you have ever been west i climbed over this one if you take an interest in such things i can tell you what all these things are for i said i should like it this putting his hand on a backing bell rope is to sound the fire alarms this putting his hand on a go ahead bell is to call the texas tender this one indicating the whistle lever is to call the captain and so he went on touching one object after another and reeling off his tranquil spool of lies i had never felt so like a passenger before i thanked him with emotion for each new fact and wrote it down in my notebook the pilot warmed to his opportunity and proceeded to load me up in the good old fashioned way at times i was afraid he was going to rupture his invention but it always stood the strain and he pulled through all right he drifted by easy stages into revealments of the river's marvelous eccentricities of one sort and another and back them up with some pretty gigantic illustrations for instance do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder well when i first came on the river that was a solid ridge of rock over 60 feet high and two miles long all washed away but that this with a sigh i had a mighty impulse to destroy him but it seemed to me that killing in any ordinary way would be too good for him once when an odd looking craft with a vast coals scuttle slanting aloft on the end of a beam was steaming by in the distance he indifferently drew attention to it as one might to an object grown weary some through familiarity and observed that it was an alligator boat an alligator boat what's it for to dredge out alligators with are they so thick as to be troublesome well not now because the government keeps them down but they used to be not everywhere but in favorite places here and there where the river is wide and shoal like plum point and stack island and so on places they call alligator beds did they actually impede navigation years ago yes in very low water there was hardly a trip then that we didn't get a ground on alligators it seemed to me that i should certainly have to get out my tomahawk however i restrained myself and said it must have been dreadful yes it was one of the main difficulties about piloting it was so hard to tell anything about the water the damn things shift around so never lie still five minutes at a time you can tell a wind reef straight off by the look of it you can tell a break you can tell a sand reef that's all easy but an alligator reef doesn't show up worth anything nine times in ten you can't tell where the water is and when you do see where it is like it's not it ain't there when you get there the devils swapped around so meantime of course there were some few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly as well as they could have any other kind but they had to have natural talent for it it wasn't a thing a body could learn you had to be born with it let me see there was ben thornberg and beck jolly and squire bell and hoarse bixby and major downing and john stevensson and billy gordon and jim brady and george ealer and billy youngblood all a one alligator pilots they could tell alligator water as far as another christian could tell whiskey read it ah couldn't they though i only wish i had as many dollars as they could read alligator water a mile and a half off yes and it paid them to do it too a good alligator pilot could always get fifteen hundred dollars a month knights other people had to lay up for alligators but those fellows never laid up for alligators they never laid up for anything but fog they could smell the best alligator water it was said i don't know whether it was so or not but and i think a body's got his hands full enough if he sticks to just what he knows himself without going around backing up other people's say so's though there's a plenty that ain't backward about doing it as long as they can roust out something wonderful to tell which is not the style of robert stiles by as much as three phantom maybe quarter less my was this robert stiles this mustached and stately figure a slim enough cub in my time how he has improved in comeliness in five and twenty year and in the noble art of inflating his facts after these musings i said aloud i should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn't have done much good because they could come back again right away if you had had as much experience of alligators as i have you wouldn't talk like that you dredge an alligator once and he's convinced it's the last you hear of him he wouldn't come back for pie if there's one thing that an alligator is more down on than another it's being dredged besides they were not simply subbed out of the way the most of the scoop fuller scooped aboard they emptied them into the hold and when they had got a trip they took them to orleans to the government what for why to make soldier shoes out of their hides all the government shoes are made of alligator hide it makes the best shoes in the world they last five years and they won't absorb water the alligator fishery is a government monopoly all the alligators are government property just like the live oaks you cut down a live oak and government finds you fifty dollars you kill an alligator and up you go for misprison of treason lucky duck if they don't hang you too and they will if you're a democrat the buzzard is the sacred bird of the south and you can't touch him the alligator is the sacred bird of the government and you've got to let him alone you ever get a ground on the alligators now oh no it hasn't happened for years well then why do they still keep the alligator boats in service well just for police duty nothing more they nearly go up and down now and then the present generation of alligators know them as easy as a burglar knows a roundsman when they see one coming they break camp and go for the woods after rounding out and finishing up and polishing off the alligator business he dropped easily and comfortably into the historical vein and told of some tremendous feats of half a dozen old-time steamboats of his acquaintance dwelling at special length upon a certain extraordinary performance of his chief favorite among this distinguished fleet and then adding that boat was the cyclone last trip she ever made she sunk that very trip captain was tom belue the most immortal liar that ever I struck he couldn't ever seem to tell the truth in any kind of weather why he would make you fairly shutter he was the most scandalous liar I left him finally I couldn't stand it the proverb says like master like man and if you stay with that kind of a man you'll come under a suspicion by and by just as sure as you live he paid first class wages but I said what's wages when your reputation's in danger so I let the wages go and froze to my reputation and I've never regretted it reputation's worth everything needed that's the way I look at it he had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world all packed in the stern sheets of his skull of course where they belonged they weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up in the air people thought it was vanity but it wasn't it was malice if you only saw his foot you take him to be 19 feet high but he wasn't it was because his foot was out of drawing he was intended to be 19 feet high no doubt if his foot was made first but he didn't get there he was only five feet 10 but that's what he was and that's what he is you take the lies out of him and he'll shrink to the size of your hat you take the malice out of him and he'll disappear that cyclone was a rattler to go and the sweetest thing to steer that ever walked the waters set her amid ships in a big river and just let her go there's all you had to do she would hold herself on a star all night if you let her alone you couldn't ever feel her rudder it wasn't any more labor to steer her than it is to count the republican vote in the south carolina election one morning just a daybreak the last trip she ever made they took her rudder aboard to mend it I didn't know anything about it I backed her out from the woodyard and went a weaving down the river all serene when I had gone about 23 miles and made four horribly crooked crossings without any rudder yes old captain tom appeared on the roof and began to find fault with me for running such a dark night such a dark night why you said never mind what I said it was as dark as Egypt now though pretty soon the moon began to rise and what do you mean the sun because you started out just at the break of well look here was this before you put in the captain on account of his lying or it was before a long time before and as I was saying he but was this the trip she sunk or was oh no months afterward so the old man he then she made two last trips because you said he stepped back from the wheels swabbing away his perspiration and said here calling me by name you take her and lie a while you're handier out of than I am trying to play yourself for a stranger and an innocent well I knew you before you had spoken seven words and I made up my mind to find out what was your little game it was to draw me out well I let you didn't I now take the wheel and finish the watch and next time place fair and you won't have to work your passage us ended the fictitious name business and not six hours I couldn't St. Louis but I had gained a privilege anyway for I had been itching to get my hands on the wheel from the beginning I seem to have forgotten the river but I hadn't forgotten how to steer a steamboat nor how to enjoy it either end of chapter 24 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain chapter 25 from Cairo to Hickman the scenery from St. Louis to Cairo 200 miles is varied and beautiful the hills were closed in the fresh foliage of spring now and we're a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing between our trip began auspiciously with a perfect day as to breeze and sunshine and our boat threw the miles out behind her with satisfactory dispatch we found a railway intruding at Chester Illinois Chester has also a penitentiary now and is otherwise marching on at Grand Tower too there was a railway and another at Cape Girardeau the former town gets its name from a huge squat pillar of rock which stands up out of the water on the Missouri side of the river a piece of nature's fanciful handiwork and is one of the most picturesque features of the scenery of that region for nearer or remote neighbors the tower has the devil's bake oven so called perhaps because it does not powerfully resemble anybody else's bake oven and the devil's tea table this latter a great smooth surfaced mass of rock was diminishing wine glass stem perched some 50 or 60 feet above the river beside of the flowered and garlanded precipice and sufficiently like a tea table to answer for anybody devil or Christian away down the river we have the devil's elbow and the devil's race course and lots of other property of his which I cannot now call to mind the town of Grand Tower was evidently a busier place than it had been in old times but it seemed to need some repairs here and there and a new coat of whitewash all over still it was pleasant to me to see the old coat once more uncle Mumford our second officer said the place had been suffering from high water and consequently was not looking at best now but he said it was not strange that it didn't waste whitewash on itself for more lime was made there and of a better quality than anywhere in the west and added on a dairy farm you never can get any milk for your coffee nor any sugar for it on a sugar plantation and it is against sense to go to a limetown to hunt for whitewash in my own experience I knew the first two items to be true and also that people who sell candy don't care for candy therefore there was pausability in uncle Mumford's final observation that people who make lime run more to religion than whitewash uncle Mumford said further that Grand Tower was a great polling center and a prospering place Jirardot is situated on a hillside and makes a handsome appearance there is a great Jesuit school for boys at the foot of the town by the river uncle Mumford said it had as high reputation for thoroughness as any similar institution in Missouri there was another college higher up on an airy summit a bright new edifice picturesquely and peculiarly towered and pinnacled a sort of gigantic caster with the crew it's all complete uncle Mumford said that Cape Jirardot was the Athens of Missouri and contained several colleges besides those already mentioned and all of them on a religious basis of one kind or another he directed my attention to what he called the strong and pervasive religious look of the town but I could not see that it looked more religious than the other hill towns with the same slope and built of the same kind of bricks partialities often make people see more than really exists uncle Mumford has been 30 years a mate on the river he is a man of practical sense and a level head has observed has had much experience of one sort in another has opinions has also just a perceptible dash of poetry in his composition an easy gift of speech a thick growl in his voice and an ulcer too where he can get at them when the exigencies of his office require a spiritual lift he is a mate of the blessed old time kind and goes gravely damning around when there is work to the fore in a way to mellow the esteem boatman's heart with sweet soft longings for the vanished days that shall come no more get up there you there'll be all day why aren't you saying you was petrified in your hind legs before you shipped he is a steady man with his crew kind and just but firm so they like him and stay with him he is still in the slouchy garb of the old generation of mates but next trip the anchor line will have him in uniform a natty blue naval uniform with brass buttons along with all the officers of the line and then he will be a totally different style of scenery from what he is now uniforms on the Mississippi it beats all the other changes put together for surprise still there is another surprise that it was not made 50 years ago it is so manifestly sensible that it might have been thought of earlier one would suppose during 50 years out there the innocent passenger in need of help and information has been mistaking the mate for the cook and the captain for the barber and being roughly entertained for it too but his troubles are ended now and a greatly improved aspect of the boat staff is another advantage achieved by the dress reform period steered down the bend below Cape Girardu they used to call it steersman's bend plain sailing and plenty of water in it always about the only place in the upper river that a new club was allowed to take a boat through in low water thieves at the head of the grand chain and commerce at the foot of it were towns easily rememberable as they had not undergone conspicuous alteration nor the chain either in the nature of things for it is a chain of sunken rocks admirably arranged to capture and kill steamboats on bad nights a good many steamboat corpses lie buried there out among the rest my first friend the paul jones she knocked her bottom out and went down like a pot so the historian told me uncle mumford he said she had a grey mare aboard and a preacher to me this sufficiently accounted for the disaster as it did of course to mumford who added but there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such a matter and call it superstition but you will always notice that there are people who have never traveled with a grey mare and a preacher i went down the river once in such company we grounded at bloody island we grounded at hanging dog we grounded just below this same commerce we jolted beaver damn rock we hit one of the worst breaks in the graveyard behind goose island we had a roust about killed in a fight we burnt a boiler broke a shaft collapsed the flu and went into caro with nine feet of water in the hold may have been more may have been less i remember it as if it were yesterday the man lost their heads with terror they painted the mare blue in sight of town and threw the preacher overboard or we should not have arrived at all the preacher was fished out and saved he acknowledged himself that he had been to blame i remember it all was that it were yesterday that this combination of preacher and grey mare should breed calamity seems strange and at first glance unbelievable but the fact is fortified by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason i myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends against taking a grey mare and a preacher with him but persisted in his purpose in spite of all that could be said and the same day it may have been the next and some say it was though i think it was the same day he got drunk and fell down the hatch way and is born to his home a corpse this is literally true no vestige of hat island is left now every shred of it is washed away i do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in except that it was between st louis and caro somewhere it was a bad region all around and about hat island in early days a farmer who lived on the illinois shore there said that 29 steam boats had left their bones strung along with insight from his house between st louis and caro the steamboat wrecks average one to the mile 200 racks all together i could recognize big changes from commerce down 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 a way out in mid river has retired to the missouri shore and boats did not go near it anymore 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 the perilous graveyard among whose numberless wrecks we used to pick our way so slowly and gingerly is far away from the channel now and a terror to nobody one of the islands formerly called the two sisters is gone entirely the other which used to lie close to the illinois shore is now on the missouri side a mile away it is joined solidly to the shore and it takes a sharp eye to see where the seam is but it is illinois ground yet and the people who live on it have to ferry themselves over and work the illinois roads and pay illinois taxes singular state of things near the mouse of the river several islands were missing washed away caro was still there easily visible across the long flat point upon whose further verge it stands but we had to steam a long way around to get to it night fell as we were going out of the upper river and meeting the floods of the ohio we dashed along without anxiety for the hidden rock which used to lie right in the way has moved upstream a long distance out of the channel or rather about one county has gone into the river from the missouri point and the caro point has made down and added to its long tongue of territory correspondingly the mississippi is a just an equitable river it never tumbles one man's farm overboard without building a new farm just like it for that man's neighbor this keeps down hard feelings going into caro we came near killing a steamboat which paid no attention to our whistle and then tried to cross our vows by doing some strong backing we saved him which was a great loss for he would have made good literature caro is a brisk town now and is substantially built and has a city look about it which is in noticeable contrast to its former estate as per mr. dickens portrait of it however it was already building with bricks when i had seen it last which was when colonel now general grant was drilling his first command there uncle munford says the libraries and sunday schools have done a good work in caro as well as the brickmasons caro has a heavy railroad and river trade and her situation at the junction of the two great rivers is so advantageous that she cannot well help prospering when i turned out in the morning we had passed columbus kentucky and were approaching hickman a pretty town perched on a handsome hill hickman is in a rich tobacco region and formally enjoyed a great and lucrative trade in that staple collecting it there in her warehouses from a large area of country and shipping it by boat but uncle munford says she built a railway to facilitate this commerce a little more and he thinks it facilitated it the wrong way took the bulk of the trade out of her hands by collaring it along the line without gathering it at her doors end of chapter twenty five this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit libra vox dot org life on the mississippi by mark twain chapter twenty six under fire talk began to run upon the war now for we were getting down into the upper edge of the former battle stretch by this time columbus was just behind us so there was a good deal said about the famous battle of belmont several of the boat's officers had been seen active service in the mississippi war fleet i gathered that they found themselves sadly out of their element in that kind of business at first but afterward got accustomed to it reconciled to it and more or less at home in it one of our pilots had his first war experience in the belmont fight as a pilot on a boat into confederate service i had often had a curiosity to know how a green hand might feel in his maiden battle perched all solitary and alone on high in a pilot house a target for tom dick and harry and nobody at his elbow to shame him from showing the white feather when matters grew hot and perilous around him so to me his story was valuable it filled a gap for me which all histories had left till that time empty the pilot's first battle he said it was the seventh of november the fight began at seven in the morning i was on the rhw hill took over a load of troops from columbus came back and took over a battery of artillery my partner said he was going to see the fight wanted me to go along i said no i wasn't anxious i would look at it from the pilot house he said i was a coward and left that fight was an awful sight general cheaton made his men stripped their coats off and throw them in a pile and said now follow me to hell or victory i heard him say that from the pilot house and then he galloped in at the head of his troops old general pillow with his white hair mounted on a white horse sailed in to leading his troops as lively as a boy by and by the federals chased the rebels back and here they came tearing along everybody for himself and devil take the hindmost and down under the bank they scrambled and took shelter i was sitting with my legs hanging out with the pilot house window all at once i noticed a whizzing sound passing my ear judged it was a bullet i didn't stop to think about anything i just tilted over backwards and landed on the floor and stayed there the balls were booming round three cannon balls went through the chimney one ball took off the corner of the pilot house shells were screaming and bursting all around mighty warm times i wished i hadn't come i lay there on the pilot house floor while the shots came faster and faster i crept in behind the big stove in the middle of the pilot house presently a mini ball came through the stove it just grazed my head and cut my hat i judged it was time to go away from there the captain was on the roof with the redheaded major from benfus a fine-looking man i heard him say he wanted to leave here but that pilot is killed i crept over to the starboard side to pull the bell to set her back raised up and took a look and i saw about 15 shot holes through the window panes had come so lively i hadn't noticed them i glanced out on the water and the spattering shot were like hail storm i thought best to get out of that place i went down the pilot house guy head first not feet first but head first slid down before i struck the deck the captain said we must leave there so i climbed up the guy and got on the floor again about that time they collared my partner and were bringing him up to the pilot house between two soldiers somebody had said i was killed he put his head in and saw me on the floor reaching for the backing bells he said oh hell he ain't shot and jerked away from the men who had him by the collar and ran below we were there until three o'clock in the afternoon and then got away all right the next time i saw my partner i said now come out be honest and tell me the truth where did you go when you went to see that battle he says i went down in the hold all through that fight i was scared nearly to death i hardly knew anything i was so frightened but you see nobody knew that but me next day general polk sentry and praised me for my bravery and gallant conduct i never said anything i let it go at that i judged it wasn't so but it was not for me to contradict a general officer pretty soon after that i was sick and used up and had to go off to hot springs when there i got a good many letters from commanders saying they wanted me to come back i declined because i wasn't well enough or strong enough but i kept still and kept the reputation i had made a plain story straightforwardly told but monford told me that that pilot had gilded that scare of his in spots that his subsequent career in the war was proof of it we struck down through the chute of island number eight and i went below and fell into conversation with a passenger a handsome man with easy carriage and an intelligent face we were approaching island number ten a place so celebrated during the war this gentleman's home was on the main shore in its neighborhood i had some talk with him about the war times but presently the discourse fell upon feuds or in no part of the south as the vendetta flourished more briskly or held out longer between warring families than in this particular region this gentleman said there's been more than one feud around here in old times but i reckon the worst one was between the darnels and the wachsons nobody don't know now what the first quarrel was about it's so long ago the darnels and the wachsons don't know if there's any of them living which i don't think there is some says it was about a horse or a cow anyway it was a little matter the money in it wasn't of no consequence none in the world both families was rich the thing could have been fixed up easy enough but no that wouldn't do rough words have been passed and so nothing but blood could fix it up after that that horse or cow whichever it was cost 60 years of killing and crippling every year or so somebody was shot on one side or the other and as fast as one generation was laid out their sons took up the feud and kept it a going and it's just as i say they went on shooting each other year in and year out making a kind of religion of it you see till they'd done forgot long ago what it was all about wherever a darnel caught a watson or a watson caught a darnel one of them was going to get hurt only question was which of them got the drop on the other they'd shoot one another down right in the presence of the family they hadn't hunt for each other but when they happened to meet they puffed and begun men would shoot boys boys would shoot them a man shot a boy 12 years old happened on him in the woods and didn't give him no chance if he had given him a chance the boy to shot him both families belong to the same church everybody around here is religious through all this 50 or 60 years fuss both tribes was there every Sunday to worship they lived each side of the line and the church was at a landing called compromise half the church and half the aisle was in Kentucky the other half in Tennessee Sundays you'd see the families drive up all in their Sunday clothes men women and children and file up the aisle and set down quiet and orderly one locked on the Tennessee side of the church and the other on the Kentucky side and the men and boys would lean their guns up against the wall handy and then all hands would join in with the prayer and praise though they say the man next the aisle didn't kneel down along with the rest of the family kind of stood guard I don't know never was it that church in my life but I remember that that's what used to be said 20 or 25 years ago one of the feud families caught a young man of 19 out and killed him don't remember whether it was the darn elves and wasans or one of the other feuds but anyway this young man rode up a steamboat laying there at the time and the first thing he saw was a whole gang of the enemy he jumped down behind a wood pile but they rode around and begun on him he firing back and they galloping and cavorting and yelling and banging away with all their might think he wounded a couple of them but they closed in on him and chased him into the river and as he swung along downstream they followed along the bank and kept on shooting at him and when he struck shore he was dead Wendy Marshall told me about it he saw it he was captain of the boat years ago the darn elves was so thinned out that the old man and his two sons concluded they'd leave the country they started to take steamboat just above number ten but the watson's got wind of it and they arrived just as the two young darn elves was walking up the companion way with their wives on their arms the fight begun then and they never got no further both of them killed after that old Darnell got into trouble with a man that run the ferry and the ferryman got the worst of it and died but his friends shot old Darnell through and through filled in full of bullets and ended him the country gentlemen who told me these things had been reared in ease and comfort was a man of good parts and was college bread his loose grammar was the fruit of careless habit not ignorance this habit among educated men in the west is not universal but it is prevalent prevalent in the town certainly if not in the cities and to a degree which one cannot help noticing and marveling at I heard a westerner who would be accounted a highly educated man in any country say never mind don't make no difference anyway a lifelong resident who was present heard it but it made no impression upon her she was able to recall the fact afterward when reminded of it but she confessed that the words had not grated upon her ear at the time a confession which suggests that if educated people can hear such blasphemous grammar from such a source and be unconscious of the deed the crime must be tolerably common so common that the general ear has become dulled by familiarity with it and is no longer alert no longer sensitive to such a fronts no one in the world speaks blemishless grammar no one has ever written it no one either in the world or out of it taking the scriptures for evidence on the latter point therefore it would not be fair to exact grammatical perfection from the peoples of the valley but they and all other peoples may justly be required to refrain from knowingly and purposefully debauching their grammar I found the river greatly changed at island number 10 the island which I remembered was some three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide heavily timbered and lay near the Kentucky shore within 200 yards of it I should say now however one had to hunt for it with a spyglass nothing was left of it but an insignificant little tuft and this was no longer near the Kentucky shore it was clear over against the opposite shore a mile away in war times the island had been an important place for it commanded the situation and being heavily fortified there was no getting by it it lay between the upper and lower divisions of the union forces and kept them separate until a junction was finally affected across the Missouri neck of land but the island being itself joined to that neck now the wide river is without obstruction in this region the river passes from Kentucky into Tennessee back into Missouri then back into Kentucky and then into Tennessee again so a mile or two of Missouri sticks over into Tennessee the town of New Madrid was looking very unwell but otherwise unchanged from its former condition and aspect its blocks of frame houses were still grouped in the same old flat plain and environed by the same old forests it was as tranquil as formerly and apparently had neither grown nor diminished in size it was said that the recent high water had invaded it and damaged its looks this was surprising news for in low water the riverbank is very high there 50 feet and in my day an overflow had always been considered an possibility this present flood of 1882 will doubtless be celebrated in the river's history for several generations before a deluge of like magnitude shall be seen it could all the unprotected lowlands underwater from Cairo to the mouse it broke down the levees in a great many places on both sides of the river and in some region south when the flood was at its highest the Mississippi was 70 miles wide a number of lives were lost and the destruction of property was fearful the crops were destroyed houses washed away and shelterless men and cattle forced to take refuge on scattering elevations here and there in field and forest and wait in peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue them the properties of multitudes of people were underwater for months and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundreds if soccer had not been promptly afforded footnote for a detailed and interesting description of the great flood written on board of the New Orleans Times Democrats relief boat see appendix a the water had been falling during a considerable time now yet as a rule we found the banks still underwater end of chapter 26 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox dot org life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain chapter 27 some imported articles 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 still league after league it pours its chocolate tied along between its solid forest walls it's almost untenanted chores with seldom a sale 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 tranquility lethargy vacancy symbol of eternity realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet and longed for by the good and thoughtless immediately after the war of 1812 tourists began to come to America from England scattering ones at first then a sort of procession of them a procession which kept up its plotting patient march through the land during many many years each tourist took notes and went home and published a book a book which was usually calm truthful reasonable kind but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors a glance at these tourist books shows us that in certain of its aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those strangers visited it but remains today about as it was then the emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects were not all formed on one pattern of course they had to be various along at first because the earlier tourists were obliged to originate their emotions whereas in older countries one can always borrow emotions from one's predecessors and mind you emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion captain basal hall rn writing 55 years ago says here i caught the first glimpse of the object i had so long wished to behold and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all the trouble i had experienced in coming so far and stood looking at the river flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything but it was not till i had visited the same spot a dozen times that i came to a right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene following our mrs trollop's emotions she is writing a few months later in the same year 1827 and is coming in at the mouth of the mississippi the first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters and mingling with a deep blue of the mexican gulf i never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the mississippi had done to seen it he might have drawn images of another borgia from its horrors one only object rears itself above the eddying waters this is the mass of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross the bar and it still stands a dismal witness of the destruction that has been and a boating profit of that which is to come emotions of honorable charles augustus murray near st louis seven years later it is only when you ascend the mighty current for 50 or 100 miles and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature that you begin to understand all his might and majesty you see him fertilizing a boundless valley bearing along in his course the trophies of his thousand victories over the shattered forest here carrying away large masses of soil with all their growth and their forming islands destined at some future period to be the residents of man and while indulging in this prospect it is then time for reflection to suggest that the current before you has flowed through two or three thousand miles and has yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before reaching its ocean destination receive now the emotions of captain mariat are in author of the details writing in 1837 three years after mr murray never perhaps in the records of nations was there an instance of a century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected from the history of the turbulent and blood stained mississippi the stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been committed it is not like most rivers beautiful to the site bestowing fertility in its course not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along nor can you wander upon its banks or trust yourself without danger to its stream it is a furious rapid desolating torrent loaded with alluvial soil and few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again footnote there was a foolish superstition of some little prevalence in that day that the mississippi would neither buoy up of swimmer nor permit a drowned person's body to rise to the surface or can support themselves along upon its surface without assistance from some friendly log it contains the coarsest and most un-eatable of fish such as the catfish and such genus and as you descend its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator while the panther basks at its edge in the cane breaks almost impervious to man pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered with trees of little value except for firewood it sweeps down whole forests in its course which disappear into mulchuous confusion whirled away by the stream now loaded with the masses of soil which nourish their roots often blocking up and changing for a time the channel of the river which as if in anger at its being opposed inundates and devastates the whole country round and as soon as it forces its way through its former channel plants in every direction the uprooted monarchs of the forest upon whose branches the bird will never again perch or the raccoon the opossum or the squirrel climb as traps to the adventurous navigators of its waters by steam who borne down upon these concealed dangers which pierce through the planks very often have not time to steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the bottom there are no pleasing associations connected with the great common sewer of the western america which pours out its mud into the mexican gulf polluting the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth it is a river of desolation and instead of reminding you like other beautiful rivers of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man you imagine it a devil whose energies have been only overcome by the wonderful power of steam it is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to handling a pen still as a panorama of the emotions sent weltering through this noted visitor's breast by the aspect and traditions of the great common sewer it has a value a value though marred in the matter of statistics by inaccuracies for the catfish is a plenty good enough fish for anybody and there are no panthers that are impervious to man later still comes alexander mckay of the middle temple barrister at law with a better digestion and no catfish dinner aboard and feels as follows the mississippi it was with indescribable emotions that i first felt myself afloat upon its waters how often in my schoolboy dreams and in my waking visions afterwards had my imagination pictured to itself the lordly stream rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless region to which it has given its name and gathering into itself in its course to the ocean the tributary waters of almost every latitude in the temperate zone here it was then in its reality and i at length steaming against its tide i looked upon it with that reverence with which everyone must regard a great feature of external nature so much for the emotions the tourists one and all remark upon the deep brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river captain dazzle hall who saw it at flood stage says sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without seeing a single habitation an artist in search of hints for a painting of the deluge would here have found them in abundance the first shall be last etc just two hundred years ago the old original first and gallantist of all the foreign tourists pioneer head of the procession ended his weary and tedious discovery voyage down the solemn stretches of the great river lasal whose name will last as long as the river itself shall last we quote from mr parkman and now they neared their journey's end on the sixth of april the river divided itself into three broad channels lasal followed that of the west and dot re that of the east while tony took the middle passage as he drifted down the turbid current between the low and marshy shores the brackish water changed to brine and the breeze grew fresh with the salt breath of the sea then the broad bosom of the great gulf opened on his site tossing its restless billows limitless voiceless lonely is when born of chaos without a sale without a sign of life then on a spot of solid ground lasal reared a column bearing the arms of france the french men were mustered under arms and while the new england indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence they chanted the today um the xaudiat and the domini salvam facre gem then whilst the musketry volleyed and rejoicing shouts burst forth the victoria's discoverer planted the column and made proclamation in a loud voice taking formal possession of the river and the vast countries watered by it in the name of the king the column bore this inscription louis le grand roi de france et de navarre reigne le neuvième avril 1692 norleans intended to fittingly celebrate this present year the bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event but when the time came all her energies and surplus money were required in other directions for the flood was upon the land then making havoc and devastation everywhere end of chapter 27 this is a libravox recording all libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit libravox.org life on the mississippi by mark twain chapter 28 uncle monford unloads all day we swung along down the river and had the stream almost holy to ourselves formally 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 peddler's family on board possibly a random scow bearing a humble hamlet and company on an itinerant dramatic trip but these were all absent far along in the day we saw one steamboat just one and no more she was lying at rest in the shade within the wooded mouth of the obion river the spyglass revealed the fact that she was named for me or he was named for me whichever you prefer as this was the first time i had ever encountered this species of honor it seems excusable to mention it and at the same time call the attention of the authorities to the tardiness of my recognition of it noted a big change in the river at island twenty one it was a very large island and used to be out toward midstream but it is joined fast to the main shore now and has retired from business as an island as we approached famous and formidable plum point darkness fell but that was nothing to shudder about in these modern times for now the national government has turned the Mississippi into a sort of two thousand mile torchlight procession in the head of every crossing and in the foot of every crossing the government has set up a clear burning lamp you are never entirely in the dark now there is always a beacon in sight either before you or behind you or abreast one might almost say that lamps have been squandered there dozens of crossings are lighted which were not shoal when they were created and have never been shoals since crossings so plain too and also so straight that a steamboat can take herself through them without any help after she has been through once lamps in such places are of course not wasted it is much more convenient and comfortable for a pilot to hold on them than on a spread of formless blackness that won't stay still and money is saved to the boat at the same time for she can of course make more miles with her rudder image ships than she can with it squared across her stern and holding her back but this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting to a large extent it and some other things together have knocked all the romance out of it for instance the peril from snags is not now what it once was the government's snag boats go patrolling up and down in these matter of fact days pulling the river's teeth they have rooted out all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable and they allow no new ones to collect formerly if your boat got away from you on a black night and broke for the woods it was an anxious time with you so was it also when you were groping your way through solidified darkness in a narrow chute but all that has changed now you flash out your electric light transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye and your perils and anxieties are at an end Horace Bixby and George Ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses by compass they have invented a lamp to go with the chart and have patented the whole with these helps one may run in the fog now with considerable security and with a confidence unknown in the old days with these abundant beacons the banishment of snags plenty of daylight in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed at a chart and compass to fight the fog with piloting at a good stage of water is now nearly as safe and simple as driving stage and is hardly more than three times as romantic and now in these few days these days of infinite change the anchor line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger wages of the two this was going far but they have not stopped there they have decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post and stand his watch clear through whether the boat be underway or tied up to the shore we that were once the aristocrats of the river can't go to bed now as we used to do and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are lugged aboard no we must sit in the pilot house and keep awake too verily we are being treated like a parcel of mates and engineers the government has taken away the romance of our calling the company has taken away its state and dignity one point looked as it had always looked by night with the exception that now there were beacons to mark the crossings and also a lot of other lights on the point and along its shore these latter glinting from the fleet of the united states river commission and from a village which the officials have built on the land for offices and for the employees of the service the military engineers of the commission have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it they are building wing dams here and there to deflect the current and dykes to confine it in narrower bounds and other dykes to make it stay there and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi they are felling the timber front for fifty yards back with a purpose of shaving the bank down to low watermark with a slant of a house roof and ballasting it with stones and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with rows of piles one who knows the Mississippi will promptly avert not allowed but to himself that ten thousand river commissions with the minds of the world at their back cannot tame that lawless stream cannot curb it or confine it cannot say to it go here or go there and make it a bay cannot save a shore which it has sentenced cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down dance over and laugh at but a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anymore they know all that can be known of their abstruse science and so since they conceive that they can better and handcuff that river and boss him it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still lilo and wait till they do it captain eads with his jetties has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities otherwise one would pipe out and say the commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct I consulted uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters and I give here the result stenographically reported and therefore to be relied on as being full and correct except that I have here and there left out remarks which were addressed to the men such as where in blazes are you going with that barrel now and which seem to me to break the flow of the written statement without compensating by adding to its information or its clearness not that I have ventured to strike out all such interjections I have removed only those which were obviously irrelevant wherever one occurred which I felt any question about I have judged it safest to let it remain uncle Mumford's impressions uncle Mumford said as long as I have been made of a steamboat 30 years I have watched this river and studied it maybe I could have learned more about it at West Point but if I believe it I wish I may be what are you sucking your fingers there for color that tag of nails four years at West Point and plenty of books and schooling will learn a man a good deal I reckon but it won't learn him the river you turn one of those little European rivers over to this commission with its hard bottom and clear water and it would just be a holiday job for them to wallet and pilot and like it and tame it down and boss it around and make it go wherever they wanted it to and stay where they put and do just as they said every time but this ain't that kind of river they have started in here with big confidence and the best intentions in the world but they are going to get left what does Ecclesiastes 713 say says enough to knock their little game galley west on it now you look at their methods once there at devil's island in the upper river they wanted the water to go one way the water wanted to go another so they put up a stone wall but what does this river care for a stone wall when it got ready and just bulge through it maybe they can build another that will stay that is up there but not down here they can't down here in the lower river they drive some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from slicing off the bank very well don't it go straight over and cut somebody else's bank certainly are they going to peg all the banks why they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper they are pegging bulletin toe head now they won't do any good if the river has got a mortgage on that island it will foreclose sure pegs or no pegs the way down yonder they have driven two rows of piles straight through the middle of a dry bar half a mile long which is forty foot out of the water when the river is low what do you reckon that is for if I know I wish I may land and hunt yourself for you son of a undertaker out with that coal oil now lively lively and just look at what they are trying to do down there at Millicombs Bend there's been a cutoff in that section and Vicksburg is left out in the cold it's a country town now the river strikes in below it and a boat can't go up to the town except in high water well they are going to build wing dams in the bend opposite the foot of 103 and throw the water over and cut off the foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where the river used to be in ancient times and they think they can persuade the water around that way and get it to strike in above Vicksburg as it used to do and fetch the town back into the world again that is they are going to take this whole Mississippi and twist it around and make it run several miles upstream well you've got to admire men that deal in ideas of that size and can tote them around without crutches but you haven't got to believe they can do such miracles have you and yet you ain't absolutely obliged to believe they can't I reckon the safe way where a man can afford it is to copper the operation and at the same time buy enough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they win government is doing a deal for the Mississippi now spending loads of money on her when there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten thousand acres of coal barges and rafts and trading scouts there wasn't a lantern from Saint Paul to New Orleans and the snags were thicker than bristles on a hog's back and now when there's three dozen steamboats and nary barge or raft government has snatched out all the snags and lit up the shores like Broadway and the boats are safe on the river and should be in heaven and I reckon that by the time there ain't any boats left at all the commission will have the old thing all reorganized and dredged out and fenced in and tied it up to a degree that will make navigation just simply perfect and absolutely safe and profitable and all the days will be Sundays and all the mates will be Sunday schools to what in the nation you fool around there for you sons of unrighteousness heirs of perdition going to be a year getting that hog's Spanish or during our trip to New Orleans and back we had many conversations with rivermen planters journalists and officers of the river commission with conflicting and confusing results to it one some believed in the commission scheme to arbitrarily and permanently confined and thus deepen the channel preserve threatened shores etc to some believe that the commission's money ought to be spent only on building and repairing the great system of levies three some believe that the higher you build your levy the higher the river's bottom will rise and that consequently the levy system is a mistake four some believed in the scheme to relieve the river in flood time by turning its surplus waters off into lake borne etc five some believed in the scheme of northern lake reservoirs to replenish the Mississippi in low water seasons wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these theories you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon the hypothesis that he does not believe in that theory and after you have had experience you do not take this course doubtfully or hesitatingly but with the confidence of a dying murderer converted one I mean for 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 no there will always be one or two with the other diseases along between and as you proceed you will find out one or two other things you will find out that there is no distemper of the lot but is contagious and you cannot go where it is without catching it 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 yes you are his sure victim yet his work is not all to your heart only part of it or he is like your family physician who comes and cures the mumps and leaves the scarlet fever behind if your man is a lake borne relief theorist for instance he will exhale a cloud of deadly facts and statistics which will lay you out with that disease sure but at the same time he will cure you of any other of the five theories that may have previously got into your system I have had all the five and had them bad but ask me not in mournful numbers which one racked me hardest or which one numbered the biggest sick list for I do not know in truth no one can answer the latter question Mississippi improvement is a mighty topic down yonder 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 and each of the several chief theories has its host of zealous part of fans but as I have said it is not possible to determine which cause numbers the most recruits all were agreed upon one point however if congress would make a sufficient appropriation a colossal benefit would result very well since then the appropriation has been made possibly a sufficient one certainly not too large a one let us hope that the prophecy will be aptly fulfilled one thing will be easily granted by the reader that an opinion from Mr Edward Atkinson upon any vast national commercial matter comes as near ranking as authority as can the opinion of any individual in the union what he has to say about Mississippi river improvement will be found in the appendix footnote the appendix B sometimes half a dozen figures will reveal as with a lightning flash the importance of a subject which 10 000 labored words with the same purpose and view had left at last but dim and uncertain here's a case of the sort paragraph from the Cincinnati commercial the tow boat and Joseph B Williams is on her way to New Orleans with a tow of 32 barges containing 600 000 bushels 76 pounds to the bushel of pole exclusive of her own fuel being the largest tow ever taken to New Orleans or anywhere else in the world her freight bill at three cents a bushel amounts to 18 000 it would take 1800 cars of 333 bushels to the car to transport this amount of coal at $10 per ton or $100 per car which would be a fair price for the distance by rail the freight bill would amount to $180 000 or 162 000 more by rail than by river the tow will be taken from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 14 or 15 days it would take 100 trains of 18 cars to the train to transport this one tow of 600 000 bushels of coal and even if it made the usual speed of fast freight lines it would take one whole summer to put it through by rail when a river in good condition can enable one to save 162 000 and a whole summer's time on a single cargo the wisdom of taking measures to keep the river in good condition is made plain to even the on commercial mind end of chapter 28 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain chapter 29 a few specimen bricks we passed through the plum point region turned Craig Head's point and glided unchallenged by what was once the formidable Fort Pillow memorable because of the massacre perpetrated there during the war massacres are sprinkled with some frequency through the histories of several Christian nations but this is almost the only one that can be found in American history perhaps it is the only one which rises to size correspondent to that huge and somber title we have the Boston massacre where two or three people were killed but we must bunch Anglo-Saxon history together to find the fellow to the Fort Pillow tragedy and doubtless even then we must travel back to the days and performances of Kurt De Leon that fine hero before we accomplish it more of the river's freaks in times past the channel used to strike above island 37 by Brandywine bar and down towards Island 39 afterward changed its course and went from Brandywine down through Vogelmann's shoot in the Devil's elbow to Island 39 part of this course reversing the old order the river running up four or five miles instead of down and cutting off throughout some 15 miles of distance this in 1876 all that region is now called Centennial Island there is a tradition that Island 37 was one of the principal abiding places of the once celebrated murals gang this was a colossal combination of robbers horse thieves Negro Steelers and counterfeiters engaged in business along the river some 50 or 60 years ago while our journey across the country towards St. Louis was in progress we had had no end of Jesse James and his stirring history for he had just been assassinated by an agent of the governor of Missouri and was in consequence occupying a good deal of space in the newspapers cheap histories of him were for sale by train boys according to these he was the most marvelous creature of his kind that had ever existed it was a mistake Merle was his equal in boldness in pluck in rapacity in cruelty brutality heartlessness treachery and in general and comprehensive vileness and shamelessness and very much his superior in some larger aspects James was a retail rascal Merle wholesale James modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight than the planning of raids upon cars coaches and country banks Merle projected Negro insurrections and the capture of New Orleans and furthermore on occasion this Merle could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation what are James and his half dozen vulgar rascals compared with this stately old time criminal with his sermons his meditated insurrections and city captures and his majestic following of 10 hundred men sworn to do his evil will here is a paragraph or two concerning this big operator from a now forgotten book which was published half a century ago he appears to have been a most dexterous as well as consummate villain when he traveled his usual disguise was that of an itinerant preacher and it is said that his discourses were very soul-moving interesting the hearers so much that they forgot to look after their horses which were carried away by his confederates while he was preaching but the stealing of horses in one state and selling them in another was but a small portion of their business the most lucrative was the enticing slaves to run away from their masters that they might sell them in another quarter this was arranged as follows they would tell a negro that if he would run away from his master and allow them to sell him he should receive a portion of the money paid for him and that upon his return to them a second time they would send him to a free state where he would be safe the poor wretches complied with this request hoping to obtain money and freedom they would be sold to another master and run away again to their employers sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or four times until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by them but as after this there was fear of detection the usual custom was to get rid of the only witness that could be produced against them which was the negro himself by murdering him and throwing his body into the Mississippi even if it was established that they had stolen a negro before he was murdered they were always prepared to evade punishment for they concealed a negro who had run away until he was advertised and a reward offered to any man who would catch him an advertisement of this kind warrants the person to take the property you found and then the negro becomes a property in trust when therefore they sold a negro it only became a breach of trust not stealing and for a breach of trust the owner of the property can only have redress by a civil action which was useless as the damages were never paid it may be inquired how it was that Merle escaped lynch law under such circumstances this will be easily understood when it is stated that he had more than a thousand sworn confederates already at a moment's notice to support any of the gang who might be in trouble the names of all the principal confederates of Merle were obtained from himself in a manner which I shall presently explain the gang was composed of two classes the heads or council as they were called who planned and concerted but seldom acted they amounted to about four hundred the other class were the active agents and were termed strikers and amounted to about six hundred and fifty these were the tools in the hands of the others they ran all the risk and received but a small portion of the money they were in the power of the leaders of the gang who would sacrifice them at any time by handing them over to justice or sinking their bodies in the Mississippi the general rendezvous of this gang of miscreants was on the Arkansas side of the river where they concealed their negroes in the morasses and cane breaks the depredations of this extensive combination were severely felt but so well where their plans arranged that although Merle who was always active was everywhere suspected there was no proof to be obtained it so happened however that a young man of the name of Stewart who was looking after two slaves which Merle had decoyed away vowing with him and obtained his confidence took the oath and was admitted into the gang as one of the general council by this means all was discovered for Stewart turned traitor although he had taken the oath and having obtained every information exposed the whole concern the names of all the parties and finally succeeded in bringing home sufficient evidence against Merle to procure his conviction and sentenced to the penitentiary Merle was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment so many people who were supposed to be honest and bore a respectable name in the different states were found to be among the list of the grand council as published by Stewart that every attempt was made to throw discredit upon his assertions his character was vilified and more than one attempt was made to assassinate him he was obliged to quit the southern states in consequence it is however now well ascertained to have been all true and although some blame Mr. Stewart for having violated his oath they no longer attempt to deny that his revelations were correct I will quote one or two portions of Merle's confessions to Mr. Stewart meant to him when they were journeying together I ought to have observed that the ultimate intentions of Merle and his associates were by his own account on a very extended scale having no less than object in views and raising the blacks against the whites taking possession of and plundering norlands and making themselves possessors of the territory the following are a few extracts I collected all my friends about norlands at one of our friends houses in that place and we sat in council three days before we got all our plans to our notion we then determined to undertake the rebellion at every hazard and make as many friends as we could for that purpose every man's business being assigned him I started to natchez on foot having sold my horse in norlands with the intention of stealing another after I started I walked four days and no opportunity offered for me to get a horse the fifth day about 12 I had to become tired and stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little while I was sitting on a log looking down the road the way that I had come a man came in sight riding on a good looking horse the very moment I saw him I was determined to have his horse if he was in the garb of a traveler he rode up and I saw from his equipage that he was a traveler I arose and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount he did so and I took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek and ordered him to walk before me he went a few hundred yards and stopped I hitched his horse and then made him undress himself all to his surf and drawers and ordered him to turn his back to me he said if you are determined to kill me let me have time to pray before I die I told him I had no time to hear him play he turned around and dropped on his knees and I shot him through the back of the head I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek I then searched his pockets and found four hundred dollars and thirty seven cents and a number of papers that I did not take time to examine I sunk the pocketbook and papers and his hat in the creek his boots were brand new and fitted me gently and I put them on and sunk my old shoes in the creek to atone for them I rolled up his clothes and put them into his portmanteau as they were brand new cloth of the best quality I mounted as fine a horse as ever I straddled and directed my course for matches in much better style than I had been for the last five days myself and a fellow by the name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses and started for Georgia we got in company with a young South Carolinian just before we got to Cumberland Mountain and Crenshaw soon knew all about his business he had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs but when he got there pork was dearer than he calculated and he declined purchasing we concluded he was a prize Crenshaw winked at me I understood his idea Crenshaw had traveled the road before but I never had we had traveled several miles on the mountain when he passed near a great precipice just before we passed it Crenshaw asked me for my whip which had a pound of lead in the butt I handed it to him and he rode up by the side of the South Carolinian and gave him a blow in the side of the head and tumbled him from his horse we lit from our horses and fingered his pockets we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars Crenshaw said he knew a place to hide him and he gathered him under his arms and I by his feet and we conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brows at precipice and tumbled him into it and he went out of sight we then tumbled in his saddle and took his horse with us which was worth two hundred dollars we were detained a few days and during that time our friend went to a little village in the neighborhood and saw the Negro advertised a Negro in our possession and a description of the two men of whom he had been purchased and giving his suspicions of the men it was rather squally times but any port in a storm we took the Negro that night on the bank of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend and Crenshaw saw him through the head we took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek he had sold the other Negro the third time on Arkansas River for upwards of five hundred dollars and then stole him and delivered him into the hand of his friend who conducted him to a swamp and veiled the tragic scene and got the last cleanings and sacred pledge of secrecy as a game of that kind will not do unless it ends in a mystery to all but the fraternity he sold a Negro first and last for nearly two thousand dollars and then put him forever out of the reach of all pursuers and they can never graze him unless they can find the Negro and that they cannot do for his carcass has fed many a tortoise and catfish before this time and the frogs have sung this many a long day to the silent repose of his skeleton we were approaching Memphis in front of which city and witnessed by its people was fought the most famous of the river battles of the Civil War two men whom I had served under in my River days took part in that fight Mr. Bixby had pilot of the Union fleet and Montgomery Commodore of the Confederate fleet both saw a great deal of active service during the war and achieved high reputations for pluck and capacity as we neared Memphis we began to cast about for an excuse to stay with the gold dust to the end of her course Vicksburg we were so pleasantly situated that we did not wish to make a change I had an errand of considerable importance to do at Napoleon Arkansas but perhaps I could manage it without quitting the gold dust I said as much so we decided to stick to present quarters the boat was to tarry at Memphis till 10 the next morning it is a beautiful city nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the river the streets are straight and spacious though not paved in a way to incite distempered admiration no the admiration must be reserved for the town's sewerage system which is called perfect a recent reform however for it was just the other way up to a few years ago a reform resulting from the lesson taught by a desolating visitation of the yellow fever in those awful days the people were swept off by hundreds by thousands and so great was the reduction caused by flight and by death together that the population was diminished three fourths and so remained for a time business stood nearly still and the streets bore an empty sunday aspect here is a picture of Memphis at that disastrous time drawn by a german tourist who seems to have been an eyewitness of the scenes which he describes it is from chapter seven of his book just published in lightsig mississippi fartney von Ernst von Hesse Wartheg in august the yellow fever had reached its extremist height daily hundreds fell a sacrifice to the terrible epidemic the city was become a mighty graveyard two-thirds of the population had deserted the place and only the poor the aged and the sick remained behind a sure pray for the infidious enemy the houses were closed little lamps burned in front of many a sign that here death had entered often several lay dead in a single house from the windows hung black crepe the stores were shut up for their owners were gone away or dead fearful evil in the briefest space it struck down and swept away even the most vigorous victim a slight indisposition then an hour of fever then the hideous delirium then the yellow death on the street corners and in the squares lay sick men suddenly overtaken by the disease and even corpses distorted and rigid food failed meat spoiled in a few hours in the fetid and pestiferous air and turned black fearful clamors issue from many houses then after a season they cease and all is still nobles self-sacrificing men come with a coffin nail it up and carry it away to the graveyard in the night stillness rains only the physicians and the herces hurry through the streets and out of the distance at intervals comes the muffled thunder of the railway train which with the speed of the wind and as if hunted by furies flies by the pest-ridden city without halting but there is life enough there now the population exceeds 40 000 and is augmenting and trade is in a flourishing condition we drove about the city visited the park and the sociable horde of squirrels there saw the fine residences rose clad and in other ways enticing to the eye and got a good breakfast at the hotel a thriving place is the good samaritan city of the mississippi has a great wholesome jobbing trade foundries machine shops and manufacturers of wagons carriages and cotton seed oil and is shortly to have cotton mills and elevators her cotton receipts reached 500 000 bales last year an increase of 60 000 over the year before out from her healthy commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway and a sixth is being added this is a very different memphis from the one which the vanished and unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put into their books long time ago in the days of the now forgotten but once renowned and vigorously hated mrs trollop memphis seems to have consisted mainly of one long street of log houses with some outlined cabins sprinkled around rearward toward the woods and now and then a pig and no end of mud that was 55 years ago she stopped at the hotel plainly it was not the one which gave us our breakfast she says the table was laid for 50 persons and was nearly full they ate imperfect silence and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner was over literally before ours was begun the only sounds heard were those produced by the knives and forks with the unceasing chorus of coughing et cetera coughing et cetera the et cetera stands for an unpleasant word there a word which she does not always chargeably cover up but sometimes prints you will find it in the following description of a steamboat dinner which she ate in the company with a lot of aristocratic planters wealthy well-born ignorant swells they were tinsled with the usual harmless military and judicial titles of that all day of cheap shams and windy pretense the total want of all the usual courtesies of the table the voracious rapidity with which the vians were seized and devoured the strange unpoothed phrases and pronunciation the loathsome spitting from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses the frightful manner of feeding with their knives till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals kernels and majors of the old world and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment end of chapter 29 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain chapter 30 sketches by the way it was a big river below Memphis banks brimming full everywhere and very frequently more than full the waters pouring out over the land flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior and in places to a depth of 15 feet signs all about of men's hard work gone to ruin and all to be done over again with straightened means and weakened courage a melancholy picture and a continuous one hundreds of miles of it sometimes the beacon light stood in water three feet deep in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles without farm woodyard clearing or break of any kind which meant that the keeper of the light must come in a skiff a great distance to discharge his trust and often in desperate weather yet I was told that the work is faithfully performed in all weathers and not always by men sometimes by women if the man is sick or absent the government furnishes oil and pays 10 or $15 a month for the lighting and tending a government boat distributes oil and pays wages once a month the ship island region was as woodsy and tenetless as ever the island has ceased to be an island has joined itself compactly to the main shore and wagons travel now where the steamboats used to navigate no signs left of the wreck of the pennsylvania some farmer will turn up her bones with his plow one day no doubt and be surprised we were getting down now into the migrating negro region these poor people could never travel when they were slaves so they make up for the privation now they stay on a plantation till the desire to travel seizes them then they pack up hail a steamboat and clear out not for any particular place no nearly any place will answer they only want to be moving the amount of money on hand will answer the rest of the conundrum for them if it will take them 50 miles very well let it be 50 if not a shorter flight will do during a couple of days we frequently answered these hails sometimes there was a group of high water stained tumbledown cabins populace with colored folk and no whites visible with grassless patches of dry ground here and there a few felled trees with skeleton cattle mules and horses eating the leaves and gnawing the bark no other food for them in the flood wasteland sometimes there was a single lonely landing cabin mirret the colored family that had hailed us little and big old and young roosting on the scant pile of household goods these consisting of a rusty gun some bedticks chests tinware stools a crippled looking glass a venerable armchair and six or eight baseborn and spiritless yellow curves attached to the family by strings they must have their dogs can't go without their dogs yet the dogs are never willing they always object so one after another in ridiculous procession they are dragged aboard all four feet braced and sliding along the stage had likely to be pulled off but the tugger marching determinedly forward bending to his work with the rope over his shoulder for better purchase sometimes a child is forgotten and left on the bank but never a dog the usual river gossip going on in the pilot house island number 63 an island was a lovely chute or a passage behind it in the former times they said jesse jameson in the skylark had a visiting pilot with him one trip a poor old broken down superannuated fellow left him at the wheel at the foot of 63 to run off the watch the ancient mariner went up through the chute and down the river outside and up the chute and down the river again and again and again and handed the boat over to the relieving pilot at the end of three hours of honest endeavor at the same old foot of the island where he had originally taken the wheel a darky on shore who had observed the boat go by about 13 times said clarity gracious I wouldn't be surprised if there's a whole line of them skylarks anecdote illustrative of influence of reputation in the changing of opinion the eclipse was renowned for her swiftness one day she passed along an old darky on shore absorbed in his own matters did not notice what steamer it was presently someone asked any boat gone up yes sir was she going fast oh so so loafing along now do you know what boat that was nosa why uncle that was the eclipse knows that so well i bet it was because she just went by here as sparkling piece of history illustrative of the violent style of some of the people down along here during the early weeks of high water a's fence rails washed down on b's ground and b's rails washed up in the eddy and landed on a's ground a said let the thing remain so i will use your rails and you use mine but b objected wouldn't have it so one day a came down on b's ground to get his rails b said i'll kill you and proceeded for him with his revolver a said i'm not armed so b who wished to do only what was right threw down his revolver then pulled a knife and cut a's throat all round but gave his principal attention to the front and so failed to sever the jugular struggling around a managed to get his hands on the discarded revolver and shot b dead with and recovered from his own injuries further gossip after which everybody went below to get afternoon coffee and left me at the wheel alone something presently reminded me of our last hour in st louis part of which i spent on this boat's hurricane deck aft i was joined there by a stranger who dropped into conversation with me a brisk young fellow who said he was born in a town in the interior of wisconsin and had never seen a steamboat until a week before also said that on the way down from lacrosse he had inspected and examined his boat so diligently and with such passionate interest that he had mastered the whole thing from stem to rudder blade asked me where i was from i answered new england oh a yank said he and went chatting straight along without waiting for a center denial he immediately proposed to take me all over the boat and tell me the names of her different parts and teach me their uses before i could enter protest or excuse he was already rattling glibly away at his benevolent work and when i perceived that he was misnaming the things and inhospitably amusing himself at the expense of an innocent stranger from afar country i held my peace and let him have his way he gave me a world of misinformation and the further he went the wider his imagination expanded and the more he enjoyed his cruel work of deceit sometimes after palming off a particularly fantastic and outrageous lie upon me he was so full of laugh that he had to step aside for a minute upon one pretext or another to keep me from suspecting i stayed faithfully by him until his comedy was finished then he remarked that he had undertaken to learn me all about a steamboat and had done it but that if he had overlooked anything just ask him and he would supply the lack anything about this boat that you don't know the name of or the purpose of you come to me and i'll tell you i said i would and took my departure disappeared and approached him from another quarter once he could not see me there he sat all alone doubling himself up and writhing this way and that in the throes of unappeasable laughter he must have made himself sick for he was not publicly visible afterward for several days meantime the episode dropped out of my mind the thing that reminded me of it now when i was alone at the wheel was the spectacle of this young fellow standing in the pilot house door with a knob in his hand silently and severely inspecting me i don't know when i have seen anybody look so injured as he did he did not say anything simply stood there and looked reproachfully looked and pondered finally he shut the door and started away halted on the texas a minute came slowly back and stood in the door again with that grieved look in his face gazed upon me a while in meek rebuke then said you let me learn you all about a steamboat didn't you yes i confessed yes you did didn't you yes you are the feller that that language failed pause impotent struggle for further words then he gave it up choked out a deep strong oath and departed for good afterward i saw him several times below during the trip but he was cold would not look at me idiot if he had not been in such a sweat to play his witless practical joke upon me in the beginning i would have persuaded his thoughts into some other direction and saved him from committing that wanton and silly impoliteness i had myself called with the four o'clock watch mornings for one cannot see too many summer sunrises on the mississippi they are enchanting first there is the eloquence of silence for a deep hush broods everywhere next there is the haunting sense of loneliness isolation remoteness from the worry and bustle of the world the dawn creeps in stealthily the solid walls of black forest soften to gray and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves the water is glass smooth gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist there is not the faintest breath of wind nor stir of leaf the tranquility is profound and infinitely satisfying then a bird pipes up another follows and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of music you see none of the birds you simply move through the atmosphere of song which seems to sing itself when the light has become a little stronger you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable you have the intense green of the mast and crowded foliage nearby you see it paling shade by shade in front of you upon the next projecting cape a mile off or more the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring the cape beyond that one has almost lost color and the further one miles away under the horizon sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it and all this stretch of water is a mirror and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it well that is all beautiful soft and rich and beautiful and when the sun gets well up and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering we had the Kentucky Bend country in the early morning scene of a strange and tragic accident in the old times Captain Poe had a small stern wheel boat for years the home of himself and his wife one night the boat struck a snag in the head of Kentucky Bend and sank with astonishing suddenness water already well above the cabin floor when the captain got out so he cut into his wife's stateroom from above with an axe she was asleep in the upper berth the roof of flimsier ones and was supposed the first blow crashed down through the rotten boards and clove her skull this bend is all filled up now result of a cut off and the same agent has taken the great and once much frequented walnut bend and set it away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track of passing steamers Helena we visited and also a town I had not heard of before it being of recent birth Arkansas City it was born of a railway the little rock Mississippi River and Texas Railroad touches the river there we asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was well said he after considering and with the air of one who wishes to take time and be accurate it's a hell of a place a description which was photographic for exactness there were several rows and clusters of shabby frame houses and a supply of mud sufficient to ensure the town against a famine in that article for a hundred years where the overflow had but lately subsided there were stagnant ponds in the streets here and there and a dozen rude scous were scattered about lying aground wherever they happen to have been when the waters drained off and people could do their visiting and shopping on foot once more still it is a thriving place was a rich country behind it an elevator in front of it and also a fine big mill for the manufacture of cotton seed oil I had never seen this kind of mill before cotton seed was comparatively valueless in my time but it is worth twelve or thirteen dollars a ton now and none of it is thrown away the oil made from it is colorless tasteless and almost if not entirely odorless it is claimed that it can by proper manipulation be made to resemble and perform the office of any and all oils and be produced at a cheaper rate than the cheapest of the originals sagacious people shipped it to Italy doctored it labeled it and brought it back as olive oil this trade grew to be so formidable that Italy was obliged to put a prohibitory in post upon it to keep it from working serious injury to her oil industry Helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the Mississippi her perch is the last the southernmost group of hills which one sees on that side of the river in its normal condition it is a pretty town but the flood or possibly the seepage had lately been ravaging it whole streets of houses had been invaded by the muddy water and the outsides of the buildings were still belted with a broad stain extending upwards from the foundations stranded and discarded scous lay all about like sidewalks on stilts four feet high were still standing the board sidewalks on the ground level were loose and ruinous a couple of men trotting along them could make a blind man think a cavalry charge was coming everywhere the mud was black and deep and in many places malaria's pools of stagnant water were standing a Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating inflection to a fire we had an enjoyable time here on this sunny Sunday two full hours liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight in the back streets but few white people were visible but there were plenty of colored folk mainly women and the girls and almost without exception upholstered in bright new clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut a glaring and hilarious contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles Helena is the second town in Arkansas in point of population which is placed at five thousand the country about it is exceptionally productive Helena has a good cotton trade handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually she has a large lumber and grain commerce has a foundry oil mills machine shops and wagon factories in brief has one million dollars invested in manufacturing industries she has two railways and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region her gross receipts of money annually from all sources are placed by the New Orleans Times Democrat at four million dollars end of chapter thirty this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org Life in the Mississippi by Mark Twain chapter thirty one a thumbprint and what came of it we were approaching Napoleon Arkansas so I began to think about my errand there time noonday and bright and sunny this was bad not best anyway for mine was not preferably a noonday kind of errand the more I thought the more that fact pushed itself upon me now in one form now in another finally it took the form of a distinct question is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime when by a little sacrifice of comfort and inclination you can have night for it and no inquisitive eyes around this settled it plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities I got my friends into my state room and said I was sorry to create annoyance and disappointment but that upon reflection it really seemed best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon their disapproval was prompt and loud their language mutinous their main argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface in such cases since the beginning of time but you decided and agreed to stick to this boat etc as if having determined to do an unwise thing one is thereby bound to go ahead and make two unwise things of it by carrying out that determination I tried various modifying tactics upon them with reasonably good success under which encouragement I increased my efforts and to show them that I had not created this annoying errand and was in no way to blame for it I presently drifted into its history substantially as follows toward the end of last year I spent a few months in Munich Bavaria in November I was living in Fraulein-Dowliners pension one egg Carlos Trassa but my working quarters were a mile from there in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers she and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to me by request one day during a ramble about the city I visited one of the two establishments where the government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead and not in a trance state it was a grizzly place that spacious room there were 36 corpses of adults in sight stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards in three long rows all of them with wax white rigid faces and all of them wrapped in white shrouds along the sides of the room were deep alcoves like bay windows and in each of these lay several marble visage babes utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers all but their faces and crossed hands around the finger of each of these 50 still forms both great and small was a ring and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling and thence to a bell in a watch room yonder where day and night a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pilot company who waking out of death shall make a movement or any even the slightest movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell I imagine myself a death sentinel drowsing there alone far in the dragging watches of some wailing gusty night and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons so I inquired about this thing asked what resulted usually if the watchman died and the restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy but I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place and went my way with a humbled crest next morning I was telling the widow my adventure when she exclaimed come with me I have a lotter who shall tell you all you want to know he has been a night watchman there he was a living man but he did not look it he was a bed and had his head propped high on pillows his face was wasted and colorless his deep sunken eyes were shut his hand lying on his breast was talon like it was so bony and long-fingered the widow began her introduction of me the man's eyes open slowly and glittered wickedly out from the twilight of their caverns he frowned a black frown he lifted his lean hand and waved us peremptorily away but the widow kept straight on till she had got out the fact that I was a stranger and an American the man's face changed at once brightened became even eager and the next moment he and I were alone together I opened up in cast iron German he responded in quite flexible English thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest this consumptive and I became good friends I visited him every day and we talked about everything at least about everything but wives and children let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned and three things always followed the most gracious and loving and tender light glimmered in the man's eyes for a moment faded out next and in its place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever saw his lids unclose thirdly he ceased from speech there and then for that day lay silent abstracted and absorbed apparently heard nothing that I said took no notice of my goodbyes and plainly did not know by either sight or hearing when I left the room when I had been this Carl Ritter's daily and soul intimate during two months he one day said abruptly I will tell you my story a dying man's confession then he went on as follows I have never given up until now but now I have given up I am going to die I made up my mind last night that it must be and very soon too you say you are going to revisit your river by and by when you find opportunity very well that together with a certain experience which fell to my lot last night determines me to tell you my history for you will see Napoleon Arkansas and for my sake you will stop there and do a certain thing for me a thing which you will willingly undertake after you shall have heard my narrative let us shorten the story wherever we can for it will need it being long you already know how I came to go to America and how I came to settle in that lonely region in the south but you do not know that I had a wife my wife was young beautiful loving and oh so divinely good and blameless and gentle and our little girl was her mother in manicure it was the happiest of happy households one night it was toward the close of the war I woke up out of a sobbing lethargy and found myself bound and gagged and the air tainted with chloroform I saw two men in the room and one was saying to the other in a horse whisper I told her I would if she made a noise and as for the child the other man interrupted in a low half crying voice you said we'd only gag them and rob them not hurt them or I wouldn't have come shut up your whining had to change the plan when they waked up you done all you could to protect them now let that satisfy you come help rummage both men were masked and wore coarse ragged nigger clothes they had a bull's eye lantern and by its light I noticed that the gentle robber had no some on his right hand they rummaged around my poor cabin for a moment the head band had then said in his stage whisper it's a waste of time he shall tell where it's hid undo his gag and revive him up the other said all right provided no clubbing no clubbing it is and provided he keeps still they approached me just then there was a sound outside a sound of voices and trampling hoofs the robbers held their breath and listened the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer then he came a shout hello the house show a light we want water the captain's voice by gun said the stage whispering ruffian and both robbers fled by the way of the back door shutting off their bull's eye as they ran the stranger shouted several times more then rode by there seemed to be a dozen of the horses I heard nothin