Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Life on the Mississippi
    Ebook945 pages8 hours

    Life on the Mississippi

    By Mark Twain

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1883
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein are members of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

    Read more from Mark Twain

    Related to Life on the Mississippi

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Take a Writer Like Him: My Complicated Love Affair with Kingsley Amis

      Aug 24, 2018

      1. As much as I may rack my brain, there are 15 minutes or so in the dark that I can’t account for and that I’ll never get back—15 minutes during which, I have to think, that creep’s hands were touching my body. It’s a weird thing to think about all

      12 min read

    • Article

      Amy Tan's Lonely, ‘Pixel-by-Pixel’ Writing Method

      Dec 10, 2013

      Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” helps remind the Joy Luck Club author to capture the “microscopic” details that make her characters unique.

      8 min read

    • Article

      80 Who Killed Claude Kendall? The Mystery Murder Of Charles Fort’s Publisher

      Dec 3, 2020

      Millions of Americans celebrated Thanksgiving in the comfort of their homes on 25 November 1937, but for one man fate reserved a different outcome. That same night, in a room on the eighth floor of a New York hotel, Claude Kendall was brutally beaten

      7 min read

    • Article

      Dreams And Nightmares

      Oct 6, 2022

      Dreams And Nightmares
      7 min read

    • Article

      'See What Can Be Done' Is A Testament To The Breadth Of Lorrie Moore’s Intellect

      Apr 2, 2018

      See What Can Be Done, novelist and short story writer Lorrie Moore’s first nonfiction collection, takes its name from the words of Robert Silvers, the late editor of The New York Review of Books. When Silvers would send Moore a book for possible revi

      3 min read

    • Article

      My Country Childhood

      Apr 27, 2022

      My Country Childhood
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Red Pill of Humility

      Oct 5, 2023

      The Red Pill of Humility
      5 min read

    • Article

      Majestic Scotland

      Aug 25, 2021

      Majestic Scotland
      6 min read

    • Article

      Novelists Go Short

      Apr 9, 2018

      Novelists Go Short
      1 min read

    • Article

      Readers’ Letters

      Nov 17, 2021

      SIR: I must applaud William Cook (Who was Blackie the donkey?, October issue) in maintaining the tradition of never allowing the facts to mar a good story. Don Mackay arrived at Jarandilla de la Vera first, not in the wake of Hugh Whittow of the Sun.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      May 18, 2023

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      7 min read

    • Article

      Return Of The Anglo-Irish

      Jul 27, 2022

      Return Of The Anglo-Irish
      3 min read

    • Article

      Grey Pride

      Jun 21, 2017

      Grey Pride
      16 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un's Notes

      Jun 28, 2023

      If you want to be a bestselling writer, get on the GCSE syllabus. That's the message from the Bookseller magazine. It reports that the top-selling book on the syllabus is An Inspector Calls (1945) by J B Priestley, selling 123,059 copies this year th

      6 min read

    • Article

      Around The World In 100 Plants

      Oct 26, 2022

      Simon Barnes (Simon & Schuster, £30) WE have become used, in recent years, to the convention of 100 short essays as a means of raising the reader’s eyebrows and setting away a never-ending series of big ideas from the starting point of an everyday o

      5 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Feb 2, 2023

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      8 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Feb 2, 2023

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      8 min read

    • Article

      Hook, Line And Sinker

      Oct 18, 2018

      Hook, Line And Sinker
      4 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Apr 14, 2022

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      9 min read

    • Article

      FLAP THOSE Wings

      Nov 13, 2019

      FLAP THOSE Wings
      6 min read

    Reviews for Life on the Mississippi

    4/5

    641 ratings149 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this one, not only for its description of life along the river at that time, but also for the author's wry sense of humor.
    • 3/5
      This book was an incredible read and a fascinating evocation of time and place.
    • 3/5
      Life on the Mississippi is part memoir, part history book, part excerpts from other works, and part twaddle. (Bonus points because I've never had the occasion to use that word in a review before.) It was a little too much twaddle. I'm guessing that the readers of the 1800s purchased the book based on his other well-written works, and just waded through the useless chapters.
    • 2/5
      Not the best audiobook for my commute. It required more attention than I could give it and my mind kept drifting off. Had to pull out after 6 discs. But I appreciated what little history and ambience I got about the steamboat culture and the Mississippi River.
    • 4/5
      A memoir of days on the Mississippi when Twain worked on the riverboats before the Civil War. Descriptions abound. You'll witness a younger America, simpler but much more dangerous.
    • 3/5
      Recently, I participated in a writer's workshop. It took place in an inn that actually floats on the Missouri River. For five days, I was to be hypnotized by the river's ever-flowing current. I thought of Mark Twain, an author whose books I have never read. What better time could there be to acquaint myself with Twain? What better work than one about the river?While the Missouri River is not the Mississippi, it is nevertheless far more impressive than my native Kansas River, a wide stream populated with massive sandbars and piles of driftwood. No ships float down my river. I'm not sure they ever did. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain paints a portrait of a time when many ships paddled lazily up and down the rivers. Full of anecdotes about his time as a young river boat pilot, Twain's love for the river and its boats is evident. Fortunately, I had the pleasure of reading the first half of this book in the days before, during, and immediately after my river sojourn. Aside from Twain's signature humor, Life on the Mississippi bristled with the life of the river—its sounds and smells. I was glad to have this book as a companion during my own exploration of the river. I don't think I would've enjoyed it nearly as much at any other time.The second half of Life on the Mississippi loses its magic. From humorous tales of his own experience on the river, Twain switches to the tales of others, statistics, and random observations. Some of these have to do with the Mississippi. Some do not. Basically, Twain was let loose to follow whatever tangents he wanted in this book and the results were underwhelming. There were some great stories within these pages, but most of it was as dry as the Kansas River.
    • 2/5
      I understand that this book was considered The Great American Novel for it's time period, but it didn't resonate with me. Part of it was the character of Huck, part of it was the seemingly scattershot nature of his adventures on the Mississippi River (it certainly wasn't the language, I have no problem with that in this or any other book), but by the time the story got to the fued between the Grangerfords and the Shepardsons, I had checked out of the story. The rest was one of the toughest slogs I've ever had to get through in reading. (Each time it was for a class assignment--the last time was to see if I had the wrong idea about the book,. I wasn't) I won't be reading it again.
    • 3/5
      I think I liked this book better than [book:Tom Sawyer], but that may be because of the dramatization of the voices -- different actors doing the different voices made it easier to follow the dialogue in audio.

      Good to have finally read this American classic.
    • 4/5
      It was easy to imagine myself as Huck Finn as a kid even though my life bared little obvious resemblance to his. However, my childhood was one of freedom and adventure and I felt like I had found a literary soul brother in Huck as I read about his adventures. While mine weren't on the scale of his many were far removed.
    • 2/5
      Audiobook. The narration was good, but I didn't care all that much for the story. I preferred Tom Sawyer's story to Huck's.
    • 3/5
      I'm listening to the audio version read by Elijah Woods. He did a great job with the dialects, and the story is of course a classic, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I love the characters, though - it's amazing how good Twain is at creating unique lovable characters.
    • 1/5
      I would like to like Mark Twain, but for some reason I don't. I had to read this in 10th grade English and at one point I read several pages and then realized that I hadn't paid attention to it at all. And that was the part about pig's blood and faking a death, or something like that. I still don't know.
    • 3/5
      The parts I enjoyed, I enjoyed greatly. The parts I did not, I very much did not. My only criticism of this book is it's amazing propensity to ramble. Where Twain rambles into a story, it's captivating. Where he rambles to describe some endless feature of a forgotten passage of the great river, not so much. He keeps the reader from ever really sinking into the narration, from ever finally succumbing to the great man's storytelling, but like continually waking someone on the verge of slumber, eventually even the most even tempered soul will snap.
    • 4/5
      I half-expected to hate this and find it a chore, and in some parts, I did and it was. But I was also secretly hoping I'd love it, and in parts I did. Which is a bit odd, since it's not a particularly uneven book, except insofar as it alternates between "Huck having adventures" (which I enjoyed), and "Huck floating on a river" (which was god-awfully boring). I like Huck, a good deal more than Tom Sawyer, who makes everything unnecessarily complicated--Huck is more down-to-earth, more practical, less manipulative, and as a result, seems more like a real character than the What-I-Wish-My-Childhood-Had-Been Tom.

      I understand why it's considered the Great American Novel; it puts together the boyhood spirit of adventure with a snapshot of the American south, with all the values and foibles that includes. It's not a romanticized account of life on the river, in a positive or negative direction, but a more straightforward account of what was (or at least, what could have been).
    • 5/5
      It's hard to imagine how I ever thought Mark Twain boring as a kid.

      There's not as much of Tom's brand of zaniness (obviously, since it's not his book) but much more of the satirical version and humor derived from careful phrasing. The satirical humor was especially wonderful.
    • 5/5
      Mark Twain enjoys the distinction of being one of the wittiest and most charming of American authors, and this book is one of his best, perhaps up there with Huck Finn and Roughing It.

      It starts off with history, then meanders through biography, anecdotal stories of his youth and travels on the Mississippi, descriptions of steamboats and the countryside, the Civil War, New Orleans, cemeteries, Mardi Gras, and all in between. If I may make a bold and yet now-hackneyed comparison, this book IS the Mississippi - Wide, deep, circular and long, a centuries-old part of our history.

      The obscurest details are made illuminating, and this story shines with humor and charm. Recommended to all fans of Twain, or laughing at books.
    • 5/5
      eBook

      What is there to say? It's my favorite novel. Funny and profound and moving; It's almost hard to read because it spins my thoughts and imagination in all different directions on almost every page.

      I suppose you could take something different from it every time you pick it up, but for me, it's about recognizing that everyone has the power to shape their beliefs to meet the world they encounter. As Huck travels down the river, he keeps adopting and discarding the belief systems he encounters until he finally realizes that it's up to him to decide what's right and what's wrong. That he's unable to stick to his guns is what makes this both a tragic work and a profoundly real one.

      Huck, the boy, is the man I aspire to be. Smart, despite not being educated; wise, yet not without flaws. It's a good day when I recognize his cadences in my thoughts.
    • 5/5
      The classic, an easy read, the dialect is a bit tedious sometimes. Huck's philosophy and Jim's patience are a delight. It seems like idyllic life on another planet.
    • 4/5
      I first read this book in elementary school. Reading it again as an adult has allowed me to appreciate it on a new level.As Twain states at the start of the book, "persons attempting to find a plot in [this book] will be shot." It's simply a compilation of a number of adventures that Finn has with his friend Jim, who happens to be an escaped slave, as they travel down the Mississippi River. Jim is seeking his freedom and Huck is along for the ride.Each vignette presents us with a sample of Twain's sense of satire and the outlandish. He portrays caricature stereotypes of his time, for example, the feuding families of the Appalachian regions, pervasive racism and a constant clash between religion and superstition. The tales also become increasingly extravagant and show Huck's skill in twisting truth to manipulate others.What strikes the modern reader most is the conflicted morality of the narrative. While Huck doesn't think twice about outright lying, cheating and defrauding others, he believes he'll go to hell because he's helping a slave escape to freedom. He acknowledges that Jim is a good and caring man, yet he still treats him as something less than fully human. Parts of the dialogue were, frankly, very difficult to read.This novel needs to be read with the historical framework within which it was written in mind. Also, this particular volume is uncensored so it makes liberal use of "the N word" with the deepest of derogatory intent. While thought provoking, this book should be discussed with young readers so they understand the racist context.
    • 3/5
      This started well and the first few chapters read like a direct continuation of Tom Sawyer, which I really enjoyed. But I did not find the subsequent adventures of Huck Finn engrossing beyond a few humorous touches; the one positive was the friendship between Huck and the runaway slave Jim, but after they fell in with a pair of eccentrics who thought they were royalty/nobility, my interest waned and I gave up just over half way through. 3/5
    • 3/5
      I'm not sure if it was the narration or the subject matter or a dated book, but eh..... Won't make my favorite list.That being said, the ending did surprise me and I liked that part.
    • 5/5
      Huck Finn had burden of being a Classic before I even started reading. Book opens extremely well with hilarious first chapter. After that, first hundred pages, while fast paced and interesting, felt point less as there didn't seem to be any direction to narrative. Once 'King' and 'Duke' characters arrived, story, while still meandering, became exceedingly funny and engaging. Last narrative on freedom of Jim was perhaps a bit stretched yet nonetheless funny. Book ended with nagging feeling of the point of it all. But perhaps that is what is intended because book isn't like other literature where character development and scene depiction takes up lot of word count. Story is very fast moving, full of dialogues, full of action, and really hilarious in parts. In that sense book has quality amenable to children's reading and is adaptable to any movie with minimal tweaking. In the end, book leaves you with wanting more. Though I am little nonplussed by implication by some critics on multi-layered meanings of this book, since I found book to be very straight forward with little scope of ambiguity or multiple interpretation.
    • 5/5
      Took me a while to chew through this one... its longer than I remembered from high school! I'm glad I read it again, however, and am looking forward to the next title in my classics challenge!
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It is exactly what I look for in a book, a great adventure and story. It moves at a good pace and doesn't get caught up in detail of a rock or the weather. The language and writing can be difficult at times to sit through but you get used to it and soon you don't even think about it. A great read
    • 5/5
      I could read this book once a year for the rest of my life. I think it may be my absolute favorite.
    • 3/5
      There are many classics that become icons of cultures and periods. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those books. Mark Twain is an entertaining part of American history.Most people who have been raised in America know at least Huck Finn’s name. He is known for his escapades in early America and his friendship with the well-known Tom Sawyer. If you haven’t read the book, you’ve seen the movie. That might be a bad thing.How can that be bad? Because if you only watch the movies and then years later read the book, you’ll be very disappointed in what you read.The movies are so different than the book is. Yes, there are many movies, but the majority veer far from Twain’s original works.It also doesn’t help that I am mostly used to contemporary writing which is much different that of the writings of the 1800s and earlier. The works are more description of scenes and actions than we are used to today. The style is vastly different. In fact, you might it difficult to read because of that.You might also find it difficult to read where the dialogue is written exactly the way it was spoken. When the slave, Jim, speaks, it is not in formal English. It is written as he spoke it. In reading these parts, you might want to read it aloud so you can hear what he said instead of reading it.I also found reading of Huck and Tom’s actions rather difficult. I don’t see boys of their age really acting that way, but that is how Twain wanted them to be. I really think the movies ruined it for me. Though I still enjoy Twain’s short stories. Maybe that is where I need to stay with him.Please be aware if you have your children read the book for school. Throughout the book, the ‘n’ word is used. It was a part of the culture’s everyday language which makes it important to use in the story. You might want to explain the use of the word then versus now before reading the book.Note: This was a free copy obtained through a public domain venue.
    • 5/5
      In my opinion, the great American novel.
    • 5/5
      I don't know if I can add much more than what's already been written and said about this enduring classic, except that it's one of the few books that ought to be read by every single member of the human race. Hilarious, enduring in its critical view of racism and endearing in exposing many other human flaws.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic... a struggle to get started with but incredibly rewarding. Twain's word play, sarcasm, and general demeanor are invigorating. Can finally check this off the books I lied about reading in high school... ;)
    • 1/5
      Argh. Classic. I don't think so. It was horrible, just... I know that I'm supposed to see it as some great book that changed whatever, blah, blah, blah, but I just can't stand it. I didn't mind the Tom Sawyer book, but this one, every time I had to read it in school (more than once, including in eighth grade) I just wanted to scream hated it so much. Give me the Sound and the Fury over this.

    Book preview

    Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain

    LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life On The Mississippi, Complete

    by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: Life On The Mississippi, Complete

    Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

    Release Date: August 20, 2006 [EBook #245]

    Last Updated: October 18, 2012

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, COMPLETE ***

    Produced by David Widger. Earliest PG text edition produced by Graham Allan

    LINK TO THE ORIGINAL HTML FILE: This Ebook Has Been Reformatted For Better Appearance In Mobile Viewers Such As Kindles And Others. The Original Format, Which The Editor Believes Has A More Attractive Appearance For Laptops And Other Computers, May Be Viewed By Clicking On This Box.

    LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI

    BY MARK TWAIN

    Click on the Image to Enlarge

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    CHAPTER I.

    The Mississippi is Well worth Reading about.—It is Remarkable.—

    Instead of Widening towards its Mouth, it grows Narrower.—It Empties

    four hundred and six million Tons of Mud.—It was First Seen in 1542.

    —It is Older than some Pages in European History.—De Soto has

    the Pull.—Older than the Atlantic Coast.—Some Half-breeds chip

    in.—La Salle Thinks he will Take a Hand.

    CHAPTER II.

    La Salle again Appears, and so does a Cat-fish.—Buffaloes also.

    —Some Indian Paintings are Seen on the Rocks.—"The Father of

    Waters "does not Flow into the Pacific.—More History and Indians.

    —Some Curious Performances—not Early English.—Natchez, or

    the Site of it, is Approached.

    CHAPTER III.

    A little History.—Early Commerce.—Coal Fleets and Timber Rafts.

    —We start on a Voyage.—I seek Information.—Some Music.—The

    Trouble begins.—Tall Talk.—The Child of Calamity.—Ground

    and lofty Tumbling.—The Wash-up.—Business and Statistics.—

    Mysterious Band.—Thunder and Lightning.—The Captain speaks.

    —Allbright weeps.—The Mystery settled.—Chaff.—I am Discovered.

    —Some Art-work proposed.—I give an Account of Myself.—Released.

    CHAPTER IV.

    The Boys' Ambition.—Village Scenes.—Steamboat Pictures.

    —A Heavy Swell.—A Runaway.

    CHAPTER V.

    A Traveller.—A Lively Talker.—A Wild-cat Victim

    CHAPTER VI.

    Besieging the Pilot.—Taken along.—Spoiling a Nap.—Fishing for a

    Plantation.—Points on the River.—A Gorgeous Pilot-house.

    CHAPTER VII.

    River Inspectors.—Cottonwoods and Plum Point.—Hat-Island Crossing.

    —Touch and Go.—It is a Go.—A Lightning Pilot

    CHAPTER VIII.

    A Heavy-loaded Big Gun.—Sharp Sights in Darkness.—Abandoned to

    his Fate.—Scraping the Banks.—Learn him or Kill him.

    CHAPTER IX.

    Shake the Reef.—Reason Dethroned.—The Face of the Water.

    —A Bewitching Scene.-Romance and Beauty.

    CHAPTER X.

    Putting on Airs.—Taken down a bit.—Learn it as it is.—The River

    Rising.

    CHAPTER XI.

    In thg Tract Business.—Effects of the Rise.—Plantations gone.

    —A Measureless Sea.—A Somnambulist Pilot.—Supernatural Piloting.

    —Nobody there.—All Saved.

    CHAPTER XII.

    Low Water.—Yawl sounding.—Buoys and Lanterns.—Cubs and

    Soundings.—The Boat Sunk.—Seeking the Wrecked.

    CHAPTER XIII.

    A Pilot's Memory.—Wages soaring.—A Universal Grasp.—Skill and

    Nerve.—Testing a Cub.—Back her for Life.—A Good Lesson.

    CHAPTER XIV.

    Pilots and Captains.—High-priced Pilots.—Pilots in Demand.

    —A Whistler.—A cheap Trade.—Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Speed.

    CHAPTER XV.

    New Pilots undermining the Pilots' Association.—Crutches and Wages.

    —Putting on Airs.—The Captains Weaken.—The Association Laughs.

    —The Secret Sign.—An Admirable System.—Rough on Outsiders.

    —A Tight Monopoly.—No Loophole.—The Railroads and the War.

    CHAPTER XVI.

    All Aboard.—A Glorious Start.—Loaded to Win.—Bands and Bugles.

    —Boats and Boats.—Racers and Racing.

    CHAPTER XVII.

    Cut-offs.—Ditching and Shooting.—Mississippi Changes.—A Wild

    Night.—Swearing and Guessing.—Stephen in Debt.—He Confuses

    his Creditors.—He makes a New Deal.—Will Pay them Alphabetically.

    CHAPTER XVIII.

    Sharp Schooling.—Shadows.—I am Inspected.—Where did you get

    them Shoes?—Pull her Down.—I want to kill Brown.—I try to run

    her.- I am Complimented.

    CHAPTER XIX.

    A Question of Veracity.—A Little Unpleasantness.—I have an

    Audience with the Captain.—Mr. Brown Retires.

    CHAPTER XX.

    I become a Passenger.—We hear the News.—A Thunderous Crash.

    —They Stand to their Posts.—In the Blazing Sun.—A Grewsome

    Spectacle.—His Hour has Struck.

    CHAPTER XXI.

    I get my License.—The War Begins.—I become a Jack-of-all-trades.

    CHAPTER XXII.

    I try the Alias Business.—Region of Goatees—Boots begin to Appear.

    —The River Man is Missing.—The Young Man is Discouraged.—

    Specimen Water.—A Fine Quality of Smoke.—A Supreme Mistake.

    —We Inspect the Town.—Desolation Way-traffic.—A Wood-yard.

    CHAPTER XXIII.

    Old French Settlements.—We start for Memphis.—Young Ladies and

    Russia-leather Bags.

    CHAPTER XXIV.

    I receive some Information.—Alligator Boats.—Alligator Talk.

    —She was a Rattler to go.—I am Found Out.

    CHAPTER XXV.

    The Devil's Oven and Table.—A Bombshell falls.—No Whitewash.

    —Thirty Years on the River.-Mississippi Uniforms.—Accidents and

    Casualties.—Two hundred Wrecks.—A Loss to Literature.—Sunday-

    Schools and Brick Masons.

    CHAPTER XXVI.

    War Talk.—I Tilt over Backwards.—Fifteen Shot-holes.—A Plain

    Story.—Wars and Feuds.—Darnell versus Watson.—A Gang and

    a Woodpile.—Western Grammar.—River Changes.—New Madrid.

    —Floods and Falls.

    CHAPTER XXVII.

    Tourists and their Note-books.—Captain Hall.—Mrs. Trollope's

    Emotions.—Hon. Charles Augustus Murray's Sentiment.—Captain

    Marryat's Sensations.—Alexander Mackay's Feelings.

    —Mr. Parkman Reports

    CHAPTER XXVIII.

    Swinging down the River.—Named for Me.—Plum Point again.

    —Lights and Snag Boats.—Infinite Changes.—A Lawless River.

    —Changes and Jetties.—Uncle Mumford Testifies.—Pegging the

    River.—What the Government does.—The Commission.—Men and

    Theories.—Had them Bad.—Jews and Prices.

    CHAPTER XXIX.

    Murel's Gang.—A Consummate Villain.—Getting Rid of Witnesses.

    —Stewart turns Traitor.—I Start a Rebellion.—I get a New Suit

    of Clothes.—We Cover our Tracks.—Pluck and Capacity.—A Good

    Samaritan City.—The Old and the New.

    CHAPTER XXX.

    A Melancholy Picture.—On the Move.—River Gossip.—She Went By

    a-Sparklin'.—Amenities of Life.—A World of Misinformation.—

    Eloquence of Silence.—Striking a Snag.—Photographically Exact.

    —Plank Side-walks.

    CHAPTER XXXI.

    Mutinous Language.—The Dead-house.—Cast-iron German and Flexible

    English.—A Dying Man's Confession.—I am Bound and Gagged.

    —I get Myself Free.—I Begin my Search.—The Man with one Thumb.

    —Red Paint and White Paper.—He Dropped on his Knees.—Fright

    and Gratitude.—I Fled through the Woods.—A Grisly Spectacle.

    —Shout, Man, Shout.—A look of Surprise and Triumph.—The Muffled

    Gurgle of a Mocking Laugh.—How strangely Things happen.

    —The Hidden Money.

    CHAPTER XXXII.

    Ritter's Narrative.—A Question of Money.—Napoleon.—Somebody

    is Serious.—Where the Prettiest Girl used to Live.

    CHAPTER XXXIII.

    A Question of Division.—A Place where there was no License.—The

    Calhoun Land Company.—A Cotton-planter's Estimate.—Halifax

    and Watermelons.—Jewelled-up Bar-keepers.

    CHAPTER XXXIV.

    An Austere Man.—A Mosquito Policy.—Facts dressed in Tights.

    —A  swelled Left Ear.

    CHAPTER XXXV.

    Signs and Scars.—Cannon-thunder Rages.—Cave-dwellers.

    —A Continual Sunday.—A ton of Iron and no Glass.—The Ardent

    is Saved.—Mule Meat—A National Cemetery.—A Dog and a Shell.

    —Railroads and Wealth.—Wharfage Economy.—Vicksburg versus The

    Gold Dust.—A Narrative in Anticipation.

    CHAPTER XXXVI.

    The Professor Spins a Yarn.—An Enthusiast in Cattle.—He makes a

    Proposition.—Loading Beeves at Acapulco.—He was n't Raised to it.

    —He is Roped In.—His Dull Eyes Lit Up.—Four Aces, you Ass!

    —He does n't Care for the Gores.

    CHAPTER XXXVII.

    A Terrible Disaster.—The Gold Dust explodes her Boilers.

    —The End of a Good Man.

    CHAPTER XXXVIII.

    Mr. Dickens has a Word.—Best Dwellings and their Furniture.—Albums

    and Music.—Pantelettes and Conch-shells.—Sugar-candy Rabbits

    and Photographs.—Horse-hair Sofas and Snuffers.—Rag Carpets

    and Bridal Chambers.

    CHAPTER XXXIX.

    Rowdies and Beauty.—Ice as Jewelry.—Ice Manufacture.—More

    Statistics.—Some Drummers.—Oleomargarine versus Butter.

    —Olive Oil versus Cotton Seed.—The Answer was not Caught.

    —A Terrific Episode.—A Sulphurous Canopy.—The Demons of War.

    —The Terrible Gauntlet.

    CHAPTER XL.

    In Flowers, like a Bride.—A White-washed Castle.—A Southern

    Prospectus.—Pretty Pictures.—An Alligator's Meal.

    CHAPTER XLI.

    The Approaches to New Orleans.—A Stirring Street.—Sanitary

    Improvements.—Journalistic Achievements.—Cisterns and Wells.

    CHAPTER XLII.

    Beautiful Grave-yards.—Chameleons and Panaceas.—Inhumation and

    Infection.—Mortality and Epidemics.—The Cost of Funerals.

    CHAPTER XLIII.

    I meet an Acquaintance.—Coffins and Swell Houses.—Mrs. O'Flaherty

    goes One Better.—Epidemics and Embamming.—Six hundred for a

    Good Case.—Joyful High Spirits.

    CHAPTER XLIV.

    French and Spanish Parts of the City.—Mr. Cable and the Ancient

    Quarter.—Cabbages and Bouquets.—Cows and Children.—The Shell

    Road. The West End.—A Good Square Meal.—The Pompano.—The Broom-

    Brigade.—Historical Painting.—Southern Speech.—Lagniappe.

    CHAPTER XLV.

    Waw Talk.—Cock-Fighting.—Too Much to Bear.—Fine Writing.

    —Mule Racing.

    CHAPTER XLVI.

    Mardi-Gras.—The Mystic Crewe.—Rex and Relics.—Sir Walter Scott.

    —A World Set Back.—Titles and Decorations.—A Change.

    CHAPTER XLVII.

    Uncle Remus.—The Children Disappointed.—We Read Aloud.

    —Mr. Cable and Jean au Poquelin.—Involuntary Trespass.—The Gilded

    Age.—An Impossible Combination.—The Owner Materializes and Protests.

    CHAPTER XLVIII.

    Tight Curls and Springy Steps.—Steam-plows.—No. I. Sugar.

    —A Frankenstein Laugh.—Spiritual Postage.—A Place where there are

    no Butchers or Plumbers.—Idiotic Spasms.

    CHAPTER XLIX.

    Pilot-Farmers.—Working on Shares.—Consequences.—Men who Stick

    to their Posts.—He saw what he would do.—A Day after the Fair.

    CHAPTER L.

    A Patriarch.—Leaves from a Diary.—A Tongue-stopper.—The Ancient

    Mariner.—Pilloried in Print.—Petrified Truth.

    CHAPTER LI.

    A Fresh Cub at the Wheel.—A Valley Storm.—Some Remarks on

    Construction.—Sock and Buskin.—The Man who never played

    Hamlet.—I got Thirsty.—Sunday Statistics.

    CHAPTER LII.

    I Collar an Idea.—A Graduate of Harvard.—A Penitent Thief.

    —His Story in the Pulpit.—Something Symmetrical.—A Literary Artist.

    —A Model Epistle.—Pumps again Working.—The Nub of the Note.

    CHAPTER LIII.

    A Masterly Retreat.—A Town at Rest.—Boyhood's Pranks.—Friends

    of my Youth.—The Refuge for Imbeciles.—I am Presented with

    my Measure.

    CHAPTER LIV.

    A Special Judgment.—Celestial Interest.—A Night of Agony.

    —Another Bad Attack.—I become Convalescent.—I address a

    Sunday-school.—A Model Boy.

    CHAPTER LV.

    A second Generation.—A hundred thousand Tons of Saddles.—A Dark

    and Dreadful Secret.—A Large Family.—A Golden-haired Darling.

    —The Mysterious Cross.—My Idol is Broken.—A Bad Season of

    Chills and Fever.—An Interesting Cave.

    CHAPTER LVI.

    Perverted History—A Guilty Conscience.—A Supposititious Case.

    —A Habit to be Cultivated.—I Drop my Burden.—Difference in Time.

    CHAPTER LVII.

    A Model Town.—A Town that Comes up to Blow in the Summer.

    —The Scare-crow Dean.—Spouting Smoke and Flame.—An Atmosphere

    that tastes good.—The Sunset Land.

    CHAPTER LVIII.

    An Independent Race.—Twenty-four-hour Towns.—Enchanting Scenery.

    —The Home of the Plow.—Black Hawk.—Fluctuating Securities.

    —A Contrast.—Electric Lights.

    CHAPTER LIX.

    Indian Traditions and Rattlesnakes.—A Three-ton Word.—Chimney

    Rock.—The Panorama Man.—A Good Jump.—The Undying Head.

    —Peboan and Seegwun.

    CHAPTER LX.

    The Head of Navigation.—From Roses to Snow.—Climatic Vaccination.

    —A Long Ride.—Bones of Poverty.—The Pioneer of Civilization.

    —Jug of Empire.—Siamese Twins.—The Sugar-bush.—He Wins his Bride.

    —The Mystery about the Blanket.—A City that is always a Novelty.

    —Home again.

    APPENDIX.

             A

             B

             C

             D

    THE 'BODY OF THE NATION'

    BUT the basin of the Mississippi is the Body of The Nation. All the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in Texas and New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains about 1,250,000 square miles. In extent it is the second great valley of the world, being exceeded only by that of the Amazon. The valley of the frozen Obi approaches it in extent; that of La Plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about eight-ninths of its area; then comes that of the Yenisei, with about seven-ninths; the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tse-kiang, and Nile, five-ninths; the Ganges, less than one-half; the Indus, less than one-third; the Euphrates, one-fifth; the Rhine, one-fifteenth. It exceeds in extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden. It would contain austria four times, germany or spain five times, france six times, the british islands or italy ten times. Conceptions formed from the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of the valley of the Mississippi; nor are those formed from the sterile basins of the great rivers of Siberia, the lofty plateaus of Central Asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon more adequate. Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every part of the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population. As a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the first upon our globe.

    EDITOR'S TABLE, HARPER'S MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1863

    Chapter 1

    The River and Its History

    THE Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world—four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope—a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.

    It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the 'Passes,' above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi's depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

    The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable—not in the upper, but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez (three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)—about fifty feet. But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half.

    An article in the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat,' based upon reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico—which brings to mind Captain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi—'the Great Sewer.' This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high.

    The mud deposit gradually extends the land—but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at all—one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.

    The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way—its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and Delta is now two miles above Vicksburg.

    Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cut-off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him.

    The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat bodily—is always moving bodily sidewise. At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy. As a result, the original site of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the State of Mississippi. Nearly the whole of that one thousand three hundred miles of old mississippi river which la salle floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry ground now. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other places.

    Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth, where the Gulfs billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet's Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has added seven hundred acres to it.

    But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities for the present—I will give a few more of them further along in the book.

    Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a word about its historical history—so to speak. We can glance briefly at its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in what shall be left of the book.

    The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. We do of course know that there are several comparatively old dates in American history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent. To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;—as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don't see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a picture of it.

    The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age.

    For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat at Pavia; the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, Sans Peur Et Sans Reproche; the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by the Turks; and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,—the act which began the Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo's paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V. were at the top of their fame, and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion; Margaret of Navarre was writing the 'Heptameron' and some religious books,—the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy being sometimes better literature preservers than holiness; lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion was the passion of their ladies, and classifying their offspring into children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime.

    In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition: the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent the nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher and another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation and his harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the banks of the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther's death; eleven years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew slaughter; Rabelais was not yet published; 'Don Quixote' was not yet written; Shakespeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse before Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell.

    Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.

    De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten—the Spanish custom of the day—and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. On the contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi. In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.

    For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them; higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey, 'for lagniappe;' and in Canada the French were schooling them in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west; and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,—so vaguely and indefinitely, that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it or even take any particular notice of it.

    But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of seeking out that river and exploring it. It always happens that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around. It happened so in this instance.

    Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.

    Chapter 2

    The River and Its Explorers

    LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory. Chief among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over to the king, and pay the expenses himself; receiving, in return, some little advantages of one sort or another; among them the monopoly of buffalo hides. He spent several years and about all of his money, in making perilous and painful trips between Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois, before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such a shape that he could strike for the Mississippi.

    And meantime other parties had had better fortune. In 1673 Joliet the merchant, and Marquette the priest, crossed the country and reached the banks of the Mississippi. They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from Green Bay, in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Marquette had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would name it Conception, in her honor. He kept his word. In that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit of priests. De Soto had twenty-four with him. La Salle had several, also. The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.'

    On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and their five subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the Mississippi. Mr. Parkman says: 'Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests.' He continues: 'Turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.'

    A big cat-fish collided with Marquette's canoe, and startled him; and reasonably enough, for he had been warned by the Indians that he was on a foolhardy journey, and even a fatal one, for the river contained a demon 'whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt.' I have seen a Mississippi cat-fish that was more than six feet long, and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds; and if Marquette's fish was the fellow to that one, he had a fair right to think the river's roaring demon was come.

    'At length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce and stupid look of the old bulls as they stared at the intruders through the tangled mane which nearly blinded them.'

    The voyagers moved cautiously: 'Landed at night and made a fire to cook their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again, paddled some way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the watch till morning.'

    They did this day after day and night after night; and at the end of two weeks they had not seen a human being. The river was an awful solitude, then. And it is now, over most of its stretch.

    But at the close of the fortnight they one day came upon the footprints of men in the mud of the western bank—a Robinson Crusoe experience which carries an electric shiver with it yet, when one stumbles on it in print. They had been warned that the river Indians were as ferocious and pitiless as the river demon, and destroyed all comers without waiting for provocation; but no matter, Joliet and Marquette struck into the country to hunt up the proprietors of the tracks. They found them, by and by, and were hospitably received and well treated—if to be received by an Indian chief who has taken off his last rag in order to appear at his level best is to be received hospitably; and if to be treated abundantly to fish, porridge, and other game, including dog, and have these things forked into one's mouth by the ungloved fingers of Indians is to be well treated. In the morning the chief and six hundred of his tribesmen escorted the Frenchmen to the river and bade them a friendly farewell.

    On the rocks above the present city of Alton they found some rude and fantastic Indian paintings, which they describe. A short distance below 'a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and surging and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees.' This was the mouth of the Missouri, 'that savage river,' which 'descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentle sister.'

    By and by they passed the mouth of the Ohio; they passed cane-brakes; they fought mosquitoes; they floated along, day after day, through the deep silence and loneliness of the river, drowsing in the scant shade of makeshift awnings, and broiling with the heat; they encountered and exchanged civilities with another party of Indians; and at last they reached the mouth of the Arkansas (about a month out from their starting-point), where a tribe of war-whooping savages swarmed out to meet and murder them; but they appealed to the Virgin for help; so in place of a fight there was a feast, and plenty of pleasant palaver and fol-de-rol.

    They had proved to their satisfaction, that the Mississippi did not empty into the Gulf of California, or into the Atlantic. They believed it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. They turned back, now, and carried their great news to Canada.

    But belief is not proof. It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the proof. He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at last got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681. In the dead of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a following of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and twenty-three Frenchmen. They moved in procession down the surface of the frozen river, on foot, and dragging their canoes after them on sledges.

    At Peoria Lake they struck open water, and paddled thence to the Mississippi and turned their prows southward. They plowed through the fields of floating ice, past the mouth of the Missouri; past the mouth of the Ohio, by-and-by; 'and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed on the 24th of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs,' where they halted and built Fort Prudhomme.

    'Again,' says Mr. Parkman, 'they embarked; and with every stage of their adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was more and more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of nature.'

    Day by day they floated down the great bends, in the shadow of the dense forests, and in time arrived at the mouth of the Arkansas. First, they were greeted by the natives of this locality as Marquette had before been greeted by them—with the booming of the war drum and the flourish of arms. The Virgin composed the difficulty in Marquette's case; the pipe of peace did the same office for La Salle. The white man and the red man struck hands and entertained each other during three days. Then, to the admiration of the savages, La Salle set up a cross with the arms of France on it, and took possession of the whole country for the king—the cool fashion of the time—while the priest piously consecrated the robbery with a hymn. The priest explained the mysteries of the faith 'by signs,' for the saving of the savages; thus compensating them with possible possessions in Heaven for the certain ones on earth which they had just been robbed of. And also, by signs, La Salle drew from these simple children of the forest acknowledgments of fealty to Louis the Putrid, over the water. Nobody smiled at these colossal ironies.

    These performances took place on the site of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas, and there the first confiscation-cross was raised on the banks of the great river. Marquette's and Joliet's voyage of discovery ended at the same spot—the site of the future town of Napoleon. When De Soto took his fleeting glimpse of the river, away back in the dim early days, he took it from that same spot—the site of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas. Therefore, three out of the four memorable events connected with the discovery and exploration of the mighty river, occurred, by accident, in one and the same place. It is a most curious distinction, when one comes to look at it and think about it. France stole that vast country on that spot, the future Napoleon; and by and by Napoleon himself was to give the country back again!—make restitution, not to the owners, but to their white American heirs.

    The voyagers journeyed on, touching here and there; 'passed the sites, since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf,' and visited an imposing Indian monarch in the Teche country, whose capital city was a substantial one of sun-baked bricks mixed with straw—better houses than many that exist there now. The chiefs house contained an audience room forty feet square; and there he received Tonty in State, surrounded by sixty old men clothed in white cloaks. There was a temple in the town, with a mud wall about it ornamented with skulls of enemies sacrificed to the sun.

    The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians, near the site of the present city of that name, where they found a 'religious and political despotism, a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple and a sacred fire.' It must have been like getting home again; it was home with an advantage, in fact, for it lacked Louis XIV.

    A few more days swept swiftly by, and La Salle stood in the shadow of his confiscating cross, at the meeting of the waters from Delaware, and from Itaska, and from the mountain ranges close upon the Pacific, with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, his task finished, his prodigy achieved. Mr. Parkman, in closing his fascinating narrative, thus sums up:

    'On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains—a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile.'

    Chapter 3

    Frescoes from the Past

    APPARENTLY the river was ready for business, now. But no, the distribution of a population along its banks was as calm and deliberate and time-devouring a process as the discovery and exploration had been.

    Seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, before the river's borders had a white population worth considering; and nearly fifty more before the river had a commerce. Between La Salle's opening of the river and the time when it may be said to have become the vehicle of anything like a regular and active commerce, seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV. and Louis XV. had rotted and died, the French monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the revolution, and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked about. Truly, there were snails in those days.

    The river's earliest commerce was in great barges—keelboats, broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back by hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months. In time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous.

    By and by the steamboat intruded. Then for fifteen or twenty years, these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the steamers did all of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their boats in New Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers.

    But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then keelboating died a permanent death. The keelboatman became a deck hand, or a mate, or a pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-berths were not open to him, he took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft constructed in the forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi.

    In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end to end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed by hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been trying to describe. I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,—an acre or so of white, sweet-smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more, three or four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for storm-quarters,—and I remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews, the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a ride.

    By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now-departed and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in, in this place, a chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more. The book is a story which details some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town drunkard of my time out west, there. He has run away from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped. They have found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high water and dead summer time), and are floating down the river by night, and hiding in the willows by day,—bound for Cairo,—whence the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free States. But in a fog, they pass Cairo without knowing it. By and by they begin to suspect the truth, and Huck Finn is persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge raft which they have seen in the distance ahead of them, creeping aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering the needed information by eavesdropping:—

    But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is impatient to find a thing out. We talked it over, and by and by Jim said it was such a black night, now, that it wouldn't be no risk to swim down to the big raft and crawl aboard and listen—they would talk about Cairo, because they would be calculating to go ashore there for a spree, maybe, or anyway they would send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat or something. Jim had a wonderful level head, for a nigger: he could most always start a good plan when you wanted one.

    I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river, and struck out for the raft's light. By and by, when I got down nearly to her, I eased up and went slow and cautious. But everything was all right—nobody at the sweeps. So I swum down along the raft till I was most abreast the camp fire in the middle, then I crawled aboard and inched along and got in amongst some bundles of shingles on the weather side of the fire. There was thirteen men there—they was the watch on deck of course. And a mighty rough-looking lot, too. They had a jug, and tin cups, and they kept the jug moving. One man was singing—roaring, you may say; and it wasn't a nice song—for a parlor anyway. He roared through his nose, and strung out the last word of every line very long. When he was done they all fetched a kind of Injun war-whoop, and then another was sung. It begun:—

    'There was a woman in our towdn,

    In our towdn did dwed'l (dwell,)

    She loved her husband dear-i-lee,

    But another man twysteas wed'l.

    Singing too, riloo, riloo, riloo,

    Ri-too, riloo, rilay—

    She loved her husband dear-i-lee,

    But another man twyste as wed'l.

    And so on—fourteen verses. It was kind of poor, and when he was going to start on the next verse one of them said it was the tune the old cow died on; and another one said, 'Oh, give us a rest.' And another one told him to take a walk. They made fun of him till he got mad and jumped up and begun to cuss the crowd, and said he could lame any thief in the lot.

    They was all about to make a break for him, but the biggest man there jumped up and says—

    'Set whar you are, gentlemen. Leave him to me; he's my meat.'

    Then he jumped up in the air three times and cracked his heels together every time. He flung off a buckskin coat that was all hung with fringes, and says, 'You lay thar tell the chawin-up's done;' and flung his hat down, which was all over ribbons, and says, 'You lay thar tell his sufferin's is over.'

    Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and shouted out—

    'Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!—and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!'

    All the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head and looking fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1