PART ONE
1
THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY was always a wild and unknown country. Above St. Anthony Falls in Minnesota, the track of the river meandered into vagueness: it wound through pristine forests, and vanished into unexplored valleys, and glinted among mazes of unnamed lakes. The river’s ultimate source wasn’t established as Lake Itasca in the far north until the 1830s, and the identification wasn’t universally accepted for several decades after that—few people were willing to venture up-country to investigate. The pine forests there were trackless and spooky. The valleys were still strewn with monstrous fossils that had lain undisturbed for thousands of years: mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves and a species of beaver that was the size of a grizzly bear—relics from the dawn world of the American wilderness, before the first humans arrived.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the dominant presence in the northern forests was the Chippewa. They lived in wigwam villages, some of four or five hundred people, in glades and clearings scattered throughout the woodlands. These were mostly on the east side of the river. On the west, in the open prairies, were the settlements of the Sioux. The Chippewa and the Sioux were continually skirmishing, and had been for several hundred years. The Sioux believed, not without justice, that when the Chippewa had migrated from the east during the great Iroquois wars, they’d stolen the ancestral Sioux land. There were also white settlers—more and more of them as the nineteenth century went on. Neither the Chippewa nor the Sioux viewed them with much alarm. They generally ignored the rumors of massacres and forced migrations in the lower valley. Both nations had signed treaties with the white authorities, for one thing (the Sioux treaty even recognized their claim to the Chippewa territory), and neither had yet realized that all such treaties with the whites were worthless. Then, too, they wanted to buy from the white traders. They were notorious for taking all the guns and whiskey the traders would sell them, but they were even more eager for cookware. Their enthusiasm for the whites’ copper utensils had wiped out traditional pottery through the North Woods almost overnight.
The white settlers mostly lived in new towns along the river. These were muddy and primitive places. A typical one is described in George Byron Merrick’s memoir, Old Times on the Upper Mississippi. Merrick grew up in Prescott, Wisconsin, which is at the junction of the Mississippi and the St. Croix rivers. In his childhood in the 1840s, the population of Prescott was around two hundred. It was a remote spot; there were no roads, and the closest railroad tracks were hundreds of miles to the south. It was also precariously situated between large settlements of Chippewa and Sioux. Both came into town to trade, and occasionally to fight: the whites all learned how to duck down alleys or crouch behind wagons as soon as they heard war whoops and gunfire.
But Merrick didn’t recall ever being troubled by the town’s isolation, or its strategic position. The main thing he remembered was the freedom. He and the other boys weren’t obsessively monitored the way children routinely are now. In fact, they weren’t monitored at all. If they weren’t in school, they were on their own—free to go off by themselves and canoe the river, or play with the boys from a nearby Chippewa village, or stage battles around the ruined French fort on the islet just downriver from town. The most romantic of their playgrounds was farther on, below the sandstone bluffs along the west bank of the river: an ancient battlefield, strewn with corroded hatchets and rusted musket nails and arrowheads like fossil fish. The Chippewa boys said it was where their ancestors had won a tremendous victory over the Sioux. Eventually it occurred to Merrick that the Sioux boys probably thought it was where they’d won a victory over the Chippewa.
The lives of the boys were dominated by the Mississippi. Merrick and his friends had a kind of private ritual to symbolize the moment each year when they gave themselves up to the river. On the first hot day of spring, as soon as school was out, they’d run through the town as fast as they could in single file and, one after the next, throw themselves off a bluff into the water. From that moment on, until the first ice sheeted it in the fall, the river was their home.
It was an idyllic and heedless life. “It seems miraculous to me,” Merrick wrote, “that all of those boys were not drowned or otherwise summarily disposed of.” But nobody ever met with disaster. Merrick himself remembered only a handful of close calls. Mostly they were times when he and the other boys were out canoeing and got caught in violent squalls; their dugout would be swamped by the choppy waters and they had to flounder desperately to the nearest shore. Once, in the open country on the western bank, Merrick was out exploring by himself when he was treed by a wolf pack. He spent a terrified hour clinging to an upper branch as the wolves leaped up to snap at his feet, until the pack inexplicably had a change of mind and ran away.
The nearest he ever came to getting himself killed was a time when he and his brother were out canoeing. They paddled south to a river bend where an immense drift of logs had built up in the shallows. There Merrick’s dugout overturned, and as he thrashed around beneath the surface, he got his legs caught in a tangle of cottonwood roots. He barely managed to writhe and jerk and lunge free—and then he had to spend another frantic few seconds scrabbling beneath the drift logs for clear air. At last he burst to the surface. His brother hauled him to safety. Ten minutes later, they were fishing as though nothing had happened.
It certainly never made him love the river less. “We grew into the very life of the river,” Merrick wrote, “as we grew in years.” Merrick’s father owned a warehouse along the levee, and Merrick and his brother commandeered the attic for their bedroom: it gave them a panoramic view of the levee, the docks, and the water. Like sentries, they kept watch on all the arrivals and departures. “At night no steamboat ever landed at the levee,” Merrick writes, “without having at least two spectators, carefully noting its distinguishing characteristics.”
Most of the traffic was heading downriver. There were wooden barges bearing ore from the mines, and flatboats carrying beaver pelts and sheaves of prairie wheat. If the harvest came in late and the river was already icing over, the flatboats would off-load the wheat and store it in the warehouses until the spring thaw. There were also the big rafts floating down from the logging camps. They were guided by steering oars so large they took dozens of men to maneuver. The crews on the rafts were a notorious lot. Whenever they’d hit town, there would inevitably be a drunken riot. Merrick recalled how the fights would spill into the backstreets and the levee after midnight; all the while, the local marshal waited them out, safely perched atop a high post on the dock, a revolver in his hand, watching the action unfold “with the enlightened eye of an expert and the enjoyment of a connoisseur.”
Boats coming up from the lower valley were the most eagerly awaited, because they brought so many essential supplies. The whole town would be on the levee to help unload. There’d be barrels of salt (a prized commodity in the upper valley, so scarce it was often used in place of money), sacks of coffee beans, tuns of cured pork and beef jerky, tubs of rice and axle grease. If the boat arrived at night, torches would be lit up all along the riverfront. People ran everywhere by the flickering light—stacking the barrels, dragging loaded wagons into the warehouses, throwing tarps over the goods that were going to be transshipped farther north. The torches smoked and billowed and flared, shedding a steady drip of pitch and charred wadding into the black water below. And then within the hour the levee would be dark and empty again. Merrick and some of the other local boys would be allowed to stay up until dawn, skylarking among the stacks of cargo, making sure it wasn’t stolen by the ubiquitous river thieves.
Now and then, one of the boys on the levee would be on board when a boat pulled out again. He would have stowed away or else talked the captain into letting him hire on as an apprentice—usually for a couple of dollars a month, starvation wages even then. That was what happened with Merrick. When he was a teenager, he left town and was hired as a mud clerk on a boat doing regular runs up and down the valley. Over the next few years, he worked his way up to apprentice engineer, cub pilot, and eventually full pilot. (Later on he went east, where he became a newspaperman and ultimately a publisher.) He thought it was a fine career, but as far as the town was concerned, that was the end of him. They had a phrase they’d use about such a boy: somebody would ask what had happened to this or that kid who used to hang out on the levee, and the answer would be a headshake, or a hand waved contemptuously in the direction of the Mississippi, and a simple dismissal:
Gone on the river.
———
All along its length, on its remotest upper reaches and its most labyrinthine tributaries, people were going on the river. They were sometimes called voyageurs—the word was a survival of the old French culture of the Mississippi, before the Louisiana Purchase. It has a romantic sound, but there was little actual romance associated with being a voyageur. Mostly it meant working the keelboats, barges, and rafts, which was brutal, unremitting, and dangerous labor; or else it meant taking a one-shot trip in a flatboat, loaded down with local goods to sell in the great markets of the river delta. Just about everybody was tempted to try that out at some time or another. It was a simple way of scoring money at a time when most of the river valley was sunk in grinding poverty. One of those who made the trip was Abraham Lincoln: he did his first run on the river in 1831, when he was twenty-two, just out of the family home and striking out on his own. He and some friends, backed by a local businessman, built a flatboat and took it down the Sangamon River to the Illinois, the Illinois to the Mississippi, and the Mississippi all the way down to New Orleans.
What did they carry? It barely mattered. Apples or hemp or whiskey, pigs or turkeys or horses or cattle; maybe there was a local craftsman who made particularly sturdy brooms, or a brewer famous around town for an unusually sweet ale. The delta markets were known to be undiscriminating and insatiable. The voyageurs set out with anything that they could make, grow, barter for, sell on commission, or steal. Ordinarily they set out in the fall, with the pick of the local harvest, or after the thaw in the spring, with whatever miscellaneous load they’d been able to scrounge together over the winter. Sometimes the whole town would gather at the levee for their departure, and the local band would play; sometimes they’d sneak away at dawn, before anybody realized what they’d taken.
The current was a fast jog, nine or ten miles an hour in the deepest channels. It was strong enough to hurry the most heavily laden boat downstream. People didn’t have to do much in the way of fancy boating to keep moving. The Mississippi had no waterfalls south of Minnesota, and only one stretch of dangerous white water, along the Iowa-Illinois border (it was successfully dredged by midcentury). The boats were carried forward, hour after hour, day after day, as the valley unfolded around them in endless cascades. There were countless islets and bluffs, feeder creeks and sloughs, marshes and canebrakes receding into the blue depths of the valley; tributaries came rushing in through ravines; clouds skimmed down so low they clipped the pines atop the ridges; drifts of mist floated off the hillsides and melted across the water. Whole days could go by without the voyageurs seeing anyone onshore, and then it might only be a small, silent figure on the near bank, standing for a moment and solemnly raising a hand as they passed.
But the river had its own dangers. Chief among them were the sandbars. The river was deep—more than a hundred feet for much of its length—but the strong drag of the current along its alluvial bottom built up sandbars in countless numbers. The bars cut the effective depth of the channels to a few feet or sometimes a few inches. A boat that went aground on a bar might be stuck there for days or weeks, until help could be found or the river rose. In seasons of low water, these bars made the river essentially impassable. One military expedition, unwisely setting out in late summer, when the river was at its lowest, recorded that between Minnesota and Illinois they went aground on sandbars more than two hundred times.
Then there were the floating trees. There were hordes of them on the river—saplings and fully mature trees and ancient giants more than a hundred feet tall. They’d collect into impassable bottlenecks on hairpin bends and form bobbing, clunking plateaus in the shallows. Sometimes a couple of dozen of them, or a couple of hundred of them, would form into a clump glued together by the mud and debris that were constantly slipping past in the current. These were known as wooden islands, and they would go careening down the river for hundreds of miles at a stretch, until they built up enough momentum to break out of the channels and collide with whatever happened to be in their path along the shore. Everyone got to know the weird creaking, grinding sound that meant a wooden island was approaching. Any boats that couldn’t be maneuvered out of the way would be pummeled into flinders by its bristling armor of splintered logs.
But the trees were even more dangerous when they were stationary. Many or perhaps most that fell into the river eventually became stuck in the mud. These were known as snags. Snags were so common that a whole specialized vocabulary was developed to categorize them. A tree that was standing straight up on the river bottom, with its branches just under the waterline, was called a planter. A tree that was stuck sideways into a riverbank or a sandbar so that it stretched out at full length under the water was a sleeper. A tree that waved back and forth in the current with a sawing motion was a sawyer. And a tree that bobbed up and down, rising up out of the water and plunging back again, as though it were performing a river baptism, was a preacher. Any of these snags could stave in or capsize a boat that glided blithely across it, and they were everywhere on the river; by one estimate there was a major snag every five hundred feet.
These perils were almost invisible to the unpracticed eye. Most of them showed up only as odd disturbances on the surface, patterns that had to be decoded from the endless fluctuations of the current. A trailing braid in smooth water was a sure sign of a snag; a quilted ripple was a tangle of submerged logs; a line or fold across the water was an undertow; a persistent swirl of froth was a whirlpool, where a strong tributary flowing quickly into the main current had created a vortex beneath the surface. The voyageurs had to teach themselves all these clues by experience, and the river put a premium on fast learners.
The voyageurs came to call the Mississippi the wicked river. The downriver run was so deceptive and so treacherous that it was said that at least one out of every five boats that set out for the delta wrecked along the way. Every traveler on the river got to know the sight of bodies drifting with the current, or hanging from a floating island, or bobbing among the logs piled up on a river bend—the red shirt that the voyageurs wore, the closest thing the river had to a uniform, could be spotted a mile off, like a distress signal.
The landscape through which the voyageurs passed was still extraordinarily pristine. The most basic traces of human occupation were only sketchily drawn in the valley. There were no main roads or highways; there were barely even any trails. There were no long fences or hedgerows marking out property lines. The countryside hadn’t yet been pierced and plotted into an array of carpet scraps, the way it is now; forest and meadow and swamp and prairie still flowed into each other according to their own logic. The air was uncannily clear. The faintest trace of smoke—a line spiraling up from a cabin on a wooded islet, or a smudge over a remote village—could be seen for miles away, as stark as a forest fire.
At night the view was even more glassy and serene. The hills and bluffs were featureless masses of india ink. There were no lights of towns, sometimes not even when there were towns—streetlights were an innovation still confined to big cities. People mostly stayed in after dark and went to bed early. A light on in a house at midnight was a bad sign: it almost always meant that someone inside was sick. Most nights, the only lights the voyageurs saw were the moon and the stars—and the stars weren’t the meager scattering of pockmarks we now think of as the constellations, but the Milky Way in full flood, veil after jeweled veil, reaching down to the treetops and shimmering on the wrinkled surface of the river. The sharpest eyes might also pick out, in the remotest depths of the night, a few tiny flickers of orange: these were enormous bonfires built on the banks of the river, advertising the wood yards where the steamboats could refuel.
There were no beacons or lighthouses or channel buoys on the river then; there were no official markers of any kind. Here and there someone would occasionally paint a warning or an arrow on a prominent rock to alert voyageurs to danger—but these were often the work of pirates, to trick boats into going aground. Nor were there any reliable maps. In that era, mapmaking, even at its best, was a mixture of supposition, obsolete or garbled information, and pure fantasy; the first rule of travel in the American interior was that only a fool trusted a commercial map.
But the voyageurs didn’t care. What did they need a map for? The land was so wild it was essentially impassable; anyone who didn’t go by the river didn’t go at all. In effect, the river served as its own map. A voyageur who needed to consult it had only to climb the nearest hill. There the route was unfolded, in all its blue-misted splendor: the great dragon tail of the river uncoiling through forested valleys and across the tallgrass prairies and into the vast shrouded swamps, glittering with ten thousand sunflecks, blurred by drifts of drizzle, blazing with reflected herds of brilliant cumulus, on and on toward the horizon. As far as the eye could see, the river was the only road.
———
To the tourists, the passing landscape was pure monotony; the British travel writer Frances Trollope wrote that the Mississippi was “dismal,” “wearisome,” “a huge and turbid river with a low and slimy shore,” and complained that there was nothing to the scenery but “forest—forest—forest.” But a voyageur learned to see every stretch of the river as unique. He needed only one glance at the banks to tell where on the thousands of miles of its course he was. Some didn’t even need to raise their eyes to the banks: they could tell their location from the color of the river alone. There were even some connoisseurs who boasted they could do it with their eyes closed, just from how the water tasted.
The river was sky blue near its headwaters, in the white-pine forests of the Far North. The pines came down to the banks, where their roots tangled in a fantastic thorny profusion, and gave the water a clean, pungent tang of pine oil. A little to the south the water became a deep blue-green as the pines gave way to densely overgrown woodlands of oak and elm and maple. The banks grew more lush: in the marshes and along the sloughs and streams were waving fields of cattails and goosefoot and button brush, and below the water’s surface in the shallows were mile-long beds of mussels. The marshes were thronged with squabbling crowds of wading birds. The river was busy with catfish and gar and bowfin and buffalo fish and bluegill and walleye; they were so abundant that people claimed there were places you could cross the river by walking on their backs.
By the time the river reached the sandstone bluffs and prairies of Iowa and Illinois, it had become an olive green with hints of brown. Here and there were long wine-red stains trailing along the shallows; the color was from the tannin that had leached from ancient bogs. By that point the forests on either side had thinned out, and the land had opened up. The river ran for hundreds of miles through the tallgrass prairie. The voyageurs would see nothing but the ruffled grass rising and falling in slow swells all the way out to the horizon. In the spring the prairie was a riot of gorgeous wildflowers, endless washes and shoals of white aster and black-eyed Susan and pink phlox and sky-blue spiderwort. In the summer the grasses were ten feet high and were swarmed by game animals like antelope and deer and bison; there were ragged black clouds of passenger pigeons so numerous that a single swarm could take days to pass overhead. In the autumn the grasses turned brittle and were easily set ablaze; after a thunderstorm there’d be a pall of smoke hanging over the horizon marking the spots where the lightning had started fires. Sometimes at night there was a brilliant line of flame edging down a distant hillside, below a titanic churn of smoke underlit by the glare. Now and then the fires swept down to the riverbank, and the voyageurs would be whisked unwillingly along an interminable billowing curtain of smoke and flame. They would be choking and coughing the whole way, and frantically checking the boat to make sure that the burning cinders and tufts of blown grass weren’t threatening to stampede their livestock or torch their cargo.
At the southern edge of the prairie was the confluence with the Missouri. The Missouri was a furious torrent bright red with the clays of the Great Plains. Its water was sour and gritty, “too thick for soup but too thin to plow”; its current was so strong that for miles south of the junction it flowed beside the Mississippi in the same bed without mingling, a swift, narrow plume of reddish cream next to a wider swath of greeny murk. Gradually they churned together into an odd pale broth that looked like yellow ash stirred into dark oil. The forests closed in again on either bank. These were some of the densest and lushest woodlands in America. The marshes and canebrakes were tangles of starflower, bloodroot, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild ginger, and mayapple; there were matted beds of maygrass, wild bean, sumac, arrowhead, knotweed, little barley, hickory, and goosefoot. The trees were scrub willow and cottonwood, pin oak and green ash, hackberry and persimmon, black willow and sycamore and honey locust and box elder and pawpaw. They towered up in countless pillars more than a hundred feet tall; the leaf canopy was a remote web of green and black reaching almost to the clouds.
Then the Ohio glided in from the east. It was wide and placid, and its blue water was so rich with topsoil that in some lights it looked black. Its taste was velvety; it was said that if you drank enough of it your sweat would be as sweet as dew. It, too, held aloof from the main current for many miles. But gradually it blended in, and the result was a rich, murky, chocolaty gold. This was the characteristic color that travelers came to associate with the Mississippi. It wasn’t very appetizing to drink; the fastidious travelers in the lower valley made a habit of letting the water stand for at least a half an hour to allow the grit and filth a chance to settle out. The hard-core river people didn’t bother. They’d just scroop a bucket into the current and guzzle it down straight. They liked to claim the river silt was good for you. They called it “the true Mississippi relish.”
Meanwhile, the forests were growing more tropical. Water oaks and water maples were interspersed with catalpas and wild cherries and tupelo gums; there were palmettos unfolding their green spearlike fans and vast stands of gloomy cypresses. Along the water’s edge were endless tessellations of Chinese lotus, and the marshlands were radiant with orchids and passionflowers and hibiscuses. Beavers and otters splashed in the sloughs and creeks, the woods were haunted by wolves and panthers, and the air was a deafening riot of millions of songbirds.
The river unfolded into the delta, as the sloughs and bayous and marshes and swamps thickened. It became at times a pale luminous green like lime soda water. Its taste was reminiscent of bitter mildew. On either side the banks were green-shadowed and marshy. Water moccasins and alligators slithered through the mud; the green was spangled with cross vine and trumpet vine, cinnamon fern and Cherokee rose, silver bell and blue lobelia, lily and hyacinth and hydrangea and yellow jasmine. The river glided on past endless receding processions of cypress trees shrouded in Spanish moss; here and there were silent lagoons in perpetual gloom. The river meandered among orange groves and stands of magnolia so pungent the smell made some travelers sick.
Then the great swamp forests began to dwindle. The banks on either side melted away into indeterminate ooze that deepened and widened into borders of reeds and cattails more than a mile wide. The last solid land broke up into a maze of little peninsulas and islets and isthmuses dense with rustles of sea grass and sedge, swarmed by pelicans. The water shone from thousands of brackish ponds and lagoons and lakes. There was no firm line between the river delta and the salt estuaries. But in the end the last islets fell away, and the great freshwater flood of lime, gold, and brown went streaming serenely out into the blue salt of the Gulf.
The river grew more crowded the farther south the voyageurs went. In the upper valley, days could pass without the sight of another boat; below St. Louis there were fresh armadas around every turn. The river traffic was a hectic, crowded, jumbled array of keelboats and flatboats, barges and rafts, pirogues and scows, skiffs and canoes and schooners. “The floating life on the water,” one writer called it; he predicted that the people of the Mississippi valley “will ultimately become as famous as the Chinese for having their habitancy in boats.”
The basic form of river transport was the broadhorn flatboat. This was essentially nothing more than a rectangular wooden box, with a wide, flat bottom and steep sides. It was typically ten to fifteen feet across, thirty to forty feet long, and three or four feet deep. Its planking was fixed to a lumber frame and held together by wooden pins—iron nails were too expensive. The bottom was sealed with caulk or tar or pitch. There was usually a hut with a peaked roof built amidships. At its stern was an enormous steering oar, sometimes just a big tree limb shorn of its leaves and branches. At either end of the bow were two smaller oars, which were mainly used to shove off from sandbars and steer away from the banks. When these oars were raised, they looked like the horns of a steer—thus its name.
The broadhorn was an ugly, clumsy, primitive boat, almost impossible to maneuver and very easy to wreck. But it had a few crucial advantages: it was cheap, it was easy to build, and it was extremely buoyant. Even when it was loaded down with several tons of cargo, it drew only a couple of feet of water, which meant that it rode high enough to get it over a lot of the sandbars and snags. It was the perfect boat for the first-time voyageur making a one-shot trip to the delta.
The other boat seen most often on the river, at least in the early years of the century, was the keelboat. This was a big, graceful gondola, sometimes fifty or sixty feet long, partially enclosed by an elegantly sloped roof—keelboats were beautiful boats, many of them, with elaborate handcrafted prows. A keelboat typically carried ten or fifteen tons of cargo and was worked by a crew of at least a dozen men. These crews were necessarily more skilled and professional than those of the flatboats; a keelboat wasn’t the kind of disposable craft whose loss could be shrugged off by its owners. Its crews tended to be proud of their skills—they often considered themselves to be the only true voyageurs on the Mississippi.
There were many other varieties of boats. Every possible method for moving up and down the current was somewhere being tried, and sometimes brought to a high art form. Canoes of hollowed-out tree trunks, often fifty or seventy-five feet long, were called pirogues; some pirogues were made up of five or six trunks set side by side and nailed together with planking to form a kind of supercatamaran. There were also the traditional birch-bark canoes of the Native Americans, extraordinarily sturdy and angelically light—many people considered them the finest boats ever put on the river. There were great barges bristling with oars and rudders, and there were vast ungainly rafts, cobbled together out of whatever wood was handy and sometimes going downriver in a state of perpetual disintegration. There were shanty boats, houseboats, tugboats, cargo boats, packet boats; there were sleds and skiffs and scows, dugouts, arks, flats, and ferries. And there were irregular and fanciful boats that had no name, built of haphazard materials, of mismatched parts of abandoned boats, of random accretions of flotsam and salvage; some had weird turrets and peaks and railings of ironwork and carved wood like nightmare castles. The writer Timothy Flint described them as “monstrous anomalies, reducible to no specific class of boats, and only illustrating the whimsical archetypes of things that have previously existed in the brain of inventive men, who reject the slavery of being obliged to build in any received form.”
All the boats were crammed with cargo. A ceaseless torrent of goods was coming downriver. The big rafts carried pine lumber from the North Woods, furs and hides from the Great Plains, and wheat and corn from the prairies. The barges carried copper and lead ore from Wisconsin and Minnesota, and glistening mountains of coal from the mines along the Ohio. The flatboats and keelboats carried pungent barrels of cider and whiskey; they carried coils of hemp rope and stinking wheels of cheese; they carried avalanches of corn ears, apples, cabbage heads, potatoes; they carried complaining flocks of chickens, turkeys, and geese and herds of skittish horses and cattle and pigs. Some carried the North’s most exotic exports, ice and snow, which at their destination were stored in dry wells and deep caves; snow flavored with rose water was always a great treat during a delta summer.
And they were carrying people—immigrants, itinerant laborers, migrant workers following the seasons. People may have been the most common and the least valuable cargo on the river. They were uncounted, uncataloged, unremembered; nobody cared whether they reached their destination or what happened to them once they arrived. The only people who were kept track of were slaves, because they came with a specific dollar value attached. Thousands of slaves were brought down the river each year. Those who transported them were known as soul drivers. Everyone on the river could recognize the soul drivers’ boats. They had a peculiar place in the impromptu society of the river. People in the lower valley took the existence of slavery for granted and universally regarded the abolitionist movement with contempt—but there was also a widespread belief that the slave trade itself was a dirty business and that the slavers were the lowest of the low. The boats of the soul drivers glided downriver on their own and were shunned by the other river people wherever they laid up for the night.
Darting among the armadas of the downriver traffic were shifting constellations of smaller boats making short hops from port to port. These were the boats of the river merchants. They went from town to village to plantation, anywhere there was a levee or a dock where they could tie up and display their wares. They could be found on any stretch of the river: dealers in kitchenware and cabinetry and furniture, sellers of books and plows, craftsmen of scythes and brooms and spinning wheels. The river had more than one floating smithy with a working forge. There were floating greenhouses selling exotic plants. There were floating daguerreotype studios, where people could pose for formal portraits. The river had its own tailors and haberdashers, knife sharpeners and tin workers; there were boats that were fully stocked general stores, with polished countertops and neatly stacked shelves displaying bolts of coarse cloth for sale by the yard, barrels of flat-head nails, and the latest newspapers and gazettes from New Orleans and St. Louis. Then there were the showboats, the traveling troupes of actors and musicians and acrobats. There were the doctors with their medicine shows: steam doctors, magnetic doctors, hydrological doctors, milk-sick doctors, homeopaths, vitopaths, mesmerists, baunscheidtists, and sellers of patent medicines. They traveled with musicians and actors, who’d sing and put on burlesque routines to draw the crowd, and once they’d made their sales, they’d be back on the river again before anybody had a chance to examine the contents of the bottles they’d just bought. And there were the gambling boats and the brothel boats—the latter came to be known as gunboats—that would anchor at a discreet distance from towns and villages, and they’d do their business until the landsmen organized a “vigilance committee” to chase them away.
The most startling sight for many travelers was the houseboats. These were rafts, sometimes eighty or ninety feet long, carrying elaborately constructed and fully furnished houses. The houses were surrounded by pens holding horses and sheep and cattle and hogs; haystacks and farm implements were scattered everywhere as though in a farmyard; children were scampering, men were whittling, and women were at the washtub. Sometimes Grandmother was seen sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, placidly knitting, as though she belonged to an Americanized version of Noah’s ark, riding the flood to a new world.
From just about anywhere on the Mississippi’s great branches, the journey down to the delta was a matter of a few days or a few weeks; the return trip could take the better part of a year. An upriver journey, before the rise of the steamboats, was a nearly impossible proposition. There came to be endless varieties of contrivances to force boats against the current. Most often people hoisted sails. If the wind was against them, they’d break out the oars. Some of the simple paddle-wheel boats were powered by hand-cranked treadmills; others had treadmills powered by horses or cattle. Keelboats were moved against the current by a peculiar technique known as poling. It was a strange and mesmerizing spectacle. The keelboat crew, all wearing the bright red shirts of the voyageurs, would line up on deck on the side of the boat nearest to the shore. Each man carried a long wooden pole tipped with an iron shoe. At a signal from the captain, they’d all lower the poles into the water and plant the shoes in the river mud. Then, gripping the poles as firmly as they could, they’d march in a line toward the stern. As each man reached the stern, he’d raise his pole up and hurry to the back of the line, where he’d plant the shoe in the mud again and resume marching. Slowly, lumberingly, the boat would slide forward beneath their feet.
Larger boats required grander techniques. The big barges were moved by warping. This involved running heavy ropes or cables through an anchor that was fixed to the shallows, or else looping them around the biggest tree or boulder onshore, and then out to a tugboat in the channel. The tugboat would move downriver with the current, and the rope would be pulled around the pivot to drag the barge upriver. When no tug was available, the rope would simply be run back from the pivot to the barge itself, and the entire crew would draw it in by hand. Sometimes the crew wouldn’t even bother with the rope or the pivot: they’d all just reach out from the barge to grab hold of the bushes on the riverbank, and they’d pull until the boat moved a few feet forward or the bushes were uprooted. This was called bushwhacking.
The most straightforward, brute-force method of upriver movement was also the most exhausting. It was known as cordelling. The crew would go ashore with a heavy rope that had been tied to the bow, and they would simply drag the boat forward. They thrashed through the underbrush, sank to their knees in the mud of the riverbanks, waded chest-deep through reedy sloughs and swamps, untangled the line from bristling stumps, on and on, sunup to sundown. The rule of thumb for a cordelle’s progress was this: a boat moving downriver with the current could sometimes make ten miles an hour; a boat going upriver by cordelle was lucky to make ten miles a day.
There were plenty of times when nothing worked. The wind died, and the sails were useless. The current was too strong or the boat was too heavy to be moved with oars. The river bottom in the shallows was so muddy that the iron-shoed poles sank through it like butter. A landslide or a sprawl of fallen timber along the bank made it impossible to go ashore with a line for warping. The shores were swamps a half a mile deep on either side and there was no solid ground for a cordelle. Boats were sometimes stranded for days or weeks, until the wind picked up, the river rose or fell, or a passing steamboat in a rare moment of kindness offered a tow—or until the crew finally abandoned the boat and looked for another way to go on.
It was no wonder that many voyageurs got down to the delta and then couldn’t face the thought of bringing their boat upriver again. This was another great advantage to flatboats: they weren’t worth anything. They were designed for a one-way trip. Once their goods had been off-loaded and disposed of in the markets of New Orleans, the boats themselves were broken up and sold for scrap. That was how flatboats became known as “the boats that never came back.” The writer James Hall found the life cycle of the flatboat to be a melancholy parable:
She pursues her voyage, like man on his earthly pilgrimage, to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller of her species ever returns; for, being calculated to stem the current, she is useless after she has reached her destination, except as so much lumber.
But even if the voyageurs were freed from the deadweight of their boat, they didn’t find their return all that easy. By midcentury, if they were flush, they could buy a cheap passage on one of the steamboats—it was only a few dollars from New Orleans to St. Louis, if they were willing to sleep on deck and work off part of their fare by helping load and unload cargo at the stops along the way. Or they could hire onto one of the big barges returning upriver and spend months cordelling somebody else’s boat through the mud of the riverbanks. Many of them found it simpler to walk. Once their business in New Orleans was done, they’d set out on foot—up the forest trails, along the margins of endless swamps, through the trackless tallgrass prairies: month after month, all the way home.
That was the calendar time set by the river. A typical voyageur would set out with a load of cargo bound for New Orleans in the spring, arrive there in a few weeks, and then spend the rest of the spring and into the summer and sometimes the fall getting home. He’d rest up all winter—and then, the following spring, build a new flatboat, pick up a fresh load of cargo, and set out downriver again. Abraham Lincoln after he rode this circuit a couple of times said that it taught him what it felt like to be a piece of driftwood.
The boats ran all day, from dawn till sundown, but only the biggest boats were still on the river after dark. The rafts and barges went barreling on; everybody else looked for some secure place to hole up until morning. A night run in a flatboat or a keelboat was only for the reckless. People might do it if they were desperate, if they had an injured man and thought there might be a town with a doctor somewhere nearby—but they risked being capsized or stove in by an invisible snag, or running fatally aground on a sandbar, or being trapped by a whirlpool, or being swamped or run over by one of the great boats lording over the channels.
Toward dusk each day the boats began to collect into great archipelagoes off the levees of the port towns. It would happen from New Madrid south to the delta: dozens, sometimes hundreds, of boats clustering together, anchoring, tying up at docks, tossing ropes and cables from boat to boat, assembling into loose, floating cities. Soon cook fires in braziers would light up on the decks, dogs on different boats would bark furiously at each other, horses and livestock would shuffle and thump in their pens, and the sounds of fiddle music and stamping and singing and laughing would float up from a hundred places, mingling with the smoke of the cook fires. As the evening deepened and the lanterns were lit, people began moving from boat to boat, clambering over gunwales, hopping across roofs. They were bartering food, looking for jobs on other boats, passing on gossip, making deals for their cargo, and arranging convoys. It was a common practice to “lash” boats into a shoal of ten or twenty and travel downriver together to defend against the river pirates. The parties quickly grew rowdy. Sooner or later drunken fights began breaking out—it wasn’t unusual for a voyageur to drink himself into a blind, belligerent stupor every single night of his life. Then, around midnight, there’d be a general exodus toward shore.
Few towns were enthusiastic about welcoming the river people. At St. Louis, there was a night watch with fifty armed men assigned to the dock district, just to make sure that the river people didn’t stray too far from the levee. Many towns actually divided themselves in two, giving over one part to the river: that was how Vicksburg, Mississippi, for instance, held itself aloof from its disorderly riverfront companion Vicksburg Landing. Natchez, Mississippi, was divided by topography: the main town stood on a high bluff and was a decorous, gracious place of pillared porticoes, white church steeples, and brick storefronts; while around the base of the bluff was a second town, a crooked, squalid maze of slums and shanties, many of them built from wood salvaged from wrecked or abandoned flatboats. The official names for the two towns were Natchez and Natchez Landing, but more often they were called Natchez-on-the-Hill and Natchez-Under-the-Hill.
On summer evenings, it was the custom for the good people of Natchez-on-the-Hill to stroll to the edge of the bluff and take in the view of their fallen sister town and the boat city below. They’d survey the dirty smoke seething up from the chimneys, and the glare in the back alleys from the saloons and taverns, and beyond, on the river, the constellations of glittering lanterns and flickering cook fires swaying in the darkness. They’d listen with a kind of amused distaste to the disorderly music floating up from open doorways; they’d take in, as though they were spectators at a sporting event, the pops of gunfire and the frequent screams, many of them interrupted. They would congratulate themselves on the way they had carried out their quarantine. Not one of them would have ever admitted to being curious about what was going on down below the hill—much less confess to having, now and then, snuck down the bluff to sample the entertainment on offer there for themselves.
The boat cities hung together at the levees each night until just before dawn. But then, as the last stragglers were drifting in from the riverfront, the assemblies began to stir. The lines and cables between the boats were loosed and coiled up again, the anchors were drawn, breakfasts were frying, and there was a great creaking, thumping, slithering overture of sails raising and oars lowering. At sunrise the signal to depart would come. It was a weird, sonorous boom of a reveille; it came from the huge wooden trumpets known as river horns, sounding out from the flatboats and keelboats and shivering the air for a mile around.
Then the boat cities broke up. In ones and twos, and in the floes of lashed convoys, the boats drifted out into the shining expanse of the river, where they were caught up in the current and went scattering downstream. That was typically the last they’d all see of each other. The immensity of the river, the vagaries of the current, and the crowds of traffic down every bend meant that the next night they’d be sorted into wholly different congregations downriver. It was a rare event for any boats on their way to the delta to encounter each other twice. The river didn’t encourage lasting friendships.