8
THE FIRST STEAMBOAT CAME DOWN the Mississippi in 1811—in fact, it was swamped and almost sank in the backwash of the Great Shakes. By the end of that decade, around a dozen steamboats were on the river system. In the 1830s, the steamboat population was estimated to be around five hundred. By the time of the Civil War, it was four thousand.
There was a simple explanation for the ascendancy of the steamboats: they could move upriver almost as easily as they did down. This gave them a decisive advantage over every other form of river transport. They rendered the old, ornate, impractical keelboats obsolete—no need for bushwhacking or cordelling when the steamboats could churn their way up against the strongest current. Keelboats disappeared from the river by the 1840s. By the 1850s, even the flatboat population was in decline. The only serious competition the steamboats had left was the great rafts and barges—they survived because the steamboats didn’t have their bulk carrying capacity.
The rise of the steamboats also wrecked the old river etiquette. The river had never been policed, but there had always been a logic to its traffic flow, one dictated by practical necessity: the downriver traffic ran in the channels, while the upriver traffic stuck to the shallows. The steamboats put an end to all that. They cut in and out of the channels no matter which direction they were traveling. Their pilots were notoriously indifferent to the chaos they could leave in their wake. The steamboats routinely swamped the smaller boats as they passed; often they ran right over them and blasted them to splinters. And if the boat people were injured or drowned, if their boats were destroyed and all their possessions were sunk, there was no recourse. It wasn’t uncommon for the boat people, when they saw a steamboat approaching—particularly one with a reputation as a channel hog—to bring out their rifles and take shots at the pilothouse.
The steamboats were glamorous—everyone agreed on that. The sight of these gigantic white-tiered wedding cakes grandly gliding up the channels, pennants flying and smokestacks churning, never failed to dazzle the watchers onshore. In many towns along the river, the arrival of a steamboat was practically a public holiday. The boys of the town would be in a frenzy of excitement at the sight. They’d often paddle their canoes out to the levee, where they would caper and deliberately capsize, in hopes that the ladies and gentlemen watching from the cabin deck would laugh and throw them pennies. If the steamboat stayed docked long enough to allow the passengers to go for a stroll, the boys would pester them with souvenir trinkets, with Indian arrowheads and pieces of ancient French flintlocks they’d dug up along the riverbanks. They’d also—as George Merrick recalled—show off their exhaustive knowledge of steamboat design:
Was she a side-wheel or stern-wheel? Was she large or small? Had she trimmings on her smokestack, or about the pilot house, and if so of what description? Had she a “Texas,” or no “Texas”? Were the outside blinds painted white, red, or green? What was the sound of her whistle and bell?
The steamboats generally ran three kinds of routes. There were the packet boats that shuttled between two ports on a regular schedule. There were the transients that did one-shot hops to wherever their largest load of cargo was bound. And then there were the great lines that covered long swaths of the river and made countless stops along the way. A company that ran a major line might at any given time have ten or twelve boats in transit somewhere in the river system.
Passage on a line from New Orleans to the upper valley cost around a hundred dollars, which included a bed in the cabin and three meals a day. Fifty dollars more paid for a private stateroom. (For contrast, a crewman might earn fifty dollars a month; apprentices were lucky to be paid twenty.) Poorer passengers had a cheap alternative available: they could sleep outside on deck and take their chances with the weather. Those who did so were called deckers. For around five dollars, deckers bought the right to whatever space they could find among the barrels and hogsheads and crates and the pens of lamenting livestock; they could work down the fare or pay for meals by helping the crew load or unload cargo at each stop.
The boats were generally designed to carry about 250 passengers, plus crew and cargo. But they were routinely oversold. A boat on a popular line was likely to have at least four hundred passengers on board between the most heavily trafficked ports—fifty to a hundred people in the interior cabin and the staterooms, a couple of hundred deckers, and another hundred or so people who were making short hops and day trips. This endlessly shifting throng through the public rooms and the decks was a source of constant fascination to many travelers. Herman Melville, in his novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, described the scene:
As among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlour men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotallers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.
For Melville, the crowd made the steamboat the soul of the river: “Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.”
The interior cabin was a dream of luxuriousness. It had gleaming brass railings and tasseled arras and porcelain doorknobs; there were framed oil paintings on the walls and doors; the dining rooms had sparkling chandeliers and stained-glass skylights that cast colored motes across the carpeted floors. But at close contact the glamour wore off. The cabin sometimes seemed to be occupied by livestock worse than that found on deck—as Frances Trollope wrote about the typical steamboat cabin, “I would infinitely prefer sharing the apartment of a party of well-conditioned pigs.”
Trollope found the cabin at its worst at mealtime. The steamboats would lay on a lavish banquet at every meal, and the ladies and gentlemen would descend on it like a locust swarm, devour it loudly without a word of small talk, and then bolt from the table fifteen minutes later. Trollope remembered a “total want of any of the courtesies of the table,” and was particularly appalled by “the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses,” and “the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth.”
Other travelers were horrified by the behavior in the public rooms. The British geologist George Featherstonhaugh recalled “noise, confusion, spitting, smoking, cursing, and swearing, drawn from the most remorseless pages of blasphemy.” The French traveler Marie de Grandfort was offended by the whistling—at the boat’s theatrical performances, the audience would express its approval with a chorus of wolf whistles, which she found inconceivably vulgar. But even worse, she thought, was another habit: whittling.
Provided with a large or a small knife, they lay hands on the first bit of stray wood that falls in their way, or the branch of a tree, or a cane, or an umbrella left in a corner. If they are deprived of these, they attack the furniture; they pitilessly cut into counters, window sills, doors, chairs, sofas, billiard tables, church pews; in fact, nothing nothing is sacred against their knife-blades. The railings of the guards on certain boats on the Mississippi have been transformed into gigantic saws by this Yankee process.
The one thing everybody agreed on about steamboat travel was that it was loud. The river and the passing landscape were almost uncannily silent. “The prevailing character of the Mississippi,” one traveler wrote, “is that of solemn gloom.” But the steamboat was a great puffing, cranking, grinding, hooting, rattling contraption; people in the cabin could barely sleep at night because of what another traveler described as “the constant whizzing of the steampipe, and the ceaseless rumble of the machinery and paddle-wheels.” But the noise of the passengers themselves was loud enough to drown all that out. The main deck, Melville observed, was like “some Constantinople arcade or bazaar.” The people were in a continual uproar. There were furious political arguments—Frances Trollope said that “the respective claims of Adams and Jackson to the presidency were argued with more oaths and vehemence than it has ever been my lot to hear.” There were the inevitable drunken fights; there were countless touts and hawkers; there were hustlers pitching land deals and charitable trusts and patent medicines; there were singers and fiddlers and actors and buskers at their trade. To the strangers caught up in the crowd, everybody seemed perpetually boorish, rude, rowdy, exuberant, quarrelsome, and drunk.
They all had one great recreation: gambling. The passengers played dice games and card games in endless varieties—rondo and keno and faro, roulette and chuck-a-luck, monte and euchre, rouge et noir and seven-up and old sledge. It was quite probable that at any given moment, every single steamboat on the river had at least one high-stakes game going in the interior cabin and several penny-ante games on deck.
Most often they played poker. Poker was the trademark game of the Mississippi. It had been invented by some anonymous genius in New Orleans sometime around 1820; within the decade it had spread everywhere from the delta to the North Woods. The principal games then were draw poker and stud poker, in essentially the same forms they’re played now (although in their first versions, four kings and an ace beat a straight flush). The memory of their origin lingers to this day: the last card dealt in a hand is still called the river card, and betting on it is still “living by the river”; if you lose, it is sometimes said that you have “drowned at the river” or else simply that you have been “rivered.”
But the gamblers didn’t need poker or any other formal game. They’d bet on anything at all. On the steamboats, they’d bet on the speed of their passage, and the afternoon’s weather, and the depth of the river bottom at the next sounding. In the port towns, they’d stagger off roaring drunk to hit up the casinos and gambling houses; if they couldn’t find a good game, they’d make any bet they could with a local, even a footrace to the end of the levee. One professional gambler, George Devol, bet a hundred dollars once on whether a fish for sale in a New Orleans market was a catfish or a pike.
They’d bet on anything; they cheated at everything. The professional gamblers routinely used marked cards, either ones they’d marked themselves or decks they’d bought commercially (these were blandly advertised as “advantage decks”), and they had dozens of dizzying ways of stacking clean decks (it was then known as stocking a deck). The gamblers’ fancy suits were as tricky as a magician’s false-bottomed box. There were whole decks concealed in the sleeves and vests, fanned out in sequence and memorized so that the necessary card could be discreetly fetched to fill a hand. The gamblers also wore mirrored rings and jewels, and they took their snuff from mirrored snuffboxes; they flashed and twinkled and glittered as they played, and every stray reflection off a silver pitcher or a glass behind the bar gave them a glimpse of their opponents’ cards.
When they weren’t cheating, they were conning. The presence of con men on every steamboat was a given: guidebooks even warned tourists to beware of any stranger striking up a conversation, because it was almost certainly going to be a con. There were con men soliciting subscriptions to orphanages and schools; there were hustlers trading in land claims and in benefits for resettled Native Americans. But probably the most vigorous and inventive of the hustlers were the medicine men. They had an endless array of products for sale: Clark’s Famous Anti-Bilious Pills, Great Worm Lozenges, Carmody’s Tonic Pills, Radway’s Ready Relief for Toothache, Wolcott’s Instant Pain Annihilator, Derby Condition Powder, Piso’s Cure for Consumption, and (a particular favorite in New Orleans) Dr. Vandeveer’s Medicated Gin and Genuine Scheedam Schnapps, which was advertised as “a wholesome beverage, and an invaluable family medicine, particularly beneficial in all cases of Dysentery, Dyspepsia, Diarrhea, Rhumatism, Gout and Fever.” It was, the bottle said, “peculiarly adapted to the use of females and children.” As a satirical poem of the time put it:
For us, new countries are the best,
Hence we perch down in this far West;
This is, despite of your attacks,
A famous stamping ground of quacks.
The poem was “Letter from a Thompsonian Doctor” by James M’Chonochie. Thompsonian doctors—the steam doctors—were a big presence on the river. On the steamboats they couldn’t hustle their famous saunas and hot baths; instead they had whole traveling stores of herbal remedies. Their placards read, “If you wish genuine poisons, call at a Genuine Mineral Drug Store; but if you wish genuine Botanic Medicine, call at a genuine Anti-Poisoning Botanic Drug Store.” Since orthodox doctors actually were feeding people poisons then (primarily arsenic and mercury), the Thompsonians had a point; in fact, they would have been the most valuable health providers on the frontier if their treatments had only worked. Unfortunately what they were selling were random herbal mixtures, in vials labeled with cryptic numbers, that left people either untreated or worse off than before. Their general efficacy was all too justly summed up by M’Chonochie:
Our numbers Six, and One Two Three,
Are drugs of sovereign potency,
They cure complaints of every name—
At least, we say so—’tis the same;
The grave will not disgorge its dead
To chase our slumbers from our bed.
The con men, of whatever persuasion, generally called themselves sharpers; everybody else they called suckers and greenhorns—there was no greater insult on the river than to refer to somebody as green. The sharpers were so plentiful that they had to work out a quick-and-dirty way of sorting out who was who, so they didn’t waste time trying to con each other. That was how they came to use a kind of shorthand code, a password; when they met a stranger on deck, they’d immediately ask, in a tone of idle curiosity:
“Do you live on the river?”
Among the landsmen, the talk wasn’t of sharpers and greenhorns but of green thumbs and black thumbs. The green thumbs were the farmers and the builders, the ones who were actually doing the work of planting and cultivating and civilizing the valley; the black thumbs were the river people. But not just the boatmen and the voyageurs and the gamblers: the black thumbs were anybody who made their money by way of the river, because on the river there was no honest business. It was a place, one travel writer observed, where “the very order of civilized society was reversed, and a disorganization of principle, of men and manners, prevailed, to which, or approaching to which, I had never seen a parallel in the whole of my former experience.”
The rule in any commercial transaction was that each party was out to cheat the other. People routinely lied and stole with impunity; they took for granted that commerce was indistinguishable from swindling. False weights, ersatz or fraudulent goods, and bait-and-switch sales were the norm. The first thing that apprentices learned on steamboats was how to judge the true weight of a load of wood, because the employees of every wood yard along the river would do everything possible to cheat the steamboats of their fuel. They were particularly fond of hollowing out the interior of a woodpile (which was sold by volume) and hoping the trick wasn’t discovered until the boat had pulled back into the river again.
The phantasmal nature of business on the river was best reflected in the money used to conduct it. Honest money was the major issue of the river economy. The only currency generally trusted was specie—the gold and silver coinage of the U.S. Mint. But specie was a rare commodity, partly because people tended to hoard it, but also because the valley’s economy was growing so fast that the demand for coin tremendously exceeded the supply. Without specie, most transactions involved barter or some equally rare commodity—coffee or salt, for instance, which were both so scarce in the upper valley that they were more prized than gold.
As a last resort, people could use the paper currency issued by private banks. This was known as commercial money, and it came in a rainbow of dubious and peculiar forms. There were bills known as greenbacks and redbacks and bluebacks, blue pup and red horse, rag tag and stump tail. People across the valley skirmished through deals involving paper money with the same fantastic ingenuity shown by the arbitrageurs and derivatives traders of the modern world. Word might come into a river town by way of a steamboat that a particularly well-known form of commercial money was now trading at substantially below face value in New Orleans or St. Louis; all over town, people holding it would immediately rush to spend it, preferably at stores where the clerks hadn’t yet heard the news. But if they got hold of specie, they would keep it until they could make a deal to sell it. Specie routinely traded for much higher than face.
Knowing what varieties of money could be trusted was an unending hassle. Paper issued by banks of uncertain solvency or legality was generally called wildcat money. It was a major challenge to avoid taking wildcat money—or, if you had it, to lay it off on somebody else as fast as possible. Meanwhile, the paper from known and respected banks was rated almost as highly as specie. This naturally led to another problem: it spawned hordes of counterfeits. Counterfeiting came to be regarded on the river as a particularly heinous crime. Anybody suspected of passing counterfeit money was immediately arrested, brought before a lynching court, and flogged; anybody found in possession of blank paper that could possibly be used to print fakes was branded; anybody who had plates etched with currency patterns would most likely be put to death.
The long-range movement of the steamboats greatly facilitated the spread of wildcat and counterfeit currency, adding to the constant tension between the river and the shore. By midcentury, periodicals known as detectors had sprung up to help businessmen on both sides assess the legitimacy of the paper currently in circulation and identify the telltale marks of known counterfeits. The most trusted detector on the river was The Western Bank Note Reporter and Counterfeit Detector, a weekly periodical published in St. Louis and distributed by steamboat. Every store and business in the large towns had a subscription; well-prepared traveling businessmen invariably brought a copy along to potential sales. Sooner or later all transactions would come down to a long, suspicious session of scrutiny and negotiation and reconsultation with the current issue of the detector, as the notes were passed around, examined, questioned, argued about, and fought over.
Melville describes such a scene in The Confidence-Man. Two characters, with the aid of a detector, exhaustively inspect something that “looks to be a three-dollar bill on the Vicksburgh Trust and Insurance Banking Company.” As they argue, the elusiveness of the bill in front of them starts to make the whole concept of the genuine seem like a will-o’-the-wisp:
“The Detector says, among fifty other things, that, if a good bill, it must have, thickened here and there into the substance of the paper, little wavy spots of red; and it says they must have a kind of silky feel, being made by the lint of a red silk handkerchief stirred up in the papermaker’s vat—the paper being made to order for the company.”
“Well, and is—”
“Stay. But then it adds, that sign is not always to be relied on; for some good bills get so worn, the red marks get rubbed out. And that’s the case with my bill here—see how old it is—or else it’s a counterfeit, or else—I don’t see right—or else—dear, dear me—I don’t know what else to think.” … “Stay, now, here’s another sign. It says that, if the bill is good, it must have in one corner, mixed in with the vignette, the figure of a goose, very small, indeed, all but microscopic; and, for added precaution, like the figure of Napoleon outlined by the tree, not observable, even if magnified, unless the attention is directed to it. Now, pore over it as I will, I can’t see this goose.”
“Can’t see the goose? why, I can; and a famous goose it is.” …
“Then throw that Detector away, I say again; it only makes you purblind; don’t you see what a wild-goose chase it has led you? The bill is good. Throw the Detector away.”