when he can get excused.
You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always
carried a large assortment of religious tracts with them
in those old departed steamboating days. Indeed they did.
Twenty times a day we would be cramping up around a bar,
while a string of these small-fry rascals were drifting down into
the head of the bend away above and beyond us a couple of miles.
Now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come fighting
its laborious way across the desert of water. It would ‘ease all,’
in the shadow of our forecastle, and the panting oarsmen would shout,
‘Gimme a pa-a-per!’ as the skiff drifted swiftly astern.
The clerk would throw over a file of New Orleans journals.
If these were picked up without comment, you might notice that now a dozen
other skiffs had been drifting down upon us without saying anything.
You understand, they had been waiting to see how No. 1 was going to fare.
No. 1 making no comment, all the rest would bend to their oars
and come on, now; and as fast as they came the clerk would
heave over neat bundles of religious tracts, tied to shingles.
The amount of hard swearing which twelve packages of religious literature
will command when impartially divided up among twelve raftsmen’s crews,
who have pulled a heavy skiff two miles on a hot day to get them,
is simply incredible.
As I have said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision.
By the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and
were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before;
we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I
had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that
of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our
nose was almost at the very spot. Some of these chutes were utter solitudes.
The dense, untouched forest overhung both banks of the crooked little crack,
and one could believe that human creatures had never intruded there before.
The swinging grape-vines, the grassy nooks and vistas glimpsed as we swept by,
the flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks,
and all the spendthrift richness of the forest foliage, were wasted and thrown
away there. The chutes were lovely places to steer in; they were deep,
except at the head; the current was gentle; under the ‘points’ the water
was absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that where the tender
willow thickets projected you could bury your boat’s broadside in them as you
tore along, and then you seemed fairly to fly.
Behind other islands we found wretched little farms, and wretcheder
little log-cabins; there were crazy rail fences sticking a foot
or two above the water, with one or two jeans-clad, chills-racked,
yellow-faced male miserables roosting on the top-rail, elbows
on knees, jaws in hands, grinding tobacco and discharging
the result at floating chips through crevices left by lost teeth;
while the rest of the family and the few farm-animals were huddled
together in an empty wood-flat riding at her moorings close at hand.
In this flat-boat the family would have to cook and eat
and sleep for a lesser or greater number of days (or possibly
weeks), until the river should fall two or three feet and let
them get back to their log-cabin and their chills again–
chills being a merciful provision of an all-wise Providence
to enable them to take exercise without exertion.
And this sort of watery camping out was a thing which these people
were rather liable to be treated to a couple of times a year:
by the December rise out of the Ohio, and the June rise out
of the Mississippi. And yet these were kindly dispensations,
for they at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead
now and then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by.
They appreciated the blessing, too, for they spread their mouths
and eyes wide open and made the most of these occasions.