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