During fifty years, out there, the innocent passenger in need
of help and information, has been mistaking the mate for
the cook, and the captain for the barber–and being roughly
entertained for it, too. But his troubles are ended now.
And the greatly improved aspect of the boat’s staff is another
advantage achieved by the dress-reform period.
Steered down the bend below Cape Girardeau. They used to call it
‘Steersman’s Bend;’ plain sailing and plenty of water in it, always;
about the only place in the Upper River that a new cub was allowed
to take a boat through, in low water.
Thebes, at the head of the Grand Chain, and Commerce at the foot
of it, were towns easily rememberable, as they had not undergone
conspicuous alteration. Nor the Chain, either–in the nature
of things; for it is a chain of sunken rocks admirably
arranged to capture and kill steamboats on bad nights.
A good many steamboat corpses lie buried there, out of sight;
among the rest my first friend the ‘Paul Jones;’ she knocked her
bottom out, and went down like a pot, so the historian told me–
Uncle Mumford. He said she had a gray mare aboard, and a preacher.
To me, this sufficiently accounted for the disaster; as it did,
of course, to Mumford, who added–
‘But there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such
a matter, and call it superstition. But you will always notice
that they are people who have never traveled with a gray mare
and a preacher. I went down the river once in such company.
We grounded at Bloody Island; we grounded at Hanging Dog;
we grounded just below this same Commerce; we jolted Beaver
Dam Rock; we hit one of the worst breaks in the ‘Graveyard’
behind Goose Island; we had a roustabout killed in a fight;
we burnt a boiler; broke a shaft; collapsed a flue; and went into
Cairo with nine feet of water in the hold–may have been more,
may have been less. I remember it as if it were yesterday.
The men lost their heads with terror. They painted the mare blue,
in sight of town, and threw the preacher overboard, or we should
not have arrived at all. The preacher was fished out and saved.
He acknowledged, himself, that he had been to blame.
I remember it all, as if it were yesterday.’
That this combination–of preacher and gray mare–should breed calamity,
seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is fortified
by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason.
I myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends
against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but persisted in his
purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the same day–it may have
been the next, and some say it was, though I think it was the same day–
he got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was borne to his home a corpse.
This is literally true.
No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away.
I do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in,
except that it was between St. Louis and Cairo somewhere.
It was a bad region–all around and about Hat Island, in early days.
A farmer who lived on the Illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine
steamboats had left their bones strung along within sight from his house.
Between St. Louis and Cairo the steamboat wrecks average one to the mile;–
two hundred wrecks, altogether.
I could recognize big changes from Commerce down. Beaver Dam Rock was
out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious ‘break;’
it used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it.
A big island that used to be away out in mid-river, has retired
to the Missouri shore, and boats do not go near it any more.
The island called Jacket Pattern is whittled down to a wedge now,
and is booked for early destruction. Goose Island is all gone
but a little dab the size of a steamboat. The perilous ‘Graveyard,’