As we approached famous and formidable Plum Point, darkness fell,
but that was nothing to shudder about–in these modern times.
For now the national government has turned the Mississippi
into a sort of two-thousand-mile torchlight procession.
In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of every
crossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp.
You are never entirely in the dark, now; there is always a beacon
in sight, either before you, or behind you, or abreast.
One might almost say that lamps have been squandered there.
Dozens of crossings are lighted which were not shoal
when they were created, and have never been shoal since;
crossings so plain, too, and also so straight, that a steamboat
can take herself through them without any help, after she has been
through once. Lamps in such places are of course not wasted;
it is much more convenient and comfortable for a pilot to hold
on them than on a spread of formless blackness that won’t
stay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same time,
for she can of course make more miles with her rudder
amidships than she can with it squared across her stern and
holding her back.
But this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent.
It, and some other things together, have knocked all the romance out of it.
For instance, the peril from snags is not now what it once was.
The government’s snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these
matter-of-fact days, pulling the river’s teeth; they have rooted out
all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and they
allow no new ones to collect. Formerly, if your boat got away from you,
on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an anxious time with you;
so was it also, when you were groping your way through solidified
darkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now–you flash out
your electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye,
and your perils and anxieties are at an end. Horace Bixby and George
Ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses by compass;
they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and have patented the whole.
With these helps, one may run in the fog now, with considerable security,
and with a confidence unknown in the old days.
With these abundant beacons, the banishment of snags, plenty of
daylight in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed,
and a chart and compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a good
stage of water, is now nearly as safe and simple as driving stage,
and is hardly more than three times as romantic.
And now in these new days, these days of infinite change, the Anchor
Line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger
wages of the two. This was going far, but they have not stopped there.
They have decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post, and stand his
watch clear through, whether the boat be under way or tied up to the shore.
We, that were once the aristocrats of the river, can’t go to bed now,
as we used to do, and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are
lugged aboard; no, we must sit in the pilot-house; and keep awake, too.
Verily we are being treated like a parcel of mates and engineers.
The Government has taken away the romance of our calling; the Company has
taken away its state and dignity.
Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with the
exception that now there were beacons to mark the crossings,
and also a lot of other lights on the Point and along its shore;
these latter glinting from the fleet of the United States
River Commission, and from a village which the officials have built
on the land for offices and for the employes of the service.
The military engineers of the Commission have taken upon
their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again–
a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it.