their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes,
some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep.
St. Louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city;
but the river-edge of it seems dead past resurrection.
Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years,
it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more,
it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature.
Of course it is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarian
who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrasted
with what it was in its prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating may
be called dead.
It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing
the freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week.
The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing
in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing;
and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight traffic
by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river
at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition
was out of the question.
Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers.
This is in the hands–along the two thousand miles of river between
St. Paul and New Orleans—of two or three close corporations well
fortified with capital; and by able and thoroughly business-like
management and system, these make a sufficiency of money out
of what is left of the once prodigious steamboating industry.
I suppose that St. Louis and New Orleans have not suffered materially
by the change, but alas for the wood-yard man!
He used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked merchandise
stretched from the one city to the other, along the banks,
and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail;
but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now,
and the seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile.
Where now is the once wood-yard man?
Chapter 23
Traveling Incognito
MY idea was, to tarry a while in every town between St. Louis
and New Orleans. To do this, it would be necessary to go from place
to place by the short packet lines. It was an easy plan to make,
and would have been an easy one to follow, twenty years ago–but not now.
There are wide intervals between boats, these days.
I wanted to begin with the interesting old French settlements
of St. Genevieve and Kaskaskia, sixty miles below St. Louis.
There was only one boat advertised for that section–
a Grand Tower packet. Still, one boat was enough; so we went
down to look at her. She was a venerable rack-heap, and a fraud
to boot; for she was playing herself for personal property,
whereas the good honest dirt was so thickly caked all over
her that she was righteously taxable as real estate.
There are places in New England where her hurricane deck
would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre.
The soil on her forecastle was quite good–the new crop of wheat
was already springing from the cracks in protected places.
The companionway was of a dry sandy character, and would
have been well suited for grapes, with a southern exposure
and a little subsoiling. The soil of the boiler deck
was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes.
A colored boy was on watch here–nobody else visible.
We gathered from him that this calm craft would go, as advertised,
‘if she got her trip;’ if she didn’t get it, she would wait
for it.
‘Has she got any of her trip?’
‘Bless you, no, boss. She ain’t unloadened, yit. She only come
in dis mawnin’.’
He was uncertain as to when she might get her trip, but thought it
might be to-morrow or maybe next day. This would not answer at all;
so we had to give up the novelty of sailing down the river on a farm.
We had one more arrow in our quiver: a Vicksburg packet, the ‘Gold Dust,’
was to leave at 5 P.M. We took passage in her for Memphis, and gave
up the idea of stopping off here and there, as being impracticable.