Life On The Mississippi, Part 6. - Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
BY MARK TWAIN
Part 6.
Chapter 26 Under Fire
TALK began to run upon the war now, for we were getting down into the
upper edge of the former battle-stretch by this time. Columbus was just
behind us, so there was a good deal said about the famous battle of
Belmont. Several of the boat's officers had seen active service in the
Mississippi war-fleet. I gathered that they found themselves sadly out
of their element in that kind of business at first, but afterward got
accustomed to it, reconciled to it, and more or less at home in it. One
of our pilots had his first war experience in the Belmont fight, as a
pilot on a boat in the Confederate service. I had often had a curiosity
to know how a green hand might feel, in his maiden battle, perched all
solitary and alone on high in a pilot house, a target for Tom, Dick and
Harry, and nobody at his elbow to shame him from showing the white
feather when matters grew hot and perilous around him; so, to me his
story was valuable--it filled a gap for me which all histories had left
till that time empty.
THE PILOT'S FIRST BATTLE
He said--
It was the 7th of November. The fight began at seven in the morning. I
was on the 'R. H. W. Hill.' Took over a load of troops from Columbus.
Came back, and took over a battery of artillery. My partner said he was
going to see the fight; wanted me to go along. I said, no, I wasn't
anxious, I would look at it from the pilot-house. He said I was a
coward, and left.
That fight was an awful sight. General Cheatham made his men strip
their coats off and throw them in a pile, and said, 'Now follow me to
hell or victory!' I heard him say that from the pilot-house; and then
he galloped in, at the head of his troops. Old General Pillow, with his
white hair, mounted on a white horse, sailed in, too, leading his troops
as lively as a boy. By and by the Federals chased the rebels back, and
here they came! tearing along, everybody for himself and Devil take the
hindmost! and down under the bank they scrambled, and took shelter. I
was sitting with my legs hanging out of the pilot-house window. All at
once I noticed a whizzing sound passing my ear. Judged it was a bullet.
I didn't stop to think about anything, I just tilted over backwards and
landed on the floor, and staid there. The balls came booming around.
Three cannon-balls went through the chimney; one ball took off the
corner of the pilot-house; shells were screaming and bursting all
around. Mighty warm times--I wished I hadn't come. I lay there on the
pilot-house floor, while the shots came faster and faster. I crept in
behind the big stove, in the middle of the pilot-house. Presently a
minie-ball came through the stove, and just grazed my head, and cut my
hat. I judged it was time to go away from there. The captain was on
the roof with a red-headed major from Memphis--a fine-looking man. I
heard him say he wanted to leave here, but 'that pilot is killed.' I
crept over to the starboard side to pull the bell to set her back;
raised up and took a look, and I saw about fifteen shot holes through
the window panes; had come so lively I hadn't noticed them. I glanced
out on the water, and the spattering shot were like a hailstorm. I
thought best to get out of that place. I went down the pilot-house guy,
head first--not feet first but head first--slid down--before I struck
the deck, the captain said we must leave there. So I climbed up the guy
and got on the floor again. About that time, they collared my partner
and were bringing him up to the pilot-house between two soldiers.
Somebody had said I was killed. He put his head in and saw me on the
floor reaching for the backing bells. He said, 'Oh, hell, he ain't
shot,' and jerked away from the men who had him by the collar, and ran
below. We were there until three o'clock in the afternoon, and then got
away all right.
The next time I saw my partner, I said, 'Now, come out, be honest, and
tell me the truth. Where did you go when you went to see that battle?'
He says, 'I went down in the hold.'
All through that fight I was scared nearly to death. I hardly knew
anything, I was so frightened; but you see, nobody knew that but me.
Next day General Polk sent for me, and praised me for my bravery and
gallant conduct. I never said anything, I let it go at that. I judged
it wasn't so, but it was not for me to contradict a general officer.
Pretty soon after that I was sick, and used up, and had to go off to the
Hot Springs. When there, I got a good many letters from commanders
saying they wanted me to come back. I declined, because I wasn't well
enough or strong enough; but I kept still, and kept the reputation I had
made.
A plain story, straightforwardly told; but Mumford told me that that
pilot had 'gilded that scare of his, in spots;' that his subsequent
career in the war was proof of it.
We struck down through the chute of Island No. 8, and I went below and
fell into conversation with a passenger, a handsome man, with easy
carriage and an intelligent face. We were approaching Island No. 10, a
place so celebrated during the war. This gentleman's home was on the
main shore in its neighborhood. I had some talk with him about the war
times; but presently the discourse fell upon 'feuds,' for in no part of
the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer
between warring families, than in this particular region. This gentleman
said--
'There's been more than one feud around here, in old times, but I reckon
the worst one was between the Darnells and the Watsons. Nobody don't
know now what the first quarrel was about, it's so long ago; the
Darnells and the Watsons don't know, if there's any of them living,
which I don't think there is. Some says it was about a horse or a cow--
anyway, it was a little matter; the money in it wasn't of no
consequence--none in the world--both families was rich. The thing could
have been fixed up, easy enough; but no, that wouldn't do. Rough words
had been passed; and so, nothing but blood could fix it up after that.
That horse or cow, whichever it was, cost sixty years of killing and
crippling! Every year or so somebody was shot, on one side or the other;
and as fast as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud
and kept it a-going. And it's just as I say; they went on shooting each
other, year in and year out--making a kind of a religion of it, you see
--till they'd done forgot, long ago, what it was all about. Wherever a
Darnell caught a Watson, or a Watson caught a Darnell, one of 'em was
going to get hurt--only question was, which of them got the drop on the
other. They'd shoot one another down, right in the presence of the
family. They didn't hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet,
they puffed and begun. Men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men. A
man shot a boy twelve years old--happened on him in the woods, and
didn't give him no chance. If he HAD 'a' given him a chance, the boy'd
'a' shot him. Both families belonged to the same church (everybody
around here is religious); through all this fifty or sixty years' fuss,
both tribes was there every Sunday, to worship. They lived each side of
the line, and the church was at a landing called Compromise. Half the
church and half the aisle was in Kentucky, the other half in Tennessee.
Sundays you'd see the families drive up, all in their Sunday clothes,
men, women, and children, and file up the aisle, and set down, quiet and
orderly, one lot on the Tennessee side of the church and the other on
the Kentucky side; and the men and boys would lean their guns up against
the wall, handy, and then all hands would join in with the prayer and
praise; though they say the man next the aisle didn't kneel down, along
with the rest of the family; kind of stood guard. I don't know; never
was at that church in my life; but I remember that that's what used to
be said.
'Twenty or twenty-five years ago, one of the feud families caught a
young man of nineteen out and killed him. Don't remember whether it was
the Darnells and Watsons, or one of the other feuds; but anyway, this
young man rode up--steamboat laying there at the time--and the first
thing he saw was a whole gang of the enemy. He jumped down behind a
wood-pile, but they rode around and begun on him, he firing back, and
they galloping and cavorting and yelling and banging away with all their
might. Think he wounded a couple of them; but they closed in on him and
chased him into the river; and as he swum along down stream, they
followed along the bank and kept on shooting at him; and when he struck
shore he was dead. Windy Marshall told me about it. He saw it. He was
captain of the boat.
'Years ago, the Darnells was so thinned out that the old man and his two
sons concluded they'd leave the country. They started to take steamboat
just above No. 10; but the Watsons got wind of it; and they arrived just
as the two young Darnells was walking up the companion-way with their
wives on their arms. The fight begun then, and they never got no
further--both of them killed. After that, old Darnell got into trouble
with the man that run the ferry, and the ferry-man got the worst of it--
and died. But his friends shot old Darnell through and through--filled
him full of bullets, and ended him.'
The country gentleman who told me these things had been reared in ease
and comfort, was a man of good parts, and was college bred. His loose
grammar was the fruit of careless habit, not ignorance. This habit among
educated men in the West is not universal, but it is prevalent--
prevalent in the towns, certainly, if not in the cities; and to a degree
which one cannot help noticing, and marveling at. I heard a Westerner
who would be accounted a highly educated man in any country, say 'never
mind, it DON'T MAKE NO DIFFERENCE, anyway.' A life-long resident who was
present heard it, but it made no impression upon her. She was able to
recall the fact afterward, when reminded of it; but she confessed that
the words had not grated upon her ear at the time--a confession which
suggests that if educated people can hear such blasphemous grammar, from
such a source, and be unconscious of the deed, the crime must be
tolerably common--so common that the general ear has become dulled by
familiarity with it, and is no longer alert, no longer sensitive to such
affronts.
No one in the world speaks blemishless grammar; no one has ever written
it--NO one, either in the world or out of it (taking the Scriptures for
evidence on the latter point); therefore it would not be fair to exact
grammatical perfection from the peoples of the Valley; but they and all
other peoples may justly be required to refrain from KNOWINGLY and
PURPOSELY debauching their grammar.
I found the river greatly changed at Island No. 10. The island which I
remembered was some three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide,
heavily timbered, and lay near the Kentucky shore--within two hundred
yards of it, I should say. Now, however, one had to hunt for it with a
spy-glass. Nothing was left of it but an insignificant little tuft, and
this was no longer near the Kentucky shore; it was clear over against
the opposite shore, a mile away. In war times the island had been an
important place, for it commanded the situation; and, being heavily
fortified, there was no getting by it. It lay between the upper and
lower divisions of the Union forces, and kept them separate, until a
junction was finally effected across the Missouri neck of land; but the
island being itself joined to that neck now, the wide river is without
obstruction.
In this region the river passes from Kentucky into Tennessee, back into
Missouri, then back into Kentucky, and thence into Tennessee again. So a
mile or two of Missouri sticks over into Tennessee.
The town of New Madrid was looking very unwell; but otherwise unchanged
from its former condition and aspect. Its blocks of frame-houses were
still grouped in the same old flat plain, and environed by the same old
forests. It was as tranquil as formerly, and apparently had neither
grown nor diminished in size. It was said that the recent high water
had invaded it and damaged its looks. This was surprising news; for in
low water the river bank is very high there (fifty feet), and in my day
an overflow had always been considered an impossibility. This present
flood of 1882 Will doubtless be celebrated in the river's history for
several generations before a deluge of like magnitude shall be seen. It
put all the unprotected low lands under water, from Cairo to the mouth;
it broke down the levees in a great many places, on both sides of the
river; and in some regions south, when the flood was at its highest, the
Mississippi was SEVENTY MILES wide! a number of lives were lost, and the
destruction of property was fearful. The crops were destroyed, houses
washed away, and shelterless men and cattle forced to take refuge on
scattering elevations here and there in field and forest, and wait in
peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national
and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue
them. The properties of multitudes of people were under water for
months, and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor
had not been promptly afforded.{footnote [For a detailed and interesting
description of the great flood, written on board of the New Orleans
TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S relief-boat, see Appendix A]} The water had been
falling during a considerable time now, yet as a rule we found the banks
still under water.
Chapter 27 Some Imported Articles
WE met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sight at once!
an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi. The loneliness
of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive--and depressing. League
after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide
along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores,
with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface
and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day
goes, the night comes, and again the day--and still the same, night
after night and day after day--majestic, unchanging sameness of
serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy--symbol of eternity,
realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for
by the good and thoughtless!
Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to come to America,
from England; scattering ones at first, then a sort of procession of
them--a procession which kept up its plodding, patient march through the
land during many, many years. Each tourist took notes, and went home and
published a book--a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable,
kind; but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed
progenitors. A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of
its aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those
strangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then. The
emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects were not all
formed on one pattern, of course; they HAD to be various, along at
first, because the earlier tourists were obliged to originate their
emotions, whereas in older countries one can always borrow emotions from
one's predecessors. And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest
things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to
manufacture seven facts than one emotion. Captain Basil Hall. R.N.,
writing fifty-five years ago, says--
'Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wished to
behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all the trouble
I had experienced in coming so far; and stood looking at the river
flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything. But it was
not till I had visited the same spot a dozen times, that I came to a
right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.'
Following are Mrs. Trollope's emotions. She is writing a few months
later in the same year, 1827, and is coming in at the mouth of the
Mississippi--
'The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this
mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters, and mingling with
the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf. I never beheld a scene so utterly
desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi. Had Dante seen it, he
might have drawn images of another Borgia from its horrors. One only
object rears itself above the eddying waters; this is the mast of a
vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross the bar, and it still
stands, a dismal witness of the destruction that has been, and a boding
prophet of that which is to come.'
Emotions of Hon. Charles Augustus Murray (near St. Louis), seven years
later--
'It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a hundred
miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature, that
you begin to understand all his might and majesty. You see him
fertilizing a boundless valley, bearing along in his course the trophies
of his thousand victories over the shattered forest--here carrying away
large masses of soil with all their growth, and there forming islands,
destined at some future period to be the residence of man; and while
indulging in this prospect, it is then time for reflection to suggest
that the current before you has flowed through two or three thousand
miles, and has yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before
reaching its ocean destination.'
Receive, now, the emotions of Captain Marryat, R.N. author of the sea
tales, writing in 1837, three years after Mr. Murray--
'Never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a
century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected
from the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi. The
stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been
committed. It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight,
bestowing fertility in its course; not one that the eye loves to dwell
upon as it sweeps along, nor can you wander upon its banks, or trust
yourself without danger to its stream. It is a furious, rapid,
desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few of those who are
received into its waters ever rise again, {footnote [There was a foolish
superstition of some little prevalence in that day, that the Mississippi
would neither buoy up a swimmer, nor permit a drowned person's body to
rise to the surface.]} or can support themselves long upon its surface
without assistance from some friendly log. It contains the coarsest and
most uneatable of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and as you
descend, its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the
panther basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man.
Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered with trees of
little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole forests in its
course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the
stream now loaded with the masses of soil which nourished their roots,
often blocking up and changing for a time the channel of the river,
which, as if in anger at its being opposed, inundates and devastates the
whole country round; and as soon as it forces its way through its former
channel, plants in every direction the uprooted monarchs of the forest
(upon whose branches the bird will never again perch, or the raccoon,
the opossum, or the squirrel climb) as traps to the adventurous
navigators of its waters by steam, who, borne down upon these concealed
dangers which pierce through the planks, very often have not time to
steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the bottom. There are
no pleasing associations connected with the great common sewer of the
Western America, which pours out its mud into the Mexican Gulf,
polluting the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth. It is a
river of desolation; and instead of reminding you, like other beautiful
rivers, of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you
imagine it a devil, whose energies have been only overcome by the
wonderful power of steam.'
It is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to handling a pen;
still, as a panorama of the emotions sent weltering through this noted
visitor's breast by the aspect and traditions of the 'great common
sewer,' it has a value. A value, though marred in the matter of
statistics by inaccuracies; for the catfish is a plenty good enough fish
for anybody, and there are no panthers that are 'impervious to man.'
Later still comes Alexander Mackay, of the Middle Temple, Barrister at
Law, with a better digestion, and no catfish dinner aboard, and feels as
follows--
'The Mississippi! It was with indescribable emotions that I first felt
myself afloat upon its waters. How often in my schoolboy dreams, and in
my waking visions afterwards, had my imagination pictured to itself the
lordly stream, rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless
region to which it has given its name, and gathering into itself, in its
course to the ocean, the tributary waters of almost every latitude in
the temperate zone! Here it was then in its reality, and I, at length,
steaming against its tide. I looked upon it with that reverence with
which everyone must regard a great feature of external nature.'
So much for the emotions. The tourists, one and all, remark upon the
deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river. Captain
Basil Hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says--
'Sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without
seeing a single habitation. An artist, in search of hints for a
painting of the deluge, would here have found them in abundance.'
The first shall be last, etc. just two hundred years ago, the old
original first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists, pioneer, head
of the procession, ended his weary and tedious discovery-voyage down the
solemn stretches of the great river--La Salle, whose name will last as
long as the river itself shall last. We quote from Mr. Parkman--
'And now they neared their journey's end. On the sixth of April, the
river divided itself into three broad channels. La Salle followed that
of the west, and D'Autray that of the east; while Tonty took the middle
passage. As he drifted down the turbid current, between the low and
marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew
fresh with the salt breath of the sea. Then the broad bosom of the great
Gulf opened on his sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless,
voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign
of life.'
Then, on a spot of solid ground, La Salle reared a column 'bearing the
arms of France; the Frenchmen were mustered under arms; and while the
New England Indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence,
they chanted the TE DEUM, THE EXAUDIAT, and the DOMINE SALVUM FAC
REGEM.'
Then, whilst the musketry volleyed and rejoicing shouts burst forth, the
victorious discoverer planted the column, and made proclamation in a
loud voice, taking formal possession of the river and the vast countries
watered by it, in the name of the King. The column bore this
inscription--
LOUIS LE GRAND, ROY DE FRANCE ET DE NAVARRE, REGNE; LE NEUVIEME AVRIL,
1682.
New Orleans intended to fittingly celebrate, this present year, the
bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event; but when the time
came, all her energies and surplus money were required in other
directions, for the flood was upon the land then, making havoc and
devastation everywhere.
Chapter 28 Uncle Mumford Unloads
ALL day we swung along down the river, and had the stream almost wholly
to ourselves. Formerly, at such a stage of the water, we should have
passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of big coal barges; also
occasional little trading-scows, peddling along from farm to farm, with
the peddler's family on board; possibly, a random scow, bearing a humble
Hamlet and Co. on an itinerant dramatic trip. But these were all
absent. Far along in the day, we saw one steamboat; just one, and no
more. She was lying at rest in the shade, within the wooded mouth of the
Obion River. The spy-glass revealed the fact that she was named for me
--or HE was named for me, whichever you prefer. As this was the first
time I had ever encountered this species of honor, it seems excusable to
mention it, and at the same time call the attention of the authorities
to the tardiness of my recognition of it.
Noted a big change in the river, at Island 21. It was a very large
island, and used to be out toward mid-stream; but it is joined fast to
the main shore now, and has retired from business as an island.
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.