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.

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

employees 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. They are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current;

and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make it

stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi, they are

felling the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the purpose of

shaving the bank down to low-water mark with the slant of a house roof,

and ballasting it with stones; and in many places they have protected

the wasting shores with rows of piles. One who knows the Mississippi

will promptly aver--not aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River

Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that

lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go

here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has

sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not

tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put

these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not

their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their

abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and

handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific

man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads,

with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which

seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to

prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and

say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and

undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into

right and reasonable conduct.

I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters; and I

give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore to be

relied on as being full and correct; except that I have here and there

left out remarks which were addressed to the men, such as 'where in

blazes are you going with that barrel now?' and which seemed to me to

break the flow of the written statement, without compensating by adding

to its information or its clearness. Not that I have ventured to

strike out all such interjections; I have removed only those which were

obviously irrelevant; wherever one occurred which I felt any question

about, I have judged it safest to let it remain.

UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONS

Uncle Mumford said--

'As long as I have been mate of a steamboat--thirty years--I have

watched this river and studied it. Maybe I could have learnt more about

it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be _what are you

sucking your fingers there for ?--collar that kag of nails!_ Four years

at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a

good deal, I reckon, but it won't learn him the river. You turn one

of those little European rivers over to this Commission, with its hard

bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday job for them to

wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it down, and boss it around,

and make it go wherever they wanted it to, and stay where they put it,

and do just as they said, every time. But this ain't that kind of a

river. They have started in here with big confidence, and the best

intentions in the world; but they are going to get left. What does

Ecclesiastes vii. 13 say? Says enough to knock _their _little game

galley-west, don't it? Now you look at their methods once. There at

Devil's Island, in the Upper River, they wanted the water to go one way,

the water wanted to go another. So they put up a stone wall. But what

does the river care for a stone wall? When it got ready, it just bulged

through it. Maybe they can build another that will stay; that is, up

there--but not down here they can't. Down here in the Lower River, they

drive some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from

slicing off the bank; very well, don't it go straight over and cut

somebody else's bank? Certainly. Are they going to peg all the banks?

Why, they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper. They are

pegging Bulletin Tow-head now. It won't do any good. If the river has

got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose, sure, pegs or no pegs.

Away down yonder, they have driven two rows of piles straight through

the middle of a dry bar half a mile long, which is forty foot out of the

water when the river is low. What do you reckon that is for? If I know,

I wish I may land in--_hump yourself, you son of an undertaker!--out

with that coal-oil, now, lively, lively!_ And just look at what they are

trying to do down there at Milliken's Bend. There's been a cut-off in

that section, and Vicksburg is left out in the cold. It's a country town

now. The river strikes in below it; and a boat can't go up to the town

except in high water. Well, they are going to build wing-dams in the

bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cut off the

foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where the river

used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade the water

around that way, and get it to strike in above Vicksburg, as it used

to do, and fetch the town back into the world again. That is, they are

going to take this whole Mississippi, and twist it around and make it

run several miles _up stream_. Well you've got to admire men that deal

in ideas of that size and can tote them around without crutches; but you

haven't got to believe they can _do_ such miracles, have you! And yet

you ain't absolutely obliged to believe they can't. I reckon the safe

way, where a man can afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the

same time buy enough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they

win. Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now--spending loads

of money on her. When there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten

thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows, there wasn't

a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags were thicker than

bristles on a hog's back; and now when there's three dozen steamboats

and nary barge or raft, Government has snatched out all the snags, and

lit up the shores like Broadway, and a boat's as safe on the river as

she'd be in heaven. And I reckon that by the time there ain't any boats

left at all, the Commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and

dredged out, and fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make

navigation just simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and

all the days will be Sundays, and all the mates will be Sunday-school

su----_what-in-the-nation-you-fooling-around-there-for, you sons of

unrighteousness, heirs of perdition! going to be a year getting that

hogshead ashore?'_

During our trip to New Orleans and back, we had many conversations

with river men, planters, journalists, and officers of the River

Commission--with conflicting and confusing results. To wit:--

1. Some believed in the Commission's scheme to arbitrarily and

permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel, preserve threatened

shores, etc.

2. Some believed that the Commission's money ought to be spent only on

building and repairing the great system of levees.

3. Some believed that the higher you build your levee, the higher the

river's bottom will rise; and that consequently the levee system is a

mistake.

4. Some believed in the scheme to relieve the river, in flood-time, by

turning its surplus waters off into Lake Borgne, etc.

5. Some believed in the scheme of northern lake-reservoirs to replenish

the Mississippi in low-water seasons.

Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these theories

you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon the hypothesis

that he does not believe in that theory; and after you have had

experience, you do not take this course doubtfully, or hesitatingly, but

with the confidence of a dying murderer--converted one, I mean. For you

will have come to know, with a deep and restful certainty, that you are

not going to meet two people sick of the same theory, one right after

the other. No, there will always be one or two with the other diseases

along between. And as you proceed, you will find out one or two other

things. You will find out that there is no distemper of the lot but is

contagious; and you cannot go where it is without catching it. You may

vaccinate yourself with deterrent facts as much as you please--it will

do no good; it will seem to 'take,' but it doesn't; the moment you rub

against any one of those theorists, make up your mind that it is time to

hang out your yellow flag.

Yes, you are his sure victim: yet his work is not all to your hurt--only

part of it; for he is like your family physician, who comes and cures

the mumps, and leaves the scarlet-fever behind. If your man is a

Lake-Borgne-relief theorist, for instance, he will exhale a cloud of

deadly facts and statistics which will lay you out with that disease,

sure; but at the same time he will cure you of any other of the five

theories that may have previously got into your system.

I have had all the five; and had them 'bad;' but ask me not, in mournful

numbers, which one racked me hardest, or which one numbered the biggest

sick list, for I do not know. In truth, no one can answer the latter

question. Mississippi Improvement is a mighty topic, down yonder. Every

man on the river banks, south of Cairo, talks about it every day, during

such moments as he is able to spare from talking about the war; and each

of the several chief theories has its host of zealous partisans; but,

as I have said, it is not possible to determine which cause numbers the

most recruits.

All were agreed upon one point, however: if Congress would make a

sufficient appropriation, a colossal benefit would result. Very well;

since then the appropriation has been made--possibly a sufficient one,

certainly not too large a one. Let us hope that the prophecy will be

amply fulfilled.

One thing will be easily granted by the reader; that an opinion from Mr.

Edward Atkinson, upon any vast national commercial matter, comes as near

ranking as authority, as can the opinion of any individual in the Union.

What he has to say about Mississippi River Improvement will be found in

the Appendix.{footnote [See Appendix B.]}

Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lightning-flash,

the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words, with the

same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain. Here is a

case of the sort--paragraph from the 'Cincinnati Commercial'--

'The towboat “Jos. B. Williams” is on her way to New Orleans with a

tow of thirty-two barges, containing six hundred thousand bushels

(seventy-six pounds to the bushel) of coal exclusive of her own fuel,

being the largest tow ever taken to New Orleans or anywhere else in the

world. Her freight bill, at 3 cents a bushel, amounts to $18,000. It

would take eighteen hundred cars, of three hundred and thirty-three

bushels to the car, to transport this amount of coal. At $10 per ton, or

$100 per car, which would be a fair price for the distance by rail, the

freight bill would amount to $180,000, or $162,000 more by rail than by

river. The tow will be taken from Pittsburg to New Orleans in fourteen

or fifteen days. It would take one hundred trains of eighteen cars to

the train to transport this one tow of six hundred thousand bushels

of coal, and even if it made the usual speed of fast freight lines, it

would take one whole summer to put it through by rail.'

When a river in good condition can enable one to save $162,000 and a

whole summer's time, on a single cargo, the wisdom of taking measures to

keep the river in good condition is made plain to even the uncommercial

mind.