ALL day we swung along down the river, and had the stream almostwholly to ourselves. Formerly, at such a stage of the water,we should have passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of bigcoal barges; also occasional little trading-scows, peddlingalong 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 mouthof the Obion River. The spy-glass revealed the fact that shewas named for me--or HE was named for me, whichever you prefer.
As this was the first time I had ever encountered this speciesof honor, it seems excusable to mention it, and at the same timecall the attention of the authorities to the tardiness of myrecognition 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 mainshore 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 modem times.
For now the national government has turned the Mississippiinto a sort of two-thousand-mile torchlight procession.
In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of everycrossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp.
You are never entirely in the dark, now; there is always a beaconin 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 shoalwhen they were created, and have never been shoal since;crossings so plain, too, and also so straight, that a steamboatcan take herself through them without any help, after she has beenthrough once. Lamps in such places are of course not wasted;it is much more convenient and comfortable for a pilot to holdon them than on a spread of formless blackness that won'tstay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same time,for she can of course make more miles with her rudderamidships than she can with it squared across her stern andholding 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 thesematter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted outall the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and theyallow 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 solidifieddarkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash outyour electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye,and your perils and anxieties are at an end. Horace Bixby and GeorgeRitchie 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 ofdaylight in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed,and a chart and compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a goodstage 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 AnchorLine have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the biggerwages 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 hiswatch 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 arelugged 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 hastaken away its state and dignity.
Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with theexception 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 StatesRiver Commission, and from a village which the officials have builton the land for offices and for the employes of the service.
The military engineers of the Commission have taken upontheir 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 makeit 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 markwith the slant of a house roof, and ballasting it with stones;and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with rowsof 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 thatlawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it,Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shorewhich it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstructionwhich 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 handcuffthat river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific manto keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads,with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippiwhich seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidencenow to prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one wouldpipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the cometsin their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bullythe Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.
I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters;and I give here the result, stenographically reported, and thereforeto be relied on as being full and correct; except that I havehere 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 havejudged it safest to let it remain.
UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONSUncle 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 learntmore about it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be WHATARE YOU SUCKING YOUR FINGERS THERE FOR ?--COLLAR THAT KAG OF NAILS!
Four years at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learna 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 holidayjob 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 herewith 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 ............