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Mark Twain > Life On The Mississippi > Chapter 27

Life On The Mississippi

Chapter 27


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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 Bolgia 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,
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.

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