Life on the Mississippi
'If you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before I
die,' I told him I had no time to hear him pray. He turned around and
dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head.
I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the
creek. I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and
thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to
examine. I sunk the pocket-book and papers and his hat, in the creek.
His boots were brand-new, and fitted me genteelly; and I put them on
and sunk my old shoes in the creek, to atone for them. I rolled up his
clothes and put them into his portmanteau, as they were brand-new cloth
of the best quality. I mounted as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and
directed my course for Natchez in much better style than I had been for
the last five days.
'Myself and a fellow by the name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses
and started for Georgia. We got in company with a young South Carolinian
just before we got to Cumberland Mountain, and Crenshaw soon knew all
about his business. He had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but
when he got there pork was dearer than he calculated, and he declined
purchasing. We concluded he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I
understood his idea. Crenshaw had traveled the road before, but I never
had; we had traveled several miles on the mountain, when he passed near
a great precipice; just before we passed it Crenshaw asked me for my
whip, which had a pound of lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he
rode up by the side of the South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the
side of the head and tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses
and fingered his pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars.
Crenshaw said he knew a place to hide him, and he gathered him under his
arms, and I by his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow
of the precipice, and tumbled him into it, and he went out of sight; we
then tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was worth
two hundred dollars.
'We were detained a few days, and during that time our friend went to a
little village in the neighborhood and saw the negro advertised (a negro
in our possession), and a description of the two men of whom he had been
purchased, and giving his suspicions of the men. It was rather squally
times, but any port in a storm: we took the negro that night on the bank
of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend, and Crenshaw shot him
through the head. We took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek.
'He had sold the other negro the third time on Arkansaw River for
upwards of five hundred dollars; and then stole him and delivered him
into the hand of his friend, who conducted him to a swamp, and veiled
the tragic scene, and got the last gleanings and sacred pledge of
secrecy; as a game of that kind will not do unless it ends in a mystery
to all but the fraternity. He sold the negro, first and last, for nearly
two thousand dollars, and then put him for ever out of the reach of all
pursuers; and they can never graze him unless they can find the negro;
and that they cannot do, for his carcass has fed many a tortoise and
catfish before this time, and the frogs have sung this many a long day
to the silent repose of his skeleton.'
We were approaching Memphis, in front of which city, and witnessed by
its people, was fought the most famous of the river battles of the Civil
War. Two men whom I had served under, in my river days, took part in
that fight: Mr. Bixby, head pilot of the Union fleet, and Montgomery,
Commodore of the Confederate fleet. Both saw a great deal of active
service during the war, and achieved high reputations for pluck and
capacity.
As we neared Memphis, we began to cast about for an excuse to stay
with the 'Gold Dust' to the end of her course--Vicksburg. We were so
pleasantly situated, that we did not wish to make a change. I had an
errand of considerable importance to do at Napoleon, Arkansas, but
perhaps I could manage it without quitting the 'Gold Dust.' I said as
much; so we decided to stick to present quarters.
The boat was to tarry at Memphis till ten the next morning. It is a
beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the
river. The streets are straight and spacious, though not paved in a way
to incite distempered admiration. No, the admiration must be reserved
for the town's sewerage system, which is called perfect; a recent
reform, however, for it was just the other way, up to a few years ago--a
reform resulting from the lesson taught by a desolating visitation
of the yellow-fever. In those awful days the people were swept off by
hundreds, by thousands; and so great was the reduction caused by flight
and by death together, that the population was diminished three-fourths,
and so remained for a time. Business stood nearly still, and the streets
bore an empty Sunday aspect.
Here is a picture of Memphis, at that disastrous time, drawn by a German
tourist who seems to have been an eye-witness of the scenes which he
describes. It is from Chapter VII, of his book, just published, in
Leipzig, 'Mississippi-Fahrten, von Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg.'--
'In August the yellow-fever had reached its extremest height. Daily,
hundreds fell a sacrifice to the terrible epidemic. The city was become
a mighty graveyard, two-thirds of the population had deserted the place,
and only the poor, the aged and the sick, remained behind, a sure prey
for the insidious enemy. The houses were closed: little lamps burned in
front of many--a sign that here death had entered. Often, several lay
dead in a single house; from the windows hung black crape. The stores
were shut up, for their owners were gone away or dead.
'Fearful evil! In the briefest space it struck down and swept away even
the most vigorous victim. A slight indisposition, then an hour of
fever, then the hideous delirium, then--the Yellow Death! On the street
corners, and in the squares, lay sick men, suddenly overtaken by the
disease; and even corpses, distorted and rigid. Food failed. Meat
spoiled in a few hours in the fetid and pestiferous air, and turned
black.
'Fearful clamors issue from many houses; then after a season they cease,
and all is still: noble, self-sacrificing men come with the coffin,
nail it up, and carry it away, to the graveyard. In the night stillness
reigns. Only the physicians and the hearses hurry through the streets;
and out of the distance, at intervals, comes the muffled thunder of the
railway train, which with the speed of the wind, and as if hunted by
furies, flies by the pest-ridden city without halting.'
But there is life enough there now. The population exceeds forty
thousand and is augmenting, and trade is in a flourishing condition.
We drove about the city; visited the park and the sociable horde of
squirrels there; saw the fine residences, rose-clad and in other ways
enticing to the eye; and got a good breakfast at the hotel.
A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi: has
a great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops; and
manufactories of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil; and is shortly
to have cotton mills and elevators.
Her cotton receipts reached five hundred thousand bales last year--an
increase of sixty thousand over the year before. Out from her healthy
commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway; and a sixth is being
added.
This is a very different Memphis from the one which the vanished and
unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put into their books
long time ago. In the days of the now forgotten but once renowned and
vigorously hated Mrs. Trollope, Memphis seems to have consisted mainly
of one long street of log-houses, with some outlying cabins sprinkled
around rearward toward the woods; and now and then a pig, and no end of
mud. That was fifty-five years ago. She stopped at the hotel. Plainly it
was not the one which gave us our breakfast. She says--
'The table was laid for fifty persons, and was nearly full. They ate in
perfect silence, and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner
was over literally before ours was begun; the only sounds heard were
those produced by the knives and forks, with the unceasing chorus of
coughing, _etc_.'
'Coughing, etc.' The 'etc.' stands for an unpleasant word there, a word
which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes prints. You
will find it in the following description of a steamboat dinner which
she ate in company with a lot of aristocratic planters; wealthy,
well-born, ignorant swells they were, tinselled with the usual harmless
military and judicial titles of that old day of cheap shams and windy
pretense--
'The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious
rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange
uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the
contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our
dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the
whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful
manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced
us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and
majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be anything
rather than an hour of enjoyment.'
CHAPTER 30
Sketches by the Way
IT was a big river, below Memphis; banks brimming full, everywhere, and
very frequently more than full, the waters pouring out over the land,
flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior; and in
places, to a depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about, of men's hard work
gone to ruin, and all to be done over again, with straitened means and a
weakened courage. A melancholy picture, and a continuous one;--hundreds
of miles of it. Sometimes the beacon lights stood in water three feet
deep, in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles without
farm, wood-yard, clearing, or break of any kind; which meant that the
keeper of the light must come in a skiff a great distance to discharge
his trust,--and often in desperate weather. Yet I was told that the
work is faithfully performed, in all weathers; and not always by
men, sometimes by women, if the man is sick or absent. The Government
furnishes oil, and pays ten or fifteen dollars a month for the lighting
and tending. A Government boat distributes oil and pays wages once a
month.
The Ship Island region was as woodsy and tenantless as ever. The island
has ceased to be an island; has joined itself compactly to the main
shore, and wagons travel, now, where the steamboats used to navigate. No
signs left of the wreck of the 'Pennsylvania.' Some farmer will turn up
her bones with his plow one day, no doubt, and be surprised.
We were getting down now into the migrating negro region. These poor
people could never travel when they were slaves; so they make up for
the privation now. They stay on a plantation till the desire to travel
seizes them; then they pack up, hail a steamboat, and clear out. Not for
any particular place; no, nearly any place will answer; they only want
to be moving. The amount of money on hand will answer the rest of the
conundrum for them. If it will take them fifty miles, very well; let it
be fifty. If not, a shorter flight will do.
During a couple of days, we frequently answered these hails. Sometimes
there was a group of high-water-stained, tumble-down cabins, populous
with colored folk, and no whites visible; with grassless patches of dry
ground here and there; a few felled trees, with skeleton cattle, mules,
and horses, eating the leaves and gnawing the bark--no other food for