Life on the Mississippi
lawless; whereas 'the truth is, they are feeble, insignificant in size,
diffident to a fault, sensitive'--and so on, and so on; you would have
supposed he was talking about his family. But if he was soft on the
Arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough on the mosquitoes of Lake
Providence to make up for it--'those Lake Providence colossi,' as he
finely called them. He said that two of them could whip a dog, and that
four of them could hold a man down; and except help come, they would
kill him--'butcher him,' as he expressed it. Referred in a sort of
casual way--and yet significant way--to 'the fact that the life policy
in its simplest form is unknown in Lake Providence--they take out a
mosquito policy besides.' He told many remarkable things about those
lawless insects. Among others, said he had seen them try to vote.
Noticing that this statement seemed to be a good deal of a strain on us,
he modified it a little: said he might have been mistaken, as to that
particular, but knew he had seen them around the polls 'canvassing.'
There was another passenger--friend of H.'s--who backed up the harsh
evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailed some stirring adventures
which he had had with them. The stories were pretty sizable, merely
pretty sizable; yet Mr. H. was continually interrupting with a cold,
inexorable 'Wait--knock off twenty-five per cent. of that; now go
on;' or, 'Wait--you are getting that too strong; cut it down, cut it
down--you get a leetle too much costumery on to your statements: always
dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster;' or, 'Pardon, once more: if
you are going to load anything more on to that statement, you want to
get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it's drawing all the
water there is in the river already; stick to facts--just stick to
the cold facts; what these gentlemen want for a book is the frozen
truth--ain't that so, gentlemen?' He explained privately that it was
necessary to watch this man all the time, and keep him within bounds;
it would not do to neglect this precaution, as he, Mr. H., 'knew to his
sorrow.' Said he, 'I will not deceive you; he told me such a monstrous
lie once, that it swelled my left ear up, and spread it so that I was
actually not able to see out around it; it remained so for months, and
people came miles to see me fan myself with it.'
CHAPTER 35
Vicksburg During the Trouble
WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream; but
we cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it, like
Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless
water--also a big island--in front of Vicksburg now. You come down the
river the other side of the island, then turn and come up to the town;
that is, in high water: in low water you can't come up, but must land
some distance below it.
Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg's tremendous
war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon balls,
cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc. The caves did good service
during the six weeks' bombardment of the city--May 8 to July 4, 1863.
They were used by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children;
not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They
were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then
branched Y shape, within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six
weeks was perhaps--but wait; here are some materials out of which to
reproduce it:--
Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand
non-combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--walled solidly
in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries;
hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro;
no God-speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed
acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious
dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see
steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing
toward the town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed;
no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over
bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--all quiet
there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten
dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a
gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of
drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to
do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three
o'clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured
tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of
hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in
a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky
is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring
bomb-shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city;
descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment
later, but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children
scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the
humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'Rats, to your holes!' and laugh.
The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron
rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops;
silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues;
by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder, and
reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing, bodies follow
heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group themselves about,
stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh
air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave; maybe straggle off
home presently, or take a lounge through the town, if the stillness
continues; and will scurry to the holes again, by-and-bye, when the
war-tempest breaks forth once more.
There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merely the
population of a village--would they not come to know each other, after a
week or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate
experiences of one would be of interest to all?
Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost
anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg? Could
you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the
imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger who did
experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why it
might not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is
an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties;
novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's
former experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his
imagination and memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live
that strange and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and
feel it all. But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession--what
then? Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become
commonplace. The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a
landsman's pulse.
Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants--a man
and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way, those people
told it without fire, almost without interest.
A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues
eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore
the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home
and into the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the
possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks
about it was gone. What the man said was to this effect:--
'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week--to us,
anyway. We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays,
and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the
night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron.
At first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did
afterwards. The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched
them both along. When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or
three weeks afterwards, when she was running for the holes, one morning,
through a shell-shower, a big shell burst near her, and covered her all
over with dirt, and a piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of
false hair from the back of her head. Well, she stopped to get that
game-bag before she shoved along again! Was getting used to things
already, you see. We all got so that we could tell a good deal about
shells; and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it was a
light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk; and a man would say,
'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of
it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it. If a
shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood
still;--uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let
go, we went on talking again, if nobody hurt--maybe saying, 'That was a
ripper!' or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe,
we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead.
In that case, every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again,
gents!' and shoved. Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading
the streets, looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye
canted up watching the shells; and I've seen them stop still when they
were uncertain about what a shell was going to do, and wait and make
certain; and after that they sa'ntered along again, or lit out for
shelter, according to the verdict. Streets in some towns have a litter
of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying
around. Ours hadn't; they had _iron _litter. Sometimes a man
would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his
neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in his front
yard--a ton of it, sometimes. No glass left; glass couldn't stand such
a bombardment; it was all shivered out. Windows of the houses
vacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull. _Whole _panes were as scarce
as news.
'We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye
pretty good turnouts. I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit
quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then--and all the more so on
account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and
pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.
Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer
combination--along at first. Coming out of church, one morning, we had
an accident--the only one that happened around me on a Sunday. I was
just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for a while,
and saying, 'Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we've got
hold of a pint of prime wh--.' Whiskey, I was going to say, you know,
but a shell interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man's arm off, and left
it dangling in my hand. And do you know the thing that is going to stick
the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else, little and big, I
reckon, is the mean thought I had then? It was 'the whiskey _is saved_.'
And yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was as
scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another
taste during the siege.
'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close.
Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no
turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have made