Life on the Mississippi
Roses the Night when last we met; Go, forget me, Why should Sorrow o'er
that Brow a Shadow fling; Hours there were to Memory Dearer; Long, Long
Ago; Days of Absence; A Life on the Ocean Wave, a Home on the Rolling
Deep; Bird at Sea; and spread open on the rack, where the plaintive
singer has left it, _ro_-holl on, silver _moo_-hoon, guide the
_trav_-el-lerr his _way_, etc. Tilted pensively against the piano, a
guitar--guitar capable of playing the Spanish Fandango by itself, if you
give it a start. Frantic work of art on the wall--pious motto, done on
the premises, sometimes in colored yarns, sometimes in faded grasses:
progenitor of the 'God Bless Our Home' of modern commerce. Framed in
black moldings on the wall, other works of arts, conceived and committed
on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white
crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds,
pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice; name of criminal
conspicuous in the corner. Lithograph, Napoleon Crossing the Alps.
Lithograph, The Grave at St. Helena. Steel-plates, Trumbull's Battle of
Bunker Hill, and the Sally from Gibraltar. Copper-plates, Moses Smiting
the Rock, and Return of the Prodigal Son. In big gilt frame, slander
of the family in oil: papa holding a book ['Constitution of the United
States'); guitar leaning against mamma, blue ribbons fluttering from
its neck; the young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped
pantelettes, one embracing toy horse, the other beguiling kitten with
ball of yarn, and both simpering up at mamma, who simpers back. These
persons all fresh, raw, and red--apparently skinned. Opposite, in
gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and twenty-two, stiff,
old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved, glaring pallidly out from
a background of solid Egyptian night. Under a glass French clock dome,
large bouquet of stiff flowers done in corpsy-white wax. Pyramidal
what-not in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with bric-a-brac of
the period, disposed with an eye to best effect: shell, with the Lord's
Prayer carved on it; another shell--of the long-oval sort, narrow,
straight orifice, three inches long, running from end to end--portrait
of Washington carved on it; not well done; the shell had Washington's
mouth, originally--artist should have built to that. These two are
memorials of the long-ago bridal trip to New Orleans and the French
Market. Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens'--quartz, with gold
wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in
it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair of bead moccasins, from uncle
who crossed the Plains; three 'alum' baskets of various colors--being
skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in
the rock-candy style--works of art which were achieved by the young
ladies; their doubles and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots
in the land; convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a
card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment--drops its
under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit--limbs
and features merged together, not strongly defined; pewter
presidential-campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer, to be
attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat; small Napoleon,
done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes of dim children, parents,
cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudes but customary ones; no
templed portico at back, and manufactured landscape stretching away in
the distance--that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague
figures lavishly chained and ringed--metal indicated and secured from
doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze; all of them too much
combed, too much fixed up; and all of them uncomfortable in inflexible
Sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectator cannot realize
could ever have been in fashion; husband and wife generally grouped
together--husband sitting, wife standing, with hand on his shoulder--and
both preserving, all these fading years, some traceable effect of the
daguerreotypist's brisk 'Now smile, if you please!' Bracketed over
what-not--place of special sacredness--an outrage in water-color, done
by the young niece that came on a visit long ago, and died. Pity,
too; for she might have repented of this in time. Horse-hair chairs,
horse-hair sofa which keeps sliding from under you. Window shades,
of oil stuff, with milk-maids and ruined castles stenciled on them in
fierce colors. Lambrequins dependent from gaudy boxings of beaten tin,
gilded. Bedrooms with rag carpets; bedsteads of the 'corded' sort,
with a sag in the middle, the cords needing tightening; snuffy
feather-bed--not aired often enough; cane-seat chairs, splint-bottomed
rocker; looking-glass on wall, school-slate size, veneered frame;
inherited bureau; wash-bowl and pitcher, possibly--but not certainly;
brass candlestick, tallow candle, snuffers. Nothing else in the room.
Not a bathroom in the house; and no visitor likely to come along who has
ever seen one.
That was the residence of the principal citizen, all the way from the
suburbs of New Orleans to the edge of St. Louis. When he stepped aboard
a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world: chimney-tops
cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes--and maybe painted red;
pilot-house, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards, all garnished with
white wooden filigree work of fanciful patterns; gilt acorns topping the
derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell; gaudy symbolical picture
on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy boiler-deck, painted blue, and
furnished with Windsor armchairs; inside, a far-receding snow-white
'cabin;' porcelain knob and oil-picture on every stateroom door; curving
patterns of filigree-work touched up with gilding, stretching overhead
all down the converging vista; big chandeliers every little way, each
an April shower of glittering glass-drops; lovely rainbow-light falling
everywhere from the colored glazing of the skylights; the whole a
long-drawn, resplendent tunnel, a bewildering and soul-satisfying
spectacle! In the ladies' cabin a pink and white Wilton carpet, as soft
as mush, and glorified with a ravishing pattern of gigantic flowers.
Then the Bridal Chamber--the animal that invented that idea was still
alive and unhanged, at that day--Bridal Chamber whose pretentious
flummery was necessarily overawing to the now tottering intellect of
that hosannahing citizen. Every state-room had its couple of cozy clean
bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snug closet; and sometimes
there was even a washbowl and pitcher, and part of a towel which could
be told from mosquito netting by an expert--though generally these
things were absent, and the shirt-sleeved passengers cleansed themselves
at a long row of stationary bowls in the barber shop, where were also
public towels, public combs, and public soap.
Take the steamboat which I have just described, and you have her in her
highest and finest, and most pleasing, and comfortable, and satisfactory
estate. Now cake her over with a layer of ancient and obdurate dirt,
and you have the Cincinnati steamer awhile ago referred to. Not all
over--only inside; for she was ably officered in all departments except
the steward's.
But wash that boat and repaint her, and she would be about the
counterpart of the most complimented boat of the old flush times: for
the steamboat architecture of the West has undergone no change; neither
has steamboat furniture and ornamentation undergone any.
CHAPTER 39
Manufactures and Miscreants
WHERE the river, in the Vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed, it
is now comparatively straight--made so by cut-off; a former distance
of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five. It is a change which threw
Vicksburg's neighbor, Delta, Louisiana, out into the country and ended
its career as a river town. Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by
a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees--a growth which will
magnify itself into a dense forest by-and-bye, and completely hide the
exiled town.
In due time we passed Grand Gulf and Rodney, of war fame, and reached
Natchez, the last of the beautiful hill-cities--for Baton Rouge, yet
to come, is not on a hill, but only on high ground. Famous
Natchez-under-the-hill has not changed notably in twenty years; in
outward aspect--judging by the descriptions of the ancient procession
of foreign tourists--it has not changed in sixty; for it is still small,
straggling, and shabby. It had a desperate reputation, morally, in
the old keel-boating and early steamboating times--plenty of drinking,
carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the
river, in those days. But Natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has
always been attractive. Even Mrs. Trollope (1827) had to confess its
charms:
'At one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved by bluffs,
as they call the short intervals of high ground. The town of Natchez is
beautifully situated on one of those high spots. The contrast that
its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black forest that
stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the pawpaw, palmetto
and orange, the copious variety of sweet-scented flowers that flourish
there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert. Natchez is the
furthest point to the north at which oranges ripen in the open air,
or endure the winter without shelter. With the exception of this
sweet spot, I thought all the little towns and villages we passed
wretched-looking in the extreme.'
Natchez, like her near and far river neighbors, has railways now, and is
adding to them--pushing them hither and thither into all rich outlying
regions that are naturally tributary to her. And like Vicksburg and New
Orleans, she has her ice-factory: she makes thirty tons of ice a day.
In Vicksburg and Natchez, in my time, ice was jewelry; none but the rich
could wear it. But anybody and everybody can have it now. I visited one
of the ice-factories in New Orleans, to see what the polar regions
might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics. But there was
nothing striking in the aspect of the place. It was merely a spacious
house, with some innocent steam machinery in one end of it and some big
porcelain pipes running here and there. No, not porcelain--they merely
seemed to be; they were iron, but the ammonia which was being breathed
through them had coated them to the thickness of your hand with solid
milk-white ice. It ought to have melted; for one did not require winter
clothing in that atmosphere: but it did not melt; the inside of the pipe
was too cold.
Sunk into the floor were numberless tin boxes, a foot square and two
feet long, and open at the top end. These were full of clear water;
and around each box, salt and other proper stuff was packed; also, the
ammonia gases were applied to the water in some way which will always
remain a secret to me, because I was not able to understand the process.
While the water in the boxes gradually froze, men gave it a stir or two
with a stick occasionally--to liberate the air-bubbles, I think. Other
men were continually lifting out boxes whose contents had become hard
frozen. They gave the box a single dip into a vat of boiling water, to
melt the block of ice free from its tin coffin, then they shot the block
out upon a platform car, and it was ready for market. These big blocks
were hard, solid, and crystal-clear. In certain of them, big bouquets
of fresh and brilliant tropical flowers had been frozen-in; in others,
beautiful silken-clad French dolls, and other pretty objects.
These blocks were to be set on end in a platter, in the center of
dinner-tables, to cool the tropical air; and also to be ornamental, for