Life on the Mississippi
the flowers and things imprisoned in them could be seen as through plate
glass. I was told that this factory could retail its ice, by wagon,
throughout New Orleans, in the humblest dwelling-house quantities, at
six or seven dollars a ton, and make a sufficient profit. This being the
case, there is business for ice-factories in the North; for we get ice
on no such terms there, if one take less than three hundred and fifty
pounds at a delivery.
The Rosalie Yarn Mill, of Natchez, has a capacity of 6,000 spindles and
160 looms, and employs 100 hands. The Natchez Cotton Mills Company began
operations four years ago in a two-story building of 50 x 190 feet, with
4,000 spindles and 128 looms; capital $105,000, all subscribed in the
town. Two years later, the same stockholders increased their capital to
$225,000; added a third story to the mill, increased its length to 317
feet; added machinery to increase the capacity to 10,300 spindles and
304 looms. The company now employ 250 operatives, many of whom are
citizens of Natchez. 'The mill works 5,000 bales of cotton annually and
manufactures the best standard quality of brown shirtings and
sheetings and drills, turning out 5,000,000 yards of these goods per
year.'{footnote [New Orleans Times-Democrat, 26 Aug, 1882.]} A close
corporation--stock held at $5,000 per share, but none in the market.
The changes in the Mississippi River are great and strange, yet were to
be expected; but I was not expecting to live to see Natchez and these
other river towns become manufacturing strongholds and railway centers.
Speaking of manufactures reminds me of a talk upon that topic which I
heard--which I overheard--on board the Cincinnati boat. I awoke out of
a fretted sleep, with a dull confusion of voices in my ears. I
listened--two men were talking; subject, apparently, the great
inundation. I looked out through the open transom. The two men were
eating a late breakfast; sitting opposite each other; nobody else
around. They closed up the inundation with a few words--having used it,
evidently, as a mere ice-breaker and acquaintanceship-breeder--then they
dropped into business. It soon transpired that they were drummers--one
belonging in Cincinnati, the other in New Orleans. Brisk men, energetic
of movement and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their
religion.
'Now as to this article,' said Cincinnati, slashing into the ostensible
butter and holding forward a slab of it on his knife-blade, 'it's from
our house; look at it--smell of it--taste it. Put any test on it you
want to. Take your own time--no hurry--make it thorough. There
now--what do you say? butter, ain't it. Not by a thundering sight--it's
oleomargarine! Yes, sir, that's what it is--oleomargarine. You can't
tell it from butter; by George, an _expert _can't. It's from our house.
We supply most of the boats in the West; there's hardly a pound of
butter on one of them. We are crawling right along--_jumping _right
along is the word. We are going to have that entire trade. Yes, and the
hotel trade, too. You are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you
can't find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in
the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, outside of the biggest cities. Why, we
are turning out oleomargarine _now _by the thousands of tons. And we can
sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has _got _to take it--can't
get around it you see. Butter don't stand any show--there ain't any
chance for competition. Butter's had its _day_--and from this out,
butter goes to the wall. There's more money in oleomargarine than--why,
you can't imagine the business we do. I've stopped in every town from
Cincinnati to Natchez; and I've sent home big orders from every one of
them.'
And so-forth and so-on, for ten minutes longer, in the same fervid
strain. Then New Orleans piped up and said--
Yes, it's a first-rate imitation, that's a certainty; but it ain't the
only one around that's first-rate. For instance, they make olive-oil out
of cotton-seed oil, nowadays, so that you can't tell them apart.'
'Yes, that's so,' responded Cincinnati, 'and it was a tip-top business
for a while. They sent it over and brought it back from France and
Italy, with the United States custom-house mark on it to indorse it for
genuine, and there was no end of cash in it; but France and Italy broke
up the game--of course they naturally would. Cracked on such a rattling
impost that cotton-seed olive-oil couldn't stand the raise; had to hang
up and quit.'
'Oh, it _did_, did it? You wait here a minute.'
Goes to his state-room, brings back a couple of long bottles, and takes
out the corks--says:
'There now, smell them, taste them, examine the bottles, inspect the
labels. One of 'm's from Europe, the other's never been out of this
country. One's European olive-oil, the other's American cotton-seed
olive-oil. Tell 'm apart? 'Course you can't. Nobody can. People that
want to, can go to the expense and trouble of shipping their oils to
Europe and back--it's their privilege; but our firm knows a trick worth
six of that. We turn out the whole thing--clean from the word go--in our
factory in New Orleans: labels, bottles, oil, everything. Well, no, not
labels: been buying them abroad--get them dirt-cheap there. You see,
there's just one little wee speck, essence, or whatever it is, in
a gallon of cotton-seed oil, that give it a smell, or a flavor, or
something--get that out, and you're all right--perfectly easy then to
turn the oil into any kind of oil you want to, and there ain't anybody
that can detect the true from the false. Well, we know how to get that
one little particle out--and we're the only firm that does. And we turn
out an olive-oil that is just simply perfect--undetectable! We are doing
a ripping trade, too--as I could easily show you by my order-book for
this trip. Maybe you'll butter everybody's bread pretty soon, but we'll
cotton-seed his salad for him from the Gulf to Canada, and that's a
dead-certain thing.'
Cincinnati glowed and flashed with admiration. The two scoundrels
exchanged business-cards, and rose. As they left the table, Cincinnati
said--
'But you have to have custom-house marks, don't you? How do you manage
that?'
I did not catch the answer.
We passed Port Hudson, scene of two of the most terrific episodes of the
war--the night-battle there between Farragut's fleet and the Confederate
land batteries, April 14th, 1863; and the memorable land battle, two
months later, which lasted eight hours--eight hours of exceptionally
fierce and stubborn fighting--and ended, finally, in the repulse of the
Union forces with great slaughter.
CHAPTER 40
Castles and Culture
BATON ROUGE was clothed in flowers, like a bride--no, much more so; like
a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now--no modifications,
no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia-trees in the Capitol
grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge
snow-ball blossoms. The scent of the flower is very sweet, but you want
distance on it, because it is so powerful. They are not good bedroom
blossoms--they might suffocate one in his sleep. We were certainly
in the South at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the
plantations--vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters
clustered together in the middle distance--were in view. And there was a
tropical sun overhead and a tropical swelter in the air.
And at this point, also, begins the pilot's paradise: a wide river hence
to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars,
snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road.
Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building; for
it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been
built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago,
with his medieval romances. The South has not yet recovered from the
debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes
and their grotesque 'chivalry' doings and romantic juvenilities still
survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the
wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factories
and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other windy
humbuggeries survive along with it. It is pathetic enough, that a
whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materials all ungenuine
within and without, pretending to be what they are not--should ever
have been built in this otherwise honorable place; but it is much more
pathetic to see this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and
perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let
dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this
restoration-money to the building of something genuine.
Baton Rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopoly
of them. Here is a picture from the advertisement of the 'Female
Institute' of Columbia; Tennessee. The following remark is from the same
advertisement--
'The Institute building has long been famed as a model of striking and
beautiful architecture. Visitors are charmed with its resemblance to
the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls, and
ivy-mantled porches.'
Keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; as romantic as keeping
hotel in a castle.
By itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough;
but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin Middle-Age
romanticism here in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and
infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has
seen, it is necessarily a hurtful thing and a mistake.
Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky 'Female College.'
Female college sounds well enough; but since the phrasing it in that
unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity, it seems
to me that she-college would have been still better--because shorter,
and means the same thing: that is, if either phrase means anything at
all--
'The president is southern by birth, by rearing, by education, and by
sentiment; the teachers are all southern in sentiment, and with the
exception of those born in Europe were born and raised in the south.
Believing the southern to be the highest type of civilization this
continent has seen, the young ladies are trained according to the
southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and
propriety; hence we offer a first-class female college for the south and
solicit southern patronage.'
{footnote [Illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser:
KNOXVILLE, Tenn., October 19.--This morning a few minutes after ten
o'clock, General Joseph A. Mabry, Thomas O'Connor, and Joseph A. Mabry,
Jr., were killed in a shooting affray. The difficulty began yesterday
afternoon by General Mabry attacking Major O'Connor and threatening to
kill him. This was at the fair grounds, and O'Connor told Mabry that it
was not the place to settle their difficulties. Mabry then told O'Connor
he should not live. It seems that Mabry was armed and O'Connor was not.
The cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transfer of some
property from Mabry to O'Connor. Later in the afternoon Mabry sent word
to O'Connor that he would kill him on sight. This morning Major O'Connor
was standing in the door of the Mechanics' National Bank, of which
he was president. General Mabry and another gentleman walked down Gay
Street on the opposite side from the bank. O'Connor stepped into the
bank, got a shot gun, took deliberate aim at General Mabry and fired.
Mabry fell dead, being shot in the left side. As he fell O'Connor fired
again, the shot taking effect in Mabry's thigh. O'Connor then reached