Old Times on the Upper Mississippi
wheel in the pilot house, listening for sounds from the engine-room.
Mr. Lay was doing all that was possible to remedy the break. He cut
off the steam from the useless cylinder, and with his assistant and
the firemen, was at work disconnecting the pitman, with the intent
to try to work the wheel with one cylinder, which would have been
an impossibility in that sea. In fact it would have been impossible
under any circumstances, for the large wheel of a stern-wheel boat
is built to be operated by two engines; there is not power enough
in either one alone to more than turn it over, let alone driving
the steamboat. When the crash came, Engineer Lay's wife, who was
on board as a passenger, ran immediately to the engine-room to be
with her husband when the worst should come. He kissed her as she
came, and said: "There's a dear, brave, little woman. Run back to
the cabin and encourage the other women. I must work. Good-bye". And
the "little woman"--for she was a little woman, and a brave little
woman, also--without another word gave her husband a good-bye kiss,
and wiping away the tears, went back to the cabin and did more than
all the others to reassure the frightened, fainting women and little
children--the very antithesis of the craven old usurer who had crept
on his knees begging for a little longer lease of a worthless life.
It took an hour or more to drift slowly, stern first, diagonally
across and down the lake to the shore above Glenmont, on the
Wisconsin side, where she struck and swung broadside onto the beach.
The men carried the women ashore through four feet of water, and in
another hour the cabin was blown entirely off the sunken hull, and
the boat was a total wreck. Her bones are there to-day, a striking
attestation of the power of wind and wave, even upon so small a body
of water as Lake St. Croix.
Big fires were built from the wreckage to warm the wet and benumbed
people. Runners were sent to nearby farm houses for teams, as well as
to Hudson, seven or eight miles way. Many of the men walked home to
Prescott and Hastings. Captain Green, who owned the boat, stayed with
his crew to save what he could from the wreck, in which he lost his
all; but he had only words of thanksgiving that not a life had been
lost while under his charge. Through it he was cool and cheerful,
devoting himself to reassuring his passengers, as soon as the drag
was in place, and giving orders for getting the women and children
ashore as soon as the boat should strike. His only deviation from
perfect equipoise was exhibited in his treatment of the old man, a
notoriously mean, and exacting money-lender, with whom he had no
sympathy at any time, and no patience at a time like this.
Chapter XXV
_A Stray Nobleman_
Of the many men whom it was my good fortune to meet while on the
river as a boy, or as a young man, there was none who came nearer
to filling the bill as a nobleman than Robert C. Eden, whose memory
suggests the title of this chapter. Just what constitutes a nobleman
in the college of heraldry, I am not qualified to assert. "Bob" Eden,
as his friends fondly called him--Captain Eden, as he was known on
the river, or Major Eden as he was better known in the closing days
of the War of Secession--was the son of an English baronet. There
were several other sons who had had the luck to be born ahead of
"Bob", and his chance for attaining to the rank and title of baronet
was therefore extremely slim. However, his father was able to send
him to Oxford, from which ancient seat of learning he was graduated
with honors. As a younger son he was set apart for the ministry,
where he finally landed after sowing his wild oats, which he did
in a gentlemanly and temperate manner that comported well with the
profession for which he was destined, all his studies having been
along theological lines. The _wanderlust_ was in his blood, however,
and he declined taking holy orders until he had seen something of
the unholy world outside. Accordingly he took the portion due him,
or which his father gave him, and departed for Canada. Not finding
things just to his taste in that British appanage, possibly not rapid
enough for a divinity student, he promptly crossed the line and began
making himself into a Yankee, in all except citizenship.
In his wanderings he finally reached Oshkosh, attracted no doubt by
the euphony of the name, which has made the little "saw dust city
of the Fox" one of the best known towns, by title, in the world. If
there was any one place more than another calculated to educate
and instruct an embryo clergyman in the ways of the world, and a
particularly wicked world at that, it was Oshkosh before the war.
That he saw some of the "fun" which the boys enjoyed in those days
was evidenced by the fund of stories relating to that place and that
era, which he had in stock in later years.
I do not know how long he remained there on his first visit. When I
made his acquaintance he was journeying up the river by easy stages
on a little side-wheel steamer, having both wheels on a single
shaft--a type of steamboat which I had known on the St. Joseph River
in Michigan, but which was not common on the Mississippi. This class
was used on the Fox and Wolf Rivers, and on Lake Winnebago. Captain
Eden had bought this little steamboat, of perhaps eighty tons burden,
for the purpose of exploring at his leisure the upper Mississippi and
its tributaries. He had sailed up the Fox River to Portage, through
the canal to the Wisconsin, and down that stream to the Mississippi,
and had reached Prescott, where I met him. He wanted to go up the St.
Croix to the Falls, stopping at all the towns, and at places where
there were no towns, at his own sweet will. First-class pilots were
getting six hundred dollars a month wages in those days. Eden's boat
was not worth two months' pay of such a pilot, and he was on the
lookout for a cheaper man when he found me.
His crew consisted of himself, acting in the capacity of captain and
first and second mates; an engineer and fireman in one person; a deck
hand, and a cook. The cook is named last, but he was by no means
the least personage aboard the "Enterprise". As this was a sort of
holiday excursion, the cook was about the most important official
about the boat. He was fully up in his business, and could cook
all kinds of game and fish to perfection, as well as the ordinary
viands of civilization. It was a privilege to be catered to by this
master of his art. The captain had under him, therefore, three men,
in addition to the pilot for temporary service from time to time as
he journeyed up the river. The "Enterprise" was not a speedy boat.
She could make four or five miles an hour upstream if the current
was not too strong, and double that downstream if the current was
strong enough. She had no upper cabin answering to the "boiler deck"
of the river boats--only a little box of a pilot house on the roof,
big enough to contain a little wheel and the man who turned it.
This wheel was only about a third the diameter of a real steamboat
wheel, and instead of wheel-ropes it had chains, large enough for a
man-of-war. When the wheel was put hard up or hard down, the chains
responded with a series of groans and squeaks not unmusical, but
new and novel to one used only to the noiseless operation of the
well-oiled wheel-ropes of the river steamers. The chains were part of
the fire-proof outfit required by regulations on the great lakes. The
"Enterprise" was from Winnebago. To pull the little three-foot wheel
hard down, and hold the stumpy little steamer up to a reef from which
she wanted to run away, required the expenditure of as much muscle as
was demanded to cramp a four-hundred ton steamer over the same bar by
the use of the larger wheel and easier-running wheel-ropes.
The cabin of the "Enterprise" was all aft of the paddle-boxes. It was
so divided as to afford sleeping quarters for the crew at the forward
part, next the engine, while Captain Eden occupied the after part,
which was fitted up as a boudoir, with a little side niche, in which
he slept. His pointer dog and his retriever also slept in the same
niche. There was a fine library in the cabin--not a great number of
books, but the best books, some English, some French, some German,
and several Greek and Latin, for Captain Eden was a polyglot in his
reading. There was also a gun rack with several rifles, three or four
shot guns of big and little calibre, and a pair of duelling pistols.
Likewise there were rods, reels, landing nets, and fly-hooks without
number, rubber boots and mackintoshes for rough weather, and all the
paraphernalia of a gentleman sportsman. It was evident at a glance
that Captain Eden was not in financial straits, and it was equally
evident that he was not steamboating for profit.
As I knew the St. Croix River well enough to navigate it with a
far larger boat than Captain Eden's, and in addition knew also a
great deal more about the haunts of bear, deer, prairie chickens,
brook trout, and indeed all species of fish inhabiting the waters
of the Mississippi River and its tributaries; and further, had a
speaking and dining acquaintance with sundry red men, both Sioux and
Chippewa, with whom Captain Eden also wished to become acquainted
for purposes of original investigation and study, I was deemed a
valuable acquisition. On my side a reasonable salary as pilot, with
a free run of the guns, fishing tackle, and books was an attractive
presentation of the case, and it took but a short time to arrange the
details of an engagement.
A day's work on this model craft consisted in steering the boat
five or six miles up or down the river or lake to the most inviting
hunting or fishing grounds, or to the vicinity of an Indian camp,
finding a sheltered place in which to tie up, and then taking a tramp
of ten or a dozen miles after deer, bear, or prairie chickens, or
a walk of three or four miles up some favorite trout stream, and
fishing back to the boat. In that day bear and deer abounded within a
very few miles of Prescott, Hudson, or other points. Indeed, as late
as 1876 bears were quite common about River Falls, one or two having
come right into the village to pick up young pigs and lambs; and deer
were also numerous within a few miles of the same place.
This in itself was an ideal occupation. But added to it was the
privilege of an intimate association with, and the conversation of,
a man from across the ocean, whose father was a baronet, who had
himself been schooled in Oxford, who had lived in London, and Paris,
and Berlin, and had seen men and things of whom and which I had read
in books, but which were all very far removed from the backwoods farm
of Michigan where I was born, and from the still wilder surroundings
of the upper Mississippi in the middle fifties.
I had been a persistent reader from the time I had learned my
letters, and was now seventeen years old. The volumes to which I
had had access were principally school books, with here and there a
history or biography, and an occasional novel. At one period only,
while working in the printing office, had I the run of a well-chosen
library belonging to the lawyer-editor. Here, however, was something
better than books. I could question this man on points that the books
might have passed over, and he could answer. His mind was quick, his
powers of observation trained, his brain well stored with the lore
of books--history, poetry, eloquence, and in addition he had seen
much of the world which lay so far beyond and outside the life of a
Western-bred country lad. It was better than any school I had ever
attended, and he was a rare teacher. He didn't realize that he was
teaching, but I did.
It was not a case of absorption alone on my part, however. In my