Life on The Mississippi (3 page)

 

—EDITOR’S TABLE,
Harper’s Magazine,
February, 1863.

There is, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, a symmetry to the continent of North America, a classical proportion provided by the great river that bisects the United States. The Mississippi provides a diagonal that stretches from the southernmost to the northernmost continental extremities, pointing toward Canada at one end and the Gulf of Mexico at the other. Toward the east, the contributory Ohio River stretches into the foothills of the Allegheny range; toward the west, there is the Missouri, whose tributaries flow out of the Rocky Mountains. This east-west configuration was viewed by Colonial geopoliticians like Thomas Jefferson as a riverine corridor for expanding empire, and in fact the three great rivers served for nearly a century as the route for westering Americans. By 1825 it was abetted by the Erie Canal and in 1832 by the Ohio system of canals, connecting the Hudson River with its western counterparts.

Although the Mississippi contributed a relatively short length along this great diagram, from the start it was seen as the single most important river on the American continent, serving as a vital commercial waterway joining the North to the South. As an adjunct to an expanding empire, however, the Mississippi seemed an often unwilling ally, thanks in large part to the muddy might of the Missouri, which drew a turbulent flood from the far-western regions. This fierce current restrained ambitions for the commercial exploitation of the great central valley, for navigation of the Mississippi was at first limited to raft, keel, and flatboat, slow-moving vessels whose passage was hampered by attacks from Indians, river pirates, and the ever-present hazards provided by snags and shifting sandbars.

We associate the invention of the steamboat with Robert Fulton and the Hudson River, but both Fulton and his unfortunate predecessor, “Poor” John Fitch, had the Mississippi in mind as they went about perfecting steam-powered navigation. Indeed, Fitch might have been more successful in promoting his invention, which made a number of voyages along the Delaware River, had the navigation of the Mississippi not been controlled at the time by the Spanish and then the French governments. President Jefferson sent Robert Livingston to France to bargain with Napoleon for navigation rights to the great river and his representative returned with what became known as the Louisiana Purchase, a vast territory that greatly increased not only the United States but the importance to the new nation of the Mississippi and its western tributaries. By 1812, one of Fulton’s steamboats had made the trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, only five years after the
Clermont
was first launched on the Hudson.

It was not long before Fulton’s boat made regular trips between New Orleans and Natchez, and it was soon followed by other steam-powered craft eventually connecting towns on the Ohio with Southern regions. The importance of riverboat navigation to the economy of the West is suggested by the image the Kentuckian Henry Clay used in an 1824 speech as a metaphor to express the welfare of the United States as a whole:

A similar contrast between keelboat and steamboat travel on the Mississippi was drawn in 1825 by the New England-born preacher Timothy Flint, in a retrospective account of the ten years he had spent on Western rivers, during which time the number of steamboats there had multiplied dramatically: “Justly to appreciate the value of steamboats on these waters, one must have moved up them, as long, as dangerously, and as laboriously, as I have done,” he wrote, recalling his travels in keelboats before moving on to a panegyric on the ease and luxuriousness of travel on “one of the better steamboats,” with

By the time Flint’s book was published, the keelboat man was an endangered species on the Mississippi, his livelihood obliterated by the steamboat, and Flint tended to imbue him with romantic qualities as a figure associated with a rapidly disappearing scene. Thus he noted that the

This hint was soon picked up by Westerners with literary ambitions, who celebrated the exploits of the most famous of Western boatmen, the boasting, vainglorious, and violent Mike Fink, who by 1825 had already retreated westward up the Missouri and been shot dead in an argument, to be made a legend in increasingly improbable tales.

Within a decade, however, Fink had become overshadowed by another figure associated with the wildest aspects of Mississippi River life, Davy Crockett. A Tennessee politician who encouraged the public perception of himself as incarnating the rambunctious spirit of the Western frontier, Crockett gained literary fame in the last five years of his life through his efforts and those of others. His death at the Alamo in 1836 considerably liberated the association, allowing Eastern hack writers to invent improbable deeds and widen Crockett’s comic range, transplanting him from the wilds of Tennessee to the great river, and imposing upon him the fabulous outlines of that folkloric amphibian combining the features of horse and alligator. This was the Davy Crockett of yearly comic almanacs, virtually all of which were published in Eastern cities during the fifteen years following the death of the historical Crockett.

Where Fink was associated with keelboat life, Crockett became a virtual incarnation of the steamboat, a transformation licensed by his famous political slogan, “Go Ahead!”—the steamboat pilot’s order once the paddlewheels had reached open water. Crockett and his cry were exploited by Whig politicians eager to convert him into a folk hero with which to do battle against Andrew Jackson, for “Go Ahead!” perfectly expressed the buoyant optimism of the Whigs, who were champions of progress in its many commercial forms, including internal improvements like the building of canals, the widening of natural waterways, and the removal of impediments to navigation.

In 1835, the year that Crockett headed west for his apotheosis at the Alamo, there was born in Florida, Missouri, an infant who would emerge as the spiritual child of the famous Tennessean, becoming for the last third of the nineteenth century what Crockett became soon after he died: the premier riverman of the United States. Born of parents with Southern (Virginia and Kentucky) origins, young Samuel Langhorne Clemens was also born a Whig, a political patrimony that links him not only to Henry Clay but to Abraham Lincoln, with whom he has often been compared. Both men, in quite different ways, inherited the mantle of Davy Crockett, sharing the Whig faith in American progress while leavening it by means of humor, the rough backwoods variety that comes with leaves, branches, and bark still attached and plenty of earthiness stuck to its roots.

Both men are associated with life on the Mississippi, Lincoln early on having built a flatboat and guided it down to New Orleans. In this, however, it is Clemens who enjoys the preminence, not so much because of his actual experience—he spent a scant five years as a steamboat pilot on the river—but because he so successfully exploited the association, commenting with his pen name taken from the leadsman’s cry, “Mark Twain!” (indicating safe water, it somewhat resembles Crockett’s “Go Ahead!” in implication). However, not only did Lincoln become a lawyer and politician, but even before Sam Clemens began his apprenticeship as a river pilot, Lincoln was representing railroads in decisive court cases that would signal the doom of the riverboat as the primary mode of transportation in the great central valley. Whigs may have championed the removal of obstructions to navigation, but Lincoln made sure that railroad bridges were not counted as such.

By the time Sam Clemens had set up shop as Mark Twain, the steamboat man had followed the keelboat man down the stream of time and the paddlewheel steamboat had become a symbol of past glories, not modern triumphs of technology. In Mark Twain’s famous novels featuring the Mississippi, the great river serves chiefly as a dramatic backdrop for scenes depicting Midwestern American life prior to the Civil War. During that time—roughly the 1840s—the river was enjoying its hegemony as the chief agent of transportation and the dominant symbol of progress in Western regions. But his most extended account of his river experiences,
Life on the Mississippi,
differs from his fiction, starting with the fact that it is a mixture of autobiography and travel narrative and ending with the fact that it is overwhelmingly what its title advertises. Published the year before
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and containing an episode that was cut from that narrative,
Life on the Mississippi
presents a contrasting picture of the river experience—a different perspective from that found in his greatest novel.

As a passenger on a raft floating down the Mississippi, Huck is a passive spectator of the passing scene, whose movements are keyed to the motions of his craft, which in turn are caught in the power of the river’s currents. His is a vessel at all times at the mercy of the river’s whims, whether flood, fog, or thunderstorms, and which passes through vistas of unsurpassed beauty and permits moments of tranquillity undisturbed. Set in an extended moment of the past, some forty years before the book’s publication, Huck’s raft is a pastoral asylum surrounded by a world in which barbarism is rampant, violence and crime are daily facts of life, and slavery is protected by the laws of the land. It is, moreover, a world seldom disturbed by steamboat or other traffic, this in a time when the river would have been crowded with all manner of vessels. The steamboat, when it does appear, is either a distant prospect or a fearful apparition, whether the ghostly Gothic wreck of the
Walter Scott
or the dragonlike craft that tears apart the floating idyll of Huck and Jim.

Admittedly, this anachronistic emphasis has a rhetorical purpose, for Mark Twain beheld the 1840s as through Reconstructionist spectacles—darkly—but the result is a book that seems antithetical to
Life on the Mississippi,
which not only limits that “life” to Mark Twain’s own experiences aboard riverboats, past and present, but concentrates on the dramatic differences between steamboat life on the river before and after the Civil War. Technology is the dominant subject matter, whether it is the detailed knowledge that the antebellum pilot had to master in order to master the river or the improvements in navigational aids made since the war, which have acted to diminish the pilot’s former heroism and grandeur. How different from the drowsing Huck floating down the river on his prelapsarian raft!

There is also detectable in
Life on the Mississippi
a materialistic emphasis virtually absent from
Huckleberry Finn
. Money for Huck is at best a necessary evil and those characters in the novel who pursue it are characterized as fools and knaves. But in
Life
it is an essential quantity, not only supporting the pilot’s luxurious habits but permeating all aspects of riverboating, most often personified as Progress, seen mainly as speed, that glamourous and exciting manifestation of the cash nexus. The steamboat is the vehicle of acceleration, the pilot its most prominent agent, and drifting rafts and raftsmen figure as anachronisms and impediments to steam-powered craft: the pilots of the latter are not averse to “borrowing an oar” from a hapless raftsman or flatboat man in order to cut a tight corner for the sake of greater speed.

The desire for speed manifested itself in every boat owner and captain, a desire that enriched those pilots like Horace Bixby who could develop the skills necessary to perform great feats of navigational daring, and who were assigned the fastest and fanciest boats on the river, but that also led to disastrous maneuvers, resulting in burst boilers and collisions. We are never told, however, why it was that such speed was desirable, nor are we ever—despite all the statistics—told just what it was that those boats were carrying at such great risk. Cotton, of course, was one of the main commodities, but human beings—slaves—were another. Commerce it was that dictated such daring and often destructive feats of navigation, as it was commerce that gave the railroad eventual precedence over the riverboat. Perhaps Twain made no mention of commercial considerations for the sake of avoiding the obvious, but the result was also to avoid a few painful facts concerning the specifics of commerce on the Mississippi before the war.

Thus, in Twain’s account of his education as a pilot, a massive blank space is concealed, suggesting that the pilothouse was indeed located at a remove from the steamboat, perched high on the superstructure called the “Texas” because of its being a detached part of the whole—a situation evoking the status of the independent republic of Texas before it jointed the Union. The pilothouse was constructed to give great visibility of the river ahead but it also acted to shut off those who worked there from certain realities of life along and on that river, the commerce to which Twain in the second half of the book (the postbellum half, as it were) is so very much alive. Only when he leaves the pilothouse for the world of commercial exchange, a world now sanitized of slavery and its attendant sins, does Mark Twain bring himself (and us) into direct confrontation with the realities of river life. The situation evoked in the first part of the book, in which the young Sam Clemens seeks to become part of that brotherhood who possessed the “right stuff,” gives a contemporary validity to the title of “pilot,” being those warriors who fly so high as to be strategically removed from the targets on which their bombs fall.