Life on The Mississippi (36 page)

Mr. Dickens declined to agree that the Mississippi steamboats were “magnificent,” or that they were “floating palaces”— terms which had always been applied to them; terms which did not overexpress the admiration with which the people viewed them.

Mr. Dickens’s position was unassailable, possibly; the people’s position was certainly unassailable. If Mr. Dickens was comparing these boats with the crown jewels; or with the Taj, or with the Matterhorn; or with some other priceless or wonderful thing which he had seen, they were not magnificent—he was right. The people compared them with what
they
had seen; and, thus measured, thus judged, the boats were magnificent—the term was the correct one, it was not at all too strong, The people were as right as was Mr. Dickens. The steamboats were finer than anything on shore. Compared with superior dwelling houses and first-class hotels in the Valley, they were indubitably magnificent, they were “palaces.” To a few people living in New Orleans and St. Louis, they were not magnificent, perhaps; not palaces; but, to the great majority of those populations, and to the entire populations spread over both banks between Baton Rouge and St. Louis, they were palaces; they tallied with the citizen’s dream of what magnificence was, and satisfied it.

Every town and village along that vast stretch of double river frontage had a best dwelling, finest dwelling, mansion,—the home of its wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen. It is easy to describe it: large grassy yard, with paling fence painted white—in fair repair; brick walk from gate to door; big, square, two-story “frame” house, painted white and porticoed like a Grecian temple—with this difference, that the imposing fluted columns and Corinthian capitals were a pathetic sham, being made of white pine, and painted; iron knocker; brass door knob—discolored, for lack of polishing. Within, an uncarpeted hall, of planed boards; opening out of it, a parlor, fifteen feet by fifteen—in some instances five or ten feet larger; ingrain carpet; mahogany center-table; lamp on it, with green paper shade—standing on a gridiron, so to speak, made of high-colored yarns, by the young ladies of the house, and called a lamp mat; several books, piled and disposed, with cast-iron exactness, according to an inherited and unchangeable plan; among them, Tupper, much penciled; also,
Friendship’s Offering
, and
Affection’s Wreath
, with their sappy inanities illustrated in die-away mezzotints; also, Ossian;
Alonzo and Melissa
; maybe
Ivanhoe
; also
Album
, full of original “poetry” of the Thou-hast-wounded-the-spirit-that-loved-thee breed; two or three goody-goody works—
Shepherd of Salisbury Plain
, etc.; current number of the chaste and innocuous Godey’s
Lady’s Book
with painted fashion plate of wax-figure women with mouths all alike—lips and eyelids the same size—each five-foot woman with a two-inch wedge sticking from under her dress and letting on to be half of her foot. Polished airtight stove (new and deadly invention), with pipe passing through a board which closes up the discarded good old fireplace. On each end of the wooden mantel, over the fireplace, a large basket of peaches and other fruits, natural size, all done in plaster, rudely, or in wax, and painted to resemble the originals—which they don’t. Over middle of mantel, engraving—Washington Crossing the Delaware; on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunderand-lightning crewels by one of the young ladies—work of art which would have made Washington hesitate about crossing, if he could have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it. Piano—kettle in disguise—with music, bound and unbound, piled on it, and on a stand nearby: “Battle of Prague”; “Bird Waltz”; “Arkansas Traveler”; “Rosin the Bow”; “Marseilles Hymn”; “On a Lone Barren Isle” (St. Helena); “The Last Link Is Broken”; “She Wore a Wreath of 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 art, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sailboat, 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. Copperplates, 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 Mama, blue ribbons fluttering from its neck; the young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped pantalettes, one embracing toy horse, the other beguiling kitten with ball of yarn, and both simpering up at Mama, 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 whatnot 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 arrowheads, 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 whatnots 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 cardboard wood sawyer, to be attached to the stovepipe 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 whatnot—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. Horsehair chairs, horsehair sofa which keeps sliding from under you. Window shades, of oil stuff, with milkmaids and ruined castles stenciled on them in fierce colors. Lambrequins dependant from gaudy boxings of beaten tin, gilded. Bedrooms with rag carpets; bedstead 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; washbowl 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: chimneytops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes—and maybe painted red; pilothouse, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards, all garnished with white wooden filagree work of fanciful patterns; gilt acorns topping the derricks; gilt deer horns over the big bell; gaudy symbolic 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 filagree-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 stateroom had its couple of cosy clean bunks, and perhaps a looking glass and a snug closet; and sometimes there was even a wash bowl 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.

Where the river, in the Vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight—made so by cutoff; 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 by, 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 keelboating and early steamboating times—plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffng, and killing there, among the riffraff 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:

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 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.