Life on The Mississippi (37 page)

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 employs 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.”
¹⁸
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 manufacturers reminds me of a talk upon that topic which I heard—which I overheard—onboard 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 cottonseed oil, nowadays, so that you can’t tell them apart.”

“Yes, that’s so,” responded Cincinnati, “and it was a tiptop business for a while. They sent it over, and brought it back from France and Italy, with the United States customhouse 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 cottonseed 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 stateroom, 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 cottonseed 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 cottonseed oil, that gives 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 cottonseed 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 customhouse 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.

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 halfway measures. The magnolia trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge snowball 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:

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:

What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that, probably blows it from a castle.

From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels back to the dim forest walls of bearded cypress in the rear. Shores lonely no longer. Plenty of dwellings all the way, on both banks—standing so close together, for long distances, that the broad river, lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street. A most homelike and happylooking region. And now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manorhouse, embowered in trees. Here is testimony of one or two of the procession of foreign tourists that filed along here half a century ago. Mrs. Trollope says:—

All the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way. The descriptions of fifty years ago do not need to have a word changed in order to exactly describe the same region as it appears today—except as to the “trigness” of the houses. The whitewash is gone from the Negro cabins now; and many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white, have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected look. It is the blight of the war. Twenty-one years ago everything was trim and trig and bright along the “coast,” just as it had been in 1827, as described by those tourists.

Unfortunate tourists! People humbugged them with stupid and silly lies, and then laughed at them for believing and printing the same. They told Mrs. Trollope that the alligators—or crocodiles, as she calls them—were terrible creatures; and backed up the statement with a blood-curdling account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into a squatter cabin one night and ate up a woman and five children. The woman, by herself, would have satisfied any ordinarily impossible alligator; but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children besides. One would not imagine that jokers of this robust breed would be sensitive—but they were. It is difficult, at this day, to understand, and impossible to justify, the reception which the book of the grave, honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable, well-meaning Captain Basil Hall got. Mrs. Trollope’s account of it may perhaps entertain the reader; therefore I have put it in the Appendix.
²⁰

The approaches to New Orleans were familiar; general aspects were unchanged. When one goes flying through London along a railway propped in the air on tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms through the open windows, but the lower half of the houses is under his level and out of sight. Similarly, in high-river stage, in the New Orleans region, the water is up to the top of the enclosing levee rim, the flat country behind it lies low—representing the bottom of a dish—and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.

The old brick salt warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city looked as they had always looked; warehouses which had had a kind of Aladdin’s lamp experience, however, since I had seen them; for when the war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night leaving them packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountain of salt turned into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and to so dizzy a height had the war news sent up the price of the article.

The vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there were as many ships as ever: but the long array of steamboats had vanished; not altogether, of course, but not much of it was left.