Read The Great American Steamboat Race Online
Authors: Benton Rain Patterson
The Great American Steamboat Race (29 page)
Also coming aboard the
Lee
were a number of newspaper reporters, who boarded the vessel on the fly. One, apparently desperate to share in some of the race’s drama, related the experience to his editor: “Owing to the fact that neither the
Lee
nor the
Natchez
landed here [Cairo] your correspondent was so engaged in making arrangements to get on board and off again, that no regular report can be sent to you. Dropping on board the
Lee
in mid-river as though shot from a cannon, I managed to obtain the following items during the two-mile ride....”
16
He then went on to succinctly relate high points of the
Lee
’s voyage, information that had previously been published.
It is precisely 6: 10
P
.
M
. and the steamer Lee has just passed a point opposite Cairo ... bound for St. Louis. She has no time to pay her respects to Cairo in respect for the prolonged shouts upon shouts that the multitude threw across the water toward her as she passed.
The avenger is on her track, and though she is ahead of the White’s time and ahead of the Natchez’s time, and ahead of everything in the world except herself, she has no leisure for courtesies and compliments.
The race is considered virtually ended, without an accident between here and St. Louis to delay the Lee till the Natchez can overhaul her.
But she is not content with simple victory. She has spent much labor and sacrificed much money to prepare for this race and is determined to set her peg where it will not be pulled up soon. The J.M. White’s time remained untouched for twenty-six years. Capt. Cannon wants his boat’s time to remain untouched to the end of the present century.
17
At 7:08
P
.
M
. the
Natchez
, having slowed to pick up its six hundred boxes of coal on the run, as the
Robert E. Lee
had done, without mishap, passed Cairo, now running about twenty miles behind the
Lee
.
Both boats were entering the final and most crucial leg of the race, from Cairo to St. Louis, with night quickly enveloping the river and the water at a low stage. A steamer descending from St. Louis, the
Rubicon
, had arrived at Cairo just minutes earlier than the
Lee
and had reported that there was but eight feet of water in the main channel above Cairo. To make matters worse, the Mississippi above Cairo was an obstacle course of islands, rocks, sandbars and narrow, often perilously shallow channels. Because of those dangers, some steamer captains routinely refused to take their boats on the run between Cairo and St. Louis after dark.
• 13•
The Fog
Not long after it had pulled away from Cairo, the
Natchez
engaged its first obstacle. Near the Illinois shore it ran aground on a sandbar, which cost it more time as it backed and struggled to free itself, then, managing to escape, sped forward again as night fell upon the river. Minutes later a new menace, more blinding, more threatening than nightfall, came seeping silently over the dark river. Fog. In places along the river’s course the gray fog was a wispy veil. In other places it was too thick to be penetrated by the eye. The riverbanks disappeared behind it.
The
Natchez
now was passing its obstacles with extreme caution, slowly hugging Elk Island, staying to starboard of it, slipping past the pair of midriver islands called the Two Sisters. At Dog Tooth Bend the boat struck bottom again. More time lost. When it was free again, the
Natchez
’s pilot showed more caution, feeling his way along, stopping and reversing engines when he suspected a threatening sandbar, before ramming into it.
The wits among the passengers aboard the
Natchez
, having abandoned all hope of catching up to the
Lee
, began making jokes about the
Natchez
’s creeping pace. The best chance of seeing the
Lee
again, one wag remarked, was on its return trip from St. Louis. The
St. Louis Republican
’s reporter aboard the boat, at last giving in to the
Natchez
’s bleak situation and faintly critical of the
Natchez
’s pilots, wrote that “the race with the
Lee
... was virtually ended, unless the pilots of the latter should go crazy and jump overboard, and even in such a contingency there would be but little chance for the
Natchez.
”
1
Captain Leathers, fulminating with curses and other blue language, apparently heard none of it and would not have been deterred if he had. He continued to press his pilots and other crewmen on. At another sharp twist in the river, called Hackett’s Bend, the
Natchez
grounded again, with a long scrape of the hull followed by a thud that halted forward movement. The
reporter from the
St. Louis Republican
observed that “it really seemed we were engaged in a sleighing expedition instead of a steamboat race.”
It was now after nine
P
.
M
. The
Natchez
had left Cairo more than two hours earlier and had come but twenty-two miles. It was running out of the channel and into the river bottom about every two miles, suffering more delays each time it had to free itself. So much for the claim that the
Natchez
had the best pilots on the Mississippi.
The fog was deepening, but Leathers kept the
Natchez
inching through it, warning crewmen he had posted on the decks to keep a sharp eye out for whatever lay hidden ahead. It was clear to crewmen and passengers alike that he had no intention of stopping. He knew that the fog and low water must be hampering Cannon and the
Robert E. Lee
as well as the
Natchez
and all he had to do to stay in the race was to keep going. After all, the
Lee
, with its deeper draft, was more susceptible to grounding than was the
Natchez
.
He managed to make it past the shallows off Goose Island, then past the jagged, underwater rocks of the Grand Chain and past the landing at Thebes, Illinois, the lights of which could be seen through the hazy fog, which was just a thin cloud at that point. Above Thebes the river straightened, and the run got easier, except for the threat presented by a rocky islet that the
Natchez
must pass to larboard before continuing on into a deep channel. The
Natchez
slid safely past the islet, turned westward and sought the reassuring wharf lights of Cape Girardeau, which, it turned out, were barely visible through the worsening fog.
Above Cape Girardeau the river was again strewn with rocky hulks jutting up from below the surface, a section of the Mississippi appropriately called Devil’s Country. The little islands, not numbered as the islands below Cairo were, were known by such hellish names as Devil’s Island, Devil’s Tea Table, Devil’s Bake Oven and Devil’s Backbone. After them came Dog Island and Muddy Island, only slightly less forbidding. As the
Natchez
groped toward them, the fog became nearly impossible to deal with. Leathers tried to cope, inching the
Natchez
through the shrouded chain of rocky islets and doubtlessly wondering if he might at any moment come across a stranded
Robert E. Lee
, run afoul of the ruinous rocks — and perhaps hoping that he would. Now Leathers’s pilots were ready to give it up, the hazards being too great. All they could see, and then only fleetingly, was a small patch of water directly off the bow. Leathers, though, insisted that they keep going.
Somewhere around Hamburg Island Leathers consulted his watch and learned that midnight was just minutes away. Evidently tired and expecting nothing but more tension and danger ahead, he at last decided he had had enough fog for one night. With some ninety passengers aboard and his boat and crew at risk, facing the mounting danger of smashing into fog-hidden rocks, Captain Leathers gave up the idea of a continued pursuit — for the time being. Around half past twelve, he ordered his pilots to feel their way toward the Missouri shore and get close enough for the deckhands to go ashore and tie the
Natchez
to a tree, and there they would impatiently wait for the fog to lift.
Warily braving the threat of sudden grounding, pilots Frank Clayton and Mort Burnham groped through the thick fog and managed to find the riverbank without running into it. Once the vessel was secured they ordered the
Natchez
’s engines stopped and resigned themselves to an indeterminate delay.
The place where they landed turned out to be Kinney’s Point, at the top of Devil’s Island, close to Shepherd’s Landing, the site of a woodyard run by a man named Delvory. Apparently thinking he had acquired a customer, Delvory at that late hour came walking through the fog to talk to the officers of the
Natchez
. From Delvory Captain Leathers learned that the
Robert E. Lee
had crept by Shepherd’s Landing not more than twenty-five minutes earlier. In the clutching fog, the
Lee
’s lead had shrunk to just twenty-five minutes. It still could be caught, Leathers believed, if the fog would dissipate enough for the
Natchez
to get back in the race. It was now 12:35
A
.
M
., Monday, July 4.
The
Lee
, with its St. Louis pilots at the wheel, had steamed briskly from Cairo in daylight, and its passengers had happily received the salutes of passing steamers on their way downriver, the
Nick Wall
, the
St. Joseph
and the
Olive Branch
, before the sun set behind the trees that crowded the Missouri shore. Once the sun had sunk out of sight, the air swiftly took on a damp chill. On the Missouri side of the river bonfires were lighted, for the racing steamers or the imminent Fourth of July, or both.
At Cape Girardeau, which it reached about nine-thirty, some four hours and forty-four minutes out of Cairo, the
Robert E. Lee
was greeted by more bonfires. It was there that those aboard the
Lee
noticed the wispy haze drifting over the river, dulling the brilliance of the bonfires’ flames. Fog was moving in.
As the fog thickened, the
Lee
kept moving, but Captain Cannon called a conference with the St. Louis pilots, Jesse Jameson and Enoch King, and his regular pilots as well as others whose judgment he trusted. After conferring, and with the approval of Jameson and King, Cannon decided to keep moving despite the fog, which, deep into it, pilot Jameson claimed was the worst he had ever encountered in some twenty-five years on the river. “Ordinarily,” assistant engineer John Wiest reported later, “the boat would have laid up to wait for it to clear away, but those St. Louis pilots were game and never said anything about quitting.”
2
What those pilots did say, though, was that they wanted the help of “the best eyes on board,”
3
which they got, to help them keep the boat from harm. They also got some other extraordinary precautions ordered by Cannon. Cannon stationed both Jameson and King in the pilothouse and put his other pilots — Conner, Pell and Clayton — at the forward end of the texas deck, closer to the bow than were Jameson and King in the pilothouse. He then positioned three other sharp-eyed, river-wise crewmen on the main deck, at the boat’s prow. And he lowered the
Lee
’s yawl into the river, manned by sturdy oarsmen who would row it out in front of the
Lee
, with leadsmen aboard to measure the river’s depth with poles and weighted lines. Cannon then stationed himself forward on the hurricane deck, where he could watch and hear the warnings of the men on duty below and immediately relay those warnings to Jameson and King in the pilothouse.
“In the engine room,” Wiest, the eyewitness, said, “they were using a moderate head of steam, with a man at the throttle of each engine. If the cry came, ‘Hard a starboard!’ [signaling a sharp turn to starboard], the pilot stopped a wheel until the boat headed away from the [left] shore, and used the same tactics reversed if the shore was too close on his left.”
4
Cannon was struggling with himself as well as the fog, trying to decide whether his obsession with getting to St. Louis first was driving him, his boat and all aboard to destruction. He was trying to decide whether it was time to call a halt, even if it meant that Leathers and the
Natchez
might pass him. For all he knew, the
Natchez
might not be in fog. Vacillating between stopping and continuing, he at one point told pilot George Clayton he wanted to put into shore, but Clayton apparently talked him out of it, reminding him that fog is not all encompassing, that it diminishes and has an end to it somewhere. And so the creeping
Robert E. Lee
continued blindly upriver, guided by the calls of the leadsmen in the yawl. Even so, it struck the riverbank once, then backed off and found the channel again.
Somewhere around Muddy Island, at about two o’clock in the morning, a breeze sprang up, and gradually the blinding mass of gray tore apart and melted into thin, blowing wisps, drifting aimlessly over the water. By the light of the moon, the
Lee
’s crew could actually see the water. The fog was gone. Up ahead, the big river was wide and clear. In the
Lee
’s pilothouse the pilot rang for the engine room to resume full speed as the yawl turned back to the steamer and the oarsmen and leadsmen climbed aboard. Captain Cannon and his pilots could then see the lights of the community of Grand Tower, which stood on the Illinois shore opposite the rocky islet called the Grand To w e r . T h e
Robert E. Lee
, steaming swiftly, was now just a little more than a hundred miles from St. Louis.