We were approaching Memphis, in front of which city, and witnessed by
its people, was fought the most famous of the river battles of the Civil War.
Two men whom I had served under, in my river days, took part in that fight:
Mr. Bixby, head pilot of the Union fleet, and Montgomery, Commodore of the
Confederate fleet. Both saw a great deal of active service during the war,
and achieved high reputations for pluck and capacity.
As we neared Memphis, we began to cast about for an excuse to stay
with the 'Gold Dust' to the end of her course—Vicksburg. We were
so pleasantly situated, that we did not wish to make a change.
I had an errand of considerable importance to do at Napoleon, Arkansas,
but perhaps I could manage it without quitting the 'Gold Dust.'
I said as much; so we decided to stick to present quarters.
The boat was to tarry at Memphis till ten the next morning. It is a
beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the river.
The streets are straight and spacious, though not paved in a way to incite
distempered admiration. No, the admiration must be reserved for the town's
sewerage system, which is called perfect; a recent reform, however, for it
was just the other way, up to a few years ago—a reform resulting from
the lesson taught by a desolating visitation of the yellow-fever. In
those awful days the people were swept off by hundreds, by thousands;
and so great was the reduction caused by flight and by death together,
that the population was diminished three-fourths, and so remained for a time.
Business stood nearly still, and the streets bore an empty Sunday aspect.
Here is a picture of Memphis, at that disastrous time,
drawn by a German tourist who seems to have been an eye-witness
of the scenes which he describes. It is from Chapter VII,
of his book, just published, in Leipzig, 'Mississippi-Fahrten, von
Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg.'—
'In August the yellow-fever had reached its extremest height.
Daily, hundreds fell a sacrifice to the terrible epidemic.
The city was become a mighty graveyard, two-thirds of the population
had deserted the place, and only the poor, the aged and the sick,
remained behind, a sure prey for the insidious enemy.
The houses were closed: little lamps burned in front of many—
a sign that here death had entered. Often, several lay
dead in a single house; from the windows hung black crape.
The stores were shut up, for their owners were gone away or dead.
'Fearful evil! In the briefest space it struck down and swept away
even the most vigorous victim. A slight indisposition, then an hour
of fever, then the hideous delirium, then—the Yellow Death !
On the street corners, and in the squares, lay sick men, suddenly overtaken
by the disease; and even corpses, distorted and rigid. Food failed.
Meat spoiled in a few hours in the fetid and pestiferous air,
and turned black.
'Fearful clamors issue from many houses; then after a season
they cease, and all is still: noble, self-sacrificing men come
with the coffin, nail it up, and carry it away, to the graveyard.
In the night stillness reigns. Only the physicians and the
hearses hurry through the streets; and out of the distance,
at intervals, comes the muffled thunder of the railway train,
which with the speed of the wind, and as if hunted by furies,
flies by the pest-ridden city without halting.'
But there is life enough there now. The population exceeds forty thousand
and is augmenting, and trade is in a flourishing condition. We drove
about the city; visited the park and the sociable horde of squirrels there;
saw the fine residences, rose-clad and in other ways enticing to the eye;
and got a good breakfast at the hotel.
A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi:
has a great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops;
and manufactories of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil;
and is shortly to have cotton mills and elevators.
Her cotton receipts reached five hundred thousand bales last year—
an increase of sixty thousand over the year before. Out from
her healthy commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway;
and a sixth is being added.
This is a very different Memphis from the one which the vanished
and unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put
into their books long time ago. In the days of the now
forgotten but once renowned and vigorously hated Mrs. Trollope,
Memphis seems to have consisted mainly of one long street of
log-houses, with some outlying cabins sprinkled around rearward
toward the woods; and now and then a pig, and no end of mud.
That was fifty-five years ago. She stopped at the hotel.
Plainly it was not the one which gave us our breakfast.
She says—
'The table was laid for fifty persons, and was nearly full.
They ate in perfect silence, and with such astonishing rapidity
that their dinner was over literally before ours was begun;
the only sounds heard were those produced by the knives and forks,
with the unceasing chorus of coughing, ETC.'
'Coughing, etc.' The 'etc.' stands for an unpleasant word there,
a word which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes prints.
You will find it in the following description of a steamboat dinner
which she ate in company with a lot of aristocratic planters;
wealthy, well-born, ignorant swells they were, tinselled with the usual
harmless military and judicial titles of that old day of cheap shams
and windy pretense—
'The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table;
the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized
and devoured; the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation;
the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it
was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful
manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade
seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful
manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife,
soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded
by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old world;
and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an
hour of enjoyment.'
