University of Virginia Library

LARGE AND SMALL STEAMERS OF THE
MISSISSIPPI.

The steamboats of the Mississippi are as remarkable for
size and form as the river itself. Gigantic specimens
of art that go bellowing over the swift and muddy current,
like restless monsters, breathing out the whisperings
of the hurricane, clanking and groaning as if an
earthquake was preparing to convulse the world, obscuring
in clouds of smoke the sun in the daytime, or
rolling over the darkness of night a flame as if the volcano
had burst from the bosom of the deep.

Who, without wondering, sees them for the first time,
as they rush along, filled with an ever-busy throng of
travellers, and loaded with the boundless wealth, that
teems from the rich soil, as the reward of the labor of
the American husbandman!

The Mississippi is also very remarkable for little
steamboats, small specimens of water-craft, that are

famous for their ambitious puffings, noisy captains, and
gigantic placards—boats that run up little streams that
empty into the Mississippi—boats that go beyond places
never dreamed of in geography—never visited by travellers,
or even marked down in the scrutinizing book of
the tax collector.

The first time one finds himself in one of these
boats, he looks about him as did Gulliver when he got
in Lilliput. It seems as if you are larger and more
magnificent than an animated colossus—you find, on
going on the boat, that your feet are on the lower deck
and your head up-stairs; the after-cabin is so disposed
of that you can sit inside of it, and yet be near the
bows. The ladies' cabin has but one berth in it, and
that only as wide as a shelf.

The machinery is tremendous; two large kettles
firmly set in brick, attached to a complicated-looking
coffee mill, two little steampipes and one big one.

And then the way that the big steam-pipe will smoke,
and the little ones let off steam, is singular. Then the
puffing of the little coffee-mill! why it works as spitefully
as a tom-cat with his tail caught in the crack of a
door.

Then the engineer, to see him open “the furnace”
doors, and pitch in wood, and open the little stop-cocks
to see if the steam is not too high, all so much like a big
steamer. Then the name of the craft, “THE U. S. MAIL,
EMPEROR,” the letters covering over the whole side of

the boat, so that it looks like a locomotive advertisement.

Then the “U. S. MAIL” deposited in one corner of the
cabin, and two rifles standing near, as if to guard it;
said mail being in a bag that looks like a gigantic shotpouch,
fastened to a padlock, and said pouch filled with
three political speeches, franked by M. C.'s, one letter,
to a man who did not live at the place of its destination,
and a small bundle of post-office documents put in by
mistake.

The bell that rang for the boat's departure, was a
tremendous bell; it swung to and fro awfully; it was
big enough for a cathedral, and as it rung for the twentieth,
`last time,' one passenger came on board weighing
about three hundred, and the boat got under way.

“Let go that hawser,” shouted the captain in a
voice of thunder. Pe, wee, wee, pish, went the little
steampipe, and we were off. Our track lay for a time
down the Mississippi, and we went ahead furiously,
overhauled two rafts and a flat-boat within two hours,
and presented the appearance of a real big steamer most
valiantly, by nearly shaking to pieces in its waves.
The two light passengers got along very well, but whenever
the fat passenger got off a line with the centre of
the cabin, the pilot would give the bell one tap, and the
captain would bawl out, “Trim the boat.”

Captain Raft, of the U. S. Mail steamer Emperor,
it may not be uninteresting to know, was one of those

eccentric men that had a singular ambition to run a
boat where no one else could—he was fond of being a
great discoverer on a small scale. In one of his eccentric
humors, Captain Raft run the Emperor up Red
River, as the pilot observed, about “a feet,” which in
the southwest, means several hundred miles.

Among the passengers upon that occasion was old
Zeb Marston, a regular out-and-outer frontiersman, who
seemed to spend his whole life in settling out of the way
places, and locating his family in sickly situations. Zeb
was the first man that “blazed” a tree in Eagle Town,
on the Mountain Fork, and he was the first man that ever
choked an alligator to death with his hands, on the Big
Cossitot. He knew every snag, sawyer, nook and corner
of the Sabine, the Upper Red River, and their tributaries,
and when “bar whar scace,” he was wont to declare
war on the Cumanchos, and, for excitement, “used them
up terribly.”

But to our story—Zeb moved on Red River, settled
in a low, swampy, terrible place, and he took it as a
great honor that the Emperor passed his cabin; and, at
every trip the boat made, there was tumbled out at Zeb's
yard a barrel of new whiskey, (as regularly as she passed,)
for which was paid the full value in cord wood.

Now, Captain Raft was a kind man, and felt disposed
to oblige every resident that lived on his route of travel;
but it was unprofitable to get every week to Zeb's out-of-the-way
place, and as he landed the fifteenth barrel,

he expressed his surprise at the amount of whiskey consumed
at his “settlement,” and hinted it was rather an
unprofitable business for the boat. Zeb, at this piece
of information, “flared up,” raised his mane, shut his
“maulers,” and told Captain Raft he could whip him,—
the pilot, and deck hands, and if they would give him
the advantage of the “under grip,” he would let the piston-rod
of the engine punch him in the side all the time
the fight was going on.

Raft, at this display of fury from Zeb, cooled down
immediately, acknowledged himself “snagged,” begged
Zeb's pardon, and adjourned to the bar for a drink.
One glass followed another, until the heroes got into
the mellow mood, and Zeb, on such occasions, always
“went it strong” for his family. After praising their
beauty individually and collectively, he broke into the
pathetic, and set the Captain crying, by the following
heart-rending appeal:—

“Raft, Raft, my dear fellow, you talk about the
trouble of putting out a barrel of whiskey every week
at my diggins, when I have got a sick wife, and five small
children, and no cow!—whar's your heart?”

Dinner in due course of time was announced—the
table was covered with the largest roast beef, the largest
potatoes, and the largest carving-knife and fork that
ever floated, and the steward rang the largest bell for
dinner, and longer than any other steward would have
done, and the captain talked about the immense extent

of the Mississippi, the contemplated canal through the
Isthmus of Darien, and the ability of the steam warships;
he said, that in the contemplation of the subject,
“his feelings war propelled by five hundred horse-power—that
the bows of his imagination cut through
the muddy waters of reality—that the practicability of
his notions was as certain as a rudder in giving the proper
direction—that his judgment, like a safety-valve to
his mind, would always keep him from advocating any
thing that would burst up, and that it was unfortunate
that Robert Fulton had not lived to be President of the
United States.”

With such enlarged ideas he wiled away the hours
of dinner;—arriving at the mouth of “Dry Outlet” (a
little ditch that draws off some of the waters of the
Mississippi when very high), the pilot turned the bows
of the “Emperor” into its mouth, and shot down,
along with an empty flour barrel, with an alacrity that
sent the bows of the boat high and dry on land, the first
bend it came to.

A great deal of hard work got it off, and away the
steamer went again, at one time sideways, at another
every way, hitting against the soft alluvial banks, or
brushing the pipes among the branches of overhanging
trees. Finally the current got too strong, and carried
it along with alarming velocity. The bows of the boat
were turned up stream, and thus managed to keep an
onward progress compatible with safety.

The banks of the “dry outlet” were very low and very
swampy, and were disfigured occasionally by wretched
cabins, in which lived human beings, who, the captain
of the “Emperor” informed us, lived, as far as he could
judge, by sitting upon the head of a barrel and looking
out on the landscape, and at his boat as it passed. From
the fact that they had no arable land, and looked like
creatures fed on unhealthy air, we presume that was
their only occupation.

In time we arrived at the “small village,” the destination
of the “mail pouch;” “the passengers” landed
and visited the town. It was one of the ruins of a
great city, dreamed of by land speculators in “glorious
times.” Several splendidly-conceived mansions were
decaying about in the half-finished frames that were
strewn upon the ground. A barrel of whiskey was
rolled ashore, the mail delivered, the fat man got out,
and the steamer was again under way.

The “dry outlet” immerged into a broad inland
lake, which itself, with a peculiarity of the tributaries
of the Mississippi, emptied into that river. Our little
boat plunged on, keeping up with untiring consistency
all its original pretensions and puffing, and the same
clanking of tiny machinery, scaring the wild ducks and
geese, scattering the white cranes over our heads, and
making the cormorant screech with astonishment in
hoarser tones than the engine itself.

Occasionally we would land at a “squatter's settlement,”

turn round and come up to the banks with
grandeur, astonishing the squatter's children, and the
invalid hens that lived in the front yard. The captain
would pay up the bill for the wood, and off he would go
again as “big as all out doors,” and a great deal more
natural. Thus we struggled on, until, sailing up a stream
with incessant labor, such as we went down when we
commenced our sketch, we emerged into the world of
water that flows in the Mississippi. Down the rapid
current we gracefully swept, very much to the astonishment
of the permanent inhabitants on its banks.

Again for the “innumerable time,” the “furnaces”
consumed the wood, and as it had to be replenished, we
ran alongside one of those immense wood-yards, so peculiar
to the Mississippi, where lay, in one continuous pile,
thousands of cords of wood. The captain of the “Emperor,”
as he stopped his boat before it, hollowed out
from his upper deck, in a voice of the loudest tone—
“Got any wood here?”

Now the owner of the wood-yard, who was a very
rich man, and a very surly one, looked on the “pile,” and
said “he thought it possible.”

“Then,” said the captain, “how do you sell it a
cord?”

The woodman eyed the boat and its crew; and eyed
the passengers, and then said, “he would not sell the
boat any wood, but the crew might come ashore and
get their hats full of chips for nothing.”

Hereupon the five hundred horse-power of the captain's
feelings, and the rudder and the safety-valves of his
well-regulated mind, became surcharged with wrath, and
he vented out abuse on the wood-yard and its owner,
which was expressed in “thoughts that breathe and
words that burn.”

A distant large boat, breasting the current like a
thing of life, at this moment coming in sight, gave us
a hint, and rushing ashore amid the “wrath,” we bid
the “Emperor” and its enraged captain a hearty good-bye,
and in a few moments more we dwindled into insignificance
on board of the magnificent —, the pride
and wonder of the Western waters.