The Paths of Inland Commerce [52]
of Hercules. The great river boldly fought its conquerors, asking and giving no quarter, biding its time when opposed by the brave but crushing the fearful on sight. In one respect alone could it be depended upon--it was never the same. It is said to bring down annually four hundred million tons of mud, but its eccentricity in deciding where to wash away and where to deposit its load is still the despair of river pilots. The great river could destroy islands and build new ones overnight with the nonchalance of a child playing with clay. It could shorten itself thirty miles at a single lunge. It could move inland towns to its banks and leave river towns far inland. It transferred the town of Delta, for instance, from three miles below Vicksburg to two miles above it. Men have gone to sleep in one State and have wakened unharmed in another, because the river decided in the night to alter the boundary line. In this way the village of Hard Times, the original site of which was in Louisiana, found itself eventually in Mississippi. Were La Salle to descend the river today by the route he traversed two and a half centuries ago, he would follow dry ground most of the way, for the river now lies practically everywhere either to the right or left of its old course.
If the Mississippi could perform such miracles upon its whole course without a show of effort, what could it not do with the little winding canal through its center called by pilots the "channel"? The flatboatmen had laboriously acquired the art of piloting the commerce of the West through this mazy, shifting channel, but as steamboats developed in size and power the man at the wheel had to become almost a superman. He needed to be. He must know the stage of water anywhere by a glance at the river banks. He must guess correctly the amount of "fill" at the head of dangerous chutes, detect bars "working down," distinguish between bars and "sand reefs" or "wind reefs" or "bluff reefs" by night as well as by day, avoid the" breaks" in the "graveyard" behind Goose Island, navigate the Hat Island chutes, or find the "middle crossing" at Hole-in-the-Wall. He must navigate his craft in fogs, in storms, in the face of treacherous winds, on black nights, with thousands of dollars' worth of cargo and hundreds of lives at stake.
As the golfer knows each knoll and tuft of grass on his home links, so the pilot learned his river by heart. Said one of these pilots to an apprentice:
"You see this has got to be learned .... A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there) and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways.... You only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD and never mind the one that's before your eyes."*
* Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," pp. 103-04.
No wonder that the two
If the Mississippi could perform such miracles upon its whole course without a show of effort, what could it not do with the little winding canal through its center called by pilots the "channel"? The flatboatmen had laboriously acquired the art of piloting the commerce of the West through this mazy, shifting channel, but as steamboats developed in size and power the man at the wheel had to become almost a superman. He needed to be. He must know the stage of water anywhere by a glance at the river banks. He must guess correctly the amount of "fill" at the head of dangerous chutes, detect bars "working down," distinguish between bars and "sand reefs" or "wind reefs" or "bluff reefs" by night as well as by day, avoid the" breaks" in the "graveyard" behind Goose Island, navigate the Hat Island chutes, or find the "middle crossing" at Hole-in-the-Wall. He must navigate his craft in fogs, in storms, in the face of treacherous winds, on black nights, with thousands of dollars' worth of cargo and hundreds of lives at stake.
As the golfer knows each knoll and tuft of grass on his home links, so the pilot learned his river by heart. Said one of these pilots to an apprentice:
"You see this has got to be learned .... A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there) and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways.... You only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD and never mind the one that's before your eyes."*
* Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," pp. 103-04.
No wonder that the two