Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [93]
Croakers are fried and served with garnish of parsley or lemon.
—The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, 1901
Rain falling on nearly half of California eventually drains into the San Francisco Bay. But the Mississippi River drains almost half the land of the entire continental United States: 41 percent of it, from New York to Montana and from West Virginia to Colorado. After the Amazon and the Nile, it’s the third-largest drainage basin in the world. Twain believed that rain falling in part of twenty-eight states ended in the river.
You’d think that such an imposing flow would have carved itself a permanent bed, fixed and immutable as the walls of the Grand Canyon. But the Mississippi flows through some of the flattest land on earth, dropping a miserly three inches for every mile it runs. And though near Twain’s Missouri hometown it usually remained between rocky walls, in the flat, silty country below Cairo, Illinois, it was free: the lower river ran wild. There, when the river wanted to slip its banks—carving out a new course through old woodlands, over a farm, or through a well-established town—there was nothing in the world to stop it. When René-Robert de La Salle explored the river, Twain believed, he had traveled an entirely different flow; the old bed was dry, forgotten. A shift in the river could bless tiny settlements with commerce or abandon thriving market towns to die. The Mississippi drowned what it wanted to drown.
In flood times the river turned surreal. The wedding-cake paddle wheelers would grope along backcountry chutes, through ancient forests and swamps, past forlorn families gathered on the roofs of sunken farmhouses. At such times land and water bled together. “We’ll creep through cracks where you’ve always thought was solid land,” Bixby told Twain. “We’ll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river to one side; we’ll see the hind-side of every island between New Orleans and Cairo.” In the cracks they’d hang out torches to aid in steering past the “swinging grape-vines[,] flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks, and all the spendthrift riches of the forest foliage” that overhung the narrow banks. During high floods they might lose track of the river’s channel entirely—especially when piles of sugarcane refuse, or bagasse, were burning inland, leaving the world gray, indistinct, and filled with a smoke “like Satan’s own kitchen.” Piloting could seem a dreamtime; even the river’s fish were bizarre, prehistoric species like the giant paddlefish, blue catfish, and alligator gar. In Twain’s youth the Mississippi was a beautiful, dangerous, defiant world.
So upon his return in 1882, it was exceptionally painful for Twain to find the once thriving, once wild river tamed. At the St. Louis wharf, once jammed by a “solid mile” of steamboats, a scant half dozen now waited quietly for cargo; seeing what rails had done to the vibrant port made Twain feel very old. “Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812,” he reflected. “At the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature.”
What was more, the United States River Commission (predecessor of the Army Corps of Engineers) had been hard at work. And though Twain didn’t know what the results of their labor would be, he was clearly disturbed. Wing dams guided the current; dikes constrained it; the shoreline was shaved of timber, loaded down with stone ballast and wooden pilings. “One who knows the Mississippi,” Twain said, “will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it,