Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [15]
All the boats were crammed with cargo. A ceaseless torrent of goods was coming downriver. The big rafts carried pine lumber from the North Woods, furs and hides from the Great Plains, and wheat and corn from the prairies. The barges carried copper and lead ore from Wisconsin and Minnesota, and glistening mountains of coal from the mines along the Ohio. The flatboats and keelboats carried pungent barrels of cider and whiskey; they carried coils of hemp rope and stinking wheels of cheese; they carried avalanches of corn ears, apples, cabbage heads, potatoes; they carried complaining flocks of chickens, turkeys, and geese and herds of skittish horses and cattle and pigs. Some carried the North’s most exotic exports, ice and snow, which at their destination were stored in dry wells and deep caves; snow flavored with rose water was always a great treat during a delta summer.
And they were carrying people—immigrants, itinerant laborers, migrant workers following the seasons. People may have been the most common and the least valuable cargo on the river. They were uncounted, uncataloged, unremembered; nobody cared whether they reached their destination or what happened to them once they arrived. The only people who were kept track of were slaves, because they came with a specific dollar value attached. Thousands of slaves were brought down the river each year. Those who transported them were known as soul drivers. Everyone on the river could recognize the soul drivers’ boats. They had a peculiar place in the impromptu society of the river. People in the lower valley took the existence of slavery for granted and universally regarded the abolitionist movement with contempt—but there was also a widespread belief that the slave trade itself was a dirty business and that the slavers were the lowest of the low. The boats of the soul drivers glided downriver on their own and were shunned by the other river people wherever they laid up for the night.
Darting among the armadas of the downriver traffic were shifting constellations of smaller boats making short hops from port to port. These were the boats of the river merchants. They went from town to village to plantation, anywhere there was a levee or a dock where they could tie up and display their wares. They could be found on any stretch of the river: dealers in kitchenware and cabinetry and furniture, sellers of books and plows, craftsmen of scythes and brooms and spinning wheels. The river had more than one floating smithy with a working forge. There were floating greenhouses selling exotic plants. There were floating daguerreotype studios, where people could pose for formal portraits. The river had its own tailors and haberdashers, knife sharpeners and tin workers; there were boats that were fully stocked general stores, with polished countertops and neatly stacked shelves displaying bolts of coarse cloth for sale by the yard, barrels of flat-head nails, and the latest newspapers and gazettes from New Orleans and St. Louis. Then there were the showboats, the traveling troupes of actors and musicians and acrobats. There were the doctors with their medicine shows: steam doctors, magnetic doctors, hydrological doctors, milk-sick doctors, homeopaths, vitopaths, mesmerists, baunscheidtists, and sellers of patent medicines. They traveled with musicians and actors, who’d sing and put on burlesque routines to draw the crowd, and once they’d made their sales, they’d be back on the river again before anybody had a chance to examine the contents of the bottles they’d just bought. And there were the gambling boats and the brothel boats—the latter came to be known as gunboats—that would anchor at a discreet distance from towns and villages, and they’d do their business until the landsmen organized a “vigilance committee” to chase them away.
The most startling sight for many travelers was the houseboats. These were rafts, sometimes eighty or ninety feet long, carrying