Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [16]
From just about anywhere on the Mississippi’s great branches, the journey down to the delta was a matter of a few days or a few weeks; the return trip could take the better part of a year. An upriver journey, before the rise of the steamboats, was a nearly impossible proposition. There came to be endless varieties of contrivances to force boats against the current. Most often people hoisted sails. If the wind was against them, they’d break out the oars. Some of the simple paddle-wheel boats were powered by hand-cranked treadmills; others had treadmills powered by horses or cattle. Keelboats were moved against the current by a peculiar technique known as poling. It was a strange and mesmerizing spectacle. The keelboat crew, all wearing the bright red shirts of the voyageurs, would line up on deck on the side of the boat nearest to the shore. Each man carried a long wooden pole tipped with an iron shoe. At a signal from the captain, they’d all lower the poles into the water and plant the shoes in the river mud. Then, gripping the poles as firmly as they could, they’d march in a line toward the stern. As each man reached the stern, he’d raise his pole up and hurry to the back of the line, where he’d plant the shoe in the mud again and resume marching. Slowly, lumberingly, the boat would slide forward beneath their feet.
Larger boats required grander techniques. The big barges were moved by warping. This involved running heavy ropes or cables through an anchor that was fixed to the shallows, or else looping them around the biggest tree or boulder onshore, and then out to a tugboat in the channel. The tugboat would move downriver with the current, and the rope would be pulled around the pivot to drag the barge upriver. When no tug was available, the rope would simply be run back from the pivot to the barge itself, and the entire crew would draw it in by hand. Sometimes the crew wouldn’t even bother with the rope or the pivot: they’d all just reach out from the barge to grab hold of the bushes on the riverbank, and they’d pull until the boat moved a few feet forward or the bushes were uprooted. This was called bushwhacking.
The most straightforward, brute-force method of upriver movement was also the most exhausting. It was known as cordelling. The crew would go ashore with a heavy rope that had been tied to the bow, and they would simply drag the boat forward. They thrashed through the underbrush, sank to their knees in the mud of the riverbanks, waded chest-deep through reedy sloughs and swamps, untangled the line from bristling stumps, on and on, sunup to sundown. The rule of thumb for a cordelle’s progress was this: a boat moving downriver with the current could sometimes make ten miles an hour; a boat going upriver by cordelle was lucky to make ten miles a day.
There were plenty of times when nothing worked. The wind died, and the sails were useless. The current was too strong or the boat was too heavy to be moved with oars. The river bottom in the shallows was so muddy that the iron-shoed poles sank through it like butter. A landslide or a sprawl of fallen timber along the bank made it impossible to go ashore with a line for warping. The shores were swamps a half a mile deep on either side and there was no solid ground for a cordelle. Boats were sometimes stranded for days or weeks, until the wind picked up, the river rose or fell, or a passing steamboat in a rare moment of kindness offered a tow—or until the crew finally abandoned the boat and looked for another way to go on.
It was no wonder that many voyageurs got down to the delta and