Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [17]
She pursues her voyage, like man on his earthly pilgrimage, to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller of her species ever returns; for, being calculated to stem the current, she is useless after she has reached her destination, except as so much lumber.
But even if the voyageurs were freed from the deadweight of their boat, they didn’t find their return all that easy. By midcentury, if they were flush, they could buy a cheap passage on one of the steamboats—it was only a few dollars from New Orleans to St. Louis, if they were willing to sleep on deck and work off part of their fare by helping load and unload cargo at the stops along the way. Or they could hire onto one of the big barges returning upriver and spend months cordelling somebody else’s boat through the mud of the riverbanks. Many of them found it simpler to walk. Once their business in New Orleans was done, they’d set out on foot—up the forest trails, along the margins of endless swamps, through the trackless tallgrass prairies: month after month, all the way home.
That was the calendar time set by the river. A typical voyageur would set out with a load of cargo bound for New Orleans in the spring, arrive there in a few weeks, and then spend the rest of the spring and into the summer and sometimes the fall getting home. He’d rest up all winter—and then, the following spring, build a new flatboat, pick up a fresh load of cargo, and set out downriver again. Abraham Lincoln after he rode this circuit a couple of times said that it taught him what it felt like to be a piece of driftwood.
The boats ran all day, from dawn till sundown, but only the biggest boats were still on the river after dark. The rafts and barges went barreling on; everybody else looked for some secure place to hole up until morning. A night run in a flatboat or a keelboat was only for the reckless. People might do it if they were desperate, if they had an injured man and thought there might be a town with a doctor somewhere nearby—but they risked being capsized or stove in by an invisible snag, or running fatally aground on a sandbar, or being trapped by a whirlpool, or being swamped or run over by one of the great boats lording over the channels.
Toward dusk each day the boats began to collect into great archipelagoes off the levees of the port towns. It would happen from New Madrid south to the delta: dozens, sometimes hundreds, of boats clustering together, anchoring, tying up at docks, tossing ropes and cables from boat to boat, assembling into loose, floating cities. Soon cook fires in braziers would light up on the decks, dogs on different boats would bark furiously at each other, horses and livestock would shuffle and thump in their pens, and the sounds of fiddle music and stamping and singing and laughing would float up from a hundred places, mingling with the smoke of the cook fires. As the evening deepened and the lanterns were lit, people began moving from boat to boat, clambering over gunwales, hopping across roofs. They were bartering food, looking for jobs on other boats, passing on gossip, making deals for their cargo, and arranging convoys. It was a common practice to “lash” boats into a shoal of ten or twenty and travel downriver together to defend against the river pirates. The parties quickly grew rowdy. Sooner or later drunken fights began breaking out—it wasn’t unusual for a voyageur to drink himself into a blind, belligerent stupor every single night of his life. Then, around midnight, there’d be a general exodus toward shore.
Few towns were enthusiastic about welcoming the