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By Root 756 0

river people. At St. Louis, there was a night watch with fifty armed men assigned to the dock district, just to make sure that the river people didn’t stray too far from the levee. Many towns actually divided themselves in two, giving over one part to the river: that was how Vicksburg, Mississippi, for instance, held itself aloof from its disorderly riverfront companion Vicksburg Landing. Natchez, Mississippi, was divided by topography: the main town stood on a high bluff and was a decorous, gracious place of pillared porticoes, white church steeples, and brick storefronts; while around the base of the bluff was a second town, a crooked, squalid maze of slums and shanties, many of them built from wood salvaged from wrecked or abandoned flatboats. The official names for the two towns were Natchez and Natchez Landing, but more often they were called Natchez-on-the-Hill and Natchez-Under-the-Hill.

On summer evenings, it was the custom for the good people of Natchez-on-the-Hill to stroll to the edge of the bluff and take in the view of their fallen sister town and the boat city below. They’d survey the dirty smoke seething up from the chimneys, and the glare in the back alleys from the saloons and taverns, and beyond, on the river, the constellations of glittering lanterns and flickering cook fires swaying in the darkness. They’d listen with a kind of amused distaste to the disorderly music floating up from open doorways; they’d take in, as though they were spectators at a sporting event, the pops of gunfire and the frequent screams, many of them interrupted. They would congratulate themselves on the way they had carried out their quarantine. Not one of them would have ever admitted to being curious about what was going on down below the hill—much less confess to having, now and then, snuck down the bluff to sample the entertainment on offer there for themselves.

The boat cities hung together at the levees each night until just before dawn. But then, as the last stragglers were drifting in from the riverfront, the assemblies began to stir. The lines and cables between the boats were loosed and coiled up again, the anchors were drawn, breakfasts were frying, and there was a great creaking, thumping, slithering overture of sails raising and oars lowering. At sunrise the signal to depart would come. It was a weird, sonorous boom of a reveille; it came from the huge wooden trumpets known as river horns, sounding out from the flatboats and keelboats and shivering the air for a mile around.

Then the boat cities broke up. In ones and twos, and in the floes of lashed convoys, the boats drifted out into the shining expanse of the river, where they were caught up in the current and went scattering downstream. That was typically the last they’d all see of each other. The immensity of the river, the vagaries of the current, and the crowds of traffic down every bend meant that the next night they’d be sorted into wholly different congregations downriver. It was a rare event for any boats on their way to the delta to encounter each other twice. The river didn’t encourage lasting friendships.

2

Old Devil River

IN HYDROLOGICAL TERMS, the Mississippi was something of a freak. It was a titanic volume of ungoverned water flowing across a floodplain of very slight declivity. There were no mountain valleys to funnel it, or deep channels dug in the bedrock to keep it in place. It was traversing a flat and infinitely malleable surface of mud, silt, and clay—and this meant that it was free to move however and whenever its currents shifted.

Its basic form was an endless series of sinuously unfolding horseshoe curves, technically known as meander loops. The exact mechanism by which meander loops are created is still imperfectly understood, but it’s believed that the primary force shaping them is the natural tendency of flowing water to fall away from a straight line. The water in a meander loop actually requires far less energy to keep moving, even though it is covering so much more territory, than water traveling through a rigorously ruler-straight