Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [21]
This is what routinely stunned visitors and new settlers: the violence and unpredictability of weather in the river valley. It wasn’t just the deep freeze of the northern winters, the flooded springs, or the mosquito-swarming summers; it was the daily calamity of the storms. Soldiers in the tallgrass prairies reported being caught in freak thunderstorms, which they called downspouts—presumably what meteorologists now call microbursts—where the rain came down so heavily they had to steeple their hands over their noses to go on breathing.
Even an ordinary spring thunderstorm could be perilous. The journalist Thomas Bangs Thorpe described one. He and a few companions were being led by an Indian guide through the wild country along the wooded bluffs on the east bank of the river when they saw a big storm billowing up over the hills on the far shore. The only shelter they could find was in a crude log cabin on the riverbank that had been abandoned by its previous inhabitants. The storm hit toward sundown, and it grew steadily worse as the evening went on. The rain was pouring in through the chinks in the logs; Thorpe wrote that they “were soon literally afloat.” A lightning strike a few hundred yards from the cabin set a huge oak ablaze, and soon the entire stand of trees that surrounded the oak was burning. The fury of the rain turned the fire into a tumult of steam, and the illumination of the lightning falling on the river was so strange that it seemed to Thorpe like something out of the book of Revelation. The river had, he wrote, “a smooth but mysterious looking surface that resembled in the glare of the lightning, a mirror of bronze, and to heighten this almost unearthly effect, the forest trees that lined its most distant shores, rose up like mountains of impenetrable darkness, against clouds burning with fire.”
As the storm raged on, Thorpe’s companions fell asleep. Thorpe was baffled by their cavalier attitude; he sat sleepless while the sound of their snoring added to his misery. Then sometime toward morning the Indian guide touched him on the arm and gestured for him to listen. Thorpe could hear nothing other than the roaring and drumming of the rain. The Indian suddenly jumped up and headed for the door. That woke one of Thorpe’s companions, who immediately grabbed for his rifle and demanded to know what was going on. “River too near,” the Indian said. Thorpe’s companion listened for a moment, and then shouted, “He’s right, so help me. The banks of the Mississippi are caving in.”
They made it out just in time. “The Indian was the last to leave the cabin,” Thorpe recalled, “and as he stepped from its threshold, the weighty unhewn logs that composed it, crumbled, along with the rich soil, into the swift-running current of the mysterious river.”
Even when there were no great events, no land-remaking floods or apocalyptic storms, the sheer scale of the river could be treacherous. Sometimes the issue was the river’s titanic lulling sameness, its vast, silent, and unhurried flow day after day: boats often came to grief for no other reason than that their crews simply couldn’t stay alert any longer. And when something did go wrong, it would suddenly become blindingly clear just how far one was from any help. A sudden squall or a swell could knock over one of the little braziers the crews kept lit on the deck and within moments the cargo could be set ablaze, or the horses or the cattle could have been panicked into a stampede—and even on the most crowded stretches of the river, the nearest boat was likely to be hundreds of yards away, bobbing along in