Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [22]
The scale of the landscape, too, created its own dangers. Settlements were still thinly spread; if a voyageur had his foot crushed by a loose barrel, he could have gangrene by the time the boat reached the next town with a doctor. Along most of the river the banks were still wholly wild, and going ashore there for any reason was perilous. There were large predators roaming along the riverbanks, bears and panthers and wolf packs; and there were human predators as well, Indian hunting parties and river pirates and armed settlers who didn’t like strangers. Lighting a fire was a major risk, for the adversaries it might attract—but in most of the country to go without a fire was even worse: the nights in the North Country could be punishingly cold, and in the South the mosquito swarms were so thick that they could drive people to madness.
The prairies of the central valley were probably the trickiest places to go ashore, because they seemed so simple: just treeless seas of grass spreading out evenly across a gently rolling terrain. They were easily passable in the spring, when the grasses were new, and in the autumn, when the grasses had died and had been burned off by the prairie fires. But in the summer the grasses grew more than ten feet high and offered no landmarks of any kind. Anyone who ventured more than a few feet from shore would become hopelessly disoriented in their rushing, sighing depths, broken only by the crisscrossing tracks left by the grazing deer. People were known to take hours or days to get back to the riverbank after thrashing around helplessly in the interior; inevitably there were stories about the unlucky wanderers who never did get back and whose skeletons weren’t found till the grasses dwindled in the fall.
But the greatest danger was the river itself, even when it seemed the most placid. A simple fall overboard could be fatal. The gigantic volume of the current caused complex forms of turbulence in the deep waters that were invisible on the surface, strong vortices and long trailing undertows that could suck down the hardiest swimmer. As one writer noted, “It is said that nothing that ever sunk beneath its muddy surface was known to rise again.” But the worst danger for a man overboard was the temperature of the water. Since the river was fed by meltwater tributaries in the Far North, even in high summer it could be bitterly cold. The slow-moving waters in the shallows were warmed by the sun and could at times become almost tepid, but the main current remained hidden in the darkness beneath the immense murky weight of the river and never got much above freezing. Anybody who was drawn down into the river depths for more than a few minutes would most likely succumb to hypothermia.
This was why a man overboard was generally considered a man lost. Even if the rest of the crew noticed in time that he was floundering in the water, there usually wasn’t much they could do for him; the boats couldn’t be turned around against the force of the current, and most were too unwieldy to be maneuvered quickly into shore—assuming the crew was willing to try. The truth was that most voyageurs took for granted that anybody who went into the water at all was doomed, and they usually wouldn’t bother to try throwing out a line. And anyway drowning was probably the most merciful way to go. A man who did manage to make it to shore found himself in a deserted and inhospitable country, perhaps hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. He was soaking wet and blue from the cold, and with no way of building a fire, he would likely be dead of exposure by morning. The last sight he would get of his boat, it was gliding impassively downriver and vanishing around a bend for good.
3
The Comet’s Tail
WHENEVER THE RIVER MEN TIRED of their technical shoptalk, they would fall to reminiscing about the river. The river, for them, wasn’t just the most interesting subject in the world; it was the only subject in the world. They would boast of their skill in a crisis. They would tell stories