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By Root 697 0

He enjoyed it enormously: he adored Montreal; he was awestruck by the natural grandeur of Quebec and the St. Lawrence Seaway; he was impressed by the canals (he called them “prodigious works of art”); he even admired the local steamboats, which he said were finer than those on the Mississippi. He then went on to Europe. This didn’t go as well: it wasn’t as interesting as the New World. He wrote that Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were “intrinsically handsomer towns” than any of the great European capitals. He was bored by all the museums and monuments. The European landscapes left him just as cold; after the sight of an American mountain range, the Alps and Apennines were “bald, ragged, revolting.”

He returned to America and his home in Alexandria. Once again he fell to brooding about the end. “I draw into my shell, abandoned by all others,” he wrote in a letter. In a poem he wrote:

Fondly I thought that, years ere this, my breast

Would cease to swell with joy or sorrow.

In May 1840, Flint and his son James were taking a steamboat trip up the Mississippi from Alexandria. Flint was sixty then; he was, needless to say, in poor health, and he’d retired from professional writing a few years earlier. He and James stopped off on May 7 in Natchez-Under-the-Hill. The town was at that point in the middle of one of its periodic attempts to clean up its image: there were still gambling houses, saloons, and brothels, but there were also dry-goods stores and haberdashers and barbershops, and there was a new hotel, called the Steam Boat Hotel, catering to the upscale river traveler.

Flint and his son had lunch in the Steam Boat Hotel’s elegant new dining room. It was a hot and humid day, and the tall windows were standing open. The sky was hazy and overcast, and beneath the clatterings and babble of the crowded room Flint could hear the mutterings of an approaching storm. He later described the sound as “a continual rumble of a hundred low thunders all melting together.” At around half past one, the sky grew so dark that the hotel staff had to bring out candles. By then the thunder had grown much louder. But nobody was alarmed. It still seemed to them like a typically stormy spring day in the lower valley.

After Flint finished his meal, he wandered restlessly through the lobby into a new barroom. It, too, had an impressive set of windows; these overlooked the main street and the levee. The levee was swarming, as it always was on spring afternoons: hundreds of flatboats, barges, and steamboats were gathered in the waters off the docks, all caught up in their routine frenzy of loading and unloading cargo. Beyond was the grand sweep of the river. Natchez had been built on the outer bank of a hairpin turn, and from where Flint was standing, he could look down the river for miles, as it flowed to the southwest between the Louisiana and Mississippi shores.

The view that afternoon was dominated by a rapidly approaching storm front that had swallowed up most of the sky. As Flint stood at the window, he had an unimpeded sight of “a terrific-looking black cloud, as though a well defined belt of black broad cloth, seeming a mile and a half wide, shooting up the river with fearful velocity.” He looked more closely and saw a weird specter: “At the end it poured out dark wreaths, resembling those of the steam-boat pipe.” He was looking at a tornado that had touched down on the river’s surface to the southwest, about twelve miles downstream, and was moving directly up the center of the channel straight at Natchez.

Another witness to the events of that day, J. H. Freleigh, the captain of the steamboat Prairie, recounted his experiences for a St. Louis newspaper. He had heard the storm coming, too—“a continual dull roaring,” he said, that was broken at intervals by “sharp heavy claps, attended with the most vivid lightning.” But as the storm came up the river, he remembered, “the distant rolling thunder assumed more the sound of moaning.” Still, he took only the ordinary precautions: he put his men on alert, he had more lines tied to the dock,