Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [35]
Almost unnoticeable in the long record of destruction was a report from under the hill. Work gangs of slaves lent by local plantation owners were excavating the ruins of the Steam Boat Hotel. Eleven bodies had been recovered so far, and a few people had been found alive, including the landlord and his wife—and also “Timothy Flint, the historian and geographer, and his son from Natchitoches, La.”
Flint was characteristically detailed and copious about his situation: “I found myself alive though much bruised and crushed, and a nail had gone through my hat and grazed my temple, so as to cause some bleeding.” About his son, he said only that he lost his hat. About the death and destruction in the town, he said it was “sickening,” but no more. As ever, he wasn’t one to dwell on other people’s sorrows.
His own sufferings continued in the aftermath of the storm. “The weather turned very cold, the night I began to ascend the river,” he wrote, “and my long drenching and exposure, with my previous sickness, gave me severe chills.” But he continued his journey; then he crossed the prairie to the Great Lakes and rode a steamboat to the East Coast, where he paid a visit to his brother. His chills worsened along the way. He’d had his inevitable presentiment by then; his letter describing the Natchez tornado, written that summer, ends in the same spirit as so many of his others:
I had not thought when I began, that I could scrawl so much. Take it, not for what it is worth, but for what it has cost me. You will, probably, be one of my last correspondents.
This time he was right; the letter is the final writing of his that survives. He died at the end of that summer, at his brother’s home in Salem, Massachusetts. The most suitable epitaph might be a remark of perhaps unintended self-description he made in Recollections:
Man is every where a dissatisfied and complaining animal; and if he had a particle of unchanged humanity in him, would find reasons for complaining and repining in paradise.
PART TWO
“DO YOU LIVE ON THE RIVER?”
5
The Desire of an Ignorant Westerner
THE MIGRATION TO THE RIVER VALLEY was the wonder of the age. New settlers were arriving in a ceaseless torrent. They were coming across the Alleghenies through the Cumberland Gap; they were riding keelboats and flatboats and arks down the Ohio; they were taking steamboat passages across the Great Lakes; they were voyaging by sailing ship down the Atlantic seaboard around the Florida peninsula up through the Gulf to the river delta and New Orleans. Travelers reported that their entire way to the river valley, along the only passable main roads beyond the Alleghenies—the Old Wilderness Road and the Natchez Trace—they were never out of sight of other wagons.
The migration began with the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, and it became a major phenomenon after the War of 1812. “The old America,” one traveler wrote in 1816, “seems to be breaking up and flowing westward.” The scale of the movement was hard for people to comprehend. At the beginning of the century, there may have been a couple of hundred thousand people scattered along the length of the Mississippi; by the time of the Civil War, there were tens of millions.
Few if any doubts were expressed about this immense transfer of people—some sentimental regret about the necessity of removing the Native Americans, none at all about the obliteration of the wilderness. The taming of the land was a self-evident good. A typical expression of this feeling can be seen in a best seller from the 1830s, The Indian Captivity of O. M. Spencer. It describes the terrifying experience from the author’s childhood when for several months he was held