Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [47]
The whole city was caught up in the drama. Both parties agreed to postpone the duel for a few weeks, until after the congressional election. This gave time for the suspense to build. On the appointed morning, thousands of people gathered at the levee to watch Pettis and Biddle and their seconds depart for the dueling ground. The crowds lined the streets; they shouldered each other aside in the downtown windows; they perched on the rooftops. There were cheers when the boat bearing the duelists pushed off into the river.
The boat’s destination was a wooded islet in the Mississippi just off St. Louis. This was where Missouri gentlemen habitually fought their duels. The islet offered privacy—duels, after all, were supposed to be discreet affairs handled among gentlemen, not vulgar public spectacles. It also offered, or was at least believed to offer, a certain amount of legal cover: although dueling was rarely prosecuted, it was illegal according to both Missouri and Illinois law, and since the islet was in the river between the two states, it might technically be considered outside the jurisdiction of either. So many duels had been fought there that it had come to be known as Bloody Island.
When Pettis and Biddle reached Bloody Island, they took their places in a clear glade screened from the shore by a stand of trees. This was the traditional dueling ground. In fact, everything up until then had been traditional—they had both been punctiliously following the Code Duello. The issuing and acceptance of the challenge had been orthodox. The terms of their encounter had also been set out and agreed to in formally correct terms: an exchange of pistol fire at a specified distance. (The modern image of a duel, where both parties begin back to back, walk away from each other, and turn and fire, seems to have largely been a Hollywood invention.) On the dueling ground, they correctly proceeded to the formal gesture of reconciliation. It was offered and refused. They were now ready to begin.
This was the point at which the duel revealed its unusual nature—the little detail that guaranteed it would become famous. In the course of accepting the challenge, Biddle had insisted that they fight not at ten or twenty paces, as was generally accepted as appropriate, but at five paces. He claimed that it was necessary because of his poor eyesight. That was probably a lie; he was a frequent and expert duelist and nobody had ever noticed anything wrong with his eyes. It’s more likely that he was trying to set a preposterous condition on the duel so as to panic Pettis into chickening out. But if it was a bluff, it didn’t work. Pettis had accepted the terms. This meant that when the two men raised their pistols to fire, the barrels were close enough to touch.
In the European tradition, there had always been a certain tacit understanding that the duelists didn’t actually have to try to kill each other. The point was simply to demonstrate that a gentleman had the courage to die for his honor if he had to. Once that was established, the offending party could apologize and the offended party could accept, without either one looking like a coward. The gentlemen of the river valley scorned all this as craven. If two gentlemen were going to fight a duel at all, they were going to do it for real. So nobody had tried to dissuade Biddle and Pettis from carrying out their absurd duel, even though the terms amounted to mutual suicide. Their seconds had in fact discreetly approached another gentleman, the most famous gentleman in the territory, Senator Thomas Hart Benton (great-uncle of the painter)—the only man who could have forced the two to call it off or at least modify its terms through the sheer authority of his prestige. But Benton wholeheartedly approved. He is reported to have said, “There will be no child’s play in the meeting.”
So the two men faced each other. There was a count of three, and they fired