Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [55]
The voyageurs and the other river people didn’t have that kind of variety available to them. Their drink of choice was Monongahela rye, which was distilled in Pennsylvania, brought down the Ohio, and distributed all through the river valley. It was rough and it was potent, and the custom was to drink it three times a day. (The menu didn’t vary, either—on most flatboats and rafts, it was beef or pork at each meal, fried in a skillet with bread dough and a lot of grease; the voyageurs as a rule disdained fish.) The result was predictable: the crew was drunk all day, every day. Drunken fights on the boats were almost an hourly occurrence. Drunken riots in the river districts at night were routine. The captains on the boats would use any means necessary to restore order. In one celebrated incident in the 1810s, a keelboat captain broke up a fight on deck by beating an oar repeatedly over the head of the most drunken and abusive crewman, until the man fell to the deck unconscious and then slithered overboard and drowned. The case became famous only because the captain was conscientious enough to turn himself in to the authorities at the next port. There a hasty inquest was held, and the verdict was “accidental death.”
But there seemed to be something other than mere drunkenness at work in the valley. The wildest passions of the frontier legends—the rages of Fink, the lunatic exuberance of Crockett and his cohorts, the extravagant energies of Annie Christmas—all had a basis in daily life; they all shared in that mysterious upwelling of outsize exuberance that inspired the shout-boasting and Audubon’s dabblings in imaginary natural history. Maybe nobody ever rode alligators around the river, but they really did keep alligators as pets. They also made pets of mountain lions, pumas, and bears.
There was one regular occasion where the collective energies of the valley found a natural outlet: the religious gathering known as the camp meeting. Camp meetings were a routine fixture of life in the valley from the beginning of the nineteenth century until sometime in the 1840s. They were wild and disorienting events. One witness, the minister James Finley, wrote that they “exhibited nothing to the spectator … but a scene of confusion, such as scarcely could be put into human language.” The British traveler William Newnham Blane said: “One of these meetings, at which many thousands are often assembled, and which commonly last for several days, fills the spectator with the utmost alarm and wonder. An Indian war-dance is a bagatelle to it, and I verily believe that it exceeds the wildest orgies of the Bacchanalians or the Corybantes.”
Camp meetings were usually held somewhere deep in the wilderness, typically in a large forest glade or clearing. They tended to last for around a week. They were almost always held in high summer, when farmers could afford to take that much time off from their fields. During the meeting, the grounds were transformed into a kind of tent city (which is why they were sometimes also known as tent meetings). There were large tents serving as makeshift hostels, taverns, and hospitals, and open-air kitchens were everywhere. Around the central meeting grounds was a ring of smaller tents where families set up housekeeping and where hawkers and peddlers put their wares on display. People who couldn’t get a place to sleep in one of the tents, which were invariably overcrowded, would find what shelter they could in the surrounding forest—this was not seen as a big hardship because the summer nights in the valley were usually sultry, and anyway these events were supposed to be about something other than material