Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [58]
The rumors of what went on around the margins of the grounds were what eventually led to the taming of the camp meeting tradition. Toward midcentury, vigilance committees began to police their local meetings; gradually the events became more staid and tedious. Preachers were still expected to be wildly dramatic—it was often said that a preacher who didn’t end a sermon by falling to the ground and rolling around in a fit was simply being lazy. But more and more, the congregations tended to listen with polite attention and only gave in to the falls and the other exercises at controlled and ritualized intervals. The religious authorities that dominated American churches later in the century regarded the boredom of the new camp meetings as one of their greatest moral triumphs.
8
The Cosmopolitan Tide
THE FIRST STEAMBOAT CAME DOWN the Mississippi in 1811—in fact, it was swamped and almost sank in the backwash of the Great Shakes. By the end of that decade, around a dozen steamboats were on the river system. In the 1830s, the steamboat population was estimated to be around five hundred. By the time of the Civil War, it was four thousand.
There was a simple explanation for the ascendancy of the steamboats: they could move upriver almost as easily as they did down. This gave them a decisive advantage over every other form of river transport. They rendered the old, ornate, impractical keelboats obsolete—no need for bushwhacking or cordelling when the steamboats could churn their way up against the strongest current. Keelboats disappeared from the river by the 1840s. By the 1850s, even the flatboat population was in decline. The only serious competition the steamboats had left was the great rafts and barges—they survived because the steamboats didn’t have their bulk carrying capacity.
The rise of the steamboats also wrecked the old river etiquette. The river had never been policed, but there had always been a logic to its traffic flow, one dictated by practical necessity: the downriver traffic ran in the channels, while the upriver traffic stuck to the shallows. The steamboats put an end to all that. They cut in and out of the channels no matter which direction they were traveling. Their pilots were notoriously indifferent to the chaos they could leave in their wake. The steamboats routinely swamped the smaller boats as they passed; often they ran right over them and blasted them to splinters. And if the boat people were injured or drowned, if their boats were destroyed and all their possessions were sunk, there was no recourse. It wasn’t uncommon for the boat people, when they saw a steamboat approaching—particularly one with a reputation as a channel hog—to bring out their rifles and take shots at the pilothouse.
The steamboats were glamorous—everyone agreed on that. The sight of these gigantic white-tiered wedding cakes grandly gliding up the channels, pennants flying and smokestacks churning, never failed to dazzle the watchers onshore. In many towns along the river, the arrival of a steamboat was practically a public holiday. The boys of the town would be in a frenzy of excitement at the sight. They’d often paddle their canoes out to the levee, where they would caper and deliberately capsize, in hopes that the ladies and gentlemen watching from the cabin deck would laugh and throw them pennies. If the steamboat stayed docked long