Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [59]
Was she a side-wheel or stern-wheel? Was she large or small? Had she trimmings on her smokestack, or about the pilot house, and if so of what description? Had she a “Texas,” or no “Texas”? Were the outside blinds painted white, red, or green? What was the sound of her whistle and bell?
The steamboats generally ran three kinds of routes. There were the packet boats that shuttled between two ports on a regular schedule. There were the transients that did one-shot hops to wherever their largest load of cargo was bound. And then there were the great lines that covered long swaths of the river and made countless stops along the way. A company that ran a major line might at any given time have ten or twelve boats in transit somewhere in the river system.
Passage on a line from New Orleans to the upper valley cost around a hundred dollars, which included a bed in the cabin and three meals a day. Fifty dollars more paid for a private stateroom. (For contrast, a crewman might earn fifty dollars a month; apprentices were lucky to be paid twenty.) Poorer passengers had a cheap alternative available: they could sleep outside on deck and take their chances with the weather. Those who did so were called deckers. For around five dollars, deckers bought the right to whatever space they could find among the barrels and hogsheads and crates and the pens of lamenting livestock; they could work down the fare or pay for meals by helping the crew load or unload cargo at each stop.
The boats were generally designed to carry about 250 passengers, plus crew and cargo. But they were routinely oversold. A boat on a popular line was likely to have at least four hundred passengers on board between the most heavily trafficked ports—fifty to a hundred people in the interior cabin and the staterooms, a couple of hundred deckers, and another hundred or so people who were making short hops and day trips. This endlessly shifting throng through the public rooms and the decks was a source of constant fascination to many travelers. Herman Melville, in his novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, described the scene:
As among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlour men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotallers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.
For Melville, the crowd made the steamboat the soul of the river: “Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.”
The interior cabin was a dream of luxuriousness. It had gleaming brass railings and tasseled arras and porcelain doorknobs; there were framed