Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [60]
Trollope found the cabin at its worst at mealtime. The steamboats would lay on a lavish banquet at every meal, and the ladies and gentlemen would descend on it like a locust swarm, devour it loudly without a word of small talk, and then bolt from the table fifteen minutes later. Trollope remembered a “total want of any of the courtesies of the table,” and was particularly appalled by “the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses,” and “the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth.”
Other travelers were horrified by the behavior in the public rooms. The British geologist George Featherstonhaugh recalled “noise, confusion, spitting, smoking, cursing, and swearing, drawn from the most remorseless pages of blasphemy.” The French traveler Marie de Grandfort was offended by the whistling—at the boat’s theatrical performances, the audience would express its approval with a chorus of wolf whistles, which she found inconceivably vulgar. But even worse, she thought, was another habit: whittling.
Provided with a large or a small knife, they lay hands on the first bit of stray wood that falls in their way, or the branch of a tree, or a cane, or an umbrella left in a corner. If they are deprived of these, they attack the furniture; they pitilessly cut into counters, window sills, doors, chairs, sofas, billiard tables, church pews; in fact, nothing nothing is sacred against their knife-blades. The railings of the guards on certain boats on the Mississippi have been transformed into gigantic saws by this Yankee process.
The one thing everybody agreed on about steamboat travel was that it was loud. The river and the passing landscape were almost uncannily silent. “The prevailing character of the Mississippi,” one traveler wrote, “is that of solemn gloom.” But the steamboat was a great puffing, cranking, grinding, hooting, rattling contraption; people in the cabin could barely sleep at night because of what another traveler described as “the constant whizzing of the steampipe, and the ceaseless rumble of the machinery and paddle-wheels.” But the noise of the passengers themselves was loud enough to drown all that out. The main deck, Melville observed, was like “some Constantinople arcade or bazaar.” The people were in a continual uproar. There were furious political arguments—Frances Trollope said that “the respective claims of Adams and Jackson to the presidency were argued with more oaths and vehemence than it has ever been my lot to hear.” There were the inevitable drunken fights; there were countless touts and hawkers; there were hustlers pitching land deals and charitable trusts and patent medicines; there were singers and fiddlers and actors and buskers at their trade. To the strangers caught up in the crowd, everybody seemed perpetually boorish, rude, rowdy, exuberant, quarrelsome, and drunk.
They all had one great recreation: gambling. The passengers played dice games and card games in endless varieties—rondo and keno and faro, roulette and chuck-a-luck, monte and euchre, rouge et noir and seven-up and old sledge. It was quite probable that at any given moment, every single steamboat on the river had at least one high-stakes game going in the interior cabin and several penny-ante games on deck.
Most often they played poker. Poker was the trademark game of the Mississippi. It had been invented by some anonymous genius in New Orleans sometime around 1820; within the decade it had spread everywhere from the delta to the North Woods. The principal games then were draw poker and stud