Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [62]
Our numbers Six, and One Two Three,
Are drugs of sovereign potency,
They cure complaints of every name—
At least, we say so—’tis the same;
The grave will not disgorge its dead
To chase our slumbers from our bed.
The con men, of whatever persuasion, generally called themselves sharpers; everybody else they called suckers and greenhorns—there was no greater insult on the river than to refer to somebody as green. The sharpers were so plentiful that they had to work out a quick-and-dirty way of sorting out who was who, so they didn’t waste time trying to con each other. That was how they came to use a kind of shorthand code, a password; when they met a stranger on deck, they’d immediately ask, in a tone of idle curiosity:
“Do you live on the river?”
Among the landsmen, the talk wasn’t of sharpers and greenhorns but of green thumbs and black thumbs. The green thumbs were the farmers and the builders, the ones who were actually doing the work of planting and cultivating and civilizing the valley; the black thumbs were the river people. But not just the boatmen and the voyageurs and the gamblers: the black thumbs were anybody who made their money by way of the river, because on the river there was no honest business. It was a place, one travel writer observed, where “the very order of civilized society was reversed, and a disorganization of principle, of men and manners, prevailed, to which, or approaching to which, I had never seen a parallel in the whole of my former experience.”
The rule in any commercial transaction was that each party was out to cheat the other. People routinely lied and stole with impunity; they took for granted that commerce was indistinguishable from swindling. False weights, ersatz or fraudulent goods, and bait-and-switch sales were the norm. The first thing that apprentices learned on steamboats was how to judge the true weight of a load of wood, because the employees of every wood yard along the river would do everything possible to cheat the steamboats of their fuel. They were particularly fond of hollowing out the interior of a woodpile (which was sold by volume) and hoping the trick wasn’t discovered until the boat had pulled back into the river again.
The phantasmal nature of business on the river was best reflected in the money used to conduct it. Honest money was the major issue of the river economy. The only currency generally trusted was specie—the gold and silver coinage of the U.S. Mint. But specie was a rare commodity, partly because people tended to hoard it, but also because the valley’s economy was growing so fast that the demand for coin tremendously exceeded the supply. Without specie, most transactions involved barter or some equally rare commodity—coffee or salt, for instance, which were both so scarce in the upper valley that they were more prized than gold.
As a last resort, people could use the paper currency issued by private banks. This was known as commercial money, and it came in a rainbow of dubious and peculiar forms. There were bills known as greenbacks and redbacks and bluebacks, blue pup and red horse, rag tag and stump tail. People across the valley skirmished through deals involving paper money with the same fantastic ingenuity shown by the arbitrageurs and derivatives traders of the modern world. Word might come into a river town by way of a steamboat that a particularly well-known form of commercial money was now trading at substantially below face value in New Orleans or St. Louis; all over town, people holding it would immediately rush to spend it, preferably at stores where the clerks hadn’t yet heard the news. But if they got hold of specie, they would keep it until they could make a deal to sell it. Specie routinely traded for much higher than face.
Knowing what varieties of money could be trusted was an unending hassle. Paper issued by banks of uncertain solvency or legality was generally called wildcat money. It was a major challenge to avoid taking wildcat money—or, if you had it, to lay it off on somebody else as fast as possible. Meanwhile,