Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [63]
The long-range movement of the steamboats greatly facilitated the spread of wildcat and counterfeit currency, adding to the constant tension between the river and the shore. By midcentury, periodicals known as detectors had sprung up to help businessmen on both sides assess the legitimacy of the paper currently in circulation and identify the telltale marks of known counterfeits. The most trusted detector on the river was The Western Bank Note Reporter and Counterfeit Detector, a weekly periodical published in St. Louis and distributed by steamboat. Every store and business in the large towns had a subscription; well-prepared traveling businessmen invariably brought a copy along to potential sales. Sooner or later all transactions would come down to a long, suspicious session of scrutiny and negotiation and reconsultation with the current issue of the detector, as the notes were passed around, examined, questioned, argued about, and fought over.
Melville describes such a scene in The Confidence-Man. Two characters, with the aid of a detector, exhaustively inspect something that “looks to be a three-dollar bill on the Vicksburgh Trust and Insurance Banking Company.” As they argue, the elusiveness of the bill in front of them starts to make the whole concept of the genuine seem like a will-o’-the-wisp:
“The Detector says, among fifty other things, that, if a good bill, it must have, thickened here and there into the substance of the paper, little wavy spots of red; and it says they must have a kind of silky feel, being made by the lint of a red silk handkerchief stirred up in the papermaker’s vat—the paper being made to order for the company.”
“Well, and is—”
“Stay. But then it adds, that sign is not always to be relied on; for some good bills get so worn, the red marks get rubbed out. And that’s the case with my bill here—see how old it is—or else it’s a counterfeit, or else—I don’t see right—or else—dear, dear me—I don’t know what else to think.” … “Stay, now, here’s another sign. It says that, if the bill is good, it must have in one corner, mixed in with the vignette, the figure of a goose, very small, indeed, all but microscopic; and, for added precaution, like the figure of Napoleon outlined by the tree, not observable, even if magnified, unless the attention is directed to it. Now, pore over it as I will, I can’t see this goose.”
“Can’t see the goose? why, I can; and a famous goose it is.” …
“Then throw that Detector away, I say again; it only makes you purblind; don’t you see what a wild-goose chase it has led you? The bill is good. Throw the Detector away.”
9
A Pile of Shavings
WHEN TRAVELERS ARRIVED at the Mississippi by way of the Gulf of Mexico, the first sign of human habitation they came to was a town of sorts known as the Balize. It was a ramshackle cluster of half-collapsed wooden shanties and lean-tos standing knee-deep in the brackish water of the estuary and linked by a jerry-rigged tangle of rotting piers and pontoons. It served as a station for the river pilots who would take over the wheel of the tall ships for the last tricky leg of their journey through the delta upriver to New Orleans. The population consisted of around a hundred pilots, maybe fifty or so of their wives and children, and twenty or thirty prostitutes. Frances Trollope called it “by far the most miserable station that I ever saw made the dwelling of man.”
There were better places ahead. Early in the nineteenth century St. Louis was a vision of loveliness: a small cluster of ornate stucco