Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [64]
But such places were never the norm. The average river town, as seen from the deck of a steamboat, was a graceless, muddy, purely functional place—no more than a huddle of shoddy buildings knocked together out of the local lumber, standing at one of the innumerable river junctions. It served as a supply depot or a transshipment point for the river traffic, and it was inevitably dominated by a row of hulking warehouses along the levee. The only retail business of note was a general store, where boatmen could stock up on basic supplies—dried meats, beans, flour and sugar, bolts of coarse fabric, tubs of lye soap—and which always stank from the open barrels of vinegar and kerosene. Behind the levee, on the straggling backstreets, there was inevitably a bunch of saloons, and up the back stairs behind any one of them was certain to be a brothel.
Travelers found these places wearying and depressing. “I thought all the little towns and villages we passed,” Frances Trollope wrote of her steamboat trip upriver, “wretched-looking in the extreme.” They seemed to merge into one enormous shantytown that stretched all the way from the delta to St. Louis and beyond. They were dreary, anonymous, filthy, and disease-ridden—and they were firetraps.
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—the only book that any literate person in the river valley was sure to have read—is about a man’s desperate search for a town where the buildings are fireproof. Most readers take this as an allegory, and with good reason: the hero is named Christian, he lives in the City of Destruction, and the fireproof refuge he ultimately finds is the Celestial City. But the readers on the Mississippi felt Christian’s dilemma on a much more visceral level. Their towns really were at the edge of fiery ruin; the threat of death in a blazing inferno was a daily terror. But there was no journeying to a safer place. The city that wouldn’t burn was as remote as heaven.
Every building in the average river town was made of wood; stone and brick construction didn’t become common until much later in the century. The buildings were heaped on top of each other with little planning and were built to no particular standard. The result was a maze of shanties set at irregular and unpredictable angles, strewn with spidery staircases and connected by rickety walkways. The heating, when there was any, was provided by woodstoves with spindly flues that exhaled still-glowing cinders that would fall into neighboring yards and blow through nearby windows. One unlucky spark and in moments the whole edifice was in flames.
There were so many fires in the river towns that people refused to believe they could have an innocent explanation. Stories were constantly circulating about mysterious gangs of incendiaries at work in the river valley who were setting the fires for some occult purpose of their own. The most common theory, particularly in the years leading up to the Civil War, was that they were disgruntled slaves and infiltrating abolitionists trying to foment a revolution. But these gangs proved to be elusive spirits—never caught, never even identified. Only once did the people of Natchez corner somebody they believed to be a member: a local loudmouth who’d been heard offering to bet that a particular downtown block would be on fire within a week. The man was almost put