Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [7]
And above all, there were the world-famous steamboats. They were shown bustling everywhere, from the great harbors of St. Louis and New Orleans to the lonely reaches of the upper river: pausing at levees and docks to unload cargo, stopping off at remote lumberyards to refuel (this was known as wooding), puffing out proud billows of smoke as they pressed on down bend after bend of the great river—grandly florid emblems of civilization lording it over the wilderness.
The panoramas were like recruitment posters for the new society rising at the edge of the world. Such images seemed to catch up audiences all over America in a tremendous surge of excitement, one they were barely able to explain or describe. Even a famous skeptic of American triumphalism like Henry David Thoreau could feel it. In his essay “Walking,” from the early 1850s, he described his fascination with the Mississippi panoramas. He had seen a panorama of the Rhine River in Germany and had been delighted by its scenes of ancient and medieval legend—the Roman bridges, the ruined castles, the walled cities that recalled the setting forth of the Crusaders. He wrote:
I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.
Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the light of to-day and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff,—still thinking more of the future than of the past or present,—I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not.
PART ONE
THE RIVER RISING
1
Gone on the River
THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY was always a wild and unknown country. Above St. Anthony Falls in Minnesota, the track of the river meandered into vagueness: it wound through pristine forests, and vanished into unexplored valleys, and glinted among mazes of unnamed lakes. The river’s ultimate source wasn’t established as Lake Itasca in the far north until the 1830s, and the identification wasn’t universally accepted for several decades after that—few people were willing to venture up-country to investigate. The pine forests there were trackless and spooky. The valleys were still strewn with monstrous fossils that had lain undisturbed for thousands of years: mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, dire wolves and a species of beaver that was the size of a grizzly bear—relics from the dawn world of the American wilderness, before the first humans arrived.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the dominant presence in the northern forests was the Chippewa. They lived in wigwam villages, some of four or five hundred people, in glades and clearings scattered throughout the woodlands. These were mostly on the east side of the river. On the west, in the open prairies, were the settlements of the Sioux. The Chippewa and the Sioux were continually skirmishing, and had been for several hundred years. The Sioux believed, not without justice, that when the Chippewa had migrated from the east during the great Iroquois wars, they’d stolen the ancestral Sioux land.