Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [70]
10
The Coasts of Dark Destruction
NEW ORLEANS WAS A SQUALID CITY, even by the standards of the river valley. The sewer system was a network of open trenches perpetually backed up with dead animals, putrid water, and rotting refuse. Garbage built up into hills and festered in the alleys and in the middle of the streets. Trash was collected in some districts, but it was merely carted off to what were known as nuisance wharves and thrown into the river, and it immediately washed back onto the levee. (Eventually the city obtained “nuisance barges” to carry the garbage a hundred yards or so into the river before dumping it.) New Orleans, one British traveler wrote, “affects painfully the olfactory nerves of all who prefer the odors of the rose to those of the cesspool.”
It was also an extraordinarily violent city. Duels, rare elsewhere in the lower valley, were daily occurrences; manslaughter and murderous assaults were common. “A frightful deluge of human blood flows through our streets and our places of public resort,” said an editorial in The New Orleans Bee in 1836. “Whither will such contempt for the life of man lead us?” An anonymous pamphlet writer noted a few years later: “We have just been looking over a broken file of Louisiana papers, including the last six months of 1837 and the whole of 1838, and find ourselves obliged to abandon our design of publishing even an abstract of the scores and hundreds of affrays, murders, assassinations, lynchings, etc, which took place during that period.”
The violence was fueled by the desperate overcrowding, by the wild currents of wealth running through the economy, and by the waves of immigrants arriving daily. The city had Creoles, Cajuns, Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Mexicans, Danes, Portuguese, Belgians, and free people of color from the West Indies and South America—all of whom were at various times feuding with at least one of the other groups. The longest-running tensions were between the Americans and Northern Europeans on the one side and the Spaniards and Creoles on the other; there were skirmishes and sometimes full-scale riots on the streets until the Civil War.
But it was also a beautiful city. The graceful crescent of white-pillared buildings along the levee was said to be the loveliest urban vista in the New World. The salt air from the Gulf rotted the stucco in curious and delicate ways; buildings only a few years old looked as mysterious as Roman ruins. The skyline was shrouded in fogs and river mists, and the shifting play of tropical light across the pastel-painted walls, with their weatherings and peelings and blotchings, was perpetually alluring and magical. The surrounding landscape added to the air of a dream. The mass of domes and cupolas and steeples floated within a maze of impassable bayous, alligator-haunted sloughs, and dim, receding forest halls of cypress cloaked in Spanish moss; the remote, sinister lagoons glimpsed from the arriving boats looked like the sunlight hadn’t penetrated them for generations.
The thing that most struck travelers arriving at the harbor was the sound. “Astonishing,” the architect Benjamin Latrobe described it in his diaries: “a sound more strange than any that is heard anywhere else in the world.” It came floating past the turmoil of boats and ships along the levee: “a most incessant, loud, rapid, and various gabble of tongues of all tones that were ever heard at Babel.” The French traveler Marie de Grandfort described it as “a strange concert of oaths, questions, cries, and savage noises.” She heard “the by God of the Yankee, the per la madona of the Italian, the carumba of the Spaniard, the Diou bibant of the Gascon, the gutteral Goddam of the Irish.” Latrobe wrote: “It is more to be compared with the sounds that issue from an extensive marsh, the residence of a million or two of frogs, from bullfrogs up to whistlers, than to anything else.”
The sound came from the great market on the levee. Between the river and the warehouses,