APPARENTLY the river was ready for business,now.But no,the distribution of a population along its banks was as calm and deliberate and time-devouring a process as the discovery and exploration had been.
Seventy years elapsed,after the exploration,before the river's borders had a white population worth considering;and nearly fifty more before the river had a commerce.
Between La Salle's opening of the river and the time when it may be said to have become the vehicle of anything like a regular and active commerce,seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of England,America had become an independent nation,Louis XIV.and Louis XV.had rotted and died,the French monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the revolution,and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked about.Truly,there were snails in those days.
The river's earliest commerce was in great barges--keelboats,broadhorns.
They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans,changed cargoes there,and were tediously warped and poled back by hand.A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months.
In time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes of rough and hardy men;rude,uneducated,brave,suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism;heavy drinkers,coarse frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day,heavy fighters,reckless fellows,every one,elephantinely jolly,foul-witted,profane;prodigal of their money,bankrupt at the end of the trip,fond of barbaric finery,prodigious braggarts;yet,in the main,honest,trustworthy,faithful to promises and duty,and often picturesquely magnanimous.
By and by the steamboat intruded.Then for fifteen or twenty years,these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream,and the steamers did all of the upstream business,the keelboatmen selling their boats in New Orleans,and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers.
But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce;and then keelboating died a permanent death.The keelboatman became a deck hand,or a mate,or a pilot on the steamer;and when steamer-berths were not open to him,he took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-flat,or on a pine-raft constructed in the forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi.
In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity,the river from end to end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts,all managed by hand,and employing hosts of the rough characters whom Ihave been trying to describe.I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,--an acre or so of white,sweet-smelling boards in each raft,a crew of two dozen men or more,three or four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for storm-quarters,--and Iremember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews,the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors;for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a ride.
By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners,and that now-departed and hardly-remembered raft-life,I will throw in,in this place,a chapter from a book which I have been working at,by fits and starts,during the past five or six years,and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more.
The book is a story which details some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy,Huck Finn,son of the town drunkard of my time out west,there.He has run away from his persecuting father,and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to make a nice,truth-telling,respectable boy of him;and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped.
They have found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high water and dead summer time),and are floating down the river by night,and hiding in the willows by day,--bound for Cairo,--whence the negro will seek ******* in the heart of the free States.
But in a fog,they pass Cairo without knowing it.
By and by they begin to suspect the truth,and Huck Finn is persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge raft which they have seen in the distance ahead of them,creeping aboard under cover of the darkness,and gathering the needed information by eavesdropping:--But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is impatient to find a thing out.We talked it over,and by and by Jim said it was such a black night,now,that it wouldn't be no risk to swim down to the big raft and crawl aboard and listen--they would talk about Cairo,because they would be calculating to go ashore there for a spree,maybe,or anyway they would send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat or something.
Jim had a wonderful level head,for a nigger:he could most always start a good plan when you wanted one.
I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river,and struck out for the raft's light.By and by,when I got down nearly to her,I eased up and went slow and cautious.
But everything was all right--nobody at the sweeps.
So I swum down along the raft till I was most abreast the camp fire in the middle,then I crawled aboard and inched along and got in amongst some bundles of shingles on the weather side of the fire.
There was thirteen men there--they was the watch on deck of course.
And a mighty rough-looking lot,too.They had a jug,and tin cups,and they kept the jug moving.One man was singing--roaring,you may say;and it wasn't a nice song--for a parlor anyway.He roared through his nose,and strung out the last word of every line very long.
When he was done they all fetched a kind of Injun war-whoop,and then another was sung.It begun:--'There was a woman in our towdn,In our towdn did dwed'l (dwell,)She loved her husband dear-i-lee,But another man twyste as wed'l.
Singing too,riloo,riloo,riloo,Ri-too,riloo,rilay ---e,She loved her husband dear-i-lee,But another man twyste as wed'l.