Wicked River Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Lee Sandlin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Images from the “Davy Crockett Almanacs” are reproduced courtesy of Dorothy Sloan Rare Books. The “Ribbon Map of the Great Mississippi River” is from the Library of Congress.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sandlin, Lee.

  Wicked river : the Mississippi when it last ran wild / Lee Sandlin.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37951-1

  1. Mississippi River—History—19th century. 2. Mississippi River—Geography. 3. Mississippi River—Environmental conditions. 4. River life—Mississippi River Region—History—19th century. 5. Community life—Mississippi River Region—History—19th century. 6. Mississippi River Region—History—19th century. 7. Mississippi River Region—Biography. 8. Mississippi River Region—Social life and customs—19th century. 9. Social change—Mississippi River Region—History—19th century. 10. Disasters—Mississippi River Region—History—19th century. I. Title.

  F353.S26 2010 977—dc22 2010008511

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  v3.1

  FOR JOANNE FOX

  SINE QUA NON

  For if and when we talk of a river we talk of a deep and dank architecture.

  Harold Pinter, No Man’s Land

  I do not remember to have traversed this river in any considerable trip, without having heard of some fatal disaster to a boat, or having seen a dead body of some boatman, recognised by the red flannel shirt, which they generally wear. The multitudes of carcasses of boats, lying at the points, or thrown up high and dry on the wreck-heaps, demonstrate most palpably, how many boats are lost on this wild, and, as the boatmen always denominate it, “wicked river.”

  Timothy Flint, Recollections

  I hate the Mississippi, and as I look down upon its wild and filthy waters, boiling and eddying, and reflect how uncertain is travelling in this region … I cannot help feeling a disgust at the idea of perishing in such a vile sewer, to be buried in mud, and perhaps to be rooted out again by some pig-nosed alligator.

  Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Introduction

  Prologue

  PART ONE The River Rising

  1 Gone on the River

  2 Old Devil River

  3 The Comet’s Tail

  4 Like Bubbles on a Sea

  PART TWO “Do You Live on the River?”

  5 The Desire of an Ignorant Westerner

  6 Bloody Island

  7 The Roar of Niagara

  8 The Cosmopolitan Tide

  9 A Pile of Shavings

  10 The Coasts of Dark Destruction

  PART THREE The Course of Empire

  11 The Mound Builders

  12 A Young Man of Splendid Abilities

  13 The Oracles

  Photo Insert

  PART FOUR Behemoth

  14 The Sky Parlor

  15 The Alligator

  PART FIVE The Good and the Thoughtless

  16 The Last of the Floating Life

  Epilogue

  A Note on Sources

  About the Author

  The path of the Mississippi River, from its source at Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico

  Introduction

  THERE IS A TRIBUTARY of the Mississippi River running through my neighborhood in Chicago. It’s not easy to spot; you have to know just where to look. It’s by the bus stop on a cluttered commercial block. Right at the curb is a manhole. The manhole cover is embossed with a decorative pattern of fish, and it carries the message DUMP NO WASTE! DRAINS TO WATERWAYS! Down below is water bound for the Mississippi.

  Sometimes when I’m waiting for the bus, I pass the time by imagining the course the water is running. It’s invisible at street level, but there is a maze of piping underneath Chicago: water mains and sewer mains and gas mains, electrical conduit and fiber-optic cabling. The water is gurgling through this spaghetti tangle for mile after mile, below the ranges of highrises and the decaying industrial districts and the limitless veldts of bungalows. It doesn’t surface until it reaches a pumping station past the southern city limits. There it empties into the Illinois River. The Illinois runs in a meandering course roughly southwest, past the suburban counties around Chicago, out through the exurban fringe, then south through the farm country in the middle of the state, and then west again, until at last, just north of St. Louis, it drains into the Mississippi.

  This is a serpentine route, but it’s not an unusual one. There are countless streams just like it. In the nineteenth century, it was estimated that the Mississippi had roughly one hundred thousand natural tributaries—that is, there were a hundred thousand distinct, individually named brooks, creeks, rivulets, and rivers emptying their waters into its gargantuan current. Today there are far more than a hundred thousand, and the majority of them are artificial. They’re like the manhole by the bus stop: they’re conduits and cisterns and sewage pipes, obscure canals and neglected culverts and out-of-the-way storm drains. The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest.

  As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic means—by locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer. It hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years.

  Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. There’s the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.

  I get a little reminder of the health of this system every time I pass by that bus stop. There’s a reason why the one particular manhole stands out among all the clutter of ancient grilles and grates along the block. It reeks. Winter and summer, it emits a peculiar odor, a compound of sewer gas, stale grease, and some kind of pungent chemical reminiscent of sour mint. I can tell how bad it is on any given day by the behavior of the people waiting at the curb. Sometimes they have to hang so far back that the bus blows past the corner without a pause.

  Of course it seems all wrong to think of the Mississippi River this way, as an industrial drainage system the length of a continent. It’s not how we want to picture Old Man River—the river of the paddle-wheel steamboats, the river that Huck and Jim escaped down when they rode their raft to freedom. That river, we like to im
agine, is still running wild the way it always was. The wistful old song “Moon River,” popular back in the sixties, caught the feeling perfectly:

  Moon River, wider than a mile,

  I’m crossing you in style some day.

  When Andy Williams crooned this, he was obviously not thinking about something as prosaic as driving across the Eads Bridge at St. Louis. He was singing about the mythical river of Mark Twain (“my huckleberry friend,” the song calls it, just so we don’t miss the point): he was crossing a river bound for the rainbow’s end, not one to be found on the interstate map.

  This is the image of the river that I grew up with. I knew all about Twain’s river long before I ever saw the actual Mississippi. In fact, I knew about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn before I learned how to read. My mother had an old illustrated edition of Twain, and sometimes when I was a little kid, she would take it down from its high shelf to show me the pictures. The book was filled with glossy plates, each protected by a thin sheet of brittle tissue, which she would delicately peel back to reveal the gorgeously colored image underneath. It never failed to astonish me. I was used to modern picture books, where pop art squiggles were at play in a featureless smear of watercolors, like a cartoon guide to subatomic physics. But here with dream-vivid clarity was Tom Sawyer in church, squirming through the sermon between two pillowy matrons in spectacular floral dresses; there was Huckleberry Finn in overalls, sitting on a barrel on the levee, smoking his corncob pipe, posed against the steepled skyline of Hannibal, Missouri, with a sun-rayed billow of cumulus behind.

  My mother didn’t try to connect up the images into a story, and I never did get a handle on the story, even when I was old enough to read Twain for myself. To this day, the plot of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a bit of a blur. I remember the scene where Tom crashes his own funeral, but I couldn’t tell you how everybody got the idea he was dead; I know that Tom and Huck find buried treasure at the end, but I had to reread it to figure out where all that gold came from. Much of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was even sketchier—the truth is, I never could get all the way through it when I was a kid. I had to keep skipping over scenes because they were too frightening. The chapter where Huck was kidnapped by his monstrous father was so upsetting to me that I couldn’t bear to keep the book by my bed; I had to sneak it back onto its shelf in the living room before I could sleep at night.

  But none of that mattered: the books still burned themselves into my brain. All the other books I read were ghosts compared with them. Tom tricking the neighbor boys into painting the fence remains as vivid to me as anything from my own childhood. The scene where the steamboat fires its cannon across the water to raise Tom’s drowned body from the river is still weirder to me than any fantasy novel. And running deeper even than these was the image of the river itself: the great prairie of water, white veined, impossibly blue, swirling underneath the majestic steamboats like a kind of art deco dance floor. I found it both alluring and unimaginable. There was nothing remotely like it in the Illinois suburb where I grew up. The one river I knew was a dinky, puttering brook that meandered through a nearby forest preserve. It was opaque, it smelled putrid, and its surface was fluorescent green. We were told to stay out of it, because if its water even touched our skin, we’d have to go to the hospital.

  Twain’s Mississippi was obviously something different, something wholly other. I was haunted by the thought that it was close by, running deep within the landscape, past the last franchise strip and the last strand of freeway. Sometimes I imagined it as a kind of secret subterranean presence flowing around the walls of basement rec rooms. On the maps in my schoolbooks it seemed to cut through the whole of the Midwest like the dark central vein in a leaf: I thought that if I ever managed to reach it, I would be swallowed up in a kind of hidden inland sea, endlessly unfolding from within, dotted everywhere by the glorious islands of the steamboats, edged by the silhouettes of forests against a sunset sky.

  That image was so alive to me that it easily survived my real-world encounters with the river. My parents would sometimes take me on trips to visit my great-aunts and great-uncles, who lived on the Illinois side of the Mississippi near St. Louis. The drive led us from the Chicago suburbs down the new interstate—a summer morning’s glide through the furrowed green oceans of the farm country, our car and the cars all around us swooping effortlessly along the arrow of highway like an invading army of flying saucers. My gaze was invariably fixed on the horizon, where the grain silos and water towers were creeping past each other like pieces in a titanic board game. I remember a thunderstorm rising up above the horizon line, one of those towering prairie storm fronts that to this day make me think of God long before I think of rain. We were heading straight into it. The highway stretched before us in a brilliant swath of humid yellow sunlight, while ahead was a wall of blackness. We swept into the storm in a furious rush; the car didn’t slow at all, even though the windshield wipers were frantically shoving the surging sheaths of rainwater aside as though they were combing the sea. On the far side of the storm front, the world was a sulking monochrome. Off the interstate we headed down a main highway hemmed in by franchise strips, discount furniture stores, and new-car lots; the rain was descending in thin curtains over sodden hills of subdivisions. The road took a bend, and there was the Mississippi.

  It was gray. It was hurrying. It was huge. Its surface was mottled and stippled with countless flickering motes of black, like the seethe of snow on a TV screen. It had nothing to do with the river I had imagined. It didn’t even seem to be a natural phenomenon. It was an interruption in the landscape, a flood, a mob trampling through a barricade, an endless, purposeless stampede of water. A half a mile off in the deep channel was a gigantic industrial barge shrouded by rain. On the remoteness of the far bank, more than a mile away, was a line of gaunt dead trees.

  There is a pretty much universal idea that Twain has a proprietary relationship to the Mississippi. It belongs to him, the way Victorian London belongs to Dickens or Dublin belongs to Joyce. This is not a new idea—in fact, it dates back to Twain’s own time. Some of his original reviewers wrote as though he’d discovered the Mississippi personally and was sending back the first dispatches from an unknown continent. An anonymous critic for The Hartford Courant was typical: “With a primeval and Robin-Hood freshness,” he wrote after Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884, “he has given us a portrait of a people, of a geographical region, of a life that is new in the world.”

  But this was getting Twain fundamentally backward. The last thing he was trying to do was describe the life of the Mississippi River valley as something “new in the world.” His fascination—obsession, really—was with the Mississippi as it had been in the past. He wasn’t interested in the contemporary Mississippi and didn’t even know that much about it. When he sat down to write Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, he hadn’t been on the river in decades.

  His Mississippi books are works of memory, even of archaeology. They’re about the world of the river valley as it had been a generation earlier, before the Civil War. That was the Mississippi he knew firsthand from his childhood: the great age of the Mississippi River culture. It had been a strange and fascinating time. From somewhere in the 1810s until the Civil War, a new society had rapidly sprouted and come to a fantastic height in the river valley: a world of its own, growing on and around the sprawling length of the Mississippi, with its own culture and its own language and its own unspoken rules. Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Huckleberry Finn are lovingly detailed reconstructions of that age. Into them Twain poured all the half-forgotten trivia and pop ephemera he could dredge up from his childhood: the bad pious poetry and the worse folk songs, the primness of river town society matrons and the crazy banter of the river men, the omen reading of the conjurers and the tirades of the drunks on the riverfront levees, the childhood games, the rumors, the ghost stories, the superstitions … it was as though the murkiness of the Mississippi had cleared to rev
eal a drowned town miraculously preserved on the river bottom.

  But in taking up this era as his subject, Twain hadn’t thought of himself as any kind of intrepid literary pioneer. There had been a long tradition of books about the Mississippi valley already; whole libraries had been devoted to the river long before he started writing about it. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the foremost authority on the Mississippi had been a journalist and historian named Timothy Flint, whose immense A History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley had been regarded as the standard reference work on the river—cited in countless other books and copied uncredited in countless more. But Flint had noted in his memoirs that he’d hesitated even writing about the Mississippi because it had already been done to death:

  There are such showers of journals, and travels, and residences, and geographies, and gazetteers; and every person, who can in any way fasten the members of a sentence together, after having travelled through a country, is so sure to begin to scribble about it, that I have felt a kind of awkward consciousness at the thought of starting in the same beaten track.

  This was in 1826—fifty years before Twain published Tom Sawyer.

  What has happened to all these books? Long gone: banished to the unvisited stacks of university libraries and the unsold inventories of antiquarian book dealers; submerged now somewhere in the bottomless depths of Google Books. In fact, they had already fallen into oblivion by Twain’s time. Of the innumerable travelers and essayists and historians of the river who flourished before the Civil War, Twain noted in 1883 that “their books cannot be purchased now.”

  From a strictly literary point of view, this isn’t much of a crime. American literature in those days was in dismal shape, and most of the early books about the river are unreadable today. But if their literary style can somehow be ignored, these books taken together do add up to a vivid collective portrait of the mysterious world of the river culture as it was at its height—and one that makes for a surprising, maybe even alarming, contrast when set next to Twain’s.