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LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 3. Chapter 11 The River Rises DURING possibly weeks), until the river should fall two or three feet and let.
Table of contents
His works contain great detail, capturing every possible sensation and characteristic of his characters and places. He writes with a dry wit and subtle humor, often times poking fun at the reader or his contemporary society. The characters he writes are full of mannerisms and qualities that make it difficult to distinguish between the people he created and the people he actually encounters. All of these are apparent in most of his works, but is most readily apparent in Life on the Mississippi.
In every chapter of this book, there is an almost painful attention to every detail. At points reading can be a chore, as every bend of the Mississippi River is described in detail. He relates this to his dream profession, riverboat pilot, and it is important to be able to understand the complexity involved.
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The people he encounters on his journeys are equally described, to the point that you can easily imagine the characters as if you had seen them yourself. Even the detail during the stories he hears is more than some entire books. He takes the approach of a dry, common sense approach. Many of these take the form of his numerous quotes and maxims. His detail and wit are characteristic of all his writing, but the people he meets along his trips along the Mississippi River are what truly set Life on the Mississippi apart. Instead of fictional characters, the characters presented in Life on the Mississippi are actual people that Twain met while traveling on riverboats.
These people range from arrogant pilots, cautious boat captains, and his rivals during training, to people with stories, passengers with news from other parts, and his own traveling companions. 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 up-stream 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 Page 42 characters whom I have 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 I remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crows, 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 Page 43 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 freedom 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. 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 Page 44 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 was n'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 was kind of poor, and when he was going to start on the next verse one of them said it was the tune the old cow died on; and another one said, "Oh give us a rest. They made fun of him till he got mad and jumped up and begun to cuss the crowd, and said he could lam any thief in the lot. They was all about to make a break for him, but the biggest man there jumped up and says Leave him to me; he is my meat. Then he jumped up in the air three times and cracked his heels together every time.
He flung off a buckskin coat that was all hung with fringes, and says, "You lay thar tell the chawin-up's done;" and flung his hat down, which was all over ribbons, and says, "You lay thar tell his sufferins is over.
Regulations
Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and shouted out I 'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, Page 45 copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansas! I 'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! All the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head and looking fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little circle, tucking up his wrist-bands, and now and then straightening up and beating Page 46 his breast with his fist, saying, "Look at me, gentlemen!
I 'm the bloodiest son of a wildcat that lives! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working! I 'm a child of sin, don't let me get a start! Smoked glass, here, for all! Don't attempt to look at me with the naked eye, gentlemen!
When I 'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder! When I 'm cold, I bile the Gulf of Mexico and bathe in it; when I 'm hot I fan myself with an equinoctial storm; when I 'm thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge; when I range the earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks!
Bow your neck and spread! I put my hand on the sun 's face and make it night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; I shake myself and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me through leather-- don't use the naked eye! I 'm the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my enclosed property, and I bury my dead on my own premises! Then the other one went to swelling around and blowing again-- the first one--the one they called Bob; next, the Child of Calamity chipped in again, bigger than ever; then they both got at it at the same time, swelling round and round each other and punching their fists most into each other's faces, and whooping and jawing like Injuns; then Bob called the Child names, and the Child called him names back again: next, Bob called him a heap rougher names and the Child come back at him with the very worst kind of language; next, Bob knocked the Child's hat off, and the Child picked it up and kicked Bob's ribbony hat about six foot; Bob went and got it and said never mind, this war n't going to be the last of this thing, because he was a man that never forgot and never forgive, and so the Child better look out, for there was a time a-coming, just as sure as he was a living man, that he would have to answer to him with the best blood in his body.
The Child said no man was willinger than he was for that time to come, and he would give Bob fair warning now , never to cross his path again, for he could never rest till he had waded in his blood, for such was his nature, though he was sparing him now on account of his family, if he had one. Both of them was edging away in different directions, growling and shaking their heads and going on about what they was going to do; but a little black-whiskered chap skipped up and says And he done it, too.
Life on the Mississippi
He snatched, and he jerked them this way and that, he booted them around, he knocked them sprawling faster than they could get up. So then they washed their faces in the river; and just then there was a loud order to stand by for a crossing, and some of them went forward to man the sweeps there, and the rest went aft to handle the after-sweeps. They sung "jolly, jolly raftsman's the life for me," with a rousing chorus, and then they got to talking about differences betwixt hogs, and their different kind of habits; and next about women and their Page 50 different ways; and next about the best ways to put out houses that was afire; and next about what ought to be done with the Injuns; and next about what a king had to do, and how much he got; and next about how to make cats fight; and next about what to do when a man has fits; and next about differences betwixt clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones.
The man they called Ed said the muddy Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to three quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river, and then it war n't no better then Ohio water--what you wanted to do was to keep it stirred up--and when the river was low, keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it ought to be.
The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to. He says Trees won't grow worth shucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high, It 's all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up. A Cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil any. And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with Mississippi water.
Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is low, you 'll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore, and pass the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way across.
See a Problem?
Then they talked about how to keep tobacco from getting mouldy, and from that they went into ghosts and told about a lot that other folks had seen; but Ed says Now let me have a say. Five years ago I was on a raft as big as this, and right along here it was a bright moonshiny night, and I was on watch and boss of the stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man named Dick Allbright, and he come along to where I was sitting, forrard--gaping and stretching, he was--and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed his face in the Page 51 river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe, and had just got it filled, when he looks up and says, He give a kind of a groan, and says, That started me at it, too.
A body is always doing what he sees somebody else doing, though there may n't be no sense in it. Pretty soon I see a black something floating on the water away off to stabboard and quartering behind us.