Selected Biographical & Historical Paragraphs from "Life On The Mississippi" 
by Twain, Mark 1917, having to do with Ark. & the history of the Mississippi 
River in Ark.

It also includes a story of the destruction of Napoleon, Arkansas & a
narrative on Helena, Arkansas, the explosion of the Pennsylvania, the
story of Murel, the Ark. outlaw, along with many short biographies &
narrative about various riverboat captains.

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...Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at
Hurricane Island, at Island 100, at Napoleon, Arkansas, at Walnut Bend,
and at Council Bend.  These shortened the river, in the aggregate,
sixty- seven miles.  In my own time a cut-off was made at American
Bend, which shortened the river ten miles or more.


...The usual river gossip going on in the pilot-house.  Island No. 63 -
an island with a lovely "chute," or passage, behind it in the former
times.  They said Jesse Jamieson, in the Skylark, had a visiting pilot
with him one trip - a poor old broken-down, super-annuated fellow -
left him at the wheel, at the foot of 63, to run off the watch.  The
ancient mariner went up through the chute, and down the river outside;
and up the chute and down the river again; and yet again and again; and
handed the boat over to the relieving pilot, at the end of three hours
of honest endeavor, at the same old foot of the island where he had
originally taken the wheel!  A darky on shore who had observed the boat
go by, about thirteen times, said, "'clar to gracious, I wouldn't be
s'prised if dey's a whole line o' dem Skylarks!"

...The Lacey started up the river two days behind the Pennsylvania.  We
touched at Greenville, Mississippi, a couple of days out, and somebody
shouted:

"The Pennsylvania is blown up at Ship Island, and a hundred and fifty
lives lost!"

At Napoleon, Arkansas, the same evening, we got an extra, issued by
aMemphis paper, which gave some particulars.  It mentioned my brother,
and said he was not hurt.

Further up the river we got a later extra.  My brother was again
mentioned, but this time as being hurt beyond help.  We did not get
full details of the catastrophe until we reached Memphis.  This is the
sorrowful story:

It was six o'clock on a hot summer morning.  The Pennsylvania was
creeping along, north of Ship Island, about sixty miles below Memphis,
on a half-head of steam, towing a wood-flat which was fast being
emptied. George Ealer was in the pilot-house - alone, I think; the
second engineer and a striker had the watch in the engine-room; the
second mate had the watch on deck; George Black, Mr. Wood, and my
brother, clerks, were asleep,as were also Brown and the head engineer,
the carpenter, the chief mate, and one striker; Captain Klinefelter was
in the barber's chair, and the barber was preparing to shave him.
There were a good many cabin passengers aboard, and three or four
hundred deck passengers - so it was said at the time - and not very
many of
them were astir.  The wood being nearly all out of the flat now, Ealer
rang to "come ahead" full of steam, and the next moment four of the
eight boilers exploded with a thunderous crash, and the whole forward
third of the boat was hoisted toward the sky!  The main part of the
mass, with the chimneys, dropped upon the boat again, a mountain of
riddled and chaotic rubbish - and then, after a little, fire broke out.

Many people were flung to considerable distances and fell in the river;
among these were Mr. Wood and my brother and the carpenter.  The
carpenter was still stretched upon his mattress when he struck the
water seventy-five feet from the boat.  Brown, the pilot, and George
Black, chief clerk, were never seen or heard of after the explosion.
The barber's chair, with Captain Klinefelter in it and unhurt, was left
with its back overhanging vacancy - everything forward of it, floor and
all, had disappeared; and the stupefied barber, who was also unhurt,
stood with one toe projecting over space, still stirring his lather
unconsciously saying not a word.

When George Ealer saw the chimneys plunging aloft in front of him, he
knew what the matter was so he muffled his face in the lapels of his
coat, and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protection in
its place so that steam could get to his nose or mouth.  He had ample
time to attend to these details while he was going up and returning.
He presently landed on top of the unexploded boilers, forty feet below
the former pilot-house, accompanied by his wheel and a rain of other
stuff, and enveloped in a cloud of scalding steam.  All of the many who
breathed that steam died; none escaped.  But Ealer breathed none of it.
He made his way to the free air as quickly as he could; and when the
steam cleared away he returned and climbed up on the boilers
again, and patiently hunted out each and every one of his chessmen and
the several joints of his flute.

By this time the fire was beginning to threaten.  Shrieks and groans
filled the air.  A great many persons had been scalded, a great many
crippled; the explosion had driven an iron crowbar through one man's
body - I think they said he was a priest.  He did not die at once, and
his sufferings were very dreadful.  A young French naval cadet of
fifteen, son of a French admiral, was fearfully scalded, but bore his
tortures manfully.  Both mates were badly scalded, but they stood to
their posts, nevertheless.  They drew the wood-boat aft, and they and
the captain fought back the frantic herd of frightened
immigrants till the wounded could be brought there an placed in safety
first.

When Mr. Wood and Henry fell in the water they struck out for shore,
which was only a few hundred yards away; but Henry presently said he
believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!) and therefore
would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded.  So they parted
and Henry returned.

By this time the fire was making fierce headway, and several persons
who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging piteously for help.
All efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless, so the buckets were
presently thrown aside and the officers fell to with axes and tried to
cut the prisoners out. A striker was one of the captives; he said he
was not injured, but could not free himself, and when he saw that the
fire was likely to drive away the workers he begged that some one would
dreadful death.  The fire did drive the axmen away, and they had to
listen, helpless, to this poor fellow's
supplications till the flames ended his miseries.

The fire drove all into the wood-flat that could be accommodated there;
it was cut adrift then, and it and the burning steamer floated down the
river toward Ship Island.  They moored the flat at the head of the
island, and there, unsheltered from the blazing sun, the half-naked
occupants had to remain, without food or stimulants, or help for their
hurts, during the rest of the day.  A steamer came along, finally, and
carried the unfortunates to Memphis, and there the most lavish
assistance was at once forthcoming.  By this time Henry was insensible.
The physicians examined his injuries and saw that they were fatal, and
naturally turned their main attention to patients who could be saved.

Forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a great
public hall, and among these was Henry.  There the ladies of Memphis
came every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies of
all kinds, and there they remained and nursed the wounded.  All the
physicians stood watches there, and all the medical students; and the
rest of the town furnished money, or whatever else was wanted.  And
Memphis knew how to do all these things well; for many a disaster like
the Pennsylvania's had happened near her doors, and she was
experienced, above all other cities on the river, in the gracious
office of the Good Samaritan.

The sight I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to
me. Two long rows of prostrate forms - more than forty in all - and
every face and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton.  It was a
gruesome spectacle.  I watched there six days and nights, and a very
melancholy experience it was. There was one daily incident which was
peculiarly depressing: this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber
apart.  It was done in order that the morale of the other patients
might not be injuriously affected by seeing one of their number in the
death- agony.  The fated one was always carried out with as little stir
as possible, and the stretcher was always hidden from
sight by a wall of assistants; but no matter: everybody knew what that
cluster of bent forms, with its muffled step and its slow movement,
meant; and all eyes watched it wistfully, and a shudder went abreast of
it like a wave.

I saw many poor fellows removed to the "death-room," and saw them no
more
afterward.  But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than once.
His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds.  He was clothed in
linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human.
He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave
and shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb
exhaustion, his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the
great apartment into a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses
into the crew;' and he would come to a sitting posture and shout, "Hump
yourselves, hump yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-
bearers!  going to be all day getting that hatful of freight out?" and
supplement this explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption of
profanity which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty.
And now and then while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off
handfuls of the cotton
and expose his cooked flesh to view.  It was horrible.  It was bad for
the others of course - this noise and these exhibitions; so the doctors
tried to give him morphine to quiet him.  But, in his mind or out of
it, he would not take it.  He said his wife had been killed by that
treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it.  He
suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines
and in his water - so he ceased from putting either to his lips.  Once,
when he had been without water during two sweltering days, he took the
dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid, and the misery
of his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his strength;
but he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that he allowed no
more to be brought near him.  Three times I saw him carried to the
death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying; but each time he
revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be taken back.  He
lived to be mate of a steamboat again.

But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive.
Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes that
go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated
judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the newspapers
had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help.  On the evening of
the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away,
and his nerveless fingers "picked at his coverlet." His hour had
struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy.

...We passed through the Plum Point region, turned Craig-head's Point,
and glided unchallenged by what was once the formidable Fort Pillow,
memorable because of the massacre perpetrated there during the war.
Massacres are sprinkled with some frequency through the histories of
several Christian nations, but this is almost the only one that can be
found in American history; perhaps it is the only one which rises to a
size correspondent to that huge and somber title.  We have the "Boston
Massacre," where two or three people were killed; but we must bunch
Anglo-Saxon history together to find the fellow to the Fort Pillow
tragedy; and doubtless even then we must travel back to the days and
the performances of Coeur de Lion, that fine "hero," before we
accomplish it.

More of the river's freaks.  In times past the channel used to strike
above Island 37, by Brandywine Bar, and down toward Island 39.
Afterward changed its course and went from Brandywine down through
Vogelman's chute in the Devil's Elbow, to Island 39 - part of this
course reversing the old order; the river running up four or five
miles, instead of down, and cutting off, throughout, some fifteen miles
of distance. This in 1876.  All that region is now called Centennial
Island.

There is a tradition that Island 37 was one of the principal abiding-
places of the once celebrated "Murel's Gang." This was a colossal
combination of robbers, horse-thieves, negro-stealers, and
counterfeiters, engaged in business along the river some fifty or sixty
years ago.  While our journey across the country toward St. Louis was
in progress we had had no end of Jesse James and his stirring history;
for he had just been assassinated by an agent of the Governor of
Missouri, and was in consequence occupying a good deal of space in the
newspapers. Cheap histories of him were for sale by train-boys.
According to these, he was the most marvelous creature of his kind that
had ever existed.  It was a mistake.  Murel was his equal in boldness,
in pluck, in rapacity; in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery,
and in general and comprehensive vileness and shamelessness; and very
much his superior in some larger aspects.  James was a retail rascal;
Murel, wholesale. James's modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight
than the planning of raids upon cars, coaches, and country banks.
Murel projected negro insurrections and the capture of New Orleans; and
furthermore, on occasion, this Murel could go into a pulpit and edify
the congregation. What are James and his half-dozen vulgar rascals
compared with this stately old-time criminal, with his sermons, his
meditated insurrections and city-captures, and his majestic following
of ten hundred men, sworn to do his evil will!

Here is a paragraph or two concerning this big operator, from a now
forgotten book which was published half a century ago:

He appears to have been a most dexterous as well as consummate villain.
When he traveled, his usual disguise was that of an itinerant preacher;
and it is said that his discourses were very "soul-moving" -
interesting the hearers so much that they forgot to look after their
horses, which were carried away by his confederates while he was
preaching.  But the stealing of horses in one state, and selling them
in another, was but a small portion of their business; the most
lucrative was the enticing slaves to run away from their masters that
they might sell them in another quarter.  This was arranged as follows:
they would tell a negro that if he would run away from his master, and
allow them to sell him, he should receive a portion of the money paid
for him, and that upon his return to them a second time they would send
him to a free state, where he would be safe.  The poor wretches
complied with this request, hoping
to obtain money and freedom; they would be sold to another master, and
run away again to their employers; sometimes they would be sold in this
manner three or four times, until they had realized three or four
thousand dollars by them; but as, after this, there was fear of
detection, the usual custom was to get rid of the only witness that
could be produced against them, which was the negro himself, by
murdering him and throwing his body into the Mississippi. Even if it
was established that they had stolen a negro, before he was murdered,
they were always prepared to evade punishment; for they concealed the
negro who had run away until he was advertised and a reward offered to
any man who would catch him.  An advertisement of this kind warrants
the person to take the property, if found.  And then the negro becomes
a property in trust; when, therefore, they sold the negro, it only
became a breach of trust, not
stealing; and for a breach of trust the owner of the property can only
have redress by a civil action, which was useless, as the damages were
never paid. It may be inquired how it was that Murel escaped Lynch law
under such circumstances.  This will be easily understood when it is
stated that he had more than a thousand sworn confederates, all ready
at a moment's notice to support any of the gang who might be in
trouble.  The names of all the principal confederates of Murel were
obtained from himself, in a manner which I shall presently explain.
The gang was composed of two classes: The Heads or Council, as they
were called, who planned and concerted, but seldom acted; they amounted
to about four hundred.  The other class were the active agents, and
were termed strikers, and amounted to about six hundred and fifty.
These
were the tools in the hands of the others; they ran all the risk, and
received but a small portion of the money; they were in the power of
the leaders of the gang, who would sacrifice them at any time by
handing them over to justice, or sinking their bodies in the
Mississippi.  The general rendezvous of this gang of miscreants was on
the Arkansas side of the river, where they concealed their negroes in
the morasses and cane- brakes.

The depredations of this extensive combination were severely felt; but
so well were their plans arranged that, although Murel, who was always
active, was everywhere suspected, there was no proof to be obtained.
It so happened, however, that a young man of the name of Stewart, who
was looking after two slaves which Murel had decoyed away, fell in with
him and obtained his confidence, took the oath, and was admitted into
the gang as one of the General Council.  By this means all was
discovered; for Stewart turned traitor, although he had taken the oath,
and having obtained every information, exposed the whole concern, the
names of all the parties, and finally succeeded in bringing home
sufficient evidence against Murel to procure his conviction and
sentence to the penitentiary (Murel was sentenced to fourteen year's
imprisonment).  So many people who were supposed to be honest, and bore
a respectable name in the different states, were found to be among the
list of the Grand Council as published by Stewart, that every attempt
was made to throw discredit upon his assertions - his character was
villified, and more than one attempt was made to assassinate him.  He
was obliged to quit the Southern states in consequence.  It is,
however, now well ascertained to have been all true; and although some
blame Mr. Stewart for having violated his oath, they no longer attempt
to deny that his revelations were correct.  I will quote one or two
portions of Murel's confessions to Mr. Stewart, made to him when they
were journeying together.  I ought to have
observed that the ultimate intentions of Murel and his associates were,
by his own account, on a very extended scale; having no less an object
in view than raising the blacks against the whites, taking possessions
of and plundering New Orleans, and making themselves possessors of the
territory.  The following are a few extracts:

"I collected all my friends about New Orleans at one of our friends'
houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got
all our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the
rebellion at every hazard, and make as many friends as we could for
that purpose. Every man's business being assigned him, I started to
Natchez on foot, having sold my horse in New Orleans - with the
intention of stealing another after I started. I walked four days, and
no opportunity offered for me to get a horse.  The fifth day, about
twelve, I had become tired, and stopped at a creek to get some water
and rest a little.  While I was sitting on a log, looking down the
road the way that I had come, a man came in sight riding on a good-
looking horse.  The very moment I saw him, I was determined to have his
horse, if he was in the garb of a traveler. He rode up, and I saw from
his equipage that he was a traveler.  I rose and drew an elegant rifle
pistol on him and ordered him to dismount.  He did so, and I took his
horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek, and ordered him to walk
before me.  He went a few hundred yards and stopped.  I hitched his
horse, and then made him undress himself, all to his shirt and drawers,
and ordered him to turn his back to me.  He said: 'If you are
determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before I die.' I told
him I had no time to hear him pray.  He turned around and dropped
on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head.  I ripped
open his belly, and took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek.  I
then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and thirty-
seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to
examine.  I sunk the pocketbook and papers and his hat in the creek.
His boots were brand new, and fitted me genteelly; and I put them on
and sunk my old shoes in the creek, to atone for them.  I rolled up his
clothes and put them into his portmanteau, as they were brand-new cloth
of the best quality.  I mounted as fine a horse as ever I and directed
my course for Natchez in much better style than I had been for the last
five days.

"Myself and a fellow by the name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses
and started for Georgia.  We got in company with a young South-
Carolinian just before we got to Cumberland Mountain, and Crenshaw soon
knew all about his business.  He had been to Tennessee to buy a drove
of hogs, but when he got there pork was dearer than he calculated, and
he declined purchasing.  We concluded he was a prize.  Crenshaw winked
at me; I understood his idea. Crenshaw had traveled the road before,
but I never had; we had traveled several miles on the mountain, when we
passed near a great precipice; just before we passed it Crenshaw asked
me for my whip, which had a pound of lead in the butt; I handed it to
him, and he rode up by the side of the South-Carolinian, and gave him a
blow on the side of the head and tumbled him from his horse; we lit
from our horses and fingered his pockets; we got twelve
hundred and sixty-two dollars. Crenshaw said he knew a place to hide
him, and he gathered him under his arms and I by his feet, and conveyed
him to a deep crevice in the brow of the precipice, and tumbled him
into it, and he went out of sight; we then tumbled in his saddle, and
took his horse with us, which was worth two hundred dollars.

"We were detained a few days, and during that time our friend went to a
little village in the neighborhood and saw the negro advertised (a
negro in our possession), and a description of the two men of whom he
had been purchased, and giving his suspicions of the men.  It was
rather squally times, but any port in a storm; we took the negro that
night on the bank of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend, and
Crenshaw shot him through the head. We took out his entrails and sunk
him in the creek.

"He had sold the other negro the third time on Arkansas River for
upward of five hundred dollars; and then stole him and delivered him
into the hand of his friend, who conducted him to a swamp, and veiled
the tragic scene, and got the last gleanings and sacred pledge of
secrecy; as a game of that kind will not do unless it ends in a mystery
to all but the fraternity.  He sold the negro, first and last, for
nearly two thousand dollars, and then put him forever out of the reach
of all pursuers; and they can never graze him unless they can find the
negro; and that they cannot do, for his carcass has fed many a tortoise
and catfish before this time, and the frogs have sung this many a long
day to the silent repose of his skeleton."

 ...The usual river gossip going on in the pilot-house.  Island No. 63
- an island with a lovely "chute," or passage, behind it in the former
times.  They said Jesse Jamieson, in the Skylark, had a visiting pilot
with him one trip - a poor old broken-down, super-annuated fellow -
left him at the wheel, at the foot of 63, to run off the watch.  The
ancient mariner went up through the chute, and down the river outside;
and up the chute and down the river again; and yet again and again; and
handed the boat over to the relieving pilot, at the end of three hours
of honest endeavor, at the same old foot of the island where he had
originally taken the wheel!  A darky on shore who had observed the boat
go by, about thirteen times, said, "'clar to gracious, I wouldn't be
s'prised if dey's a whole line o' dem Skylarks!"

...We had the Kentucky Bend country in the early morning - scene of a
strange and tragic accident in the old times.  Captain Poe had a small
stern-wheel boat, for years the home of himself and his wife.  One
night the boat struck a snag in the head of Kentucky Bend, and sank
with astonishing suddenness; water already well above the cabin floor
when the captain got aft. So he cut into his wife's stateroom from
above with an ax; she was asleep in the upper berth, the roof a
flimsier one than was supposed; the first blow crashed down through the
rotten boards and clove her skull.

This bend is all filled up now - result of a cut-off; and the same
agent has taken the great and once much-frequented Walnut Bend, and set
it away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track of passing
steamers.

Helena we visited, and also a town I had not heard of before, it being
of recent birth - Arkansas City.  It was born of a railway; the Little
Rock, Mississippi River and Texas Railroad touches the river there.  We
asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was.
"Well," said he, after considering, and with the air of one who wishes
to take time and be accurate, "it's a h - - l of a place." A
description which was photographic for exactness.  There were several
rows and clusters of shabby frame houses, and a supply of mud
sufficient to insure the town against a famine in that
article for a hundred years; for the overflow had but lately subsided. 
There were stagnant ponds in the streets, here and there, and a dozen
rude scows were scattered about, lying aground wherever they happened
to have been when the waters drained off and people could do their
visiting and shopping on foot once more. Still, it is a thriving place,
with a rich country behind it, an elevator in front of it, and also a
fine big mill for the manufacture of cotton- seed oil.  I had never
seen this kind of a mill before.

Cotton-seed was comparatively valueless in my time; but it is worth
twelve or thirteen dollars a ton now, and none of it is thrown away.
The oil made from it is colorless, tasteless, and almost, if not
entirely, odorless. It is claimed that it can, by proper manipulation,
be made to resemble and perform the office of any and all oils, and be
produced at a cheaper rate than the cheapest of the originals.
Sagacious people shipped it to Italy, doctored it, labeled it, and
brought it back as olive-oil.  This trade grew to be so formidable that
Italy was obliged to put a prohibitory impost upon it to keep it from
working serious injury to her oil industry.

Helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the Mississippi. Her
perch is the last, the southernmost group of hills which one sees on
that side of the river.  In its normal condition it is a pretty town;
but the flood (or possibly the seepage) had lately been ravaging it;
whole streets of houses had been invaded by the muddy water, and the
outsides of the buildings were still belted with a broad stain
extending upward from the foundations.  Stranded and discarded scows
lay all about; plank sidewalks on stilts four feet high were still
standing; the broad sidewalks on the ground level were loose and
ruinous - a couple of men trotting along them could make a blind man
think a cavalry charge was coming; everywhere the mud was black and
deep, and in many places malarious pools of stagnant water were
standing.  A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and
desolating infliction to a fire.

We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday; two full hours'
liberty ashore while the boat discharge freight.  In the back streets
but few white people were visible, but there were plenty of colored
folk - mainly women and girls; and almost without exception upholstered
in bright new clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut - a glaring
and hilarious contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles.

Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population - which
is placed at five thousand.  The country about it is exceptionally
productive. Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty
thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has
a foundry, oilmills, machine shops, and wagon factories - in brief, has
one million dollars invested in manufacturing industries.  She has two
railways, and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous
region. Her gross receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are
placed by the New Orleans
Times-Democrat at four million dollars.

..."Come, what is all this about?  Can't a man go ashore at Napoleon,
if he wants to?"

"Why, hang it, don't you know?  There isn't any Napoleon any more.
Hasn't been for years and years.  The Arkansas River burst through it,
tore it all to rags, and emptied it into the Mississippi!"

"Carried the whole town away?  Banks, churches, jails, newspaper
offices, court-house, theater, fire department, livery stable -
everything?"

"Everything!  Just a fifteen-minute job, or such a matter.  Didn't
leave hide nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a
shanty and one brick chimney.  This boat is paddling along right now
where the dead-center of that town used to be; yonder is the brick
chimney - all that's left of Napoleon.  These dense woods on the right
used to be a mile back of the town. Take a look behind you - up-stream
- now you begin to recognize this country, don't you?"

"Yes, I do recognize it now.  It is the most wonderful thing I ever
heard of; by a long shot the most wonderful - and unexpected."

Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rogers had arrived, meantime, with satchels and
umbrellas, and had silently listened to the captain's news.  Thompson
put a half-dollar in my hand and said softly:

"For my share of the chromo."

Rogers followed suit.

Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between
unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good
big self-complacent town twenty years ago.  Town that was county- seat
of a great and important county; town with a big United States marine
hospital; town of innumerable fights - an inquest every day; town where
I had used to know the prettiest girl, and the most accomplished, in
the whole Mississippi valley; town where we were handed the first
printed news of the Pennsylvania's mournful disaster a quarter of a
century ago; a town no more - swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the
fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick
chimney!

...In regard to Island 74, which is situated not far from the former
Napoleon, a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of
men and made them a vanity and a jest.  When the state of Arkansas was
chartered, she controlled "to the center of the river" - a most
unstable line.  The state ofnMississippi claimed "to the channel" -
another shifty and unstable line.  No. 74 belonged to Arkansas.  By and
by a cut-off threw this big island out of Arkansas, and yet not within
Mississippi. "Middle of the river" on one side of it, "channel" on the
other.  That is as I understand the problem.  Whether I have got the
details right or wrong, this fact remains: that here is this big
and exceedingly valuable island of four thousand acres, thrust out in
the cold, and belonging to neither the one state nor the other; paying
taxes to neither, owing allegiance to neither.  One man owns the whole
island, and of right is "the man without a country."

Island 92 belongs to Arkansas.  The river moved it over and joined it
to Mississippi.  A chap established a whisky-shop there, without a
Mississippi license, and enriched himself upon Mississippi custom under
Arkansas protection (where no license was in those days required).

...We glided steadily down the river in the usual privacy - steamboat
or other moving thing seldom seen.  Scenery as always; stretch upon
stretch of almost unbroken forest on both sides of the river; soundless
solitude.  Here and there a cabin or two, standing in small openings on
the gray and grassless banks - cabins which had formerly stood a
quarter or half mile farther to the front, and gradually been pulled
farther and farther back as the shores caved in.  As at Pilcher's
Point, for instance, where the cabins had been moved back three hundred
yards in three months, so we were told; but the caving banks had
already caught up with them, and they were being conveyed rearward once
more.

Napoleon had but small opinion of Greenville, Mississippi, in the
oldtimes; but behold, Napoleon is gone to the catfishes, and here is
Greenville full of life and activity, and making a considerable
flourish in the valley; having three thousand inhabitants, it is said,
and doing a gross trade of two million five hundred thousand dollars
annually.  A growing town.

There was much talk on the boat about the Calhoun Land Company, an
enterprise which is expected to work wholesome results.  Colonel
Calhoun, a grandson of the statesman, went to Boston and formed a
syndicate which purchased a large tract of land on the river, in Chicot
County, Arkansas - some ten thousand acres - for cotton-growing.  The
purpose is to work on a cash basis: buy at first hands, and handle
their own product; supply their negro laborers with provisions and
necessaries at a trifling profit, say eight or ten per cent.; furnish
them comfortable quarters, etc., and encourage them to save money and
remain on the place. If this proves a financial success, as
seems quite certain, they propose to establish a banking-house in
Greenville, and lend money at an unburdensome rate of interest - six
per cent. is spoken of.

...Some of the pilots whom I had known had had adventures - the outcome
fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases.  Captain Montgomery, whom I
had steered for when he was a pilot, commanded the Confederate fleet in
the great battle before Memphis; when his vessel went down, he swam
ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant
and narrow escape.  He was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his
serenity.  Once when he was captain of the Crescent City, I was
bringing the boat into port at New Orleans, and momently expecting
orders from the hurricane-deck, but received none.  I had stopped the
wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased.  It was
evening - dim twilight; the captain's hat was perched upon the big
bell, and I supposed the intellectual end of the captain was in it, but
such was not the case. The captain was very strict; therefore I knew
better than to touch a bell without orders.  My duty was to hold the
boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to
take care of themselves - which I did.  So we went plowing past the
sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer - the crash was
bound to come very soon - and still that hat never budged; for alas!
the captain was napping in the texas.... Things were becoming
exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable.  It seemed to me that the
captain was not going to appear in time to see the entertainment.  But
he did. Just as we were walking into the stern of a steamboat, he
stepped out on deck, and said, with heavenly serenity, "Set her back on
both" - which I did; but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we
went smashing through that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most
prodigious racket.  The captain never said a word to me about the
matter afterward, except to remark that I had done right, and that he
hoped I would not hesitate to act in the same way again in
like circumstances.

One of the pilots whom I had known when I was on the river had died a
very honorable death.  His boat caught fire, and he remained at the
wheel until he got her safe to land.  Then he went out over the breast-
board with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get
ashore. He died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours,
and his was the only life lost.

...The "cub" pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected
with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep
dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his
being useful in it. And so effectively are these admonitions inculcated
that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick
to the wheel, and die there when occasion requires.  In a Memphis
graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great
many years ago, in White River, to save the lives of other men.  He
said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a
sand-bar, some distance away, all could be saved, but that to land
against the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of many
lives.  He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water; but
by that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping through
them he was fatally burned.  He had been urged to fly sooner, but had
replied as became a pilot to reply:

"I will not go.  If I go, nobody will be saved.  If I stay, no one will
be lost but me.  I will stay."

There were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the
pilot's.  There used to be a monument to this young fellow in that
Memphis graveyard.  While we tarried in Memphis on our down trip, I
started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that I was
obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished.

The tugboat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead - blown up,
near Memphis, and killed; that several others whom I had known had
fallen in the
war - one or two of them shot down at the wheel; that another and very
particular friend, whom I had steered many trips for, had stepped out
of his house in New Orleans, one night years ago, to collect some money
in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen again - was
murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that Ben Thornburg
was dead long ago; also his wild "cub," whom I used to quarrel with all
through every daylight watch.  A heedless, reckless creature he was,
and always in hot water, always in mischief.  An Arkansas passenger
brought an enormous bear aboard one day, and chained him to a life-boat
on the hurricane-deck.  Thornburg's "cub" could not rest till he had
gone there and unchained the bear, to "see what he would do." He was
promptly gratified.  The bear chased him around and around the deck,
for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the
railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail and
went into the texas to chew it.  The off-watch turned out with
alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession.  He presently grew
lonesome, and started out for recreation.  He ranged the whole boat -
visited every part of it, with an advance-guard of fleeing people in
front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner
captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere;
everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude.

I was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel, from
heart disease, in 1869.  The captain was on the roof at the time.  He
saw the boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer; ran
up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor.

Mr. Bixby had been blown up in Madrid Bend; was not injured, but the
other pilot was lost.

George Ritchie had been blown up near Memphis - blown into the river
from the wheel, and disabled.  The water was very cold; he clung to a
cotton-bale - mainly with his teeth - and floated until nearly
exhausted, when he was rescued by some deck-hands who were on a piece
of the wreck. They tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton, and
warmed the life back into him, and got him safe to Memphis.  He is one
of Bixby's pilots on the Baton Rouge now.

Into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had dropped a bit of
romance - somewhat grotesque romance, but romance nevertheless.  When I
knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, good-
hearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously
promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing.
In a Western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his
wife; and in their family was a comely young girl - sort of friend,
sort of servant.  The young clerk of whom I have been speaking - whose
name was not George Johnson, but who shall be called
George Johnson for the purposes of this narrative - got acquainted with
this young girl, and they sinned; and the old foreigner found them out
and rebuked them.  Being ashamed, they lied, and said they were
married; that they had been privately married.  Then the old
foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed them. After
that, they were able to continue their sin without concealment.  By and
by the foreigner's wife died; and presently he followed after her.
Friends of the family assembled to mourn; and among the mourners sat
the two young sinners.  The will was opened and solemnly read. It
bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to Mrs. George
Johnson!

And there was no such person.  The young sinners fled forth then and
did a very foolish thing: married themselves before an obscure justice
of the peace, and got him to antedate the thing.  That did no sort of
good. The distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date
with extreme suddenness and surprising ease, and carried off the
fortune, leaving the Johnsons very legitimately, and legally, and
irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage, but with not so
much as a penny to bless themselves withal.  Such are the actual facts;
and not all novels have for a base so
telling a situation.

...We had some talk about Captain Isaiah Sellers, now many years dead.
He was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore
and on the river.  He was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in
his old age - as I remember him - his hair was as black as an Indian's,
and his eye and hand were as strong and steady and his nerve and
judgment as firm and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the
fraternity of pilots.  He was the patriarch of the craft; he had been a
keelboat pilot before the day of steamboats; and a steamboat pilot
before any other steamboat pilot, still surviving at the time I speak
of, had ever turned a wheel.  Consequently, his brethren held him in
the sort of awe in which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are
always held by their associates.  He knew how he was regarded, and
perhaps this fact added some trifle of stiffening to his natural
dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff in its original state.

He left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back to his
first steamboat trip, which was said to be 1811, the year the first
steamboat disturbed the waters of the Mississippi.  At the time of his
death a correspondent of the St. Louis Republican culled the following
items from the diary:

In February, 1825, he shipped on board the steamer Rambler, at
Florence, Ala., and made during that year three trips to New Orleans
and back - this on the General Carrol, between Nashville and New
Orleans.  It was during his stay on this boat that Captain Sellers
introduced the tap of the bell as a signal to heave the lead; previous
to which time it was the custom for the pilot to speak to the men below
when soundings were wanted.  The proximity of the forecastle to the
pilot-house, no doubt, rendered this an easy matter; but how different
on one of our palaces of the present day!

In 1827 we find him on board the President, a boat of two hundred and
eighty-five tons burden, and plying between Smithland and New Orleans. 
Thence he joined the Jubilee in 1828, and on this boat he did his first
piloting in the St. Louis trade; his first watch extending from
Herculaneum to St. Genevieve.  On May 26, 1836, he completed and left
Pittsburg in charge of the steamer Prairie, a boat of four hundred
tons, and the first steamer with a stateroom cabin ever seen at St.
Louis.  In 1857 he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which
has, with some slight change, been the universal
custom of this day; in fact, is rendered obligatory by act of Congress.

As general items of river history, we quote the following marginal
notes from his general log:

In March, 1825, General Lafayette left New Orleans for St. Louis on the
low-pressure steamer Natchez.

In January, 1828, twenty-one steamers left the New Orleans wharf to
celebrate the occasion of General Jackson's visit to that city.

In 1830 the North American made the run from New Orleans to Memphis in
six days - best time on record to that date.  It has since been made in
two days and ten hours.

In 1831 the Red River cut-off formed.

In 1832 steamer Hudson made the run from White River to Helena, a
distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours.  This was the source
of much talk and speculation among parties directly interested.

In 1839 Great Horseshoe cut-off formed.

Up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain, by
reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips
to New Orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred and
four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.

Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots, a chill
fell there, and talking ceased.  For this reason: whenever six pilots
were gathered together, there would always be one or two newly fledged
ones in the lot, and the elder ones would be always "showing off"
before these poor fellows; making them sorrowfully feel how callow they
were, how recent their nobility, and how humble their degree, by
talking largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river;
always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could,
so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest degree
possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree.  And how these
complacent bald- heads would swell, and brag, and lie, and date back
- ten, fifteen, twenty years, and how they did enjoy the effect
produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters!

And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings, the stately
figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine Son of
Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst.  Imagine the size of
the silence that would result on the instant!  And imagine the feelings
of those baldheads, and the exultation of their recent audience, when
the ancient captain would begin to drop casual and indifferent remarks
of a reminiscent nature - about islands that had disappeared, and cut-
offs that had been made, a generation before the oldest baldhead in the
company had ever set his foot in a pilot-house!

Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in
the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him.  If
one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the
misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice;
and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a
name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before.  If
you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular
about little details; never spoke of "the state of Mississippi," for
instance - no, he would say, "When the state of Mississippi was where
Arkansas now is"; and would never speak of Louisiana or Missouri in a
general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind - no, he
would say, "When Louisiana was up the river farther," or "When Missouri
was on the Illinois side."

The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to
jot down brief paragraphs of plain, practical information about the
river, and sign them "Mark Twain," and give them to the New Orleans
Picayune.  They related to the stage and condition of the river, and
were accurate and valuable; and thus far they contained no poison.  But
in speaking of the stage of the river to-day at a given point, the
captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the
first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular
point in forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island so-
and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such
observation as "disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly." In these
antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old
pilots, and they used to chaff the "Mark Twain" paragraphs with
unsparing mockery.

...Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that
day forth.  When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words.
It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as
Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of
it.  It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much
greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of
people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me.

He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again
signed "Mark Twain" to anything.  At the time that the telegraph
brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast.  I was a
fresh, new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the
ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it
remain what it was in his hands - a sign and symbol and warrant that
whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the
petrified truth.  How I've succeeded, it would not be modest in me to
say.