Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River
201
Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River
201eBook
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Overview
The Mississippi River occupies a sacred place in American culture and mythology. Often called The Father of Rivers, it winds through American life in equal measure as a symbol and as a topographic feature. To the people who know it best, the river is life and a livelihood. River boatmen working the wide Mississippi are never far from land. Even in the dark, they can smell plants and animals and hear people on the banks and wharves.
Bonnie Stepenoff takes readers on a cruise through history, showing how workers from St. Louis to Memphis changed the river and were in turn changed by it. Each chapter of this fast-moving narrative focuses on representative workers: captains and pilots, gamblers and musicians, cooks and craftsmen. Readers will find workers who are themselves part of the country’s mythology from Mark Twain and anti-slavery crusader William Wells Brown to musicians Fate Marable and Louis Armstrong.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826273499 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 07/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 201 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Bonnie Stepenoff grew up in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania and eventually moved to Missouri, where she became a professor of history at Southeast Missouri State University. Now retired, she continues to write non-fiction and poetry. She has six books to her credit, including Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River (University of Missouri Press, 2015), The Dead End Kids of St. Louis: Homeless Boys and the People who Tried to Save Them (University of Missouri Press, 2010), Big Spring Autumn (Truman State University Press, 2008), From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century (University of Missouri Press, 2006), Thad Snow: A Life of Social Reform in Southeast Missouri (University of Missouri Press, 2003), and Their Fathers’ Daughters: Silk Mill Workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania (Susquehanna University Press, 1999). Her articles, essays, and poetry have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including the Sherlock Holmes Journal (2016), Missouri Law and the American Conscience (2016), Red Moon Anthology (2009 and 2016), Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology (2013), Cultural Landscapes (2008), Mining Women (2006), The Other Missouri History (2004), Rebellious Families (2002), Labor History, Labor’s Heritage, New York History, Pennsylvania History, Missouri Historical Review, Gateway, Missouri Conservationist, Missouri Life, Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and The Heron’s Nest. She lives in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Read an Excerpt
Working the Mississippi
Two Centuries of Life on the River
By Bonnie Stepenoff
University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2015 The Curators of the University of MissouriAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-7349-9
CHAPTER 1
St. Louis, Missouri
I went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like sardines at the long St. Louis wharf, and humbly inquired for the pilots, but got only the cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks.
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
In the first half of the nineteenth century, St. Louis grew from a frontier trading post to a rapidly expanding river city powered by steam. In the winter and spring of 1803–1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark camped at Wood River, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, preparing their keelboat and pirogues for a bold expedition up the Missouri River. Two prominent French fur traders, Auguste Chouteau and his younger brother Pierre, welcomed the explorers to their St. Louis residences and assisted the explorers in many ways, even engaging some men to join their crew. Thirteen years later, the Chouteau brothers were past middle age and were retiring from their business when the Zebulon M. Pike landed at the foot of Market Street on August 2, 1817, introducing steamboats to St. Louis.
Riverboat commerce brought an assortment of footloose young men to the city's wharves and streets. Native-born whites and immigrants worked in the loading areas, engine rooms, and on the decks. Black men, both slave and free, found employment as roustabouts, firemen, stewards, and cooks. In late April of 1836, a black man named Francis McIntosh arrived in town on the steamboat Flora. McIntosh, who worked as a steward, was probably inebriated on April 28, when he became involved in a confrontation on the wharf. Two white policemen, William Mull and George Hammond, tried to arrest a group of workers for disorderly conduct. McIntosh intervened, allowing the other workers to run away.
The events following this riverfront confrontation led to McIntosh's gruesome death and vividly brought to light the racial tensions in the city. Mull and Hammond arrested McIntosh and led him toward the jail. When Hammond taunted the captive by telling him he would probably hang for what he had done, McIntosh pulled a knife, slashed Mull's abdomen, and stabbed Hammond in the throat. Mull survived, but Hammond died in the street. Bystanders rushed in and pushed McIntosh into the jail, where a mob gathered, dragged him out again, chained him to a tree, built a fire around him, and burned him to death. Fifteen or twenty people participated in the lynching, but a larger crowd watched. Reactions in the city were mixed. Some newspapers made excuses for the atrocity, but the St. Louis Observer, edited by Elijah Lovejoy, raged against it. Lovejoy later moved to Alton, Illinois, where he became a martyr to the antislavery cause.
Violence and tragedy continued to plague the riverfront, as commerce continued to grow. On a single day, May 17, 1849, twenty boats burned in the great fire on the St. Louis wharves. They must have been "packed together like sardines" as young Samuel Clemens noted in the 1850s. The fire did not put a damper on river traffic. The boats kept coming, and in the streets along the river's edge, restaurants, laundries, grocery stores, brothels, and gambling houses vied to serve the needs of passengers and crew members, while boys like Clemens dreamed of becoming pilots.
In addition to freight and passengers the riverboats brought cholera to St. Louis in the terrible epidemic of 1849. During the month of January, at least four different boats docked with sick passengers aboard: the Amaranth carried thirty; the Aleck Scott, forty; the St. Paul, twenty-six; and the General Jessup had many ailing, although the precise number is not known. At least ten of these passengers died of the contagious disease. There were no reported deaths in February, but in March and April, the death toll rose steadily to more than twenty per day. Frightened citizens hoped that the fire of May 17 would clear the riverfront of contagion, and for two weeks after that there was a brief respite as the number of deaths declined, but then the disease spread like a wildfire, with more than four hundred deaths occurring in the week before June 17.
By August, the epidemic had subsided, leaving about 7 percent of the city's residents dead. During the crisis, St. Louis suffered the highest death rate of any city in the nation. Although it was not known at the time, cholera is caused by a bacterium (Vibrio cholera) that thrives in unsanitary water supplies and ineffective sewer systems. It was carried around the world by people traveling on oceans and rivers, and it seems clear, in hindsight, that St. Louis's water and food supplies became contaminated, spreading the disease. After the tragedy, St. Louis invested in water and sewer projects that made the city a healthier place. River traffic slowed for a short time, but by the 1850s travelers and immigrants had once again swelled the population.
Among the worst perils of river transportation was ice, both when forming in the winter and when melting in the spring. The Mississippi River did not often freeze over completely at St. Louis, but the winter of 1855–1856 was exceptionally cold. On New Year's Day 1856, the river closed, and the ice continued to get thicker for several more weeks. Late in February, warm weather upstream caused a rise in the water while the river at St. Louis was still frozen. The ice began to move slowly and gradually gathered power, crowding vessels into one another then ripping them from their moorings, forcing them downstream, and slamming them into whatever lay in their path. The Missouri Republican estimated that about twenty boats sank, and many others suffered damage during the hour or so before the ice began to crumble. Grant Marsh, who later became a famous captain on the Missouri River, was a young watchman who was stranded aboard the A. B. Chambers No. 2, floating through the wreckage on the levee, expecting to die, until the boat came to a safe landing three miles from its original mooring.
One person who profited from the perils of river travel was James B. Eads, who began his career as a steamboat clerk in 1838, when he was eighteen years old. Four years later, he invented a diving bell and went into the salvage business. The daring and ingenious Eads plied the river between St. Louis and New Orleans, searching for wrecked boats buried as much as sixty-five feet below the surface. By the 1850s, he owned a fleet of salvage vessels, and he probably understood the river, its currents, and its dangers as well as anyone.
During the Civil War, when the Union Army undertook a massive assault on Confederate strongholds in the lower Mississippi valley, Eads set to work building ironclad gunboats for the U.S. War Department. He leased a boatyard known as "Emerson's Docks" in Carondelet, just south of St. Louis, after the yard's owner, Primus Emerson, went to Memphis to build ironclads for the Confederacy. One of Eads's armored vessels, the Carondelet, played a major part in General Ulysses S. Grant's campaign to gain control of the river. On April 4, 1862, the boat sped past Island No. Ten to join the Union Army at New Madrid, Missouri. After Island No. 10 fell, the Carondelet descended the river to join in the fighting at Fort Pillow and Memphis. When the war ended, Eads had won national fame as an engineer and a sizable fortune as a businessman.
His greatest achievement came after the war with the design and construction of a path-breaking bridge. Before 1867, Eads had never built a bridge, but he knew the depth and shape of the river better than did any other engineer at the time. In July of that year, he presented a design for a massive structure composed of three 500-foot spans supported by stone arches resting on bedrock under the river. From bedrock to top, the bridge towered more than one hundred feet, in some places resting more than sixty feet under the water. For the workers who laid the foundations of the bridge, the job was dangerous — even fatal. In the late 1860s, little was known about the dangers of deep water and how rapid changes in pressure affected the body. Eads himself had frequently experienced illness after submerging in his diving bell, but he did not realize the cause. Of the six hundred men who worked in caissons (watertight enclosures) underwater while constructing the bridge, 119 suffered illness and 14 died. In spite of these tragedies and a series of design changes, in 1873, Eads's famous bridge opened, celebrated with parades, fanfare, and a one-hundred-gun salute.
The Eads Bridge was a railroad bridge, a sign that foretold the end of the golden age of steamboating, but in the 1870s, most St. Louisans had no clear presentiment of what the future might bring. Steamboats still ruled the waters, and excitement ran high for the most famous steamboat race in history. On June 30, 1870, the race began between the massive steamer Robert E. Lee and its sleek, fast rival the Natchez. Without admitting publicly that they were running a race, the captains of the two boats left New Orleans simultaneously at 4:55 pm on Thursday, June 30. Reporters for various newspapers covered the story, and crowds began to gather in towns along the way. On Saturday night, when the Lee reached Cape Girardeau, spectators had built a bonfire on the landing. The Lee arrived in St. Louis at 11:25 am on the Fourth of July. The Natchez was delayed by fog but reached the finish line six hours later. In all the excitement of the great race, few people stopped to consider that railroad trains on regular schedules made the same trip in a single day.
Railroad passengers took part in the jubilant celebration welcoming the Lee to St. Louis. On the morning of July 4, passengers traveling south on the Iron Mountain Railroad waved handkerchiefs and hats as the train, with its whistle screaming, raced along the tracks near the river and shot past the boat. Special excursion trains brought spectators to the riverbank. The men at Jefferson Barracks fired a gun in salute as the Lee rumbled north, with smoke surging from her chimneys. Deckhands and roustabouts sang songs of victory. Rooftops and windows of buildings facing the levee filled with people. Huge crowds gathered on the wharf. Steamboats tied up in the harbor blew their whistles and rang their bells. The Lee passed by at full speed, then turned around, came back, and landed at the wharf at the foot of Walnut Street. Police could not restrain people from boarding the boat to shake hands with and embrace the victorious crew. If this event signaled the end of an era, it came with a bang, not a whimper.
Steamboats and railroads brought people of many races and nationalities to St. Louis, and newcomers struggled to make a living by opening businesses on shabby little by-ways scattered among the streets and alleyways on the riverfront. Ship's chandlers (suppliers) opened boat stores, stocked with chains, ropes, anchors, food, and clothing. A Chinese enclave known as Hop Alley occupied an area bounded by Walnut, Market, Seventh and Ninth streets. Most of the residents of Hop Alley were ordinary businessmen and their families, trying to survive by opening laundries, grocery stores, and restaurants. But the public, fueled by newspaper sensationalism, imagined it to be a world of opium sellers, drug-induced dreams, incense, and smoky rooms. Young men went there at midnight to buy "hop" and carry it away or lie in rattan bunks and smoke it in pipes.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the St. Louis riverfront possessed a distinct, and sometimes shadowy, allure. People flocked there, looking for excitement and sometimes for trouble. In the brutally cold winter of 1899, a team of grifters conducted a shell-game on folding tables set up on the ice halfway across the river. Within a short period of time, a crowd gathered around them. Three men ran the games, while another three mingled with the crowd. The men playing the games kept three walnut shells moving at a rapid pace, while keeping up a constant line of patter. Bettors had to guess which of the shells concealed a little black ball, which most likely was hidden under the shell man's thumb. The game was rigged; the bettors always lost. But the police could do nothing to stop it, because it took place on the river, out of their jurisdiction.
Local authorities consistently failed to enforce laws against gambling. On October 11, 1878, the St. Louis Evening Post printed a letter from a concerned citizen to the St. Louis Board of Commissioners. The writer identified seventeen keno and faro houses on Sixth Street, Chestnut Street, and Washington Avenue. He further stated that a "great number of poker rooms," too numerous to mention, operated in private homes, and he begged the commissioners to break up these games and protect the public morals. Journalists J. A. Dacus and James W. Buel confirmed that there were dozens of gambling houses on Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth streets in the vicinity of the river and that these places were open for business day and night. Occasional police raids did nothing to put a damper on illegal games.
Prostitution flourished in the streets nearest the river and spread to other thoroughfares as the city expanded westward. On Sixth, Seventh, and Poplar streets and Almond Avenue, at every hour of the day and night, lewd women leaned from upstairs windows, couples standing on the sidewalks embraced, drunkards slept in doorways, and men of all ages loafed and brawled in saloons. A grand jury investigation in 1881 identified two hundred brothels in the downtown area from the levee to Twelfth Street. Later in that decade, houses of prostitution spilled over into the area west of Twelfth Street and east of Fifteenth Street along Chestnut, Market, and Pine. Despite the efforts of city officials to confine the institution to the seedier neighborhoods, as respectable residents moved west, prostitutes took up residence in gaudily furnished houses throughout the city, and madams rode in elegant horse-drawn carriages.
On the dark streets near the river, violent crime also flourished. Dacus and Buel went undercover to investigate the night life on Broadway between Fourth and Ninth streets, where streetwalkers and gamblers were most numerous. Larceny, burglary, robbery, assault, and murder occurred more commonly in this area than in any other part of the city. Dacus and Buel constructed the common tale of a deckhand receiving his pay and spending the night in a boardinghouse on the levee. Observing that he had fifty or a hundred dollars in his pocket, predatory men might induce him to go drinking in one of the all-night saloons. On the following morning, his body might turn up "stiff and cold on the levee," or he might just disappear into the river. No one would investigate. "He was only a deck-hand, may be, without home or friends. None will ever know his resting place."
As the streets near the river became meaner in the late nineteenth century, the city expanded to the west. Theodore Dreiser, who arrived from Chicago in 1892, worked as a newspaper reporter. He found the riverfront in a state of decline. Far from downtown, on the West End, wealthy people were building magnificent homes in gated parks. At the same time, he observed, old mansions near the central business district were falling into disrepair. Stores, factories, and offices, even a few tall Chicago-style buildings, were rising in their places. Dreiser took up residence in a seedy rooming house on Pine Street, where the streetcars clanged all night long. When he walked along the waterfront, he found a mill area flanked by "wretched tenements, as poor and grimy and dingy as any" he had seen in Chicago.
On May 27, 1896, a tornado (known as the Great Cyclone) brought death and destruction to the St. Louis levee. Early that afternoon, a fitful wind came from the northwest. Just after 5:00 pm masses of clouds darkened the city, and rain began to fall. Within minutes, the tornado touched down. Lightning and wind turned telegraph poles into pillars of flame. Pedestrians ran for cover through torrents of rain, dodging flying bricks and timbers. Lafayette Park suffered severe damage. Soulard Market, the City Hospital, and the City Poor House also were centers of destruction. From Broadway to the river, much of the town lay in ruins. On the morning after the storm, masses of people searched through the wreckage or clamored outside the morgue, trying to find their loved ones. In all, the storm killed about three hundred people and injured about one thousand.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Working the Mississippi by Bonnie Stepenoff. Copyright © 2015 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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