River-Horse: A Voyage Across America by William Least Heat-Moon
That section of the river breaks through a distant outreach of the Ozark Mountains at the top of what was once the Mississippi Embayment, a very long arm of the Gulf of Mexico. When the great sauropods and forty-five-foot crocodiles were in their last days, this former mouth of the ancient river probably poured over a three-hun dred-foot-high precipice, a massive cascade twice the height of Niagara, to enter the Gulf. Had Commerce been around, it would have been a seaport.
At Cape Girardeau, we looked for gasoline but found the flood had either closed or damaged two different fuel docks. We couldn’t risk going farther, so I turned Nikawa downstream again and pulled up on the inside of a big Corps of Engineers floating dry dock. I climbed the ladder and walked into a small lounge. Workers sat drinking coffee, and I asked whether we might tie up there for an hour till we found gasoline. “No, you can’t! Get out of here!” a bloated man said. “Get your craft out of here!” I said we were in a real pinch, what with this flood. “I told you to get your damn boat off this dock!” Okay, I said, just direct me to some other place to tie up. “I told you all I’m gonna tell you except this—you aren’t going to stay here!” I said, leaving, Thanks for your help, you swampsucker.
We prowled along the high floodwall. There was but one possibility, an inundated concrete ramp, or what looked like a ramp, a thing useless except for a boat trailer, where four men stood staring at the flood. With no idea what was under us, I edged through the rough water on one motor, Pilotis giving me the sounder readings until we were close enough to ask the men about the ramp. “It’s not a ramp!” one yelled, and picked up a piece of drift and plunged it in to show the depth. “It’s a straight wall!” Good news. We approached slowly, got our fenders down low enough to ride against the ledge, and tossed a line to them to hold Nikawa steady in the barge waves threatening to slam her onto the concrete.
The men were down-and-out, had no vehicle, and the gasoline was up on the highway, too far to walk, so I stood bewildered. Pilotis asked, “Waiting for a coincidence?” It’s all we’ve got, I said. “Again.” So we passed the time: took snapshots, counted trees coming down the river, someone told a flood joke involving a chicken and pig. Then a man carrying his daughter on his shoulders walked up to show her the bad Mississippi misbehaving. He asked about Nikawa. I told him about her, spoke of our voyage, and his expression became intense. His name was David Keiper, and he once had sailed a trimaran from San Francisco to New Zealand. He understood exigencies. “So you need some gas?” Indeed. While I checked the fenders, Pilotis said, “There’s one person in the entire state who’s sailed across the Pacific, and he’s the one who strolls right up to us.” And the Piper said innocently, “Duck soup.” I quoted Ernest Hemingway after he walked away from an airplane crash in Africa: “The luck, she is still running good.”
In an hour I had canisters of gasoline, and we were under way again, waved onto the flood by our benefactors, and I said I was glad to have come across the swampsucking orzizzazz—his role made for better drama. “Yes,” said Pilotis, “but your Pacific deus ex machina was too much. The audience won’t buy it.” Given the pressure, it was the best I could do, I said.
For lunch we ate peanut-butter-and-preserves sandwiches on sourdough bread, mine with sliced sweet pickles. The twenty-eight miles up to Tower Rock was a generally straight run full of low swells that impeded us on the upside and rocketed us forward on the downslope, and driftwood formed into floating islands, some so large we could only tractor through as if we were in a small Sargasso Sea.
South of St. Louis, the Mississippi is somewhat lacking in exceptional scenery, but much of the best of what is there occurs between Cape Girardeau and Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. In that stretch the most celebrated landmark is Tower Rock, or the Grand Tower, the latter name not really accurate in either word, although the stony outlier is distinctive with its creviced striations of yellowed limestone capped by oaks and cedars, a thing even jaded towmen like to look at. From the late seventeenth century on, travelers—Marquette and Jolliet, Lewis and Clark, explorer Stephen Long, ethnographer Prince Maximilian and his artist Karl Bodmer, John James Audubon, Mark Twain—have noted or sketched the Tower, the earliest accounts speaking of the fear and reverence Indians held for the rock and its swirling waters. Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal:
This [Tower] seems among the watermen of the mississippi to be what the tropics or Equanoxial line is with regard to the Sailors; those who have never passed it before are always compelled to pay or furnish some sperits to drink or be ducked. . . . These strong courants thus meeting each other form an immence and dangerous whirlpool which no boat dare approach in that state of the water; the counter courent driving with great force against the East side of the rock would instandly dash them to attoms and the whirlpool would as quickly take them to the botom.
Concerned not about hard water but rocks, we approached only closely enough for photographs and then went on.
If you’ve seen the movie In the Heat of the Night, you may remember the high, slender bridge the police captain uses to overtake a fleeing man suspected of murder. The span links Missouri to Chester, Illinois, atop the eastern bluff, with a state prison below it and northward a plainly handsome French-colonial house Pierre Menard built in 1802 on the low bank of the Mississippi, elevated just enough to stay dry. Menard, a merchant and legislator, was an alert immigrant who troubled himself to study the territory and adapt to its ways. During muggy summers, he piped chilly drafts from his springhouse into his home to make it one of the first air-cooled places in America; there he comfortably entertained Lafayette and Indian chiefs and became wealthy by understanding and respecting two native forces: the Mississippi and the aboriginal people.
Among those not giving the river or the Indians their due were the priestly founders of Old Kaskaskia, platted in 1703 on the floodplain just below the spot the Kaskaskia River issues into the Mississippi—a bonehead location that nevertheless managed to last almost two centuries before the rivers sent south this once most important river village above New Orleans and, for a couple of years, the first capital of Illinois. On the bluff above, earthen ramparts of Fort Kaskaskia remain, overgrown in large trees, a haunting place where John Dodge, an acquaintance of George Washington, took up despotic rule from the abandoned fort in 1784. He tyrannized the wilderness residents and murdered messengers sent out for help. A priest, Father Gibault, wrote of the iniquity: “Breaking of limbs, murder by means of a dagger, sabre, or sword (for he who will carries one) are common, and pistols and guns are but toys in this region. The most solemn feasts and Sundays are days given up to dances and drunkenness, with girls suborned and ravished in the woods, and a thousand other disorders which you are able to infer from these.” It took troops under George Rogers Clark, William’s elder brother, to set things right.
Four miles around the big bend upstream from these troubles, we found a small dredged-out harbor near the old French village of Ste. Genevieve. Despite some of the boatworks lying underwater, we pulled in for the night and, for the first time, broke out the kayak to get us to shore to a small bar—not one of sand but rather the other kind—and we ordered a round of quenchers and toasted our surviving another day. I coaxed the smiling bartender to take us across Bois Brulé Bottom into Ste. Genevieve when she got off work. As she drove us into one of the first towns west of the Mississippi, she said, “So you’re on a little ol excursion trip?”
People revere Ste. Genevieve as they do a Queen Mum—for her dignity, quaintness, and for having seen so damn much history. Yet in her early days of frontier hardship, residents of rival Kaskaskia, “the little Paris of the Wilderness” now gone downriver, called her Misère (“misery” or “poverty” or “shabbiness”; St. Louis was then popularly Pancour, “short of bread”). We took lodging in the attic of the Main Street Inn, an excellent antebellum house. Our hosts invited us onto the garden porch for wine, popcorn, and conversation. Pilotis, relaxing in the late sun, said, “When this little ol excur
To the Tune of “Garry Owen” We Get Ready
THE MISSISSIPPI at Ste. Genevieve was ten feet above flood stage and still rising, and we’d heard that the Missouri, only seventy-five miles away, would crest about the time we reached it, a concern because the Corps of Engineers might “shut down the river”—not its flow but navigation on it. I’d become confident Nikawa could handle the flood, but would the necessity of catching the spring rise in the Far West allow us to accommodate regulations two thousand miles east?
As I oiled the engines and refueled, I talked with a man who had arrived a couple of days earlier from Florida, on his way to Chicago in a fifty-foot motor yacht, a boat bigger than its length alone suggests. He had used 450 gallons of diesel to run the 122 miles from Cairo to Ste. Genevieve, at a cost of seven hundred dollars. He said, “That damn current ate my lunch.” I told him we’d come almost two thousand miles from the Atlantic Ocean on only a third more than that. “Sure,” he said, “but you’re in a toy.” The eye of the beholder: I’d considered boats like his the toys.
The weather was about to turn again, and already the wind was reaching twenty miles an hour, but it was generally blowing upriver to give us a push against the current. Every few miles we had to stop and raise the motors to clear the props of drift while Nikawa, indeed, bounced like a toy. We took one hard hit that knocked off a piece of propeller first damaged in Lake Chautauqua, but it wasn’t enough to stop us. When people asked, as they often did, “Is it fun?” I remembered the perpetual threats, a sure depressant of that so American thing called fun. I thought, Toys are fun—cross-country river trips are something the hell else.
Above the Ste. Genevieve ferry, rocky bluffs come down to the river along the Missouri shore, and where quarries have not destroyed them, the cliffs are lovely, seated in maples and cottonwoods, topped with cedars and hickories. On the Illinois side a long line of levees protected a bottom cropland of grains and legumes. For more than a thousand miles, the Mississippi from above St. Louis to below New Orleans runs as an engineered conduit with either levees or bluffs penning the river, a circumstance that makes the roll of a flood faster, deeper, meaner. Like the Missouri, the Mississippi can no longer significantly spread high water full of silt into lowlands to diffuse the flow and enrich the soil. Of the hundreds of uses of this river, the Army Corps of Engineers for years tried to operate it for only one—barge navigation. The old steamboats, of course, hauled freight and people when the Mississippi was still nearly a wild river, but then those boats and cargoes were smaller; today, shipping companies speak only about economies of scale, and well they can, since on the broad Mississippi a full fifteen-barge tow can carry as much as 870 semi trucks.
The river has been not just caged, it has also undergone considerable straightening—channelizing—another element adding to the severity of a modern flood. And sometimes the Father of Waters takes things into his own hands. Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.
Villages and towns along this portion of the river, unlike on the Ohio or the Allegheny, do not commonly sit right on the edge of the banks; rather, they’re behind a levee or a natural rise, frequently some distance away, so for hours the traveler may have little relief from the miles of willows and maples, shrub and bush, with no main drags—often named Water or Front Street—to offer a pause to body or a boost to imagination. If you want to know you’re passing, say, old glass-making Crystal City, population 4,000, you have to look at a map. Despite these drawbacks to the journeyer, the Mississippi, of all our waterways, has spawned a greater number of river narratives than any other, a happenstance brought about more by the spell of Twain than any magic in the lower Mississippi itself. I had a couple of years earlier traveled it from New Orleans to St. Paul, and below St. Louis the river isn’t by any means one of my favorites, so I moved along that day with a near eagerness to get off it and take on the longest river in America, of which an old pilot once said, “We used to separate the men from the boys at the mouth of the Missouri. The boys went up the Mississippi and the men up the Missouri.”
The day became progressively darker as we banged on north, and by the time we passed the mouth of the Meramec River, the sky had turned oppressive and the industry of St. Louis started showing itself. A fourteen-year-old boy, Auguste Chouteau, began the construction of the city named to honor Louis IX of France and, indirectly, pay regard to the boy’s current king, Louis XV, that self-indulgent, lecherous profligate who inherited the mightiest monarchy in Europe and proceeded to give up much of it while he pursued, among others, Madame Pompadour, a woman whose counsel almost made him into a good king. It was this Louis who purportedly said, “After me, the flood,” words that often have an ironic ring to them in St. Louis. In fact, the day we arrived there, the Mississippi was inching its way up to the foot of the great Gateway Arch, the tallest national monument in America.
Three miles below the heart of the old waterfront where the teenaged Chouteau first put saw to timbers, hammer to pegs, we searched out a moorage Pilotis had recently arranged with the Corps of Engineers on the inside of its big dredge Potter and two service barges. Tethered off the bank, the boats formed a narrow chute free of the roiling water on the channel, a safehold further quieted by a driftwood dam beavers had built between the Potter and the shore. We were only twenty feet from the open Mississippi, but the chute was gentle enough to shelter a dozen black-crowned night herons giving out their guttural quok! quok! quok! at our arrival. I once heard the birds called river ravens, and assuredly the evening fit their dark plumes and mournful quothings.
We phoned a friend to ask for a lift from under the actual shadow of the second-largest brewery in the world to a small pub serving its own cask-conditioned ales and a potently spiced white-bean chili. I called on our musician to play. As he blew his bag full, the windy night began to rattle the windows of the St. Louis Brewery, lightning flashed, and rain got dumped everywhere, but he merely glanced into the blackness and piped away, and women rose to dance to “Garry Owen,” lifting their smooth knees high, hands clapping above their heads, and inspiration flowed like the sky.
When we returned to Nikawa, she was low in the stern from rain in the welldeck, and a young man from the Corps lent me an electric bilge-pump to empty her. Off and on the rain came down through the thunder-and-fire-rent night, a storm to extinguish the flames of Hell, and I had no doubt that the great Missouri, which would hold our lives for at least the next six weeks, was announcing itself, already testing our mettle.
VII
THE LOWER MISSOURI RIVER
NIKAWA NEAR ROCHEPORT, MISSOURI
Iconogram VII
[September 10, 1840] For the last 2 or 3 days we were steaming up the Missouri. Being confined to my berth, I saw but little of the scenery, but it appeared to be the same kind the whole way. The river itself is the most peculiar feature: the steamer was continually winding & twisting about among the enormous snags & sawyers and masses of trees & bushes laced together with which the course of this extraordinary stream is con
William Fairholme
Journal of an Expedition to the Grand Prairies of the Missouri