Mississippi Riverboat Captains

In the 1850s, a Mississippi riverboat pilot was the highest-paid and most socially prestigious professional in America. He earned ten times a carpenter's wage, answered to no one while at the wheel, and carried the entire length of the Mississippi River — twelve hundred miles of shifting channel, hidden snags, and treacherous crossings — in his head. There were no buoys, no lighthouses, no charts worth trusting. The river changed after every flood. The pilot read the water's surface the way a doctor reads a face: the color, the texture, the specific pattern of ripples that told him what lay beneath. Training took two to three years under a veteran pilot who taught by pointing, not explaining, and never repeated himself. When the cub pilot finally knew the river, he discovered the river had changed. 

This episode follows a veteran pilot and his cub on a six-day run from St. Louis to New Orleans in 1857, through the most important commercial waterway on earth, past the cotton wharfs of Natchez and Vicksburg, toward the largest slave market in the Western hemisphere — and through a world that had perhaps five years left before a war would stop the river entirely and the railroads would finish what the war started.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It is two in the morning and you are alone. Not entirely alone. Somewhere below you, two hundred and twelve passengers are sleeping in their state rooms or sprawled across cotton bales on the main deck, and the engine crew is down in the boiler room, feeding wood into the furnaces at a rate that keeps the steam pressure where you need it. But up here in the pilot house, it is just you and the river, and tonight the river is dark enough that you cannot see its banks. You cannot see the banks. There is no moon, there is fog building on the water to the south, and this stretch of river, the lower Missouri Shore from commerce to Goose Island, has a cross current coming off a tributary that pushes you left at the wrong moment if you haven't accounted for it. There are no buoys, there are no lighthouses, there is nothing on the water between St. Louis and New Orleans that will tell you where you are or warn you what is ahead. The chart on the shelf behind you is three months old, and the river has changed since it was printed. The river always changes. What you have instead of charts and lights is memory. Twelve years of it, every bend from St. Louis to the Gulf carried in your head like a city. You have walked so many times you could navigate it blindfold. You know this crossing. You know where the current turns treacherous, and you know what the surface of the water looks like, even in the dark, even in the fog, when the channel is running true and when it is not. You feel a change in the paddle wheel's rhythm that tells you the water is shallower than it should be, and you move the wheel slightly left, and the change corrects itself and you return to center. You are James Holloway, river pilot. And tonight you are steering the packet steamer Bell of Memphis on the fifth night of a six day run from St. Louis to New Orleans. You are thirty eight years old. You have been on this river since you were twenty six. You earn five hundred dollars a month, which is more than a United States senator, more than most doctors, more than any man you grew up with in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri ever imagine earning. You eat at the captain's table? You sleep in the best cabin on the boat? You answer while at that wheel, to no one. The only question always is whether you know the river well enough to keep two hundred and twelve people alive through the night. Tonight you believe you do. The Bell of Memphis left the St. Louis levee at six o'clock on a Tuesday morning in late May eighteen fifty seven, and the levee at six in the morning was one of the things in the world you never stopped finding remarkable, even after twelve years. The St. Louis waterfront ran for nearly a mile along the river, paved in stone blocks shaped by hand from Missouri granite, and by six in the morning it was already so crowded with activity that moving through it required constant attention. The steamboats tied up along the levee numbered a hundred and fifty on a busy morning, their tall twin smokestacks rising like a city of iron chimneys above the waterline, their decks stacked with goods being loaded and unloaded in a continuous churning flow of labor. Roustabouts, mostly Irish and free black workers, rolled barrels and hauled bales and carried crates down gangplanks on their shoulders, while the mud clerks tallied cargo with chalk on wooden boards, and the captains shouted from the upper decks about the schedule they were already behind. The smell was wood smoke from the furnaces and river mud, and the specific sharp smell of green cotton, and the animal smell of livestock waiting in riverside pens to be loaded for the journey south. By the eighteen fifties, St. Louis was the second largest port in the country after New York. Everything that was going west or south moved through here. Settlers bound for the Oregon and California trails, merchants with dry goods for the frontier towns, farmers selling grain and tobacco and hides, and the machinery and manufactured goods flowing the other direction. There were no railroads worth speaking of west of the Mississippi yet, and wouldn't be for years. If something needed to move, it moved by river. The bell carried three hundred tons in her hold that morning, bolts of cloth from Cincinnati Mills, barrels of flour and salt pork for the plantation stores, hardware, a consignment of whiskey from a Louisville distillery, and personal luggage belonging to the hundred and twelve cabin passengers who had taken state rooms on the boiler deck. Another hundred passengers traveled below on the main deck among the freight, sleeping where they could find space. The cabin passengers had paid fifteen dollars for a state room, and three meals a day at tables covered with linen, served by waiters in white jackets, who brought plates of roast chicken and pickled vegetables, and cornbread, and in the evenings, sometimes a dessert of sweet potato pie. The deck passengers had paid three dollars and were expected to feed themselves. You took the first watch at departure, standing in the pilot house as the bell swung out from the levee into the main channel, the wheel heavy and responsive under your hands, the familiar translation of wood and water and pressure that told you what the river was doing at its hull. Below you, through the glass windows of the pilot house, you could see the city sliding past on the left bank, the brick warehouses and counting houses and the church steeples, and further back, the new construction going up on every block because St. Louis was growing faster than it could build. On the right bank there was nothing but Missouri bottom land, flat and green and enormous, stretching back to the tree line where the forest started. Your cub was on watch with you. His name was Thomas Garrett. He was twenty years old, and he had been on the river for eight months. He stood at the window with his notebook open, writing down everything you said and some things you didn't, because that was what Cubs did. You had been where he was once, standing beside a veteran pilot named Eli Cross on the packet steamer, Missouri Queen, your own notebook open, trying to absorb a river that seemed determined to resist absorption. What are you writing? you asked him now. The snag at the head of Willow Island, he said, not looking up. You said to remember it sits six feet below the surface on the downstream end. I said to remember what the water looks like above it. Not just where it is. He looked up. The snag is where it is, you said. Next spring it'll be somewhere else. What you need to remember is that a particular pattern of ripple on the surface in that stretch of water means there's something below it that will kill this boat if you hit it wrong. The pattern, not the location. He wrote that down too. You watched him write it and thought of Eli Cross watching you write things down, and of Cross stopping you one afternoon on the lower river and asking if you had the Helena crossing memorized. You said you did. He told you to throw away the notebook. You asked why. He said, Because the river doesn't care what's in your notebook. It only cares what's in your head. When you're at this wheel at midnight in a fog, the notebook is on the shelf and the river is under you, and the only thing between you and the bottom is what you actually know. You threw the notebook away. Within a month you understood why. What a pilot had to know was not a set of facts, it was a way of reading. The Mississippi below St. Louis carried roughly a million gallons of water per second on an average day, all of it loaded with silt from the Missouri and the Ohio, and a hundred smaller tributaries, all of it moving south at a pace that varied with the season, and the recent rainfall and the specific geography of every bend and crossing. The river was not one river, it was a river that was continuously becoming a different river, carving new channels and abandoning old ones, building sandbars in one place, and erasing them in another, toppling trees from collapsing banks and sending them downstream to lodge in new places, and wait for a steamboat to hit them in the dark. A snag was a tree whose upstream end had lodged in the riverbed, and whose downstream end pointed up at an angle, sometimes just below the surface, sometimes just above it, occasionally visible as a dark shape in the current, but more often invisible. A large snag could punch through the hull of a steamboat and sinker in four minutes. Between eighteen eleven and eighteen fifty three, approximately seven thousand people died in steamboat accidents on this river and its tributaries. The average lifespan of a steamboat was three to five years before a snag or a boiler explosion or a fire or a collision took her. Of the five hundred and seventy two steamboats operating on the western rivers in eighteen forty nine, only twenty two were more than five years old. The others were on the bottom. What the pilot read to avoid this fate was the surface of the water, a smooth ripple in a specific pattern over a submerged bar, a boiling eddy that meant a river was entering the main channel from below the surface. A particular shade of brown that told him the water was eight feet deep rather than twelve, and that twelve was what he needed. The color of the water changed with depth and with the composition of the bottom, sand, gravel, clay. And a pilot who knew the river could read these distinctions in daylight at speed, and to some degree in darkness, because the water caught what little light there was differently depending on what lay beneath it. Mark Twain, who learned to pilot on this same river in these same years, put it this way If you will take the longest street in New York and travel up and down it, until you know every house and window and door and lamppost, and sign by heart so accurately that you can name the one you are abreast of when set down in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of what a pilot must know. And then, if you will take half the signs on that long street and change their places once a month, and keep up with these changes in the dark, you will understand what is required of a pilot's memory by the fickle Mississippi. The training took two to three years under a licensed pilot who taught by pointing and questioning and correcting, and occasionally, in moments of crisis, by standing aside and letting the cub feel what it was like when he didn't know enough. Your own training under Eli Cross had included a night on the Lower River below Memphis, when Cross stepped back from the wheel and told you to take her through a crossing you had watched him make a dozen times, but had never done yourself. You took the wheel, and within forty seconds you felt the hull shudder as you ran her over a bar you had not seen coming, and Cross stepped forward and corrected the heading without a word and afterwards said only that's what it feels like when you've lost the thread. Don't lose the thread. You never forgot what losing the thread felt like. You had done your best to communicate the same lesson to five cubs in twelve years, including Thomas Garrett, who stood beside you now in the pilot house, making notes about the water's surface over the Willow Island snag, learning to read a language that had no alphabet. The first day on the river passed through country that was still, in 1857, partly wild. The Missouri shore on the right was bluffs and forest, occasionally interrupted by small towns that were no more than a landing, a warehouse, a tavern, and a scattering of houses set back from the bank. The Illinois shore on the left was flatter, the fields of corn and wheat coming closer to the water, farmhouses visible in the distance with smoke rising from their chimneys. Occasionally a farmer would come down to his landing and signal with a flag for the boat to stop, and the captain would decide whether the cargo or the passengers he wanted to add or subtract were worth the delay, and sometimes they were and sometimes they weren't, and the flag waving farmer would watch the steamer continue south and disappear around the next bend. The river below Cape Girardeaux entered the broad floodplain, the banks flattening out, the trees pressing close to the water on both sides and in places hanging out over it, and this was where the reading got harder because the channel shifted more in the floodplain and the visual cues were less distinct. He ran the first watch from departure until noon, then handed the wheel to a colleague named Parker, who held the second watch while you went below for your midday meal, and then three hours of sleep in your cabin. The pilot's cabin was adjacent to the pilot house, a small room with a single bunk, a wash basin, a small stove, and the particular vibration of the boat working its way through the hull that you had learned to sleep through years ago. You slept hard and woke at four, and went back up and took the wheel for the evening watch, and this was the rhythm of the six day run. Four hours on, four off, four on. Sleeping when you could, eating when the meals appeared, always coming back to the wheel. The pilot house was where you lived for the run. It was a glass sided room at the top of the boat, high enough to see over the bow and the smokestacks on either side, with windows on all four sides that you could open in good weather and close when the rain came, or the sparks from the stacks drifted back. There was a stool which you rarely used, and the wheel, which was large and spoked and required real force to move against the current, and a bell pull connected to the engine room below, which you rang to signal changes in speed. Two bells for slow ahead, three for stop, one long ring for back. The engine room responded to these signals through a counterbell, and this was the only communication between the pilot house and the engine room. No speaking tubes, no voice, just the bells and the trained inference on both ends about what the other party needed. On the second day, the river entered Tennessee and the landscape changed. The plantations appeared on the eastern shore, long stretches of cleared bottom land that had been forests thirty years ago and were now cotton fields running from the water's edge back to the tree line, the cotton still young in late May, the green rows stretching away in precise geometry towards the distant slave quarters, and the plantation house set back on a rise. A large plantation might stretch for a mile or more along the river, with its own landing where the cotton bales were staged for loading onto boats exactly like this one. The pilot's relationship to the cotton economy was intimate and unavoidable. Cotton was what the bell was carrying south to New Orleans. Cotton was what paid the passenger fares that paid the pilot's wage. The fields you were passing were worked by enslaved people whose labor produced the commodity that kept the river system functioning, and the boats that moved that commodity also carried, sometimes, the enslaved people themselves being sold from one place to another. You had seen this often enough that it had become simply part of the river, which was not an easy thing to think about, but was the truth. A coughle of thirty men and women shackled in the forward hold, being transported to the New Orleans market. A slave trader traveling first class who would walk them off the boat at Natchez or at New Orleans, and sell them individually to buyers who would take them further into the cotton country. To be sold down the river was the worst thing that could happen to an enslaved person in the upper south, and you were the man who steered the vessel that made it happen. You did not dwell on this, but it was there. Memphis appeared on the third morning, its bluffs rising above the left bank, the city spreading back from the waterfront, in a grid of streets that in eighteen fifty seven was rapidly becoming something substantial. The bell stopped for four hours to take on wood and discharge and receive cargo and passengers, and during that stop you walked the waterfront and bought a newspaper and ate a meal in a dockside eating house and talked to the pilot of a northbound steamer about the state of the river below, where a new bar had appeared south of Helena, what the channel was doing at the catfish point crossing, whether the fog that had been building each night was getting worse further south. This exchange of intelligence was the lifeblood of the pilot's profession. Two pilots stopping to talk on a levee were exchanging information that no chart contained. Current knowledge of a river that had changed since any chart was drawn, and this information might save both their boats. The pilots benevolent association formalized this exchange. Founded in 1861, it was, for the decade before the Civil War, the most effective labor organization in America. Member pilots pooled their river intelligence systematically, maintaining a current record of every hazard and channel change reported by any member. Non-member pilots could not access this intelligence and therefore could not do the job safely, which meant the boats that refused to pay union rates could not compete for the prestige runs. The association also set wages,$250 a month at minimum, up to$500 or more for senior pilots on premier packets, and enforced them by the simple mechanism of not supplying pilots to boats that paid less. In the years when the association was at its peak, a qualified pilot had more practical power than the captain of the boat he served. The captain owned the schedule and the manifest and the commercial relationships. The pilot owned the only knowledge that kept the boat off the bottom. On the third night, below Memphis, the river entered the deep delta country, and this was where the navigation became most demanding. The Lower Mississippi was, in Twain's phrase, the crookedest river in the world. Between Cairo, Illinois, and the Gulf, it used thirteen hundred miles of river to cover what a crow would fly in five hundred. It looped and doubled back on itself in meanders so extreme that in flood years it sometimes cut through its own bends and created shortcuts that made the charts obsolete overnight. The pilot who had run this river in April might find in June, that a bend he had memorized no longer existed, and a straight cut had appeared in its place. He had to adapt. He had to read. The fog came on the third night exactly as the Memphis pilot had warned, settling on the water south of Helena in patches that thickened as the hours passed. You slowed the bell to a crawl, watching the bow cut through white nothing, navigating by the sounds of the bank, the frogs on the left shore, the specific silence that meant open water, the faint change in echo that told you a bend was coming before you could see it. You sounded the bell at intervals and listened for the echo to come back. This was piloting at its most extreme. Navigating a moving river in zero visibility with two hundred lives behind you, and nothing ahead but what you need. Knew Thomas Garrett stood beside you in silence. He had stopped writing in his notebook. He was watching your hands on the wheel. At dawn the fog burned off, and the river was as beautiful as it ever was, the light coming through the willows on the left bank in long horizontal bars, the water turning from grey to brown to a particular pale gold, and the first of the plantation houses visible in the distance on the right, white columns above the tree line, and then the smell that told you Natchez was near before you could see it, wood smoke and mud, and something sweet and slightly rotten. That was the specific smell of the sugar country, different from anything north of Vicksburg. Natchez came into view on the morning of the fourth day, and it was, as it always was, two cities. The city on the bluff was one of the wealthiest places in America. Cotton had made it rich beyond what any New Englander who hadn't seen it could easily imagine. Nearly seven hundred antebellum mansions packed into a few square miles of hilltop. Greek revival columns and iron lace balconies and gardens of magnolia and live oak, the families inside them worth millions in land and cotton, and primarily in the human beings they owned and worked. Natchez had more millionaires per capita in eighteen fifty than any other city in the country. The cotton that came down the river through here was the cotton that kept the mills of Manchester running, and the families who grew it on the backs of enslaved people lived in a style that was by any external measure extraordinary. A hundred feet below the bluff, connected to it by a single switchback road, was Natchez under the hill. The riverfront was the domain of the boatmen and the traders and the gamblers and the women who followed them, and it had been this way for decades. The steamboat man who described it in a memoir summed it up accurately. You could see all kinds of games and chicken fights in the streets, money was plentiful, and murders innumerable. The bells stopped for two hours to unload and take on cargo, and you watched the work from the pilot house, the roustabouts rolling hogsheads down the gangplank, the slave trader who had been traveling first class supervising the disembarkation of the people he was moving to the Natchez market, the cotton factors meeting the boat with tallies in their hands. Two cities, one river. Vicksburg the following morning, where the bluffs commanded both banks of the river and the city, on top, processed the cotton of the entire state of Mississippi through its counting houses. Another stop, another exchange of cargo and intelligence and fuel. The pilot of a southbound boat pulled up alongside yours at the levee and shouted across the gap. The river below Baton Rouge was running high, and the left bank crossing at Profit Island was tricky. The channel had moved two hundred yards east of where it was last fall. You wrote nothing down. You filed it in the place in your mind where the river lived. South of Vicksburg, the landscape began to change in ways that always marked the approach to New Orleans even before the city was visible. The land flattened until it barely cleared the river. You were below sea level now, the levees, the only thing between the cotton fields and permanent inundation. The trees changed, cypress and live oak draped with Spanish moss, the air heavier, more humid, the smell of the river mixed with something vegetal and warm that was the smell of the bayous, alligators on the banks in the morning, motionless in the sun, herons standing in the shallows with the patience of statues, the sky bigger than it was anywhere to the north, the clouds towering over the flat country and formations that built during the afternoon heat, and sometimes produced thunderstorms of an intensity that forced you to bring the boat to the bank and tie off and wait. On the fifth night you were alone in the pilot house in the dark with no moon and the fog building, and you steered the bell through a river. You knew the way you knew your own body by the specific language of sensation and pressure and change. The wheel under your hands telling you what the water was doing below, and you kept the thread. New Orleans appeared on the morning of the sixth day, and it was in eighteen fifty seven the most remarkable city in America. The levee at New Orleans made St. Louis look like a staging ground. Ships were tied up five and six deep along a mile of waterfront, their masts and smokestacks so dense above the levee that a man could walk deck to deck from one end of the city to the other. Cotton bales were stacked on the levee in walls twenty feet high, hogsheads of sugar and molasses rolled by the hundreds. Sailors shouted in French and Spanish and English and a dozen other languages. The smell was cotton and river mud and sugar, and the particular smell of the city itself, coffee and chicory, and something floral that came from the gardens of the French quarter above of the levee, mixed with the smell of the slave pens where the people being sold waited in compounds near the waterfront for the buyers who would come later in the day. In eighteen forty six, New Orleans had recorded two thousand seven hundred and seventy steamboat arrivals. It was the fourth largest port in the world. More than half of all the cotton grown in the United States passed through the city on its way to the mills of England. The wealth this generated was visible everywhere, in the architecture of the French Quarter, in the restaurants that serve food unlike anything north of here, in the cultural life of a city that had opera and theater and a press in three languages. It was also visible in the slave markets, fifty of them within the city, where seven hundred and fifty thousand people had been bought and sold by the time the Civil War came to end it. The same commerce that built the city bought and sold human beings to do the work that kept it running. You brought the bell into the levee at half past seven in the morning, the paddle wheel backing as you came alongside, the ropes thrown and caught, the gangplank dropped. Thomas Garrett was in the pilot house beside you for the landing, watching how you judged the approach, the angle, the current, the gap between the hull and the other boats already tied up. When the bell was fast at the levee, you stepped back from the wheel for the first time in six days. She's in, you said. He said, How did you know the current was running harder than usual against the north end of the levee? You thought about how to answer that. The color of the water, you said finally. It was a shade lighter right along the face of the levee than it was ten feet out. Lighter water near a fixed structure means the current is pushing harder. The turbulence keeps the silt in suspension longer. That lighter shade was the current. He wrote it down. He watched him write it and thought in two years, maybe three, he would know the river well enough to read that for himself, and he would have forgotten that he learned it. It would simply be what the water looked like and what that meant, and what to do about it. That was how the knowledge worked. It stopped being instruction and became instinct, and then it stopped being instinct and became something harder to name. The feeling of the river inside you, the thousand miles of bend and crossing and bar and snag alive in your body as precisely as the contents of any book ever read by any man who learned from pages rather than water. For six days you had moved two hundred and twelve people and three hundred tons of freight down the length of the continent. Nothing had hit the hull. Nobody had drowned. The cotton was in New Orleans. The passengers were ashore. The cub was still learning, in two days you would head back up river, which was longer and harder and would take ten days against the current, and you would start the whole process over, reading the river northbound, which was a different language even though it was the same water. The Bell had five years left before the Civil War closed the river, and four years after that before a boiler failure took her to the bottom at a crossing above Memphis. Thomas Garrett would get his license in the winter of eighteen fifty nine and pilot for two years before the war ended his career on the lower river. He would come back afterward to the upper river, and pilot until eighteen eighty one, when the railroads had taken enough of the freight traffic that the work dried up and he took a job on a government snag boat instead. You would pilot until eighteen sixty three, and then the war would find other uses for the river and for the men who knew it. But that was later. This morning the bell was in at New Orleans, the levee was roaring around you, and somewhere in the city a bell was ringing the hour, and the coffee vendors were already working the waterfront with their carts, and the river moved past without pause, brown and fast and going south, and it knew nothing about what it was carrying or what it meant, and it never would. And that was the only true thing about it.