Many people, especially foreigners, were dismayed by their first contact with this vast and
often terrifying river. Charles Dickens, writing of Cairo, one of its ‘dismal towns,’ called it:
The hateful Mississippi, circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern
course, a slimy monster, hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a
grave uncheered by any gleam of promise ... An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three
miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour; its strong and frothy current choked
and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees: now twining themselves
together in great rafts, from the interstices of which a sedgy, lazy foam works up, to float
upon the water's top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled roots showing
like matted hair; now glancing singly by like giant leeches; and now writhing round and
round in the vortex of some small whirlpool like wounded snakes. The banks low, the
trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart,
their inmates hollow cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into
every crack and crevice in the boat, mud and slime on everything: nothing pleasant in its
aspects but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon the dark horizon.
But to Mark Twain (1835-1910), it was ‘the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent
Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.' And Twain knew! It was the
river which gave him his writer's name, from the words the rivermen called out when they
sounded two fathoms. It was as Samuel Clemens, the teenager, that he learned the Mississippi
river-pilot's trade in the 1850s, later (1883) setting it down in the best book ever written about a
river, Life on the Mississippi.
At their peak, there were 6,000 steamers in the Mississippi fleets. They competed ferociously
against each other in size, capacity, grandeur, gambling, girls, and, above all, speed. It was the
spirit of burgeoning American capitalism, afloat. `The boats going north,' wrote Twain,
always left New Orleans between four and five in the afternoon. From three PM onwards
they would be burning rosin and pitch-pine to get ready, and a three-mile line of boats
would produce a huge mushroom cloud of smoke over the city in consequence. Then the
bells rang and they all slid into the river. This was an amazing sight, not to be seen once
the Civil War started or forever after. Races between the two fastest steamers were
advertised weeks in advance and watched all along the river, boats being stripped of non-
essential weight and loaded exactly to get maximum speed. Wood boats were hitched
alongside and towed so refueling could take place in progress.
The Eclipse was the fastest, doing the 1,440 miles New Orleans-Louisville in 1853 in four
days, nine hours, and thirty minutes. In 1870, the Robert E. Lee, in a famous race with the
Natchez, did the New Orleans-St Louis run, 1,218 miles, in three days, eighteen hours, and
fourteen minutes. The craze for speed on the Mississippi was not without its human cost. In
February 1830 the Helen McGregor was leaving Memphis, Tennessee, when the head of her
starboard boiler cracked, and the explosion killed fifty souls, flayed alive or suffocated by the
scalding steam. Burst boilers were the most common accidents which beset these steamers,
sinking one-third of all boats up to the end of the 1830s. Officially, burst boilers killed 1,400
people up to the year 1850 but the real total was higher, and Dickens was advised to sleep at the
stern of the boat if he wished to avoid being scalded to death. Losses on bars and snags led the
federal government to spend $3 million, 1820-60, on improving the four main rivers, the