Life on the Mississippi, page 2
Even the original investment in construction timber could be recouped at a profit. At the end of their journey, most of the flatboats were broken apart and sold as the salvage beams, sidewalk planks, and furniture stock that built the boomtowns along the water route. Cincinnati’s first schoolhouse, the first residence in Maysville, Kentucky, and countless Creole cottages in some of New Orleans’s most charming neighborhoods were built with “bargeboards” from dismantled flatboats.
The boats were called “broadhorns” because the long side sweeps and steering rudders operated off the roofs above decks, outfitted with carved paddles at the bottom to push the water, resembled giant horns from a distance. Flatbottoms no more than 14 feet at the beam were called “Ohio” or “Kentucky” boats, indicating the operator’s plan to ship along only the narrow channels of a single river. The “Natchez” or “New Orleans” boats, 20 or 25 feet across and immensely long, were designed to carry large cargoes to the Sugar Coast plantations of Louisiana or all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The simple crew shanties of the 18th-century boats were eventually expanded into elaborate, dormitory-style structures with bunk beds, cookstoves, and a wide living area with movable tavern furniture for meals and nighttime fiddling parties. The open-air decks on the bow and stern allowed boats to tie up together at night while the rivermen shared meals, news, and information about navigation hazards ahead. Often, four or five large flatboats were lashed together as a single, 500,000-pound fortress drifting in the channel, floating villages joined by elaborate catwalks and sleeping tents. Massive canvas sails were added and mounted from bow masts, catboat style, to give the barges headway around the bends and capture following winds on brisker days. These sails were called “latines,” or “lateens,” because they were modeled after the forward-mounted, triangular sails of the Roman galleys and the dhows of ancient Arabia. Their color was “tannin,” a yellowish-burgundy hue that emerged after the cotton and canvas sails were hardened and preserved in vats of tree bark (tannins), and then mixed with oxblood and linseed oil.
“The river men are inventive sorts who reject the slavery of being obliged to build in any received form,” one eastern traveler on the Mississippi wrote in 1820. “You can scarcely imagine an abstract form in which a boat can be built, that in some part of the Ohio or Mississippi you will not see, actually in motion.”
At night the lanterns of the joined boats cast spooky beams of light across the water and the caterwauling of the partying crews echoed for miles around the oxbows. By day, from the wharves at Vincennes, or the cliffs at Vicksburg, the pinkish tannin sails luffed around the bends above the tree line, mystically scudding south like pyramids suspended in the sky. Thousands of teenage boys, watching the parade of sails from the grassy banks at Marietta or Paducah, caught the fever and soon disappeared downriver. “No young man could count himself among the elite young bucks of the community,” one local history from Indiana read, “without having made at least one [flatboat] trip.”
The grand pageantry of American life drifted south and west beneath those sails. Every year there were long caravans of “settlers’ boats,” often called “arks” because of the menagerie of farm animals fenced in on their decks, plying the lower Mississippi and the tributaries of the Ohio to search for new lands. Many families lived on their flatboats for a year or more until they could stake a claim for property, and then disassembled their craft to build their first cabin in the wilderness. Another common variant was “store boats,” or “peddlers’ boats,” which tied up at the docks of small towns and plantations, their captains selling their cargo for cash or trading for goods that could be marked up for resale farther south. There were print boats for printers, “fire boats” loaded with charcoal and cordwood to sell along the way, floating brothels, for some reason called “gun boats,” and “smithy boats” for blacksmiths, even “whiskey boats,” also called “distillery boats,” with taverns and gambling halls mounted on jaunty rafts. Conversely, dozens of “colporteurs,” or traveling Bible salesmen and evangelists, plied the rivers in flatboats fitted out with steeples or high wooden crosses to advertise their mission. In 1847, two of these colporteurs, the Reverends Gideon H. Lowe and Malkijah S. Vaughan, ministers from a breakaway Tennessee evangelical group called the Cumberland Presbyterians, made a five-month trip down the Cumberland, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers on a thirty-two-foot flatboat named the Bethel. Lowe and Vaughan were scandalized when a group of rowdy rivermen purchased two dozen Bibles and resold them downriver at a profit to buy whiskey. But by the end of their journey the ministers reported that they had visited ninety-four flatboats, seventy-three steamboats, twenty river towns, and preached at seventy-two public meetings, and had either sold or given away 3,400 Bibles.
By the 1830s, the madcap cultural mixing that became America was enhanced by another commercial development. Shipments of Minnesota and Wisconsin logs, lashed together as “great rafts” a half-mile long and 150 feet across, blocked river traffic for hours as they snaked around the giant, curved oxbows. As they waited their turn on the bend, the flatboats swarmed together against the sandbars. A typical afternoon gathering included peddlers’ boats, Bible boats, and—most popular—“band” rafts with bagpipers from Scotland, minstrel shows, and traveling Irish harp-and-fiddle troupes. The flatboat crews and settler families restocked their larders from the peddler boats and walked down the bars to join the audiences ringed around the band rafts, forming a kind of flea market–cum–Woodstock along the banks. The roots music of every corner of Europe echoed across the waters, making the Ohio and the Mississippi the arteries that created America’s legendary multicultural sound. In his 1826 bestselling travelogue about his many trips west, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi, the traveling minister and diarist Timothy Flint wrote: “Almost every boat, while it lies in the harbor has one or more fiddles scraping continually aboard, to which you often see the boatmen dancing.” The popular tunes included “Wind on the Wabash,” “Wiggle-Ass Jig,” and “Where Is My Pants At?” In his Old Man River, Paul Schneider writes that a violin medley “that started out as a Scotch-Irish reel from Ulster might be passed on along the river to a German fiddler from Mannheim, or a Bohemian Jew, or even a wayward Brahmin from Boston.” The inland river country, once so barren and uninhabited, had become quintessentially American—slapdash, colorful, ethnically mixed.
For the farm boys of Ohio and Illinois, reaching New Orleans—sultry, crowded with foreigners, and lined with the ornate mansions of the slave-owning South—was a cultural awakening. Downtown slave auctions and the huge bales of cotton lining the wharves symbolized the tragic complexities of a slave-holding South joined by the Mississippi into economic union with the slave-loathing North. The flatboat wharves along the great bend in the Mississippi beside the French Quarter became a riotous open market with rivermen screaming out prices for barrels of corn whiskey, sides of dried beef and hams, and the bang of auctioneers’ gavels echoing through the masts as commercial brokers bid for that day’s shipment of coal, flour, and cordwood.
The Mississippi’s greatest contribution to the American mindset was to define us as a migratory people, radically departed from our European antecedents. In the Old World, stasis, hereditary property rights, and social caste defined prosperity and happiness for the aristocracy and the merchant class, while virtually denying wealth for the common man. Crewing a flatboat on the Ohio and the Mississippi abruptly reversed that, becoming a template occupation for the new western man. At the edge of civilization in North America, at the wharves and bursting river towns of the new territories, social caste and standing belonged to the uprooted, the wayfarers, the self-made men and boys struggling with their oars to land a broadhorn against the current. Ohio or Indiana farm boys, after a river trip or two, became sophisticated travelers, educating themselves for careers as river captains, traders, and merchants. In 1818, Morris Birkbeck, an English writer and agronomist who migrated to America to become an Illinois frontiersman, observed in his Notes on a Journey in America, “The condition of the people of America is so different from aught that we in Europe have an opportunity of observing. They are great travelers and in general better acquainted with the vast expanse of country, spreading over eighteen states, than the English with their little island.” Birkbeck’s traveling companion, Henry Fearon, thought that “the American has always something better in his eye, further west. He therefore lives and dies on hope, a mere gypsy.”
They were gypsies, however, with a purpose, a mass economic movement that set a country on its way. The America of contemporary popular myth was built by the western wagon trails, the railroads, and the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York. But in its first decades America was primarily a river culture, built along a vast and rapidly growing universe of inland water. University of Pittsburgh historian Leland D. Baldwin, author of The Keelboat Age on Western Waters, may have said it best. “Perhaps it is not too much to say, that out of the womb of the ark was born the nation.”
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The urge to build a flatboat and follow Jacob Yoder’s route from Pittsburgh to New Orleans didn’t overwhelm me right away. At first it simply annoyed me that I knew almost nothing about so formative an era in our history, and the yearning to learn more about flatboats wouldn’t go away. There was even an intellectual principle involved. I’ve found over the years that the history that I’ve either neglected or that has been deliberately hidden from me leads to far more interesting places than the accepted wisdom handed down by textbooks. Like most Americans, probably because of the impact of the Hollywood Western, I thought of “frontier America” as the period that began in the 1850s as pioneers, gunslingers, and cattle barons pushed into the plains country beyond the Missouri River. For me, as for so many Americans, that era and its character types became accepted as a cultural motif.
Devouring all that I could about America’s initial western leap down the Ohio and Mississippi was just the first part of the journey. As I pored over 19th-century maps and dipped into seminal works like Michael Allen’s Western Rivermen, 1763–1861, or Marquis Childs’s Mighty Mississippi, I began to realize with increasing intensity that the old frontier lands of the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys were calling me personally. I wasn’t just curious about what had become of the country that defined America’s first century of growth. My lifelong thirst for adventure and learning had mostly been land-borne. Now I would explore the mysteries of nationhood along this most captivating water space, bobbing like a cork in the currents, sharing the romance of my forebears.
I first stumbled upon the importance of the flatboating years while I was researching a book on the later generation of Americans who joined America’s ceaseless push west, the Oregon Trail pioneers of the 1850s. I was surprised to discover that fording skills were decisive for these “overland” travelers. When moving their cumbersome covered wagons across the wide rivers of the far West, the ability to fashion crude log rafts out of driftwood and felled trees often meant the difference between failure and success for the thousands of settlers who crossed Nebraska and Wyoming every summer. Flat-bottomed ferries, pontoon bridges, and floatable wagons shaped like hulls became indispensable fixtures on the trail crossings of the Platte, the Sweetwater, and the Green. As many as a third of the covered wagons that finally reached the Columbia River in Oregon were so completely battered by the two-thousand-mile journey over the plains and the Rocky Mountains that the pioneers had no choice but to rip their decrepit vehicles apart, convert the lumber to rafts or shallow-draft boats, and then complete their continental journey by floating the rest of the way to the Pacific coast. The sturdy Midwestern farmers and small-town shopkeepers who made up the bulk of the trail pioneers had inherited their boatbuilding skills from their fathers or their grandfathers during the flatboating era, demonstrating the plucky, hand-me-down ingenuity that built a country. For the average Midwestern farm boy in the 1820s, learning the rudiments of building a flatboat was no more challenging than framing a barn.
I loved how this understanding of frontier carpentry skills changed my conception of history. Traditional historians, when describing the creation of America, love to dwell on the high-sounding ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights—protections against big government, the promotion of individualism, freedom of speech and religion—but those were principles far removed from the hardscrabble, edgy lives of most 19th-century Americans. They were citizen-farmers, and they built America with logs, laboriously harvested by axe and two-man crosscut saws. First the logs were flatboats descending the Ohio, then they were converted into crude shacks on the frontier. If there was flatboat lumber after that, they used it to build furniture and simple barns. The steamboat boom that revolutionized American travel and cargo transportation in the 1830s and 1840s was the next logical step, and steamboats relied on flatboat hulls for their design. Federalism and the Missouri Compromise are, of course, useful things to understand. But now I felt refreshingly liberated from the conventions of thinking about our past, the composite of high theory and “great man” narratives that we call history. Logs were the national DNA. America was built by adventuresome people from trees.
The flatboat era was also profoundly tragic. Pioneering the inland rivers also joined white Americans in signature, collective cruelty—the extermination of the Native American tribes, and the metastasizing of slavery into an even more brutal system as the cotton economy was pushed south. America’s expansion southwest into the inland river country beyond the Appalachians opened up vast acreages of tillable land, which most white settlers believed had to be cleared of the tribes so that the country’s agricultural progress could continue. No one pursued the policy of Native American cleansing longer and more zealously than Andrew Jackson, whose presidency began with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, during which more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes were force-marched across the Mississippi into the arid barrens of eastern Oklahoma. At least four thousand Cherokees alone died during their 1,200-mile trek west, one of the darkest chapters of American history now known as the Trail of Tears. Simultaneously, in another brutal chapter still unknown to most Americans, almost a million African American slaves were marched by foot one thousand miles over the Appalachians from the depleted tobacco plantations of Maryland and Virginia to the next source of American wealth, the sweltering cotton and sugarcane fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The slaves were marched south in “coffle lines” that connected them to each other by chains attached to a circular steel restraint locked around the slave’s neck. After slavery’s expansion south, brutal quota systems for harvesting crops were introduced, and deaths by beatings, heatstroke, and disease were pandemic. The common term “sold down the river,” and the misfortunes involved in the expansion of slavery to the Mississippi valley, is another legacy of the flatboat era.
The rivermen never completely disappeared. The most alluring group of river people who kept the romance alive were the “shantyboaters” of the late 19th century and post–World War I era. After the devastating Panic of 1893, thousands of abruptly unemployed and now homeless industrial workers, in river towns from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, found that they could cobble together a livable house on top of an abandoned commercial barge down on the waterfront, or build a shantyboat from scratch from the broad selection of cast-off timbers and driftwood lining virtually every mile of riverbank. Each year, hundreds of shantyboat families simply cast off from Memphis or Cincinnati and spent the warm months drifting downriver, camping on remote islands, planting gardens or harvesting wild berries. In a land that prized security and forethought, the shantyboat families were the quintessential Americans living on the fringe. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration estimated that as many as fifty thousand Americans lived on shantyboats.
The most iconic of the river wanderers were Harlan and Anna Hubbard, an artist-writer couple who in 1944 built a shantyboat on the banks of the Ohio in Kentucky and then spent seven years drifting to New Orleans, living off the land along the banks, fishing for supper, dawdling at attractive river towns like Paducah, Kentucky, or Helena, Arkansas, to catch up with their mail and send drawings and paintings to art shows back east. I was inspired when I discovered Harlan Hubbard’s memoir about that trip, Shantyboat: A River Way of Life, a mostly forgotten gem of American nonfiction comparable to Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. Hubbard’s prose is simple but lambent. Landing one evening on the Ohio River opposite Cincinnati, he wrote: “We landed at the broad sandbar on the Kentucky side, relaxed, and ate our dinner of catfish which had been broiling on the fireplace.… Strange train whistles were heard, and constellations of city lights shone from the opposite hill.” Hubbard faced the same skepticism about taking on the rivers that I would encounter seventy years later—one riverman warned him before he left that his shantyboat would be caught in the whirlpools of the Mississippi, spun in circles, and then “sucked beneath the surface never to reappear.”
Harlan and Anna Hubbard made a lyrical, seven-year journey down the Ohio and the Mississippi in the 1940s. Hubbard’s Shantyboat: A River Way of Life served as both a practical guide and my inspiration seventy years later.
But Hubbard and his wife safely and delightfully made it to New Orleans, creating with a dreamy river trip not only an unusual marriage but a charming story about the diverse possibilities of American life. Reading Harlan Hubbard wasn’t just a poetic invitation to cast off and then point myself downriver past the bluffs, sailing for the unknown. Hubbard’s “river way of life” was a call for personal independence, an unshackling from the comforting but essentially delusional “conveniences” of modern life.
