Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0141/01417.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 12KB | 205 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01417}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter LVII}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{city
now
time
another
dean
keokuk
like
still
upon
}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter LVII

An Archangel

     From St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the
presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical
nineteenth-century populations.  The people don't dream; they work.  The happy
result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things, and
the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear.

     Quincy is a notable example - a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and
now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things.

     But Marion City is an exception.  Marion City has gone backward in a most
unaccountable way.  This metropolis promised so well that the projectors
tacked "city" to its name in the very beginning, with full confidence; but it
was bad prophecy.  When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago, it
contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses.  It contains but one
house now, and this one, in a state of ruin, is getting ready to follow the
former five into the river.

     Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy.  It had another
disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water mark,
whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill.

     In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England
town: and these she has yet; broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and
lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings.  And there are
ample fair-grounds, a well-kept park, and many attractive drives; library,
reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a
grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a square.  The population of the
city is thirty thousand.  There are some large factories here, and
manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a great scale.

     La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria; was told
it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer.

     Keokuk was easily recognizable.  I lived there in 1857 - an extraordinary
year there in real-estate matters.  The "boom" was something wonderful.
Everybody bought, everybody sold - except widows and preachers; they always
hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left.  Anything in the semblance of
a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would
still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks.

     The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing
with a healthy growth.  It was night, and we could not see details, for which
we were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city.  It
was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced, not
retrograded, in that respect.

     A mighty work, which was in progress there in my day, is finished now.
This is the canal over the Rapids.  It is eight miles long, three hundred feet
wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep.  Its masonry is of the
majestic kind which the War Department usually deals in, and will endure like
a Roman aqueduct.  The work cost four or five millions.

     After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river
again.  Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that
erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean.  I believe I never saw him but once; but he
was much talked of when I lived there.  This is what was said of him:

     He began life poor and without education.  But he educated himself - on
the curbstones of Keokuk.  He would sit down on a curbstone with his book,
careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the
passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing
his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass
unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse,
had been burned into his memory, and were his permanent possession.  In this
way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeonholed
in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was
wanted.

     His clothes differed in no respect from a "wharf-rat's," except that they
were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more
extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier.  Nobody could infer
the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself.

     He was an orator - by nature in the first place, and later by the
training of experience and practice.  When he was out on a canvass, his name
was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around.
His theme was always politics.  He used no notes, for a volcano does not need
notes.  In 1862 a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen, Mr. Claggett,
gave me this incident concerning Dean:

     The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a great
mass-meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum.  A
distinguished stranger was to address the house.  After the building had been
packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage
still remained vacant - the distinguished stranger had failed to connect.  The
crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious.  About this time
a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curbstone, explained the dilemma to
him, took his book away from him, rushed him into the building the back way,
and told him to make for the stage and save his country.

     Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and
everybody's eyes sought a single point - the wide, empty, carpetless stage.  A
figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons
present.  It was the scarecrow Dean - in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks
of odd colors, also "down"; damaged trousers, relics of antiquity and a world
too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest, also too
short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen between it and the
waist-band; shirt-bosom open; long black handkerchief, wound round and round
the neck like a bandage; bobtailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of
the back, with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected; small,
stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of - whichever bump it
was. This figure moved gravely out upon the stage, and with sedate and
measured step, down to the front, where it paused, and dreamily inspected the
house, saying no word.  The silence of surprise held its own for a moment,
then was broken by a just audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of
faces like the wash of a wave.  The figure remained as before, thoughtfully
inspecting.  Another wave started - laughter, this time.  It was followed by
another, then a third - this last one boisterous.

     And now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier- cap,
tossed it into the wing, and began to speak with deliberation, nobody
listening, everybody laughing and whispering.  The speaker talked on
unembarrassed, and presently delivered a shot which went home, and silence and
attention resulted.  He followed it quick and fast with other telling things;
warmed to his work and began to pour his words out, instead of dripping them;
grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightnings and thunder - and
now the house began to break into applause, to which the speaker gave no heed,
but went hammering straight on; unwound his black bandage and cast it away,
still thundering; presently discarded the bobtailed coat and flung it aside,
firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vest after the
coat; and then for an untimed period stood there, like another Vesuvius,
spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes, raining pumice-stone and cinders,
shaking the moral earth with intellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon
explosion, while the mad multitude stood upon their feet in a solid body,
answering back with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing
snow-storm of waving handkerchiefs.

     "When Dean came," said Claggett, "the people thought he was an escaped
lunatic; but when he went, they thought he was an escaped archangel."

     Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill-city; and
also a beautiful one - unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing city, with a
population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories of nearly
every imaginable description.  It was a very sober city, too - for the moment
- for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbid the manufacture,
exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing, lending, stealing,
drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident,
or otherwise, in the state of Iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage
known to the human race, except water.  This measure was approved by all the
rational people in the state; but not by the bench of judges.

     Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices
for right and intelligent government, including a paid fire department; a
thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still employs that
relic of antiquity, the independent system.

     In Burlington, as in all these Upper-River towns, one breathes a go-
ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils.  An opera-house has lately
been built there which is in strong contrast with the shabby dens which
usually do duty as theaters in cities of Burlington's size.

     We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight view of it
from the boat.  I lived there awhile, many years ago, but the place, now, had
a rather unfamiliar look; so I suppose it has clear outgrown the town which I
used to know.  In fact, I know it has; for I remember it as a small place -
which it isn't now.  But I remember it best for a lunatic who caught me out in
the fields, one Sunday, and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and
proposed to carve me up with it, unless I acknowledged him to be the only son
of the Devil.  I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only
member of the family I had met; but that did not satisfy him; he wouldn't have
any half-measures; I must say he was the sole and only son of the Devil - and
he whetted his knife on his boot.  It did not seem worth while to make trouble
about a little thing like that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and
saved my skin whole.  Shortly afterward, he went to visit his father; and as
he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet.

     And I remember Muscatine - still more pleasantly - for its summer
sunsets.  I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled
them.  They used the broad, smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every
imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies of the
opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding purple and
crimson conflagrations, which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it
at the same time.  All the Upper Mississippi region has these extraordinary
sunsets as a familiar spectacle.  It is the true Sunset Land: I am sure no
other country can show so good a right to the name.  The sunrises are also
said to be exceedingly fine.  I do not know.