Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0141/01418.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob01418}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter LVIII}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{years
st
now
river
island
region
towns
davenport
population
boat}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter LVIII

On The Upper River

     The big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch
processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude.  Hour by hour, the boat
plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous Northwest; and with each
successive section of it which is revealed, one's surprise and respect gather
emphasis and increase.  Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel
homage.  This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are
competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened; they read, they
keep abreast of the best and newest thought; they fortify every weak place in
their land with a school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live
under law. Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order.

     This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its
babyhood.  By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast
what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity.  It is so new that
the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it.  For
sixty years the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river between St.
Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and written his book; believing he
had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that had anything to see.
In not six of all these books is there mention of these Upper-River towns -
for the reason that the five or six tourists who penetrated this region did it
before these towns were projected.  The latest tourist of them all (1878) made
the same old regulation trip - he had not heard that there was anything north
of St. Louis.

     Yet there was.  There was this amazing region, bristling with great
towns, projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning.  A
score of them number from 1,500 to 5,000 people.  Then we have Muscatine,
10,000; Winona, 10,000; Moline, 10,000; Rock Island, 12,000; La Crosse,
12,000; Burlington, 25,000; Dubuque, 25,000; Davenport, 30,000; St. Paul,
58,000; Minneapolis, 60,000 and upward.

     The foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them in
his books.  They have sprung up in the night, while he slept.  So new is this
region that I, who am comparatively young, am yet older than it is.  When I
was born St. Paul had a population of three persons; Minneapolis had just a
third as many.  The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and
when he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years, of
fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety- nine persons.  He had a frog's
fertility.

     I must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of St.
Paul and Minneapolis, are several months old.  These towns are far larger now.
In fact, I have just seen a newspaper estimate, which gives the former
seventy-one thousand and the latter seventy-eight thousand. This book will not
reach the public for six or seven months yet; none of the figures will be
worth much then.

     We had a glimpse at Davenport, which is another beautiful city, crowning
a hill - a phrase which applies to all these towns; for they are all comely,
all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye, and cheering to the
spirit; and they are all situated upon hills.  Therefore we will give that
phrase a rest.  The Indians have a tradition that Marquette and Joliet camped
where Davenport now stands, in 1673.  The next white man who camped there, did
it about a hundred and seventy years later - in 1843.  Davenport has gathered
its thirty thousand people within the past thirty years.  She sends more
children to her schools now than her whole population numbered twenty-three
years ago.  She has the usual Upper-River quota of factories, newspapers, and
institutions of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs, an electric
alarm, and an admirable paid fire department, consisting of six
hook-and-ladder companies, four steam fire-engines, and thirty churches.
Davenport is the official residence of two bishops - Episcopal and Catholic.

     Opposite Davenport is the flourishing town of Rock Island, which lies at
the foot of the Upper Rapids.  A great railroad bridge connects the two towns
- one of the thirteen which fret the Mississippi and the pilots between St.
Louis and St. Paul.

     The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and half a mile
wide, belongs to the UnitedStates, and the government has turned it into a
wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and threading its
fine forests with many miles of drives.  Near the center of the island one
catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone four story buildings,
each of which covers an acre of ground.  These are the government workshops;
for the Rock Island establishment is a national armory and arsenal.

     We move up the river - always through enchanting scenery, there being no
other kind on the Upper Mississippi - and pass Moline, a center of vast
manufacturing industries; and Clinton and Lyons, great lumber centers; and
presently reach Dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region.  The
leadmines are very productive, and of wide extent.  Dubuque has a great number
of manufacturing establishments; among them a plow factory, which has for
customers all Christendom in general.  At least so I was told by an agent of
the concern who was on the boat.  He said:

     "You show me any country under the sun where they really know how to
plow, and if I don't show you our mark on the plow they use, I'll eat that
plow; and I won't ask for any Woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with,
either."

     All this part of the river is rich in Indian history and traditions.
Black Hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was Keokuk's, further
down.  A few miles below Dubuque is the Tete de Mort - Death's- head rock, or
bluff - to the top of which the French drove a band of Indians, in early
times, and cooped them up there, with death for a certainty, and only the
manner of it matter of choice - to starve, or jump off and kill themselves.
Black Hawk adopted the ways of the white people toward the end of his life;
and when he died he was buried, near Des Moines, in Christian fashion,
modified by Indian custom; that is to say, clothed in a Christian military
uniform, and with a Christian cane in his hand, but deposited in the grave in
a sitting posture.  Formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief.
The substitution of the cane shows that Black Hawk's haughty nature was really
humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over.

     We noticed that above Dubuque the water of the Mississippi was
olive-green - rich and beautiful and semitransparent, with the sun on it. Of
course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion as it is in
some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood stage, and therefore
dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from caving banks.

     The majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region,
charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the soft beauty of
their adornment.  The steep, verdant slope, whose base is at the water's edge,
is topped by a lofty rampart of broken, turreted rocks, which are exquisitely
rich and mellow in color - mainly dark browns and dull greens, but splashed
with other tints.  And then you have the shining river, winding here and there
and yonder, its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islands
threaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages, asleep
upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade of the forest
walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points.  And it is all as
tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about it -
nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon.

     Until the unholy train comes tearing along - which it presently does,
ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's war-whoop and
the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels - and straightway you are back in
this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand for your entertainment;
for you remember that this is the very road whose stock always goes down after
you buy it, and always goes up again as soon as you sell it.  It makes me
shudder to this day, to remember that I once came near not getting rid of my
stock at all.  It must be an awful thing to have a railroad left on your
hands.

     The locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almost the
whole way from St. Louis to St. Paul - eight hundred miles.  These railroads
have made havoc with the steamboat commerce.  The clerk of our boat was a
steamboat clerk before these roads were built.  In that day the influx of
population was so great, and the freight business so heavy, that the boats
were not able to keep up with the demands made upon their carrying capacity;
consequently the captains were very independent and airy - pretty "biggity,"
as Uncle Remus would say.  The clerk nutshelled the contrast between the
former time and the present, thus:

     "Boat used to land - captain on hurricane-roof - mighty stiff and
straight - iron ramrod for a spine - kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind
- man on shore takes off hat and says:

     "'Got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n - be great favor if you can take
them.'

     "Captain says:

     "'I'll take two of them' - and don't even condescend to look at him.

     "But nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles all the
way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow which he hasn't got any
ramrod to interfere with, and says:

     "'Glad to see you, Smith, glad to see you - you're looking well - haven't
seen you looking so well for years - what you got for us?'

     "'Nuth'n', says Smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turns his back and
goes to talking with somebody else.

     "Oh, yes!  eight years ago the captain was on top; but it's Smith's turn
now.  Eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom
full, and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid
deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain.  To get a
first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility and
four hundred years of descent, or be personally acquainted with the nigger
that blacked the captain's boots. But it's all changed now; plenty staterooms
above, no harvesters below - there's a patent self-binder now, and they don't
have harvesters any more; they've gone where the woodbine twineth - and they
didn't go by steamboat, either; went by the train."

     Up in this region we met massed acres of lumberrafts coming down - but
not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with joyous and
reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whisky-drinking, breakdown-dancing
rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful
stern-wheeler, modern fashion; and the small crews were quiet, orderly men, of
a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them
anywhere.

     Along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedingly narrow
and intricate island chutes by aid of the electric light.  Behind was solid
blackness - a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrow elbow of water, curving
between dense walls of foliage that almost touched our bows on both sides; and
here every individual leaf and every individual ripple stood out in its
natural color, and flooded with a glare as of nooday intensified.  The effect
was strange and fine, and very striking.

     We passed Prairie du Chien, another of Father Marquette's camping-
places; and after some hours of progress through varied and beautiful scenery,
reached La Crosse.  Here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population,
with electric-lighted streets, and blocks of buildings which are stately
enough, and also architecturally fine enough to command respect in any city.
It is a choice town, and we made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us, in
roaming it over, though the weather was rainier than necessary.