“Because,” explained the captain promptly, “they are just a pick-up lot of boats, all, I think, stern-wheelers. Only their bow is protected with plates and railroad-iron. Their engines are weak, and if maneuvered down-stream they will drag their anchors in the muddy bottom and are hard to control. They are real fighting-ships only when they point their noses up-stream.”
When at last Barker invited Tatanka into a cabin, the Indian smiled. “No,” he said, “Indian cannot sleep in a box. I sleep in my blankets outside, with plenty of air around me.”
CHAPTER XX—ON TO VICKSBURG
The steamer Grey Hawk cast off from the New Madrid landing at dawn of day.
The years just preceding the Civil War and the years of the war were the great days of steamboating on the Mississippi and its tributaries.
Hundreds of boats, large and small, ran on the main stream, on the Ohio, the Missouri, the Illinois, the Minnesota and other rivers of the great Mississippi basin. The average life time of a Mississippi steamer was only five years, because countless snags, ice, fires, and other dangers were the bad medicine to navigation on all the streams. None of them were improved, none had any system of lights or signs; the pilots had to know the rivers, whose currents and sandbars and snags were constantly shifting. But the business was so profitable that the trips of one season often paid for the boat. Settlers were rushing into the western country and they and all their goods went by steamboat, for no railroads had yet crossed the Mississippi. On the turbulent Missouri the steamers ran to the mouth of the Yellowstone and beyond, taking up settlers, soldiers, general freight and goods for the Indian trade, and bringing back loads of buffalo-skins and other fur from the Rocky Mountain country. On the Minnesota small steamers ran two hundred miles beyond St. Paul into the newly opened Sioux country to market the first wheat of the new settlers. A few small boats plied on the upper Mississippi above St. Paul and Minneapolis, where the lumber industry and flour-mills were just developing.
The Civil War proved a fatal blow to river traffic. Both the Federal and the Confederate government commandeered a large number of vessels for war purposes, and many of those were wrecked and sunk or burnt in battle.
Immediately after the war, railroads began to parallel the Mississippi and its navigable tributaries. The steamboat traffic lingered for a number of years, but it never again attained its former glory, and soon sank into its present insignificance.
Moreover, the great movement of traffic in North America is east and west, while the trend of our great navigable river system is north and south.
Barker and Tatanka, as well as the boys, found life on a Mississippi steamer very attractive.