Tales of a Vanishing River

by Earl H. Reed

Bill was the genius loci, and gave it a rich and mellow character, which it would have been difficult for Posey to sustain alone. He was a grizzled veteran of the marshes. For many years he had lived in a tumble-down shack on “Huckleberry Island.” He trapped muskrats and mink over a wide area in the winter, and shot ducks and geese for the market in the spring and fall. When the fur harvests began to fail, and the game laws became oppressive, he concluded that he was getting too old to work, and was too much alone in the world. He moved up the river and built a new shack on “Watermelon Bend,” which was within easy walking distance from the store, where he could usually find plenty of congenial company when he wanted it. Here he had become a fixture.

Out of the ample fund of his experience, flavored and garnished by the rich and inexhaustible fertility of an imagination, that at times was almost uncanny, had come tales of early life on the river and marshes that had enthralled the loiterers at the store. They shared the shade of the awning with him during the hot summer days, and surrounded the big bellied wood stove in the dingy interior during the winter days and evenings when “they was nothin’ doin’” anywhere else in the region, and listened with rapt interest to his reminiscences. Any expression of incredulity met with crushing rebuke. “I didn’t notice that you was there at the time,” he would remark with asperity. “If you wasn’t, that’ll be all from you.”

The muskrat colonies still left along the river, and out on the marshy areas, were often drawn upon by adventurous youngsters, solely for the purpose of “seein’ Bill skin ’em.” Clusters of the unfortunates were brought by their tails and laid on the store platform. The old man would look the crowd over patronizingly, take his “ripper” from his pocket, and, with a few dexterous strokes, perform feats of pelt surgery that made the tyros gasp with admiration.

“I skun six hundred an’ forty-eight rats once’t, in five hours, that I’d caught on Muckshaw Lake the night before,” was Bill’s invariable remark after he had finished his grewsome performance.

The adulation of these small audiences was the glow that illumined his declining days.

When I first met the old man years ago, he was engaged in writing his autobiography, and at last accounts he was still at it. His shack and the little room over the store had gradually become literary temples. His complicated manuscripts and notes were kept in an old black satchel of once shiny oil cloth, that he called his “war bag.” On its side was the roughly lettered inscription: “HISTORIC CRONICELS—STILES.” He carried it back and forth between his abodes with much solicitude. During the many evenings I spent with him, he would frequently extract its contents and read aloud in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. He often paused and looked over the rims of his spectacles, with animation in his gray eyes, when he came to passages that he deemed of special importance. The masses of foolscap contained records that were only intelligible to the writer. His grammar and spelling were hopelessly bad, his methods of compilation were baffling, and his penmanship was mystic, but his collection of facts and near-facts was prodigious. He took long reflective rests between the periods of active composition. They were deathless chronicles in the sense that they seemed to be without end, and they appeared to become more and more deathless as he proceeded.

The first two or three hundred pages were what Bill called a “Backfire Chapter.” It began with the Creative Dawn, and was a general historical résumé down to the time of his appearance on earth. It skipped lightly over the great events, that loom like mountain peaks in the world’s history and tower away into the receding centuries. When he came to the Deluge he got lost among Noah’s animals for awhile and floundered hopelessly for adjectives. It was impossible to enumerate and describe all of them, but he did the best he could. Through a maze of wars and falling empires, he got Columbus to America. The Republic was established, and civilization finally flowered with the birth of Bill Stiles, A.D., 1836. From the dawn of time to the rocking of Bill’s cradle was a far cry, but his annals included what he considered the essential features of that dark period.

In addition to a vast amount of matter of purely personal interest, the work was designed to accurately record the happenings in the river country during Bill’s lifetime.

Much of his material was collected at the store. The year that Bundy’s Bridge was built, and the ferry ceased operations, was shrouded in historic gloom. Five times the year had been changed in the chronicles, for five eminent authorities differed as to the date, and each of them had at one time or another succeeded in impressing Bill. He seemed confident of all his other facts. The other bridges had given him no trouble.

There was no question in his mind as to when the Pottowattomies were relieved of their lands and forcibly removed from the country, or when the camp of horse thieves on Grape Island was broken up.