Altogether the duties of the steward were arduous and tormenting. The passengers expected much; and after getting the best, if any slip occurred they were sure to enter complaint—a complaint so worded as to convey the impression that they never had anything fit to eat while on the boat, nor any service that white men were justified in tolerating. The fact was, that most of the passengers so served had never in all their lives lived so well as they did on the trip from Galena to St. Paul on one of the regular boats of the Minnesota Packet Company. Certainly, after reaching their destination in the Territory of Minnesota, the chances were that it would be many long years, in that era of beginnings, before they would again be so well fed and so assiduously cared for, even in the very best hotels of St. Paul.
This chapter on Mississippi menus would be incomplete without some reference to the drinkables served on the steamboat tables. These were coffee, tea, and river water. Mark Twain has described the ordinary beverage used on the river, as it is found on the Missouri, or on the Mississippi below the mouth of the "Big Muddy":
"When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers, crying. Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Baxter, Ferguson, Bascom, nor Thompson; but he answered to either of them that a body found handy in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that you meant him. He said:
"'What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water? drink this slush?'
"'Can't you drink it?'
"'I would if I had some other water to wash it with.'
"Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected this water's mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good; the one good to eat, the other good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. The one appeases hunger, the other, thirst. But the natives do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of the glass, they stir it up, and then take the draught as they would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once used to it he will prefer it to water. This is really the case. It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing."
The above sketch had not been written in 1860, as Mark Twain was himself piloting on the lower river at that time. It could not, therefore, have been this description which prejudiced many eastern people against Mississippi River water as a beverage. But that prejudice did exist, away back in the fifties, and the fame of the yellow tipple had reached even to the fastnesses of the Vermont hills at that early day. Many emigrants from the old New England states provided themselves with kegs, jugs or "demijohns", and before embarking at Rock Island or Dunleith for the river trip, would fill these receptacles with water from the nearest well, or even cistern, and drink such stuff, warm, and sometimes putrid, rather than drink the life-giving elixir which had welled up from springs nestled in the shadows of the everlasting hills, or had been distilled by the sun from the snowbanks and ice fields of the unspoiled prairies and azure lakes of the great northwest.
One old Yankee would pin his faith to nothing less than the water from his own spring or well at home, away back in old Vermont, and brought, at infinite pains and labor, a five-gallon demijohn all the way from his native state, drinking it on the cars en route, and on the boat after reaching the river.
It wasn't as bad as that. The river water was as pure and healthful as any water on the footstool—then. It may not be so now—it isn't, now. Then there were no great cities on the river banks, pouring thousands of gallons of sewage and all manner of corruption into the stream, daily. There was very little land under cultivation even, and few farmyards, the drainage from which might contaminate the feeders of the great river. It was good, clean, healthful, spring and snow water. Above the mouth of the Missouri, in any ordinary stage of water, especially with a falling river, the water was but slightly discolored with the yellow sediment with which the river itself is always tinged; and this sediment was so fine that there was no suspicion of grit about it. When properly stirred up and evenly mixed, as those to the manner born always took it, it was an invigorating potion, and like good old Bohea, it would cheer but not inebriate.