Chapter XX
Music and Art
In the middle of the nineteenth century, many an artist whose canvases found no market in the older cities, found ready bidders for his brush, to decorate the thirty-foot paddle-boxes of the big side-wheelers with figures of heroic size; or, with finer touch, to embellish the cabins of Western steamboats with oil paintings in every degree of merit and demerit.
The boat carrying my father and his family from Rock Island to Prescott, upon my first appearance on the Father of Waters, was the "Minnesota Belle". Her paddle-boxes were decorated with pictures the same on each side, representing a beautiful girl, modestly and becomingly clothed, and carrying in her arms a bundle of wheat ten or twelve feet long, which she apparently had just reaped from some Minnesota field. In her right hand she carried the reaping-hook with which it was cut.
All the "Eagles" were adorned with greater than life-size portraits of that noble bird. Apparently all were drawn from the same model, whether the boat be a Grey-, Black-, Golden-, War-, or Spread-Eagle.
The "Northern Belle", also had a very good looking young woman upon her paddle-boxes. Evidently she exhibited herself out of pure self-satisfaction, for she had no sheaf of wheat, or any other evidence of occupation. She was pretty, and she knew it.
The "General Brooke" showed the face and bust, in full regimentals, of the doughty old Virginian for whom it was named.
Later, the "Phil Sheridan" boasted an heroic figure of Little Phil, riding in a hurry from Winchester to the front, the hoofs of his charger beating time to the double bass of the guns at Cedar Creek, twenty miles away.
The "Minnesota" reproduced the coat-of-arms of the state [153] [154] whose name she bore—the ploughman, the Indian, and the motto "L'étoile du Nord". But the majority of the side-wheel boats boasted only a sunburst on the paddle-boxes, outside of which, on the perimeter of the wheel-house circle, was the legend showing to what line or company the boat belonged. The sunburst afforded opportunity for the artist to spread on colors, and usually the effect was pleasing and harmonious.
It was the inside work wherein the artists in oil showed their skill. Certainly there were many panels that showed the true artistic touch. The "Northern Light", I remember, had in her forward cabin representations of Dayton Bluff, St. Anthony Falls, Lover's Leap, or Maiden Rock, drawn from nature, for which the artist was said to have been paid a thousand dollars. They were in truth fine paintings, being so adjudged by people who claimed to be competent critics. On the other hand there were hundreds of panels—thousands, perhaps, in the myriad of boats that first and last plied on the river—that were the veriest daubs. These were the handiwork of the house painters who thought they had a talent for higher things, and who had been given free hand in the cabin to put their ambitions on record.