The deck hands also met with a surprise from the mate, and that in less than a minute. Men think fast in such an emergency, especially those schooled amid dangers and quickened in mind and body by recurring calls for prompt action. A dozen seas had not struck the "Equator" before the mate was on the forecastle, driving the panic-stricken deck hands to work. Dropping the two long spars to the deck, with the assistance of the carpenter and such men as had gathered their wits together, he lashed them firmly together at each end. Then bending on a strong piece of line extending from end to end, and doubled, he made fast the main hawser, or snubbing line, to the middle, or bight of the rope attached to the spars, and then launched the whole overboard, making a "sea-anchor" that soon brought the bow of the vessel head to sea, and eased the racking roll of the hull, steadying the craft so that there was little further danger of her sinking. In the ten or fifteen minutes that it had taken to get the drag built and overboard, the waves had swept over the lower deck and into the hold, until there was a foot of water weighing her down, which the bilge pumps operated by the "doctor" were unable to throw out as fast as it came in. Had it continued to gain for fifteen minutes longer, the boat would have gone to the bottom with all on board. The drag saved the vessel; the coolness and quickness of the mate and carpenter were the salvation of the steamer and its great load of people.
In the meantime other incidents were occurring, that made a lasting impression upon my mind. I did not witness them myself, but I learned of them afterwards. All this time I stood at the side of the useless wheel in the pilot house, listening for sounds from the engine-room. Mr. Lay was doing all that was possible to remedy the break. He cut off the steam from the useless cylinder, and with his assistant and the firemen, was at work disconnecting the pitman, with the intent to try to work the wheel with one cylinder, which would have been an impossibility in that sea. In fact it would have been impossible under any circumstances, for the large wheel of a stern-wheel boat is built to be operated by two engines; there is not power enough in either one alone to more than turn it over, let alone driving the steamboat. When the crash came, Engineer Lay's wife, who was on board as a passenger, ran immediately to the engine-room to be with her husband when the worst should come. He kissed her as she came, and said: "There's a dear, brave, little woman. Run back to the cabin and encourage the other women. I must work. Good-bye". And the "little woman"—for she was a little woman, and a brave little woman, also—without another word gave her husband a good-bye kiss, and wiping away the tears, went back to the cabin and did more than all the others to reassure the frightened, fainting women and little children—the very antithesis of the craven old usurer who had crept on his knees begging for a little longer lease of a worthless life.
It took an hour or more to drift slowly, stern first, diagonally across and down the lake to the shore above Glenmont, on the Wisconsin side, where she struck and swung broadside onto the beach. The men carried the women ashore through four feet of water, and in another hour the cabin was blown entirely off the sunken hull, and the boat was a total wreck. Her bones are there to-day, a striking attestation of the power of wind and wave, even upon so small a body of water as Lake St. Croix.
Big fires were built from the wreckage to warm the wet and benumbed people. Runners were sent to nearby farm houses for teams, as well as to Hudson, seven or eight miles way. Many of the men walked home to Prescott and Hastings. Captain Green, who owned the boat, stayed with his crew to save what he could from the wreck, in which he lost his all; but he had only words of thanksgiving that not a life had been lost while under his charge. Through it he was cool and cheerful, devoting himself to reassuring his passengers, as soon as the drag was in place, and giving orders for getting the women and children ashore as soon as the boat should strike. His only deviation from perfect equipoise was exhibited in his treatment of the old man, a notoriously mean, and exacting money-lender, with whom he had no sympathy at any time, and no patience at a time like this.
Chapter XXV
A Stray Nobleman
Of the many men whom it was my good fortune to meet while on the river as a boy, or as a young man, there was none who came nearer to filling the bill as a nobleman than Robert C. Eden, whose memory suggests the title of this chapter. Just what constitutes a nobleman in the college of heraldry, I am not qualified to assert. "Bob" Eden, as his friends fondly called him—Captain Eden, as he was known on the river, or Major Eden as he was better known in the closing days of the War of Secession—was the son of an English baronet. There were several other sons who had had the luck to be born ahead of "Bob", and his chance for attaining to the rank and title of baronet was therefore extremely slim. However, his father was able to send him to Oxford, from which ancient seat of learning he was graduated with honors. As a younger son he was set apart for the ministry, where he finally landed after sowing his wild oats, which he did in a gentlemanly and temperate manner that comported well with the profession for which he was destined, all his studies having been along theological lines. The wanderlust was in his blood, however, and he declined taking holy orders until he had seen something of the unholy world outside. Accordingly he took the portion due him, or which his father gave him, and departed for Canada. Not finding things just to his taste in that British appanage, possibly not rapid enough for a divinity student, he promptly crossed the line and began making himself into a Yankee, in all except citizenship.
In his wanderings he finally reached Oshkosh, attracted no doubt by the euphony of the name, which has made the little "saw dust city of the Fox" one of the best known towns, by title, in the world. If there was any one place more than another calculated [197] [198] to educate and instruct an embryo clergyman in the ways of the world, and a particularly wicked world at that, it was Oshkosh before the war. That he saw some of the "fun" which the boys enjoyed in those days was evidenced by the fund of stories relating to that place and that era, which he had in stock in later years.
I do not know how long he remained there on his first visit. When I made his acquaintance he was journeying up the river by easy stages on a little side-wheel steamer, having both wheels on a single shaft—a type of steamboat which I had known on the St. Joseph River in Michigan, but which was not common on the Mississippi. This class was used on the Fox and Wolf Rivers, and on Lake Winnebago. Captain Eden had bought this little steamboat, of perhaps eighty tons burden, for the purpose of exploring at his leisure the upper Mississippi and its tributaries. He had sailed up the Fox River to Portage, through the canal to the Wisconsin, and down that stream to the Mississippi, and had reached Prescott, where I met him. He wanted to go up the St. Croix to the Falls, stopping at all the towns, and at places where there were no towns, at his own sweet will. First-class pilots were getting six hundred dollars a month wages in those days. Eden's boat was not worth two months' pay of such a pilot, and he was on the lookout for a cheaper man when he found me.
His crew consisted of himself, acting in the capacity of captain and first and second mates; an engineer and fireman in one person; a deck hand, and a cook. The cook is named last, but he was by no means the least personage aboard the "Enterprise". As this was a sort of holiday excursion, the cook was about the most important official about the boat. He was fully up in his business, and could cook all kinds of game and fish to perfection, as well as the ordinary viands of civilization. It was a privilege to be catered to by this master of his art. The captain had under him, therefore, three men, in addition to the pilot for temporary service from time to time as he journeyed up the river. The "Enterprise" was not a speedy boat. She could make four or five miles an hour upstream if the current was not too strong, and double that downstream if the current was strong enough. She had no upper cabin answering to the "boiler deck" of the river boats—only a little box of a pilot house on the roof, big enough to contain a little wheel and the man who turned it. This wheel was only about a third the diameter of a real steamboat wheel, and instead of wheel-ropes it had chains, large enough for a man-of-war. When the wheel was put hard up or hard down, the chains responded with a series of groans and squeaks not unmusical, but new and novel to one used only to the noiseless operation of the well-oiled wheel-ropes of the river steamers. The chains were part of the fire-proof outfit required by regulations on the great lakes. The "Enterprise" was from Winnebago. To pull the little three-foot wheel hard down, and hold the stumpy little steamer up to a reef from which she wanted to run away, required the expenditure of as much muscle as was demanded to cramp a four-hundred ton steamer over the same bar by the use of the larger wheel and easier-running wheel-ropes.