In some of the boats negro fish-markets are conducted, advertised by large catfish dangling from posts and railing
Whether fishing for market, for personal use, or merely for the sake of having an occupation involving a minimum of effort, the residents of shanty boats—particularly the negroes—seem to spend most of their days seated in drowsy attitudes, with fish poles in their hands. Their eyes fall shut, their heads nod in the sun, their lines lag in the muddy water; life is uneventful, pleasant, and warm.
When Porter's mortar fleet lay in the river, off Vicksburg, bombarding the town, that river was the Mississippi, but though it looks the same to-day as it did then, it is not the Mississippi now, but the Yazoo River. This comes about through one of those freakish changes of course for which the great stream has always been famous.
In the old days Vicksburg was situated upon one of the loops of a large letter "S" formed by the Mississippi, but in 1876 the river cut through a section of land and eliminated the loop upon which the town stood. Fortunately, however, the Yazoo emptied into the Mississippi above Vicksburg, and it was found possible, by digging a canal, to divert the latter river from its course and lead its waters into the loop left dry by the whim of the greater stream. Thus the river life, out of which Vicksburg was born, and without which the place would lose its character, was retained, and the wicked old Mississippi, which has played rough pranks on men and cities since men and cities first appeared upon its banks, was for once circumvented. This is but one item from the record of grotesque tricks wrought by changes in the river's course: a record of farms located at night on one side of the stream, and in the morning on the other; of large tracts of land transferred from State to State by a sudden switch of this treacherous fluid line of boundary; of river boats crashing by night into dry land where yesterday a deep stream flowed; of towns built up on river trade, utterly dependent upon the river, yet finding themselves suddenly deserted by it, like wives whose husbands disappear, leaving them withering, helpless, and in want.
Where the upper Mississippi, above St. Louis, flows between tall bluffs it attains a grandeur which one expects in mighty streams, but that is not the part of the river which gets itself talked about in the newspapers and in Congress, nor is it the part of the river one involuntarily thinks of when the name Mississippi is mentioned. The drama, the wonder, the mystery of the Mississippi are in the lower river: the river of countless wooded islands, now standing high and dry, now buried to the tree tops in swirling torrents of muddy water; the river of black gnarled snags carried downstream to the Gulf with the speed of motor boats; the river whose craft sail on a level with the roofs of houses; the river of broken levees, of savage inundations.
The upper river has a beauty which is like that of some lovely, stately, placid, well-behaved blond wife. She is conventional and correct. You always know where to find her. The lower river is a temperamental mistress. At one moment she is all sweetness, smiles and playfulness; at the next vivid and passionate. Even when she is at her loveliest there is always the possibility of sudden fury: of her rising in a rage, breaking the furniture, wrecking the house—yes, and perhaps winding her wicked cold arms about you in a final destroying embrace.
Being the "Gibraltar of the river" (albeit a Gibraltar of clay and not of rock), Vicksburg does not suffer when floods come. Turn your back upon the river, as you stand on the platform of the Yazoo & Mississippi railroad station, and you may gather at a glance an impression of the town piling up the hillside to the eastward.
The first buildings, occupying the narrow shelf of land at the water's edge, are small warehouses, negro eating houses, dilapidated little steamship offices, and all manner of shacks in want of paint and repairs. From the station Mulberry Street runs obliquely up the hillside to the south. This street, which forms the main thoroughfare to the station, used to be occupied by wholesale houses, but has more lately been given over largely to a frankly and prominently exposed district of commercialized vice—negro and white. Not only is it at the very door of Vicksburg, but it parallels, and is but one block distant from, the city's main street.
Other streets, so steep as hardly to be passable, directly assault the face of the hill, mounting abruptly to Washington Street, which runs on a flat terrace at about the height of the top of the station roof, and exposes to the view of the newly arrived traveler the unpainted wooden backs of a number of frame buildings which, though they are but two or three stories high in front, reach in some cases a height of five or six stories at the rear, owing to the steepness of the hillside to which they cling. The roof lines, side walls, windows, chimneys, galleries, posts, and railings of these sad-looking structures are all picturesquely out of plumb, and some idea of the general dilapidation may be gathered from the fact that, one day, while my companion stood on the station platform, drawing a picture of this scene, a brick chimney, a portrait of which he had just completed, softly collapsed before our eyes, for all the world like a sitter who, having held a pose too long, faints from exhaustion.