Once inside the city, I was interested to note that most cities, like people, retain their characteristics permanently. Thus in my day, Evansville was already noted as a furniture manufacturing city. Plainly it was so still. In half a dozen blocks we passed as many large furniture companies, all their windows open and the whir and drone of their wheels and saws and planes pouring forth a happy melody. Again, it was already at that time establishing a reputation for the manufacture of cheap pottery; and here, to our left, was a pottery crowded in among other things, not large, but still a pottery. If there was one, we might expect others.
At the edge of the town, making its way through a notable gorge, was Pigeon Creek, a stream in which Ed, Al and I had often bathed and fished, and to the shore of which we had been led, on divers occasions, by a stout German Catholic priest, or three or four of them, giving an annual or semiannual picnic. The fact that the land rises at this section was probably what attracted the first settlers here, and gives to this creek and the heart of the city a picturesque and somewhat differentiated character.
Not far from the center of the city, in a region which I once considered very remote, we passed the double-steepled church of St. Anthony, an institution which, because I was taken to its dedication by my father, I had retained in memory as something imposing. It was not at all—a rather commonplace church in red brick and white stone, such as any carpenter and builder of Teutonic extraction might design and execute. A little farther on, facing my much beloved Vine Street, where stood Holy Trinity Catholic Church and School, and along which, morning and evening, I used to walk, I discovered the Vanderburg County Court House, filling a space of ground which had once been our public school playground. It was very large, very florate, and very like every other court house in America.
Friends, why is it that American architects can design nothing different—or is it that our splendidly free and unconventional people will not permit them? I sometimes feel that there could not exist a more dull witted nation architecturally than we are. In so far as intelligence is supposed to manifest itself in the matter of taste, we give no evidence of having any—positively none. Our ratiocinations are of the flock, herd or school variety. We run with the pack. Some mountebank Simon in art, literature, politics, architecture, cries “thumbs up,” and up goes every blessed thumb from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Then some other pseudo-ratiocinating ass calls “thumbs down,” and down go all thumbs—not a few, but all. Let a shyster moralist cry that Shakespeare is immoral and his plays are at once barred from all the schools of a dozen states. Let a quack nostrum peddling zany declare that the young must not be contaminated, and out go all the works of Montagne, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Balzac, on the ground, forsooth, that they will injure the young. Save the sixteen year old girl, if you must make mushheads and loons, absolute naturals, of every citizen from ocean to ocean!
I despair, really. I call for water and wash my hands. A land with such tendencies can scarcely be saved, unless it be by disaster. We need to be tried by fire or born again. We do not grasp the first principles of intellectual progress.
But our breakfast! Our breakfast! Before getting it I had to take Franklin to view the Ohio River from Water Street (I do believe they have changed the name to Riverside Drive, since New York has one) for I could not rest until he had seen one of the most striking American river scenes of which I know anything. I know how the Hudson joins the ocean at New York, the Missouri the Mississippi at St. Louis, the Moselle the Rhine, at Coblenz, the New and Big Kanawha in the picturesque mountains of West Virginia, and the Alleghany the Monongahela to make the Ohio in Pittsburg—but this sweep of the Ohio, coming up from the South and turning immediately south again in a mighty elbow which pushes at the low hill on which the city stands, is tremendous. You know this is a mighty river, bearing the muddy waters of half a continent, by merely looking at it. It speaks for itself.
Standing on this fronting street of this purely commercial city, whose sloping levee sinks to the water’s edge, you see it coming, miles and miles away, this vast body of water; and turning, you see it disappearing around a lowland, over whose few wreak and yellow trees the water frequently passes. In high water, whole towns and valleys fall before it. Houses and cabins go by on its flood. On it ride those picturesque sternwheelers, relics of an older order of navigation, and here on this bright August morning were several anchored at our feet. They were fastened to floating wharves, chained to the shore. On the long, downward slope of cobble stones were lying boxes and bales, the evidence of a river traffic that no inimical railroad management can utterly kill. A river capable of bearing almost all the slow freight of a half score of states is left to distribute the minor shipments of perhaps four or five. Franklin and Bert were struck with it, which pleased me greatly, for it is pleasant to bring another to a great view. They exclaimed over its scope and beauty.
Then we went looking for a restaurant. Although the killing of game was still out of season, we found one where broiled squirrels were being offered for the humble sum of sixty cents. We feasted. Our conservative chauffeur declared, as we sat down, that he did not care for anything much, and then ordered a steak, three eggs, a pot of coffee, a bowl of wheatena, muffins and hashed brown potatoes, topped off with a light plate of waffles and maple syrup.
“Bert,” exclaimed Franklin, “you really aren’t as strong as you might be this morning. You must look after yourself.”
He scarcely heard. Lost in a sea of provender, he toiled on, an honest driver worthy of his hire.