In the forward part of the cabin there was a bar, a stove, a table, and a placard of rules, forbidding smoking, gambling, or swearing in the cabin, and a close company of drinkers, smokers, card-players, and constant swearers. I went out, and stepped down to the boiler-deck. The boat had been provided with very poor wood, and the firemen were crowding it into the furnaces whenever they could find room for it, driving smaller sticks between the larger ones at the top by a battering-ram method.
Most of the firemen were Irish born; one with whom I conversed was English. He said they were divided into three watches, each working four hours at a time, and all hands liable to be called, when wooding, or landing, or taking on freight, to assist the deck-hands. They were paid now but thirty dollars a month—ordinarily forty, and sometimes sixty—and board. He was a sailor bred. This boat-life was harder than seafaring, but the pay was better, and the trips were short. The regular thing was to make two trips, and then lay up for a spree. It would be too hard on a man, he thought, to pursue it regularly; two trips “on end” was as much as a man could stand. He must then take a “refreshment.” Working this way for three weeks, and then refreshing for about one, he did not think it was unhealthy, no more than ordinary seafaring. He concluded by informing me that the most striking peculiarity of the business was that it kept a man, notwithstanding wholesale periodical refreshment, very dry. He was of opinion that after the information I had obtained, if I gave him at least the price of a single drink and some tobacco, it would be characteristic of a gentleman.
Going round behind the furnace, I found a large quantity of freight: hogsheads, barrels, cases, bales, boxes, nail-rods, rolls of leather, ploughs, cotton, bale-rope, and firewood, all thrown together in the most confused manner, with hot steam-pipes and parts of the engine crossing through it. As I explored farther aft, I found negroes lying asleep in all postures upon the freight. A single group only, of five or six, appeared to be awake, and as I drew near they commenced to sing a Methodist hymn, not loudly, as negroes generally do, but, as it seemed to me, with a good deal of tenderness and feeling; a few white people—men, women, and children—were lying here and there among the negroes. Altogether, I learned we had two hundred of these deck passengers, black and white. A stove, by which they could fry bacon, was the only furniture provided for them by the boat. They carried with them their provisions for the voyage, and had their choice of the freight for beds.
As I came to the bows again, and was about to ascend to the cabin, two men came down, one of whom I recognized to have been my cot neighbor. “Where’s a bucket?” said he. “By thunder, this fellow was so strong I could not sleep by him, so I stumped him to come down and wash his feet.” “I am much obliged to you,” said I; and I was, very much; the man had been lying in the cot beneath mine, to which I now returned, and soon fell asleep.
I awoke about midnight. There was an unusual jar in the boat, and an evident excitement among people whom I could hear talking on deck. I rolled out of my cot and stepped out on the gallery. The steamboat “Kimball” was running head-and-head with us, and so close that one might have jumped easily from our paddle-box on to her guards. A few other passengers had turned out besides myself, and most of the waiters were leaning on the rail of the gallery.
Occasionally a few words of banter passed between them and the waiters of the “Kimball;” below, the firemen were shouting as they crowded the furnaces, and some one could be heard cheering them: “Shove her up, boys! Shove her up! Give her hell!” “She’s got to hold a conversation with us before she gets by, anyhow,” said one of the negroes. “Ye har that ar’ whistlin’?” said a white man; “tell ye thar ain’t any too much water in her bilers when ye har that.” I laughed silently, but was not without a slight expectant sensation, which Burke would perhaps have called sublime. At length the “Kimball” drew slowly ahead, crossed our bow, and the contest was given up. “De ole lady too heavy,” said a waiter; “if I could pitch a few ton of dat ar freight off her bow, I bet de ‘Kimball’ would be askin’ her to show de way mighty quick.”
[Our traveller missed the experience which in former days made travel now and then very lively upon the Mississippi,—a blow up of one or other of the racing boats. A bell was rung to rouse the cot-sleepers at half-past four, and the rest of the day was taken up in preparations for and eating the three meals.]
Every part of the boat, except the black hurricane-deck, was crowded; and so large a number of equally uncomfortable and disagreeable men I think I never saw elsewhere together. We made very slow progress, landing, it seems to me, after we entered Red River, at every “bend,” “bottom,” “bayou,” “point,” and “plantation” that came in sight; often for no other object than to roll out a barrel of flour or a keg of nails; sometimes merely to furnish newspapers to a wealthy planter, who had much cotton to send to market, and whom it was therefore desirable to please.
I was sitting one day on the forward gallery, watching a pair of ducks, that were alternately floating on the river and flying farther ahead as the steamer approached them. A man standing near me drew a long-barrelled and very finely-finished pistol from his coat-pocket, and, resting it against a stanchion, took aim at them. They were, I judged, fully the boat’s own length—not less than two hundred feet—from us, and were just raising their wings to fly when he fired. One of them only rose; the other flapped round and round, and when within ten yards of the boat dived. The bullet had broken its wing. So remarkable a shot excited, of course, not a little admiration and conversation. Half a dozen other men standing near me at once drew pistols or revolvers from under their clothing, and several were firing at floating chips or objects on the shore. I saw no more remarkable shooting, however; and that the duck should have been hit at such a distance was generally considered a piece of luck. A man who had been in the “Rangers” said that all his company could put a ball into a tree, the size of a man’s body, at sixty paces, at every shot, with Colt’s army revolver, not taking steady aim, but firing at the jerk of the arm.
This pistol episode was almost the only entertainment in which the passengers engaged themselves, except eating, drinking, smoking, conversation, and card-playing. Gambling was constantly going on, day and night. I don’t think there was an interruption to it of fifteen minutes in three days. The conversation was almost exclusively confined to the topics of steamboats, liquors, cards, black-land, red-land, bottom-land, timber-land, warrants, and locations, sugar, cotton, corn, and negroes.