It is impossible to describe the fascination these pages held for Steinhaeuser. He would stop every few moments and insist that I listen to the details of another felonious profile. I told him that we had no time for this and that our first duty was to find another ship heading south down the river and see if we could book passage to New Orleans.
He compromised by convincing me that we should stop for a drink. Let it be known that the St. Louis streets fronting the river are the filthiest I have encountered since my arrival, and the nadir of these is an unnamed alley between Washington Ave and Elm Street. Here was situated the first drinking establishment we came upon, and here is where Steinhaeuser demanded we stop. This public house bore its name on a sign which had fallen off its hinge on one side. The letters on the sign were uneven as if drawn by a child and simply said SALUUN. We entered into a dark, hot room that would hardly be fit for a decently brought up pig.
There was no bar. In its place was a supper table with three bottles of whiskey and some greasy glasses on one side of it, and a man seated behind sweating over what smelled like a bowl of last month’s catfish parts. He sat with his head close by the horrid bowl and took a few slurps from his spoon before addressing us. Without looking up he said, “What’ll it be gents?” Something must have gotten into Steinhaeuser, for he began to toy with the barkeep. In retrospect, I believe it may have had something to do with reading those entries from the Criminal News. He looked at me and said, “How about a nice cool beer, Burton? No, no, wait, I’ll bet my friend would like a gin and tonic, with a slice of fresh lime if you please. As for me? Your best single malt scotch, my man. I believe it is a bit early for port or a brandy.” He looked at me and was having trouble restraining his laughter.
The fellow behind the table interrupted his meal and wiped his chin with his naked forearm. His mouth hung open as he grunted, “Whiskey, we got whiskey.” He fixed John with a look of distrust, but Steinhaeuser would not relent. “All right then, we’ve changed our minds—a bottle of chilled champagne, Herr Laden Miester.” This time John could not control himself and broke out in a fit of giggling laughter. People seated at the tables behind us began to get up and leave.
Steinhaeuser took notice of this and asked, “Where are you going, my friends. I was just about to treat the house to a glass of champag …” That was as far as he got before a large bottle shattered over the top of his head. His hair was immediately matted with blood and whiskey and I dragged him out the door with muttering apologies. I was able to get his scalp stitched just a few blocks away at the upstairs office of a local surgery. The physician on duty drolly commented that, “Skull splitting doesn’t usually begin until about four or five in the afternoon in these parts.”
Steinhaeuser was able to leave the surgery under his own power but not before having a large section of his head shaved and a huge cotton bandage placed on the top, which was affixed by a gauze wrap that tied under his chin. I took his arm and directed us back to the docks in order to try and secure some tickets. We needed to quit St. Louis as soon as possible and hope that both social and physical conditions will improve as we travel south.
A return to the dock brought us to a ticket office, where after offering to pay double the standard price, an obliging agent secured cabin space for us all the way to New Orleans. He booked us on a steamboat called The Sultana and told us there would be but two stops between here and there. I was somewhat surprised to hear this and curious as to the reason. The agent sat back in his chair and returned to the business of applying a small knife to a piece of wood. He thought for a bit before addressing my question. “Wall, in the first place there just ain’t all that many stops; one side o’ the river’s a slave state and the other’s not until you hit Cairo, an’ then you’ll be in the South; you’ll not encounter a single bridge across the river till you reach Baton Rouge, and … wall, fact is a lot of people just don’t appreciate the Sultana puttin’ in at their place. She’s got somethin’ of a reputation. You’ll find that out soon enough.” He looked up at me with one eye and commented, “Looks like your friend there already got hisself a Sultana haircut, so you’re off to a real good start.”
We found the Sultana in the process of loading cargo at the far end of the docks; she was off by herself and at first glance looked like any other boat of its kind on the river. Closer inspection revealed a marked decrease in the volume of below-deck hardware—they seemed to be loading only barrels of whiskey—and a waiting clientele who exactly fit the description of those who were denied passage by Ezekiel Bibbs. Men dressed in coarse dirty canvas with .30-caliber Fusils over their shoulders stood side by side with slippery-looking dandies wearing top hats and silk vests. Some others gripped bottles of liquor by the neck and drained heroic amounts while waiting to board, and then passed the poison to their scurvy mates. Blacklegs or turf swindlers mixed with drummers, the Barmecidean traveling salesmen of the New World. There is nothing the drummer will not attempt to sell, but nostrums are his most popular items. It seems Americans share with the rest of the world a love for being duped when it comes to their health.
Our Captain was nowhere to be seen at the scheduled departure time and when he rolled off the back of a wagon three hours later, he appeared to be drunk. He wobbled up the gangplank and began shouting orders in preparation for a quick departure. The centerpiece of the Sultana was a great salon and bar which occupied the better part of the upper deck. Here was the social hall for the passengers and the absolute center of all activity on board, which seemed to consist exclusively of drinking and gambling. The green cloth card tables were crowded with players from the moment we pulled away from the dock. Here one is afforded the opportunity of losing his money to a number games of chance. One may try his hand at poker, euchre, keno, rondo, three card monte, cutting the Jack, or the most popular of all, faro, which is also known as “fighting the tiger.”
Steinhaeuser was still not feeling too well from his latest encounter and elected to stay in the cabin and rest. As a result, I felt able to roam the salon without too much fear of another rash incident. However much the world understands that spirits and gambling are a bad combination anywhere, here aboard the Sultana one has the feeling of exceptional volatility.
We were a good twelve hours out of St. Louis when it occurred to me that our captain, Lester Beach, had never once left his place at the faro table. He was drunk when he arrived, even drunker now, and in a mean spirit due to his bad luck with the cards. I walked out of the smoky hall to the open deck and took in the sights. The men with the Fusil rifles were lounging in a group by the bow where a leadman should have been. Some were either sleeping or passed out, I cannot say which, and those still with their wits were entertaining the music of a bandore. The pilot house was occupied by a nervous-looking boy of seventeen who gripped the wheel seemingly with enough force to crush it. I approached the lad and engaged him in conversation. He identified himself as the ship’s cabin boy and said that he had been appointed Captain Pro Tem until such time as Mr. Beach’s luck ran out. The good captain had provided the boy with a bottle of Aunt Sally’s Celery Tonic to fortify him against the night air and make sure he kept his eyes skinned.
I later learned from the drummer who provided Beach with the bottle that Celery Tonic was in actuality a tincture of Peruvian coca leaf which is known to have strong stimulating effects.
The boy had been drinking this and bad coffee since St. Louis and the combination had his pulse racing and left him near a nervous fit of fear and confusion. Apoplexy was not out of the question. I spoke to him in gentle tones and reassured him that Captain Beach would be here to relieve him very shortly. The boy said that for some crazy reason he felt like he could take it for another full day, but he expressed concern that the approach to our first stop was among the most dangerous on the entire river and he didn’t feel up to the challenge. I asked where this first stop would be, and he told me it was Cairo, at the convergence of the mighty Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
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br /> May 27, 1860
Cairo
Lester Beach did indeed regain the helm just hours before we reached the convergence and just after what was at least, a twenty-seven hour debauch of alcohol and faro. The crusty Beach was in a dyspeptic mood. He cursed and spun the ship’s wheel with great ferocity in order to avoid dozens of logs that now swirled about in the liquid mud. He seemed older in the sunlight, and the lines around his eyes and mouth appeared to be etched much deeper than just the day before. His hair was wild and he reeked of tobacco smoke and cheap whiskey. Nevertheless, he cut a defiant figure in the pilot’s house and one sensed that he was enjoying this desperate tilt with Father River.
I will take back what I said about St. Louis, for Cairo is without a doubt the most foul dog hole on the river, worse than Zanzibar and Tobora combined. It is a humid and pestilential hell that is entirely covered in mud and mosquitoes, and I suspect the Pharaohs of old would burst their wrappings if they knew their namesake city was of such a low order. The Illinois natives even mangle the name itself, calling the place something that sounds like “Kay Row.”
An unbearably heavy stench filled our lungs from the moment we arrived. Tar pots have been set off throughout the city and have been continually releasing thick black smoke into the air for the past seven days. This was the citizenry’s answer to their most recent outbreak of Yellow Fever. Beach ordered the gangplank lowered and it immediately sunk into the mud. Greeters and stevedores had their overshoes clawed off by mud, wagons were paralyzed in the mud, livestock trapped in the mud were left to a slow death, and the very border between river and shore was blurred because of the mud. In fact, the whole of the convergence was nothing but mud, and the city of Cairo just a gloomy pile of sticks bobbing atop the ooze.
Steinhaeuser and I left the Sultana and managed to slog our way into a nearby shop. Fresh graves of Yellow Fever victims filled a lot next to the store and could be recognized by rows of gelatinous, quivering mud mounds that were a-swarm with flies.
The proprietor, a grubby man with a stubble beard and no teeth, saw me looking at the graves. He nodded his head and said, “Oh, Jack’s been here again alright. Buried another one just this morning.” Steinhaeuser inquired just who this Jack fellow was. “Yellow Jack, friend—yellow fever. Why do you think all them tar pots are a-smokin’? Folks here get used to lookin’ into each other’s eyes to see who’s got it next.” He rushed up to John and used his thumbs to pull down on his cheeks and expose the whites of his eyes. “Not yet,” he snickered. His eyes flashed up to Steinhaeuser’s head, “But you sure do have a funny lookin’ bonnet on toppa that Sul-tana haircut.”
Then in outright defiance of everything we had seen so far, he proclaimed that Cairo was the healthiest place on the river. Moving behind the counter he asked what “he could do us for,” and I noticed that his shelves were stocked with every cure in the American pharmacopoeia. There were boxes of DR. CHARLES CHILLS AND FEVER MEDICINE, JESUITS BARK EYE WHITENER, PROFESSOR YANKOV’S FEVER DROPS, INDIAN CURE AND RELIEF PELLETS, CINCINNATI DIARRHEA CURE, OLD BOB’S STOMACH MIX, COMMODORE WHIPPLE’S YELLOW AWAY, and INCA ROCA FATIGUE TONIC to name just a few of the many, many medicinal offerings. As it turned out, there was almost nothing else available on the shelves although the proprietor insisted that his was a “general store.”
We left in hopes of obtaining basic stuff for the remainder of the trip and as soon as we took to the muddy streets again it began to rain. Now the stench of marsh gas mixed with the smoldering tar and forced us to tie our bandhnu over mouth and nose to prevent gagging. We passed a sickly young dog that had all four legs stuck in the mud for God knows how many days. It managed a pitiful whine as we passed by and Steinhaeuser stopped to rescue it. He took off his shoes, rolled his pant legs up above the knee and extricated the poor thing after much pulling and tugging against the sucking Cairo muck.
Steinhaeuser dried the dog with his coat and was rewarded with many grateful face licks and animated tail wagging. There was a nearby house and we approached it directly.
We reached Madame Gurnette’s Boarding House in hopes of obtaining a brief respite from the driving rain and perhaps a bowl of scraps for Steinhaeuser’s appreciative dog. We were greeted by Madame Gurnette herself, a cretinous old bag in her late 50s, whose operation was nothing more than a dank and swampy coffin with walls. She guessed that we were off the Sultana and made some disgusting comment which suggested that she and Captain Lester Beach were, or had once been, intimate. This thought alone was enough to send The Captain to his quarters with a shiver of revulsion, but what happened next was perhaps the ne plus ultra of Cairo opprobrium.
She told us to “come-on in” and lewdly battered the tarred eyelashes above her wrinkled cheeks. She commented that Lester Beach was not the only man off the Sultana that had gotten lucky with her after accepting a similar invitation. She also referred to me as “Sugar,” which turned my stomach and made the Captain feel like bolting the door. John’s dog was relearning to walk again on the landing in front of Madame Gurnette’s door and was following Steinhaeuser everywhere he went. Just as I was about to decline her offer and beg a bone, she turned, pulled a pistol from under her apron and shot the poor dog off the porch, killing it with a sickening yelp and sending the pitiful orphan back into the mud from which it had just been rescued. She refitted the pistol under a roll of fat and said, “Don’t want to get the floor any muddier than it is already. I like to keep a clean house for my boys.”
I had seen men shot and not felt as bad. Steinhaeuser stood with his mouth open and then began shouting for an explanation of why she would do such a monstrous thing.
“I already told you, handsome. Momma don’t like mud in her house when men come a-callin’.” John ran out into the rain and began throwing handfuls of mud against the house and at the awful woman. He was crying and cursing and then began hurling rocks and anything else he could lay hands on. Madame Gurnette was screaming for him to stop, but John was in no mood to obey her. While he was searching for something else to pelt her with, I saw the old bat reach under the apron again for her pistol.
At this point I produced my own gun, and placed the barrel of one of Colonel Colt’s excellent revolvers in her ear.
VIII
A SLAVE TO A SLAVE IN OLD LOUISIANA
May 30, 1860
West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana
We have been on the river since Cairo and are soon to make port in the place called Louisiana. The feeling of being trapped on Lester Beach’s Sultana has dulled the romance of the Mississippi and any friendly associations that may have once existed with this floating casino. Our landing will afford my first opportunity to get a glimpse of the South, its environs and inhabitants, and I am anxious to take full advantage of the two-day layover. Steinhaeuser has been in a funk since the episode at Madame Gurnette’s. He has kept to himself and has been taking poison alone in the cabin, rarely talking when he is not asleep or passed out, and he is seemingly oblivious to all that surrounds him. I did not even inform him that I was leaving for a forty-eight hour off-board immersion because he has made ducks and drakes of all similar opportunities, so I left him in his cups and headed down the gangplank.
The entrepot here in West Feliciana is Bayou Sara, located on the alluvial flats just west of glacial bluffs which reminded one of the lower and more disagreeable portions of Switzerland. Ponce de Leon was the first European to see this area and it was he who gave it its present name.
Tonti, the companion of LaSalle, was the first white man to actually live here. Now, two hundred years later, my aim is to pay a brief visit to one of the plantation estates this area has become famous for and investigate the state of race relations under American slavery. And by God, I also plan on finally meeting up with the Red Man.
I have been reading Tucker’s The Valley of the Shenandoah, and in these pages one is led to believe that the New World planter resides in a tidy, pillared mansion with manicured grounds and exists in the unl
ikely state of perpetual civility and gentlemanly good grace. Their women are both beautiful and chaste—a most improbable combination—hospitable to a fault, and matronly in the care of their charges. All about them are black field hands happy in their work, naturally given to lively outbursts of song and dance, unfailingly loyal to their deserving master and surrounded by joyous pick ninnies and fields of snowy cotton. What a cheery and unbelievable little world George Tucker has provided us. I understand that Littleton’s Swallow Barn may even surpass Shenandoah in its incipient naiveté and capacity to offend.
On the other hand, it is impossible to turn a stone without having a copy of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly crawl out. In the eight years since its publication, methinks every literate fellow on the globe has had the opportunity to view the South with a jaundiced eye. Curious that nearly all the evil characters in her book are Yankees, and indeed one could make a case that the true villains are industrialism and enterprise, which are arguably Northern traits. Nevertheless, this work of mawkish fiction has left the South’s reputation in low water. For some reason, this attitude has become so fashionable that a horde of imitators have appeared with hideously duplicative titles such as Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, The Cabin and the Parlor, Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Tom without one in Boston, and, I suppose, a host of others with which I am blessedly unfamiliar.
Ruffian Dick Page 10
