The Lure Of The Mississippi Part 23

"The pipes for the exhaust steam had been led into the wheel-house at the stern, so the puffing of the steam could not be heard.

"About ten o'clock, Commander Walke gave the order to cast off. By the time the _Carondelet_ came opposite the Confederate sh.o.r.e batteries, the flashes of lightning were so vivid that the boat was discovered and the roar of the batteries and the crack and scream of the b.a.l.l.s soon mixed with the roar of thunder. But during the pitch-dark moments, between flashes of lightning and in the rain, the Confederate gunners had not time and could not see to aim their guns. They had to fire almost at random.

"So close ran the _Carondelet_ to the island that the men on board could hear an officer shout, 'Elevate your guns.'

"Away the _Carondelet_ steamed down the black river. No lights on board, except the roaring fire under her boilers, which twice set the soot in her smokestack on fire. She raced past the sh.o.r.e batteries, past the formidable island batteries, past the floating battery below the island.

Dozens of cannon-b.a.l.l.s were fired at her. One struck the coal-barge and one was found in a bale of hay.

"About midnight, Commander Walke arrived at New Madrid with every man on board safe. What hundreds of men had believed impossible, he and his volunteers had done.

"On the 7th of April, Commander Thompson, of the _Pittsburgh_, also ran the island in safety.

"About the same time we finished our channel and ran boats through it to New Madrid."

"But, Captain Banks," the lads asked eagerly, "what happened to the men on Island No. 10?"

"Well, you see," the captain explained, "they were cut off and had to surrender. Only a few of them got away in dugouts and boats through the swamps on the Tennessee sh.o.r.e."

"Why didn't they all march away into Tennessee!" Tim asked.

"Boys, they couldn't," Barker explained to them. "Only a little way east of Island No. 10 lies Reelfoot Lake, so they couldn't march away in that direction. They held the island just as long as they could."

"Time to go to bed for you lads," the captain took the word again. "I have told you all I know about Bissell's Channel and the fight at Island No. 10."

The lads were soon fast asleep in their cabin, dreaming of Spook Lake, of monster battle-ships, and of their home in Vicksburg.

The men continued talking for some time, Captain Banks telling his friends about the dramatic river battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862.

"Captain, I want to ask you one thing," Barker said. "Why can't the Union gun-boats do any good fighting down-stream, why do they have to do all their heavy fighting headed up-stream?"

"Because," explained the captain promptly, "they are just a pick-up lot of boats, all, I think, stern-wheelers. Only their bow is protected with plates and railroad-iron. Their engines are weak, and if maneuvered down-stream they will drag their anchors in the muddy bottom and are hard to control. They are real fighting-ships only when they point their noses up-stream."

When at last Barker invited Tatanka into a cabin, the Indian smiled.

"No," he said, "Indian cannot sleep in a box. I sleep in my blankets outside, with plenty of air around me."

CHAPTER XX-ON TO VICKSBURG

The steamer _Grey Hawk_ cast off from the New Madrid landing at dawn of day.

The years just preceding the Civil War and the years of the war were the great days of steamboating on the Mississippi and its tributaries.

Hundreds of boats, large and small, ran on the main stream, on the Ohio, the Missouri, the Illinois, the Minnesota and other rivers of the great Mississippi basin. The average life time of a Mississippi steamer was only five years, because countless snags, ice, fires, and other dangers were the bad medicine to navigation on all the streams. None of them were improved, none had any system of lights or signs; the pilots had to know the rivers, whose currents and sandbars and snags were constantly shifting. But the business was so profitable that the trips of one season often paid for the boat. Settlers were rushing into the western country and they and all their goods went by steamboat, for no railroads had yet crossed the Mississippi. On the turbulent Missouri the steamers ran to the mouth of the Yellowstone and beyond, taking up settlers, soldiers, general freight and goods for the Indian trade, and bringing back loads of buffalo-skins and other fur from the Rocky Mountain country. On the Minnesota small steamers ran two hundred miles beyond St. Paul into the newly opened Sioux country to market the first wheat of the new settlers. A few small boats plied on the upper Mississippi above St. Paul and Minneapolis, where the lumber industry and flour-mills were just developing.

The Civil War proved a fatal blow to river traffic. Both the Federal and the Confederate government commandeered a large number of vessels for war purposes, and many of those were wrecked and sunk or burnt in battle.

Immediately after the war, railroads began to parallel the Mississippi and its navigable tributaries. The steamboat traffic lingered for a number of years, but it never again attained its former glory, and soon sank into its present insignificance.

Moreover, the great movement of traffic in North America is east and west, while the trend of our great navigable river system is north and south.

Barker and Tatanka, as well as the boys, found life on a Mississippi steamer very attractive.

The broad main channel and bayous, sloughs and oxbow lakes; the high bluffs and the lowland forests, had all in turn lured them on to much hard traveling and many interesting side-trips. But just now they all felt that they had had enough of traveling by birch-bark, enough of camping wherever a good place invited them, and enough of eating whatever they could secure.

Below Cairo the low lands widen. There are no distinct hills or bluffs on the west side, while the Chickasaw Bluffs which stretch from Cairo to Memphis are in places ten miles from the river.

A long time ago the Gulf of Mexico extended probably as far north as Cairo, and the great flood-plain from Cairo to the Gulf is land, which was made by the Mississippi. From the Alleghenies, from the Rocky Mountains, from the Black Hills, the Ozarks, and the prairies of Minnesota, the streams are ever bringing down fine, fertile soil into the Mississippi, which spreads it at times of high water over fields, forests, and swamps and carries some of it into the gulf. So great is the amount of fine soil carried by the great river that every year it would make a vast block a square mile in area and four hundred feet high.

Of all the travelers on the _Grey Hawk_, Tatanka took the keenest interest in everything around him; for he had, before this trip, never seen the Mississippi farther south than La Crosse in Wisconsin. "Why do the white people need so many ships?" he wondered. "What will they do with all the big guns they have, and where are all the soldiers going to fight!"

"My friend," Barker told him, "wait till we reach Vicksburg. There you will see soldiers and guns."

"Where do all the black people live?" he asked. "Do they live in the woods and come out to work in the fields of cotton that we have seen?

"If our young men could have seen all the soldiers and ships and guns and towns of the white people, they never would have made war against them."

The second day on the boat was a Sunday and the pastry-cook did his best to furnish a wonderful collection of cakes, pies, and jellies.

Barker and the boys could not help being amused at the way Tatanka looked furtively at the sumptuous Sunday dinner. The variously colored jellies served in tall gla.s.ses, especially excited his-curiosity and suspicion.

"Is it medicine or is it to eat?" he whispered to Barker.

"It's all to be eaten," Barker informed him. "Don't think again of bad medicine on this boat."

"If the Sioux chiefs were here," Tatanka remarked with a smile, "they would have to carry away many gla.s.ses of food, for it is the custom of the Indians to take away with them whatever they cannot eat at a feast.

"Captain Banks must be very rich to have so many dishes on his ship."

The pilot of the _Grey Hawk_ did not know the river well enough to run after dark, so the pa.s.sengers saw the whole distance by daylight.

At night a group of colored deck-hands appeared as minstrels for the entertainment of the pa.s.sengers.

"The black men have big white teeth and big white eyes, and they can sing and dance," Tatanka remarked, "but they couldn't give the Sioux war-whoop."

About the 20th of June the steamer tied up at Haynes Bluff on the Yazoo River.

Tatanka, who had wondered at the soldiers and ships at New Madrid, was here simply bewildered. Ships, teams, mule-teams, ox-teams, horse-teams, and soldiers and more soldiers everywhere; infantry, cavalry, and terrible artillery. Tatanka, with the observant eyes of an Indian scout, saw everything, but hardly spoke a word all day.

Grant had by this time about 70,000 men, an army about ten times as large as the whole Sioux nation. From Haynes Bluff southward his lines were stretched out and entrenched over a distance of fifteen miles.

Over hills, through ravines, through woods and cane-brakes ran the sheer endless line of rifle-pits, trenches, parapets, and batteries. And in front of the Union works, rose in grim defiance the lines and pits and batteries of the Confederates. The lines of the two armies ran about three miles east of Vicksburg over wooded hills which rise about two hundred feet above the river. For one month since the 19th of May the Confederate army under General John C. Pemberton and the city of Vicksburg had been besieged, by the Union army, while the Union fleets held the river above and below the city.

General Pemberton, now in command at Vicksburg, was the same man, who two years ago had taken his battery from Fort Ridgely to La Crosse on the _f.a.n.n.y Harris_.

Grant had at first attempted to take the city by a.s.sault, but had found that the Confederates were so strongly entrenched and defended their lines so stubbornly that the Northern army had to settle down to a regular siege with the object of starving their opponents into surrender.