Knoxville journal. [volume] (Knoxville, Iowa) 1874-1986, 1875-04-15

90 through or stay there six months if
you get caught ON . falling river. There
are about fifty of these cracks which
YOU can't run at all except when the
river is brim full and over the banks"
"This new lesson is a cheerful pros
pect."
Cheerful enough. And mind just
what I've told you: when you start into
one of those places you've got to go
through. They are too narrow to turn
round in, too crooked to back out of and
the shoal water is always up at the head;
never elsewhere. And the head of them
is always likely to be filling up, little by
little, so that the marks you reckon their
depth by this season may not answer for
next"
Learn new set, then, every year,"
Exactly. Cramp her up to the bar!
What are you standing up through the
middle of the river for?'
The next few months showed me
strange things. On the same day that
we held the conversation above narrated
| we met a great rise coming down the
river The whole vast face of the stream
was black with drifting dead logs, broken
| boughs and great trees that had caved in
and been washed away. 1t required the
incest steering TO pick ones way through
| this rushing raft, even in the daytime,
when crossing from point to point; and
at night the difficulty was nightly in
| creased; every now and then huge
| log, lying deep in the water, would sud
| denly appear right on our bows, coming
headon no use to try to avoid it then !;
we could only stop the engines, and one
wheel would walk over the log from one
end to the other, keeping up a thunder
ing racket, and careening the boat in a
way that was very uncomfortable to pas
sengers Now and then we would hit
one of these sunken logs a rafting bang,
dead in the center, with full head of
steam, and it would stun the boat as ii
she had hit continent. Sometimes this
log would lodge and stay right across
our nose, and back the Mississippi up
before it; we would have to do little
craw-fishing then to get away from the
| obstruction. We often hit aoltite logs in
| the dark, for we could not see them till
we were right on them; but black log
is pretty distinct object at night. A
white snag is an ugly customer when
the daylight is gone.
OF course, on the great rise, down came
a swarm of prodigious timber, RATS from
| VIC utdd WdtCIb VI bhC luloolSblpplt wal
barges from Pittsburgh, little trading
scows from everywhere, and broad horns
from Posey County" Indiana, freighted
with fruit and furniture"-.the usual
term for describing it, though in English
the freight thus aggrandized was hoop
poles and pumpkins. Pilots bore a
mortal hatred to these craft; and it was
returned with usury. The law required
all such helpless traders to keep light
burning, but it was law that was often
broken. All of sudden, on a murky
night, light would hop up right under
our bows, almost, and an agoniZed voice,
with the backwoods "whang" to 1t,
would wall out:
"Whar you goin' to! Can't you see
nothin', you dash-dashed aig-suckin'
sheepstealin', one-eyed son of stuffed
monkey"
Then for an instant, as we whistled by,
the red glare from our furnaces would
reveal the scow and the form of the
| gesticulating orator as if under a light
ming flash, and in that instant our fire.
men and deck hands would send and re-
Active tempest of missiles and profanity,
one of our wheels would walk off with
the crashing fragments of steering-oar,
and down the dead blackn5ss would shut
out again And that fiatboatman would
be sure to 60 into New Orleans and sue
our boat, swearing stoutly that he had
light burning all the time, when in
truth his gang had the lantern down be-
low, to sing and lie and drink and gam.
bic by, and no watch on deck. Once, at
night, in one of those forest-bordered
crevices (behind an island) which steam.
boatmen intensely describe with the
phrase, g as dark as the inside of cow ,
we should have eaten up Posey County
family, fruit, furniture and all, but that
they happened to be fiddling down be.
low, and we just caught the sound of the
music in time to sheer of, doing no seri.
Gus damage, unfortunately, but coming
so near it that we had good hopes for a
moment. These people brought up Their
lanterns then, of course; and as we
backed and filled to get away the pre-
cious family stood in the light of it,
both sexes, and various ages-and cursed
us till everything turned blue. Once q
coal boatman sent bullet through oul
pilot-house when we borrowed steer
ing-oar of him in very narrow place.
| During this big rise these small-fry
crafts were an intolerable nuisance. We
were running chute after chute--a new
| world to me- and II there was a partlc'
ular cramped place in chute we would
be pretty sure to meet broad-horn
there; and if he failed to be there we
would find him in a still worse locality
namely, the head of the chute, on the
shoal water And then there would be
no end of profane cordialities ex
changed.
Sometimes, in the big river, when we
would be feeling our way cautiously
along through fog, the deep hush would
suddenly be broken by yells and clamol
of tin pans, and all in an instant log
craft would appear vaguely through the
webby veil, close upon us; and then we
did not wait to swap knives, but snatched
our engine bells out by the roots and
piled on all the steam we had to scramble
out of the way! One doesn't hit rock
or solid log raft with steamboat when
he can get excused.
As have said, the big rise brought a
new world under my vision. By the
time the river was over its banks we had
forsaken our old paths and were hourly
climbing over bars that had stood ten
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