The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-08-02
GREAT RIVERS GLORY GONE.

1EhE-al Fl Elk . ATLOE1 JUNE.
 The recent death of Captain A. M. de Souchet, of this city. has been made the subject of a memorial by his friend and associate for forty years, Captain J. 4. Lemcke, who in this tri- bute 10 his memory says:
 Through part of the war and for years afterward, De Souchet was cap- tain, clerk and an owner in the Evans vile. Paducah and Cairo mail line of steamers. I was for time superin- tendent and manager; and when, in 1867. to take a trip abroad, I turned over the management 10 him, he con- ducted the affairs of the company with much ability and discretion.
 De SOuchet was born of French pa rents in old Posey, the same county in which some of the years of my young life were spent.
 He had been alternately citizen of Mount Vernon and Evansville, when nearly thirty years ago he moved to the beautiful capital of In diana. so attractive to the dweller in the provinces. He soon made friends
 
 ''Of those, who in the last years of the war founded the E. P. and C. mail line, and assembled d numerous fleet of fine boats. only two out of ten are now alive. Captain Jaek Grammer, the well-known and able traflc mana ger of one of the Vanderbilt lines of railways, Is one, and am the other.
 'Steamboat:ng before the war was prosperous, and this prosperity was evident in such palatial craft as the Eclipse, the Shotwell. the White, the Adams. and other clippers. the pie lures of which to this day adorn many offices and hotel lobbies. The block ade of the Mississippi at the beginning of the war put check on, and rail- road extension eventually wrecked it completely.
 From an early day it had been the ardent wish and nightly dream of every barefooted boy on the banks of 'the river to be, or become the com- irnander of one of the fiery dragons, with glitterlng interior, then plough ing the waters of the Ohio and Mis- sissippi. The mighty power of the president at Washington and the transcendental glory of the man with the big horn in the village brass band paled and faded when compared with the loftiness of the captain. as with the naughty air of "the roostsrs tail at sunrise," he proudly trod the hur' ricane deck of one of those floating palaces; all this has become thing of the tempt plssati.
 AS captain and owner of the large side-wheel steamer, Fanny Bullitt with a load of Confederate prisoners on board, I, under convoy of a United States gunboat, made trip down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Yazee above Vicksburg, when the southern stronghold was yet intact. During the progress of this voyage I could not fail to observe the complete ab sence of life and animation of ante. i bellum days. The mighty river under i the blighting influence of a blockade at both ends, had fallen into a repose' full sleep. which it seemed rude to dis 1 turb with the reverberating sound of 2 1 shrill steamboat whistle, or the sono' rous coughing of boats steam escape i pipes.
 For few years after the fall ot Vicksburg it seemed that the grea' river should again come to it's own but since then the paralysis has stead i fly advanced. As the gods abandoned i bright Olympus, so the steamboat once the pride of our great centra valley, has departed from the bosom of the Father of the Waters. Tht commerce of the Mississippi, riveI i greater by far than the venerable i Nile, has been taken captive and i; 1 held with shackIes of steel by the snakelike ribbon of the iron horse 1 Silence and stagnation have overcast the face of the stream, where erst, while bustling life covered it's shining surface and enlivened the adjacent shores.
 ! "The mutability of human concerns has nowhere been more startlingly de, monstrated than in the annihilation oi that rich current of the country'E | commerce which in untold millions ] used to float over its course down tC the sea.
 The seasons of seedtime and har. vest succeeded each other in wontet 1 regularity, solely now to fatten in its