Life on the Mississippi | Page 7

that day,
heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly,
foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of the
trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main,
honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often
picturesquely magnanimous.
By and by the steamboat intruded. Then for fifteen or twenty years,
these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the
steamers did all of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their
boats in New Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the
steamers.
But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed
that they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then keelboating

died a permanent death. The keelboatman became a deck hand, or a
mate, or a pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-berths were not open
to him, he took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft
constructed in the forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi.
In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end to end
was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed by hand, and
employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been trying to
describe. I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used
to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,--an acre or so of white, sweet-
smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more, three or
four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for storm-
quarters,--and I remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of
their big crews, the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning
successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get
on these rafts and have a ride.
By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that
now-departed and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in, in this
place, a chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and
starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the
course of five or six more. The book is a story which details some
passages in the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the
town drunkard of my time out west, there. He has run away from his
persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to
make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and with him a slave
of the widow's has also escaped. They have found a fragment of a
lumber raft (it is high water and dead summer time), and are floating
down the river by night, and hiding in the willows by day,--bound for
Cairo,--whence the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free
States. But in a fog, they pass Cairo without knowing it. By and by they
begin to suspect the truth, and Huck Finn is persuaded to end the
dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge raft which they have
seen in the distance ahead of them, creeping aboard under cover of the
darkness, and gathering the needed information by eavesdropping:--
But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is impatient
to find a thing out. We talked it over, and by and by Jim said it was
such a black night, now, that it wouldn't be no risk to swim down to the
big raft and crawl aboard and listen--they would talk about Cairo,

because they would be calculating to go ashore there for a spree, maybe,
or anyway they would send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat
or something. Jim had a wonderful level head, for a nigger: he could
most always start a good plan when you wanted one.
I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river, and struck
out for the raft's light. By and by, when I got down nearly to her, I
eased up and went slow and cautious. But everything was all right--
nobody at the sweeps. So I swum down along the raft till I was most
abreast the camp fire in the middle, then I crawled aboard and inched
along and got in amongst some bundles of shingles on the weather side
of the fire. There was thirteen men there--they was the watch on deck
of course. And a mighty rough-looking lot, too. They had a jug, and tin
cups, and they kept the jug moving. One man was singing--roaring, you
may say; and it wasn't a nice song--for a parlor anyway. He roared
through his nose, and strung out the last word of every line very long.
When he was done they all fetched a kind of Injun war-whoop, and
then another was sung. It begun:--
'There was