AS it continued to rain most perseveringly, we all remained
below: the damp gentlemen round the stove, gradually becoming mildewed by the
action of the fire; and the dry gentlemen lying at full length upon the seats,
or slumbering uneasily with their faces on the tables, or walking up and down
the cabin, which it was barely possible for a man of the middle height to do,
without making bald places on his head by scraping it against the roof. At about
six o'clock, all the small tables were put together to form one long table, and
everybody sat down to tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steaks,
potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black- puddings, and sausages.
'Will you try,' said my opposite neighbour, handing me a dish of potatoes,
broken up in milk and butter, 'will you try some of these fixings?'
There are few words which perform such various duties as this word 'fix.' It
is the Caleb Quotem of the American vocabulary. You call upon a gentleman in a
country town, and his help informs you that he is 'fixing himself' just now, but
will be down directly: by which you are to understand that he is dressing. You
inquire, on board a steamboat, of a fellow-passenger, whether breakfast will be
ready soon, and he tells you he should think so, for when he was last below,
they were 'fixing the tables:' in other words, laying the cloth. You beg a
porter to collect your luggage, and he entreats you not to be uneasy, for he'll
'fix it presently:' and if you complain of indisposition, you are advised to
have recourse to Doctor So-and-so, who will 'fix you' in no time.
One night, I ordered a bottle of mulled wine at an hotel where I was staying,
and waited a long time for it; at length it was put upon the table with an
apology from the landlord that he feared it wasn't 'fixed properly.' And I
recollect once, at a stage-coach dinner, overhearing a very stern gentleman
demand of a waiter who presented him with a plate of underdone roast-beef,
'whether he called THAT, fixing God A'mighty's vittles?'
There is no doubt that the meal, at which the invitation was tendered to me
which has occasioned this digression, was disposed of somewhat ravenously; and
that the gentlemen thrust the broad- bladed knives and the two-pronged forks
further down their throats than I ever saw the same weapons go before, except in
the hands of a skilful juggler: but no man sat down until the ladies were
seated; or omitted any little act of politeness which could contribute to their
comfort. Nor did I ever once, on any occasion, anywhere, during my rambles in
America, see a woman exposed to the slightest act of rudeness, incivility, or
even inattention.
By the time the meal was over, the rain, which seemed to have worn itself out
by coming down so fast, was nearly over too; and it became feasible to go on
deck: which was a great relief, notwithstanding its being a very small deck, and
being rendered still smaller by the luggage, which was heaped together in the
middle under a tarpaulin covering; leaving, on either side, a path so narrow,
that it became a science to walk to and fro without tumbling overboard into the
canal. It was somewhat embarrassing at first, too, to have to duck nimbly every
five minutes whenever the man at the helm cried 'Bridge!' and sometimes, when
the cry was 'Low Bridge,' to lie down nearly flat. But custom familiarises one
to anything, and there were so many bridges that it took a very short time to
get used to this.
As night came on, and we drew in sight of the first range of hills, which are
the outposts of the Alleghany Mountains, the scenery, which had been
uninteresting hitherto, became more bold and striking. The wet ground reeked and
smoked, after the heavy fall of rain, and the croaking of the frogs (whose noise
in these parts is almost incredible) sounded as though a million of fairy teams
with bells were travelling through the air, and keeping pace with us. The night
was cloudy yet, but moonlight too: and when we crossed the Susquehanna river -
over which there is an extraordinary wooden bridge with two galleries, one above
the other, so that even there, two boat teams meeting, may pass without
confusion - it was wild and grand.
I have mentioned my having been in some uncertainty and doubt, at first,
relative to the sleeping arrangements on board this boat. I remained in the same
vague state of mind until ten o'clock or thereabouts, when going below, I found
suspended on either side of the cabin, three long tiers of hanging bookshelves,
designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size. Looking with greater
attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such literary preparations in
such a place), I descried on each shelf a sort of microscopic sheet and blanket;
then I began dimly to comprehend that the passengers were the library, and that
they were to be arranged, edge-wise, on these shelves, till morning.
I was assisted to this conclusion by seeing some of them gathered round the
master of the boat, at one of the tables, drawing lots with all the anxieties
and passions of gamesters depicted in their countenances; while others, with
small pieces of cardboard in their hands, were groping among the shelves in
search of numbers corresponding with those they had drawn. As soon as any
gentleman found his number, he took possession of it by immediately undressing
himself and crawling into bed. The rapidity with which an agitated gambler
subsided into a snoring slumberer, was one of the most singular effects I have
ever witnessed. As to the ladies, they were already abed, behind the red
curtain, which was carefully drawn and pinned up the centre; though as every
cough, or sneeze, or whisper, behind this curtain, was perfectly audible before
it, we had still a lively consciousness of their society.
The politeness of the person in authority had secured to me a shelf in a nook
near this red curtain, in some degree removed from the great body of sleepers:
to which place I retired, with many acknowledgments to him for his attention. I
found it, on after- measurement, just the width of an ordinary sheet of Bath
post letter-paper; and I was at first in some uncertainty as to the best means
of getting into it. But the shelf being a bottom one, I finally determined on
lying upon the floor, rolling gently in, stopping immediately I touched the
mattress, and remaining for the night with that side uppermost, whatever it
might be. Luckily, I came upon my back at exactly the right moment. I was much
alarmed on looking upward, to see, by the shape of his half-yard of sacking
(which his weight had bent into an exceedingly tight bag), that there was a very
heavy gentleman above me, whom the slender cords seemed quite incapable of
holding; and I could not help reflecting upon the grief of my wife and family in
the event of his coming down in the night. But as I could not have got up again
without a severe bodily struggle, which might have alarmed the ladies; and as I
had nowhere to go to, even if I had; I shut my eyes upon the danger, and
remained there.
One of two remarkable circumstances is indisputably a fact, with reference to
that class of society who travel in these boats. Either they carry their
restlessness to such a pitch that they never sleep at all; or they expectorate
in dreams, which would be a remarkable mingling of the real and ideal. All night
long, and every night, on this canal, there was a perfect storm and tempest of
spitting; and once my coat, being in the very centre of the hurricane sustained
by five gentlemen (which moved vertically, strictly carrying out Reid's Theory
of the Law of Storms), I was fain the next morning to lay it on the deck, and
rub it down with fair water before it was in a condition to be worn again.
Between five and six o'clock in the morning we got up, and some of us went on
deck, to give them an opportunity of taking the shelves down; while others, the
morning being very cold, crowded round the rusty stove, cherishing the newly
kindled fire, and filling the grate with those voluntary contributions of which
they had been so liberal all night. The washing accommodations were primitive.
There was a tin ladle chained to the deck, with which every gentleman who
thought it necessary to cleanse himself (many were superior to this weakness),
fished the dirty water out of the canal, and poured it into a tin basin, secured
in like manner. There was also a jack-towel. And, hanging up before a little
looking-glass in the bar, in the immediate vicinity of the bread and cheese and
biscuits, were a public comb and hair-brush.
At eight o'clock, the shelves being taken down and put away and the tables
joined together, everybody sat down to the tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon,
shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black-puddings, and sausages,
all over again. Some were fond of compounding this variety, and having it all on
their plates at once. As each gentleman got through his own personal amount of
tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham,
chops, black-puddings, and sausages, he rose up and walked off. When everybody
had done with everything, the fragments were cleared away: and one of the
waiters appearing anew in the character of a barber, shaved such of the company
as desired to be shaved; while the remainder looked on, or yawned over their
newspapers. Dinner was breakfast again, without the tea and coffee; and supper
and breakfast were identical.
There was a man on board this boat, with a light fresh-coloured face, and a
pepper-and-salt suit of clothes, who was the most inquisitive fellow that can
possibly be imagined. He never spoke otherwise than interrogatively. He was an
embodied inquiry. Sitting down or standing up, still or moving, walking the deck
or taking his meals, there he was, with a great note of interrogation in each
eye, two in his cocked ears, two more in his turned-up nose and chin, at least
half a dozen more about the corners of his mouth, and the largest one of all in
his hair, which was brushed pertly off his forehead in a flaxen clump. Every
button in his clothes said, 'Eh? What's that? Did you speak? Say that again,
will you?' He was always wide awake, like the enchanted bride who drove her
husband frantic; always restless; always thirsting for answers; perpetually
seeking and never finding. There never was such a curious man.
I wore a fur great-coat at that time, and before we were well clear of the
wharf, he questioned me concerning it, and its price, and where I bought it, and
when, and what fur it was, and what it weighed, and what it cost. Then he took
notice of my watch, and asked me what THAT cost, and whether it was a French
watch, and where I got it, and how I got it, and whether I bought it or had it
given me, and how it went, and where the key-hole was, and when I wound it,
every night or every morning, and whether I ever forgot to wind it at all, and
if I did, what then? Where had I been to last, and where was I going next, and
where was I going after that, and had I seen the President, and what did he say,
and what did I say, and what did he say when I had said that? Eh? Lor now! do
tell!
Finding that nothing would satisfy him, I evaded his questions after the
first score or two, and in particular pleaded ignorance respecting the name of
the fur whereof the coat was made. I am unable to say whether this was the
reason, but that coat fascinated him afterwards; he usually kept close behind me
as I walked, and moved as I moved, that he might look at it the better; and he
frequently dived into narrow places after me at the risk of his life, that he
might have the satisfaction of passing his hand up the back, and rubbing it the
wrong way.
We had another odd specimen on board, of a different kind. This was a
thin-faced, spare-figured man of middle age and stature, dressed in a dusty
drabbish-coloured suit, such as I never saw before. He was perfectly quiet
during the first part of the journey: indeed I don't remember having so much as
seen him until he was brought out by circumstances, as great men often are. The
conjunction of events which made him famous, happened, briefly, thus.
The canal extends to the foot of the mountain, and there, of course, it
stops; the passengers being conveyed across it by land carriage, and taken on
afterwards by another canal boat, the counterpart of the first, which awaits
them on the other side. There are two canal lines of passage-boats; one is
called The Express, and one (a cheaper one) The Pioneer. The Pioneer gets first
to the mountain, and waits for the Express people to come up; both sets of
passengers being conveyed across it at the same time. We were the Express
company; but when we had crossed the mountain, and had come to the second boat,
the proprietors took it into their beads to draft all the Pioneers into it
likewise, so that we were five-and-forty at least, and the accession of
passengers was not at all of that kind which improved the prospect of sleeping
at night. Our people grumbled at this, as people do in such cases; but suffered
the boat to be towed off with the whole freight aboard nevertheless; and away we
went down the canal. At home, I should have protested lustily, but being a
foreigner here, I held my peace. Not so this passenger. He cleft a path among
the people on deck (we were nearly all on deck), and without addressing anybody
whomsoever, soliloquised as follows:
'This may suit YOU, this may, but it don't suit ME. This may be all very well
with Down Easters, and men of Boston raising, but it won't suit my figure nohow;
and no two ways about THAT; and so I tell you. Now! I'm from the brown forests
of Mississippi, I am, and when the sun shines on me, it does shine - a little.
It don't glimmer where I live, the sun don't. No. I'm a brown forester, I am. I
an't a Johnny Cake. There are no smooth skins where I live. We're rough men
there. Rather. If Down Easters and men of Boston raising like this, I'm glad of
it, but I'm none of that raising nor of that breed. No. This company wants a
little fixing, IT does. I'm the wrong sort of man for 'em, I am. They won't like
me, THEY won't. This is piling of it up, a little too mountainous, this is.' At
the end of every one of these short sentences he turned upon his heel, and
walked the other way; checking himself abruptly when he had finished another
short sentence, and turning back again.
It is impossible for me to say what terrific meaning was hidden in the words
of this brown forester, but I know that the other passengers looked on in a sort
of admiring horror, and that presently the boat was put back to the wharf, and
as many of the Pioneers as could be coaxed or bullied into going away, were got
rid of.
When we started again, some of the boldest spirits on board, made bold to say
to the obvious occasion of this improvement in our prospects, 'Much obliged to
you, sir;' whereunto the brown forester (waving his hand, and still walking up
and down as before), replied, 'No you an't. You're none o' my raising. You may
act for yourselves, YOU may. I have pinted out the way. Down Easters and Johnny
Cakes can follow if they please. I an't a Johnny Cake, I an't. I am from the
brown forests of the Mississippi, I am' - and so on, as before. He was
unanimously voted one of the tables for his bed at night - there is a great
contest for the tables - in consideration for his public services: and he had
the warmest corner by the stove throughout the rest of the journey. But I never
could find out that he did anything except sit there; nor did I hear him speak
again until, in the midst of the bustle and turmoil of getting the luggage
ashore in the dark at Pittsburg, I stumbled over him as he sat smoking a cigar
on the cabin steps, and heard him muttering to himself, with a short laugh of
defiance, 'I an't a Johnny Cake, - I an't. I'm from the brown forests of the
Mississippi, I am, damme!' I am inclined to argue from this, that he had never
left off saying so; but I could not make an affidavit of that part of the story,
if required to do so by my Queen and Country.
As we have not reached Pittsburg yet, however, in the order of our narrative,
I may go on to remark that breakfast was perhaps the least desirable meal of the
day, as in addition to the many savoury odours arising from the eatables already
mentioned, there were whiffs of gin, whiskey, brandy, and rum, from the little
bar hard by, and a decided seasoning of stale tobacco. Many of the gentlemen
passengers were far from particular in respect of their linen, which was in some
cases as yellow as the little rivulets that had trickled from the corners of
their mouths in chewing, and dried there. Nor was the atmosphere quite free from
zephyr whisperings of the thirty beds which had just been cleared away, and of
which we were further and more pressingly reminded by the occasional appearance
on the table-cloth of a kind of Game, not mentioned in the Bill of Fare.
And yet despite these oddities - and even they had, for me at least, a humour
of their own - there was much in this mode of travelling which I heartily
enjoyed at the time, and look back upon with great pleasure. Even the running
up, bare-necked, at five o'clock in the morning, from the tainted cabin to the
dirty deck; scooping up the icy water, plunging one's head into it, and drawing
it out, all fresh and glowing with the cold; was a good thing. The fast, brisk
walk upon the towing-path, between that time and breakfast, when every vein and
artery seemed to tingle with health; the exquisite beauty of the opening day,
when light came gleaming off from everything; the lazy motion of the boat, when
one lay idly on the deck, looking through, rather than at, the deep blue sky;
the gliding on at night, so noiselessly, past frowning hills, sullen with dark
trees, and sometimes angry in one red, burning spot high up, where unseen men
lay crouching round a fire; the shining out of the bright stars undisturbed by
noise of wheels or steam, or any other sound than the limpid rippling of the
water as the boat went on: all these were pure delights.
Then there were new settlements and detached log-cabins and frame- houses,
full of interest for strangers from an old country: cabins with simple ovens,
outside, made of clay; and lodgings for the pigs nearly as good as many of the
human quarters; broken windows, patched with worn-out hats, old clothes, old
boards, fragments of blankets and paper; and home-made dressers standing in the
open air without the door, whereon was ranged the household store, not hard to
count, of earthen jars and pots. The eye was pained to see the stumps of great
trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat, and seldom to lose the eternal
swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of rotten trunks and twisted branches
steeped in its unwholesome water. It was quite sad and oppressive, to come upon
great tracts where settlers had been burning down the trees, and where their
wounded bodies lay about, like those of murdered creatures, while here and there
some charred and blackened giant reared aloft two withered arms, and seemed to
call down curses on his foes. Sometimes, at night, the way wound through some
lonely gorge, like a mountain pass in Scotland, shining and coldly glittering in
the light of the moon, and so closed in by high steep hills all round, that
there seemed to be no egress save through the narrower path by which we had
come, until one rugged hill-side seemed to open, and shutting out the moonlight
as we passed into its gloomy throat, wrapped our new course in shade and
darkness.
We had left Harrisburg on Friday. On Sunday morning we arrived at the foot of
the mountain, which is crossed by railroad. There are ten inclined planes; five
ascending, and five descending; the carriages are dragged up the former, and let
slowly down the latter, by means of stationary engines; the comparatively level
spaces between, being traversed, sometimes by horse, and sometimes by engine
power, as the case demands. Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme
verge of a giddy precipice; and looking from the carriage window, the traveller
gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the mountain
depths below. The journey is very carefully made, however; only two carriages
travelling together; and while proper precautions are taken, is not to be
dreaded for its dangers.
It was very pretty travelling thus, at a rapid pace along the heights of the
mountain in a keen wind, to look down into a valley full of light and softness;
catching glimpses, through the tree- tops, of scattered cabins; children running
to the doors; dogs bursting out to bark, whom we could see without hearing:
terrified pigs scampering homewards; families sitting out in their rude gardens;
cows gazing upward with a stupid indifference; men in their shirt-sleeves
looking on at their unfinished houses, planning out to-morrow's work; and we
riding onward, high above them, like a whirlwind. It was amusing, too, when we
had dined, and rattled down a steep pass, having no other moving power than the
weight of the carriages themselves, to see the engine released, long after us,
come buzzing down alone, like a great insect, its back of green and gold so
shining in the sun, that if it had spread a pair of wings and soared away, no
one would have had occasion, as I fancied, for the least surprise. But it
stopped short of us in a very business-like manner when we reached the canal:
and, before we left the wharf, went panting up this hill again, with the
passengers who had waited our arrival for the means of traversing the road by
which we had come.
On the Monday evening, furnace fires and clanking hammers on the banks of the
canal, warned us that we approached the termination of this part of our journey.
After going through another dreamy place - a long aqueduct across the Alleghany
River, which was stranger than the bridge at Harrisburg, being a vast, low,
wooden chamber full of water - we emerged upon that ugly confusion of backs of
buildings and crazy galleries and stairs, which always abuts on water, whether
it be river, sea, canal, or ditch: and were at Pittsburg.
Pittsburg is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so.
Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, factories, public
buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity
of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its iron-works. Besides the prison
to which I have already referred, this town contains a pretty arsenal and other
institutions. It is very beautifully situated on the Alleghany River, over which
there are two bridges; and the villas of the wealthier citizens sprinkled about
the high grounds in the neighbourhood, are pretty enough. We lodged at a most
excellent hotel, and were admirably served. As usual it was full of boarders,
was very large, and had a broad colonnade to every story of the house.
We tarried here three days. Our next point was Cincinnati: and as this was a
steamboat journey, and western steamboats usually blow up one or two a week in
the season, it was advisable to collect opinions in reference to the comparative
safety of the vessels bound that way, then lying in the river. One called the
Messenger was the best recommended. She had been advertised to start positively,
every day for a fortnight or so, and had not gone yet, nor did her captain seem
to have any very fixed intention on the subject. But this is the custom: for if
the law were to bind down a free and independent citizen to keep his word with
the public, what would become of the liberty of the subject? Besides, it is in
the way of trade. And if passengers be decoyed in the way of trade, and people
be inconvenienced in the way of trade, what man, who is a sharp tradesman
himself, shall say, 'We must put a stop to this?'
Impressed by the deep solemnity of the public announcement, I (being then
ignorant of these usages) was for hurrying on board in a breathless state,
immediately; but receiving private and confidential information that the boat
would certainly not start until Friday, April the First, we made ourselves very
comfortable in the mean while, and went on board at noon that day.
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