American Adventures Part 42

So far as I know there is but one man who has witnessed this phenomenon without being impressed. That man is Samuel Merwin. Merwin went down and visited Ma.r.s.e Harris in Vicksburg, and saw all the sights. He was polite about the battlefield, and the river, and the negro stories, and everything else, until Ma.r.s.e Harris showed him how the highways had eroded through the hills. That did not seem to impress him at all.

Moreover, instead of being tactful, he started telling about his trip to China. In China, he said, there were similar formations, but, as the civilization of China was much older than that of Vicksburg (fancy his having said a thing like that!) the gorges over there had eroded to a much greater extent. He said he had seen them three hundred feet deep.

The more Ma.r.s.e Harris tried to get him to say something a little bit complimentary about the Vicksburg erosions, the more Merwin boasted about China. He declared that the Vicksburg erosions didn't amount to a hill of beans compared with what he could show Ma.r.s.e Harris if Ma.r.s.e Harris would go with him to a certain point on the banks of the Wa Choo, in the province of Lang Pang Si.

Evidently he harped on this until he touched not only his host's local pride, but his pride of discovery. Before that, Ma.r.s.e Harris had been content to stick around in Mississippi, with perhaps a little run down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, or up to Dogtail to see a break in the levee, but after Merwin's talk about China he began to grow restless, and it is generally said in Vicksburg that it was purely in order to have something to tell Merwin about, the next time he saw him, that he made his celebrated trip to the source of the Nile. As for Merwin, he has never been invited back to Vicksburg, and it is to be observed that, even to this day, Ma.r.s.e Harris, by nature of a sunny disposition, shows signs of erosion of the spirit when China is mentioned.

It is apropos the battlefield that I mention the peculiarities of the soil. Had the bare ground been exposed to the rains of a few years, the details of redoubts, trenches, gun positions, saps, and all other military works would have melted away. Fortunately, however, there is a kind of tough, strong-rooted gra.s.s, called Bermuda gra.s.s, indigenous to that part of the country, and this gra.s.s quickly covered the battlefield, holding the soil together so effectually that all outlines are practically embalmed. So, although those in charge of the park have contributed not a little to its preservation--putting old guns in their former places, perpetuating saps with concrete work, and placing white markers on the hillsides, to show how far up those hillsides the a.s.saulting Union troops made their way in various historic charges--it is due most of all to Nature that the Vicksburg battlefield so well explains itself.

Could Grant and Pemberton look to-day upon the hills and valleys where surged their six weeks' struggle for possession of the city, I doubt that they would find any important landmark wanting, and it is certain that they could not say, as Wellington did when he revisited Waterloo: "They have spoiled my battlefield!"

Besides the old guns and the markers, the field is dotted over with observation towers and all manner of memorials. Of the latter, the marble pantheon erected by the State of Illinois, and the beautiful marble and bronze memorial structure of the State of Iowa, are probably the finest. The marble column erected by Wisconsin carries at its summit a great bronze effigy of "Old Abe," the famous eagle, mascot of the Wisconsin troops. Guides to the battlefield are p.r.o.ne to relate to visitors--especially, I suspect, those whose accents betray a Northern origin--how "Old Abe," the bird of battle, went home and disgraced himself, after the war, by his ungentlemanly action in laying a setting of eggs.

The handsomest monument to an individual which I saw upon the battlefield was the admirable bronze bust of Major General Martin L.

Smith, C.S.A., and the one which appealed most to my imagination was also a memorial to a Confederate soldier: Brigadier-General States Rights Gist. Is there not something Roman in the thought that, thirty or more years before the war, a southern father gave his new-born son that name, dedicating him, as it were, to the cause of States Rights, and that the son so dedicated gave his life in battle for that cause? The name upon that stone made me better understand the depth of feeling that existed in the South long years before the War, and gave me a clearer comprehension of at least one reason why the South made such a gallant fight.

Of more than fourscore national cemeteries in the United States, that which stands among the hills and trees, overlooking the river, at the northerly end of the military park, is one of the most beautiful, and is, with the single exception of Arlington, the largest. It contains the graves of nearly 17,000 Union soldiers lost in this campaign--three-fourths of them "unknown"!

It is interesting to note that, because the surrender of Pemberton to Grant occurred on July 4, that date has, in this region, a.s.sociations less happy than attach to it elsewhere, and that the Fourth has not been celebrated in Vicksburg since the Civil War, except by the negroes, who have taken it for their especial holiday. This reminds me, also, of the fact that, throughout the South, Christmas, instead of the Fourth of July, is celebrated with fireworks.

CHAPTER XLVI

SHREDS AND PATCHES

It was Ma.r.s.e Harris d.i.c.kson who showed us the battlefield. As we were driving along in the motor we overtook an old trudging negro, very picturesque in his ragged clothing and battered soft hat. My companion said that he would like to take a picture of this wayfarer, and asked Ma.r.s.e Harris, who, as author of the "Old Reliable" stories, seemed best fitted for the task, to arrange the matter. The automobile, having pa.s.sed the negro, was stopped to wait for him to catch up. Presently, as he came by, Ma.r.s.e Harris addressed him in that friendly way Southerners have with negroes.

"Want your picture taken, old man?" he asked.

To which the negro, still shuffling along, replied:

"I ain't got no money."

Ma.r.s.e Harris, knowing the workings of the negro mind, got the full import of this reply at once, but I must confess that a moment pa.s.sed before I realized that the negro took us for itinerant photographers looking for trade.

With the possible exception of Irvin S. Cobb, I suppose Ma.r.s.e Harris has the largest collection of negro character stories of any individual in this country. And let me say, in this connection, that I know of no better place than Vicksburg for the study of southern negro types.

One day Ma.r.s.e Harris was pa.s.sing by the jail. It was hot weather, and the jail windows were open. Behind the bars of one window, looking down upon the street, stood a negro prisoner. As Ma.r.s.e Harris pa.s.sed this window a negro wearing a large watch chain came by in the other direction. His watch chain evidently caught the eye of the prisoner, who spoke in a wistful tone, demanding:

"What tahme is it, brotha?"

"What foh you want t' know what tahme it is?" returned the other sternly, as he continued upon his way. "You ain't goin' nowhere."

Through Ma.r.s.e Harris I obtained a copy of a letter written by a negro named Walter to Mr. W.H. Reeve of Vicksburg. Walter had looked out for Mr. Reeve's live stock during a flood, and had certain ideas about what should be done for him in consequence. I give the letter exactly as it was written, merely inserting, parenthetically, a few explanatory words:

_Mr. H W Reeve an bos dear sir I like to git me a par [pair] second hand pance dont a fail or elce I will be dout [without] a pare to go eny where so send me something. Dont a fail an send me a par of youre pance [or] i will hafter go to work for somebody to git some.

I don't think you all is treating me right at all I stayed with youre hogs in the water till the last tening [attending] to them and I dont think that youre oder [ought to] fail me bout a pare old pance_

WALTER

Though I cannot see just why it should be so, it seemed to us that the Vicksburg negroes were happier than those of any other place we visited.

Whether drowsing in the sun, walking the streets, doing a little stroke of work, fis.h.i.+ng, or sitting gabbling on the curbstone, they were upon the whole as cheerful and as comical a lot of people as I ever saw.

"Wha' you-all goin' to?" I heard a negro ask a group of mulatto women, in clean starched gingham dresses, who went flouncing by him on the street one Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

"Oh," returned one of the women, with the elaborate superiority of a member of the cla.s.s of idle rich, "we're just serenadin' 'round."

"Serenading," as she used the word, meant a promenade about the town.

Perhaps the happiness of the negro, here, has to do with the lazy life of the river. The succulent catfish is easily obtainable for food, and the wages of the roustabout--or "rouster," as he is called for short--are good.

The rouster, in his red unders.h.i.+rt, with a bale hook hung in his belt, is a figure to fascinate the eye. When he works--which is to say, when he is out of funds--he works hard. He will swing a two-hundred-pound sack to his back and do fancy steps as he marches with it up the springy gangplank to the river steamer's deck, uttering now and then a strange, barbaric s.n.a.t.c.h of song. He has no home, no family, no responsibilities.

An ignorant deck hand can earn from forty to one hundred dollars a month. Pay him off at the end of the trip, let him get ash.o.r.e with his money, and he is gone. Without deck hands the steamer cannot move. For many years there has been known to river captains a simple way out of this difficulty. Pay the rousters off a few hours before the end of the trip. Say there are twenty of them, and that each is given twenty dollars. They clear a s.p.a.ce on deck and begin shooting c.r.a.ps. No one interferes. By the time the trip ends most of the money has pa.s.sed into the hands of four or five; the rest are "broke" and therefore remain at work. Yet despite the ingenuity of those who have the negro labor problem to contend with, Ma.r.s.e Harris tells me that there have been times when the levee was lined with steamers, full-loaded, but unable to depart for want of a crew. Not that there was any lack of roustabouts in town, but that, money being plentiful, they would not work. In such times perishable freight rots and is thrown overboard.

I am conscious of a tendency, in writing of Vicksburg, to dwell continually upon the negro and the river for the reason that the two form an enchanting background for the whole life of the place. This should not, however, be taken to indicate that Vicksburg is not a city of agreeable homes and pleasant society, or that its only picturesqueness is to be found in the river and negro life.

The point is that Vicksburg is a patchwork city. The National Park Hotel, its chief hostelry, is an unusually good hotel for a city of this size, and Was.h.i.+ngton Street, in the neighborhood of the hotel, has the look of a busy city street; yet on the same square with the hotel, on the street below, nearer the river, is an unwholesome negro settlement. So it is all over the city; the "white folks" live on the hills, while the "n.i.g.g.e.rs" inhabit the adjacent bottoms. Nor is that the only sense in which the town is patched together. Some of the most charming of the city's old homes are tucked away where the visitor is not likely to see them without deliberate search. Such a place, for example, is the old Klein house, standing amid lawns and old-fas.h.i.+oned gardens, on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. This house was built long before the railroad came to Vicksburg, cutting off its grounds from the river. A patch in the paneling of the front door shows where a cannon ball pa.s.sed through at the time of the bombardment, and the ball itself may still be seen embedded in the woodwork of one of the rooms within.

And there are other patches. Near the old courthouse, which rears itself so handsomely at the summit of a series of terraces leading up from the street, are a number of old sand roads which must be to-day almost as they were in the heyday of the river's glory, when the region in which the courthouse stands was the princ.i.p.al part of the city--the days of heavy drinking and gambling, dueling, slave markets, and steamboat races. These streets are not the streets of a city, but of a small town.

So, too, where Adams Street crosses Grove, it has the appearance of a country lane, the road represented by a pair of wheel tracks running through the gra.s.s; but Cherry Street, only a block distant, is built up with city houses and has a good asphalt pavement and a trolley line.

CHAPTER XLVII

THE BAFFLING MISSISSIPPI

As inevitably as water flows down the hills of Vicksburg to the river, the visitor's thoughts flow down always to the great spectacular, historic, mischievous, dominating stream.

Mark Twain, in that glorious book, "Life on the Mississippi," declared, in speaking of the eternal problems of the Mississippi, that as there are not enough citizens of Louisiana to take care of all the theories about the river at the rate of one theory per individual, each citizen has two theories. That is the case to-day as it was when Mark Twain was a pilot. I have heard half a dozen prominent men, some of them engineers, state their views as to what should be done. Each view seemed sound, yet all were at variance.

Consider, for example, that part of the river lying between Vicksburg and the mouth. Here, quite aside from the problem as to the hands in which river-control work should be vested--a very great problem in itself--three separate and distinct physical problems are presented.

From Vicksburg to Red River Landing there are swift currents which deposit silt only at the edge of the bank, or on sand bars. From Red River Landing to New Orleans the problem is different; here the channel is much improved, and slow currents at the sides of the river, between the natural river bank and the levee, deposit silt in the old "borrow pits"--pits from which the earth was dug for the building of the levees--filling them up, whereas, farther up the river, the borrow pits, instead of filling up, are likely to scour, undermining the levee. From New Orleans to the head of the Pa.s.ses--these being the three main channels by which the river empties into the Gulf--the banks between the natural river bed and the levees build up with silt much more rapidly than at any other point on the entire stream; here there are no sand bars, and the banks cave very little. In this part of the river it is not current, but wind, which forms the great problem, for the winds are terrific at certain times of year, and when they blow violently against the current, waves are formed which wash out the levees.

This is the barest outline of three chief physical problems with which river engineers must contend. There are countless others which have to be met in various ways. In some places the water seeps through, under the levee, and bubbles up, like a spring, from the ground outside. This, if allowed to continue, soon undermines the levee and causes a break.

The method of fighting such a seepage is interesting. When the water begins to bubble up, a hollow tower of sand-filled sacks is built up about the place where it comes from the ground, and when this tower has raised the level of the water within it to that of the river, the pressure is of course removed, on the siphon principle.

As river-control work is at present handled, there is no centralization of authority, and friction, waste, and politics consequently play a large part.

Consider, for example, the situation in the State of Louisiana. Here control is, broadly speaking, in the hands of three separate bodies: (1) the United States army engineer, who disburses the money appropriated by Congress for levees and bank revetment, working under direction of the Mississippi River Commission; (2) the State Board of Engineers, which disburses Louisiana State funds wherever it sees fit, and which, incidentally, does not use, in its work, the same specifications as are used by the Government; and (3) the local levee boards, of which there are eight in Louisiana, one to each river parish--a parish being what is elsewhere called a county. Each of these eight boards has authority as to where parish money shall be spent within its district, and it may be added that this last group (considering the eight boards as a unit) has the largest sum to spend on river work.

The result of this division of authority creates chaos, and has built up a situation infinitely worse than was faced by General Goethals when Congress attempted to divide control in the building of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. It will be remembered that, in that case, a commission was appointed, but that Roosevelt circ.u.mvented Congress by making General Goethals head of the commission with full powers.