But As We Turned
On The River, The Tug-Boat Which Had Brought Us Down Was Unable To
Hold Us Up Against The Force Of The Stream.
A second tug-boat was
at hand; and, with one on each side, we were just able in half
An
hour to recover the hundred yards which we had lost down the river.
The pressure against the stream was so great, owing partly to the
weight of the raft and partly to the fact that its flat head buried
itself in the water, that it was almost immovable against the
stream, although the mortar was not yet on it.
It soon became manifest that no trial could be made on that day, and
so we were obliged to leave Cairo without having witnessed the
firing of the great gun. My belief is that very little evil to the
enemy will result from those mortar-boats, and that they cannot be
used with much effect. Since that time they have been used on the
Mississippi, but as yet we do not know with what results. Island
No. 10 has been taken; but I do not know that the mortar-boats
contributed much to that success. But the enormous cost of moving
them against the stream of the river is in itself a barrier to their
use. When we saw them - and then they were quite new - many of the
rivets were already gone. The small boats had been stolen from some
of them, and the ropes and oars from others. There they lay,
thirty-eight in number, up against the mud banks of the Ohio, under
the boughs of the half-clad, melancholy forest trees, as sad a
spectacle of reckless prodigality as the eye ever beheld. But the
contractor who made them no doubt was a smart man.
This armada was moored on the Ohio, against the low, reedy bank, a
mile above the levee, where the old, unchanged forest of nature came
down to the very edge of the river, and mixed itself with the
shallow, overflowing waters. I am wrong in saying that it lay under
the boughs of the trees, for such trees do not spread themselves out
with broad branches. They stand thickly together, broken, stunted,
spongy with rot, straight, and ugly, with ragged tops and shattered
arms, seemingly decayed, but still ever renewing themselves with the
rapid, moist life of luxuriant forest vegetation. Nothing to my
eyes is sadder than the monotonous desolation of such scenery. We
in England, when we read and speak of the primeval forests of
America, are apt to form pictures in our minds of woodland glades,
with spreading oaks, and green, mossy turf beneath - of scenes than
which nothing that God has given us is more charming. But these
forests are not after that fashion; they offer no allurement to the
lover, no solace to the melancholy man of thought. The ground is
deep with mud or overflown with water. The soil and the river have
no defined margins. Each tree, though full of the forms of life,
has all the appearance of death. Even to the outward eye they seem
to be laden with ague, fever, sudden chills, and pestilential
malaria.
When we first visited the spot we were alone, and we walked across
from the railway line to the place at which the boats were moored.
They lay in treble rank along the shore, and immediately above them
an old steamboat was fastened against the bank. Her back was
broken, and she was given up to ruin - placed there that she might
rot quietly into her watery grave. It was midwinter, and every tree
was covered with frozen sleet and small particles of snow which had
drizzled through the air; for the snow had not fallen in hearty,
honest flakes. The ground beneath our feet was crisp with frost,
but traitorous in its crispness; not frozen manfully so as to bear a
man's weight, but ready at every point to let him through into the
fat, glutinous mud below. I never saw a sadder picture, or one
which did more to awaken pity for those whose fate had fixed their
abodes in such a locality. And yet there was a beauty about it too -
a melancholy, death-like beauty. The disordered ruin and confused
decay of the forest was all gemmed with particles of ice. The eye
reaching through the thin underwood could form for itself
picturesque shapes and solitary bowers of broken wood, which were
bright with the opaque brightness of the hoar-frost. The great
river ran noiselessly along, rapid but still with an apparent
lethargy in its waters. The ground beneath our feet was fertile
beyond compare, but as yet fertile to death rather than to life.
Where we then trod man had not yet come with his axe and his plow;
but the railroad was close to us, and within a mile of the spot
thousands of dollars had been spent in raising a city which was to
have been rich with the united wealth of the rivers and the land.
Hitherto fever and ague, mud and malaria, had been too strong for
man, and the dollars had been spent in vain. The day, however, will
come when this promontory between the two great rivers will be a fit
abode for industry. Men will settle there, wandering down from the
North and East, and toil sadly, and leave their bones among the mud.
Thin, pale-faced, joyless mothers will come there, and grow old
before their time; and sickly children will be born, struggling up
with wan faces to their sad life's labor. But the work will go on,
for it is God's work; and the earth will be prepared for the people
and the fat rottenness of the still living forest will be made to
give forth its riches.
We found that two days at Cairo were quite enough for us. We had
seen the gun-boats and the mortar-boats, and gone through the sheds
of the soldiers.
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