I remember it all, as if it were yesterday.'
That this combination - of preacher and gray mare - should breed calamity,
seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is
fortified by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor
reason. I myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous
friends against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but
persisted in his purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the
same day - it may have been the next, and some say it was, though I think
it was the same day - he got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was
borne to his home a corpse. This is literally true.
No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away.
I do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in, except
that it was between St. Louis and Cairo somewhere. It was a bad region -
all around and about Hat Island, in early days. A farmer who lived on
the Illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine steamboats had left
their bones strung along within sight from his house. Between St. Louis
and Cairo the steamboat wrecks average one to the mile; - two hundred
wrecks, altogether.
I could recognize big changes from Commerce down. Beaver Dam Rock was
out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious 'break;'
it used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it.
