arbor, where the water was
deep so close inshore that the port's unbroken mile of steamboat wharf
nowhere stretched out into the boiling flood. Instead it merely lined
the shore, the steamers packing in bow on with their noses to it, their
sterns out in the stream, their fenders chafing each other's lower
guards.

New Orleans was very proud of this scene. Very prompt were her citizens,
such as had travelled, to remind you that in many seaports vast
warehouses and roofed docks of enormous cost thronged out so greedily to
meet incoming craft that the one boat which you might be seeking you
would find quite hidden among walls and roofs, and of all the rest of
the harbor's general fleet you could see little or nothing. Not so on
this great sun-swept, wind-swept, rain-swept, unswept steamboat levee.
You might come up out of any street along that mile-wide front, and if
there were a hundred river steamers in port a hundred you would behold
with one sweep of the eye. Overhead was only the blue dome, in full view
almost from rim to rim; and all about, amid a din of shouting,
whip-cracking, scolding, and laughing, and a multitudinous flutter of
many-colored foot-square flags, each marking its special lot of goods,
were swarms of men--white, yellow, and black--trucking, tumbling,
rolling, hand-barrowing, and "toting" on heads and shoulders a countless
worth of freight in bags, barrels, casks, bales, boxes, and baskets.
Hundreds of mules and drays came and went with this same wealth, and out
beyond all, between wharf and open river, profiled on the eastern sky,
letting themselves be unloaded and reloaded, stood the compacted,
motionless, elephantine phalanx of the boats.

The flood beneath them was up to the wharf's flooring, yet their low,
light-draught hulls, with the freight decks that covered them doubled in
carrying room by their widely overhanging freight guards, were hid by
the wilderness of goods on shore. Hid also were their furnaces, boilers,
and engines on the same deck, sharing it with the cargo. But all their
gay upper works, so toplofty and frail, showed a gleaming white front to
the western sun. You marked each one's jack-staff, that rose mast high
from the unseen prow, and behind it the boiler deck, high over the
boilers. Over the boiler deck was the hurricane roof, above that the
officers' rooms, called the "texas." Above the texas was the
pilot-house, and on either side, well forward of the pilot-house and
towe