n one of those shadows, but you
know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you
are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is
a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a
starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty
dim ones, too; and you'd run them for straight lines only you know
better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid,
straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve
there) and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your
gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly,
gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A
gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well,
then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in
different ways.... You only learn the shape of the river; and you learn
it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape
that's IN YOUR HEAD and never mind the one that's before your eyes." *

* Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," pp. 103-04.

No wonder that the two hundred miles of the Mississippi from the mouth
of the Ohio to St. Louis in time contained the wrecks of two hundred
steamboats.

The river trade reached its zenith between 1840 and 1860, in the two
decades previous to the Civil War, that period before the railroads
began to parallel the great rivers. It was a time which saw the rise
of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Arkansas, and which
witnessed the spread of the cotton kingdom into the Southwest. The
story of King Cotton's conquest of the Mississippi South is best told in
statistics. In 1811, the year of the first voyage which the New Orleans
made down the Ohio River, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi exported
five million pounds of cotton. In 1834 these same States exported almost
two hundred million pounds of cotton. To take care of this crop and
to supply the cotton country, which was becoming wealthy, with the
necessaries and luxuries of life, more and more steamboats were needed.
The great shipyards situated, because of the proximity of suitable
timber, at St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville became busy hives, not
since paralleled except by such centers of shipbuilding as Hog Island in
1917-18, during the time of the Great War. The steamboat tonnage of the
Mississippi Valley (exclusive of New