J60 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
under the circumstances, overlooking the fact that this advance on a
cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal more than necessary to
cover the new wages.
So, straightway the captains and owners got up an association of
their own, and proposed to put captains' wages up to five hundred
dollars, too, and move for another advance in freights. It was a
novel idea, but of coui'se an effect winch had been producer! once
could be produced again. The new association decreed (for this was
before all the outsiders had been taken into the pilots' association)
that if any captain employed a non-association pilot, he should be
forced to discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars.
Several of these heavy fines were paid before the captains' organisation
grew strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership;
but that all ceased, presently. The captains tried to get the pilots to
decree that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-
association captain; but this proposition was declined. The pilots
saw that they would be backed tip by the captains and the under-
writers anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering into
entangling alliances.
As I have remarked, the pilots* association was now the compact-
est monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible.
And yet the days of its glory were numbered. First, the new railroad
stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to
Northern railway centres, began to divert the passenger travel from
the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated tlie
steamboating industry during several years, leaving most of the
pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all the time; then the
treasurer of the Sfc. Louis association put his hand into the till and
walked off with every dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the rail-
roads intruding everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when
the war was over, but carry freights; so straightway some genius
from the Atlantic coast introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer
cargoes down to New Orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat;
and behold, in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association
and the noble science of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic
past I