J22 LIFE ON MISSISSIPPI.
it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a
creature. Of coarse it is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled
who could once Jump twenty-two feet on level ground:
but sa contrasted with what it was in its prime vigour, Mississippi
gteamboating may be called dead..
It Hied the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing the freight,
trip to New Orleans to less than a week. The railroads have killed
the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what
the steamboats consumed a week in doing; and the to wing. fleets have
killed the "through-freight traffic by dragging sis or seven steamer-
loads of stuff down the river at a time, at an expense so trivial
that steamboat competition was out of the question.
Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers. This
is in the hands—along the two thousand miles of river between St.
Paul and Hew Orleans—of two or three close corporations well forti-
fied with capital; and by able and thoroughly business-like manage-
ment and system, these make a sufficiency of money out of what is
left of the once prodigious steamboating industry. I suppose that
St. Louis and New Orleans have not suffered materially by the change^
but alas for the wood-yard man !
He used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked mer-
chandise stretched from the one city to the other, along the banks,.
and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail;
but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now, and the
seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is ,a wood-pile. Where
now is the once • wood-yard saaa f