2*3 LIPS ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
That this combination—of preacher and grey 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 dishonour
reason. I myself remember a case where a captain was warned by
numerous friends against taking a grey 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 recognise big changes from Commerce down. Beaver
Dam Hock was out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a
prodigious * break;' it used to be dose to the shore, and boats went
down outside of it. A big island that used to be away out in mid-
river, has retired to the Missouri shore, and boats do not go near it
any more. The island called Jacket Pattern is whittled down to a
wedge now, and is booked for early destruction. Goose Island is all
gone but a little dab the size of a steamboat. The perilous * Grave-
yard,' among whose numberless wrecks we used to pick our way so
slowly and gingerly, is far away from the channel now, and a terror
to nobody. One of the islands formerly called the Two Sisters is gone
entirely; the other, which used to lie dose to the Illinois shore, ia
n0w on the Missouri side, a mile away ; it is joined solidly to the
shore, and it takes a sharp eye to see where the seam is—but it is
Illinois ground yet, and the people who live on it have to ferry
themselves over and work the Illinois roads and pay Illinois taxes:
na-ngnl^r1 state of things!
Near the mouth of the river several islan^ were Tnigsnreg—--washed
away. Cairo was sHU there—easify visible across the long, fiat point