As they approached the mouth of the Ohio, Titus realized he had flatboated from the gentle mountains and forests of the upper river, southwesterly to a region of flooded lowlands and great stretches of treeless, brushy wilderness as far as the eye could see. The Ohio was the feeder, bringing the races and cultures tumbling together: Scotch-Irish, Kentuckians, English and French, pioneers all, rubbing shoulders with Creoles, Negro slaves, mulattoes, and freedmen, as well as an array of tribesmen—Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Peoria, Sauk, and Piankashaw.
“These Injuns ain’t a problem to rivermen no more,” Zane explained as they closed on the mouth of the river, where the often-roiling blue Ohio mingled with and lost itself to the coffee-colored, more sedate Mississippi. “Most of them redskins moving on into the Illinois country. Maybeso across the Mississippi to the west. White man’s land over here. Let them red bastards have all that’s left ’em over yonder.”
His eyes widened as he stood, mesmerized and amazed in watching the great sweep of water come in off the starboard. Pointing, Titus asked, “What’s that river coming in?”
“It ain’t coming in, Titus,” the pilot explained with a smile. “This’r Ohio coming into it.”
In wonder at the sheer size of it he exclaimed, “That’s the Mississip?”
Working his rudder beneath one arm to position them into the colliding currents, Ebenezer Zane replied, “Ain’t none the other. You come to the mighty Mississip, Titus Bass.” Nodding to the south, he said, “Over here is all the land any man could want to farm and raise up his towns.”
Yet Titus stared off across the widening expanse of water at the far, far shore. He pointed to the west. “And over there?”
“Over there,” Zane answered with a sigh, “is the beginning of a wilderness fit only for Injuns, critters, and wild men.”
10
As Titus stood atop some of the hogsheads of flour to get himself the best view of that spectacular, unpeopled country, Ebenezer Zane heaved against his rudder to slip the flatboat out from the mouth of the Ohio and into the great, wide Mississippi already beginning to spread itself a mile and more wide in its slow roll to the south.
“Yonder’s Cairo,” the pilot called out, pointing off toward the collection of shacks and log cabins built around a tiny wharf at the end of that peninsula formed by the joining of the two waters.
Kingsbury brought his oar out of the water and leaned back with a sigh. “Farther on up there, Titus—a man comes to St. Louie.”
“Like I said: time enough to get there, young as I am,” Titus said, his eyes widening as he took in the vast sweep of all that stretched before him on that far western horizon.
“Young as you is,” Root scoffed at his oar below Bass, “you can have you two or three big adventures afore you gotta figure out what it is you’re gonna do for the rest of your life.”
“Don’t pay him no heed, Titus,” Zane advised. “Reuben still ain’t sorted out what he’s gonna do when he gets growed up!”
While rolling hills and timbered bluffs dominated the Mississippi’s shoreline above the mouth of the Ohio, from there south one could watch the landscape begin to flatten. Eagles dotted the cold, clear sky overhead, sweeping across the great expanse of the river in search of a meal they could pluck from the muddied waters in huge claws. Wild turkeys squatted in autumn’s leafless trees along the riverbanks like stumpy, black-robed, wattle-necked old men, curiously watching the boatmen float past.
“Lookee there!” Heman Ovatt cried out, pointing to the eastern shore where loped a small pack of wolves, no more than a half dozen, slinking easily along the skirt of timber that frilled the riverbank.
“Hunting must be good in these parts,” Titus exclaimed, already sensing an undeniable itch to have the ground beneath his moccasins and the woods at his elbow once more.
Zane scratched at his hairy cheek and inquired, “You figure you could find us some game yonder?”
With an eager grin Bass turned to the steersman, saying, “If you spot wolves along the bank, I figure there’s a good chance I’d run onto something for us to eat over there too.”
“Damn right,” Kingsbury added. “Them wolves didn’t look like they’d missed a meal a’tall!”
“I’ll bet these fellas would appreciate you giving them a change in supper fare tonight, Titus,” Zane continued, then looked off to the west to measure the fall of the sun in that cold sky. “Not far down here, I know a place where we can put over and let you off with your rifle. We’ll ease on down a few miles and tie up for the night. Get us a fire going and wait for you to bring us in some victuals for supper. How’s that strike you?”
“It sounds fine to me!” Bass replied, starting to scramble down from atop the great oak kegs, eager to have a chance to hunt for the crew once again, just as he already had done on several occasions while they’d descended the lower Ohio.
“Here’s one man gets damned tired of eating pig all the time,” Kingsbury grumbled.
“Speak for yourself,” Root snapped. “A thick slab of salt pork allays better’n some gamy ol’ slice of buckskin.”
“Y’all got my hungers up already,” Ovatt cheered from the bow, where he had been working at expanding one of his most elaborate tattoos, scratching at his forearm with a needle, then marking the artistic wound with India ink. More than any of the others, Heman was nearly covered in the gaudy blue drawings of sea serpents and devil’s heads, water maidens and feathered Indians. He looked up from his work, saying, “Don’t you give Reuben no never mind, Titus. This belly of mine could do wrapping around something new tonight, Titus!”
“G’won now and get yourself ready,” Zane instructed. “It ain’t far till we come to that stretch of shore where we’ll drop you off to do some hunting. That is, if the river ain’t et the bank away too bad since’t last summer.”
Even as slow as it moved, the relentless Mississippi had a way of doing that: gobbling up great bites of the riverbank from season to season. Come late spring, early summer, the river would lift twenty-five feet or more above its banks, cutting itself a new channel in the process, going here and there to alter last year’s course. As it did so, the Mississippi would destroy old islands and create new ones, uproot trees from both the banks and the far end of those new islands, depositing that timber on the upstream end of the next island met downriver. At high- water times of the year, tying up for the night could be a ticklish proposition: a good river captain understood that to secure his boat beneath a high bank or large timber just might mean the Mississippi would cause that bank to cave in on his broadhorn, or chew away enough of the shore, toppling one of the huge trees to come crashing down upon his sleeping crew.
Flowing anywhere from three to five miles per hour, the Mississippi ran thirty feet deep in most places, fifty feet in some spots as it seesawed back and forth, making itself remarkably crooked. Despite the river’s width, it still proved itself a real test not only of a river pilot’s abilities at the rudder, but of the watchfulness of the rest of his crew as they kept eyes sweeping the roiling waters for all manner of dangers: sawyers and planters and submerged sandbars.
“You warm enough now?” Zane asked as he eased the flatboat out of the running current and headed for the eastern shore.
“I’ll be fine,” Bass replied, kneeling at the gunnel as Root lowered the skiff into the muddy water.
After Titus climbed into the tiny boat and he began paddling with Reuben, Ovatt played out a length of hawser lashed to the back of the skiff.
“Get on off afore we gotta push back into the running current,” Root advised.
The youngster heaved himself onto the bank just as Root waved across those yards of icy water, signaling Heman Ovatt to pull the skiff back to the flatboat.
“Cold as it is, Titus,” Reuben hollered over his shoulder as Heman began to drag him away from the shoreline, “lot better to be hunting now. Come the summer in these here parts, skeeters come pick you up and carry you off, you go hunting way you are in them woods!”
Such winged torment wasn’t the only disadvantage to hunting the riverbanks come the summer season. The heat and humidity both conspired against a man laboring through the thick, semitropical brush, weakening many with heat-fevers.
