Chapter I

_Early Impressions_

Descent from an ancestry whose members built and sailed ships from
Salem, Newburyport, and Nantucket two hundred years ago, and even
down to the early days of the nineteenth century, ought to give an
hereditary bias toward a sailor’s life, on waters either salt or
fresh. A score-and-a-half of men of my name have “died with their
boots on” at sea, from the port of Nantucket alone. They went for
whales, and the whales got them. Perhaps their fate should have
discouraged the sea-going instinct, but perversely it had the
opposite effect. A hundred men are lost out of Gloucester every year,
yet their boys are on the “Banks” before they are fairly weaned.

I was born at Niles, Michigan, on the historic St. Joseph River,
which in those days was of considerable importance commercially.
Scores of keel boats plied between South Bend and the mouth of the
river at St. Joseph, on Lake Michigan. Keel boats drifted down the
river, and after unloading were towed back by little steamboats,
about eighty feet long by eighteen feet beam. These were propelled by
side wheels attached to a single shaft, driven by a horizontal engine
of indifferent power. These steamers towed four “keels” upstream at
the rate of five or six miles an hour. The former had no upper cabin
answering to the “boiler deck” of the Mississippi River boats–only
a roof covering the main deck, with the passenger cabin aft, and the
quarters of the crew forward of the boiler and engine.

It was, I suppose, a quarter of a mile from my birthplace to the
river bank where we boys of the neighborhood went to see the
steamboats pass. In the opposite direction, around a sharp bend and
across the low-lying, alluvial land, which comprised the home farm,
the river was discernible a mile away. When a boat was seen coming up
river, the alarm was given, and we little shavers of the neighborhood
raced for the nearest point of view, a high bank of blue clay, rising
probably seventy-five feet above the river. We used to think it was
as many hundreds of feet; and what I now know as the quarter mile,
then stretched away into interminable distances as it was measured
by the stubby yet sturdy little legs of six-year-old runners. On the
edge of this blue-clay bank, I received my first impressions in river
piloting.

My teacher in these matters was a man whom I greatly envied. Kimball
Lyon lived in a house three times as large as that in which I was
born. His father had left a big farm and a bank account of fabulous
dimensions. We knew it was large, because “Kim” never worked as other
young men of twenty-five or thirty years did in those days. His
mother always kept a “hired man”, while Kim toiled not; but he spun.

It was not his riches, however, nor his immunity from toil, that
common lot of other men, which excited the envy of the six-year-olds.
He could, and did, play on the accordion. Lying on his back in the
shade and resting one corner of his instrument upon his bosom, with
irresistible power and pathos he sang and played

“A life on the ocean wave,
A home on the rolling deep.”

It appealed to all the natural impulses of our being, and the dormant
instincts inherited from generations of whale-hunting ancestors were
aroused by the power of music, reinforced by the suggestive words of
the song itself; and then and there we vowed that when we were men
like Kimball Lyon, we too would own and play upon accordions, and
do all else that he had done; for marvelous tales he told, of his
experiences in great storms at sea and of deeds of aquatic prowess.
We learned in after years that “Kim” once sailed from St. Joseph
to Chicago in a sawed-off lumber hooker, when the wind was west
nor’west, down the lake, and that he did actually lie on the deck,
but not on his back, and that it was not music which he emitted, and
that the sailors railed at him, and that he came back from Chicago by
stage coach to Niles. But we didn’t know this when he was awakening
our viking instincts, as we lay on the banks of the old St. Joe in
the sunny summer days of long ago.

“Kim” Lyon knew all about steamboats, as well as about deep sea
ships, and when we asked questions he could answer out of the
fullness of his knowledge. We wondered what made the wheels go
’round, and he told us. I have forgotten _what_ made them go ’round,
but my recollection is that it was a peculiar mechanical process
of which I have never seen the like in any other service on river,
lake or ocean. His answer to the query as to “what is the man in the
little house on top of the boat doing?” I have never forgotten, as it
afterward came more in my line of business. The man was twisting the
wheel as all pilots before and since that time twist it, a spoke or
two to port, a half dozen to starboard, hard up and hard down, there
being a shallow piece of river just there, beset with big boulders
and reefs of gravel, through which he was cautiously worming his boat
and its kite-tail of keels.

“That man,” said Kimball, “is drawing water from a well in the bottom
of the boat and emptying it into the boiler, just as your father
draws water from his well with a rope, a bucket and a crank. If he
should stop for a minute the boiler would burst for want of water,
the boat would blow up, and we should all be killed by the explosion.”

This definition at once gave us a personal interest in the work of
the man at the wheel; we all felt that our lives depended upon this
man’s devotion to his duty. Had he struck a piece of “easy water” at
that time, and centred his wheel, there is no doubt that we would
have scurried for home before the inevitable explosion should occur.
That was my first lesson in piloting. Perhaps this childish concern
that the man “drawing water for the boilers” should faithfully
perform his duty, was but a prefigurement of the interest with which
the writer, and hundreds of others, in later years, have watched the
pilot work his boat through a tangled piece of river, knowing that
the safety of all depended upon the knowledge and faithfulness of the
“man at the wheel.”

The steamboats plying on the St. Joe were crude little affairs, and
there were but four or five of them, all alike. I remember the name
of but one, the “Algoma”; the others are quite forgotten. Doubtless
they were commonplace, and did not appeal to the poetic side of the
boy. But “Algoma”! The word has a rhythmical measure, and conjures up
visions of wigwams, council fires, dusky maidens, and painted braves.
An Indian name would stick when all the saints in the calendar were
forgotten. The “Algoma” and her consorts have gone the way of all
steamboats. The railroad came and killed their business, just as a
few years later, it did on the Great River.

A few years later I saw the Mississippi River for the first time,
at Rock Island, Illinois; and through the kindness of another
well-posted bystander to whom the then twelve-year-old boy appealed,
I received my first impressions of a stern-wheel boat. There were two
steamboats lying at the levee–the “Minnesota Belle”, a side-wheeler,
upon which we had taken passage, while just above lay the “Luella”,
a stern-wheeler. I knew about the former variety from observation on
the St. Joe, but I had never seen even a picture of one of the latter
sort, so it was a novelty. I wasn’t certain that it was a steamboat
at all, and after referring the matter to my stranger friend, I
learned definitely that it wasn’t. The “Luella’s” wheel was slowly
turning over as she lay at the levee, and as I did not comprehend the
mechanical details of that kind of craft I began asking questions.
My mentor assured me that the “Luella” was not a steamboat at all,
but a water power sawmill. The big wheel then moving was driven by
the current, and it in turn operated the sawmill machinery on the
inside of the boat. As I could not figure any other use for a wheel
out in the open, at the end of the boat, instead of on the side where
it ought to be, and as I had no reason to doubt the statement of my
informant, I readily accepted the sawmill explanation, and hastened
to confide my newly-acquired knowledge to my brother and other
members of the family. A few hours later both boats pulled out for
St. Paul. After she had rounded the first point, ahead of us, we saw
nothing more of the “Luella” until we met her coming down the river
on her return trip. She was a heavily-powered boat, and showed her
heels to the larger and slower “Minnesota Belle”. The sight of the
“Luella” kicking her way upstream at the rate of two miles to our
one, not only dissipated the sawmill impression, but taught me not
to accept at face value all information communicated by glib-tongued
and plausible strangers.

That steamboat trip from Rock Island to Prescott was one long holiday
excursion for us two small and lively boys from Michigan. There was
so much to see and in so many different directions at once, that it
was impossible to grasp it all, although we scampered over the deck
to get differing view points. We met dozens of boats, going back to
St. Louis or Galena after further loads of immigrants and freight;
and there were other boats which came up behind us, gaining slowly
but surely, and finally passing the deeply-laden “Belle”. There were
landings to be made, and freight and passengers to be disembarked.
There were strange Indians to be seen–we were familiar enough with
Michigan tribesmen, having been born within a mile or two of old
Pokagon’s tribal village. There were boys with fish for sale, fish
larger than any inhabiting the waters of Michigan streams, sturgeons
only excepted, and this promised well for the fun in store when we
should reach our journey’s end.

Finally, on a bright June day in the year 1854, the writer, then a
boy of twelve, with his brother, three years younger, were fully
transplanted from their Michigan birthplace to the row of stores
and warehouses which fronted on the “levee” at Prescott, Wisconsin,
where the waters of St. Croix River and Lake join the Mississippi.
The town was then a typical frontier settlement. Two hundred white
people were planted among five hundred Chippewa Indians; with as many
more Sioux, of the Red Wing band, across the river in Minnesota, a
few miles lower down the river. The not infrequent outbreaks of the
hereditary enmity existing between these ancient foes, would expend
itself on the streets of the town in war whoops, gunpowder, and
scalping knives, enlivening the experience of the average citizen as
he dodged behind the nearest cover to avoid stray bullets; while the
city marshal was given an opportunity to earn his salary, by driving
out both bands of hostiles at the point of his revolver.