Authors: Jason Manning
The Mississippi River was the carotid artery of Trans-Appalachian America. And dozens of lines branched off to service her many tributaries: on the Ohio System, the Cumberland up to Nashville, the Kanawha up to Charleston, the Allegheny and the Muskingum. Steamboats struggled against the wild Missouri as far as Fort Benton these days, carrying supplies to military outposts strung all along the Big Muddy. On the "Lower River," the packets steamed up and down the Red, Arkansas, Ouachita, Black, and Yazoo rivers. Smaller boats made their way along the numerous bayous of Louisiana and to the very steps of the plantation houses to load thousands of bales of cotton each year and carry them to the docks of New Orleans for shipment overseas or to the New England mill towns. But cotton was not the only freight of the riverboat—corn, wheat, hemp, tobacco, and live
stock came down the river from the young nation's heartland, while manufactured goods and luxuries were carried upriver from the great port of New Orleans.
Delgado remembered to pocket the pearl-handled derringer his father had presented him on the day he left home three years ago. Angus McKinn was of the firm opinion that a wise man trusted no one, and he would not permit his son to venture forth into the world unarmed. Delgado considered the short-barreled, large-bore, "over and under" hideout a useless encumbrance, he had never had cause to resort to it and never expected to. But he did not want the gun to fall into the hands of a sneak thief. The derringer was a gift from his father, and he cherished it for that reason, if for no other.
With one last glance about the stateroom, Delgado stepped out into the long, gilded, grand saloon, off which all the staterooms were aligned. Two rows of fluted columns, ten prism-fringed chandeliers, an oil painting—a misty and eye-pleasing pastoral scene—on every stateroom door, a blue-and-gold rug, custom-made in Belgium, two hundred feet in length, extending from one end of the ornate room to the other. In stark contrast to the previous night, the saloon was nearly empty this morning. A platoon of cabin boys, looking natty in their plum-colored livery, were busy sweeping, wiping, and polishing up. The
Sultana
was no cheap, gaudy packet, but rather a genuine "floating palace," and it was Delgado's opinion that the saloon, as well as the adjoining staterooms with their brass and porcelain and velvet accouterments, were as splendid as the court of any Persian potentate.
He found the spacious gallery, forward of the saloon on the boiler deck, already crowded, as ladies and gentlemen took advantage of the cool morning air. Finding a spot at the railing, Delgado glanced down the starboard length of the boat, admiring the graceful sheer of the three-hundred-foot vessel. Though she sat on an even keel, her decks—main, boiler, hurricane, and texas—all followed the same pronounced curve, for the boat rode high at bow and stern. The upper three decks were fenced and ornamented with white railings. The paddleboxes were adorned with the
Sultana's
crescent moon emblem. A similar device dangled between the pair of soaring smokestacks capped with filigree crowns done in the likeness of oak leaves. At the base of the smokestacks on the texas deck stood the pilothouse, with glass and exquisitely wrought "gingerbread" all around.
Black smoke bellowed from the smokestacks, pluming behind the
Sultana
as she splashed resolutely against the strong current, making eight miles an hour. Delgado felt the rhythm of the wheels as they smote the shimmering surface of the mighty river and heard the muted roar of the inferno in the boilers through the open furnace doors. A half mile to the east a line of trees, solemn old woods, marked the Illinois shore. Kaskaskia was behind them; today they would reach St. Louis.
St. Louis marked an ending of sorts for Delgado, and he contemplated his imminent arrival there in a melancholy light. Another eight hundred miles lay between him and his Taos home—long, arduous miles across the southern plains. Thus far he had enjoyed the trip immensely. Having dutifully applied himself to his studies at Ox
ford for the better part of three years, he had viewed his leisurely return via New York and New Orleans as a well-earned vacation. At the time of his departure from England the United States and the Republic of Mexico had still been at peace.
This had been his first exposure to the United States. The vibrant new nation had many wonders for a young man who had spent his twenty-three years in the insulated environment of Taos. He had been particularly impressed by New York City, where he had arrived three months ago aboard a steamship of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, founded six years before by Sir Samuel Cunard. The voyage across the Atlantic had taken only a fortnight. The steam engine was revolutionizing sea travel and doomed the sailing ship to eventual extinction, and in a way Delgado regretted that. His voyage to England had been as a passenger aboard the
Flying Cloud
, one of the most famous of the clipper ships, and the experience had been an exciting one. Sadly, he predicted that in ten years the clipper ship would be but a memory.
No question but the times were a-changing, almost faster than the mind could assimilate. In Taos all things moved at a languorous and well-structured pace. In many ways Taos was little changed from the way it had been a hundred years ago. The society was steeped in time-honored tradition. Life was to be savored. In the United States life was to be spent—in a hurry, and in the pursuit of prosperity. Only recently were Americans learning to indulge in leisure.
New York City was a case in point. No one who saw the metropolis in all its vitality and
magnitude could fail to be inspired by a sense of raw power and magnificent destiny. A forest of masts and spars rose from the hulls of hundreds of ships packed like sardines in the East River. The merchants and warehouses at the southern end of Manhattan Island handled half the imports and a third of the exports for the entire nation. Though London was still considered the financial capital of the world, Wall Street was coming on fast and could already boast the greatest concentration of wealth in America. Forty-six years ago, at the turn of the century, New York's population had not exceeded 125,000, now almost 400,000 souls resided there, with hundreds more arriving every week, most of these refugees from the political unrest in Europe, or, as in the case of the Irish, fleeing the grim prospect of famine.
Once Boston and Philadelphia had rivaled New York City as commercial centers, but no longer. The latter enjoyed too many natural advantages. Its harbor was broad and sheltered. It enjoyed ready access to a busting, industrialized New England. To the north the Hudson River linked the city with the Erie Canal, which in turn connected New York with the fast-growing regions beyond the formidable barrier of the Appalachians. The decade of uncertainty, deflation and, in some cases, ruination, which had marked the worldwide depression following the Panic of 1837 had been but a temporary setback.
New York City was symbolic of American power and progress. The city was brash, barbaric, hustling, arrogant, ostentatious, confident, unrefined. Delgado had visited the Astor Place Opera, and at the Chatham he had been entertained by a "grand national drama" entitled
The March to
Freedom
, which featured General Taylor and the Goddess of Liberty vanquishing Mexican tyranny. He had dined at the Milles-Colonnes, sampled ice cream—the newest rage—at Contoit's, been accosted by a lady of dubious virtue as he strolled the enchanting woods of the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, seen the magnificent town homes of the gentry in Park Place and Washington Square.
He had seen the darker side of the city, too—the squalid ghettos near Five Points, the ragpickers, hot corn girls, and apple peddlers who exemplified the thousands of unseen poor. Many better-off New Yorkers ignored these suffering masses or contemptuously considered them the degraded overflow of European society. But many more, feeling it their duty to extend a helping hand to those less fortunate, contributed time and money to a host of benevolent charities like The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows and the New York Orphan Asylum. Delgado had concluded that while sometimes Americans could be small-minded, they were more often than not big-hearted.
After experiencing New York, he could not help but wonder what fate held in store for Taos. The Americans believed they were destined to own the continent, and Delgado did not believe the strife-torn Republic of Mexico could stand against the irresistible Yankee tide. Though Angus McKinn had never said so, Delgado suspected his father of sending him off to England to place him well out of harm's way, knowing that a clash was inevitable. This had suited Delgado, he was no warrior, and he could muster no allegiance, no patriotic enthusiasm, for any flag. Now a war was being fought, and territory would change hands.
Taos would soon be a part of the United States. The Stars and Stripes would fly above the old Cabildo in the provincial capital of Santa Fe.
By virtue of conquest, whether he liked it nor not, Delgado McKinn was destined to become an American. On that score he was ambivalent. Americans and their ways were fascinating, but remained strange to him. He wondered if he would fit in, or forever feel like an outcast.
3
The
Sultana
was putting in to shore on the Missouri side, where a small village in a quick-cut clearing was coming to sudden life with the arrival of the "floating palace." In such a frontier settlement, drowsy in the summer sunshine, the day was a slow and dreary thing, yesterday's mirror image and a blueprint for tomorrow. But even as Delgado watched, the levee came alive with people as the cry
"Steamboat a'comin'!"
rang out. From every rough-hewn log and raw clapboard structure the denizens poured to gaze in awe at the wondrous sight of the side-wheeler, so long and trim and resplendent.
The whistle blasts that had awakened Delgado served to alert crew and passengers of imminent landfall. Now, as the
Sultana
veered nearer the western shore, the big bell above the pilothouse rang out, two mellow notes. From the hurricane deck, almost directly above Delgado, the watchman called out,
"Labboard lead! Starboard lead!"
The leadsmen rushed to their places near the bow, on the main deck. When the pilot rang the bell once, the starboard leadsman tossed out his
knotted and weighted line to measure the river's depth and called out, "Mark three!" At two bells the man on the other side performed the same ritual "Quarter less three!" And soon, "Half twain! . . . Quarter twain! . . . Mark twain!" The pilot hailed the engine room, and the
Sultana
slowed perceptibly. Steam whistled as it escaped through the gauge cocks.
Having visited the pilothouse earlier, Delgado could picture in his mind's eye what was occurring there at this moment. The pilot would be putting the wheel down hard to swing the boat into her marks. The cries of the leadsmen indicated that the water was becoming "shoal." "Eight and a half!" "Eight!"
"Seven and a half!"
Delgado felt a tingle at the base of his spine and glanced about him surreptitiously to see if any of the other passengers presently occupying the deck realized that now the steamboat's hull was less than two feel from the bottom.
"Seven feet!"
Would they run aground? Surely not. A boat like the
Sultana
would merit the services of the best "lightning pilot" money could hire. At this speed, if they did run aground, the impact would be violent, and Delgado imagined himself hurled through a shattered railing into the murky brown water below. But he did not move, or betray in any way his apprehension. Suddenly, the engines stopped—he could no longer feel their pulse through the decking beneath his feet. The agile
Sultana
swung its stern sharply toward the shore as the pilot rolled the big wheel faster than the human eye could follow.
"Eight feet!" called the starboard leadsman, and Delgado breathed again.
Nice as you please, the side-wheeler came
alongside a ramshackle wharf of gray, weathered timber. The mate, a big, burly, and profane man, took charge of the deck hands responsible for running out the gangplank. "Start the plank forward! Look lively now! Damn your eyes, are you asleep, boy? Heave! Heave! You move slower than a damned hearse! Aft again! Aft, I say! Are you deaf as well as daft?"
Delgado watched four men with rifles tilted on their shoulders come up the gangplank. They halted before stepping foot on the packet and looked up at the captain who stood in his most imposing fashion by the big bell on the texas deck.
"Ahoy, Cap'n!" called the foremost of the quartet. "We be bound for St. Looy to join Doniphan's Volunteers. Will you take us free of charge? Our pockets are full of dust and not much else."
"Come aboard, boys," answered the
Sultana's
captain with a sweeping and magnanimous gesture. "I would not accept so much as a redback dollar from brave men who are marching off to strike a blow for liberty."
The volunteers grinned and tipped their hats and came aboard, seeking some small space on the already overcrowded main deck, where those who could not afford the first-class comfort of the staterooms were packed in amongst the freight: sacks of rice, barrels of molasses, casks of rum, crates of imported goods, and a variety of livestock.
The four rifle-toting young men intrigued Delgado. Where were they bound? Surely St. Louis was not their final destination. Who was Doniphan? No doubt it had something to do with the war.
A man appeared at the railing beside him. It
was Sterling, a newspaper rolled under one arm and a twinkle in his eye.
"Good morning, McKinn. No ill effects from last night's excesses, I trust?"
"I've never felt better," lied Delgado. The sharp, stabbing pain in his head had subsided into a dull, persistent ache behind the eyes. "Tell me, Sterling, about Doniphan's Volunteers."
"You mean the First Missouri Mounted Rifles. They are to join Colonel Stephen Kearny and his dragoons at Fort Leavenworth. Kearny is being dispatched to Santa Fe to protect U.S. citizens and property there. In other words, to occupy New Mexico and—who knows?—California, too, in all likelihood. Alexander Doniphan is an acquaintance of mine, a young lawyer, who was one of the first to answer Governor Edwards's call for volunteers. He enlisted as a private, but, as is the custom in our volunteer forces, the men elected him their commander. Whereupon the State of Missouri has honored him with the rank of colonel."