“Why didn’t they all march away into Tennessee!” Tim asked.
“Boys, they couldn’t,” Barker explained to them. “Only a little way east of Island No. 10 lies Reelfoot Lake, so they couldn’t march away in that direction. They held the island just as long as they could.”
“Time to go to bed for you lads,” the captain took the word again. “I have told you all I know about Bissell’s Channel and the fight at Island No. 10.”
The lads were soon fast asleep in their cabin, dreaming of Spook Lake, of monster battle-ships, and of their home in Vicksburg.
The men continued talking for some time, Captain Banks telling his friends about the dramatic river battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862.
“Captain, I want to ask you one thing,” Barker said. “Why can’t the Union gun-boats do any good fighting down-stream, why do they have to do all their heavy fighting headed up-stream?”
“Because,” explained the captain promptly, “they are just a pick-up lot of boats, all, I think, stern-wheelers. Only their bow is protected with plates and railroad-iron. Their engines are weak, and if maneuvered down-stream they will drag their anchors in the muddy bottom and are hard to control. They are real fighting-ships only when they point their noses up-stream.”
When at last Barker invited Tatanka into a cabin, the Indian smiled. “No,” he said, “Indian cannot sleep in a box. I sleep in my blankets outside, with plenty of air around me.”
The steamer _Grey Hawk_ cast off from the New Madrid landing at dawn of day.
The years just preceding the Civil War and the years of the war were the great days of steamboating on the Mississippi and its tributaries.
Hundreds of boats, large and small, ran on the main stream, on the Ohio, the Missouri, the Illinois, the Minnesota and other rivers of the great Mississippi basin. The average life time of a Mississippi steamer was only five years, because countless snags, ice, fires, and other dangers were the bad medicine to navigation on all the streams. None of them were improved, none had any system of lights or signs; the pilots had to know the rivers, whose currents and sandbars and snags were constantly shifting. But the business was so profitable that the trips of one season often paid for the boat. Settlers were rushing into the western country and they and all their goods went by steamboat, for no railroads had yet crossed the Mississippi. On the turbulent Missouri the steamers ran to the mouth of the Yellowstone and beyond, taking up settlers, soldiers, general freight and goods for the Indian trade, and bringing back loads of buffalo-skins and other fur from the Rocky Mountain country. On the Minnesota small steamers ran two hundred miles beyond St. Paul into the newly opened Sioux country to market the first wheat of the new settlers. A few small boats plied on the upper Mississippi above St. Paul and Minneapolis, where the lumber industry and flour-mills were just developing.