At the present time it is comparatively easy to pilot a steamboat on the Mississippi. Hundreds of wing-dams, built by the government engineers, keep the current in the same channel, and numerous guideboards and lights on shore tell the pilot where to steer his boat. In addition to this, the modern boats are all provided with powerful headlights and search-lights.
At the time of the Civil War wing-dams, guideboards, shore-lights, and search-lights were all unknown. The safety of the Mississippi steamers depended entirely on the pilots. Their accurate knowledge of the river, their skill in handling the wheel, their quick decision in moments of danger, brought every year hundreds of boats safely back and forth between the ports of St. Paul and St. Louis.
As the _Red Hawk_ was gliding by the magnificent groves of cottonwoods, which begin to line the Mississippi just below the Indian Mounds at St. Paul, the trapper and his three friends were quietly sitting on the upper deck in front of the pilot-house.
There was little talk, for all were absorbed in the running of the boat.
Now the boat seemed to be headed into an absolutely black wall, which proved, however, to be only the dense shadow caused by the forest or by a high rocky bank. Had the pilot not had the nerve to steer straight into the black shadow, he would have wrecked his boat among the snags on a sandbar, where the safe channel seemed to run.
At the end of three hours the boat stopped at Prescott, at the mouth of the St. Croix, one of the two navigable tributaries of the upper Mississippi, near St. Paul and Minneapolis, almost two thousand miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Here the river grew wider and deeper, so that the pilot could pick his way with a little less anxiety, but to the four fugitives from the Sioux country, the mystery continued.
At one moment the boat was headed into a dark forest of tall cottonwoods and maples, and a little later the boys felt sure she would crash against a solid wall of rock, and then suddenly the river seemed to come to an end.
“We’ve lost the river, we’re in a big slough,” Tim whispered as he held firmly to Meetcha.
But always just in time, the wheel turned just enough and the boat glided safely past trees and cliffs, past sandbars and snags, and around every bend and turn.