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Show OLD RIVER DAYS. a Stories of steamboat Racing on the Mississippi. When one steamboat comes "alongside "along-side another on the Mississippi, each tries to pass the other. That is an invariable in-variable rule of fiie roadr , No pilot likes to takes thy-ash and , broken water of another.:ba'efpeeiy;y if the other boat is slower or more heavily loaded. WhyC!when the procession of steamboats escorted the United States gunboat Nashville up the river last spring, one of the steamboats showed the poor taste to lead the Nashville on the way to the harbor. The engineer and the pilot of the Nashville, an old river pilot, had the greatest kind of trouble keeping themselves out after her and pulling her down. They did show their heels in first-class shape to one river boat that tried to pass, them down below Memphis. It is in the human hu-man blood and no amount of danger from overtaxed boilers, narrowness of channel, sand bars, shoals or snais will deter the fast boat from showing its heels to the slower boat I have seen passengers in the 'olden time, when everybody knew a good deal about the river and its dangers, come up to the captain of the boat they had taken passage pas-sage on and say to him solicitously: "Now, captain, I want you to assure me of one thing, that you are not going go-ing to race. I've got my wife and children on board and I don't want to expose them to needless danger." "Of course we won't race," the captain would answer, and he would mean It when he said it. In a little while along would come a slow, heavily loaded scow of a boat and try to pass us. The captain would get busy and so would the pilot, the engineer and the firemen. And as the competing boat would shade down to a small speck on the rear horizon, the passenger who was so anxious to keep his.family out of needles danger would come up from below, wiping a pair of bruised and dirty hands and, Inflating his chest pouldly, say to the captain. "She never touched us." That pasenger had been down on the boiler deck during the race, passing cordwood to the stokers stok-ers to put under the boilers. That's how it Is with steamboat racing. St. Louis Republic. |
