Driftwood (Spears)/Chapter 5

LL that Mr. and Mrs. Carruth could do was done. Telegrams, telephone messages, word to the river people were sent out, and the whole world of Mississippi Valley rumor was notified to watch for Sibley Carruth, who had disappeared with the family shanty boat in the rising tide.

When the river is low, and in its banks, the shanty-boaters who go dropping down from bend to bend have little in common with the stay-at-homes behind the levees. At some landings river-men may not land at all, because a few reckless river-rats have done things at those landings that have given all of the river people a reputation some of them by no means deserve. There is many a landing where any shanty-boat that tries to land is "shot up." This is due to the river pirates, who are as bad as their name. They make free with cane-rooters, the little black-and-white hogs of the brakes and bars; they kill cattle where the woods are dense and the owners far away; and their lawlessness extends even to burglary and other crimes in large cities.

In time of flood a few of these bad river-men prove that they are not entirely vicious, by entering into the great rescue work, which satisfies their hunger for excitement. Most of these are just ignorant, or mentally sick—not knowing how to find thrills in the heroism of peace, or unable to distinguish between right and wrong.

The Carruths, shanty-boaters, working out in the refugee camps, saw other shanty-boaters moored in the back-water of the overflow. After passing the time of day they begged them to send word to the Cape if any news were heard of Sibley.

Motor-boats, driven by river navigators of all kinds, brought in victims of the flood who were found marooned on mounds, on cabin roofs, and even in the trees, all waiting for some one to come and find them. Dozens of these motor-boats went up and down from Cape Girardeau and whenever a boat landed in with its list of people from the bottoms, the Carruths tried to see that special word went to the captain, asking about Sibley.

They were not alone, however, in seeking news of missing people. There were men who on crude rafts had set out from their homes to get help and who had found their houses washed away when they returned. Had their families been rescued first? There were men who had returned and found their houses intact, but the family gone, and no word left as to where, whether up to Chester or down to Cairo, or across to Cape Girardeau. If a boat were heavily laden, it might land anywhere against a bluff and send its passengers ashore three miles from a house "over in that direction, some’rs!"

Down the river were coming daring navigators, some in private craft, and some in government boats, that braved any danger in order to deliver thousands of bags to hold dirt to stack on top of levees, or food for the marooned or for the refugee camps, or small boats to distribute for the service in the overflowed woodlands and isolated clearings, or for back-water service, or where not enough gasolene boats could be had. The great beautifully painted, high standing government boats loomed majestically upon the flood, and landed against the second story of some of the buildings. The smoke stacks, standing as high as the hills, showed how huge they were compared with the dwellings of mankind.

Commercial craft had to seek refuge with the rest. Boats exposed to the drift were carried away, and some went down the river in it. Barges and other craft for towing went by, but the people alongshore could not swing them in with lines or tow them in with boats, though they would have been rewarded by payment of salvage—what the Government allows for the rescuing of a boat adrift—amounting to thou sands of dollars. There was no time, or else the danger was too great for such work, even had it been feasible to dislodge the valuable craft from the vast jackstraw masses of swirling, floating driftwood.

Down the river came a few hardy voyagers. They were river people about their own business. Some were fishermen going down to new locations in which to place their nets for market fish; some were trappers in a hurry to carry their winter catch of furs to the markets; some were "drifters," who caught logs, lumber, runaway boats, and anything else they could sell or hold for salvage money; others were traders seeking bargains in merchandise; still others were pirates looking for loot in the abandoned homes in the overflow. Lunch-room boats sought places where their owners could serve meals to the refugees marooned on levees or hills. Many a river tripper was looking for work that would pay him high wages, such as driving cattle across the flood, swimming them from mound to mound toward the highlands.

Some of these venturesome travelers were in skiffs or jon-boats, rowing in and out among the driftwood; some were in motor-boats which they steered down the lanes between the masses of flotsam that swirled in the river; some dropped down in their shanty-boats, with a line fast to some great snag that towed them down the current, no matter how hard the wind blew. All were in dire danger of being caught in a squeeze and left afloat on a snag or a log or a bale of hay, but they gambled their safety against the chance of reward or profit somewhere downstream.

The voyagers made fast time with the current, running night and day. They were some times hailed from the bank, or an eddy, and asked by some fellow river-man to carry a message, shouted out to them, to others far away on the lower river, and word thus sent with them would pass Cairo, and go even to New Orleans, a thousand miles away, being delivered at its destination as a favor. Of six or eight boats carrying such a message, one was sure to pass it on to its destination. So when Mr. Carruth sent word down to Sibley, he had hopes it would reach the boy’s ears at last.

The telegraph and the telephone hourly brought messages to Cape Girardeau and all other towns whose communications had not been washed out, and the bulletins were posted where a crowd of tens or scores constantly turned the papers on the hooks.

The Weather Bureau reports commanded first and universal attention. More rain meant, perhaps, another inch or two of rainfall on ten thousand square miles, and that meant millions upon millions of cubic feet of water to run off into brooks, creeks, rivers, and at last down the narrow channel of the main outlet, at the rate of a million feet or more a second.

There were reports in the air that levees had given way, and some at least of these reports were true. Out on the bottoms rescuers found places where houses had been swept from their foundations, and no one knew whether the occupants had escaped or not. Children were taken sick in the refugee tents and had to be gotten into warmer, better quarters. Pneumonia caught some of the people who had been exposed to the rigors of the weather.

Mr. Carruth went out with another man in a motor-boat, and roamed a long way into the back country, to make sure that all those in jeopardy had been taken to safety. His wife went into the temporary hospital, to help look after sick children. When they could, they went to the bulletin board and the telegraph office, to see if any one had reported their own boat as salvaged down the river. A bundle of St. Louis newspapers arrived in town, and all the flood news was read aloud to groups of people in the stores or the camps, or wherever there were listeners.

"St. Francis Bottoms all under water," was one item. "Memphis flood pumps are working top speed," was another. For hundreds of miles down the river the workers were gathering to fight the river at the levees, building up the long dirt embankments and strengthening them. "New Madrid, Point Pleasant, and Tiptonville are isolated, and no word can be had from them till boat communication is established," the paper reported. "Floods are meeting at Cairo, and all industries have stopped, to put the men on the levees," was another item. From Helena, Arkansas, came word that thousands of head of cattle had taken refuge on Crowley’s ridge, and that rescue work in the plantations and settlements was going on as rapidly as possible.

So many people had been brought to safety that it was impossible to give their names. Only when some accident or tragedy had occurred, some feature of special purport or interest or of general value appeared, did the reporters try to give names. Many times they spoke of the "people of Gum Brake Ridge," or "the Marked Tree residents," or some other group, as all being affected by the same flood wave or rescue.

From up-river Cape Girardeau heard appeals to watch for scores of people, whose names were given. Families sought families, individuals sought their relatives, and among the last was a river-man named Veraine.

"I had two boys," he told sympathetic listeners. "They was carried out onto a raft, and was gone before I could get a skiff, or anything, to them. Our skiff was caught in a squeeze." "Probably they’ve landed on the other side."

"There’s hope!" The man shook his head. "I’d come down sooner, only I found two-three people up above, and had to row ’em back to a camp. It’s Grand Tower Suck that I’m afraid of. Laws, laws! You never saw anything like it is, now. I saw a two-hundred-foot barge drawed in there; she went around and around, an’ the bow went down and the stern went up, and she went around and around, on her nose. Then down she went, way down into the eddy, out o’ sight, and that’s the last o’ that barge. Everything sucks down, there. They say a steamboat went in there, one time, and never a stick of her come out again. I hope that old whirlpool didn’t get my boys."

There was not a word of comfort for him, there at the Cape. He knew that it would take thirty hours or more for a drift to come down from where his boys had gone out into it. He thought there was no use in looking farther. If they hadn’t found a haven—he turned disconsolately back up the river, and returned to his own eddy, to gather in timber, drift logs, and other salvage, resuming thus the occupation at which he made a part of his living.

Every hour was crowded in Cape Girardeau, which was almost wholly undamaged by the flood. Its people turned out to help those who had suffered in the bottoms, and scores of other towns were helpful in the same way. The most active of the workers, coming in sight of the river, would stop and gaze at the passing volumes of water and the acres and acres of black drift, going irresistibly down the valley. It looked as though whole forests, towns, and grain-fields must have yielded their all to make that raft of débris and flotsam that went by at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour, night and day, during the rise of the river from the time it went over its banks and the river ice ran out.

Worst of all, the water crept farther up the inclines and ascended the emergency gage inch by inch, so slowly that the gaze could hardly see a change at the water’s edge; in driblets it filled hoof-marks in the mud; it washed across the levels in little wavelets and did not recede.

"She’s booming! Old Mississip’s booming!" people whispered, and old men told tales of 1844, 1882, 1898, and 1903. There were many things, in between, to remember about the great river!

Patiently the Carruths did what they could, waiting for word—if ever word should come!—of Sibley.