Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/68



HE Mississippi River drains several empires. The Trans-Missouri Prairie, the Corn, the Middle West, the Breast-Bone of the Continent, the Cotton, the Oil, are some of these empires. The river is itself an empire with treasures of pearls and a people of its own—the shantyboaters.

More than fifty thousand people live in floating river homes—houseboats varying in size from tiny tent-cabined skiffs to great show boats carrying half a hundred men, women, and children. These shantyboaters have their own floating stores, boarding houses, mission boats, sacred concerts, recluses, grafters, doctors, drifters, whisky boats and countless other up-the-bank phenomena as well as their own particular occupations. They are River Gypsies.

Some of them hardly ever come in contact with people on the river shores. They hide down lonesome bends, and lurk in old river lakes. Perhaps away back yonder, somewhere, some time, they did some meanness and a sheriff would be glad to trouble them for a reward. Others live in city eddies, or up a tributary moored permanently to the bank at some city, 62