But the change of changes was on the ‘levee.’  This time, a departure from the rule.  Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones!  This was melancholy, this was woeful.  The absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard-saloon was explained.  He was absent because he is no more.  His occupation is gone, his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd, he grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous.  Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used to contend!{footnote [Capt.  Marryat, writing forty-five years ago says:  ’St. Louis has 20,000 inhabitants.  The river abreast of the town is crowded with steamboats, lying in two or three tiers.’]} Here was desolation, indeed.

’The old, old sea, as one in tears, Comes murmuring, with foamy lips, And knocking at the vacant piers, Calls for his long-lost multitude of ships.’

The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it well and completely.  The mighty bridge, stretching along over our heads, had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation.  Remains of former steamboatmen told me, with wan satisfaction, that the bridge doesn’t pay.  Still, it can be no sufficient compensation to a corpse, to know that the dynamite that laid him out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be.

The pavements along the river front were bad:  the sidewalks were rather out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud.  All this was familiar and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays, and struggling throngs of men, and mountains of freight, were gone; and Sabbath reigned in their stead.  The immemorial mile of cheap foul doggeries remained, but business was dull with them; the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed, and in their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes, some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep.  St. Louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city; but the river-edge of it seems dead past resurrection.

Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead!  A strangely short life for so majestic a creature.  Of course it is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating may be called dead.

It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing the freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week.  The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing; and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition was out of the question.