Free Faith and Betrayal by Sally Denton Page A

barely above the water’s edge surrounded this deck. “On the inner side of the gallery is a row of cabins,” she wrote, “with two doors each—one opening onto the gallery, the other into the saloon, which is 150 feet in length by 30 feet in width.” The ladies’ cabin was separate, and “splendidly furnished with sofas, rocking chairs, work tables, and a piano. The floor, as well as the saloon’s, is covered with Brussels carpeting.” There was also “a smoking room for the gentlemen,” equipped with numerous card tables for gambling. A contemporary of Jean Rio’s, the English artist Frederick Hawkins Piercy, described the steamers as “floating palaces, open to, and for the use of, all who can pay, negroes excepted.” Piercy continued, “A colored man, however well educated or wealthy, dare not show his nose in the saloon, he must confine himself to the deck, with the deck hands.”
    A staircase ascended to the upper deck, where the officers’ cabins and the pilothouse were located. “The one forward encloses the steering wheel. Here stands the pilot completely secluded from the wind and weather,” wrote Jean Rio. The pilot communicated with the engineers and laborers below by means of bell signals.
    The captain explained the mechanism of the ship to Jean Rio, showing her two ropes attached to the wheel and then to a lever that moved the rudder. “The whole arrangement is very simple and the elevated position of the pilot, forty feet above the lower deck, enables him to see and avoid the collision with snags, which are plentiful still though the government has done much toward clearing them away,” she wrote. Snag boats routinely patrolled the river, sending divers down to cut the debris from the river bottom. Like icebergs in the ocean, the “snags and sawyers” posed a great risk to the steamboats. “A snag is a large tree which has either been uprooted by a hurricane or loosened by an inundation, and at last been blown into the river.” The heaviest part of the tree sinks to the bottom and becomes fixed in the mud in an upright position. As the foliage decays the naked trunk remains above the surface of the water. A sawyer is far more dangerous, she learned, for it is the same as a snag except that the top of the tree remains invisible below the surface. Steamboats hitting a sawyer could sink within minutes.
    “I have run away from the upper deck, which is not a very pleasant place except in cloudy weather . . . although on a moonlit night the view is delightful, at least to such an admirer of wild scenery as I.” In a headwind, the upper deck was covered with hot cinders. “They burn wood, not coal, and when the steam gets low or they want to pass a steamer in advance of them, the firemen throw on resin by shovelfuls.” As an official mail carrier, the
Concordia
was the fastest boat on the river, gliding past enormous sugar plantations and tropical groves on both shores.
    Within five days Jean Rio and her company had arrived in St. Louis. She was fortunate to have the financial wherewithal that allowed her to linger and truly observe a part of her new country, as she had done in New Orleans. Now she was determined to experience St. Louis, the exciting frontier outfitting post for all of the expeditions heading west in the expansionist fever of the moment. Besides which, she knew her group would be more comfortable ensconced in a home in St. Louis than sleeping on the ground at the overcrowded base camp. She calculated the time it would take her to rendezvous with the Saints at Council Bluffs before they began their long wagon-train journey to Utah, and then rented a large house, where she intended to remain for several weeks. She hired a team of men to bring her party’s numerous personal effects there, including the unwieldy crated piano.
    With two parlors, two bedrooms, and an outhouse “answering all the purposes of kitchen and washhouse,” the temporary residence was a welcome respite