Free The Great American Steamboat Race by Benton Rain Patterson Page B

who instructed Snodgrass to tell Cannon, “I wish it had been his blankety-blank neck.” 15
    After passing St. Joseph, despite its best efforts to catch up, the Natchez was still more than eight minutes behind the Robert E. Lee . To make matters worse, it had to make a stop at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, while the Lee would be able to keep up its steady pace. At Grand Gulf, which it reached a little past 5:15 P . M . on Friday, the Natchez took on ten passengers who were Captain Leathers’s regular customers and who were making their annual trip north. They had booked passage on the Natchez on its previous trip, and Leathers, true to his word and the notice he had placed in the Picayune , was taking care of his customers. But he lost another eight minutes in getting the passengers and their trunks and other baggage aboard, which could only have further distressed him, having learned that the Lee had steamed past the landing twenty minutes earlier.
    For all his braggadocio, gruffness and intimidating manner, Tom Leathers had a heart that could be touched, and his faithfulness to his Grand Gulf passengers was but one example. His generosity showed in the number of times he had given free passage to ministers, priests and nuns and to individuals who were desperate for transportation but unable to pay. Sometimes he even put them in staterooms aboard the Natchez . The professional gambler George Devol, a frequent passenger on Leathers’s boats, once came upon a woman who needed passage for herself and her six children but was unable to pay the price of the tickets. Moved by the woman’s plight, Devol doffed his top hat and passed it among the Natchez ’s passengers and officers while the boat was docked. According to Devol, all of them put something in the hat except for one man. Devol then took the hatful of bank notes and silver coins to Leathers, standing on the hurricane deck, showed it to him, told him about the poor woman and said what he had collected should be enough to pay for tickets for the woman and her kids. Leathers, though, refused to take the money. “Give the money to the woman,” he told Devol. He then instructed the Natchez ’s chief clerk, Samuel Ayles, to book the family into a stateroom and treat them as if they had paid the full first-class fare.
    Devol made his way back to the woman, gave her the money he had collected and returned to the Natchez ’s saloon, where he took over a table and opened up a game of three-card monte. One of the first players he attracted was the man who had declined to contribute when Devol passed his hat. Devol took him for eight hundred dollars, to the delight of the other passengers, who taunted him, one of them asking, “Aren’t you sorry you didn’t give something to the woman before you lost your money?”
    The man complained to Leathers, to no avail. Leathers refused him both help and sympathy. 16
After Grand Gulf came Hard Times, Louisiana, and then Vicksburg would be next. The St. Louis reporter on the Natchez narrated the voyage :
    The scenes on board, as we witness the crowds and hear the shouting, cannot be portrayed. At this hour we are approaching Vicksburg, the Lee being still considerably ahead. But we are surely, though slowly lessening the distance.
    Sometimes in a long stretch of clear river she is plainly in sight, then a bend shuts her out, all but her smoke, which hangs away off northward like a dense cloud; then an island or a sudden projection of woodland hides all traces of our lively rival from our view. We feel safe but keep wonderfully busy, because we know she is there going like lightning. There is life and wakefulness and speed and determination in the swiftly following vessel, which will give us the victory before we are done with her. These occasional glimpses of the Lee seem to give the Natchez more muscle and force her to her very best. 17
    The Natchez had to make another stop at Vicksburg, to discharge seventeen passengers and take on