"Every steamboat was a
gambling house, and there used to be big games before the war."

"How big?"

"Well," he returned, "as Captain Leathers once put it, it used to be
'nigger ante and plantation limit.' And that's no joke about playing for
niggers either. Those old planters would play for anything. I've known
people to get on a boat at Yazoo City to come to Vicksburg, and get in a
game, and never get off at Vicksburg at all--just go back to Yazoo; yes,
and come down again, to keep the game going.

"There was a saloon called the Exchange near our house in Yazoo, and I
remember once my father got into a game, there, with a gambler named
Spence Thrift. That was before the war. Thrift was a terrible stiff
bluffer. When he got ready to clean up, he'd shove up his whole pile.
Well, he did that to my father. Thrift's pile was twenty-two hundred
dollars, and all my father had in front of him was eight hundred. But he
owned a young negro named Calvin, so he called Calvin, and told him:
'Here, boy! Jump up on the table.' That equalled the gambler's pile; and
it finished him--he threw down his hand, beaten.

"Business in those times was done largely on friendship. It used to be
said that I 'owned' the Yazoo River when I was running my line. I knew
everybody up there. They were my friends, and they gave me their
business for that reason, and also because I brought the cotton down
here to Vicksburg, and reshipped it from here on, down the river. It was
considered an advantage to reship cotton because moving it from one boat
to another knocked the mud off the bales.

"There used to be some enormous cargoes of cotton carried. The largest
boat on the river was the _Henry Frank_, owned by Frank Hicks of
Memphis. She ran between Memphis and New Orleans, and on one trip
carried 9226 bales. Those were the old-style bales, of course. They
weighed 425 to 450 pounds each, as against 550 to 600 pounds, which is
the weight of a bale to-day, now that powerful machinery is used to make
them. The heavy bale came into use partly to beat transportation
charges, as rates were not made by weight, but at so much per bale.

"The land up the Yazoo belonged to the State, and the State sold it for
$1.25 per acre. The fellows that got up there first weren't any too
anxious to see new folks coming in and entering land. Used to try all
kinds of schemes to get them out.

"There were two brothers up there named Parker. One of them was a
surveyor--we