association decreed (for this was before all the
outsiders had been taken into the pilots' association) that if any
captain employed a non-association pilot, he should be forced to
discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars. Several of
these heavy fines were paid before the captains' organization grew
strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership; but that
all ceased, presently. The captains tried to get the pilots to decree
that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-association
captain; but this proposition was declined. The pilots saw that they
would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow, and so
they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances.

As I have remarked, the pilots' association was now the compactest
monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible. And
yet the days of its glory were numbered. First, the new railroad
stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to Northern
railway centers, began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers;
next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating
industry during several years, leaving most of the pilots idle, and the
cost of living advancing all the time; then the treasurer of the St.
Louis association put his hand into the till and walked off with every
dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the railroads intruding
everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the war was over,
but carry freights; so straightway some genius from the Atlantic coast
introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to New
Orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the
twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science
of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past!

Chapter 16 Racing Days

IT was always the custom for the boats to leave New Orleans between four
and five o'clock in the afternoon. From three o'clock onward they would
be burning rosin and pitch pine (the sign of preparation), and so one
had the picturesque spectacle of a rank, some two or three miles long,
of tall, ascending columns of coal-black smoke; a colonnade which
supported a sable roof of the same smoke blended together and spreading
abroad over the city. Every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at
the jack-staff, and sometimes a duplicate on the verge staff astern. Two
or three miles of mates were c