Huck and Jim’s little raft is not made of logs, as it is often depicted in illustrations, but of sawn planks, and it was originally part of a much larger raft. Beidler explains why this matters and describes the other rivercraft that appear in the book. He gives what will almost certainly be the last word on the vexed question of whether the lengthy “raft episode,” removed at the publisher’s suggestion from the novel, should be restored to its original place.
Huck and Jim’s little raft is not made of logs, as it is often depicted in illustrations, but of sawn planks, and it was originally part of a much larger raft. Beidler explains why this matters and describes the other rivercraft that appear in the book. He gives what will almost certainly be the last word on the vexed question of whether the lengthy “raft episode,” removed at the publisher’s suggestion from the novel, should be restored to its original place.
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Overview
Huck and Jim’s little raft is not made of logs, as it is often depicted in illustrations, but of sawn planks, and it was originally part of a much larger raft. Beidler explains why this matters and describes the other rivercraft that appear in the book. He gives what will almost certainly be the last word on the vexed question of whether the lengthy “raft episode,” removed at the publisher’s suggestion from the novel, should be restored to its original place.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826273987 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 02/02/2018 |
| Series: | Mark Twain and His Circle |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 24 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Peter G. Beidler is the Lucy G. Moses Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at Lehigh University and has written many books, including A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"A little section of a lumber raft"
A Rise, a Raft, a Crib
What was Huck and Jim's raft like? Two recent books suggest the scope of the world's confusion about how to answer that simple question. In 2002 Lee Smith published a novel called The Last Girls. Most of its action takes place on a luxury tourist steamboat traveling downriver from Memphis to New Orleans in 1999. The main characters are two aging graduates of a fictional all-women's southern school named Mary Scott College. These women are a small subset of a larger group of twelve young women who, inspired by their reading of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn about thirty-five years earlier in their sophomore Great Authors course, had decided to replicate Huck's raft journey down the Mississippi River. We learn about that earlier raft journey to New Orleans in a series of flashbacks.
In 1965 these twelve women, the "last girls" of Mary Scott College, had placed an ad in a riverboat magazine for a pilot to supervise the construction of a large raft and then to guide them on their journey south. The following fictional article from a June 10, 1965, Paducah, Kentucky, newspaper provides a succinct statement of the kind of raft the young women used for their "Huck Finn" journey south:
PADUCAH, Ky. (AP) — "We can't believe we're finally going to do it!" were the parting words of twelve excited Mary Scott College students about to begin their "Huck Finn" journey down the Mississippi River on a raft.
The adventuresome misses weighed anchor at 1:15 p.m. today, bound for New Orleans, 950 miles south. Their departure was delayed when one of the "crew" threw an anchor into the river with no rope attached, necessitating a bikini-clad recovery operation, to the crowd's delight. "Hey, New Orleans is that away!" shouted local wags as the ramshackle craft finally left land, hours later than planned.
Their skipper, seventy-four-year-old retired riverboat captain Gordon S. Cartwright, answered an ad that the girls had run in a riverboat magazine, writing them that he would pilot their raft down the river for nothing. He plans to make eight or nine miles an hour during daylight, tie up at night, and reach New Orleans in ten or twelve days. ...
The raft, named the Daisy Pickett, was built by a Paducah construction company under Captain Cartwright's supervision. Resembling a floating porch, the Daisy Pickett is a forty-by-sixteen-foot wooden platform with plyboard sides, built on fifty-two oil drums and powered by two forty-horsepower motors. It cost $1800 to build. The raft has a superstructure of two-by-fours with a tarpaulin top that the "sailors" can pull up over it, mosquito netting that they can hang up, and a shower consisting of a bucket overhead with a long rope attached to it.
Living provisions are piled in corners of the raft, with army cots around the walls for sleeping. Some girls will have to sleep on the floor each night, or on land. A roughly lettered sign spelling "Galley" leads into a two-by-four plywood enclosure with canned goods, hot dog buns, and other odds and ends of food supplies. The girls will take turns on "KP duty" and have a small wood-burning stove in one corner.
To call such a trip a "Huck Finn journey" is of course ludicrous on almost every level. Huck's journey was a matter of life or death, of freedom or bondage. For the "girls" of Mary Scott College, it is an expensive holiday, a game with nothing more at risk than a few mosquito bites. The Daisy Pickett, designed and captained by an experienced riverboat professional, is about as different from Huck's raft as possible: it is more than three times bigger and has a tarpaulin covering, a mosquito net, a galley, and a shower. It is buoyed up by a lot of empty oil barrels. Furthermore, the raft is powered by two outboard motors and so is not, as Huck and Jim's raft was, dependent on the downward pull of the river current. As we shall see, Huck and Jim's raft was nothing like the Daisy Pickett. Anyone who reads The Last Girls hoping to learn something about Huck and Jim's actual raft will be seriously misled.
When I saw a 2004 book called Huck's Raft, I was delighted. Finally, I thought, someone was going to answer the many questions I had about the raft on which Huck and Jim make their escape from what oppresses them in St. Petersburg: cruel parents, unfeeling slave owners, and greedy runaway-slave chasers, silly companions, and self-serving notions of what it is to be "sivilized." But no, Huck's Raft said almost nothing about either Huck or the raft that he and Jim share on the Mississippi. The author, Steven Mintz, never talks about the raft as a raft but only refers to it as a symbol, and then only in a few sentences like these: "The image of Huck's raft encapsulates the modern conception of childhood as a period of peril and freedom; an odyssey of psychological self-discovery and growth; and a world apart, with its own values, culture, and psychology" (5); and "Those who cannot adjust are cast adrift, to float aimlessly in a river that threatens to sink their lonely raft" (383). Furthermore, the scraggly raft in the fuzzy cover photograph (fig. 1.1) is nothing at all like the raft that Huck describes for us in his book.
In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the river rises and falls, the people come and go, and the scenery changes. The raft provides the only steady home that Huck and Jim know. The raft is the physical and spiritual centerpiece of the novel. Surely, then, we owe it to Mark Twain to try to answer some fundamental questions about it: What exactly was a raft? Who owned this one? Was it a log raft or a lumber raft? How was it put together? How big was it? How was it propelled? Where did it come from? How hard was it to stop such a raft once it was in motion? How much did Twain himself know about how rafts were assembled? How accurate are the many artistic renderings of Huck and Jim's raft?
Whose raft is it, anyhow?
The title Huck's Raft is misleading in another sense, as well, since it erases Jim's co-ownership of the raft. I prefer to call it "Huck and Jim's raft" because they found it together: "One night we catched a little section of a lumber raft" (HF 60). Later Huck refers to it as "our raft" (HF 88). After the collision with the steamboat, Jim tells Huck about how he had repaired "our ole raf'," to which Huck replies, "You mean to say our old raft warn't smashed all to flinders!" Jim explains that some of the local slaves had found the raft caught on a snag and had argued about which of them owned it the most. Jim tells Huck that he had insisted to them that the raft did not "b'long to none uv um, but to you en me" (HF 150).
Of course, legally speaking, since Huck is a minor, his share of the raft could have been claimed by his father, and Jim cannot at the start of the novel be even part owner of the raft, since it was illegal for slaves to own anything. According to pre–Civil War law, then, the raft had initially belonged to Huck's pap and Miss Watson, Jim's owner. In fact, however, both Huck's pap and Miss Watson had died early on, the former in the floating house and the latter "two months ago" (HF 357). Once Jim was set free in her will, he was eligible to own half the raft. During most of the time span covered in the novel, then, Huck and Jim are the rightful co-owners of the raft, although during most of that time neither knows it.
This is not the place to go into the technical details of maritime salvage laws, but it would appear that Huck and Jim's little raft had been abandoned by its original owner, who had no intention of trying to reclaim it. Speaking of the abandonment of "a vessel, raft, or other craft," Martin Norris wrote that "abandoning maritime property within the meaning of the salvage law is the act of leaving or deserting such property by those who were in charge of it, without hope on their part of recovering it and without the intention of returning to it." Twain gave no indication that the little raft legally belonged to anyone but Huck and Jim.
What does Huck mean by the term raft?
We now tend to think of a raft either as a stationary floating structure held up by a flotation device of some sort and designed to provide a safe place where swimmers can rest and bask in the sun or as an inflatable boat designed to carry people down some risky rapids, as in whitewater rafting. For Huck and Jim, however, a raft was a temporary binding together of floating logs or lumber. It was designed to drift with the river current while being minimally moved or reoriented by the raftsmen. A raft was built not to carry something else but to convey itself; that is, the raft was its own cargo. A river raft was made to take advantage of the free river current to carry logs or lumber downriver to sawmills or markets.
In Huck's time rafts usually did carry a crew, but these raftsmen were not passengers being taken to a place they wanted to visit or see. They were workmen helping to nudge a raft safely to its destination. Indeed, the men's own destination was behind them. When they had delivered the raft, the raftsmen boarded a steamboat and went back upriver to their homes, leaving the raft to be dismantled. Occasionally a piece of a raft was appropriated for other purposes, such as quietly helping fugitives — like boys, slaves, kings, and dukes — escape their pursuers, but that was not its original, or defining, purpose.
Huck mentions two kinds of rafts, the log raft and the lumber raft. The defining purpose of a log raft was to float logs to a sawmill to be turned into lumber. A log raft was typically a single log in thickness, so could be floated down very shallow rivers. The defining purpose of a lumber raft was to float milled planks, boards, and beams to a town downriver to be dismantled and turned into houses, barns, bridges, boats, or furniture. A lumber raft was usually about two feet thick and so could be launched only on rivers that were deep or that became deep when rain or upstream melting snow made them so.
Early in Huckleberry Finn, while he is living with his pap in an old log shanty on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River three miles upstream from St. Petersburg, Huck notices that the river has begun to rise:
I noticed some pieces of limbs and such things floating down, and a sprinkling of bark; so I knowed the river had begun to rise. I reckoned I would have great times, now, if I was over at the town. The June rise used to be always luck for me; because as soon as that rise begins, here comes cord-wood floating down, and pieces of log rafts — sometimes a dozen logs together; so all you have to do is to catch them and sell them to the wood yards and the sawmill. (HF 37)
What was a log raft?
A log raft was made up of floating round lengths of tree trunk with the bark still intact but with the limbs cut off. The logs were fastened or corralled together, not to carry people or cargo but because the logs themselves had to be held together as they drifted downstream to a sawmill. Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi of the danger that log rafts posed for steamboats:
Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way cautiously along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly be broken by yells and a clamor of tin pans, and all in an instant a log raft would appear vaguely through the webby veil, close upon us; and then we did not wait to swap knives, but snatched our engine-bells out by the roots and piled on all the steam we had, to scramble out of the way! One doesn't hit a rock or a solid log raft with a steamboat when he can get excused. (LM 292)
Occasionally a small log raft was used for other purposes before it could be joined to other small rafts to make one big raft or before it was dismantled at a sawmill. For example, in chapter 13 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper become "pirates" by "capturing" just above St. Petersburg "a small log raft." Because it is not said to be a piece, a part, a fragment, a section, or a segment of a larger raft, and because it already has steering oars in place fore and aft, we can safely assume that it had been built as a separate raft and guided down a narrow or shallow tributary to the big river.
Charles Russell, one of the early historians of the rafting industry, wrote about a raftsman named Stephen Hanks who in the winter of 1837–1838 went out to cut trees along the upper Mississippi River to supply the sawmill of a relative. He cut the trees into sawlogs and then made them "into rafts, little rafts, eight or ten logs in each, and helped to float them down to the mill." The small log raft that Tom Sawyer's "pirates" "capture" was apparently a raft like that. Tom and his fellow pretend pirates use the steering oars to maneuver their raft out to the middle of the Mississippi and then to land it on Jackson's Island. They leave it there and go ashore. Soon a rise in the river carries it off. It is found some days later washed up on the riverbank five or six miles below St. Petersburg. What the boys used as a pretend pirate ship had apparently been built merely to be floated to a sawmill.
The logs in the log rafts that Huck describes in Huckleberry Finn are sawlogs — that is, round logs with the branches cut off, most commonly in lengths of twelve or sixteen feet, ready to be made into lumber in a sawmill. These logs were typically held together in rafts by long poles attached crosswise and by ropes, chains, or (later) steel cables. Large log rafts could be very large indeed (fig. 1.2), far too large and heavy for a boy in a canoe or a skiff to tow. Besides, a large log raft would have been manned by raftsmen who would have prevented Huck from taking it.
It is important to notice that Huck speaks of finding "pieces of log rafts." Sometimes a large log raft would hit a snag, a rock, or an island, or be struck by a steamboat, and have a piece torn away. Walter A. Blair describes such a collision: "One of the Northern Line packets, going up river in the night, ran into a raft, under way, and did it considerable damage. George Tromley, the pilot of the raft, made a claim on the Packet Company, when he delivered his raft to Saint Louis. ... The bill was then promptly paid, with costs." The owner of a damaged large log raft would have had good financial reason to keep his men on the larger raft, abandoning the smaller pieces of just a few logs. Abandoned pieces of log rafts were in theory the property of the company that cut them, fastened them together, and floated them downriver, but in practice they were often abandoned and so considered salvage by those who could "catch" them and tow them to a local sawmill. The owners of the sawmills were not fussy about asking for proof of ownership. They were happy to pay cash for good sawlogs.
One afternoon Huck and his pap go out to the riverbank to see what the rising Mississippi has brought them:
The river was coming up pretty fast, and lots of drift-wood going by on the rise. By and by, along comes part of a log raft — nine logs fast together. We went out with the skiff and towed it ashore. Then we had dinner. Anybody but pap would a waited and seen the day through, so as to catch more stuff; but that warn't pap's style. Nine logs was enough for one time; he must shove right over to town and sell. (HF 39)
A river on the rise picked up lots of useless wood — limbs, branches, and stumps — that Jim and Huck refer to as "drift-wood" (HF 39, 42, 54), but floating sawlogs and log rafts were not useless. They represented cash in hand.
In Huck's time sawmills were often situated on riverbanks. There were three reasons for this. First, the early upper-river sawmills ran on water power, using either a waterwheel or a water turbine. Steam-powered sawmills replaced water-powered ones, especially on the lower Mississippi, where the river was wide, the current was slower, and the water level fluctuated greatly. Tom Sawyer's uncle, Silas Phelps, is said to own and run "a little steam sawmill that was on the bank" (HF 271). Second, the river brought to the sawmill floating sawlogs and log rafts from upriver. Third, the river gave the sawmill operators a way to float the sawed lumber downriver to markets. The Mississippi and its upper tributaries, then, provided not only cheap energy to run the sawmills but also cheap transportation for log rafts coming in from upriver and for lumber rafts going downriver to markets like St. Louis and New Orleans. The key feature of the Mississippi River was that it moved. What floated on it moved also.
As soon as his pap disappears across the river to sell his nine-log raft to the sawmill, Huck makes his escape in the drift canoe he had previously retrieved from the Mississippi. Early the next morning he finds himself at the head of Jackson's Island. It is still dark, but from his vantage point he can see a big raft in the moonlight:
A monstrous big lumber-raft was about a mile up stream, coming along down, with a lantern in the middle of it. I watched it come creeping down, and when it was most abreast of where I stood, I heard a man say, "Stern oars, there! — heave her head to stabboard [starboard, or right]!" (HF 44)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Rafts & Other Rivercraft in Huckleberry Finn"
by .
Copyright © 2018 The Curators of the University of Missouri.
Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents - Rafts and Other RivercraftAcknowledgments
Introduction “On such a craft as that”: Some Basic Questions
1. “A little section of a lumber raft”: A Rise, a Raft, a Crib
2. “Right in the middle of the wigwam”: Shelter, Oars, Smallpox
3. “Riding high like a duck”: Canoes, Boats, Ferries
4. “In amongst some bundles of shingles”: A Baby, a Barrel, a Home
5. “Generally known as a ‘sucker’”: A Boy, a Raft, a River
Works Consulted
Index