Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 14.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Leaving Leavenworth and Kansas behind (although he thought he might drive up through the John Brown country of the eastern Kansas borderlands when the trip was at last in its final stages), Max crossed the river back into Missouri, driving north through the farmlands of Platte and Buchanan Counties on his way to St Joseph.

He'd never learned precisely where Tom's regiment would have been stationed here.  Up on the hill at the old Fort Smith?  Probably down in town.  Didn't matter.  He only wanted to get a general feel for the lay of the land.

Memories of the physicality of the country will be useful in retrospect when I know more in the future.

Time had been compressed and heated and melted and squeezed and re-congealed into a solid, metamorphic object.

Past and future and present.  All the same:  a deep-stacked manifold of long passed days, thin as onion skin.  Geologic pressure acting on sediment.  Filmy veils of crystalline nanopaper pressed incalculably close.  Casimir Effect.

During Tom's childhood long parades of steamers would have been vying for passage all the way up the Missouri River as far as St Joe, tying together this veritable Lover's Leap into the West all the way back, by way of the Ohio River, to Pittsburgh.  Removing his hat and putting it down in the vacant seat next to him, Max wiped his forehead and swept back his hair and looked at the clock.  Six-thirty flat.

Two hours stolen away.

He considered those steamer days when the bison holocaust was underway, boats loaded with their stinking hides at anchor up and down the river banks.  Indians mixing and trading freely with white men, slaves, French, German, Italian, Welsh and Irish pioneers and tawdry hangers-on.  Great herds of antelope and elk still rambled over the rolling Missouri plains then.  Exotic, blanketed Indians alongside shaggy mountain men clad in fringed buckskin with tangled beards and sunburnt cheeks.  Blacksmiths and other tinkerers laboring to stamp out uncountable numbers of wagon wheels for the big push West, hot workrooms full of men at their anvils and their hammers ringing incessantly all day and late into the night.  He pictured herds of nervous cattle and teams of mules contending for right of way through the dusty white streets, and great red oxen, resolute, plowing over anyone foolish enough to get in their way, with their heavy yokes and complex harnesses of straps buckled over their brutish and brawny bodies.  Always the oxen trains before the mules.  That was the season of cholera, too, billions of vibrioids burning through St Louis downriver, and the sick and the hypochondriacs alike subsisting on a nasty, inefficacious mash of cornmeal doused in whiskey.  A few years later, consumed by a different disease ‑‑ gold fever ‑‑ forty-niners swarmed through St Joe, their red eyes fixed and staring at the open plains, delirious for California.

Joseph and Louis were sainted cousins, endpoints on the Little Dixie river arc, he thought, but it was the railroad chord strung between them that turned St Joe into the great jumping off point.  Kansas City was only a remote landing at the end of a crude boardwalk.  St Joe the most populous city only after St Louis.  Train from Samuel Clemens' Hannibal bearing civilians, soldiers and Pony Express mail.  Take a chance.  Take a chance.  Go West. 

A month before secessionist governor Claiborne Fox Jackson was driven out of Jefferson City, Merriwether Jeff Thompson briefly thrust St Joseph into national headlines by hacking down the stars and stripes from its position above the post office and hurling it down to a crowd of rabid, rodential rowdies in the street below, who passionately ripped it to shreds.  This notorious incident ushered in numerous exchanges in martial and quasi-martial dominations over the local civil sector as Union forces and ruthless bushwhackers vied with varying degrees of exuberance, or lack thereof, for control of northwest Missouri throughout the war.  The Pony Express was defunct before the year was out, and the town would never fully recover its reputation or former glory.

Through four decades the endless, melodious steam whistle calls drifted up from the muddy Missouri.  But now, as he drove alongside the river, St Joseph looked to him like any bleary, busy city, almost without character, nondescript warehouses and silos, heavy traffic, modern and industrial.

The river bluffs tumble and melt down like the ruins of another conquered Goliath.  Another supine giant fallen alongside a wild river's corrosive edge.  Maybe the mud-churned bones of drowned fenians once upon a time rolled along under these bluffs, all the way down from Montana.  Meagher ‑‑ Here?  So far from home? ‑‑ What the Kell?  Book of Balls.  Insular hero, Meagher; not continental.  Fare thee well the great fluttering emerald banner.

He stopped by the little white clapboard house with dark green shutters where Robert Ford killed Jesse James two decades after the war began.  The surrounding streets were empty.  Quiet.  He looked around a little, soon convincing himself there wasn't anything to see.  It was getting on seven already and the shadows were lengthening.  Tomorrow would be a long day.

He'd seen what he needed to see here.  The general lay of the land.  There was no reason to spend any more time in St Joseph.