July 22, 1905.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
half a mile long. It was iJ 4 in. rope. Instead of row- 
ing the boat inshore, when it was desired to make a 
landing, Young sent a couple of boys in a rowboat 
toward the bank, dragging the end of the handy line. 
The boys ran ashore, and took a turn around a tree- 
stub, or half a dozen saplings, and then took half 
hitches with the end of the rope around the line, fasten- 
ing it securely. This done they jumped away a few 
yards, while the whole weight of the boats came on 
the little line and whipped it up taut. The boat end of 
the rope was fastened around two bulkheads with four 
or five turns made criss-cross. The old boatman 
slacked the line, as the strain increased almost to the 
breaking point, and the current swung the boats ashore, 
broadsid^e to, into some eddy chosen by the 'appearance 
of the land from a distance of a mile or so. The rope 
smoked and screamed and frayed where it dragged on 
the posts in a manner that was most entertaining to the 
Medicine Man, river rat that he was. It was a new 
idea to him. He thought of getting a handy line for 
his own boat, as a saving-of-work measure, but he for- 
got it when we reached Greenville. 
We came into Greenville with a rush. We discovered 
the town across a point, and sight of it caused Young 
to make up his mind to land. He sent the handy line 
ashore, and we were thrown in on the starboard side, 
threatening to crush our cabin boats against a caving 
bank. The Medicine Man and I shot our boat clear, 
while the Gambler created a mighty fuss getting his 
little shack out. The Medicine Man and I went on 
down with the current, and found an eddy above Green- 
ville, where we tied in for the night. 
There had been hungry times on the boat. The flour 
.was nearly all gone, in spite of rigorous economy. We 
had only a little salt pork, and not enough other stuff 
to make a meal from when we reached the landing. 
The first thing the Medicine Man and I did was to go 
down to a restaurant and get a meal of Gulf of Mexico- 
oysters. The price was high, but there were plenty of 
the oysters, considering that we had eaten what was 
left of our grub before going to town. 
Greenville was another behind-the-levee town, but 
a much neater looking one than any of those we had 
stopped at above. Neat houses, streets laid out In rec- 
tangles, and the atmosphere of prosperity ryere con- 
fSpicuous. 
In the morning we bought temporary supplies after 
walking around a while in order to get the lay of the 
land as regards stores and their prices. _ No one is 
more careful than the river man in finding the best 
bargains a town affords. We found Nolen’s store, and 
were surprised at the low prices. Our few purchases 
made, we walked back up the levee toward our boat, 
which was' moored in one of the stone-lined eddies 
above town, where The river’s eating into the bank has 
threatened the existence of the city. 
We had gone to the upper cabin boats with which 
the waterfront of Greenville is lined, in and out of 
the water, when the Medicine Man exclaimed: “There’s 
the Fines’ boat!” It was a little green craft, and on 
our going down to it, we found Mr. and Mrs. Leon 
Fine, of Dixon, 111 . Perhaps no more interesting 
couple was on the Mississippi River at that time. Fine 
was .a painter by trade. Neither he nor his wife had 
ever been a hundred miles from their own home town 
when the Rock River, flowing past their home, sug- 
gested that they go traveling. They had heard of a 
cabin or houseboat, but never had seen one. They 
talked with Fred Watermans, Fine’s Partner, and Mrs. 
Watermans. They decided to go on a cruise down the 
river to the Mississippi and perhaps go as far as St. 
Louis. They built a cabin boat from an idea they had 
formed of what cabin boats were. It was simply a shal- 
low box, with a cabin on it. The forward and rear 
decks of the boat were not a part of the boat box. It 
was so small that the men could lift it out of water and 
carry it around the dams known to be down the Rock 
River. They -got it ready in a barn, put it on a wagon, 
carried it to the river and launched it in the presence 
of a great crowd. The boat was christened Dixon with 
a bottle of wine, and the four floated down stream to 
where they were going to put in the supplies, stove and 
other things. Suddenly it was discovered that the bot- 
tom was more than half full of water. The craft was 
hastily run ashore and hauled out. Instead of the slanting 
end boards of the hull having been flattened off, just the 
corners of the boards pressed on the bottom of the boat, 
and the water poured through the joining. This was , 
remedied by putting in the boards properly and caulk- 
ing them. The dry pine swelled, and thereafter not a 
drop came in, not even when the. wind drove waves 
up on the overhanging decks in the wide Rwer reaches 
of the Mississippi, for the doors fitted like weather- 
stripped windows. In this craft, which was not 12ft. 
long by 6ft. wide, inside measurement, the two couples 
traveled to Memphis, Tenn., whence the two Water- 
mans turned toward home, having seen enough of the 
world. The Fines kept on down the river. 
They met the Gambler and the Medicine Man, and as 
Mrs. Fine had a voice much better than is usually 
heard at the river bank, the four gave a concert and 
made some money that way. Then the Medicine Man 
got Fine to sell some medicine, a.nd he made more 
money at this than at painting. Fine traveled, work- 
ing at towns for the money he needed. Mrs. Fine kept 
1 diary of her experiences, and of the wonderful_ things 
she had seen — “awful big steamboats,” St. Louis with 
its “houses” so much larger than anything they had 
ever seen, and finally the negroes of the plantations. 
“We don’t want to go home yet,” Mrs. Fine said. 
■■‘We want to see some more, but if we have to go home 
Tom here, we will not complain any. We are just com- 
mon country village folks. We never expected to go 
anywhere. We don’t expect to go anywhere again 
But if we never do go anywhere, we’ll feel contented 
for the rest of our lives. You can imagine what 
it- was like to us, to all of a sudden be transported, 
into a new and different country— to go somewhere 
ind see something we had never seen the likes of be- 
fore. It seems just like a dream.” 
The Medicine Man and I got a quart of oysters, and 
Mrs Fine cooked them into a delicious stew, with 
which we celebrated the Medicine Man’s fortieth birth- 
day— a day that was otherwise very gloomy for him. 
“My!” he exclaimed. “Forty years old! It seems 
only like yesterday when I was a little boy. I don’t 
want to be old. They ain’t no fun in being old.”. 
However, the stew and the banjo and French harp 
music afterward cheered him up, and we went to our 
boat feeling much more jovial than at any time since 
leaving Arkansas City. 
It was said in Greenville that that is a “farming” 
country. Groceries and manufactured ware were cheap 
and of good quality. But owing to the fact that “farm- 
ing” referred to cotton growing almost exclusively, 
there was a condition of affairs notable there as 
throughout the lower valley of the Mississippi. Eggs, 
butter, milk, vegetables and other farm produce were 
most expensive. . The whites raised cotton, and a few 
negroes supplied the home-grown “market stuff.” I 
found a negro market gardener a few miles above 
Vicksburg who was taking advantage of his oppor- 
tunities, with the result that he was growing rich sup- 
plying the city with vegetables, for which there was a 
steady and increasing demand. I did not hear of a 
white man who realized the fact that there is money 
in some of the cotton regions on the Mississippi to 
be made raising chickens and farm produce as well as 
in raising cotton. Cotton is at once a very great bles- 
sing to the South, and a blinder as well. If a couple of 
the dozen negroes who tend the cotton fields or each 
of the great plantations were put to work on two acres 
of garden patch, the plantation owners would live on 
better provender, or at least would get the table stuff 
at a quarter of the expense. 
On Monday, Feb. 21, we got some supplies, and at 
noon the Medicine Man and I pulled out into the 
stream again. The Gambler’s thanks to the Medicine 
Man for taking care of him for days consisted of a 
cussing for bringing him down the river on such a 
jaunt. The Medicine Man looked back on Greenville 
from a distance of a mile and said: 
“I’m glad I ain’t there any more. Now I can get 
some money. We’ll watch for some place where we 
can sell some medicine. There’s a log camp down 
here somewhere. I must make some medicine. I got 
to work now. I supported that Gambler all the way 
down the river, and I’m sick of that.” 
He went to the bow of the boat, and lifted a plank 
in the deck. He took from the hold a bushel of bottles 
that would hold a pint or more and lugged them to the 
stern of the boat, where he put them in a wash boiler 
filled with water from the river. The bottles were of 
all descriptions, round and flat, and of various colors, 
from clear white to a pale green and dark brown. Into 
the boiler he dumped some concentrated lye, and stirred 
it in with a stick. 
“Now, I got to make the medicine,” he said. He had 
an old five-gallon lard can in which we had been wash- 
ing our clothes for weeks back. He rinsed this out 
and filled it full of water, which he let stand for an 
hour “to settle it.” Into the water he dropped a broken 
bitter apple, and stirred in the pieces thoroughly. Then 
he burned a pound of sugar in a frying pan — burned it 
black, and then washed the pan in the lard can. It 
changed the water to a molasses hue. 
“Now ain’t that a pretty medicine?” he asked. 
The bitter apples cost 40 cents a dozen, the sugar 
10 cents, and the water the trouble of dipping it out 
of the stream. The total cost of gallons of the 
stuff was less than 15 cents. To this must be added the 
cost of the bottles. Half of them had been picked up 
on the sandbars, and the other half purchased of Young 
for 2 cents each. The corks were also garnered on the 
sandbars, and along the river banks. 
'fhe bottles, having soaked in the lye, were rinsed 
out and allowed to drain out. Some were discarded be- 
cause the sun had “cooked the dirt into thern,” and 
some because the label would not cover the dirt that 
still remained inside where the customer could see it. 
The Medicine Man’s pride was a “line of patent 
medicines” — two- dozen bottles of a much advertised 
cure. Fle filled them first, and corked them tightly, 
and then got out some labels. The labels were pink 
in color and had the picture of a smooth-shaven man 
wearing a high hat and a dress suit. The label read: 
ZA-MI-A-YA BITTERS. 
The Great BLOOD AND NERVE TONIC. 
A POSITIVE CURE 
For Rheumatism, Blood Disorders, Stomach Troubles, 
Liver and Kidney Complaint, Sick Headache, Malaria, 
Indigestion, Dyspepsia, Constipation, Catarrh of the 
Stomach, Nervousness, Skin Disease, Salt Rheum, Scrofula 
and Neuralgia. 
Price, $1 Per Bottle. 
Address: J. W. Carpenter, Benton, 111. 
Ihis IS not an exaggeration — it is copied literally 
from. ?ne of • the labels which I have before me. The 
Medicine Man said of it: “Now that’s a good label. 
It catches a man every time. , Blood and nervous dis- 
orders, stomach, liver and kidney complaint, malaria 
and headache— why, dod blast it,: a man’s just got to 
have some of them things down in this climate. I 
tell 3'ou that’s the best label I ever saw. That Carpen- 
ter, he’s an old-timer. He’s my father-in-law. He 
thought that label up, and I don’t b’lieve there ever 
was a better one. We used to sell this medicine to- 
gether. We worked every town in Arkansaw— had a 
6oft. circus tent. We’d go to a town, and give a reg’lar 
plaj^. I d fiddle, and he’d fiddle, er play the banjo. 
The crowd would come into the tent, and then we’d 
give ’em a talk. Talk ’em right up good. Pretty soon 
they’d go to the drug store— you see we had to have 
a drug store sell our stuff, else they wouldn’t stand for 
us. We’d give a druggist ten cents a bottle for selling 
it. We cleared $25 in some towns. In other towns 
we’d strike a big trade, and sell all the bottles we could 
buy— would have a hundred dollars to show for a day’s 
trading. You see that $i sign? Well, we worked the 
best bluff you ever saw on that. We offered the 
medicine for 50 cents just to introduce it. That fetched 
them. They were getting it for half-price, and they 
always do like that. We said we were introducing it, 
and that when it was put on sale regularly, it would 
cost $i a bottle. It was just bully the way they come 
up to that. 
6 ^ 
‘I tell you my father-in-law was a schemer, he was. 
I expected to meet him or hear of him down here some 
where. After we’d get our money in, we’d blow it — • 
oh, my! but we went on some awful drunks. He g 6 t 
so he wanted to go down into the yellow fever 
country to sell th» stuff. It’d been all right — we’d 
been selling yet, only he wasn’t satisfied. He had to 
SO leaking the medicine without any acid into it in the 
middle of the summer. Of course it soured, and we 
staid too long into one place. The bottles begun to 
blow up pop went the corks. Luckily for us they was 
a cyclone hit that Arkansaw town when it did. It 
lifted our tent, just about the time visitors was ex- 
pecting to come in on us. Me an’ him was drunk 
wh^n the tent come down, and we didn’t know them 
men was coming, but a. feller told us. We went down 
Black River into a skift— didn’t have a bloody dollar, 
nor; a bottle with us. Then we hit another town, and 
we built a boat out of packing boxes — rattiest cabin 
boafjTOV jever saw. We was into that , when that sleet 
storm coite two years ago. The sleet got so h^vy on 
the roof she capsized, and we had to go out on the 
bank. We was there all night, in that sleet without 
even our pants. I punched him, and then he’d punch 
me. Then we’d lie on our backs and hold our feet in 
the air, they was so burny with the ice on the ground 
—four miles from the nearest house— Law! Law! That 
was a night. Me and him parted soon after that. I 
worked south, and he hit for old Kaintuck. Gracious! 
there’s a lumber camp! Let’s make it! I’ll raise a 
stake there!” Raymond S. Spears. 
Instructions for |Life-Saving from 
Drowning. 
Editor Forest and Ftream: 
There are so many lives — about 1,200 — lost every year 
by drowning in the United Stales that might be saved by 
a knowledge of how to act in cases of emergency, that 
we are constrained to request you to publish our summer 
bulletin of advice. First, do not go out in any pleasure 
boat of small or large dimensions without being assured 
that there are live-saving buoys or cushions aboard suffi- 
cient to float all on board in case of an upset or collision, 
or festooned with life-saving ropes. 
Second, with a party, be sure you are all properly and 
satisfactorily seated before you leave the shore — particu- 
larly so with girls on board. Let no one attempt to ex- 
change seats in mid-stream, or to put a foot on the edge 
or gunwale of the boat to change seats, or to rock the 
boat for fun. This, by rollicking young people, has up- 
turned many a boat and lost very many lives every year. 
Where the waters become rough from a sudden squall or 
passing steamers never rise in the boat, but settle down 
as close to the bottom as possible, and keep cool until the 
rocking danger is past. If overturned, a woman’s skirts, 
if held out by her extended arms, while she uses her feet 
as if climbing a stairs, will often hold her up while a 
boat may pull out from the shore and save her. A non- 
swimmer, by drawing his arms up to his sides and push- 
ing down with widely extended hands, while stair-climbing 
or treading water with his feet, may hold himself up sev- 
eral minutes, often when a single minute means his life, 
or throwing out the arms, dog fashion, forward over- 
hand and pulling in, as if reaching for something — that 
may bring, him help, may at least keep him afloat till help 
comes 
Third. In rescuing drowning persons, seize them by 
the hair or the collar, back of the neck; do not let them 
throw their arms around your neck or arms. If unman- 
ageable, do not strike them, but let them dron under a 
moment_ until quiet, then tow them in to the shore. If 
unconscious, do not wait a moment for a doctor or an 
ambulance, but begin at once; first, get the tongue out 
and hojd it bj^ a handkerchief or towel to let the water 
out ; get a buoy, box or barrel under the stomach, or hold 
them over your knee, head down, and jolt the water out, 
then turn them over side to side four or five times, then 
on the back, and with^a pump movement keep their arms 
agoing from pit of stomach overhead to a straight out 
and back fourteen, or sixteen times a minute until signs 
of returning life are shown. A bellows movement pres- 
sure 'on the stomach at the same time is a great aid if 
you have help. Of course you will at first loosen collar 
and ail binding clothing. Let some one at once remove 
shoes. and stockings, and at the same time rub the lower 
limbs with an upward movement from foot to knee, oc- 
casionally slapping the soles of the feet with the open 
hand. 'Working ..on these lines our volunteer life-savers 
have been successful after two hours’ of incessant manipu- 
lation, but are generally successful inside of thirty min- 
utes. Spirits of ammonia to the nostrils, or a feather 
tickling in the throat, often helps to quicken, but we rare- 
ly need anything more than the above mechanical means. 
Use no spirits internally until after breathing and circu- 
lation are restored, then a moderate use of stimulants or 
hot tea and a warm blanket or bed is of the first im- 
portance. 
The U. S. 'Volunteer Life-Saving Corps has distrib- 
uted several thousands of its illustrated “Rescue and Re- 
suscitation Cards” through its life-saving members, and, 
per -mail, it will furnish them to anyone on receipt of the 
cost of postage and mailing tube, five cents. But if any 
of your readers will cut out this article from your paper 
and study its instructions and carry it with them, they 
will be able to meet any emergencies that may occur upon 
the waters. 
Whenever, in any State, or any waterways, where peo- 
ple gather for swimming or boating, three or more expert 
swimmers will form a volunteer live-saving crew, we will 
furnish them, free of expense to them, life-saving buoys 
and flags and signs to designate their station, and button 
and badges to_ denote their official positions, and also 
boats and medicine chests where needful, containing all 
remedies to resuscitate the drowning at half their cost. 
For the Board, Very truly yours, 
J. Wesley Jones, 
President and General ^upt. of the U. S. V. L. S. C. 
General offices, where all inquiries for information of 
life-saving work or information of life-saving crews in 
any State may be addressed, 63-65 Park Row, New York 
City. 
