Aug. 12, 1905.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
12 7 
Each of the bedrooms has its own window. The big 
fire-place is. located on the rear wall of the living room, 
and along the side are numerous windows. The entrance 
door is on the front and leads to a roomy covered porch 
which in turn is surrounded by a strong paved terrace. 
This cottage, like the others, is on the lake and a stone 
retaining wall built up from the water’s edge supports the 
lerrace. The building is of logs and the roof of shingles. 
The porch columns are of wood and the big chimney is 
Df stone. The remarks made regarding frame construc- 
tion apply to this house as well as to the first one de- 
scribed. 
Design No. 3 is a decidedly rustic structure and an in- 
teresting building in many ways. The plan has features 
embodied in the plan shown in the first paper on “Sum- 
mer Roof Trees,” in the Forest and Stream of June 17 
1905. It is a good one and has much to recommend it. 
It is less of the camp and more of the cottage than the 
other two designs, and would be more suitable for a sim- 
ple summer home to be used by a family. The main room 
is not so large as those in the other plans, nor is a large 
room needed when there is a kitchen. There is a roomy 
closet reached from the living room and another reached 
from the kitchen. The rear porch is also a very good 
feature. We like also the separation of the bedroom, and 
the wide porch extending along the front would make a 
most enjoyable lounging place. 
The exterior is very pleasing and would look particu- 
larly well if covered with shingles instead of logs. 
Floating Down the Mississippi* 
Another Cyclone and Vicksburg. 
One gets used to most things on the Mississippi. The 
restless spirit is tamed into carelessness and shiftless- 
ness in an attempt to float a cabin boat from St. Louis 
to New Orleans. The experienced river man will lie 
in an eddy for a week awaiting the going down of a 
wind, no matter how lonesome the eddy or how urgent 
the call from down stream. The true cabin-boater 
learns not to worry about not being able to float, poor 
duck shooting, an empty flour can, or an uncertain 
future; but one thing will always stir him up and bring 
fire into his eyes, and that is a cyclone. A man down 
with malaria, aching with rheumatism and not a year 
from the grave, will get up from his bed at the ropes 
when the blue clouds come sliding up out of the west 
and the long, white tresses of flying scud begin to dart, 
clawing up from the horizon and scaring the blackening 
storm. 
The river man says three things are sudden on the 
Mississippi, a crevasse, a cut-off and a cyclone. To 
compare the Mississippi one would say “Crevasse, cut- 
off, cyclone” — these are the bad, worse and worst of 
the Mississippi bottoms. The cyclone is most frequent, 
and no cabin-boater of a year’s experience but has a 
tale to tell of these storms. I had two, the first one 
nearly terminating my river and other experiences by 
jamming me down into alongshore mticf and then 
swinging a cabin boat around on top of me. My second 
was equally startling and nearly as dangerous. 
On March 12, we landed in at Salem landing, and on 
the following afternoon the Medicine Man came in 
about I o’clock, feeling happy over sales amounting to 
$4. In a few minutes we sat down to dinner, and at 
h:55, I went to the stern of the boat and noted the ap- 
pearance of the river and the sky. 
“A patter of rain,” I wrote, “swallows shimmering 
over the water close to the surface. Blue clouds low 
in the north, working around to the westward. Very 
dark clouds, with light patches among them, but no 
rounded thunder heads. Two ducks flying up-stream 
like bullets close to the water, while a bald eagle flaps 
awkwardly but as fast in flight a hundred feet above 
them, a little behind. Partner has just remarked that 
he was blown into the willows a mile below here by a 
cyclone four years ago. Drift is running. A plume of 
white cloud a bit south of west of us is very pretty to 
look at, and suggests spray whipped from the tops of 
salt sea waves.” 
At 2:05, I noted, “Drift running, rain pattering down 
at intervals, lightning grows plainer. A« the drops 
hit the water, little columns of water jump up. The 
curious white tresses seem fairly to dart across the 
skjn Some of them are more than half way to the 
zenith, though ten minutes ago they were only just 
noticeable low down in the west.” 
The willows, with their new_ flung leaves, seemed 
fairly to be swept with green, bright and beautiful, with 
splashes of gold as subdued sunshine was flung across 
the brakes. I thought it was the coming of a heavy 
shower, and I sat delighted by the view and making my 
notes with glad heart that I had so good a description 
NO. II. 
of events before a southern rain storm. Prosaically, I 
wrote, “Swept out, wiped dishes, hail coming down and 
rain sprinkling down. Now she conies — the distant 
banks fade slowly from sight, two more ducks fleet 
up stream, but I do not see anything after them— 
wonder why they go so fast. 
“2:25 o’clock. Cooler by several degrees. The little 
shower has turned the switch willows on the sand bars 
a dark, beautiful green — were purple only yesterday. 
The Medicine Man does not believe in working on Sun- 
day — says it never helped him, and he won’t do it, not 
even float, if only to keep some line between him and 
the river people who know neither Saturdays nor Sun- 
days, nor Woden-days. 
“Cottonwoods show against the dark-purple forests 
here now as the poplars show against the green balsam 
of Adirondack swamps in relatively the same season 
of the year up north — a light haze against the dark 
background.” 
I attempted to describe the coming of the water 
around the bend, its heaving up on the point of the low 
sandbar, where the switch willows grew, and the long 
undulating reflections of the tall trees — a characteristic 
and beautiful river scene. We were in an eddy, about 
forty feet wide, and a hundred feet long — a deep, swirl- 
ing pool. Judging from where the sun set the night 
before, we were well sheltered from a wind out of the 
west by a point of high, tough, caving bank, which had 
resisted the wear of the river longer than the bank 
above or below. The compass showed later that this 
apparent shelter from the west wind was deceptive, for 
the boat, end on to the bank, was broadside and fully 
exposed to the west gale for two-thirds the cabin’s 
length. An anchor line was out astern, fortunately, 
and the bow lines ran to logs to starboard forty feet 
and to port some farther. 
Having noted these things, for lack of anything 
better, and having drawn the point roughly,. I noted: 
“2:47, another storm has developed and is coming- 
lightning, thunder and a cloud. It is like a skirmish 
line ahead of artillery, and the main army behind. Rain 
commences slowly, and the wind comes in strong blasts. 
‘It looks like a cyclone,’ Jim shouts, ‘get ready to go 
ashore!’ Then it hits us like a .” 
The last entry was in a scrawl and most hastily done. 
It was nearly three hours later when I was able to write 
again, and in the meantime the cyclone swept over us. 
A cyclone is a wandering band of contending cur- 
rents of air, swaggering across the country, kicking up 
a mighty dust, and a-throwing all things handy and 
movable up and down and in all directions. The first 
gusts of the storm which struck us seemed to be rolls 
of air bunched up and thrust ahead by the Ishmaelite 
rowdy currents. I could see the storm coming nearly 
two miles across the water and low sandbar, which was 
surrounded by water. The trees on the distant bank 
bent and sprung back as they were lost to sight in a 
dull, grayish mist. The water jerked, apparently, and 
whitened. The sandbar had been wet down by the rain, 
but when the water came whitening along both sides 
of the bar, there was a great puff of tawny cloud sprang 
up which grew larger and larger, boiling hundreds of 
feet up into the gray cloud which was coming, and 
hiding everything behind except the first few yards of 
fading, bending willows and water beginning to stand 
up in peaks. Perhaps four minutes elapsed from the 
time I first saw the trees' bending on the distant bank 
to when the water began to whiten at the near end of the 
sandbar, a fourth of a mile distant. It was at this time 
that the Medicine Man caught sight of the phenomenon 
of which I was so interested and innocent a witness. 
A glance told his practiced eye what was coming, and 
his yell of ‘‘Get ready to go ashore!” was so full of ex- 
periences gone before, and another coming on, that I 
slammed my note book closed and with four motions 
wrapped it up with my other ledger, already full of 
notes, and started for the bow. Whatever else might 
happen, I would save the- 250,000 words in notes I had 
already written. The oil cloth would keep them from 
getting wet in any rain. 
I was half way through the cabin, and at the partition 
between the galley and sitting room, when there was 
a slap against the side of the boat like a plank hitting 
it flat side to. The. boat leaned far over to port, almost 
upsetting, and then seemed to drop back again. Be- 
hind me, I heard a thing like fire burning in a great 
pile of loosely-heaped laths and other wood. I looked 
back and saw the starboard side of the galley rood 
rising in the air, while the red window curtain was 
flapping straight up toward the ceiling. The roof, of 
quarter-inch pine, tar-papered, flapped up and down a 
dozen times and then rolled over till a third of the 
galley ceiling was open air. Then the roof slammed 
back again, and I did a thing for which I cannot just 
account. I jumped and grabbed the roof near the star- 
board side wall, and held on. Once, as I was lifted 
by the roof till my heels were clear of the floor, I 
thought I’d better let go, but the Medicine Man had 
come aft and he_ seized the roof, and our combined 
weight brought it down. The pound and whirl at 
the head of the storm passed by, and a steady gale set 
in, and with the gale came long waves which threw 
NO. m. 
the boat against the bank, sucked it back and threw 
it again harder yet. Still my notes under my arm, I 
ran to the bow and saw another curious thing. 
The boat was broadside to the waves coming down 
current from due west! The water pounded against 
the starboard side, flew up and came down in sheets 
in the stern in a fashion that would soon have swamped 
it. There were moments when it seemed as if the boat 
would turn over. 
The starboard line was fast to a three-foot cypress 
log. It was a two-inch rope, and I tied it — one turn 
around the log and then two tight half-hitches around 
the line with at least two feet of the end for play. Be- 
cause the boat seemed about to be “tore up,” I looked 
at that fastening first. What was my horror to see the 
knot wriggle and then slip out, while the long rope 
came trailing across the little beach looking like a 
snake through the fog of rain which hid any object 
thirty yards distant. While I stood watching, the bank 
drew away, and I realized that the boat had moved. 
I made a dandy jump. It seemed as though the rain 
would pound me down into the water, but it didn’t. I 
reached land, with a yell that may have sounded like 
a railway train rounding a curve coming from my lips. 
The Medicine Man followed, and then we looked 
around. As we did so, the port line, dragging in the 
drift on the beach, caught in a drift willow fork and 
hung the boat quartering to the waves instead of broad- 
side as it had been. With one mind, we divined what 
had happened, and the Medicine Man knew what to do. 
The boat came in as the port line tightened, and he ran 
aboard, and hauled in the anchor line. That brought 
us end on to the. wave's, and this position, and this one 
only, saved the boat from swamping right there. My 
skiff, tied at the bow, was washed under and it was three 
hours before we managed to drag it ashore out of the 
pounding waves. 
The first few minutes over — that is to say, the worst 
of the storm and the time during which there was 
danger of the -boat being thrown over — we got our 
stuff ready to rush ashore in case the waves should 
swamp us. My trunk and other duffle was in compara- 
tively good order for hasty exit, and I had a big canvas 
to sling over the stuff and weigh down with logs of 
drift wood, and thus keep it dry. When my boat was 
drawn up, and found to be uninjured by the pounding 
it had received, I had no worry, for I could go on down 
the river in it safely as ever. The Medicine Man was 
equally philosophical, 
“I thought she was going, didn’t you?” he said. “If 
she had, I’d quit the river and hit the back country— 
I’m double dogged if I like this old river anyhow. 
I s’pose we’ll have to pump now.” 
There was the water in the hold, and this we pumped 
out, taking turns at the churn-dasher-like occupation by 
the half hour. The temperature dropped almost to 
freezing, and the wind settled to a gale which came from 
the points between west and northeast. The waves 
rolled in from ten to fifteen a minute and sloshed against 
the bluff bank with wearying, unrhythmic noise. Exam- 
ination disclosed the discomfiting fact that the cabin 
had been sprung a couple of inches, and that the waves 
against the side of the boat, had found a half-inch crack, 
or less, above the gunwale, through which the water 
spurted into our bed unnoticed till capillary attraction 
had caused the wetting of a third of the bedding. At 
this discovery, we sat down by the stove until the very 
dolefulness of our faces made us laugh, and when we 
had cooked supper, the banjo and the French harp 
solaced the long hours in which w’e sat up, ready to 
jump ashore, or to the lines, should anything, need our 
attention during the gale which lasted with fury till 
after midnight. When the wind died away enough, the 
blankets and quilts were sufficiently dry, and we went 
to bed. 
Monday morning came, and the day was a ca’ming 
finely. After breakfast, the sun shone delightfull}* and 
temptingly. 
“I’ll remember this ole landing nex’ time,” the Med- 
icine Man said. “’F I’d a noticed ’twas the landin’ 
where I got Flowed into the willows before and was 
’most drowned, I’d neveh stopped yeah, no indeedy!” 
We cast off about 2 o’clock P. M., by which time 
the wind was well down. Our anchor hanging into 
the wearing bank about thirty feet below the surface, 
was deep in mud, but we jerked it out by running the 
the boat against the snubbed line. A few miles down 
— away below Duvall’s landing — I saw Spanish moss on 
a tree, and soon after, several trees draped in it. I 
had seen pictures of Louisiana swamps, but they con- 
veyed but scant idea of the utter ghastliness of the hang- 
ing gray crape, swinging in the wind. It did not better 
the impression wheri the sunlight and a closer view dis- 
closed a purplish tinge. For me, there was exulting 
at the sight, however. The cypress tree had been evi- 
