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69 From Excursion Through the Slave States George W. Featherstonhaugh George W. Featherstonhaugh was a man of many parts. In the words of biographers Edmund and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, “He was very much involved at various times in agriculture, diplomacy, geology, literature, and railroads” (xiii). Though born in England, Featherstonhaugh spent many years in America. Most famously, he played a vital role in the construction of the pioneering Albany and Schenectady Railroad and conducted important geological investigations in the territory between the Missouri and Red rivers obtained in the Louisiana Purchase. His varied career meant that he was well traveled, and his account of his American experiences, titled Excursion Through the Slave States (1844), achieved much popularity. The extract that follows details Featherstonhaugh’s troubles with a number of riverboat gamblers—an exasperation common to many travelers. For further information , see Edmund and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, George William Featherstonhaugh : The First U.S. Government Geologist (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988). Upon embarking on board of this steamer I was certainly pleased with the prospect that presented itself of enjoying some repose and comfort after the privations and fatigues I had endured; but never was traveller more mistaken in his anticipations! The vexatious conduct of the drunken youth had made a serious innovation upon the slight degree of personal comfort to be obtained in such a place, but I had not the slightest conception that that incident would be entirely thrown into the shade by others a thousand times more offensive, and that, from the moment of our departure from the post of Arkansas until our arrival at New Orleans, I was destined to a series of brutal annoyances that extinguished every hope of repose, or a chance of preserving even the decencies of existence. I had been told at the post of Arkansas that ten passengers were waiting to come on board, and that several of them were notorious swindlers and gamblers, who, whilst in Arkansas, lived by the most desperate cheating and bullying, and who skulked about alternately betwixt Little Rock, Natchez, and New Orleans, in search of any plunder that violent and base means could bring into their hands. Some of their names were familiar to me, having heard them frequently spoken of at Little Rock as scoundrels of Blacklegs, Card Sharps, and Confidence Men 70 the worst class. From the moment I heard they were coming on board as passengers I predicted to Mr. T—— that every hope of comfort was at an end. But I had also been told that two American officers, a Captain D—— and a Lieut. C——, the latter a gentleman entrusted with the construction of the military road in Arkansas, were also coming on board; and I counted upon them as persons who would be, by the force of education and a consciousness of what was due to their rank as officers, on the side of decency at least, if not of correct manners; and if those persons had passed through the national military academy at West Point, or had served under the respectable chief of the Topographical Bureau at Washington, I should not have been as grievously disappointed as it was my fate to be. It was true I had heard that these officers had been passing ten days with these scoundrels at a low tavern at this place, in the unrestrained indulgence of every vicious extravagance, night and day, and that they were the familiar intimates of these notorious swindlers. Nevertheless, believing that there must be some exaggeration in this, I continued to look forward with satisfaction to having them for fellow passengers, confident that they would be our allies against any gross encroachments of the others. Very soon after I had retired to the steamer at sun-set, the whole clique came on board, and the effect produced on us was something like that which would be made upon passengers in a peaceful vessel forcibly boarded by pirates of the most desperate character, whose manners seemed to be what they aspired to imitate. Rushing into the cabin, all but red-hot with whiskey , they crowded round the stove and excluded all the old passengers from it as much as if they had no right whatever to be in the cabin. Putting on a determined bullying air of doing what they pleased because they were the majority, and armed with pistols and knives, expressly made for cutting and stabbing, eight inches long and an inch and a half broad...

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