Captain W. W. Withenbury's 1838–1842 "Red River Reminiscences"

7. At Swanson’s Landing

The Reminiscences  47 5. Cypress Bayou was sometimes referred to as a lake because it provided slackwater navigation up to a few miles from Jefferson. 6. It had only been necessary for the Relief to go to the head of Sodo Lake to take the western bypass in its previous trip. 7. The front of the upper deck. 8. Soda Lake formed in a shallow floodplain depression. 9. Apparently Rees E. Price, head of a prominent Cincinnati family, an abolitionist , and a religious eccentric. An example of his views can be found in J. R. Buchanan’s 1855 Buchanan’s Journal of Man. 10. The Rochester was apparently not headed to Port Caddo. The March 22, 1856, Clarksville Standard reports that the Waverly from Cincinnati spotted the Rochester coming out of Sulphur Fork carrying a load of cotton in early 1842. 11. The Republic of Texas until 1845, with the international line running through Caddo Lake. 12. To alert the people at Swanson’s Landing that the Relief was arriving. 7  At Swanson’s Landing • Swanson’s Landing1 was on the south shore of Caddo Lake a short distance past the Texas line and served as a shipping and receiving point for the adjacent Swanson plantation and those of neighbors. Peter Swanson, his wife Elizabeth Amelia (“Milly”), and their family were among the earliest settlers on the lake. Swanson arrived in Texas in February 1838, and the first steamboat to penetrate Caddo Lake (the Manchester, in June 1838) brought freight to Swanson’s Landing before making a side trip across the lake to Potter’s Point. The landing inadvertently became the starting point 48  Red River Reminiscences of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1857, developed a significant infrastructure for the export of cotton and the import and sale of dry goods and groceries, and intended to become a town named Petersburg—an objective that came to naught when the rails were removed during the Civil War for use elsewhere.  [First part not used.] T he Relief, as I have stated, lay all night of December 10, 1841, at “Swanson’s Landing.” This fact of itself would seem to have no particular significance, but to the few remaining rivermen of those days, and to the landsmen who have “kept the run of things,” it may not be uninteresting to look back to Swanson’s Landing of 1841, to old Peter Swanson and his hospitable, provident wife, and their sociable sons and daughters , who never failed to visit the boats which landed at their place, when engaged in the exploration in their new field of labor. We boatmen all remember the butter, the sausages, the head-cheese, in fact all the choice edibles which a well regulated farm could produce, and a thrifty, cleanly housewife prepare; and when our mouths water now at the recollection of these good things, we are carried back to Swanson’s Landing of the early days, and the picture of welcome to the “stranger” is only made complete by the images still fresh in our memories, of “Uncle Peter” as he sat on the shore leaning upon his rifle and at regular intervals sending up little curling wreaths from his pipe, only removing it from his mouth long enough to cry out “Captain, your boat’s right on a stump;” of the good old lady in the back-ground, with her baskets, her crocks, her jugs (of buttermilk, of course); an old negro or The Reminiscences  49 two, with mules loaded with bags of sweet potatoes, cow-peas and hominy, and a few strings of chickens dangling across their backs, who, seeming to realize their impending doom, improvised the chorus “Gone up in a balloon;”2 and the sons—one, two, three—of these old folks at home, who, at the sight of a “steamboat on the lake,”3 seemed to foresee the future importance of their landing, the first available point after crossing the line into Texas, and their young eyes seemed to twinkle with pride as they fancied themselves standing there upon their own soil, and dispensing the commerce of Texas among the many “birds of passage” who, in time to come, would alight at this favorite spot, and already they began to run their hands away down to the very bottom of their pockets, hoping to feel the cash results of their anticipated profits. But to return to the Relief. After making...