This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
When you were little, do you remember your parents telling you to look both ways when crossing the street, and then do it twice more? Paying close attention is good advice as a number of old upper Mississippi steamboat pilots could tell you.
Steamboating was at its height in the 1850s. A steamboat pilot's wage in 1850 was two hundred and fifty dollars a month—a great wage for the time. But there was too large a supply of cubs, who needed only to apprentice to a pilot for two years, and then go on their own. Wages fell to a hundred dollars a month before the pilots took matters into their own hands. Under a special charter from the government, they formed the Pilot's Benevolent Association. New pilots could only be certified as pilots by the Association. Current pilots they enticed into joining by attractive benefits: a pension of twenty-five dollars a month for unemployed pilots, and the same for widows of deceased members. Pilots who died were buried at the association's expense.
Pilots still reluctant to join were eventually forced to do so by the withholding of vital information on river conditions from all but association members, causing the non-members to wreck a high percentage of their boats.
Shortly, nearly every river pilot belonged to the association, and wages rose back to their old levels, and higher. Eventually, the Pilot's Benevolent Association announced that on September 1, 1861, wages would increase to five hundred dollars a month, and then to seven hundred. It was, said Mark Twain, "the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men.”
So busy were the pilots protecting their incomes that they did not notice that some entrepreneur had figured out that a single towboat could push twelve barges of cargo in a single trip at a fraction of the cost of going by steamer.
"Behold," wrote Twain, "in the twinkling of an eye, the pilot's association and the noble science of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past." They should have looked both ways.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
