Sea Control - Sea Control 432 - Shantyboats and Roustabouts with Dr. Gregg Andrews

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

Links1. Shantyboats and Roustabouts – The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875-1930, Gregg Andrews, LSU Press, 2022.

Hey, folks, it's Jared. We have an episode for you here featuring Dr. Greg Andrews based on his book Shanty Boats and Roustabouts, the Riverport of St. Louis, 1875 to 1930. We did have a few audio challenges as we record this, but our ace editor, Joshua Gruber, has done excellent work here to clean those up for you. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of the local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org, so if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International and Maritime Security. Hello, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Greg Andrews, and we're going to discuss his book, Shanty Boats and Roustabouts, The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875 to 1930. So, Greg, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Thank you very much, Jerry. First of all, thank you for inviting me to be a guest on your podcast. I look forward to it. I grew up in south of Mark Twain's boyhood home of Hamble, Missouri, about three miles in a little river bottoms village known as Monkey Run. And so that's where I spent my boyhood in the shadow of a cement plant that my father worked at and many other men and women worked at that was created there in 1903. I grew up there and got my Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, in 1988.

And I took a position at Texas State University. At that time, it was Southwest Texas State University. And I came here then. And I retired here in 2009 after 21 years in the history department. And so I've been enjoying my retirement, playing music and writing other books, including Shandy Boats and Roustabouts. Right. Well, I somehow missed that you had gone to NIU. So one go Huskies to my pretty much my entire family is back in northern Illinois. I was just back there last weekend for my mother's 70th birthday.

It gets mighty cold there as the wind blows across those cornfields. on Wednesday nights. I remember that very, very well. I got to Chicago for a number of years too. Okay. Well, can you tell me, what was the population of Monkey Run while you were growing up there? Monkey Run had about 100 people and just as many dogs. It was a section of what once was the company town called Alaska, Missouri. And the name of Monkey Run is, the technical name as Stilwell's first addition to Alaska. But somehow over time, people in the area dubbed it Monkey Run. A lot of the men, I think, who lived there in the early years

worked in the quarry as powder monkeys. They were the teams of blasters. My father was one of them much later, of course. But I'm pretty sure that's how the name was derived. But it was a small village. It still is. It's still there. It's been flooded out so many times.

And the number of houses has been reduced. But there's still a number of people down there trying to keep the trying to keep the villas alive. We've answered most of my first question that I was going to ask. I'm going to go ahead with it anyways. And you can tell me anything that you haven't mentioned to date about it. But what's your own relationship with Mississippi? And then how did you uncover your family's history with the river?

That's a good question. My first memory, Jared, as far as I can tell, is a fragmented one. I was two and a half years old, and my mother was carrying me frantically in her arms as we ran down a dirt alley to the railroad tracks and up the river, up the cross ties to the mouth of the river where a drowning had just occurred. And my father was down there fishing at the time, which added to my mother's anxiety. We didn't know at that point who the victim was, but that's my very first memory. And I guess you'd say the river was my childhood playground. as i grew up i mean i was a river i was a river rat uh i loved to be down there i it was a place you know where i could get away from the blues in my family's home uh we had hard struggles like

other people in that in that community did and it was a place to go sneak a cigarette i learned to roll my own cigarettes at age six if you can believe that but it was always down at the river And that's where I fished. I hung out. I hunted with my uncles and cousins and other kinfolk on the islands in the Mississippi as a child. And I continue to do that. You know, I went out on the boats with commercial fishermen and set out the baskets and trot lines and bank lines. I loved it. I mean, you know, you pull in, pull up those nets and you see those big, beautiful buffalo fish and carp and big old flatheads. It was a thrilling for thrilling for a child to be a part of that. And I did that up until the time I moved away to go to college. So I cut my teeth on the river.

it's it's been a major it's had a major cultural influence on me both as a historian and as a singer-songwriter so i owe a lot to the mississippi and although my earlier scholarship didn't focus so much on the river uh in retirement it it it came back to me and i became more interested in trying to figure out the ancestry of my family because I found out in 1992 that my grandmother was born on, was lived on a shanty boat as a child along with that till 1992.

My mother used to talk about the people who lived on shanty boats in the area and she didn't know it. And I was intrigued by that. How did that get lost in family memory? And so in 1992, when I made that discovery, I started, I developed a strong interest in some, at some point, coming back to that and trying to put my ancestors' heritage in a broader cultural context. Why did you choose to focus on the area near St. Louis? Well, I set out initially to frame my ancestors' cultural heritage as Shanty Boat people in a broader context.

And so I turned to St. Louis, which is only 100 miles south of Hannibal. I turned to St. Louis because St. Louis was the largest city on the Mississippi River at the time. And it attracted, as I did research, I discovered it had dozens and dozens of shanty boat settlements on the riverfront. And it also, I mean, if you look at the location of St. Louis, you've got the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi River just north of there, 30 miles. The Illinois River, maybe about 45 miles north of there. And then below it, of course, you've got Cairo, you know, where the Ohio empties into the river. And it seemed like that as I did the research, St. Louis was the happening place for shanty boat settlements and roustabouts. And the roustabouts, of course, were work the steamboat packets.

And so that's how I landed on St. Louis. And initially, I didn't plan to do a book. I was just really doing it for fun at the time. And as I got deeper and deeper into it, I realized I had a much larger study. And St. Louis acts as a kind of a panoramic window into the entire Mississippi Valley. people from st paul to new orleans passing through stopping at st louis it was a major major stopping point for shanty boat people on the river and so and also it to me i always associated with up until the time i did the research i associated shanty boat living with

adaptive river living more to rural areas and yet here was st louis a major urban area And so it raises all kinds of thorny issues in terms of relationship between municipal authorities, private landowners who still own some of the levy, and shanty boat people who laid claim to their, they asserted their rights to be able to use that public levy. And so it ended up to be a fascinating study for me. I learned so much from it and was entertained by it as well as I did the research. So is there an actual definition for what constitutes a shanty boat? And then how do people come to own them? Shanty boat, the term shanty boat at the time in the late 1800s was a term that was used. Generally, it was a pejorative term used to denigrate shanty boat people. um according to one source i saw some people preferred the shanty boat people themselves

preferred cabin boats or house boats so that that's how the term uh sort of originated i used it intentionally since it was used as a pejorative term to use it in defense of shanty boat people so that the term becomes less it takes some of the sting out of it in other words Who found their way to the Mississippi in the period that you're describing here? One of the things that fascinated me, Jared, when I did the research was to find out just the diversity of people who lived in those settlements. I mean, first of all, primarily a lot of fishermen lived in these shanty boats, in these settlements. But there were also people from all kinds of professions. I found lawyers living there. I found medical students living in the communities, actors, photographers, a number of merchants who owned books and did trades.

You know, they did trading on the river and people who operated stores on the riverfront in North St. Louis in the largest shanty boat settlement was called Little Oklahoma there was a a guy that had his ship captain's license and he operated the saloon and grocery store there in a beer grove and it was a hopping place I mean live music and everything you know and there was a there a part of the population did now a lot of the people who lived on shanty boats followed the lifestyle up and down the river. Let's say they lived in St. Paul and they're going to New Orleans for the winter

or they lived in St. Louis and they're going to New Orleans for the winter or Arkansas. But there were others who did not own boats or they rented boats or lived in boats that were unseaworthy. And they were generally marginalized people because of economic circumstances

and lived in a number of either shanty boats, huts, dugouts in the hillside, wherever they could find a place to get some kind of shelter. So there's that part of the population as well. So you had sort of class divisions within the shanty boat communities. The people who lived on the river who migrated, I think they were probably occupied, they were held in very high regard by others in the community because of their knowledge of the river from a navigational standpoint and all that. But there were, you know, some people, boat builders lived there, and they would build a few extra boats and rent them out to people. Some of them consciously because they wanted to build affordable housing for the residents there.

refugees from the rat infested tenements in the city just a few blocks away the absence of landlords coming around harassing you for rent that sort of thing many industrial workers who worked in on the railroads also lived on the riverfront that was there and if you go to pittsburgh area and on the ohio that there were there were a lot of hard work and working people who that was their home on the river it was cheaper you know you could you could get your fuel supply if you by catching driftwood you you they drank drank the water out of the mississippi now yeah it doesn't sound it's like you saw my face just then it was like i saw that i couldn't imagine it either and sometimes you know the older generations on

the shanty boats still drank it out of the river but they started getting good water for their for their children you know there's some recognition that this might not be good for the young ones but they you know they developed an immunity system i guess it was just incredibly strong i found some people lived there i mean up in their 80s and were you know still active and in a lot of different ways um but then of course fish provided their food how much time did you spend looking into sort of the the way the names sprung up for these places because you mentioned little oklahoma but the thought of people going from oklahoma back to st louis that's not the typical way that we think about you know sort of the way that americans migrated or you know

colonize the american west they didn't go we don't think of them as having gone that direction so did you spend any time looking into all the all these different place names because like that story behind like what monkey run may symbolize uh well i think i think yeah i think chicken town for example in saint on the south south end of saint louis i think it got his name because of the fact there were a lot of cock there's a lot of cockfighting there you know uh but i really don't know the answer to that i i do know that in the case of little oklahoma the people themselves began to call themselves Little Oklahomans in the mid-1880s. And I think a lot of this had to do with, in other words,

they were squatters on the riverfront down there. And they're comparing it to what's going on in Oklahoma at the time with the land rush and Oklahoma squatters going out there to try to claim land. And that's my best guess as to how that name evolved. At first, I assumed that others gave them the name Little Oklahoma, but in the research, I found out that the people themselves there were calling themselves. You know, they had a great sense of humor, too. You had to, to live that kind of life.

And so, but that's to my best knowledge, you know, they gave that name to themselves. and other settlements I don't know like Squatterstown you know or Squatterville every city that had them had their own variations of that name

so I'm going to pause and plug your book for a second here because if you order this book and I recommend that you do order it it's like it's going to show up and you're going to think ah this thing's it looks pretty thin it's like it is so dense with the kind of stories that you've just described i was like blown away by the amount

that you packed in there because it's just story after story after story about all these little communities and all the characters who populate them um is there a definition for a roustabout or is that sort of a more general term for river folk i know you mentioned something earlier about it sounded very specific about what what those folks job was yeah well the term roustabout you know i mean the term is used in like refer to circus workers too you know i think if i remember right all those presley's movie comes to mind roustabout but they travel with the circus you know well the roust the the term roustabout in the context of my book applies to those people who traveled on the boats, they lived on the boats, let's say they contracted on a steamer

from St. Louis to New Orleans. They're going to load and unload at every steamboat landing in between those two port cities. Now, when they get to the port cities, there are stevedores who are going to unload those ships. And when they get back to St. Louis and the home port, There are stevedores, groups of laborers that usually they go through a labor contractor, and they come down and unload the ship. But the roustabouts live on the boat, and they work. I mean, sometimes I've seen, you know, captains saying how sometimes they work 36 hours without sleep if they had to. They did everything. They put the gangplank out.

They loaded, you know, Arkansas Razorbacks, ill-tempered Razorbacks. stock cattle and they load them onto and unload them from from the boats and uh if they needed to stop and take on wood for fuel they go out they go wooding as they call it or or coal boats they'd load coal or unload coal from from coal boats and uh it was a hard life one one roustabout that i it was interviewed in the late 30s called it the life of a dog because of the way the roustabouts were treated on the by the mates usually who were their overseers you know a lot of the roustabouts had come out of slavery and so this was their transition from slavery to freedom and so the discipline and it very much resembled uh you know plantation there's whippings and

beatings of course racial insults constantly cursing and you get in some tight spots you know in some really areas that are heavily infested with mosquitoes, and it's 95 to 100 degrees humidity and the same amount of humidity, tempers flare. And there was a lot of violence on those packets as a result of that where Rousevats, who had their belly full of it. But the term was often misused by newspaper reporters at the time. The deckhands were generally white, for one thing, but the newspapers sometimes would call them roustabouts, sometimes deckhands, and so the public was often confused about who does what, you know, on the boats, but roustabouts traveled on the steamboats.

The stevedores lived in the city where they worked, and they usually had families. The rouse-a-bouse tended to be young guys, you know, 18 to 20 in their early 20s, single usually. They, of course, needed a place to live when they weren't working the boats, and they usually lodged in saloons in the entertainment district in St. Louis, you know, for little or nothing. Sometimes the saloon owners had to carry them during hard times, let them stay there free, you know, and hope they get paid back, you know, when the next steamboat came in. That's generally what, you know, the roustabout,

that was the role of the roustabout, very, very difficult life. Music was a huge part of their, of the waterfront in general, is a form of entertainment. And roustabouts were known for it, singing and dancing. So you touch on this briefly. what was the ethnic and racial makeup of these communities like you can find about every european nationality in the settlements it depends on where you go new orleans you're going to find you know you're going to find a lot of uh of black shanty boat uh residents mixed cajun

come up the river vicksburg you're going to have a lot of black shanty boats settlers there on the riverfront. St. Louis was a mixture. You had, you know, newspapers often pointed out and complained about the interracial nature of the settlements. There was a lot of racial miscegenation that went on, you know, in those communities, and newspapers were angry about it. You know, there's a mixture. I found that some Shanty, some Roustabouts lived in the settlements. Most did not. But you tended to find the elderly roustabouts who could not find, you know, a way to support themselves in old age living in those shanty boat settlements. So it's an interesting mixture, especially when you consider that this was all going on in the age in which racial segregation was being fastened on to the country.

there was a black church in the dock street addition to little oklahoma it was racially integrated most of them were black who attended but uh you know we're talking small churches maybe maybe 20 something people go five or six of them might be white and that church that church was targeted you know they tried piling the city and a local lumber company tried piling of garbage up around the outside of it trying to force them out of there so you know there's a lot of hostility toward people who lived in these settlements what environmental challenges were those who lived on the river confronted with and how they deal with the flooding the ice and all the other challenges i think the major fear of people who lived on the river and i think this

was true of you know steamboat captains and steamboat owners not if i remember 1909 right before the mckinley bridge which which crosses the mississippi river uh there to venice illinois that bridge was just still under construction and there were a lot of men up there working person who was living across the river in the shanty boat community saw what was happening he saw the the ice break up and he tried to get out there to warn them fortunately miraculously they i mean that the whole thing came tumbling down on the structure that they were working on and they were able to somehow survive the the the fall into the river and they were plucked out of the river and uh it was really quite miraculous that no one was killed in that but that's i mean

that that ice when it breaks out it it can destroy a shanty but it can destroy a steamboat it often did if it caught it just right um so i think that was uh and then you know that was probably the most dangerous thing but then you know you know sometimes in the wintertime like if you get an unusual year where you get heavy rains and then uh warmer temps and then it refreezes again and And, I mean, life, people trying to save their boats and everything and get their possessions and make it to higher ground, it was a real, real challenge from a standpoint of survival. I ran across many people who had frozen feet trying to run across ice in an emergency, you know, situation, trying to get to shore. But, of course, the flooding was always a risk. But I think probably shanty boat people fared better than most because they kind of knew how to cope with it.

I mean, as long as they had their boats tied up to some secure location, they'd just float, you know, with the river. As it came up, they'd float above it. And as long as they had that secure tie. And then when it came down, you know, sometimes they'd end up, lumber companies didn't like it because they'd end up, when a river dropped, it'd drop them right in the middle of their lumber yard. and so they want them out fast and of course from a standpoint of the people who lived in those boats

you know it's expensive for one thing to get those boats to get them back to the shoreline so I mean it was a complicated life in so many ways involving the natural elements if you were going to go south for the winter and you live someplace north

you want to get an early start if the river starts freezing on you you're in trouble. And as you know, from reading the book, I mean, there were many cases where people found themselves in very, very dangerous spots, and still managed to survive them. I mean, using poles to keep ice flows away from the boat and all that, until it gradually as they go south of the river, gets a little warmer, and then finally it melts. And so there are plenty of those stories out there on the river i've you know i grew up in you know mark twain country

and my folks both my father and my mother were wonderful storytellers and so um that's what i tried to do in this book is let these people whose voices have not been heard before in history let them come on stage and make their appearance and say their lines and do what they have to do and then step off and then here's another one that's coming on and my challenge was to put these stories together in a narrative framework and an analytical framework that you know that that was the i think that for me was the was the big challenge but i love storytelling and and these people were wonderful storytellers well perfect transition i think this will be the last question that we have time for but what what sort of entertainment and economy evolved to support

the communities along the river and for those of you who like if you've got the book at home the chapter, The American Fondest for Humbug, but that's going to be where this answer is derived from. It's probably my favorite chapter, but Greg, go ahead. Well, first of all, music was central to these settlements. I mean, every settlement had any number of good musicians, fiddle players, guitar, you name it. And of course, the Roustabouts were known for their singing and their influence on ragtime music as well as blues and later riverboat jazz. Shell diggers, you know, one of the groups of people you often find on a river. I mean, almost everybody in those camps played a fiddle.

And so you had these fiddle stomps going on for entertainment. And people would throw a party. I mean, people would dance on top of the shanty boats. You know, someone in the community would host a party and invite everybody, And you might get 30, 35 people come in there. And, of course, there's no room for everybody to dance in the boat. But people would get on top of the boats. And it would just be, you know, that's how people entertain themselves.

And, of course, along the levee, you have other people who are not living in the shanty boats. But there are shops and taverns, honky-tonks, all along the levee there. that provided entertainment it was a very lively place i came across this ragged culture that fascinated me a dancing craze a cultural fad if you will and the headquarters seemed to be little oklahoma the the tavern and the grocery store beer garden owned by louis site and because his his bartender there was uh who lived there and lodged and lodged it there he was the regarded as the king of the raggers anyway i was a fascinating look at their culture i mean the whole way they dressed there was a gang swagger about them these weren't the most poor people

because they had to have money to dress like that you know they were they were working class mainly from the i think it originated in north st louis but uh a segment of the working class that had a little money that they could they could they could buy these kind of clothes and go to these big ragger balls and everything and dance contests and everything. And it just tickled me when I ran across that, that the headquarters was right there in Little Oklahoma. It was a hangout place on Sundays, especially. Raggers came in there from all over the city.

And before you know it, wealthy people were hiring these raggers to come into their private homes and put on shows, dance contests and all that. Political parties were starting to invite them to their doings, you know, trying to gain political support. So I think, you know, it's just a fascinating look at life. I think what I've done here in this book is provide, you know, a cultural history of the Mississippi River Basin. It's not just St. Louis. It's the entire Mississippi. No, it was great, Greg.

I really appreciate you coming on. And unfortunately, that's all the time that we or that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank Dr. Greg Andrews. Greg, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? You can find me online. I have a WordPress blog called LostRiverStories.com. All one word, LostRiverStories.com. You can find me on the Greg Andrews Facebook.

And so, yeah, that's probably the best way to get in touch with me. My next project, I'm very far along on the next project. I think it's going to be called Tales from Point Breeze, which is the St. Louis workhouse. Tales from the workhouse, which overlooked the Mississippi River down near the U.S. Arsenal on the south side of St. Louis. And I'm looking at stories from people who were sent to the workhouse for a number of reasons. And it's a fascinating, I found some fascinating stories already. So that's what I'm doing. It's a history of the St. Louis Workhouse.

Well, that sounds great, Greg. I look forward to talking with you about it once you publish that. But thank you again for joining us. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. I walked up to the powerhouse counter Way, hey, put it in the alley There I met with Greasy Annie

Put it on the shimbo now So help me, Bob, I'm puttin' in the alley Way, hey, put it in the alley Help me, Bob, I'm puttin' in the alley Put it on the shimbo now A porter of rum and a porter of gin, oh Where can I find a bully in the alley? A porter of wine, of white and red, oh

But I'm in Chippewa now So help me, oh, I'm bullied in the alley Where can I find a bully in the alley? Help me, oh, I'm bullied in the alley But I'm in Chippewa now