The Berlin was picked up by aptly named ‘tug’ boats, that tugged it through sandy shallows to the deeper water of the main channel. Then one tug headed back out for another incoming ship and one “began its hard task, towing us up against the current to New Orleans, 107 miles distant.”
My 2017 exploration was a reverse course – downriver from Baton Rouge to meet my guide, Richie Blink (Delta Discovery Tours) at the docks in Venice, where the road ends and we kept on going. Venice is the last community on Highway 23 accessible by automobile, and it is the southern terminus of the Great River Road. This has earned the town the nickname “The end of the world.”
I had explained my purpose and Blink’s recommendation was that we head for Passe A Loutre, the eastward most channel of the “mouths of the Mississippi,” since Hogan’s ship was coming from the Keys.
Put-in ramp at Venice, Louisiana docks. This town on the west bank of the river is truly the “end of the road.” The land road, that is. From here we headed out into the Gulf.
We motored along jungle-green channels where water lilies and elephant ears had invaded (non-native species), to reach the main channel of the river.
There’s nothing like dashed expectations to put a damper on one’s enthusiasm for any endeavor. Hogan was not an exception:
…(T)here was no ebbing or flowing tide, not enough rise of tide to cover a croaking frog; no belt of strand to mark the boundary between land and water, for land and water seemed interlocked and of the amphibious kind—an impenetrable jungle of swamps and bushes, infested with sharks, snakes, and alligators. There was water enough, of the kind it was, but who dare drink of it? Ha! That from the marshes smelt of toads and reptiles; that from the Mississippi suggested a fish trap, for, besides mud, it may have a young alligator in it. And this is America—America indeed. Alas! No help for me now; I am on the Mississippi and must go it.
This ship I am on won’t stop until I get to New Orleans; and if I throw myself overboard and attempt to swim ashore, maybe the alligators or the buzzards will get me. See the miserable, muddy banks, not high enough above water for a drowning rat to dry himself on.
Some views looked the same in 2017 as in 1848:
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Bishop Hogan recounted his childhood memories and his voyage to America and to the priesthood in Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir, written in 1898 and published in 1907. His second memoir covered his early missionary years on the Missouri frontier, to his consecration as bishop of St. Joseph in 1868. Our companion volume to Mystery of the Irish Wilderness contains both those memoirs plus additional biographical information I was able to learn from the archives of both the Kansas City-St. Joseph and St. Louis dioceses.
On the Mission in Missouri and Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir is available on our website for 10% off ($22.50), postage paid at www.beautifulozarks.com Companion volume, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness: Land and Legend of Father John Joseph Hogan’s Lost Irish Colony in the Ozark Wilderness, is also available for $17.00, postpaid.