The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed.  Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it themselves.  When the pilots’ association announced, months beforehand, that on the first day of September, 1861, wages would be advanced to five hundred dollars per month, the owners and captains instantly put freights up a few cents, and explained to the farmers along the river the necessity of it, by calling their attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established.  It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it.  It looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a bushel of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal more than necessary to cover the new wages.

So, straightway the captains and owners got up an association of their own, and proposed to put captains’ wages up to five hundred dollars, too, and move for another advance in freights.  It was a novel idea, but of course an effect which had been produced once could be produced again.  The new association decreed (for this was before all the outsiders had been taken into the pilots’ association) that if any captain employed a non-association pilot, he should be forced to discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars.  Several of these heavy fines were paid before the captains’ organization grew strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership; but that all ceased, presently.  The captains tried to get the pilots to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-association captain; but this proposition was declined.  The pilots saw that they would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances.

As I have remarked, the pilots’ association was now the compactest monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible.  And yet the days of its glory were numbered.  First, the new railroad stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to Northern railway centers, began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating industry during several years, leaving most of the pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all the time; then the treasurer of the St. Louis association put his hand into the till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the railroads intruding everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the war was over, but carry freights; so straightway some genius from the Atlantic coast introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to New Orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past!