Excerpt from Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg as published in Travels on the Lower Mississippi. Notice the tone of the impressed European.
. . . Speeding through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, each in its turn, our express brings us to the Mississippi at last. We cross the "Father of Waters" on a huge, majestic bridge . . . The river at our feet does not resemble an ice-covered body of water, but an elongated puddle of frozen mud-an expanse black in some places, dirty-yellow and gray in others, opaque, like dry and frozen land.
. . . They are majestic, these grand steamboats. Approaching from a distance, one of them suggests a mosque taking shape against the blue of a southern sky, a floating mosque with tall slim minarets. It boggles the imagination, this floating, glittering palace in scintillating white, this phantasmagoria. As for the dozen together at St. Louis now-what a spectacle!
. . . One night we drifted along a lazy Mississippi toward the sunny South. The moon obliged with enough light for pilots. Everyone else saw only a ghostly riverscape, dim and mysterious, as if the moon did not so much illuminate as cast a veil over it. I was up in the tiny pilothouse. Anxiously the pilots studied the surface of the water and monitored the progress of our large and loaded steamboat. A dangerous "piece of river" extends from S. Louis to the mouth of the Ohio and beyond, even to New Orleans. Feminine monsters like those of the Lorelei imperil every inch of this river, except they are neither so young nor so pretty, and they wreck the sailor without siren songs or other poetic compensation. Our Mississippi sailor also has a crowd of passengers to worry about and hundreds of tons of cargo: a situation of greater risk and more serious consequences than Heinrich Heine could have imagined when he sang of the Lorelie. Besides, the romance of his beautiful poem would never have survived the steamboats, cotton bales, and Negro deckhands.