Cairo, Illinois has recently come to my attention because of feedback on my entry for this location in Twain’s Geography. I can readily see why Cairo may have been missed by Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi, Most of the town is actually situated on the Ohio River. My respondent denies any significant economic activity in the town she grew up in, and this is likely the case for her, her parents and probably her grandparents. I found a publication from 1910 that goes into great detail on the history of development – and periods of destruction experienced by this town. Aside from Twain, Cairo is possibly best known as the southern terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad.

It’s known that Sam Clemens visited the town on several occasions, starting with his first cruise from Cincinnati on the John Paul. He had also made numerous stops there will learning the river and while piloting. But it wasn’t until the town got railroad-fever that significant development was attempted. Unfortuntely for those attempting to operate businesses there, those in control were either ignorant of or choose to ignore simple fluvial dynamics. This spit of land was a product of the rivers. The land was added to by high water periods and eroded by the natural processes of two major rivers flowing along both sides, the river banks tended to erode and wash away but the spit would be replenished by high water events. When humans are around, those that like to settle in one spot, such events are categorized as natural hazards and need to be mitigated, in this case levees.

James M. Lansden, in 1910 writes: But while the geographical position fully justified all that was said of it, its topographical features were largely the reverse; so much so, indeed, that the local disadvantages seemed to outweigh the advantages of the geographical position. The difficulty was obvious enough; a great central position, great rivers coming together, draining an empire in extent, but almost annually claiming dominion over the intervening land they themselves had created.

What is probably of most interest to Twain scholars are remarks Twain made in response to Charles Dickens‘ mention of Cairo in his American Notes for General Circulation. Dickens was in Cairo, IL April 9 and 15 of 1842. Twain’s last visit to Cairo in 1882, described in Life on the Mississippi, shows Cairo in a more positive light. See Alan Gribben’s Mark Twain’s Literary Resources, volume two (page 199) for an enlightening discussion of Twain’s response to “American Notes”. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain does not quote from Dickens but only compares his own observations with those of Dickens. Gribben notes that “Dickens’s derogatory view of Twain’s beloved river may have played a role in altering his attitude toward the English author.” Gribben goes on to note an interview of Twain in 1895: “Dickens, in Martin Chuzellwit and his American Notes, told us a great many unpleasant truths, but they were truths undoubtedly.”

AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION AND PICTURES FROM ITALY by Charles Dickens

From CHAPTER XII, FROM CINCINNATI TO LOUISVILLE IN ANOTHER WESTERN STEAMBOAT; AND FROM LOUISVILLE TO ST. LOUIS IN ANOTHER.  ST. LOUIS

At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full of interest.  At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin.  A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.

But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him! An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees: now twining themselves together in great rafts, from the interstices of which a sedgy, lazy foam works up, to float upon the water’s top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled roots showing like matted hair; now glancing singly by like giant leeches; and now writhing round and round in the vortex of some small whirlpool, like wounded snakes.  The banks low, the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slime on everything: nothing pleasant in its aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon the dark horizon.

From St. Louis, Dickens would return to Cincinnati:

From CHAPTER XIV, RETURN TO CINCINNATI.  A STAGE-COACH RIDE FROM THAT CITY TO COLUMBUS, AND THENCE TO SANDUSKY.  SO, BY LAKE ERIE, TO THE FALLS OF NIAGARA

If the coming up this river, slowly making head against the stream, be an irksome journey, the shooting down it with the turbid current is almost worse; for then the boat, proceeding at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles an hour, has to force its passage through a labyrinth of floating logs, which, in the dark, it is often impossible to see beforehand or avoid.  All that night, the bell was never silent for five minutes at a time; and after every ring the vessel reeled again, sometimes beneath a single blow, sometimes beneath a dozen dealt in quick succession, the lightest of which seemed more than enough to beat in her frail keel, as though it had been pie-crust.  Looking down upon the filthy river after dark, it seemed to be alive with monsters, as these black masses rolled upon the surface, or came starting up again, head first, when the boat, in ploughing her way among a shoal of such obstructions, drove a few among them for the moment under water.  Sometimes the engine stopped during a long interval, and then before her and behind, and gathering close about her on all sides, were so many of these ill-favoured obstacles that she was fairly hemmed in; the centre of a floating island; and was constrained to pause until they parted, somewhere, as dark clouds will do before the wind, and opened by degrees a channel out.

In good time next morning, however, we came again in sight of the detestable morass called Cairo; and stopping there to take in wood, lay alongside a barge, whose starting timbers scarcely held together.  It was moored to the bank, and on its side was painted ‘Coffee House;’ that being, I suppose, the floating paradise to which the people fly for shelter when they lose their houses for a month or two beneath the hideous waters of the Mississippi.  But looking southward from this point, we had the satisfaction of seeing that intolerable river dragging its slimy length and ugly freight abruptly off towards New Orleans; and passing a yellow line which stretched across the current, were again upon the clear Ohio, never, I trust, to see the Mississippi more, saving in troubled dreams and nightmares.  Leaving it for the company of its sparkling neighbour, was like the transition from pain to ease, or the awakening from a horrible vision to cheerful realities.

Philip V. Allingham, Contributing Editor, Victorian Web, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario writes: Dickens's Impressions of the Mississippi valley at Cairo, Illinois, the original of "Eden" in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Dickens's biographer Fred Kaplan interprets his response to the place as a terror of the wilderness, of the absence of civilisation, and of civilised conduct:

The edge, the frontier, the open spaces, seemed to him empty or, even worse, savage. Deserted and decaying settlements along the riverbanks quickly slipped back into the wilderness of nature. The settlers soon reverted to instinctive barbarism. Civilization was more fragile, more superficial, than he had imagined. [137-38]

For Martin, then, as for Dickens, the steamboat trip to Cairo is an archetypal voyage to Hades, a place of terror and epiphany, the heart of darkness in an empty continent that Joseph Conrad's Marlow and Kurtz visit later in the century on another great inland waterway, the Congo. For Dickens and his wife, the return to civilisation was a short stagecoach journey from Cincinnati to British North America (Kingston, Toronto, and Montreal). On the other hand, but for the good offices of the most English of the American characters in Martin Chuzzlewit, Mr. Bevan of Massachusetts, Mark and Martin would have been unable to afford the passage back to the Old World with their new insights.

https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/mc/cairo.html