Suwannee River
by
[Farrar & Rinehart,, $2.50]
WHEN Stephen Foster, casting about for a more musical dissyllabic name than the Peedee of his first choice, hit upon what all the world now knows as the Swanee River, he could not have taken from the map of the United States a river whose upper basin is less in tune with the associations of ‘Old Folks at Home.’ Romantic the Upper Suwannee certainly is, but with the wild fierce romance of the jungle, not with the nostalgia of fondly remembered home and childhood.
Because of the fame of the song, various and conflicting reports of the river have come to us from time to time. It has been rumored to be no more than an unlovely swamp creek; on the other hand, it has only recently been described by Mr. Jonathan Daniels as ‘a river lovely as a song.’ But it has remained for Mrs. Matschat to discover, explore, and reveal the real Suwannee River in all its strangeness and sinister beauty.
The Suwannee River rises in the Okefenokee Swamp, a sombre fresh-water swampland of some 700 square miles on the borders of Georgia and Florida. Although Mrs. Matschat boated the 240 miles of river from its source to the Gulf, describing as she went its orchids, the high banks of its lower courses, and the remnant of its plantation life, it is to the swamp that she devotes most of her attention. It is a region of bottleshaped cypresses, Spanish moss, labyrinthine runs and bays, ground so spongy the tread of a man will set an eighty-foot cedar quivering like an aspen. Wild life is abundant. Bears, deer, wild cats, foxes, stalk and run through the tree-filtered light of its forests. Cranes dance on the shores of its bays; alligators boom in its runs. It is a land of rare birds, plants, and fish, a zoölogist’s and botanist’s paradise. Here within sixty miles of Jacksonville is a world as little known to the tourist as Kipling’s jungle, and as thick with exotic local color.
The people who live in this strange semitropical swamp are as cantankerous, independent, and distrustful of the outside world they call the ’outland’ and ’Ameriky’ as their Kentucky cousins. Illiterate, isolated, they have preserved the folk mind which delights in legends, charms, dance games, ballads of dying lovers, and tall tales of humorously complex exaggeration. Their vocabulary is racy with old Scottish and Northern England dialectical words, their pronunciation and idiom those of the Southern Appalachian mountaineer, their picturesque speech untamed by the reading of newspapers.
For a people who have lived for generations in a semitropical climate they are surprisingly energetic. The dangers which beset Daniel Boone have disappeared from the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, but the Okefenokee folk, surrounded by deadly poisonous snakes and the alligator and alligator snapper, have to look alive to live. And they live surprisingly well. Their tables are laden with the abundance of the old pioneer days when the early settlers ate breast of partridge for bread. Theirs is no limited mountainy diet of corn bread, hog meat, and long sweet’nin’. They feast like kings. Fish, oysters, all kinds of game, honey, wild fruits, lie piled plate by platn with the domestic beef, pork, and scarcer mutton.
A woman of science and imagination, Mrs. Matschat was admirably equipped to describe this region, and as a result this, the third of that interesting series, ‘The Rivers of America,’ is the best of the books yet issued. I have only one complaint worth stating: in her book, as in its predecessors in the series, the reader is made conscious of the writer’s zeal for interest and consequent striving for effect. I wish she had been content to tell what she saw and heard as she saw and heard it, not felt it necessary to fictionize her material so that it is impossible for us to distinguish what she herself observed from what she invented and imagined and what she took from the bibliography printed at the end of her book.
HORACE REYNOLDS