I like to talk to cabdrivers. Especially the old salts. When my efforts to engage them in conversation are successful, they’ll inevitably ask me where I’m from. “Cairo, Illinois,” is what I reply, and the reaction is almost always the same. I swear I’m not exaggerating, this has happened at least 15 times: “Goddamn, that’s a rough town.” Always “rough” and almost always “goddamn” for emphasis.
The next thing I knew we were bouncing into the parking lot at Saint Mary’s Hospital. This is where my granny lives, I thought. We burst through the entrance and headed for the emergency room. My dad planted me on the bench right outside the big wooden double doors and told me to stay put in a voice that meant I was going nowhere and I knew it.
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Not that Cairo was a bucolic Mayberry before the race war. Founded at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, it had a penchant for violence that was established along with the town itself. The first attempt at incorporation was in 1818, though that and two other efforts failed because of the lack of a flood control system. So for many years Cairo was little more than a rest stop and liquor store for the keelboaters working their way up and down the two rivers. It was most hospitable to the sort of businessman who would take your money while the hired help unloaded your shit off your boat, knocked a hole in the bottom of it, and sank the son of a bitch, then would trade you one of his extras for all the goods his men bravely rescued. Little did the merchant pirates realize they were setting the foundations of the local economy for the next 150 years: booze, crime, and screwing anybody who came to town.
Eventually, after levees were built in the 1840s, the town started to take root. Financiers vigorously solicited investment out east and in England. Posters plastered London describing the place as the future “World’s Greatest Manufacturing Mart and Emporium,” illustrated with fanciful images of smoke-belching factories and a gleaming capitol dome. Plans for a great railway system linking Illinois’ two most important towns, Cairo and Galena, suffered through several aborted starts until 1850, when Stephen A. Douglas added Chicago to the plan and engineered through Congress a historic two-million-acre federal land grant to the newly incorporated Illinois Central Railroad. When the project was completed in 1855, the Illinois Central Railroad, a Y-shaped route with its foot in Illinois’ southern tip, was the longest in the world. When the first train reached Cairo from Chicago, 600 dignitaries disembarked, and after much speech making by political figures, Mexican War heroes, and newspaper publishers, everyone got rip-roaring drunk. Finally, Cairo was booming. The new railroad connected the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and in 1859 six million pounds of cotton and wool were shipped through Cairo. The population topped 2,000. Bars opened left and right, whorehouses sprang to life, gambling was everywhere. Cairo was fast gaining a reputation as the wildest town on the rivers, as roustabouts and deckhands from up and down both rivers left their earnings on Ohio Street, then one of the busiest stretches in the United States. Early explorers had marveled at the tongue of land between the two great waterways and predicted great things. Many agreed with one of the town’s founders, General Clark Carr, when he opined, “The time is sure to come when Cairo will be the largest city in the world.” Then came the Civil War.
The successful Union blockade of the Mississippi that made Cairo so strategically important would also prove to be its undoing. The blockade forced both north and south to create other means to move people and goods. The steamboats would thrive for another couple decades, but the locomotive whistle had signaled the beginning of the end for the boats. And though in the 1880s Cairo would boast more railroads per capita than any other city in the world, it couldn’t sustain its status as a major rail center. Its last glory in that department was the opening of the great four-mile-long Illinois Central bridge, which, including its approaches, was for many years the longest in the world.
Then of course came the 60s and the aforementioned rioting.
I suppose the weather might have been bad the day he dropped by.
