This week I follow Lovecraft way out… across the Mississippi river. Dealing again with steamboats, this post is thus a follow-on to last week’s post on Lovecraft’s steamboat trips to Newport, RI. Yes, he actually once made it to the Mississippi, but he also encountered and was delighted by a rail journey along…

… the sinuous windings of the yellow Tennessee River. … After a couple of days in Chattanooga I rode across southern Tennessee to Memphis, where I saw the mighty Mississippi for the first time in my life. This ride involved some of the most magnificent sights of the whole trip — for most of it lay in or beside what is whimsically called the ‘Grand Canyon of the Tennessee River’ — the magnificent bluffs forming part of the Cumberland Mountain system [as they coil above] golden-tinted waters.

Once settled into the old quarter of New Orleans he crossed over “Old Father Mississippi” via the Algiers ferry…

for the first time treading soil west of the Mississippi….

Did he also see the big old river steamers? It’s quite possible, as it was summer 1932 and they were working on the river to be seen and photographed until at least 1936. As seen here in 1936…

He was also riding south on steam trains. In summer 1932 Lovecraft was still living in the last few years of the great age of steam power. At home in Providence, he would the next year move into a new home heated by steam.

His visit to Lookout Mountain, also while in Tennessee, had however been via a nippy electrified mountain rail-car…

This precipitous car hauled him aloft Lookout Mountain and then he descended via a deep elevator shaft to explore another large and spectacular cave system. His first such descent having been in summer 1928 at the Endless Caverns.

I went up Lookout Mountain and revelled in the view and afterward descended into the spectral caverns inside the mountain — where in a vast vaulted chamber a 145-foot waterfall thunders endlessly in eternal night. This chamber and waterfall were discovered only ten years ago — at the end of sealed galleries whose geological formations prove them never to have been entered by mankind before.

I went all over Lookout Mountain [Tennessee], & explored the magnificent network of limestone caverns inside it — culminating in the vast & new-discovered [1923] chamber called “Solomon’s Temple” where a 145-foot waterfall bursts forth from the side — near the roof — & dashes down to a pool whose outlet no man knows.