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.

For sale, a Lovecraft postcard, a pictorial addendum to a letter, in which he mentions his river journey down the river at Silver Springs. It sounds like it was sent to Clark Ashton Smith.

“Later – June 9 [1934]. Young Ar E’ch-Bei has held this epistle up several days, wishing to [solicit?] one enclosure. Meanwhile the envelope of your drawings has come, and he is in ecstasies over them. He keeps them always within reach and takes them out to gaze at every few minutes — and has made copies of many of them as best he can. I hope you can fix him up regarding the mythological matters. He wants all the available data on Tsathoggua — have you still the bits from ‘The Mound’ that I sent you when casting up that tale in 1930?

I went yesterday to Silver Springs, where the bottom of a lake is riddled with picturesque views seen from a glass-bottomed boat. Also sailed 10 miles down a tropical river which looked very much like the Amazon or Congo. The scenes for the cinema of ‘Tarzan’ were made here. I must send you a folder of the place — one of the most distinctive and fascinating spots I have ever seen. Evr Yrs for the Eternal Infra-red Flame.”

My June 2020 Picture Postals: On Silver River considered the same trip, with pictures.