LIFE ON MISSISSIPPI, IN WORDS AND PICTURES

To a German traveler on the Mississippi in the middle of the 19th century, Cape Girardeau appeared as "a row of substantial houses" looking "down from steep banks..., melting like sugar into the river."

That description and many others are found in a new book containing more than 200 19th century lithographs and paintings of Mississippi River towns along with recent aerial photographs.

The 342-page "Cities of the Mississippi" is dedicated to the memories of the victims and to the survivors of the Flood of 1993. It includes depictions of both metropolises like Minneapolis, St. Louis and New Orleans, and towns such as Cairo, Ill., and Cape Girardeau.

A. Bottger's 1858 drawing of Cape Girardeau -- 28 vignettes of the town surrounding a primary view of the waterfront from the Illinois side -- is among the artwork, which is fleshed out by the accounts of travelers who passed by the city on their way up or down the river.

The book contains many more descriptions of Cairo, which visitors as luminous as Mark Twain predicted would one day prosper. It did during the middle of the century due to its strategic military location but never overcame its vulnerability to flooding during the 19th century.

The book also offers references to Ste. Genevieve and its battles with the river.

"Cities of the Mississippi" was compiled and written by John W. Reps and published by the University of Missouri Press. Reps is a professor emeritus of city and regional planning at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

His written and pictorial journey extends from The Balize, a village of ship pilots near the mouth of the Mississippi, to its source at St. Cloud, Minn. Along the way, 19th century travelers, journalists and residents give readers their impressions.

Robert Baird wrote in "View of the Mississippi" in 1834: "Cape Girardeau is the first town on the Missouri side (ascending from the Ohio). It is a small place, but will eventually be one of much importance. It is situated on a bluff of considerable elevation, and a rich country spreads out from it."

In 1867, Nathan Parker wrote in "Missouri As It Is": "The best private residences are in the outskirts of the town, and the few old French buildings, valued by some for their antiquity and past history, add nothing to the beauty of the place...this place, in 1850, had a population of only about 800, which has within ten years increased to 3,000."

Discussing Ste. Genevieve, Reps writes: "Early visitors to Missouri found Ste. Genevieve, across from Kaskaskia, far more impressive and citylike than New Madrid or Cape Girardeau. It first occupied a site that proved too flood-prone, and in 1685 its residents began moving to a new and much higher location four miles northwest.

"For a time Ste. Genevieve rivaled St. Louis, but as the fur trade moved west and local deposits of salt and lead neared exhaustion, its population began to decline. As early as 1722 on its first site the city's population reached nearly 700. In 1800 the new town numbered only 806 residents, almost exactly the population in 1836."

Bottger, who created the lithograph of Cape Girardeau, is an obscure figure among the 19th century artisans who recorded life on the Mississippi.

Many of the vignettes he captured are of public buildings or major private structures.

Reps refers to one as "St. Vincent's Academy, which was established in 1838 but moved to its new three-and-a-half-story building in 1843. Damaged by a steamboat explosion five years later and by a tornado in 1850, the building was reconstructed and converted to a seminary for training Roman Catholic priests before Bottger recorded its likeness in the lithograph."

He may have confused St. Vincent's Academy -- a girls' school established in 1838 -- with St. Vincent's College, the boys' school and later seminary founded in 1843. The academy was situated in a building a distance from the college.

The owners of some of the other structures "doubtless paid for the privilege and honor of having images of their homes or enterprises given such prominence," Reps writes.

He bemoans the dearth of contemporary descriptions and drawings of Cape Girardeau. One is found in "Travels on the Lower Mississippi," published in 1879 or 1880 by German writer and traveler Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, who explored the town when his steamboat stopped here.

He noted "the only stone wharf on the 1,250 miles between St. Louis and New Orleans." Hesse-Wartegg described Cape Girardeau as "little more than a settlement, in other words a large village in its tenderest years; streets unpaved and muddy, cut and furrowed by creeks that form in the rain, and houses not in rows but scattered sporadically to either side of a street.

"An occasional house of brick interjects luxury amid a picturesque array and disarray of wood houses. Brick or wood, all hug the ground as if the earnest builders feared earthquakes at any moment."

The book sells for $59.95 until Jan. 31, and $85 thereafter. It is available at stores or directly from the publisher, University of Missouri Press, 2910 LeMone Blvd., Columbia, Mo. 65201. Mail orders require an additional $3 shipping and handling for the first book and 50 cents for each additional book.