The lower Mississippi is among the muddiest streams in the world.
During the average year it brings down 7,500,000,000 cubic yards of
sediment, discharging it along the lower course, or pushing it into
the Gulf. As one thinks of the small amount of sediment held in a
gallon or two of river water, a comprehension of this vast amount of
silt is impossible. It is enough to cover a square mile in area to a
depth of 268 feet. In five hundred years it would build above the sea
level a State as large and as high as Rhode Island. Thus, by means of
this sediment, the river has pushed its mouths fifty miles into the
sea, confining its flow within narrow strips of land--natural levees
made by the river itself.
The Mississippi is notable for its varying length. Within the memory
of the oldest pilot the length of the river between St. Louis and New
Orleans has varied more than one hundred and fifty miles, being
sometimes longer and sometimes shorter, as the year may be one of
drought or of excessive rainfall. Occasionally the river will shorten
itself a score of miles at a single leap. The shortening invariably
takes place at one of its long sinuous curves for which it is so
remarkable. At a season when the volume of water begins to increase,
the narrow neck of the loop gives way little by little under the
continuous impact of the strengthening current. Narrower and narrower
it grows as the water ceaselessly cuts away the bank. Finally the
barrier is broken; there is a tumultuous meeting of waters; the next
steamboat that comes along goes through a new cut; and a moat or
ox-bow lake is the only reminder of the former channel.[5]
[Footnote 5: One of the most noteworthy examples of these cut-offs is
Davis'. This cut-off occurred at Palmyra Bend, eighteen miles below
Vicksburg. The mid-channel distance around the bend was not far from
twenty miles; the neck was only twelve hundred feet across. The fall
of the river, measured around the bend, was about four inches per
mile; the slope, measured across the neck, was about five and one-half
feet, nearly twenty feet per mile. Inasmuch as the soil in the neck
was wholly alluvial, the current cut its new channel with exceedingly
great rapidity, soon clearing it out a mile in width and more than one
hundred feet in depth. The water rushed through the channel with such
a velocity that steamboats could not breast its flow for many weeks,
while the roaring of its flood could be heard many miles away. The
influence of the cut-off was felt both above and below Vicksburg for
several years after. The rate of erosion has been perceptibly
increased above Vicksburg: and it is not unlikely that the cut-off
which occurred a few years later at Commerce, about thirty miles below
Memphis, was a result of Davis' Cut. Other recent cut-offs have
occurred near Arkansas City, below Greenville, near Duncansby, below
Lake Providence at Vicksburg, and at Kienstra. The latter place is
below Natchez; all the others are between Natchez and Memphis. A
double cut-off is strongly threatened at Greenville.]
In 1863 the city of Vicksburg was situated on the outer curve of such
a loop. At that time General Grant and his army were on the opposite
side of the river, and the whole power of the Federal government was
directed upon devising how the army might cross it and capture the
long-beleagured city. So an army engineer conceived the idea of
turning the river around the rear of the army. Accordingly, a canal
was cut across the loop, in order to make an artificial channel
through which its current might run. But the river steadfastly refused
to accept any channel it had not itself made, and the ditch soon
silted up. Twelve years or more afterward there was trouble; for the
river, which had all this time so persistently ignored the canal, one
stormy night, when its current was considerably swollen, took a notion
to adopt the canal that it had so long refused. Next morning the good
people of Vicksburg woke to find their metropolis, not on the river
channel, but practically an inland town overlooking a stagnant mud
flat. The town of Delta, which, the night before, was three miles
below Vicksburg, was, in the morning, two miles above it. Since that
time, energy and intelligence have conspired in its behalf, and
Vicksburg is still an important river port; but the channel of the
river is persistent, and constant effort and watchfulness alone keep a
depth of water sufficient for the needs of navigation before the
wharves.
The average inhabitant of the flood plain of the Mississippi is not
surprised at this capriciousness of the river, for long experience has
taught him to look for it. During seasons of mean or of low water,
there is little or no trouble; but when floods begin to swell the
current, then it is high time to be on the alert, for no one knows
what a day or even an hour may bring forth. Perhaps a snag, loosened
from the bank above, may come floating down the stream. It strikes a
shallow place somewhere in the river, and thereupon anchors in
mid-channel. Directly it does, a small riffle or bar of silt will form
around it, and this, in turn, sends an eddying current over against
the bank. By and by the latter begins to be chipped away, little by
little. Perhaps the corrosion of the bank might not be noticed except
by a bottom land planter or a riverman. But there is no time to be
lost. If some unfortunate individual happens to possess belongings in
that vicinity, he simply lays aside his coat and works as if he were a
whole legion doing Cæsar's bidding; he well knows that in a very few
hours the river will be swallowing up his real estate at the rate of
half an acre to the mouthful. It is certainly hard to see one's
earthly possessions disappear before the angry flood of the river, but
the bottom land planter does not complain, because the experience of
generations has taught him that he must expect it. A queer fortune
befell Island No. 74.
Between the States of Arkansas and Mississippi there is a large
island, which, for want of a name, is commonly known as Island No.
74.[6] This slip of insular land is probably the only territory within
the United States and not of it, for this island is without the
boundaries of either State, county or township. It is not under
control of the government, because it is in the possession of an owner
whose claim is acknowledged by the government. The anomalous position
of the island as to political situation is due to the erosion of the
river as an active and the defects of statutory law as a passive
agent. According to the enactment whereby the States of Arkansas and
Mississippi were created, the river boundary of the former extends to
_mid-stream_; that of the latter to _mid-channel_. Herein is the
difficulty. A dissipated freshet turned the current against the
Mississippi bank, and shifted the former position of mid-channel many
rods to the eastward, so that the fortunate or unfortunate owner found
his possessions lying beyond both the mid-river point of Arkansas and
the mid-channel line of Mississippi. The owner of the plantation may
be unhappy at time of election, for he is practically a non-resident
of any political division. His grief, however, is somewhat assuaged
when the tax gatherer calls, for, being outside of all political
boundaries, he has no taxes to pay.
[Footnote 6: For convenience to navigation, the islands in the lower
Mississippi, beginning at St. Louis, are numbered. Many of them,
however, have local names by which they are frequently known.]
Within a few years the town of Napoleon, which has already been
mentioned as the site which beheld the cross erected by Marquette and
the seizure of La Salle, was the scene of still another chapter in
history. Almost two hundred years from the time when Joliet and
Marquette beheld the historic ground, the river turned its current
against the banks, and in a few hours the crumbling walls of an old
stone building, half a mile or more from the river banks, were the
surviving monument that marked the former location of the town.
The Mississippi is indeed a grand study, and the people who have lived
in its valley during past ages have seen the river doing just what it
is doing to-day; and as race has succeeded race, each in turn has seen
the landmarks of its predecessors swept away by its angry flood and
buried beneath its sediment. Ever since the crests of the Appalachian
and Rocky Mountains were thrust up above the sea, the river has been
wearing them away, and bearing the scourings to the vast plain below.
In the time of its building it has made the greatest and the richest
valley on the face of the earth; next to that of the Amazon it is the
largest, covering an area of one and one-quarter million square miles.
The river and its tributaries drain twenty-eight States and
Territories--an area equal to that of all Europe except Russia. This
basin includes half the area of the United States, exclusive of
Alaska. It is five times as large as Austria-Hungary, six times the
size of France or Germany, nine times the area of Spain, and ten times
that of the British Isles. Measured by its grain-producing capacity,
this valley is capable of supporting a larger population than any
other physical region on the face of the earth. Already it is the
foremost region in the world in the production of grain, meat and
cotton. The rich soil, sedentary on the prairie and alluvial in the
bottomlands, is almost inexhaustible in its nutritious qualities. The
soil cannot be "worn out" in the bottomlands, for nature restores its
vitality by bringing fresh supplies from the highlands as fast or
faster than the seed crop exhausts it. Sixty bushels of wheat or two
bales of cotton may be harvested from an acre of bottom lands. So vast
in proportions is the yearly crop of food stuffs that more than three
hundred thousand freight cars and about two thousand vessels are
required to move the crop from farm to market. One hundred and
twenty-five thousand miles of railway, fifteen thousand miles of
navigable water, exclusive of the Great Lakes, and several thousand
miles of canals are insufficient to transport this enormous
production; thousands of miles of railway are therefore yearly built
in order to keep pace with the growth of population and the settlement
of new lands. To the natural resources of the soil add the enormous
mineral wealth hidden but a few feet below the surface, and wonder
grows to amazement. Coal fields surpassing in extent all the remaining
fields in the world; iron ore sufficient to stock the world with iron
and steel for the next thousand years; copper of the finest quality;
zinc, lead, salt, building stone and timber, all in quantities
sufficient for a population a hundred times as great. Is it strange
that wise economists point to this territory and say, "Behold the
future empire of the world"? Where in the wide world is another valley
in which climate, latitude and nature have been so liberal?
It is only a few years since the Indian and the bison divided between
them the sole possession of this region. What a change hath the hand
of destiny wrought! What a revelation, had some unseen hand lifted the
curtain that separated the past from the future! Iron, steam and
electricity have in them more of mysterious power than ever oriental
fancy accredited to the genii of the lamp, and the future of the basin
of the Mississippi will be a greater wonder than the past.
The feast of La Salle was the death warrant of the Indian, and the
Aryan has crowded out the Indian, just as the latter evicted the mound
builder--just as the mound builder overcame the people whose monuments
of burned brick and cut stone now lie fifty feet below the surface.
Only a few centuries have gone by since these happenings; can we
number the years hence when rapacious hordes from another land shall
drive out the effete descendants of the now sturdy Aryan?
(_To be continued_.)
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