wanders so crookedly over this flat plain that the stream, whose
general direction is south, must be going straight north at this
particular turn in its winding!" He had guessed the right answer to the
Southern riddle, "Can you name a spot where the sun sets in the east?"
The dislocated sunset had a lowering aspect. Anthony scanned the clouds
with the eye of a weather prophet. "It looks like more rain. A wet moon
is overhanging these lands, already quite damp enough."
Two Indians, dripping from a recent shower, were sloshing along in the
mud of the bank. They signaled him. He put ashore in the funny little
coracle he was using. A coracle is a fishing-tub made of a wooden frame
covered with skin. It is as safe as it is slow. The French prefer it to
the canoe for angling.
"Medicine-men danced all night," began the Indians. "Our old Father
of Waters, the Meact-Chassippi, is angry because the white man has
tried to imprison him within his own banks. All land belongs to
Meact-Chassippi. He wanders over it where he wills. Who defies him must
perish. He is in a rage and has come to destroy our camp. The white men
who oppose him must help us."
Anthony never treated any Indian messenger carelessly. Under every
flowery speech and childish demand was some vital human need. These
Chickasaws were leagued with the rival English. They were bringing
their warlike camps nearer and nearer to the French settlements. All
the doings of the colonists and every unfriendly act of nature they
construed as a good reason for criticizing or attacking the posts.
"It is easy for me to stop the Great River's flow," replied Anthony,
with fine sarcasm. "I will do it after your tribe has taken all
your camps back into the hills of the Chickasaw country where the
Meact-Chassippi can't get you. Tell your chiefs to move away to their
own high ground. Then will the inundation cease."
"We cannot return with a message. As we came the lowlands flooded
themselves behind us."
"By the magic of my coracle, one of you shall go back to your Chickasaw
sorcerers. If the camps come toward the Great River it will drink
them up. If they go back into the hills the waters will recede," was
Anthony's ultimatum. The messenger inverted the coracle upon his head
and waded away to launch it. The wily medicine-men who sent him out in
rising water, with the surety that he could not swim back, would use
his disappearance as a cause of war against the French. In the coracle
he would reappear with the promise of falling waters and the positive
command to retire if they wished to keep dry.
"That outwits our Chickasaw medicine-men for the present." He smiled
at the other Chickasaw, who stood ankle-deep on what was supposed to
be the shore. A wide river stretched before them. Behind them was
the flooded plain. As far as they could see the ground was covered
with rapidly deepening waves. Some place the bank had burst and
Meact-Chassippi, old as it was, frolicked with abandon.
Once it had lived in a glacier and had come down over the plain,
chiseling with knives of ice a gully through the limestone. Then in the
middle of this immensely wide stone valley it had begun to make itself
a soft bed of silt. From fertile hillsides and deep-loamed prairies its
tributaries carried fine particles of earth in their water and dropped
it as they went along the channel until there was a deposit of mud in
the center of the valley much higher than the surrounding country. The
old river has made itself a bed where it can overlook the valley. There
it still turns and twists, with never-ending restlessness. All the
banks of mud are soft. The swiftly flowing stream digs now here, now
there, straightens one part of the channel, makes loops in another. It
carries away whole acres from one place and, dropping them in another,
changes the aspect of a neighborhood every season in the year.
As mud is piled upon the banks rank growth of grass, brush, and trees
springs up to beautify and hold them. Thus they grow firmer year by
year. In spring freshets, as the melting ice and heavy rains bring down
high volumes of water, the southern channels are cut deeper and burrow
under the banks, dig through them or rise up and tumble over them as
over some big dam. Then it begins all over again to make a new bed for
itself along the new channel thus formed. The old bed becomes a bayou.
Nothing is certain about the Great River except the uncertainty of its
next flood.
Anthony was quivering with laughter; it was so absurd to be paddling
with unwebbed feet where only a duck belonged. The Indian showed no
emotion of any kind. But when the jocose white man and the apathetic
red one questioned what to do, both pairs of lips formed the one word,
"_Cajeu_."
So they set to work splashing among the canes, breaking them off,
laying them flat like a mat, and weaving them together with long leaves
and grasses. One of these little rafts was set upon another, with the
canes of the first running at right angles to canes of the other.
On this frail craft, half awash under their weight, they used their
hands for oars and started for New Orleans. Their utter helplessness,
like two insects on a floating leaf, did not in the least disturb them.
They were doing in precarious simplicity what had often been done
before. That they crossed safely was not a wonder. It was a custom. The
first bridge over the Mississippi was that primitive boat, the _cajeu_.
In New Orleans the Chickasaw went to the authorities and told his
mission. Anthony's report of a broken bank and the rising flood gave
much concern. The whole town, in a drenching rain, examined the puny
walls of earth wherewith they had tried, as the Chickasaw declared, "to
imprison that mighty giant, Meact-Chassippi."
In selecting a site for the town it had been necessary to find some
spot that would be easy to reach by the ships coming through the Delta
and also through Lake Pontchartrain. The highest place was taken, but
even that could not be very high in this low flood-plain.
When the energetic citizen Dubreuil took a shovel and threw up this
levee, and then dug a ditch inside to carry away the drip, he did a
sensible act. The water was standing two feet deep in the houses after
every freshet. Yellow fever followed all inundations.
The colony's engineer, Sieur La Tour, had ordered each householder to
put a palisade around his premises and to cut a ditch outside. The
levee was made higher and stronger. The assistant engineer, young
Pauger, was proud of the system of defense.
"Why so serious a face, my Tony?" he asked. "Are we not protected to
please you?"
Anthony could not laugh. "This will be a very wet season."
"How do you know?"
"By the way the sky lowers, the manner in which the beasts take to the
uplands, by the odors in the air, and"--here he wagged his head sagely
like an oldest inhabitant--"and a feeling in my bones!"
Although Pauger was a hard-headed mathematician, he had faith in such
uncanny "signs" as Anthony picked up from the Indians who lived in the
open. He always acted upon them seriously. "We must get permission to
go up the river and show the smaller outposts our manner of making a
dike," he said. "Then will they be secure against the coming freshet."
As the pirogue, which was a tree-trunk hollowed out in boat shape, was
being paddled to the north, Pauger inquired: "Why do you look behind us
so often, Tony? Do you see any one?"
Anthony shook his head.
"Do you hear something?"
Another negative.
"Do you _almost_ know that we are being followed?"
Anthony nodded. Pauger believed a pursuer was on their trail as fully
as he did that a flood was coming.
Like little fishes, they kept near shore out of the strong current.
Their food and their fire-pot were in the pirogue, and they slept at
night curled up in bow or stern while the boat was hidden among fallen
trunks which looked exactly like itself.
They could not discover the thing which stalked them--did not know
whether it was man or beast, by land or water.
Still it came on, and they hid from it and fled before it as any other
explorer would have done.
The few posts on the river welcomed them, listened to Pauger with
respect. They agreed to begin at once, for their own sakes, to set up
stockades at the points of most exposure, to heap them with dirt, to
dig a moat, and to prepare for a heavy freshet.
Several times the pirogue crossed the river, which was not yet
too dangerous. The French called any boat, big or little, a
"water-carriage." If a hydroplane had dropped down beside these two
old-time rowers they would have had no other name for even so startling
a vision.
The "water-carriages" of the Mississippi have been of changing styles.
The resources of the country determined their shape and power. American
pioneers who followed the French took lumber from their forest, sawed
it into planks by their water-driven mills, spiked and doweled it
together, and built big flatboats, guided by poles, on which they
loaded the products of their farms and floated down to New Orleans to
sell the goods, boat and all. Thousands of flatboats at a time lined
the wharves of the post. At the beginning of the nineteenth century
steamboats, at first small and clumsy, afterward large and graceful,
were going up and down the Great River, carrying undreamed-of tonnage
and housing passengers in luxury as soft as the palaces of France.
Anthony and Pauger would not have believed a word of any story which
foretold a steamboat or a hydroplane, yet they had absolute faith in
the enemy prowling unseen.
At Fort Chartres they found the garrison already alarmed. An eddy of
the rising water was beginning to eat away the peninsula which stood
between the fort and the Mississippi. No engineer with definite plans
for spiles, stone barriers, and dikes ever found more energetic helpers
than Pauger in the folks on the Illinois.
Each day they labored on the levee. Every night some untoward accident
happened to delay it. Tools were lost. Openings grew larger. The best
logs rolled to the brink and floated away.
Said an Illinois chief in secret to Anthony: "The manitou of the waters
is against us. He does not like to be turned from the path of his
desire."
Like a flash Anthony saw the cause of their troubles. It was the
Chickasaw! He had followed them from New Orleans. He was doing the
damage; he was spreading dissension. That his meddling might drown the
whole Illinois nation did not deter him if he could thereby destroy
the fort and its white men to propitiate his manitou.
"We must set double guards to-night. We will both watch," Anthony said
to Pauger as he told his news. "The cut by the eddy is forty feet deep.
If it begins to undermine the mainland the fort itself will topple in."
In the early hours, while the sentinels snored carelessly, as they had
probably done every night, a dim form--silent, slow as a wraith of
smoke, drifted along the center of the stockade and pried and pulled
and sawed away at the last spile set like a keystone to the arch of the
barricade. The engineer, with dreadful visions of his whole levee going
down, ran toward the figure, firing his pistol. Anthony called, rousing
the garrison to stop the fatal leak which must follow such a break.
The bullet missed the Indian. It so startled him that he lost his
balance. He fell straight into the gap his own fanatic hands had made.
With his body head downward in the mud he stopped the gap. Earth
closed round him, the spiles settled, his bones formed the cap of the
arch--the levee held.
Poor Chickasaw! Only one of many victims to the tyranny of the Great
River, so bountiful, so mysterious, and so awe-inspiring!
[Illustration: THE TWO MEN CLUNG DESPERATELY TO THE BRANCHES THEY
HAPPENED TO BE ON AND WENT DOWN-STREAM WITH IT]
When Anthony and the engineer had made sure that the level was not
injured they did a foolish thing. Going 'way down to the Mississippi
bank, they climbed a giant gnarled oak to view the flood now sweeping
on in fearsome grandeur.
The tree, long undermined, chose this hour to fall. The oak--roots,
earth, trunk, branches, all--dropped into the stream and whirled away.
The two men clung desperately to the branches they happened to be on
and went down-stream with it.
The heavy roots, like the stone tip of an arrow, went first. The boughs
floated with their lightest side up. In them rode the two explorers
with the speed of an express train.
They crept together as full of terror as two children might have been.
They wedged themselves in secure nests among the stout old limbs.
Exhausted, one watched while the other slept. Hungry, they chewed the
leaf-buds. In the most dangerous of all water-carriages they bridged
the stream from side to side, yet dared not try to get ashore.
From a crumbling hill a panther leaped upon their wildly hurrying craft
and crouched against the trunk, mewing piteously. Afraid of the men,
of the flood, and of the rocking tree, it dared not move to attack or
defense.
The merciless waves at last threw them into a bayou against a turn of
a bank where other debris was plastered, spread out like fans against
the bluff.
* * * * *
Why is one man superior to his fellows? Why should Pauger, marooned in
a brush-heap on a flooded river, tired and wet and hungry as he was,
notice that the running water was dammed by the closely interlaced
branches of fallen trees on either side of its channel?
They prevented its spread; so it began to dig for itself a deeper and
deeper channel in the less resisting mud of the bottom. "If we were to
plait branches with small limbs and strengthen such mats with heavy
posts against the shores of the Delta to keep the river from spreading,
then by its own force would it dig a deeper channel for itself as it
goes to the sea just as this stream is doing. Such a device of branches
would keep open the ship canal to the Gulf." This observation of the
engineer Pauger was the beginning of the idea of those jetties which
now clear the water path to the sea.
There was a boy of French extraction with the mind and spirit of the
early explorers who chanced to be born in our own times. His name
was James Buchanan Eads. He had the title of captain. Pauger's first
hazy inspiration of the jetties Eads perfected and put into practical
working use at the mouth of the Great River. He improved all the old
systems of levees.
During the Civil War, the President of the United States appealed to
Eads to aid the navy. In response to the country's need he invented the
gunboat, forerunner of armed cruisers; built several in an incredibly
short time, and sent them to thunder at the forts of Vicksburg and turn
the tide of battle in favor of the Union.
He was a builder. Caissons, those large water-tight boxes within which
work is done under water, were his invention. They made possible the
construction of that long bridge, a triumph of engineering skill, which
crosses the Mississippi at St. Louis and spans the years from our day
to that hour of the flood when Anthony went from east to west on a
floating tree.
Pauger was fainting under the strain of their exposed position. To
encourage him Anthony said, "The post of Point Arkansas is just below
here." Filling his cupped hands with water, he sent up shower after
shower of mimic rain between them and the miserable, cowering beast.
"Pretty pussy! Pretty pussy! Now--_scat!_" She backed away from the
spattering water which all cats hate. As she crawled up the tangled
roots she spied some patches of dry ground. In a tawny streak she
leaped the chasm from the dripping tree to the knobs ahead, and
disappeared.
Then Anthony, quite as a part of his day's work, stretched his
half-unconscious companion on a spreading limb, detached it, and,
abandoning the tree, swam down the bayou, pulling the precious load
after him until he found a landing-place.
He was weak. The heavy water nearly overcame him. The landing was
difficult, his companion was a dead weight. Several times on the point
of sinking, he did not give up, but made the shore by supreme efforts.
Taking Pauger on his back, he started for the post. The garrison saw
him and came running out with welcoming shouts.
The sun was bright, the air clear, the whole happy world looked good
to Anthony. He had taken part in great events and had seen many noble
men whom two nations remember with gratitude. He little dreamed that in
all the history of the Great River there were few explorers more heroic
than he had been that day.
AFTERWORD
AS the boys of bygone days grew to be men they handed down to other
lads in the stories of their adventures the history of the events which
had happened to them and the things they had learned from experience.
If it were not for the knowledge thus accumulated and given to us by
many past generations the young Americans of these times would still be
running about naked, fighting with sharp stones, and eating one another
with the appetite and manners of the first savages.
When the United States bought the country called Louisiana she acquired
much more than the land; she received also the recorded experiments
and the results of the hard work of the French for more than a hundred
years.
Their successes and their failures, their romantic struggles, their
dauntless spirit, their ideals of fair play, were all a part of the
same inheritance.
Wherever a French explorer set his wandering feet there has since
followed an American business man to develop the fabulous wealth of
those first discoveries.
The iron deposits, north of the sources of the Great River, where the
fur traders wandered, when smelted by the coal further south, have
yielded the richest ores of the world. Lead- and zinc- and copper-mines
have done the same.
Wheat-fields in the Red River region have sent their farmers to mill at
St. Anthony's Falls with the heaviest grist ever known.
Water-power has sawed the lumber of countless forests. Prairies have
pastured as many domestic cattle as ever were fed in the time of
migrating buffalo herds.
Corn- or cane- or cotton-fields border the river everywhere. Orchards
flourish in many states.
Each region has its own city which it supplies with products for
export and which in turn manufactures vast quantities of necessary and
luxurious articles. These cities from source to mouth are strung like
precious pearls of wampum on the glistening thong of the Great River's
length.
Through the jetties and out across Lake Pontchartrain now go the loaded
ships taking supplies to the nation who first planted these shores with
food crops.
The semi-barbarous red tribes which once roamed the whole valley,
quarreling so among themselves that they were few in number and often
starving and ill housed, now live on smaller areas, cultivating
prosperous farms. They are probably more numerous than they were when
the continent was discovered. In civilization they grow apace, as the
early fathers dreamed they might.
The black races, brought by force to the Mississippi Basin, have
marched from savagery to civilization in two centuries. They have added
to history the name of one genius world famous.
In an Atlantic harbor of the United States stands the Statue of
Liberty, given by France to her sister Republic. The flame of her torch
glowing like the spirit of the first explorers is kept forever burning
to guide humanity to Freedom!
THE END
Transcriber's Notes
Page 49, hugh changed to huge (were not as huge as the immense)
Standardized the spelling of Ship's Island
Silently corrected punctuation