Americans like to boast of the things of this country that are larger,
longer, more valuable, or more wonderful than anything of the kind in
the world. They have recited in school such a number of statements
about the Mississippi river that the great stream has become one of the
essential points of our nation's honor.
You may be able to make the average man believe that Washington was not
always as truthful in his youth as Weems in the cherry-tree story tried
to make him; that Captain John Smith drew somewhat on his imagination
when some sixteen years after the expedition into the woods he told the
story of his rescue by Pocahontas; that perhaps, after all, we did not
whip the entire British nation twice in open warfare--but it will be
hard to make any native-born American admit that the Mississippi river
is not the longest in the world.
He may listen to your argument in favor of the Nile or the Amazon, but
he will tell you that he still thinks that if the Mississippi had been
measured correctly at first, taking the source of the Missouri as the
source of the Mississippi, we would have been the possessors of the
longest river on earth.
And if that should seem a trifle weak he will at once tell you that
the great river is more wonderful than all others because its source
is several hundred feet nearer the center of the earth than its mouth.
In other words, the river flows up hill. The curvature of the earth
is not the true arc of a circle from the equator to the poles, for
the axis of the earth is shorter than its diameter at the equator by
about twenty-six miles. It is thirteen miles less from the north pole
to the center of the earth than from any point on the equator to the
center. So the river flows towards the equator with an apparent fall as
estimated from the sea-level, but with an actual rising away from the
earth's center just as the sea rises round this shoulder of the earth.
So the Mississippi is a source of joy and boastful conversation to
every citizen of the United States.
The Acadian settlers of Nova Scotia whose praises have been sung by
Longfellow in his "Evangeline", were the earliest to reclaim land from
the sea in America. Being weaker than those who used the ax to fell the
giants of the forest primeval, they were more skillful with the spade.
They took advantage of the extremely high tides of the Bay of Fundy and
its branches, and when the water was low threw up embankments which
prevented the sea from covering part of the rich red mud flats before
the village of Grand Pre.
At the time of their painful dispersion they had secured all the land
between the original shore and the island which stood out in the basin
of Minas.
Though they could not take these rich lands with them in their exile,
many of them carried the knowledge of dike-building down to the lower
courses of the Mississippi, and taught the rest of the Americans there
how to get the fat lands of the river bottoms by means of levees.
When General Pakenham gave up his life and lost a fine British army to
General Jackson after the treaty of peace had been signed in the War of
1812, his right rested on the bank of the Mississippi where there was a
levee a little over five feet high.
This levee cut off the waters from spreading when the freshet was on.
It was sufficient at that time. Extensions of levee work cut off more
and more of the bottom-lands from the spread of the high waters till
now nearly four-fifths of the area over which the waters of the June
freshet used to spread are protected by these structures.
The levees are not now the low banks of earth which once kept the
waters back. The great mass of water that comes from the melting of
snows in the Alleghenies and the Rockies must either spread out or pile
up. Confining within less than a mile of width a surplus of water that
formerly spread itself for a hundred miles makes it necessary for the
water to rise and rush forward with greater violence.
Year by year the levees have crept up the sides of the great river,
choking it into narrow walls. Year after year it has risen in its wrath
and burst its bounds to destroy the cities and plantations which have
been fattening in the mud of its alluvial flats. Every year the levees
are put up higher, and as the works extend to the northward and more
effectually close up the southern places of spreading out there is an
average increase in the stage of high water and in velocity of the
current. When it was allowed to wander over great stretches of country
the water seemed in no hurry to get to the gulf, but now it goes
tearing madly through its narrowed banks, and it has become a question
with Congress which will take much deliberation and experiment as well
as great financial outlay to solve.
It has been proposed that great reservoirs be constructed in the
mountain districts to hold back the waters that are wasted in their
rush to the sea. If there could be made in the Bad Lands in northern
Wyoming a reservoir that would hold all the waters accumulating there
during the months of spring, that reservoir would "skim off" the top of
the Mississippi river two thousand miles away and save the people there
from the perils that threaten them whenever the water mounts toward the
danger-point.
It would require a vast artificial lake to hold these waters, but there
are mountain ranges that could be utilized to form the barriers and the
land taken from profitable grazing could be paid for with much less
expense than the cost of one inundation of Mississippi bottom lands
when a levee breaks.
Instead of one vast reservoir it will probably be found expedient to
lay out a great number of works for retaining the western waters, as
well as others in the eastern mountains and some in the beds of other
tributary rivers whose sources are in the great basin between.
If these stores of water could be utilized for irrigation it is
probable that the works would eventually pay for themselves in the
increase in value of cultivated lands. The water at present is largely
wasted because it rushes past the lands that need it before their
distress of drouth comes, and its bulk is fairly spent when they need
most the water that has passed. Adequate systems of reservoirs would
also prevent largely the wearing away of banks and the changing of the
course of the channel and even of the river itself which now sometimes
tears away the foundations of cities, obliterates landmarks, and
carries off bodily many well-tilled farms. Navigation could be much
improved if the stages of high water could be moderated.
The Kansas farmer complained that the Missouri river is too thick to
drink and too thin to plow. Control of surplus water near the sources
would make this river so moderate that commerce would move along its
surface. Varying moods and shifting sands now prevent navigation on
that great river almost completely.
The Chinese have a problem similar to ours. Their government esteems
their board of public works as one of the highest in their country.
This board has charge of the canals and embankments along the great
rivers. But it is a Chinese board.
The Hoang Ho resembles our great water course in that it rises in
mountains and flows for hundreds of miles through comparatively level
country in its lower courses. It deposits mud along its way through the
great plain so that the people are continually obliged to construct
levees higher and higher until nature no longer will put up with such
treatment and the great yellow river breaks its bonds and travels
across the country to find a new outlet at the seacoast.
In 2500 years it has altered its general course nine times with
terrible destruction of life and property. Its last great breach
occurred in 1887, when it tore through the empire a new channel
that caused its waters to reach the sea through the mouth of the
Yangtse-kiang five hundred miles away from its present mouth. More
than a million lives were lost and the devastation of the country has
never been approximately estimated. The gap torn in its embankment was
two-thirds of a mile in width. Efforts to close it were ineffective
except in low water, and when it was at last almost accomplished the
celestials had a narrow but constantly deepening breach to mend, its
depth during the last days of the work being so great that a torrent
sixty feet deep fought with gigantic might against the endeavors of the
men. At times the bed of this river has actually stood above the level
of the surrounding country, its walls having risen with the rise of
the bed due to the deposit of mud till it seemed as if the great river
had risen to take a look over the surrounding plain to see where it
could wreak the direst vengeance on those who prevented it from running
unvexed to the sea.
We may learn from the wide experience of the Chinese that there is
no safety for us in merely building higher the walls to restrain the
Mississippi. The nation must take hold of the matter with a strong
hand. Possibly forty or fifty millions will be necessary to construct
the works which will moderate the flow and distribute its waters to
those who need it in their irrigating ditches. Even though it cost
thrice the sum paid to Spain in settlement of the Philippine question,
the people would more gladly give it.
Nothing short of a great ship canal along the bed of the Mississippi
will satisfy Americans. There is but one objection to the work, and
that is its great expense. But we have recently seen that the cost of
one great inundation along the Brazos was far more than the figures
here named, and no account need be made of the loss of life and the
suffering that followed that great disaster.
Our great river must be controlled. Not in the Chinese fashion, which
we know to be merely the storing of wrath against the day of wrath,
but it must be done intelligently and with patience, with faith in
ourselves and a determination to prevent the great loss of life which
will be imminent every time there happens to be the coming of a flood
from the eastern mountains and another from the western at the same
time.
Our great water way, when properly controlled and protected by
permanent revetments and masonry, will furnish the farmers of the great
plains a natural outlet to the sea for all their produce. This will be
monopolized by no railway trust; no combination of steam-boat men will
put the farmer into the hands of corporations seeking to rob him of the
best part of his crop on the way to market, for there will be docks
along every man's water front, and the rudest flatboat will always rely
upon the favoring current to bear its cargo to the sides of independent
vessels plying the seas to the uttermost parts of the earth.