Joel Cook

XX.

THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

The Father of Waters—Its Drainage Area—The Big Muddy—Sources of the Missouri—The Great Falls—Fort Benton—Sioux City—Council Bluffs—Omaha—St. Joseph—Atchison—Leavenworth—Lawrence—Topeka—Osowatomie—John Brown—Kansas Emigrants—The Walls of Corn—Kansas City—Wyandotte—Chillicothe—Florida—Mark Twain—Muscatine—Burlington—Nauvoo—Keokuk—Des Moines—St. Louis—Jefferson Barracks—Egypt—Belmont—Columbus—Island No. 10—Fort Pillow—The Chickasaws—Memphis—Mississippi River Peculiarities—Its Deposits and Cut-Offs—The Alluvial Bottom Lands—St. Francis Basin—Helena—White River—Arkansas River—Fort Smith—Little Rock—Arkansas Hot Springs—Washita River—Napoleon—Yazoo Basin—Vicksburg—Natchez Indians—Natchez—Red River—Texarkana—Shreveport—Red River Rafts—Atchafalaya River—Baton Rouge—Biloxi—Beauvoir—Pass Christian—New Orleans—Battle of New Orleans—Lake Pontchartrain—The Mississippi Levees—Crevasses—The Delta and Passes—The Balize—The Forts—South Pass—Eads Jetties—Gulf of Mexico.

THE BIG MUDDY.

The great "Father of Waters," with its many tributaries, drains a territory of a million and a half square miles, in which live almost one-half the population of the United States. The length of the Mississippi River from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico is about twenty-six hundred miles, the actual distance in a direct line being but sixteen hundred and sixty miles. Its name comes from the Ojibway words Misi Sepe, meaning the "great river, flowing everywhere," and the early explorers spelled it "Mesasippi." The Iroquois called it the Kahnahweyokah, having much the same meaning. The upper waters of the Mississippi have already been described in a preceding chapter, and taken in connection with its chief tributary, the Missouri, it is one of the longest rivers in the world, the distance from the source to the Gulf being almost forty-two hundred miles. The Dakotas called this stream Minni-shosha, or the "muddy water," and its popular name throughout the Northwest, from the turbid current it carries, has come to be the "Big Muddy." The head streams rise in Idaho, the Eda Hoe of the Nez Perces, meaning the "Light on the Mountains," and in Wyoming. The name of the Indian nation through whose lands its upper waters flow—the Dakotahs—means the "Confederate People," indicating a league of various tribes. The Mississippi drains practically the whole country between the Appalachian Mountains on the east and the "Continental Divide" of the Rockies on the west.

The Missouri River is formed in southwestern Montana, by the union of the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin Rivers. Its length from the source of the Madison River in the Yellowstone National Park to its confluence with the Mississippi above St. Louis is about three thousand miles. The first exploration of the headwaters of the Missouri was by the famous expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark in 1805, who ascended to its sources, and crossing the Rockies descended the Snake and Columbia Rivers into Oregon. They found the confluence of the three rivers making the Missouri, in July, and called it "the Three Forks," at the same time naming the rivers after President Jefferson and his Secretaries of State and the Treasury. The Missouri, from the junction, first flows northward through the defiles of the Rockies, and breaks out of the mountain wall in Prickly Pear Canyon, at the Gate of the Mountains, where the rocky cliffs rise twelve hundred feet. Forty miles northeast it goes down its Great Falls to a lower plateau, having a total descent of nearly five hundred feet, the stream contracting in the gorge to a width of three hundred yards, and tumbling over repeated cascades, with intervening rapids. The Black Eagle descends fifty feet, Colter's Falls twelve feet, the Crooked Falls twenty feet, the Rainbow forty-eight feet, and the Great Falls ninety-two feet, this series of rapids and cascades covering a distance of sixteen miles. Lewis and Clark were the first white men who saw these magnificent cataracts of the Upper Missouri, and they named the different falls. The Black Eagle was named from the fact that on an island at its foot an eagle had fixed her nest on a cottonwood tree. It is recorded by a United States Engineer officer who was there in 1860, that the eagle's nest then still remained in the cottonwood tree on the island, being occupied by a bald eagle of large size. Again in 1872 the nest and the old eagle were still there, and from the longevity of these birds, it was then believed to be the same eagle seen in 1805. The old eagle nest and cottonwood tree are all gone now, and in their place are a big dam, power-house and huge ore-smelter, worked by the ample water-power of the fall. The flourishing town of Great Falls gets its prosperity from these cataracts and is a prominent locality for copper-smelting, having fifteen thousand people. At the head of river navigation, some distance farther down, is the military post of Fort Benton. The river then flows eastward through Montana, receives the Yellowstone at Fort Buford and turns southeast in North Dakota, passing Bismarck, the capital, and flowing south and southeast it becomes the boundary between Nebraska and Kansas on the west, and South Dakota, Iowa and Missouri on the northeast. Its course is through an alluvial valley of great fertility, from which it gathers the sediment with which its waters are so highly charged. Much of the adjacent territory in Dakota and Montana is covered by the extensive reservations of the Indian tribes of the Northwest, where the remnants now live a semi-nomadic life under military guardianship and government control. The river flows past Yankton, a supply post for these reservations, which being the settlement farthest up-stream, was thus named Yankton, meaning "the village at the end." Some distance below, the Big Sioux River flows in, forming the boundary between Dakota and Iowa, and here is Sioux City, where there are forty thousand people, much trade, and important manufactures.

Below here lived the Omahas, or "up-stream" Indians, and soon the Missouri in its onward course flows between Omaha and Council Bluffs. Here the bluffs bordering the river recede for some distance on the eastern bank, making a broad plain adjoining the shore, whither the Indians of all the region formerly came to hold their councils and make treaties. A settlement naturally grew at the Council Bluffs, which is now a city of twenty-five thousand people on the plain and adjacent hills, with fine residences in the numerous glens intersecting the bluffs in every direction. Three bridges cross the Missouri to Omaha, on the western shore, two for railways, one of them being the great steel bridge carrying over the Union Pacific, the pioneer railroad constructed to the Pacific Coast. Omaha is the chief city of Nebraska, the State receiving its name from the Nebraska river, meaning the "place of broad shallow waters." Omaha has over one hundred and fifty thousand people and is built on a wide plateau elevated about eighty feet above the river, from which it gradually slopes upward. It dates from 1854, but did not receive its impetus until the completion of the Pacific Railway converged to it various lines bringing an enormous trade. From its position at the initial point it is known as the "Gate City." There are large manufactures and its meat-packing industries are of the first importance, while its enterprise is giving it rapid growth. The Union Pacific Railroad pursues its route westward through Nebraska, up the valley of the Platte River for several hundred miles, and at Fort Omaha, just north of the city, is the military headquarters of the Department.

THE STATE OF KANSAS.

Various great railways bound to the West cross the Missouri in its lower course. The river flows between Kansas and Missouri, and here are St. Joseph with sixty thousand people, immense railway and stock-yards, and many factories; and Atchison with twenty thousand population and large flouring-mills, where the Atchison railway system formerly had its initial point, though now it traverses the country from Chicago southwest to Santa Fe and the Pacific Ocean. Leavenworth, a city of twenty-five thousand, has grown at the site of Fort Leavenworth, one of the important early posts on the Missouri. To the southward the Kaw or Kansas River flows in, the Indian "Smoky Water," coming from the west, draining the greater part of the State which it names. Upon this river is Lawrence, the seat of the Kansas State University, having a thousand students, and of Haskell Institute, a Government training-school for Indian boys and girls. Westward along the Kansas River broadly spread the vast and fertile prairies making the agricultural wealth of the State, and sixty-seven miles from the Missouri, built on both sides of the river, is Topeka, the capital, having thirty-five thousand people, large mills and an extensive trade with the surrounding farm district. In this eastern portion of Kansas, prior to the Civil War, was fought, often with bloodshed, the protracted border contest between the free-soil and pro-slavery parties for the possession of the State, that had so much to do with bringing on the greater conflict. When Congress passed the bill in 1854 organizing Nebraska and Kansas into territories, an effort began to establish slavery, and the Missourians coming over the border tried to control. They founded Atchison and other places and sent in settlers. At the same time Aid Societies for anti-slavery emigrants began colonizing from New England, large numbers thus coming to preËmpt lands. During four years the contests went on, Lawrence and other towns being besieged and burnt. The first Free-State Constitution was framed at Topeka in 1855, which Congress would not approve, and the following year the pro-slavery Constitution was enacted at Lecompton, which the people rejected. After the Civil War began, Kansas was admitted to the Union in 1861 with slavery prohibited. Among the free-soilers who went out to engage in these Kansas conflicts was old John Brown. Near the Missouri border, to the southward of Kansas River, is the little town of Osowatomie, in the early settlement of which Brown took part. Here he had his fights with the slavery invaders who came over from Missouri, finally burning the place and killing Brown's son, a tragedy said to have inspired his subsequent crusade against Harper's Ferry, which practically opened the Civil War. A monument is erected to John Brown's memory at Osawatomie. The New England emigration to Kansas in those momentous times inspired Whittier's poem, The Kansas Emigrants:

"We cross the prairie as of old

The Pilgrims crossed the sea,

To make the West, as they the East,

The homestead of the free!

"We go to rear a wall of men

On Freedom's southern line,

And plant beside the cotton-tree

The rugged Northern pine!

"We're flowing from our native hills

As our free rivers flow;

The blessing of our Mother-land

Is on us as we go.

"We go to plant her common schools

On distant prairie swells,

And give the Sabbaths of the wild

The music of her bells.

"Upbearing, like the Ark of old,

The Bible in our van,

We go to test the truth of God

Against the fraud of man.

"No pause nor rest, save where the streams

That feed the Kansas run,

Save where our Pilgrim gonfalon

Shall flout the setting sun!

"We'll tread the prairie as of old

Our fathers sailed the sea,

And make the West, as they the East,

The homestead of the free!"

The Civil War ended all these conflicts, and since then Kansas has been eminently peaceful. It is now the leading State of the corn belt which broadly crosses the middle of the United States. Its vast corn crops make the wealth of the people, and as they may be good or poor, the Kansan is in joy or despair. One year the farmers will be overwhelmed with debt; the next brings an ample crop, and they pay their debts and are in affluence. Thus throbs the pulse as the sunshine and rains may make a corn crop in the State that sometimes exceeds three hundred millions of bushels; and then there are not enough railway cars available to carry away the product. In a good crop the cornstalks grow to enormous heights, sometimes reaching twenty feet to the surmounting tassel, and a tall man on tip-toe can about touch the ears, while a two-pound ear is a customary weight, with thirty-five ears to a bushel. These vast cornfields, watched year by year and crop after crop by the hard-working wife of a Kansas farmer, caused her to write the touching lyric which has become the Kansas national hymn, Mrs. Ellen P. Allerton's "Walls of Corn":

"Smiling and beautiful, heaven's dome

Bends softly over our prairie home.

"But the wide, wide lands that stretched away

Before my eyes in the days of May;

"The rolling prairie's billowy swell,

Breezy upland and timbered dell;

"Stately mansion and hut forlorn—

All are hidden by walls of corn.

"All the wide world is narrowed down

To walls of corn, now sere and brown.

"What do they hold—these walls of corn,

Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn?

"He who questions may soon be told—

A great State's wealth these walls enfold.

"No sentinels guard these walls of corn,

Never is sounded the warder's horn;

"Yet the pillars are hung with gleaming gold,

Left all unbarred, though thieves are bold.

"Clothes and food for the toiling poor;

Wealth to heap at the rich man's door;

"Meat for the healthy, and balm for him

Who moans and tosses in chamber dim;

"Shoes for the barefoot; pearls to twine

In the scented tresses of ladies fine;

"Things of use for the lowly cot

Where (bless the corn!) want cometh not;

"Luxuries rare for the mansion grand,

Booty for thieves that rob the land—

"All these things, and so many more

It would fill a book but to name them o'er,

"Are hid and held in these walls of corn

Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn.

"Where do they stand, these walls of corn,

Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn?

"Open the atlas, conned by rule,

In the olden days of the district school.

"Point to this rich and bounteous land

That yields such fruits to the toiler's hand.

"'Treeless desert,' they called it then,

Haunted by beasts and forsook by men.

"Little they knew what wealth untold

Lay hid where the desolate prairies rolled.

"Who would have dared, with brush or pen,

As this land is now, to paint it then?

"And how would the wise ones have laughed in scorn

Had prophet foretold these walls of corn

Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn."

The Kansas River flows into the Missouri at Kansas City, the chief settlement of the Missouri Valley, entirely the growth of the period since the Civil War, through the prodigious development of the railways. There are two cities where the Missouri is crossed by three fine bridges, and having two hundred thousand people, the larger being Kansas City in Missouri, on the southern river bank, and the other adjoining is Kansas City or Wyandotte, the largest city in Kansas, through which the Kansas River flows. The two cities are separated by the State boundary between Kansas and Missouri. Next to Chicago, this place has the largest stock-yards and packing-house plants, and does an enormous trade in cattle, meats and grain, many railroads radiating in all directions. The site was originally the home of the Wyandotte Indians who were removed here from Ohio in 1843. The town of Wyandotte had a small population prior to the Civil War, but the growth did not begin until after the close of that conflict had stimulated railway building and western colonization, and being on the trail from the Missouri River to the southwest, this gave the first impetus. These cities now have a rapid expansion, and are the greatest railway centres west of the Mississippi River, their lines going to the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific through sections of country which are rapidly populating and developing vast agricultural and mineral products.

The Missouri River traverses the entire State of Missouri in winding, turbid current from west to east. It passes Jefferson City, the State Capital, having about seven thousand people, and just below receives the Osage River coming up from the southwest. At Chillicothe to the northwest is buried Nelson Kneiss, who composed the music for Thomas Dunn English's popular ballad of Ben Bolt; and at Florida, to the northeast, was born in November, 1835, the humorist, Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain. Captain Sellers, who furnished river news to the New Orleans Picayune, had used this nom-de-plume, and dying in 1863, Clemens adopted it. Twenty miles above St. Louis the Missouri flows into the Mississippi, contributing the greater volume of water to the joint stream, the clear Mississippi waters, pushed over to the eastern bank, refusing for a long distance below to mingle with the turbid flood of the Missouri.

THE CITY OF ST. LOUIS.

The Mississippi River below the Moline Rapids at Rock Island passes various flourishing cities, including Muscatine and Burlington, the former having considerable trade in timber and food products, while Burlington, a much larger place, spreads back from the bluffs and is a busy railroad city, fronted by a beautiful reach of the river. About thirty miles below, on the Illinois shore, is Nauvoo, a small town chiefly raising grapes and wine, but formerly one of the leading settlements on the river. This town was originally built by the Mormons under the lead of their prophet, Joseph Smith, in 1838, after they had been driven from various places in New York, Ohio and Missouri. Nauvoo flourished greatly, reaching fifteen thousand population, but dissensions arose and the enmity of the growing population elsewhere caused riots, in one of which, in 1844, Smith, who had been arrested and taken to jail at Carthage, Illinois, was killed. Brigham Young then assumed leadership, and in 1845 removed the colony over to the Missouri River at Council Bluffs, finally migrating to the Great Salt Lake in Utah, two years later. Below Nauvoo are the Lower Rapids of the Mississippi, extending twelve miles to Keokuk, a beautiful city built partly along the river, but mostly on the summit of the bluffs, here rising one hundred and fifty feet. Keokuk was a noted Indian chief, his name meaning the "watchful fox." Des Moines River, forming the boundary between Iowa and Missouri, flows in at the lower edge of the city, having come down from the northwest and passing the Iowa State Capital, Des Moines, at the head of navigation, where there is a population of sixty thousand and extensive manufactures. This city has a magnificent Capitol, erected at a cost of $3,000,000, and its prosperity is largely due to the extensive coal measures of the neighborhood. It has grown around the site of the former frontier outpost of Fort Des Moines, built in the early days for protection against the Sioux. Below are Quincy, Hannibal and Alton, the latter being just above the confluence with the Missouri, and then the Mississippi River flows majestically past the levee at St. Louis, the chief city on its banks, having two great railway bridges crossing over to the Illinois shore.

When the French held Louisiana, a grant was made in 1762 to Pierre Ligueste Laclede and his partners to establish, as the "Louisiana Fur Company," trading-posts on the Mississippi. Laclede in that year came out from France to New Orleans, and in 1764, in order to open the fur trade with the Indians on the Missouri, he ascended the Mississippi, and on February 15th made the first settlement on the site of St. Louis, building a house and four stores and naming the place in honor of King Louis XV. of France. He had frequent journeys along the river, and died upon one of them near the mouth of the Arkansas in 1778. The post was made the capital of Upper Louisiana, but it grew very slowly, having only a thousand people when Louisiana was ceded to the United States in 1803. The development of steamboating and afterwards of the railway systems, all the great lines seeking St. Louis, gave it rapid growth subsequently, and its population now reaches seven hundred thousand. It spreads with its vast railway terminals for nearly twenty miles along the Mississippi, sweeping in a grand curve past the centre of the city, which rises in repeated terraces as it extends westward back from the river, the highest being two hundred feet above the water-level. It has an enormous trade and extensive manufactures, being the largest tobacco-making city in the world, and having one of the greatest American breweries, the Anheuser-Busch Company. Its Chamber of Commerce, of sandstone in Renaissance, is a noted building, and its grand Court House, erected as a Greek cross, is surmounted by a dome three hundred feet high. It also has a new and magnificent City Hall. St. Louis been singularly free from fires, but its great disaster was upon May 27, 1896, when a terrific tornado swept through the city, killing three hundred people and destroying property valued at $10,000,000.

The chief institution of learning is Washington University, which has fine new buildings in Forest Park on the western verge of the city, and cares for seventeen hundred students. The park system is very extensive, spreading partially around the built-up portions and embracing twenty-one hundred acres. The chief of these are the Forest Park, with fine trees and drives, the Tower Grove Park, Lafayette and Carondelet Parks, and in the northern suburbs O'Fallon Park, having adjacent the spacious Bellefontaine and Calvary Cemeteries. The gem of the system, however, is the Missouri Botanical Garden of seventy-five acres, the best of its kind in the country, which was bequeathed to the city by Henry Shaw, a native of Sheffield, England, who came to St. Louis, grew up with the city, and died there in 1889. The great attraction of St. Louis is its splendid bridge crossing the Mississippi, built by James B. Eads and completed in 1874 at a cost of $10,000,000, carrying a railway across, with a highway on the upper deck, being more than two thousand yards long, and resting on arches rising fifty-five feet above the water. The railway is tunnelled under the city for nearly a mile, and leads to the Union Station, which is one of the largest in the world. The Merchants' Bridge, which cost $3,000,000, brings another railway over, three miles above, and a third bridge is projected. The vast aggregation of railways centering at St. Louis also uses another bridge route north of the city, crossing the Missouri just above its mouth and then the Mississippi to Alton on the Illinois shore. The military post of St. Louis is Jefferson Barracks down the river, an important station of the United States army.

DESCENDING THE MISSISSIPPI.

The scenery of the Mississippi River changes below St. Louis, and it loses much of the picturesqueness displayed by the bluff shores above. The mass of the waters is larger, the shores lower, and the adjacent regions more subject to overflow. There are many bends and islands, and the Ohio River comes in at the end of the long low peninsula of Cairo, further adding to the enormous current. The Southern Illinois lowlands have long been known as Egypt, and upon these bottom lands are grown prolific crops of corn. In one field in the great crop of 1899, covering over six thousand acres south of Ava, was raised six hundred thousand bushels, the banner American cornfield of that year. Twenty miles below Cairo is Columbus, on a high bluff upon the Kentucky shore, having Belmont opposite in Missouri, this having been the scene of General Grant's first battle in the Civil War. The Confederates in 1861 had fortified Columbus and placed twenty thousand men there to hold the Mississippi. Grant, in November, made an attack upon Belmont, and broke up and destroyed their outpost camp in spite of a heavy fire from Columbus, afterwards cutting his way out and returning to Cairo. When in the next spring Forts Henry and Donelson were captured, the Confederates found Columbus untenable and abandoned it without a contest. Fifty miles below is Donaldson Point, and off it the noted Island No. 10, for all these islands below Cairo were numbered. The Union gunboats attacked Island No. 10 in March, 1862, and carried on a bombardment and siege for a month, when it was captured with New Madrid on the Missouri shore several miles farther down, they being mutually dependent. The remains of earthworks are still visible on the island, and also the canal cut to assist in the investment. The Mississippi beyond, skirts the various bluffs of the Chickasaw region on the eastern bank, while on the western shore are broad alluvial lowlands, as the great river passes between Tennessee and Arkansas. On the first Chickasaw bluff is Fort Pillow, another Confederate stronghold, which, however, they were compelled to abandon in June, 1862, as the Union army had got in their rear. Here afterwards occurred the "Fort Pillow Massacre," in April, 1864, when the Confederates under General Forrest attacked and captured it.

All the region hereabout was inhabited by the Chickasaw Indians, who were so called in their language because they were "swamp-dwellers" and "eaters of the bog-potato." This tribe long ago removed to the Indian territory, where they are now in a prosperous condition and successful agriculturists. On the southwestern border of Tennessee is what is known as the fourth Chickasaw bluff, and here is the city of Memphis, the leading town between St. Louis and New Orleans. The bluff shore rises about eighty feet above the river at the ordinary stage of water, and is fronted by a wide levee extending for two miles and a broad esplanade bordered by warehouses. It was here that De Soto in 1541, with his band of adventurous explorers searching for gold, came and first saw the great river, their chronicler writing home "the river was so broad that if a man stood still on the other side, it could not be told whether he was a man or no; the channel was very deep, the current strong, the water muddy and filled with floating trees." Memphis is a handsome city, attractively laid out, the residential section having spacious lawn-bordered avenues, and there being an attractive park in the centre, the Court Square inhabited by numerous squirrels and adorned by Andrew Jackson's bust. Memphis has seventy thousand people, and a large trade both by river and railroad, being a leading cotton-shipping port, whence steamboats take vast amounts down to New Orleans for foreign export. Among its attractions are the cotton compresses and cotton-seed oil mills. In the Civil War, Memphis was captured by the Union gunboats in June, 1862, and held afterwards. On the outskirts, a grim memorial of the great conflict, is the National Cemetery, with fourteen thousand Union soldiers' graves.

PECULIARITIES OF THE GREAT RIVER.

The Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio is an entirely changed river. Above that stream, it is similar to most other inland waterways, having tolerably stable banks and not much change in width. Below Cairo, however, the deposits forming the banks are composed of alternate layers of sand and mud or clay, the sand having been deposited by running water, and the mud in comparatively still water, so that the sand-layers are readily washed out, thus causing the banks to cave whenever the current sets against them. Below the influx of the Ohio, the river traverses alluvial bottom lands of inexhaustible fertility, and usually stretching to a width of forty miles or more. These alluvial lands have a general southern slope of about eight inches to the mile, and stretch five hundred miles to the southward, the river winding through them in a devious course for eleven hundred miles, occasionally on the eastern side washing bluffs of one to three hundred feet. The slope is sufficient to create high velocities in the current, making a very unstable channel, constantly shifting laterally and causing the river to develop into a serpentine form, one bend following another continuously. The immediate river, wherever it may be at the time, is confined by banks of its own creation, which, like all sediment-bearing rivers, are highest near the stream itself. Thus apparently following a low ridge through the bottom lands, the resistless mass of muddy water sweeps onward with swiftness, eroding its outer banks in the bends and rebuilding them on the opposite points, frequently forming islands by its deposits, and as frequently removing them, as the direction of flow may be modified by the unending changes in progress. Chief among these changes is the formation of "cut-offs." Two vast eroding bends covering several miles of distance gradually approach each other until the water forces a passage across the narrow neck. As the channel distance between these bends may have been many miles around, the sudden "cut-off" makes a cascade of several feet, through which the torrent rushes with a roar heard far away. The sandy banks dissolve like so much sugar, in a single day the course of the river is radically changed, and steamboats pass where a few hours before was cultivated land. The checking of the current at the upper and lower mouths of the abandoned channel soon obstructs them with the deposits, and in a few years forms a crescent-shaped lake, of which there are so many in the bottoms adjacent to the river. The convex bank in a bend is built up as rapidly by the deposits as the opposite concave bank washes off, so that the river does not usually become any wider in the bends on account of the process. The deepest water is always next to the concave or wasting bank, where the most current flows. It is not an unusual sight along this extraordinary river to see an ancient and well-constructed house hanging over the caving bank, destined ultimately to drop into the water. It may originally have been a mile from the river in the centre of an old plantation, but the mighty current sweeping around and into the bend has worn away the land, often dissolving it by acres, and as it dropped in, has piled the sediment on the opposite point, thus steadily moving the river over without materially changing the width, until it is ready to engulf the house.

While the great river above the Ohio is generally bordered by limestone bluffs, making stable conditions, yet below, the Mississippi flows through a region wholly formed by its own deposits. It is said the alluvial basin below Cairo was once an estuary of the Gulf of Mexico, and that it has been raised in level, along with the entire southern portion of the Continent, about a hundred feet, and then filled in with the sediment the river carries down. This alluvial region is sometimes as much as seventy miles wide; and when not confined to the channel by levees, the natural course of a great Mississippi flood is to spread entirely over the basin. These floods will rise fifty feet, and the basin then becomes a great reservoir and storage-ground for the surplus waters, though the levee system has much restricted this. It is estimated that the annual discharge of the Mississippi is twenty-one million millions of cubic feet of water, and that it carries in a year four hundred millions of tons of solid material down to the Gulf to be deposited; thus cutting away from its banks a space equalling ten square miles of territory eighty feet deep. It takes one-fourth the rainfall of its valley down to the Gulf, or water equalling a depth of seven or eight inches over its whole drainage area, and the solid matter annually carried along and deposited there is equal to a body a mile square and three hundred and sixty feet high. The flow of the river is from one to six miles an hour in different stages and sections. The flood periods are in April and June, the river being above the mid-stage usually from January to August; and the lowest stage comes generally in October.

MEMPHIS TO VICKSBURG.

Following down the great river, its winding and varying channel south of Memphis becomes the boundary between the States of Mississippi and Arkansas. To the westward the Arkansas shore is a lowland and the interior largely swamps, with many bayous and lakes, the tributaries of St. Francis River, which, rising in the Iron Mountain district of Missouri, flows four hundred and fifty miles, generally southward, to fall into the Mississippi just above Helena. This river passes through a continuous swamp after entering Arkansas, spreads into numerous lakes, and its extensive basin is one of the great reservoirs of overflow relieving the Mississippi in time of flood. Its port of Helena has a trade in timber brought out of the neighboring swamps and forests. About one hundred miles below, the White River and the Arkansas River flow in upon the western shore. Very curiously, these rivers, having mouths about fifteen miles apart, join some distance above, their waters commingling in the alluvial bottom land. The White River is nine hundred miles long, rises in the Ozark Mountains of Northern Arkansas, makes a long circuit through Missouri and then comes southward, being navigable some four hundred miles to Batesville, the seat of Arkansas College. The Arkansas River, next to the Missouri, is the greatest Mississippi tributary, being nearly twenty-two hundred miles long and having its sources in the Rockies in Colorado, out of which it flows in a magnificent canyon. It comes for five hundred miles eastward through plains that are largely sterile, enters Kansas, turns southeast in the Indian Territory, and crosses the State of Arkansas to its mouth, being navigable for eight hundred miles. At the western border of the State the river is guarded by Fort Smith, where an active town has grown around the former frontier post on the verge of the Indian Territory, having large trade and a population of fifteen thousand.

In the centre of Arkansas, this great river, being about four hundred yards wide, passes the State capital Little Rock, having thirty thousand people, its largest city, with railways radiating in all directions, and conducting an extensive cotton trade. Its State House is attractive, and spreading magnolias pleasantly shade many of the streets. A spur of the Ozark Mountains comes down to the westward of Little Rock, and its foothills are thrust out towards the Arkansas River. In ascending it through the lowlands from the Mississippi, the original explorers met here the only elevations of land they had seen, the first being a rocky cliff rising about fifty feet above the water, which they called the "Little Rock," and on it the city has been built, while two miles above another cliff, rising five hundred feet, is called the "Big Rock." Southwest of Little Rock, in this spur of the Ozark Mountains, is the famous Arkansas town of Hot Springs, having ten thousand inhabitants and many visitors. It is located in a narrow gorge between the Hot Springs Mountain on the east and West Mountain, the wide Main Street being flanked on one side by bath-houses and on the other by hotels and shops. There are over seventy springs, rising on the western slope of the Hot Springs Mountain above the town, and discharging daily five hundred thousand gallons of clear, tasteless and odorless waters, of varying temperatures, the highest 158°. They contain a little silica and carbonate of lime, but their beneficial effects in rheumatism, gout, costiveness and other troubles are ascribed mainly to their heat and purity. There is a large Government Hospital here for the army and navy, the Springs being United States property. The waters flow into the Washita River, which passes through a pleasant valley to the southward and then goes off nearly six hundred miles down into Louisiana to the Red River. At the mouth of Arkansas River on the Mississippi is the town of Napoleon.

The vast current of the Mississippi River, constantly augmented by capacious tributaries, naturally finds outlets in times of flood through the banks, and thus overspreads the extensive adjacent lowlands. To the eastward, south of Memphis, and extending down almost to Vicksburg, is the enormous Yazoo Basin, a lowland of many bayous and lakes, making a region of excessive fertility, and its Choctaw name has thus been naturally acquired, meaning "leafy." The river originates in the bayous and sloughs springing from the eastern Mississippi bank, which form the Tallahatchie River, and that stream, uniting with the Yallabusha and the Sunflower, make the deep, winding and very sluggish Yazoo, flowing nearly three hundred miles down to the Mississippi, twelve miles above Vicksburg. The extensive bottom lands of this Yazoo Delta compose about one-sixth of the State of Mississippi, its entire northwestern portion, and being a rich agricultural region are traversed by railways and have many flourishing towns and villages. There is a perfect network of waterways throughout this fertile delta, over thirty of the streams being navigable for large steamboats, and it also has extensive forests of valuable timber. The entire region is alluvial, the soil having been deposited by the overflows of the Mississippi during past ages, and now that this extensive basin is protected by an elaborate system of levees from further overflows, almost the whole of it is available for cultivation. There are nearly five millions of acres of reclaimed lands here, and though less than one-fifth of this surface is devoted to cotton, it is said to grow more of that great staple than any other single district in the world. The malaria, often prevalent along the Yazoo, led the Choctaws to call it the "river of death."

Both banks of the Mississippi below the Arkansas River are lined with cotton plantations, giving a most interesting scene during the harvesting of the fleecy crop in the autumn. The broad plantations disclose the comfortable and often quaint planters' houses of the olden time embosomed in trees, and as one progresses southward the trees become more and more draped with the dark and sombre Spanish moss, giving a weird appearance to the shores. The Yazoo flows in, and the long and imposing range of the Walnut Hills rises on the eastern bank to five hundred feet elevation. Here a planter named Vick made the first settlement in 1836, and the city of Vicksburg has grown on the summit and slopes of the hills, the lucrative traffic of the Yazoo delta providing a chief source of its prosperity, making it the largest city in the state of Mississippi, there being fifteen thousand people. It presents a picturesque view from the river, but is chiefly known abroad from its famous siege and capture by General Grant in July, 1863. The Confederates, having lost Memphis and New Orleans, made their last desperate stand to hold the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, surrounding it with vast fortifications, crowning the hills with batteries, not only along the river front, but up the Yazoo River to Haines' Bluff. Several attempts were made to capture it in 1862, Farragut's fleet running past, and Grant began operations in the spring of 1863. After several battles, he appeared before the city in May, assaulting and being repulsed, and then began the siege which resulted in the surrender on July 4th. General Pemberton, commanding Vicksburg, surrendered thirty-one thousand men, his previous losses exceeding ten thousand. General Grant had similar losses, his forces engaged in the siege and preliminary battles approximating seventy thousand men. This siege greatly damaged the city, while in 1876 the Mississippi, in one of its peculiar freaks, cut through a neck of land opposite, took an entirely new channel, and left Vicksburg isolated on an inland lake. The Government has since, at heavy expense, diverted the Yazoo outflow past the city and restored the harbor. There are beautiful views and romantic glens in the Walnut Hills, with many traces of the old fortifications, while a favorite drive is to the extensive National Cemetery, where seventeen thousand soldiers' graves recall the terrific conflicts of the Civil War.

NATCHEZ TO NEW ORLEANS.

When the Sieur de la Salle made his voyage of exploration down the great Father of Waters from the Falls of St. Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico, he found in the spring of 1682 an interesting Indian settlement on the eastern bank a hundred miles below Vicksburg. This settlement was under a bluff rising a hundred and fifty feet above the river. Later, in 1699, Commander d'Iberville examined the Mississippi delta, and having founded Fort St. Louis at Biloxi, heard of these Indians, sought their friendship, and in 1700 came up and established a trading-post at their village under the bluff. He described them as numbering twelve hundred warriors, living in nine contiguous villages, ruled by a chief of the "family of the suns," their highest caste, and called the Natchez Indians, the word meaning "the hurrying men, running as in war." The French kept up communication with them, and regarded the tribe as the noblest of the many with whom they had been brought in contact in America. These Indians had a religious creed and ceremonies not unlike the "Fire Worshippers" of Persia. In their "Temple of the Sun," the priests kept the sacred fire constantly burning on the altar, their tradition being that the fire came originally from heaven and had always been maintained. In 1713 the Sieur de Bienville, who had succeeded his brother, d'Iberville, built Fort Rosalie alongside the landing, and around it grew a town which was the beginning of the city of Natchez. Unfortunately, just about this time the Indians' sacred fire accidentally went out, and attributing this to the coming of the white men, they became dissatisfied and conflicts arose. There were repeated fights, and in 1729 they swooped down upon the settlement and massacred the French. The following year troops came up from New Orleans, attacked and scattered them, burning their villages, and the tribe ultimately disappeared, the last small remnant of half-breed descendants remaining in Texas until recently, when they joined the Creeks and Cherokees. Now the city of Natchez has its business portion along the narrow stretch of river-bank in front of the bluff, where some traces yet remain of the earthworks of the old French fort. The greater part of the city, however, is on the bluff, where the brow of the hill is a wide-spreading park giving a splendid outlook. Also on the bluff is a National Cemetery filled with soldiers' graves, the sad memorial of the War. There is a large river-trade at Natchez, and twelve thousand population, and in the cotton-shipping season, business along the levee is very active.

About seventy miles below, the Red River flows in, the last of the great tributaries of the Mississippi. This stream is over fifteen hundred miles long, draining a region of a hundred thousand square miles, and gets its name from the red-colored sediment its waters bring down. It originates in the extensive "Staked Plain" of northern Texas, the "Lone Star State," its sources being at twenty-five hundred feet elevation. Its flow is eastward, forming the Texan northern boundary on the border of Oklahoma and the Indian Territory, and then it turns south near the twin city of Texarkana, which stands on both sides of the line between Texas and Arkansas. Coming into Louisiana it passes Shreveport, a city of fifteen thousand people, with a large trade in cotton and cattle, and then crosses the state to the Mississippi. The special and curious feature of the Red River is the formation of rafts. Its upper shores are heavily timbered, and vast numbers of trees are engulfed by the current washing out the banks in times of freshet, and they accumulate lower down, where the speed of the water slackens. These rafts are formed many miles long, growing by additions to the up-stream side, while the logs decay and are gradually floated off and broken up on the lower extremity. This makes the obstruction steadily move up-stream. In 1854, the great raft fifty miles above Shreveport extended thirteen miles up the river and was accumulating at the rate of nearly two miles annually. In colonial times this raft was said to have been two hundred miles lower down the river. Vegetation had taken root on the older portions, thus making a floating forest, and the retardation of the waters above made a lake over twenty miles long. In 1873, when the Government attacked it and opened a navigable channel, this raft had grown to thirty-two miles length, and the opening of the channel lowered the upper retarded waters fifteen feet. Snag-boats have since patrolled the Red River, pulling out thousands of trees every year, and breaking up the rafts, to maintain navigation. The lower course of Red River is very crooked and sluggish, through swamps and lowlands, and near its mouth part of the current, particularly in times of freshet, is diverted into Atchafalaya River, which flows for about two hundred miles southward directly to the Gulf of Mexico. This stream is said to have originally been the outlet of Red River to the Gulf, and such it seems again coming to be, the Government having a very serious problem in dealing with it. The Mississippi River in its earlier vagaries developed a bend towards the west, which struck Red River, thus making it a tributary, the former channel silting up. It was then named Atchafalaya, meaning the "lost river." To improve navigation, some time ago this old channel was opened, when to the general astonishment, the Atchafalaya began absorbing the Red River waters and developing a large river, which now carries a current more than one-third the volume of the Mississippi, and as they all run together at high-water stages, there is a fear that the whole Mississippi may at some time conclude to go into the Atchafalaya, thus leaving New Orleans on an arm of the sea. Extensive Government works are in progress to prevent this diversion and maintain the old conditions.

Below Red River, the Mississippi is all in Louisiana, its width barely a half-mile, and its depth very great, in many places one to two hundred feet, necessary to carry the vast flow of water. The banks are throughout protected by levees, and on the last bluff rising alongside the river, on the eastern bank, is the Louisiana state capital, Baton Rouge, a quaint old city with ancient French and Spanish houses, spreading over the bluff fifty feet above the water. There is a population of about ten thousand, and overlooking the river are the State House and the buildings of the Louisiana State University. Below Baton Rouge, both banks of the Mississippi are bordered by attractive gardens and extensive plantations, with sections of forest, sombre moss-draped trees and rich vegetation, the whole of the "coast," as the lower river banks are familiarly called, being lavish in the display of semi-tropical luxuriance. The voyage down, skirting the low shores and levees for a hundred and twenty miles, is most picturesque, as the windings of the river make pleasant views. Finally, a grand sweeping bend is rounded, where the city of New Orleans is spread out upon both banks, the streets and buildings stretching far inland upon the lowlands behind the great protective embankments.

THE CRESCENT CITY.

The Spanish in the sixteenth century made various evanescent explorations of the Gulf coast and the entrances to the Mississippi, but never gained a permanent foothold. La Salle descended the great river to its mouth in 1682, took possession of the country for France and named it Louisiana, in honor of his King Louis XIV. The first colony planted in the Province by the French was at Biloxi Bay on the Gulf coast, about eighty miles northeast of New Orleans, in February, 1699, by Commander d'Iberville. Biloxi is now a quiet town of five thousand people, having a good trade and some manufactures. A short distance to the westward is Beauvoir, which was the home of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, where he died in 1889; and about ten miles farther westward is the extensive Bay St. Louis, where at Pass Christian is one of the most frequented pleasure-resorts on the Gulf coast. The French built a fort at Biloxi, and for years d'Iberville and his younger brother, the Sieur de Bienville, maintained their colony under serious difficulties, de Bienville finally deciding to change the location, and removing to Mobile bay. After considerable exploration, however, he determined upon a permanent location within the Mississippi River, and entering the passes in 1718 he ascended to where he found the most eligible fast land and founded the colony of New Orleans, naming it in honor of the then Regent of France, the Duke of Orleans. Thus began the city, which in 1721, being then described as "a village of trappers and gold hunters," was made the capital of the French royal Province of Louisiana. In 1732 it had about five thousand population, and after the transfer of sovereignty to the United States it was chartered a city in 1804, then having ten thousand. There are now two hundred and seventy-five thousand people in New Orleans.

This noted city is about one hundred and seven miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and the older portion was built around the outer curve of a grand crescent-shaped river bend, which gave it the popular designation of the "Crescent City." It afterwards grew far up stream, and stretched around another reverse bend, so that now the river passes through in form much like the letter S. The surface descends from the river by gentle slope towards a marshy region in the rear, and is several feet below the level of high water, the levee being a strong embankment about fourteen feet high and fifteen feet wide on the surface, effectually protecting from overflow. Its magnificent position near the mouth of the river, where an enormous interior commerce, coming by railroad and steamboat, has to be transhipped to ocean-going vessels, has made the prosperity of the city. Its event of chief memory is the battle of January 8, 1815, when General Andrew Jackson defeated the British under General Pakenham. The battlefield was at Chalmette in the southern suburbs, on ground stretching from the Mississippi River bank back about a mile to the cypress swamps. The war with England had already been ended by a peace concluded at Ghent December 24, 1814, but neither side then knew of it. The British advanced from the eastward to attack the city, and a hastily constructed line of breastworks formed of cotton bales was thrown up, behind which Jackson's men were stationed to receive the attack. The result was a most disastrous defeat, Pakenham, his second in command and twenty-six hundred men falling, while the American loss was only one hundred. A marble monument on the field commemorates the victory, and a National Cemetery, with many graves of soldiers fallen in the Civil War, now occupies a portion of the ground. In the Civil War, in April, 1862, Admiral Farragut ran his fleet past the forts commanding the river at the head of the Passes, and appearing before the city compelled its surrender, when it was occupied by the accompanying land forces under General Butler.

There is, in the older town, so much of characteristic French and Spanish survival, that New Orleans is a most interesting and picturesque city, though it has not very much to show in the way of elaborate architecture. The streets have generally French or Spanish names, and there is a distinctive French quarter inhabited by Creoles, where the buildings have walls of adobÉ and stucco, inner courts, tiled roofs, arcades and balconies, the whole region being lavishly supplied with semi-tropical plants. The chief business thoroughfare, Canal Street, is at right-angles to the river bank, and borders the French quarter. The levee for over six miles is devoted to the shipping, and in its gathering of ocean vessels and river steamboats, loading or unloading, is a most animated place, impressing the observer with the idea that tributary to this great mart of trade is the richest agricultural valley in the world. The hero of New Orleans, General Andrew Jackson, has his equestrian statue in Jackson Square, which was the old-time Place d'Armes, and adjoining is the French Cathedral of St. Louis, built in the eighteenth century, but since considerably altered. The chief institution of learning is Tulane University, having fine buildings and a thousand students, the benefaction of a prominent citizen. In Lafayette Square there is a statue of John McDonough, whose legacy for school-houses has built and equipped thirty spacious buildings, accommodating twenty thousand pupils. Around Lafayette Square are various public edifices and churches.

New Orleans has two fine parks, the City Park and Audubon Park, both displaying collections of live oaks and magnolias, which are picturesque. The city cemeteries also have many good trees and are attractive and peculiar. The soil being semi-fluid at a depth of two or three feet, nearly all the tombs are above ground, some being costly and beautiful structures. Most of them, however, are buildings composed of cells placed one above another to the height of seven or eight feet. The cell is only large enough to receive the coffin, and as soon as the funeral is over, it is hermetically bricked up at the narrow entrance. These cells are called "ovens," and bear tablets appropriately inscribed. The Cypress Grove Cemetery, near the City Park, is one of the most interesting. In Greenwood Cemetery, near by, is a monument to the Confederate dead, and General Albert Sidney Johnston is interred in Metairie Cemetery, which also has his equestrian statue. In some cases the graves are in earthen mounds, while occasionally, where the interment is in the ground, the grave-digging is so arranged as to be completed just as the funeral arrives, and the coffin thus gets placed and covered before there is time for much water to ooze into the grave. The most uniquely picturesque sight in the city is furnished by the old French Market, near the levee, in the early morning, when business is in full tide, and the mixed population in peculiar costume and language is seen to advantage. A favorite resort of the people is Lake Pontchartrain, five miles north, the spacious inland sea covering nearly a thousand square miles, to which fine shell roads lead.

THE LEVEES AND THE DELTA.

The whole country around New Orleans, and indeed the entire region adjacent to the Mississippi and its bayous, would be overflowed in times of freshet were it not for the elaborate systems of levees, which are a special feature of the whole lower Mississippi Valley. The work of constructing these extensive embankments began at the foundation of the infant city of New Orleans, when a dyke a mile long was projected to protect the settlement from overflow, and it was built soon afterwards. In 1770 the settlements extended thirty miles above and twenty miles below the city, the plantations being protected by levees. By 1828, the levees, though in many places insufficient, had become continuous nearly to the mouth of Red River. The methods of construction were various, and the authorities conflicting, but the Government took hold of the work in 1850, beginning by giving the States the swamplands to provide a fund for reclamation. When the Civil War began, the levees extended a thousand miles along the river, and as far north as the State of Missouri. During the war the system fell into decay, and afterwards much work of restoration was necessary. The Mississippi River Commission now has charge, under comprehensive methods, and large sums are devoted to the purpose, aggregating over $4,000,000 annually from the General Government and the States, there being continuous lines of levees from Memphis nearly to the delta below New Orleans. Were the river left to itself, in most of this region during the spring floods it would overflow the banks by several feet, this being, however, prevented by these massive earth entrenchments, through which there nevertheless often breaks a destructive crevasse. The sediment brought down by the river has been deposited most abundantly upon the banks, making their front the highest surface, so that there is a gradual descent inland and back from the river of about four feet to the mile. During the floods, an observer standing alongside the levee has the water in the river running high above him, and when the levee breaks the bottom-lands are soon extensively overflowed. The estimate is that these lands, reclaimed and protected by the levees, embrace thirty thousand square miles of the most fertile soil in the world, about one-sixth of it being under cultivation; and that there are altogether twenty-six hundred miles of levees along the great river, and the adjunct tributary bayous, lakes and other water-courses. For nine months the water stage is low, so that very little attention is given it, but when the spring comes, the melted snows of the Rockies and the torrential rains come down usually in conjunction, bringing an enormous flood, that rushes along, filling the river to the tops of the embankments. Processes of decay and weakening are always going on—rats and mice have their burrows, and millions of crawfish, with claws like chisels, riddle the levees with holes. Then in some unexpected place the dreaded alarm is sounded that the bank is giving way and a crevasse impends. The water-soaked bank shows fissures and help is implored—bells are rung, fleet horsemen arouse the neighborhood, the people assemble and try to stop the break. But the crumbling levee soon gives way, and the swollen and muddy current pours through with a roar like Niagara, the waters spreading afar over the lowlands, and thus by reducing the stream-level bringing relief to the river, but converting the adjacent region for many miles into a turbid lake and ruining the crops.

Below New Orleans, as the river is descended, the thick forest vegetation along the banks gradually disappears, giving place to vast expanses of marsh and isolated patches of fast land bearing stunted trees. The river banks grow less defined, and are finally lost in what appears to be an interminable marsh with many waterways. This leads to the delta, gradually built up from the sediment deposited by the river, and demonstrating the eternal conflict and gradual encroachment of the land upon the sea. Through the ages, this delta, steadily constructed by the river, has been protruded into the Gulf of Mexico, far beyond the general coast-line, and it is slowly advancing year after year from the accumulated deposits. The delta divides into the various channels or "passes" by which the waters seek the sea. These are at first bordered by shore-lines of mud, which lower down dissolve into consecutive lines of coarse grass growing from beneath the watery surface, and then they are discernible only to the practiced eye of the pilot by what appears to be a regular current flowing along in the universal waste. This delta covers an area of fourteen thousand square miles, and it divides into four separate passes, which are hardly much more than outlet currents through the expanse of waters and marsh, thus excavating deeper and navigable channels. There are lighthouses at the entrances, and just inside the Northeast Pass is a spacious mud-bank known as the Balize, where there once was a colony of wreckers, but now are pleasant residences. Above the head of the delta, and about seventy miles below New Orleans, located in eligible positions at a bend, are Forts St. Philip and Jackson, the defensive works of the river entrance, and below them the main ship channel goes out to the Gulf through the South Pass, where the bar has been deepened through the effective scouring produced by the famous Eads Jetties on either side—one over two miles long and the other a mile and a half. These jetties cost $5,000,000, and they maintain a channel thirty feet deep. The twin lights marking their extremities can be regarded as indicating as nearly as may be the mouth of the great river, and beyond is the broad expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. Vast as is the enormous outflow brought down by the Father of Waters, the drainage of the whole broad centre of the Continent thus poured into the Gulf, yet it has no appreciable effect upon the ocean into which it flows. The Gulf easily swallows up all the Mississippi waters in a way that reminds of Rossetti's dirge:

"Why does the sea moan evermore?

Shut out from heaven it makes its moan,

It frets against the boundary shore;

All earth's full rivers cannot fill

The sea, that drinking, thirsteth still"