Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longestriver in the world--four thousand three hundred miles.
It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world,since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundredmiles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in sixhundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much wateras the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine,and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames.
No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its watersupply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware,on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idahoon the Pacific slope--a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude.
The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water fromfifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats,and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels.
The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areasof England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany,Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile;the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.
It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth,it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohioto a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water:
thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the 'Passes,' abovethe mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohiothe Mississippi's depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually,reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.
The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable--not in the upper,but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez(three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)--about fifty feet.
But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet;at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only twoand one half.
An article in the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat,' based upon reportsof able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundredand six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico--which brings to mindCaptain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi--'the Great Sewer.'
This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundredand forty-one feet high.
The mud deposit gradually extends the land--but only gradually;it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundredyears which have elapsed since the river took its place in history.
The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to beat Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundredmiles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river.
This gives us the age of that piece of country, without anytrouble at all--one hundred and twenty thousand years.
Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that liesaround there anywhere.
The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way--its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrownecks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself.
More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles ata single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects:
they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts,and built up sand bars and forests in front of them.
The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg:
a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and Delta is now TWOMILES ABOVE Vicksburg.
Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by thatcut-off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions:
for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day,a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himselfand his land over on the other side of the river, within theboundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana!
Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times,could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and madea free man of him.
The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone:
it is always changing its habitat BODILY--is always moving bodily SIDEWISE.
At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region itused to occupy. As a result, the original SITE of that settlementis not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river,in the State of Mississippi. NEARLY THE WHOLE OF THAT ONE THOUSANDTHREE HUNDRED MILES OF OLD MISSISSIPPI RIVER WHICH LA SALLE FLOATED DOWNIN HIS CANOES, TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, IS GOOD SOLID DRY GROUND NOW.
The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of itin other places.
Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down atthe mouth, where the Gulfs billows interfere with its work,it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up:
for instance, Prophet's Island contained one thousand fivehundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river hasadded seven hundred acres to it.
But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricitiesfor the present--I will give a few more of them further alongin the book.
Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a wordabout its historical history--so to speak. We can glance brieflyat its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters;at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at itsflushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters;and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epochin what shall be left of the book.
The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use,the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get andpermanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it.
We do of course know that there are several comparatively old dates inAmerican history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea,no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent.
To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River,saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it:
it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomicalmeasurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;--as aresult, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don't see the sunset.
It would have been better to paint a picture of it.
The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us;but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and factsaround it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that thisis one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age.
For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less thana quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat at Pavia;the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, SANS PEUR ET SANS REPROCHE;the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by the Turks;and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,--the act whichbegan the Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of the river,Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was notyet a year old; Michael Angelo's paint was not yet dry on the LastJudgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born,but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child;Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto Cellini,and the Emperor Charles V. were at the top of their fame,and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion;Margaret of Navarre was writing the 'Heptameron' and some religious books,--the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacybeing sometimes better literature preservers than holiness;lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather,and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled finegentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religionwas the passion of their ladies, and classifying their offspringinto children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime.
In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition:
the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting,and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continentthe nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire;in England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisherand another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformationand his harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the banksof the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther's death;eleven years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years beforethe St. Bartholomew slaughter; Rabelais was not yet published;'Don Quixote' was not yet written; Shakespeare was not yet born;a hundred long years must still elapse before Englishmen would hear the nameof Oliver Cromwell.
Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datablefact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newnessof our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspectof rustiness and antiquity.
De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buriedin it by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priestsand the soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten--the Spanish custom of the day--and thus move other adventurersto go at once and explore it. On the contrary, their narrativeswhen they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity.
The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a termof years which seems incredible in our energetic days.
One may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion,by dividing it up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river,a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and thenShakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century,then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably morethan half a century, the SECOND white man saw the Mississippi.
In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapsebetween glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discovera creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in,Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither:
one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to huntfor each other.
For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been whitesettlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimatecommunication with the Indians: in the south the Spaniardswere robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them;higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to themfor a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey,'for lagniappe;' and in Canada the French were schooling themin a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing wholepopulations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal,to buy furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clustersof whites must have heard of the great river of the far west;and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,--so vaguely and indefinitely,that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable.
The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have firedcuriosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur.
Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it,nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a halfthe Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed.
When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and hadno present occasion for one; consequently he did not value itor even take any particular notice of it.
But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea ofseeking out that river and exploring it. It always happensthat when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea,people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around.
It happened so in this instance.
Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the rivernow when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations?
Apparently it was because at this late day they thought theyhad discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to bebelieved that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California,and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China.
Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic,or Sea of Virginia.
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