The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It
is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways
remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is
the longest river 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 hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow
would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges
three times as much water as 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 water supply from twenty-eight
States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard,
and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific
slope—a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The
Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-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 areas of 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 Ohio to 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,’ above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile.
At the junction of the Ohio the 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 two and one half.
An article in the New Orleans ‘Times-Democrat,’ based upon
reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties
four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of
Mexico—which brings to mind Captain Marryat’s rude name for the
Mississippi—’the Great Sewer.’ This mud, solidified, would
make a mass a mile square and two hundred and 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 hundred
years which have elapsed since the river took its place in
history. The belief of the scientific people is, that the
mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that
the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built
by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country,
without any trouble at all—one hundred and twenty thousand
years. Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that
lies around there anywhere.
The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way—its
disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow
necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself.
More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a 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 two
miles above Vicksburg.
Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by
that cut-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 himself and his land over on the other side of the river,
within the boundaries 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 made a 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 it used to occupy.
As a result, the original site of that settlement is 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
thousand three hundred miles
of old Mississippi river
which La Salle floated
down in 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 it in other places.
Although the Mississippi’s mud builds land but slowly, down at
the 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 five hundred
acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has added
seven hundred acres to it.
But enough of these examples of the mighty stream’s
eccentricities for the present—I will give a few more of them
further along in the book.
Let us drop the Mississippi’s physical history, and say a word
about its historical history—so to speak. We can glance
briefly at its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters;
at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its
flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters;
and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in
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
and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old
about it. We do of course know that there are several
comparatively old dates in American 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
astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their
scientific names;—as a result, 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
facts around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes
that this is one of the American dates which is quite respectable
for age.
For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white
man, less than a 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 which began the Reformation. When De
Soto took his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure
name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael
Angelo’s paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment 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 indelicacy being
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
fine gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while
religion was the passion of their ladies, and classifying their
offspring into 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 continent the nations were being
persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in England, Henry
VIII. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher and another
bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation and his
harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the banks of
the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther’s death;
eleven years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before
the 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 name of Oliver Cromwell.
Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable
fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of
our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of
rustiness and antiquity.
De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in
it by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests
and the soldiers to multiply the river’s dimensions by ten—the
Spanish custom of the day—and thus move other adventurers to go at
once and explore it. On the contrary, their narratives when
they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity.
The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of 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 then Shakespeare was born;
lived a trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had
been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the
second white man saw the Mississippi. In our day we
don’t allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses
of a marvel. If somebody should discover a 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 hunt for each
other.
For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white
settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in
intimate communication with the Indians: in the south the
Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting
them; higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to
them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey,
‘for lagniappe;’ and in Canada the French were schooling them in a
rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole
populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to
buy furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters
of 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 fired curiosity 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 half the Mississippi remained out of the market and
undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a
river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not
value it or even take any particular notice of it.
But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of seeking
out that river and exploring it. It always happens that 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 river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding
generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they
thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had
come to be believed 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.