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