Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.
That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.
Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic,
can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,’ just a million
years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards
of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out
over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token
any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now
the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long,
and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together,
and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual
board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling
investment of fact.
When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I
have been speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts
to move. The water cleaves the banks away like a knife.
By the time the ditch has become twelve or fifteen feet wide,
the calamity is as good as accomplished, for no power on earth
can stop it now. When the width has reached a hundred yards,
the banks begin to peel off in slices half an acre wide.
The current flowing around the bend traveled formerly
only five miles an hour; now it is tremendously increased
by the shortening of the distance. I was on board the first
boat that tried to go through the cut-off at American Bend,
but we did not get through. It was toward midnight, and a wild
night it was–thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain.
It was estimated that the current in the cut-off was making
about fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twelve or thirteen
was the best our boat could do, even in tolerably slack water,
therefore perhaps we were foolish to try the cut-off. However,
Mr. Brown was ambitious, and he kept on trying.
The eddy running up the bank, under the ‘point,’ was about
as swift as the current out in the middle; so we would
go flying up the shore like a lightning express train,
get on a big head of steam, and ‘stand by for a surge’
when we struck the current that was whirling by the point.
But all our preparations were useless. The instant the current hit
us it spun us around like a top, the water deluged the forecastle,
and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep
his feet. The next instant we were away down the river,
clawing with might and main to keep out of the woods.
We tried the experiment four times. I stood on the forecastle
companion way to see. It was astonishing to observe how
suddenly the boat would spin around and turn tail the moment
she emerged from the eddy and the current struck her nose.
The sounding concussion and the quivering would have been
about the same if she had come full speed against a sand-bank.
Under the lightning flashes one could see the plantation cabins
and the goodly acres tumble into the river; and the crash they
made was not a bad effort at thunder. Once, when we spun around,
we only missed a house about twenty feet, that had a light burning
in the window; and in the same instant that house went overboard.
Nobody could stay on our forecastle; the water swept across
it in a torrent every time we plunged athwart the current.
At the end of our fourth effort we brought up in the woods two miles
below the cut-off; all the country there was overflowed, of course.
A day or two later the cut-off was three-quarters of a mile wide,
and boats passed up through it without much difficulty, and so
saved ten miles.
The old Raccourci cut-off reduced the river’s length twenty-eight miles.
There used to be a tradition connected with it. It was said that a boat
came along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow
the usual way, the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made.