They are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current;
and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make
it stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi,
they are felling the timber-front for fifty yards back,
with the purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark
with the slant of a house roof, and ballasting it with stones;
and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with rows
of piles. One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver–
not aloud, but to himself–that ten thousand River Commissions,
with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that
lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it,
Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore
which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction
which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.
But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words;
for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere;
they know all that can be known of their abstruse science;
and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff
that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man
to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads,
with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi
which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence
now to prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would
pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets
in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully
the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.
I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters;
and I give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore
to be relied on as being full and correct; except that I have
here and there left out remarks which were addressed to the men,
such as ‘where in blazes are you going with that barrel now?’
and which seemed to me to break the flow of the written statement,
without compensating by adding to its information or its clearness.
Not that I have ventured to strike out all such interjections;
I have removed only those which were obviously irrelevant;
wherever one occurred which I felt any question about, I have
judged it safest to let it remain.
UNCLE MUMFORD’S IMPRESSIONS
Uncle Mumford said–
‘As long as I have been mate of a steamboat–thirty years–
I have watched this river and studied it. Maybe I could have learnt
more about it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be WHAT
ARE YOU SUCKING YOUR FINGERS THERE FOR ?–COLLAR THAT KAG OF NAILS!
Four years at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn
a man a good deal, I reckon, but it won’t learn him the river.
You turn one of those little European rivers over to this Commission,
with its hard bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday
job for them to wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it down,
and boss it around, and make it go wherever they wanted it to,
and stay where they put it, and do just as they said, every time.
But this ain’t that kind of a river. They have started in here
with big confidence, and the best intentions in the world;
but they are going to get left. What does Ecclesiastes vii. 13 say?
Says enough to knock THEIR little game galley-west, don’t it?
Now you look at their methods once. There at Devil’s Island,
in the Upper River, they wanted the water to go one way, the water wanted
to go another. So they put up a stone wall. But what does the river
care for a stone wall? When it got ready, it just bulged through it.
Maybe they can build another that will stay; that is, up there–
but not down here they can’t. Down here in the Lower River, they drive
some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from slicing