off the bank; very well, don’t it go straight over and cut somebody
else’s bank? Certainly. Are they going to peg all the banks?
Why, they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper.
They are pegging Bulletin Tow-head now. It won’t do any good.
If the river has got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose,
sure, pegs or no pegs. Away down yonder, they have driven two rows
of piles straight through the middle of a dry bar half a mile long,
which is forty foot out of the water when the river is low.
What do you reckon that is for? If I know, I wish I may land
in-HUMP YOURSELF, YOU SON OF AN UNDERTAKER!–OUT WITH THAT COAL-OIL, NOW,
LIVELY, LIVELY! And just look at what they are trying to do down
there at Milliken’s Bend. There’s been a cut-off in that section,
and Vicksburg is left out in the cold. It’s a country town now.
The river strikes in below it; and a boat can’t go up to the town
except in high water. Well, they are going to build wing-dams in
the bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cut
off the foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where
the river used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade
the water around that way, and get it to strike in above Vicksburg,
as it used to do, and fetch the town back into the world again.
That is, they are going to take this whole Mississippi,
and twist it around and make it run several miles UP STREAM.
Well you’ve got to admire men that deal in ideas of that size and can
tote them around without crutches; but you haven’t got to believe
they can DO such miracles, have you! And yet you ain’t absolutely
obliged to believe they can’t. I reckon the safe way, where a man
can afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the same time buy
enough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they win.
Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now–spending loads
of money on her. When there used to be four thousand steamboats
and ten thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows,
there wasn’t a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags
were thicker than bristles on a hog’s back; and now when there’s
three dozen steamboats and nary barge or raft, Government has
snatched out all the snags, and lit up the shores like Broadway,
and a boat’s as safe on the river as she’d be in heaven.
And I reckon that by the time there ain’t any boats left at all,
the Commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and dredged out,
and fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make navigation
just simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and all
the days will be Sundays, and all the mates will be Sunday-school
su-WHAT-IN-THE-NATION-YOU-FOOLING-AROUND-THERE-FOR, YOU SONS
OF UNRIGHTEOUSNESS, HEIRS OF PERDITION ! GOING TO BE A YEAR GETTING THAT
HOGSHEAD ASHORE ?’
During our trip to New Orleans and back, we had many conversations with
river men, planters, journalists, and officers of the River Commission–
with conflicting and confusing results. To wit:-
1. Some believed in the Commission’s scheme to arbitrarily
and permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel,
preserve threatened shores, etc.
2. Some believed that the Commission’s money ought to be spent
only on building and repairing the great system of levees.
3. Some believed that the higher you build your levee,
the higher the river’s bottom will rise; and that consequently
the levee system is a mistake.
4. Some believed in the scheme to relieve the river, in flood-time,
by turning its surplus waters off into Lake Borgne, etc.
5. Some believed in the scheme of northern lake-reservoirs to replenish
the Mississippi in low-water seasons.
Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these
theories you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon
the hypothesis that he does not believe in that theory; and after