CHAPTER 1

The River and Its History

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.