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Mark Twain > Life On The Mississippi > Chapter 1

Life On The Mississippi

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.

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