but these gradually yielded, and the animals were drowned in droves. Defenses yielded where least expected. By April 3, there was two feet of water in the streets of Greenville. There was nothing left but to make the best of the situation. People took to the upper floors, and appeals for state, national and individual aid were sent out. The telephone lines leading out of the city were destroyed, and communication with the outer world was greatly hindered. Occasional reports of destitution and suffering came from Greenville, but these were contradicted by meetings of leading citizens, who said, “there is no destitution here that home people can not relieve. If the negroes want to wait for government rations and refuse from $1.50 to $2.50 per day to work on levees, their starving arouses no sympathy. While all these sensational reports of destitution are traveling about, the steamboats are running into Memphis and Vicksburg begging for levee hands, and the native negro is sitting on the levee fishing.”
The water swept rapidly southward, submerging almost the entire region between the Yazoo and Mississippi. Meanwhile, the trouble in Louisiana was just beginning. The banks began caving near the levee in Madison Parish Front, compelling the erection of a new levee in the rear of the old one. But the fight went on stubbornly for three weeks, both along the river front and along the bayous in the interior. Atchafalaya River was forty-five feet above low water. The contest for the levees there was as bitter as along the main stream. Occasional breaks occurred, but they were closed or kept from spreading by the twenty thousand men who labored day and night along the stream between Bayou Sara and New Orleans.
Ere long it appeared that the greatest danger was along the Concordia and Pointe Coupee parish fronts. (A parish in Louisiana coincides with what is known as a county elsewhere). Considerable appropriations were made, and the head of the third district levee system, Captain D. C. Kingman, conducted the fight on the Pointe Coupee front in person. The battle ended here in disastrous defeat. The men held their ground manfully till April 20, no serious breaks having then occurred. All that day the men were compelled to work in a drenching rain storm that
STOCK RAFT.
was beating fiercely against the already overburdened and sodden levees on the west bank of the river. The danger at the great Morganza bend grew excessive. It was hoped that during the night the storm would cease, or at least that the wind might shift to some other quarter, but when the morning broke there were the same leaden skies overhead, with darker masses still scurrying to the westward before a fierce easterly gale that was as fresh and strong as ever, and which hurled storms of white-capped waves upon the rain-soaked earthworks. Bags of earth and sand were piled up along the levee, to prevent the waves from washing over. Wilder and more furious raged the storm: higher and higher beat the waves, as the day passed. “In the teeth of drenching surf and blinding rain, the battle with rising flood went bravely on. Sacks were piled upon sacks and revetments of plank and jute bagging were carried up till the superstructure upon the crown of the levee looked like a fair-sized levee itself. Not only the men, but even the women and children fought bravely for their homes in the teeth of that wild furious storm.
“As Monday night closed in, the situation was more gloomy than ever. The heavy leaden sky was deeply shadowed by low hanging clouds of dull slaty black, driven before the fierce gale that was sweeping up the reach, thrashing it into long ribs of foam that every now and then broke clear over the levees all along the New Texas system, and beat savagely against the great Morganza, just below them.