The broad main channel and bayous, sloughs and oxbow lakes; the high bluffs and the lowland forests, had all in turn lured them on to much hard traveling and many interesting side-trips. But just now they all felt that they had had enough of traveling by birch-bark, enough of camping wherever a good place invited them, and enough of eating whatever they could secure.
Below Cairo the low lands widen. There are no distinct hills or bluffs on the west side, while the Chickasaw Bluffs which stretch from Cairo to Memphis are in places ten miles from the river.
A long time ago the Gulf of Mexico extended probably as far north as Cairo, and the great flood-plain from Cairo to the Gulf is land, which was made by the Mississippi. From the Alleghenies, from the Rocky Mountains, from the Black Hills, the Ozarks, and the prairies of Minnesota, the streams are ever bringing down fine, fertile soil into the Mississippi, which spreads it at times of high water over fields, forests, and swamps and carries some of it into the gulf. So great is the amount of fine soil carried by the great river that every year it would make a vast block a square mile in area and four hundred feet high.
Of all the travelers on the Grey Hawk, Tatanka took the keenest interest in everything around him; for he had, before this trip, never seen the Mississippi farther south than La Crosse in Wisconsin. “Why do the white people need so many ships?” he wondered. “What will they do with all the big guns they have, and where are all the soldiers going to fight!”
“My friend,” Barker told him, “wait till we reach Vicksburg. There you will see soldiers and guns.”
“Where do all the black people live?” he asked. “Do they live in the woods and come out to work in the fields of cotton that we have seen?
“If our young men could have seen all the soldiers and ships and guns and towns of the white people, they never would have made war against them.”
The second day on the boat was a Sunday and the pastry-cook did his best to furnish a wonderful collection of cakes, pies, and jellies.
Barker and the boys could not help being amused at the way Tatanka looked furtively at the sumptuous Sunday dinner. The variously colored jellies served in tall glasses, especially excited his-curiosity and suspicion.
“Is it medicine or is it to eat?” he whispered to Barker.