“Not by any manner of means,” responded Ed. “We aren’t going over more than a small fraction of it.”
“Why, the Ohio River alone is thirteen hundred miles long,” said Will; “I remember that much of my geography; and most of the Mississippi lies below the mouth of the Ohio, doesn’t it?”
“It’s lucky you’ve passed your geography examinations in the high school, Will,” said Ed. “Now come here, all you fellows, and take a look. This map shows the entire system of rivers of which the Mississippi is the mother. It is the greatest river system in the world. There is nothing, in fact, to compare it with but the Amazon and its tributaries, and they have never done anything for mankind, because they lie almost wholly in an unsettled and uncivilized tropical region that has no commerce and no need of any, while the Mississippi and its tributaries have built up an empire. They have in effect created the better part of this vast country of ours that is feeding the world and—”
“Oh, come now,” said Irv Strong. “You aren’t writing a composition or an editorial for the Vevay Reveille.” This was in allusion to the fact that Ed sometimes published “pieces” in the local newspaper.
“Well, no,” said Ed, laughing at his own enthusiasm. “Besides, I’ll come to all that some other time perhaps. At present I want to give Will some new ideas about the bigness of our river system. True, the Ohio is twelve or thirteen hundred miles long, but about half of it lies above Vevay, so we’re covering only six or seven hundred miles of it. From Cairo to New Orleans—the part of the Mississippi we shall traverse—is about one thousand and fifty miles long. So we’re only going to travel over sixteen or seventeen hundred miles of river. Now there are about fifteen or sixteen thousand miles of this river system that steamboats can, and actually do, navigate, and nobody has ever really reckoned the length of the rest—the parts not navigable. We’re going over only about one-tenth of the navigable part—one twenty-fifth part perhaps of the whole.”
By this time the boys were all lying prone around the big map, their feet radiating in every direction from it, like light-rays from a star.
“See here,” said Ed; “here’s the Tennessee River. It’s a mere tributary of the Ohio, yet it is about two-thirds as long as the main river. Its head waters are in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It starts out through Tennessee and tries, in a stupid sort of fashion, to find its way to the Gulf of Mexico through Alabama. But it gets discouraged by the mountains down there, turns back, throws a dash of water into the face of the state of Mississippi, returns to Tennessee and travels north clear across that state and Kentucky, and finally in despair gives up its effort to find the sea and turns the job over to the Ohio. Look at it on the map!”
“And as if it thought the Tennessee had more than it could do to drain so great a region,” said Phil, studying the map, “the Cumberland also went into the business and after pretty nearly paralleling its sister river for a great many hundreds of miles, fell into the Ohio only a few miles above the mouth of the Tennessee. The two together are longer than the Ohio itself.”
“Very decidedly,” said Ed. “And then there are all the other tributaries of the Ohio,—look at them on the map. Together they again exceed its total length.”
The boys looked at the map and saw that it was so. Then Ed resumed:—