The complexion of the river water is a light mud-color, which it derives from the turbid Missouri,—the Upper Mississippi being a clear stream. Pour off a glass of it after it has been standing a short time, and a sediment of dark mud appears at the bottom. Notwithstanding this unpleasant peculiarity, it is used altogether for cooking and drinking purposes on board the steamboats, and I found New Orleans supplied with it.
A curious fact has been suggested with regard to this wonderful river,—that it runs up hill. Its mouth is said to be two and a half miles higher—or farther from the earth’s centre—than its source. When we consider that the earth is a spheroid, with an axis shorter by twenty-six miles than its equatorial diameter; and that the same centrifugal motion which has caused the equatorial protuberance tends still to heap up the waters of the globe where that motion is greatest; the seeming impossibility appears possible,—just as we see a revolving grindstone send the water on its surface to the rim. Stop the grindstone, and the water flows down its sides. Stop the earth’s revolution, and immediately you will see the Mississippi River turn and flow the other way.
Some years ago I made a voyage of several days on the Upper Mississippi, to the head of navigation. It was difficult to realize that this was the same stream on which I was now sailing day after day in an opposite direction,—six days in all, from Memphis to New Orleans. From St. Anthony’s Falls to the Gulf, the Mississippi is navigable twenty-two hundred miles. Its entire length is three thousand miles. Its great tributary, the Missouri, is alone three thousand miles in length: measured from its head-waters to the Gulf, it is four thousand five hundred miles. Consider also the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Red River, and the hundred lesser streams that fall into it, and well may we call it by its Indian name, Michi-Sepe, the Father of Waters.
CHAPTER LVI.
THE CRESCENT CITY.
On the morning of January 1st, 1866, I arrived at New Orleans.
It was midwinter; but the mild sunny weather that followed the first chill days of rain, made me fancy it May. The gardens of the city were verdant with tropical plants. White roses in full bloom climbed upon trellises or the verandas of houses. Oleander trees, bananas with their broad drooping leaves six feet long, and Japan plums that ripen in February, grew side by side in the open air. There were orange-trees whose golden fruit could be picked from the balconies which they half concealed. Magnolias, gray-oaks and live-oaks, some heavily hung with moss that swung in the breeze like waving hair, shaded the yards and streets. I found the roadsides of the suburbs green with grass, and the vegetable gardens checkered and striped with delicately contrasting rows of lettuce, cabbages, carrots, beets, onions, and peas in blossom.
The French quarter of the city impresses you as a foreign town transplanted to the banks of the Mississippi. Many of the houses are very ancient, with low, moss-covered roofs projecting over the first story, like slouched hat-brims over quaint old faces. The more modern houses are often very elegant, and not less picturesque. The names of the streets are Pagan, foreign, and strange. The gods and muses of mythology, the saints of the Church, the Christian virtues, and modern heroes, are all here. You have streets of “Good Children,” of “Piety,” of “Apollo,” of “St. Paul,” of “Euterpe,” and all their relations. The shop-signs are in French, or in French and English. The people you meet have a foreign air and speak a foreign tongue. Their complexions range through all hues, from the dark Creole to the ebon African. The anomalous third class of Louisiana—the respectable free colored people of French-African descent—are largely represented. Dressed in silks, accompanied by their servants, and speaking good French,—for many of them are well educated,—the ladies and children of this class enter the street cars, which they enliven with the Parisian vivacity of their conversation.
The mingling of foreign and American elements has given to New Orleans a great variety of styles of architecture; and the whole city has a light, picturesque, and agreeable appearance. It is built upon an almost level strip of land bordering upon the left bank of the river, and falling back from the levee with an imperceptible slope to the cypress and alligator swamps in the rear. The houses have no cellars. I noticed that the surface drainage of the city flowed back from the river into the Bayou St. John, a navigable inlet of Lake Ponchartrain. The old city front lay upon a curve of the Mississippi, which gave it a crescent shape: hence its poetic soubriquet. The modern city has a river front seven miles in extent, bent like the letter S.
The broad levee, lined with wharves on one side and belted by busy streets on the other, crowded with merchandise, and thronged with merchants, boatmen, and laborers, presents always a lively and entertaining spectacle. Steam and sailing crafts of every description, arriving, departing, loading, unloading, and fringing the city with their long array of smoke-pipes and masts, give you some idea of the commerce of New Orleans.
Here is the great cotton market of the world. In looking over the cotton statistics of the past thirty years, I found that nearly one half the crop of the United States had passed through this port. In 1855–1856 (the mercantile cotton year beginning September 1st and ending August 31st) 1,795,023 bales were shipped from New Orleans,—986,622 to Great Britain (chiefly to Liverpool); 214,814 to France (chiefly to Havre); 162,657 to the North of Europe; 178,812 to the South of Europe, Mexico, &c.; and 222,100 coastwise,—151,469 going to Boston and 51,340 to New York. In 1859–1860, 2,214,296 bales were exported, 1,426,966 to Great Britain, 313,291 to France, and 208,634 coastwise,—131,648 going to Boston, 62,936 to New York, and 5,717 to Providence. This, it will be remembered, was the great cotton year, the crop amounting to near 5,000,000 bales.