PECULIARITIES OF THE GREAT RIVER.
The Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio is an entirely changed river. Above that stream, it is similar to most other inland waterways, having tolerably stable banks and not much change in width. Below Cairo, however, the deposits forming the banks are composed of alternate layers of sand and mud or clay, the sand having been deposited by running water, and the mud in comparatively still water, so that the sand-layers are readily washed out, thus causing the banks to cave whenever the current sets against them. Below the influx of the Ohio, the river traverses alluvial bottom lands of inexhaustible fertility, and usually stretching to a width of forty miles or more. These alluvial lands have a general southern slope of about eight inches to the mile, and stretch five hundred miles to the southward, the river winding through them in a devious course for eleven hundred miles, occasionally on the eastern side washing bluffs of one to three hundred feet. The slope is sufficient to create high velocities in the current, making a very unstable channel, constantly shifting laterally and causing the river to develop into a serpentine form, one bend following another continuously. The immediate river, wherever it may be at the time, is confined by banks of its own creation, which, like all sediment-bearing rivers, are highest near the stream itself. Thus apparently following a low ridge through the bottom lands, the resistless mass of muddy water sweeps onward with swiftness, eroding its outer banks in the bends and rebuilding them on the opposite points, frequently forming islands by its deposits, and as frequently removing them, as the direction of flow may be modified by the unending changes in progress. Chief among these changes is the formation of "cut-offs." Two vast eroding bends covering several miles of distance gradually approach each other until the water forces a passage across the narrow neck. As the channel distance between these bends may have been many miles around, the sudden "cut-off" makes a cascade of several feet, through which the torrent rushes with a roar heard far away. The sandy banks dissolve like so much sugar, in a single day the course of the river is radically changed, and steamboats pass where a few hours before was cultivated land. The checking of the current at the upper and lower mouths of the abandoned channel soon obstructs them with the deposits, and in a few years forms a crescent-shaped lake, of which there are so many in the bottoms adjacent to the river. The convex bank in a bend is built up as rapidly by the deposits as the opposite concave bank washes off, so that the river does not usually become any wider in the bends on account of the process. The deepest water is always next to the concave or wasting bank, where the most current flows. It is not an unusual sight along this extraordinary river to see an ancient and well-constructed house hanging over the caving bank, destined ultimately to drop into the water. It may originally have been a mile from the river in the centre of an old plantation, but the mighty current sweeping around and into the bend has worn away the land, often dissolving it by acres, and as it dropped in, has piled the sediment on the opposite point, thus steadily moving the river over without materially changing the width, until it is ready to engulf the house.
While the great river above the Ohio is generally bordered by limestone bluffs, making stable conditions, yet below, the Mississippi flows through a region wholly formed by its own deposits. It is said the alluvial basin below Cairo was once an estuary of the Gulf of Mexico, and that it has been raised in level, along with the entire southern portion of the Continent, about a hundred feet, and then filled in with the sediment the river carries down. This alluvial region is sometimes as much as seventy miles wide; and when not confined to the channel by levees, the natural course of a great Mississippi flood is to spread entirely over the basin. These floods will rise fifty feet, and the basin then becomes a great reservoir and storage-ground for the surplus waters, though the levee system has much restricted this. It is estimated that the annual discharge of the Mississippi is twenty-one million millions of cubic feet of water, and that it carries in a year four hundred millions of tons of solid material down to the Gulf to be deposited; thus cutting away from its banks a space equalling ten square miles of territory eighty feet deep. It takes one-fourth the rainfall of its valley down to the Gulf, or water equalling a depth of seven or eight inches over its whole drainage area, and the solid matter annually carried along and deposited there is equal to a body a mile square and three hundred and sixty feet high. The flow of the river is from one to six miles an hour in different stages and sections. The flood periods are in April and June, the river being above the mid-stage usually from January to August; and the lowest stage comes generally in October.
MEMPHIS TO VICKSBURG.
Following down the great river, its winding and varying channel south of Memphis becomes the boundary between the States of Mississippi and Arkansas. To the westward the Arkansas shore is a lowland and the interior largely swamps, with many bayous and lakes, the tributaries of St. Francis River, which, rising in the Iron Mountain district of Missouri, flows four hundred and fifty miles, generally southward, to fall into the Mississippi just above Helena. This river passes through a continuous swamp after entering Arkansas, spreads into numerous lakes, and its extensive basin is one of the great reservoirs of overflow relieving the Mississippi in time of flood. Its port of Helena has a trade in timber brought out of the neighboring swamps and forests. About one hundred miles below, the White River and the Arkansas River flow in upon the western shore. Very curiously, these rivers, having mouths about fifteen miles apart, join some distance above, their waters commingling in the alluvial bottom land. The White River is nine hundred miles long, rises in the Ozark Mountains of Northern Arkansas, makes a long circuit through Missouri and then comes southward, being navigable some four hundred miles to Batesville, the seat of Arkansas College. The Arkansas River, next to the Missouri, is the greatest Mississippi tributary, being nearly twenty-two hundred miles long and having its sources in the Rockies in Colorado, out of which it flows in a magnificent canyon. It comes for five hundred miles eastward through plains that are largely sterile, enters Kansas, turns southeast in the Indian Territory, and crosses the State of Arkansas to its mouth, being navigable for eight hundred miles. At the western border of the State the river is guarded by Fort Smith, where an active town has grown around the former frontier post on the verge of the Indian Territory, having large trade and a population of fifteen thousand.
In the centre of Arkansas, this great river, being about four hundred yards wide, passes the State capital Little Rock, having thirty thousand people, its largest city, with railways radiating in all directions, and conducting an extensive cotton trade. Its State House is attractive, and spreading magnolias pleasantly shade many of the streets. A spur of the Ozark Mountains comes down to the westward of Little Rock, and its foothills are thrust out towards the Arkansas River. In ascending it through the lowlands from the Mississippi, the original explorers met here the only elevations of land they had seen, the first being a rocky cliff rising about fifty feet above the water, which they called the "Little Rock," and on it the city has been built, while two miles above another cliff, rising five hundred feet, is called the "Big Rock." Southwest of Little Rock, in this spur of the Ozark Mountains, is the famous Arkansas town of Hot Springs, having ten thousand inhabitants and many visitors. It is located in a narrow gorge between the Hot Springs Mountain on the east and West Mountain, the wide Main Street being flanked on one side by bath-houses and on the other by hotels and shops. There are over seventy springs, rising on the western slope of the Hot Springs Mountain above the town, and discharging daily five hundred thousand gallons of clear, tasteless and odorless waters, of varying temperatures, the highest 158°. They contain a little silica and carbonate of lime, but their beneficial effects in rheumatism, gout, costiveness and other troubles are ascribed mainly to their heat and purity. There is a large Government Hospital here for the army and navy, the Springs being United States property. The waters flow into the Washita River, which passes through a pleasant valley to the southward and then goes off nearly six hundred miles down into Louisiana to the Red River. At the mouth of Arkansas River on the Mississippi is the town of Napoleon.
The vast current of the Mississippi River, constantly augmented by capacious tributaries, naturally finds outlets in times of flood through the banks, and thus overspreads the extensive adjacent lowlands. To the eastward, south of Memphis, and extending down almost to Vicksburg, is the enormous Yazoo Basin, a lowland of many bayous and lakes, making a region of excessive fertility, and its Choctaw name has thus been naturally acquired, meaning "leafy." The river originates in the bayous and sloughs springing from the eastern Mississippi bank, which form the Tallahatchie River, and that stream, uniting with the Yallabusha and the Sunflower, make the deep, winding and very sluggish Yazoo, flowing nearly three hundred miles down to the Mississippi, twelve miles above Vicksburg. The extensive bottom lands of this Yazoo Delta compose about one-sixth of the State of Mississippi, its entire northwestern portion, and being a rich agricultural region are traversed by railways and have many flourishing towns and villages. There is a perfect network of waterways throughout this fertile delta, over thirty of the streams being navigable for large steamboats, and it also has extensive forests of valuable timber. The entire region is alluvial, the soil having been deposited by the overflows of the Mississippi during past ages, and now that this extensive basin is protected by an elaborate system of levees from further overflows, almost the whole of it is available for cultivation. There are nearly five millions of acres of reclaimed lands here, and though less than one-fifth of this surface is devoted to cotton, it is said to grow more of that great staple than any other single district in the world. The malaria, often prevalent along the Yazoo, led the Choctaws to call it the "river of death."
Both banks of the Mississippi below the Arkansas River are lined with cotton plantations, giving a most interesting scene during the harvesting of the fleecy crop in the autumn. The broad plantations disclose the comfortable and often quaint planters' houses of the olden time embosomed in trees, and as one progresses southward the trees become more and more draped with the dark and sombre Spanish moss, giving a weird appearance to the shores. The Yazoo flows in, and the long and imposing range of the Walnut Hills rises on the eastern bank to five hundred feet elevation. Here a planter named Vick made the first settlement in 1836, and the city of Vicksburg has grown on the summit and slopes of the hills, the lucrative traffic of the Yazoo delta providing a chief source of its prosperity, making it the largest city in the state of Mississippi, there being fifteen thousand people. It presents a picturesque view from the river, but is chiefly known abroad from its famous siege and capture by General Grant in July, 1863. The Confederates, having lost Memphis and New Orleans, made their last desperate stand to hold the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, surrounding it with vast fortifications, crowning the hills with batteries, not only along the river front, but up the Yazoo River to Haines' Bluff. Several attempts were made to capture it in 1862, Farragut's fleet running past, and Grant began operations in the spring of 1863. After several battles, he appeared before the city in May, assaulting and being repulsed, and then began the siege which resulted in the surrender on July 4th. General Pemberton, commanding Vicksburg, surrendered thirty-one thousand men, his previous losses exceeding ten thousand. General Grant had similar losses, his forces engaged in the siege and preliminary battles approximating seventy thousand men. This siege greatly damaged the city, while in 1876 the Mississippi, in one of its peculiar freaks, cut through a neck of land opposite, took an entirely new channel, and left Vicksburg isolated on an inland lake. The Government has since, at heavy expense, diverted the Yazoo outflow past the city and restored the harbor. There are beautiful views and romantic glens in the Walnut Hills, with many traces of the old fortifications, while a favorite drive is to the extensive National Cemetery, where seventeen thousand soldiers' graves recall the terrific conflicts of the Civil War.
NATCHEZ TO NEW ORLEANS.
When the Sieur de la Salle made his voyage of exploration down the great Father of Waters from the Falls of St. Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico, he found in the spring of 1682 an interesting Indian settlement on the eastern bank a hundred miles below Vicksburg. This settlement was under a bluff rising a hundred and fifty feet above the river. Later, in 1699, Commander d'Iberville examined the Mississippi delta, and having founded Fort St. Louis at Biloxi, heard of these Indians, sought their friendship, and in 1700 came up and established a trading-post at their village under the bluff. He described them as numbering twelve hundred warriors, living in nine contiguous villages, ruled by a chief of the "family of the suns," their highest caste, and called the Natchez Indians, the word meaning "the hurrying men, running as in war." The French kept up communication with them, and regarded the tribe as the noblest of the many with whom they had been brought in contact in America. These Indians had a religious creed and ceremonies not unlike the "Fire Worshippers" of Persia. In their "Temple of the Sun," the priests kept the sacred fire constantly burning on the altar, their tradition being that the fire came originally from heaven and had always been maintained. In 1713 the Sieur de Bienville, who had succeeded his brother, d'Iberville, built Fort Rosalie alongside the landing, and around it grew a town which was the beginning of the city of Natchez. Unfortunately, just about this time the Indians' sacred fire accidentally went out, and attributing this to the coming of the white men, they became dissatisfied and conflicts arose. There were repeated fights, and in 1729 they swooped down upon the settlement and massacred the French. The following year troops came up from New Orleans, attacked and scattered them, burning their villages, and the tribe ultimately disappeared, the last small remnant of half-breed descendants remaining in Texas until recently, when they joined the Creeks and Cherokees. Now the city of Natchez has its business portion along the narrow stretch of river-bank in front of the bluff, where some traces yet remain of the earthworks of the old French fort. The greater part of the city, however, is on the bluff, where the brow of the hill is a wide-spreading park giving a splendid outlook. Also on the bluff is a National Cemetery filled with soldiers' graves, the sad memorial of the War. There is a large river-trade at Natchez, and twelve thousand population, and in the cotton-shipping season, business along the levee is very active.