About seventy miles below, the Red River flows in, the last of the great tributaries of the Mississippi. This stream is over fifteen hundred miles long, draining a region of a hundred thousand square miles, and gets its name from the red-colored sediment its waters bring down. It originates in the extensive "Staked Plain" of northern Texas, the "Lone Star State," its sources being at twenty-five hundred feet elevation. Its flow is eastward, forming the Texan northern boundary on the border of Oklahoma and the Indian Territory, and then it turns south near the twin city of Texarkana, which stands on both sides of the line between Texas and Arkansas. Coming into Louisiana it passes Shreveport, a city of fifteen thousand people, with a large trade in cotton and cattle, and then crosses the state to the Mississippi. The special and curious feature of the Red River is the formation of rafts. Its upper shores are heavily timbered, and vast numbers of trees are engulfed by the current washing out the banks in times of freshet, and they accumulate lower down, where the speed of the water slackens. These rafts are formed many miles long, growing by additions to the up-stream side, while the logs decay and are gradually floated off and broken up on the lower extremity. This makes the obstruction steadily move up-stream. In 1854, the great raft fifty miles above Shreveport extended thirteen miles up the river and was accumulating at the rate of nearly two miles annually. In colonial times this raft was said to have been two hundred miles lower down the river. Vegetation had taken root on the older portions, thus making a floating forest, and the retardation of the waters above made a lake over twenty miles long. In 1873, when the Government attacked it and opened a navigable channel, this raft had grown to thirty-two miles length, and the opening of the channel lowered the upper retarded waters fifteen feet. Snag-boats have since patrolled the Red River, pulling out thousands of trees every year, and breaking up the rafts, to maintain navigation. The lower course of Red River is very crooked and sluggish, through swamps and lowlands, and near its mouth part of the current, particularly in times of freshet, is diverted into Atchafalaya River, which flows for about two hundred miles southward directly to the Gulf of Mexico. This stream is said to have originally been the outlet of Red River to the Gulf, and such it seems again coming to be, the Government having a very serious problem in dealing with it. The Mississippi River in its earlier vagaries developed a bend towards the west, which struck Red River, thus making it a tributary, the former channel silting up. It was then named Atchafalaya, meaning the "lost river." To improve navigation, some time ago this old channel was opened, when to the general astonishment, the Atchafalaya began absorbing the Red River waters and developing a large river, which now carries a current more than one-third the volume of the Mississippi, and as they all run together at high-water stages, there is a fear that the whole Mississippi may at some time conclude to go into the Atchafalaya, thus leaving New Orleans on an arm of the sea. Extensive Government works are in progress to prevent this diversion and maintain the old conditions.
Below Red River, the Mississippi is all in Louisiana, its width barely a half-mile, and its depth very great, in many places one to two hundred feet, necessary to carry the vast flow of water. The banks are throughout protected by levees, and on the last bluff rising alongside the river, on the eastern bank, is the Louisiana state capital, Baton Rouge, a quaint old city with ancient French and Spanish houses, spreading over the bluff fifty feet above the water. There is a population of about ten thousand, and overlooking the river are the State House and the buildings of the Louisiana State University. Below Baton Rouge, both banks of the Mississippi are bordered by attractive gardens and extensive plantations, with sections of forest, sombre moss-draped trees and rich vegetation, the whole of the "coast," as the lower river banks are familiarly called, being lavish in the display of semi-tropical luxuriance. The voyage down, skirting the low shores and levees for a hundred and twenty miles, is most picturesque, as the windings of the river make pleasant views. Finally, a grand sweeping bend is rounded, where the city of New Orleans is spread out upon both banks, the streets and buildings stretching far inland upon the lowlands behind the great protective embankments.
THE CRESCENT CITY.
The Spanish in the sixteenth century made various evanescent explorations of the Gulf coast and the entrances to the Mississippi, but never gained a permanent foothold. La Salle descended the great river to its mouth in 1682, took possession of the country for France and named it Louisiana, in honor of his King Louis XIV. The first colony planted in the Province by the French was at Biloxi Bay on the Gulf coast, about eighty miles northeast of New Orleans, in February, 1699, by Commander d'Iberville. Biloxi is now a quiet town of five thousand people, having a good trade and some manufactures. A short distance to the westward is Beauvoir, which was the home of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, where he died in 1889; and about ten miles farther westward is the extensive Bay St. Louis, where at Pass Christian is one of the most frequented pleasure-resorts on the Gulf coast. The French built a fort at Biloxi, and for years d'Iberville and his younger brother, the Sieur de Bienville, maintained their colony under serious difficulties, de Bienville finally deciding to change the location, and removing to Mobile bay. After considerable exploration, however, he determined upon a permanent location within the Mississippi River, and entering the passes in 1718 he ascended to where he found the most eligible fast land and founded the colony of New Orleans, naming it in honor of the then Regent of France, the Duke of Orleans. Thus began the city, which in 1721, being then described as "a village of trappers and gold hunters," was made the capital of the French royal Province of Louisiana. In 1732 it had about five thousand population, and after the transfer of sovereignty to the United States it was chartered a city in 1804, then having ten thousand. There are now two hundred and seventy-five thousand people in New Orleans.
This noted city is about one hundred and seven miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and the older portion was built around the outer curve of a grand crescent-shaped river bend, which gave it the popular designation of the "Crescent City." It afterwards grew far up stream, and stretched around another reverse bend, so that now the river passes through in form much like the letter S. The surface descends from the river by gentle slope towards a marshy region in the rear, and is several feet below the level of high water, the levee being a strong embankment about fourteen feet high and fifteen feet wide on the surface, effectually protecting from overflow. Its magnificent position near the mouth of the river, where an enormous interior commerce, coming by railroad and steamboat, has to be transhipped to ocean-going vessels, has made the prosperity of the city. Its event of chief memory is the battle of January 8, 1815, when General Andrew Jackson defeated the British under General Pakenham. The battlefield was at Chalmette in the southern suburbs, on ground stretching from the Mississippi River bank back about a mile to the cypress swamps. The war with England had already been ended by a peace concluded at Ghent December 24, 1814, but neither side then knew of it. The British advanced from the eastward to attack the city, and a hastily constructed line of breastworks formed of cotton bales was thrown up, behind which Jackson's men were stationed to receive the attack. The result was a most disastrous defeat, Pakenham, his second in command and twenty-six hundred men falling, while the American loss was only one hundred. A marble monument on the field commemorates the victory, and a National Cemetery, with many graves of soldiers fallen in the Civil War, now occupies a portion of the ground. In the Civil War, in April, 1862, Admiral Farragut ran his fleet past the forts commanding the river at the head of the Passes, and appearing before the city compelled its surrender, when it was occupied by the accompanying land forces under General Butler.
There is, in the older town, so much of characteristic French and Spanish survival, that New Orleans is a most interesting and picturesque city, though it has not very much to show in the way of elaborate architecture. The streets have generally French or Spanish names, and there is a distinctive French quarter inhabited by Creoles, where the buildings have walls of adobé and stucco, inner courts, tiled roofs, arcades and balconies, the whole region being lavishly supplied with semi-tropical plants. The chief business thoroughfare, Canal Street, is at right-angles to the river bank, and borders the French quarter. The levee for over six miles is devoted to the shipping, and in its gathering of ocean vessels and river steamboats, loading or unloading, is a most animated place, impressing the observer with the idea that tributary to this great mart of trade is the richest agricultural valley in the world. The hero of New Orleans, General Andrew Jackson, has his equestrian statue in Jackson Square, which was the old-time Place d'Armes, and adjoining is the French Cathedral of St. Louis, built in the eighteenth century, but since considerably altered. The chief institution of learning is Tulane University, having fine buildings and a thousand students, the benefaction of a prominent citizen. In Lafayette Square there is a statue of John McDonough, whose legacy for school-houses has built and equipped thirty spacious buildings, accommodating twenty thousand pupils. Around Lafayette Square are various public edifices and churches.
New Orleans has two fine parks, the City Park and Audubon Park, both displaying collections of live oaks and magnolias, which are picturesque. The city cemeteries also have many good trees and are attractive and peculiar. The soil being semi-fluid at a depth of two or three feet, nearly all the tombs are above ground, some being costly and beautiful structures. Most of them, however, are buildings composed of cells placed one above another to the height of seven or eight feet. The cell is only large enough to receive the coffin, and as soon as the funeral is over, it is hermetically bricked up at the narrow entrance. These cells are called "ovens," and bear tablets appropriately inscribed. The Cypress Grove Cemetery, near the City Park, is one of the most interesting. In Greenwood Cemetery, near by, is a monument to the Confederate dead, and General Albert Sidney Johnston is interred in Metairie Cemetery, which also has his equestrian statue. In some cases the graves are in earthen mounds, while occasionally, where the interment is in the ground, the grave-digging is so arranged as to be completed just as the funeral arrives, and the coffin thus gets placed and covered before there is time for much water to ooze into the grave. The most uniquely picturesque sight in the city is furnished by the old French Market, near the levee, in the early morning, when business is in full tide, and the mixed population in peculiar costume and language is seen to advantage. A favorite resort of the people is Lake Pontchartrain, five miles north, the spacious inland sea covering nearly a thousand square miles, to which fine shell roads lead.
THE LEVEES AND THE DELTA.
The whole country around New Orleans, and indeed the entire region adjacent to the Mississippi and its bayous, would be overflowed in times of freshet were it not for the elaborate systems of levees, which are a special feature of the whole lower Mississippi Valley. The work of constructing these extensive embankments began at the foundation of the infant city of New Orleans, when a dyke a mile long was projected to protect the settlement from overflow, and it was built soon afterwards. In 1770 the settlements extended thirty miles above and twenty miles below the city, the plantations being protected by levees. By 1828, the levees, though in many places insufficient, had become continuous nearly to the mouth of Red River. The methods of construction were various, and the authorities conflicting, but the Government took hold of the work in 1850, beginning by giving the States the swamplands to provide a fund for reclamation. When the Civil War began, the levees extended a thousand miles along the river, and as far north as the State of Missouri. During the war the system fell into decay, and afterwards much work of restoration was necessary. The Mississippi River Commission now has charge, under comprehensive methods, and large sums are devoted to the purpose, aggregating over $4,000,000 annually from the General Government and the States, there being continuous lines of levees from Memphis nearly to the delta below New Orleans. Were the river left to itself, in most of this region during the spring floods it would overflow the banks by several feet, this being, however, prevented by these massive earth entrenchments, through which there nevertheless often breaks a destructive crevasse. The sediment brought down by the river has been deposited most abundantly upon the banks, making their front the highest surface, so that there is a gradual descent inland and back from the river of about four feet to the mile. During the floods, an observer standing alongside the levee has the water in the river running high above him, and when the levee breaks the bottom-lands are soon extensively overflowed. The estimate is that these lands, reclaimed and protected by the levees, embrace thirty thousand square miles of the most fertile soil in the world, about one-sixth of it being under cultivation; and that there are altogether twenty-six hundred miles of levees along the great river, and the adjunct tributary bayous, lakes and other water-courses. For nine months the water stage is low, so that very little attention is given it, but when the spring comes, the melted snows of the Rockies and the torrential rains come down usually in conjunction, bringing an enormous flood, that rushes along, filling the river to the tops of the embankments. Processes of decay and weakening are always going on—rats and mice have their burrows, and millions of crawfish, with claws like chisels, riddle the levees with holes. Then in some unexpected place the dreaded alarm is sounded that the bank is giving way and a crevasse impends. The water-soaked bank shows fissures and help is implored—bells are rung, fleet horsemen arouse the neighborhood, the people assemble and try to stop the break. But the crumbling levee soon gives way, and the swollen and muddy current pours through with a roar like Niagara, the waters spreading afar over the lowlands, and thus by reducing the stream-level bringing relief to the river, but converting the adjacent region for many miles into a turbid lake and ruining the crops.
Below New Orleans, as the river is descended, the thick forest vegetation along the banks gradually disappears, giving place to vast expanses of marsh and isolated patches of fast land bearing stunted trees. The river banks grow less defined, and are finally lost in what appears to be an interminable marsh with many waterways. This leads to the delta, gradually built up from the sediment deposited by the river, and demonstrating the eternal conflict and gradual encroachment of the land upon the sea. Through the ages, this delta, steadily constructed by the river, has been protruded into the Gulf of Mexico, far beyond the general coast-line, and it is slowly advancing year after year from the accumulated deposits. The delta divides into the various channels or "passes" by which the waters seek the sea. These are at first bordered by shore-lines of mud, which lower down dissolve into consecutive lines of coarse grass growing from beneath the watery surface, and then they are discernible only to the practiced eye of the pilot by what appears to be a regular current flowing along in the universal waste. This delta covers an area of fourteen thousand square miles, and it divides into four separate passes, which are hardly much more than outlet currents through the expanse of waters and marsh, thus excavating deeper and navigable channels. There are lighthouses at the entrances, and just inside the Northeast Pass is a spacious mud-bank known as the Balize, where there once was a colony of wreckers, but now are pleasant residences. Above the head of the delta, and about seventy miles below New Orleans, located in eligible positions at a bend, are Forts St. Philip and Jackson, the defensive works of the river entrance, and below them the main ship channel goes out to the Gulf through the South Pass, where the bar has been deepened through the effective scouring produced by the famous Eads Jetties on either side—one over two miles long and the other a mile and a half. These jetties cost $5,000,000, and they maintain a channel thirty feet deep. The twin lights marking their extremities can be regarded as indicating as nearly as may be the mouth of the great river, and beyond is the broad expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. Vast as is the enormous outflow brought down by the Father of Waters, the drainage of the whole broad centre of the Continent thus poured into the Gulf, yet it has no appreciable effect upon the ocean into which it flows. The Gulf easily swallows up all the Mississippi waters in a way that reminds of Rossetti's dirge: