"Slowly we crept through the tangled paths until we were beyond the sight of shore, in the perfect silence of this vast ruined temple, on every side the endless obelisks of the decaying cypress, and as far as the eye could see were ranged the numberless nodding bells of the yellow lilies, and the still-eyed white stars below them. While we waited in the coming evening, the silence was so deep, the whir of a bald eagle's wings, as he swept through the air, was audible from afar. The lonely creature sat on the peak of one of the wooden towers over our boat, and looked curiously down upon us. The waters seemed full of fish, and, indeed, the lake has much celebrity as a place for such game. We could see them creeping through the mazes of the water- forest, in a slow, blind way, not a bit like the dance of the northern creatures of the active waters of our mountain streams.
"There is something of forgetfulness in such a scene, a sense of a world far away, with no path back to it. One might fall to eating our Wampapin lily, as did the Chickasaws of old, and find in it the all- forgetting lotus, for it is, indeed, the brother of the lotus of the Nile. We do not know how far these forgotten savages found the mystic influence of the Nilotic lotus in these queenly flowers of the swamps, but tradition says that they ate not only the seeds, but the bulbous roots, which the natives aver are quite edible. So we, too, can claim a lotus-eating race, and are even able to try the soul-subduing powers of the plant at our will.
"There is something in the weight of life and death in these swamps that subdues the mind, and makes the steps we take fall as in a dream. It was not easy to fix a basis for memory with the pencil, and recollection shapes a vast sensation of strangeness, a feeling as if one had trod for a moment beyond the brink of time, rather than any distinct images."
At sunset I came upon Joe Eckel's Bar,—not the fluvial establishment so much resorted to by people ashore,—but a genuine Mississippi sandbar, or shoal, which was covered with two feet of water, and afforded lodgment for a heavy raft of trees that had floated upon it. The island was also partly submerged, but I found a cove with a sandy beach on its lower end; and running into the little bay, I staked the boat in one foot of water, much to the annoyance of flocks of wild- fowl which circled about me at intervals all night. The current had been turbid during the day, and to supply myself with drinking-water it was necessary to fill a can from the river and wait for the sediment to precipitate itself before it was fit for use. Fifty-six miles were logged for the day's row.
In the morning Joe Eckel's Bar was alive with geese and ducks, cackling a lusty farewell as I pushed through the drift stuff and resumed my voyage down the swelling river.
The reaches were usually five miles in length, though some of them were very much longer. Sometimes deposits of sand and vegetable matter will build up a small island adjacent to a large one, and then a dense thicket of cotton-wood brush takes possession of it, and assists materially in resisting the encroachments of the current. These little, low islands, covered with thickets, are called tow-heads, and the maps of the Engineer Corps of the United States distinguish them from the originally numbered islands in the following manner: "Island No. 18," and "Tow Head of Island No.18."
In addition to the numbered islands, which commence with Island No. 1, below the mouth of the Ohio, and end with Island No. 125, above the inlet to Bayou La Fourche, in Louisiana, there are many which have been named after their owners. During one generation a planter may live upon a peninsula comprising many thousand acres, with his cotton- fields and houses fronting on the Mississippi. The treacherous current of this river may suddenly cut a new way across his estate inland at a distance of two miles from his home. As the gradual change goes on, he looks from the windows of his house upon a new scene. He no longer has the rapid flowing river, enlivened by the passage of steamboats and other craft; but before him is a sombre bayou, or crescent-shaped lake, whose muddy waters are almost motionless. He was the proprietor of Needham's Point, he is now the owner of Needham's Island, and lives in the quiet atmosphere of the backwoods of Tennessee.
This day's row carried me past heavily-wooded shores, cotton-fields with some of the cotton still unpicked; past the limits of Missouri on the left side, and into the wild state of Arkansas at Island No. 21. I finally camped on Island No. 26, in a half submerged thicket, after a row of fifty-eight miles.
As there were many flat and shanty boats floating southward, I adopted a plan by means of which my dinners were frequently cooked with little trouble to myself or others. About an hour before noon I gazed about within the narrow horizon for one of those floating habitations, and rowing alongside, engaged in conversation with its occupants. The men would tell what success they had had in collecting the skins of wild animals (though silent upon the subject of pig-stealing), while the women would talk of the homes they had left, and sigh for the refinements and comforts of "city life," by which they meant their former existence in some small town on the upper river. While we were exchanging our budgets of information I would obtain the consent of the presiding goddess of the boat to stew my ambrosia upon her stove, the sneak-box floating the while alongside its tub-like companion. Many a half hour was spent in this way; and, besides the comfort of a hot dinner, there were advantages afforded for the study of characters not to be found elsewhere.
These peculiar boats, so often encountered, found refuge in the frequent cut-offs behind the many islands of the river; for besides those islands which have been numbered, new ones are forming every year. At times, when the water is very high, the current will cut a new route across the low isthmus, or neck, of a peninsula, around which sweeps a long reach of the main channel, leaving the tortuous bend which it has deserted to be gradually filled up with snags, deposits of alluvium, and finally to be carpeted with a vegetable growth. In some cases, as the stream works away to the eastward or westward, it remains an inland crescent-shaped lake, numbers of which are to be found in the wilderness many miles from the parent stream. I have known the channel of the Mississippi to be shortened twenty miles during a freshet, and a steam-boat which had followed the great ox-bow bend in ascending the river, on its return trip shot through the new cut-off of a few hundred feet in length, upon fifteen feet of water where a fortnight before a forest had been growing.