And in our own country the astonishing facilities of communication afforded by the telegraph and long lines of railroads seem to detract somewhat from the importance of rivers. We can only appreciate their value when we think of them in connection with the toil requisite for subduing the wilderness and laying under contribution the resources of our country. How earnestly and bravely our forefathers battled in this warfare, one generation taking up the task where it was left by another, so as to subdue the land and render possible such marvels as the Pacific railroad! Whatever may be the social development of the human race hereafter, and however wonderful the applications of art and science to the uses of life, will not our own age be looked back upon as perhaps the grandest in its history? To have lived in a period that saw the mysteries of Central Africa explained, the continents united with telegraphic nerves, the oceans traversed with steamships and monitors, the seas clasped together with railways, and, as we hope, the thin air made a navigable element, will be to have enjoyed the most startling triumphs of emotion of which the soul is capable.
What first strikes the attention upon comparing the rivers of the New and the Old World is the diminutive size of the latter, especially of many in the most civilized portions of Europe, or rendered famous in classical times. The Nile, with its ancient mysteries, its dim historic memorials of one of the oldest civilizations, its stupendous monuments of human wisdom and of human folly over which the centuries have brooded in solemn silence, and its wonderful physical peculiarities, is, indeed, a magnificent river. Reaching from the Mediterranean to the central regions of Africa, and forming an intimate connection with its great lake and river system, it will doubtless accomplish for that portion of Africa what the Mississippi has done, and is now doing, in the material development of the United States—what the Danube may also accomplish in Eastern Europe, the Amazon in South America, and the Hoang Ho in Eastern Asia, when their expiring strata of civilizations shall have been aroused by the restless, aggressive spirit of modern times. The Jordan is only a mountain torrent. The Tiber and the Po can be swum with a single arm. The Simois and Scamander, the sacred rivers of Troy, are, like the Rubicon, the merest brooks, and would hardly drive a saw-mill. The Cephisus can be leaped across, and the Ilissus scarcely suffices for a few Athenian washerwomen, sorry representatives of its nymphs and graces of old.
The Mississippi river drains not far from a million and a quarter square miles of territory, equal to about one third of the extent of Europe. From the source of the Missouri, on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, to the Balize, is, following the windings of the river, a distance of four thousand five hundred miles. A circular line drawn through the head waters of the Mississippi and its chief tributaries would not be less than six thousand miles in length. With all of its confluents the Mississippi forms a great moving sinuous highway fully twenty-five thousand miles long, and ploughed by many thousand steamboats. They stretch out as if to embrace the beauty, to grasp the wealth, and gather, as into a lap, the products of the vast region between the two mountain chains of the continent; the coal and oil of the Alleghanies, the gold of the Rocky Mountains, the grain, lumber, and lead of the North, and the cotton, sugar, and tropical fruits of the South. Equally well will they serve for the distribution of the Asiatic commerce and travel which will be poured across the continent on the completion of the Pacific railroad. St. Louis may then become a great distributing centre, and the same causes which have made London, Paris, Vienna, and Pekin the commercial capitals of their respective countries, may, in time, give that favored and opulent city the supremacy now enjoyed by the great marts of trade on the Atlantic coast. It is hardly safe to predict what may be the social and material, much less the intellectual possibilities of that near period, when, gliding on "the pale iron edge," we may jostle Chinese mandarins en route for Europe, and European money kings on their way to the Golcondas of the East.
The lotus-eating tourist of the Nile floats dreamily along the river between quaint villages and graceful palm-trees, past the pyramids, past the deserted sites of ancient cities, past the stupendous ruins of Luxor and Thebes. The monotony of the desert is broken by gloomy hills of sunburnt rock, and by the narrow strip of verdure which fringes both banks of the river. Should he push his explorations further, he will come in contact with the barbarous negro tribes of the upper Nile, and may encounter troops of giraffes and elephants.
How different the objects that attract the attention of the voyage up the Mississippi! The eye is charmed with the prospect of orange groves, of vast fields of sugar-cane of the deepest green, and of cotton plantations whose verdure and bloom at the proper season are only equalled in beauty by the snow-like whiteness of the opened balls. The forests are hung with long festoons of moss, giving them a sombre, funereal aspect. For between two and three hundred miles, both river banks, called coasts in Louisiana, are lined almost continuously with plantations, which, before the war, were in a high state of cultivation and furnished homes of luxury. The region now teeming with such active and varied life, inspired by the adjacent city of New Orleans, is made romantic by the adventures of De Soto and La Salle, and the wandering hither of the Acadians, known as Cagians by the Louisianians, whose sufferings in the wilderness excited even the compassion of hostile savages. Further up the river vast forests intervene, with here and there a straggling town or settlement on the banks. The monotony is broken by the sight of enormous flat-boats and rafts floating lazily down the current; and an occasional column of black smoke rising high above the trees in the distance indicates the presence of a steamboat, but, so crooked is the river, it is often impossible to say whether above or below. In consequence of the great bends, approaching boats are sometimes moving in parallel lines in the same direction, or are absolutely diverging and running from each other. Now and then the huge steamboat stops to land, perhaps, a single passenger, or, at long intervals, at a wood-yard where some settler is laying the foundation of a future fortune, the stump being usually the first product of American industry. The rude, vigorous, untamed aspect of the region seems, to a certain degree, to be reflected in the characteristics of the passengers on board. Still further north the traveller begins first to feel the pulses of that wonderful life which is throbbing throughout the great West. Here are vast prairies waving with fields of grain, and dotted with mounds built perhaps before the pyramids of Egypt. Up the Missouri one will soon reach the great plains on which roam herds of buffaloes and tribes of red men. About the head-waters of the Mississippi and its chief confluents is to be found some of the wildest mountain scenery on the continent. Where, upon the banks of a single river, are to be seen such varieties of climate, scenery, and animated life?
Very remarkable are the physical, it might almost be said paradoxical, characteristics of the Mississippi. Its average width below Natchez is not so great as from Natchez to Cairo. At Vicksburg, the river rises and falls about forty feet; at New Orleans not more than twelve feet. During the lowest stage of water, the largest ships experience but little difficulty in crossing the bar at the passes; when the great floods have filled the banks above to overflowing, deep-draught vessels can hardly be got over the bar. Below the mouth of Red river streams run out of the Mississippi instead of into it. Much of the distance below Cairo the river runs, not in an ordinary channel between the hills, but on the crest of a ridge of its own formation. The source of the Mississippi is about two and a half miles nearer the centre of the earth than the mouth, thereby causing it to run actually uphill.
The delta of the Mississippi, properly, extends from the mouth of the Red river to the gulf, a distance of about three hundred miles, following the windings of the river. It has an area of about fourteen thousand square miles, and its numerous bayous form an admirable system of natural canals. To the delta really belongs the left bank of the river below Manshac, where the bayou Manshac formed an outlet from the Mississippi to lake Pontchartrain, until it was closed by General Jackson in the war of 1812, to prevent the British getting into the river above New Orleans. The bayou could not be reopened without jeopardizing the safety of the city. A crevasse some distance above New Orleans, a few years ago, inundated the back streets. Skiffs took the place of omnibuses, and when the waters subsided some of the residents were surprised to find alligators "herbivorating" in their gardens. There is also a large partially alluvial tract west of the Atchafalaya, which covers the wonderful salt mine of Petit Aunce Island, and out through which ooze the petroleum springs of Calcasieu, where the Cagians have long been in the habit or greasing the axles of their rude carts.
Extending from the mouth of the Red river to a point above Cairo is the great alluvial plain of the Mississippi, varying from thirty to fifty miles in width, and containing a territory of about seventeen thousand square miles. The bluffs retreat from the east side of the river in many places, making room for rich bottom lands, and touch the river only at one point on the west side, namely, at Helena, Arkansas. From Cairo to the Balize is by the river almost twelve hundred miles, while in a straight line it is only five hundred. The frequent changes in the bed of the Mississippi, caused by "cut-offs," where it forces a channel through a narrow neck of land around which it has hitherto flowed in a wide circuit, have left numerous semicircular lakes and fausses rivières, whose tranquil waters abound with alligators and wild fowl.
The soil of the delta is filled with whole trees deposited while it was in process of formation. A sudden change in the direction of the river sometimes unearths the trunks, standing erect and close together, as if they had grown where they are found. While boring an artesian well in New Orleans, they came upon a solid cypress log nearly five hundred feet below the surface. The Mississippi is said to be, geologically, one of the oldest rivers on the globe. We happened to be with Professor Hyrtl of Vienna a few years ago, when be received, as a contribution to his unequalled museum of natural history, a couple of ganoid fishes, now to be found only in the "father of waters." They were clad in coats of mail, fitting them for existence in bodies of water dashed about by conflicting tempests and currents and convulsed by the upheavals of the earth. At the base of the obelisk of Heliopolis, erected by Sesostris four thousand years ago, one can see that, during that long interval of time, the valley of the Nile has been raised about nine feet around the monument. A friend of mine, engaged in sinking a shaft in the alluvium over the salt mine of Petit Aunce Island, recently exhumed the skeleton of a mastodon, and the rude implements and traces of the habitation of a people that must have passed away centuries ago. Skirting the delta on the gulf shore are vast shell-banks, consisting entirely of millions upon millions of cubic yards of small sea-shells. The popular superstition of the country ascribes their origin to the Indians, who came down to the coast for subsistence and deposited the shells where they are now found. But their existence in such vast quantities, in a purely alluvial region, is one of the curious problems of geology. In view of these facts, what ages upon ages is the mind carried back by the formation of the delta and the great alluvial plain of the Mississippi, to that far-off time when the place they now occupy was covered with a silent sea in which floundered the ichthyosauri of the pre-Adamic period!
The most remarkable feature of the lower Mississippi, and that which gives origin to very many of the peculiarities already mentioned, is the annual rise of its waters in consequence of the rain and melting of the snow above. Egypt owes its fruitfulness in great part to the sediment yearly deposited by the Nile wherever it overflows the land. We saw fellahs scattering seed upon the fresh and scarcely uncovered ooze, almost in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, and treading it in with oxen, as mentioned by Herodotus. The side canals are filled when the flood is at its height, and every possible means is employed to retard the fertilizing waters for irrigation, as rain very rarely falls. Just below the head of the delta an immense barrage, or dam, has been built across both the Damietta and Rosetta branches of the Nile, for the purpose of keeping back the flood. When the Nilometer indicates that the river has risen to a certain height, there is rejoicing throughout Egypt, a plentiful harvest being safely predicted from a full river.