LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

CHAPTER I.
THE EIVEE AND ITS HISTORY.
THE Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a common
place river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Consider-
ing the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world
—four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that il
is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its
journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the
same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-
five. It discharges tihree times as much water as the St. Lawrence,
twenty-five times as much as the Ehine, and three hundred and
thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so
vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight
States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and
from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope—
a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives
and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that
are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navi-
gable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as
the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Prance,
Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost
aU this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is ex-
ceptionally so.
It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward
its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. JBVom the