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CHAPTER XTIL
CUT-OFFS AND STEPHEN.
THESE dry details are of importance in one particular. They give
me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi's oddest
peculiarities,—that of shortening its length from time to time. If
you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will
pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi
River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo,
Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully
crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals.
The two-hundred-mile stretch from Cairo northward to Si. Louis is
by no means so crooked, that being a rocky country which the river
cannot cut much.
The water cuts the alluvial banks of the * lower' river into deep
horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to
get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the
neck, half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a
couple of hours while your steamer was coming around the long
elbow, at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again.
When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is
back in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has only to watch
his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some
dark night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short
time a miracle has happened : to wit, the whole Mississippi has taken
possession of that little ditch, and placed the countryman's plantation
on its bank (quadrupling its value), and that other party's formerly
valuable plantation finds itself away out yonder on a big island ; the
old watercourse around it will soon shoal up, boats cannot approach