176 LIES ON TSE MISSISSIPPI.
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower
Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.
That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.
Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that
in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next
November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million
three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of
Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can
see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower
Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo
and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be
plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual
board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling
investment of fact.
When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I
have been, speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts to move.
The water cleaves the banks away like a knife. By the time the
ditch has become twelve or fifteen feet wide, the calamity is as good
as accomplished, for no power on earth can stop it now. "When the
width has reached a hundred yards, the banks begin to peel off in
slices half an acre wide. The current flowing around the bend
travelled formerly only five miles an hour \ now it is tremendously
increased by the shortening of the distance. I was on board the first
boat that tried to go through the cut-off at American Bend, but we
did not get through. It was toward midnight, and a wild night it
was—thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain. It was estimated
that the current in the cut-off was making about fifteen or twenty
miles an hour; twelve or thirteen was the best our boat could do,
even in tolerably slack water, therefore perhaps we were foolish to
try the cut off. However, Mr. Brown was ambitious, and he kept
on trying. The eddy running up the bank, under the * point/ was
about as swift as the current out in the middle; so we would go
flying tip the shore like a lightning express train, get on a big head
of steam, and * stand by for a surge' when we struck the current that
was whirling by the point. But all onr preparations were useless.
The instant the current hit us it spun us around like a top, the water