Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0136/01361.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 13KB | 228 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01361}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life On The Mississippi
Chapter I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{river
hundred
mississippi
years
miles
yet
de
mouth
three
country}
$Date{1917}
$Log{}
Title:       Life On The Mississippi
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1917

Chapter I

The River And Its History

     The Mississippi is well worth reading about.  It is not a commonplace
river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri
its main branch, it is the longest river in the world - four thousand three
hundred miles.  It seems safe to say that it 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 three times as much water as the St.
Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, 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 navigable by flats and keels.  The area of its
drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland,
Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and
almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is
exceptionally so.

     It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its
mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper.  From the junction of the
Ohio to a point half-way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high
water; thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the
"Passes," above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile.  At the junction
of the Ohio the Mississippi's depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases
gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

     The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable - not in the upper,
but in the lower river.  The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez (three
hundred and sixty miles above the mouth) - about fifty feet.  But at Bayou La
Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New Orleans only fifteen,
and just above the mouth only two and one-half.

     An article in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, based upon reports of able
engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million
tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico - which brings to mind Captain Marryat's
rude name for the Mississippi - "the Great Sewer." This mud, solidified, would
make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high.

     The mud deposit gradually extends the land - but only gradually; it has
extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have
elapsed since the river took its place in history.

     The belief of the scientific people is that the mouth used to be at Baton
Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between
there and the Gulf was built by the river.  This gives us the age of that
piece of country, without any trouble at all - one hundred and twenty thousand
years.  Yet it is much the youthfulest batch of country that lies around there
anywhere.

     The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way - its disposition to
make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus
straightening and shortening itself.  More than once it has shortened itself
thirty miles at a single jump!

     These cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river
towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand-bars and forests in
front of them.  The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg; a
recent cut-off has radically changed the position, and Delta is now two miles
above Vicksburg.

     Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that
cut-off.  A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for
instance, a man is living in the state of Mississippi to-day, a cut- off
occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the
other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the
state of Louisiana!  Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old
times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a
free man of him.

     The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is
always changing its habitat bodily - is always moving bodily sidewise. At Hard
Times, Louisiana, the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy.
As a result, the original site of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at
all, but on the other side of the river, in the state of Mississippi.  Nearly
the whole of that one thousand three hundred miles of old Mississippi River
which La Salle floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good
solid dry ground now.  The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to
the left of it in other places.

     Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth,
where the Gulf's billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in
better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet's Island contained
one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river
has added seven hundred acres to it.

     But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities for
the present - I will give a few more of them further along in the book.

     Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a word about its
historical history - so to speak.  We can glance briefly at its slumbrous
first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch
in a couple more; at its flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many
succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present
epoch in what shall be left of the book.

     The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word
"new" in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain
the impression that there is nothing old about it.  We do of course know that
there are several comparatively old dates in American history, but the mere
figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct realization, of the
stretch of time which they represent.  To say that De Soto, the first white
man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which
states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the
dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the
colors by their scientific names - as a result, you get the bald fact of the
sunset, but you don't see the sunset.  It would have been better to paint a
picture of it.

     The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but
when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it, he
adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the American
dates which is quite respectable for age.

     For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less
than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat at Pavia;
the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, sans peur et sans reproche; the
driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by the Turks; and the
placarding of the Ninety-five Propositions - the act which began the
Reformation.  When De Soto took his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola was
an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael
Angelo's paint was not yet dry on the "Last Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel;
Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed.
Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her
teens; Calvin, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V. were at the top
of their fame, and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar
fashion; Margaret of Navarre was writing the "Heptameron" and some religious
books - the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy being
sometimes better literature-preservers than holiness; lax court morals and the
absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the joust and the
tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine gentlemen who could fight
better than they could spell, while religion was the passion of their ladies,
and the classifying their offspring into children of full rank and children by
brevet their pastime.  In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly
blooming condition: the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish
Inquisition was roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free hand;
elsewhere on the Continent the nations were being persuaded to holy living by
the sword and fire; in England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries,
burned Fisher and another bishop or two, and was getting his English
Reformation and his harem effectively started.  When De Soto stood on the
banks of the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther's death; eleven
years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew
slaughter; Rabelais had not yet published; Don Quixote was not yet written;
Shakespeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse before
Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell.

     Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which
considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives
her a most respectable outside aspect of rustiness and antiquity.

     De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his
priests and soldiers.  One would expect the priests and the soldiers to
multiply the river's dimensions by ten - the Spanish custom of the day - and
thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it.  On the contrary,
their narratives, when they reached home, did not excite that amount of
curiosity.  The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of
years which seems incredible in our energetic days.  One may "sense" the
interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: after De
Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed,
and then Shakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then
died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century,
the second white man saw the Mississippi.  In our day we don't allow a hundred
and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel.  If somebody should
discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in,
Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither; one to
explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.

     For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements
on our Atlantic coasts.  These people were in intimate communication with the
Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving, and
converting them; higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to
them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whisky, "for
lagniappe"; and in Canada the French were schooling them in a rudimentary way,
missionarying among them, and drawing whole populations of them at a time to
Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy furs of them.  Necessarily, then, these
various clusters of whites must have heard of the great river of the Far West;
and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely - so vaguely and indefinitely that its
course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable.  The mere
mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled
exploration; but this did not occur.  Apparently nobody happened to want such
a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and
a half the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed.  When De
Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for
one; consequently, he did not value it or even take any particular notice of
it.

     But at last, La Salle, the Frenchman, conceived the idea of seeking out
that river and exploring it.  It always happens that when a man seizes upon a
neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all
around.  It happened so in this instance.

     Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the
river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations?
Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a
way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi
emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from
Canada to China.  Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the
Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.