In our day,if you travel by river from the southernmost of these three cut-offs to the northernmost,you go only seventy miles.
To do the same thing a hundred and seventy-six years ago,one had to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles!--shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance.At some forgotten time in the past,cut-offs were made above Vidalia,Louisiana;at island 92;at island 84;and at Hale's Point.These shortened the river,in the aggregate,seventy-seven miles.
Since my own day on the Mississippi,cut-offs have been made at Hurricane Island;at island 100;at Napoleon,Arkansas;at Walnut Bend;and at Council Bend.These shortened the river,in the aggregate,sixty-seven miles.In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend,which shortened the river ten miles or more.
Therefore,the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago.
It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722.
It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off.It has lost sixty-seven miles since.Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
Now,if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people,and 'let on'
to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past,or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years,what an opportunity is here!
Geology never had such a chance,nor such exact data to argue from!
Nor 'development of species,'either!Glacial epochs are great things,but they are vague--vague.Please observe:--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 Ihave 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 traveled 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 up 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 our preparations were useless.The instant the current hit us it spun us around like a top,the water deluged the forecastle,and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep his feet.The next instant we were away down the river,clawing with might and main to keep out of the woods.
We tried the experiment four times.I stood on the forecastle companion way to see.It was astonishing to observe how suddenly the boat would spin around and turn tail the moment she emerged from the eddy and the current struck her nose.
The sounding concussion and the quivering would have been about the same if she had come full speed against a sand-bank.
Under the lightning flashes one could see the plantation cabins and the goodly acres tumble into the river;and the crash they made was not a bad effort at thunder.Once,when we spun around,we only missed a house about twenty feet,that had a light burning in the window;and in the same instant that house went overboard.
Nobody could stay on our forecastle;the water swept across it in a torrent every time we plunged athwart the current.
At the end of our fourth effort we brought up in the woods two miles below the cut-off;all the country there was overflowed,of course.
A day or two later the cut-off was three-quarters of a mile wide,and boats passed up through it without much difficulty,and so saved ten miles.
The old Raccourci cut-off reduced the river's length twenty-eight miles.
There used to be a tradition connected with it.It was said that a boat came along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow the usual way,the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made.
It was a grisly,hideous night,and all shapes were vague and distorted.
The old bend had already begun to fill up,and the boat got to running away from mysterious reefs,and occasionally hitting one.
The perplexed pilots fell to swearing,and finally uttered the entirely unnecessary wish that they might never get out of that place.