1 8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



different curves, and these necks are rapidly disappearing as the banks 

 cave in. Twenty-five years ago at the curve farthest up-stream from 

 the city the neck was over 4,000 feet wide, five years ago it was less 

 than half that width and was caving badly. The neck below the city 

 is only half a mile wide and is also yielding rapidly to the attacks of 

 the river. Greenville is confronted with these alternatives : If the neck 

 below the city is cut through first by continued sapping, the city will 

 be left high and dry, five miles from the river and its reason for exist- 

 ing will be gone. If, on the contrary, the neck above the city is the 

 first to succumb, the resulting changes in the channel will cause most 

 vigorous scouring of the bank exactly where Greenville stands and it 

 will be speedily swept away. The levee now stands where the main 

 street once ran and, despite every effort to stop it, the town has been 

 forced to play leap frog over itself to keep away from the advancing 

 river. Through the expenditure of a million dollars in protective 

 devices the crisis has been delayed, yet the city is doomed eventually, 

 and the money spent in its protection must be regarded as wasted. 



St. Joseph, Missouri, with a population exceeding 100,000, and 

 one of the most important centers of the west, faces a somewhat similar 

 fate from the Missouri river. Opposite the city the stream swings 

 around a great bend, St. Joseph being located on the bluff above the 

 river bottoms. Some smaller villages on the flat have already been 

 swallowed up in the stream, and, at its present rate, the current will 

 soon cut its way through the narrow neck which lies a few miles west 

 of the city, severing the Grand Island railroad, rendering the big steel 

 bridges at St. Joseph practically useless, making new bridges over the 

 new channel necessary, cutting off the intake of the water supply, and 

 leaving the city without any outlet for its sewer system. Here, again, 

 somewhat over a million dollars has been spent in river work above and 

 below the city, but the banks have continued to cave, and St. Joseph 

 is facing the prospect of being left higher and dryer than Greenville. 

 From the standpoint of transportation by water, however, the loss of 

 the river front at St. Joseph would not now be a serious calamity, since 

 the Missouri route is at present rendered quite useless by the excessive 

 formation of sand bars. 



Both the federal government and the Chicago and Alton railroad 

 have spent large sums in an attempt to control the Missouri at Glasgow. 

 Kaskaskia, the one-time capital of Illinois, has been wiped out of exist- 

 ence by the changing current of the Mississippi, while the prospect of 

 a cut-off at Cowpen Bend, above Natchez, indicates that the harbor 

 of that city will be destroyel by the deposition of large quantities of 

 sand along the entire water front. Striking as these individual cases 

 may be in themselves, the question of this cutting away of the banks, 

 accompanied by deposition of sand in other places, takes on far greater 

 significance as soon as costly improvements are suggested. It is unde- 



