THE MISSISSIPPI. 



W. E. WATT. 



jnr MERICANS like to boast or the 

 T^ things of this country that are 

 ± \_ larger, longer, more valuable, or 

 more wonderful than anything 

 of the kind in the world. They have 

 recited in school such a number of 

 statements about the Mississippi river 

 that the great stream has become one 

 of the essential points of our nation's 

 honor. 



You may be able to make the aver- 

 age man believe that Washington was 

 not always as truthful in his youth as 

 Weems in the cherry-tree story tried 

 to make him; that Captain John Smith 

 drew somewhat on his imagination 

 when some sixteen years after the ex- 

 pedition into the woods he told the 

 story of his rescue by Pocahontas; that 

 perhaps, after all, we did not whip the 

 entire British nation twice in open war- 

 fare — but it will be hard to make any 

 native-born American admit that the 

 Mississippi river is not the longest in 

 the world. 



He may listen to your argument in 

 favor of the Nile or the Amazon, but 

 he will tell you that he still thinks that 

 if the Mississippi had been measured 

 correctly at first, taking the source of 

 the Missouri as the source of the Mis- 

 sissippi, we would have been the pos- 

 sessors of the longest river on earth. 



And if that should seem a trifle 

 weak he will at once tell you that 

 the great river is more wonderful 

 than all others because its source is 

 several hundred feet nearer the center 

 of the earth than its mouth. In other 

 words, the river flows up hill. The 

 curvature of the earth is not the true 

 arc of a circle from the equator to the 

 poles, for the axis of the earth is 

 shorter than its diameter at the equa- 

 tor by about twenty-six miles. It is 

 thirteen miles less from the north pole 

 to the center of the earth than from 

 any point on the equator to the cen- 

 ter. So the river flows towards the 

 equator with an apparent fall as esti- 

 mated from the sea-level, but with an 

 actual rising away from the earth's 

 center just as the sea rises round this 

 shoulder of the earth. 



So the Mississippi is a source of joy 

 and boastful conversation to every cit- 

 izen of the United States. 



The Acadian settlers of Nova Scotia 

 whose praises have been sung by Long- 

 fellow in his "Evangeline", were the 

 earliest to reclaim land from the sea in 

 America. Being weaker than those 

 who used the ax to fell the giants of 

 the forest primeval, they were more 

 skillful with the spade. They took ad- 

 vantage of the extremely high tides of 

 the Bay of Fundy and its branches, and 

 when the water was low threw up em- 

 bankments which prevented the sea 

 from covering part of the rich red mud 

 flats before the village of Grand Pre. 



At the time of their painful disper- 

 sion they had secured all the land be- 

 tween the original shore and the island 

 which stood out in the basin of Minas. 



Though they could not take these 

 rich lands with them in their exile, 

 many of them carried the knowledge 

 of dike-building down to the lower 

 courses of the Mississippi, and taught 

 the rest of the Americans there how to 

 get the fat lands of the river bottoms 

 by means of levees. 



When General Pakenham gave up 

 his life and lost a fine British army to 

 General Jackson after the treaty of 

 peace had been signed in the War of 

 1812, his right rested on the bank of 

 the Mississippi where there was a levee 

 a little over five feet high. 



This levee cut off the waters from 

 spreading when the freshet was on. It 

 was sufificient at that time. Extensions 

 of levee work cut off more and more of 

 the bottom-lands from the spread of the 

 high waters till now nearly four-fifths 

 of the area over which the waters of 

 the June freshet used to spread are pro- 

 tected b)' these structures. 



The levees are not now the low banks 

 of earth which once kept the waters 

 back. The great mass of water that 

 comes from the melting of snows in 

 the Alleghenies and the Rockies must 

 either spread out or pile up. Confin- 

 ing within less than a mile of width a 

 surplus of water that formerly spread 

 itself for a hundred miles makes it nee- 



