PIRATES IN THE MOUNTAINS 63 



He said that the Missouri River appeared to be 

 made up more of mud than water, and he 

 thought it was a pirate not because it really 

 wanted more water but land, more mud and sand. 

 It captured other rivers incidentally in its hasty 

 digging out and washing away of the country- 

 side. 



"Water and land are always fighting," he 

 went on to say. "You can see this at the sea- 

 shore. Each is ever trying for the area of the 

 other. The sea would hardly be sending water 

 up in the air and across country in cloud ships, 

 then back to the sea in rivers just for the fun of 

 it. What it is up to is to wash the land away. 

 The more land that washes into the sea the 

 higher and wider the sea becomes. I was read- 

 ing last winter that the sea occupies seventy-one 

 per cent, of the earth's surface and land only 

 twenty-nine per cent, and that if all the land 

 surface above sea level were washed into the sea 

 and spread over the bottom it would raise the 

 water, fill in, only seven hundred feet." 



In thinking over what he said I felt that he 

 was correct. Just what Big Water, which the 

 Indians called the sea, was thinking about is a 

 guess. Anyway, rivers are all the time washing 

 all land surface down into the sea. Someone 

 has said that the Missouri River is too thin for 

 cultivation and too thick for navigation. One 



