APPENDIX. Tl 



metto tents where the city of New Orleans now stands, they 

 found themselves annually liable to floods that they must guard 

 against; and in 1T17 the governor ordered his engineer, De la 

 Tour, to throw up a dike round the fort and the proposed city. 

 They commenced planting on the adjacent fertile grounds, and 

 found that crops were impossible without protection ; and they 

 then extended the earthen embankments along the river in front 

 and made guard levees running back, to guide the flood waters 

 past them. The new arrivals of colonists planted the land still 

 above and below them, and extended the protection still further. 

 And still they found themselves flanked by the floods, and again 

 new settlers carried the works further and further upwards. 



These efforts resulted in laws regulating levees, as communities 

 grew up along the river, and upon the interior streams partly 

 reclaimed by front levees and partly by similar works on the 

 bayous. After the purchase of the country from France, the 

 American population rapidly increased, and extended the settle- 

 ments upward and into the interior, invited by the extraordinary 

 productiveness of the lands and the mildness of the climate; and 

 laws regulating the levee building and enjoining upon every pro- 

 prietor to build and maintain his own levee, were enacted and 

 enforced with much rigor. 



By the year 1838, when the writer's labors in connection with 

 levees commenced, the protection was pretty complete from sixty 

 miles below New Orleans up to Red River, and a large portion of 

 the riverfront for one hundred miles above Red River was being 

 protected. And still the flood waters would flank the plantations, 

 as the levees were carried upward and upward. Several large 

 outlets had been closed. Bullitt's Bayou, and L'Argentin Con- 

 cordia were leveed ; and such were the happy eff"ects of these 

 works on the interior country, that in 1840 the writer published' 

 the bold proposition to levee and master the ivhole alluvial basin. 

 This was contrary to nearly universal opinion as to practicability, 

 but soon found adherents. The demand for land-dominion fast 

 moulded opinion. 



The universal impression, without much reason, that tne river 

 must fill up its bed, and cause a constant raising of the levees, 

 began to give way, and we soon (by 1847) ran our levees to the 

 very northern limits of Louisiana. 



The theorists, however, nearly all maintained that the proposi- 

 tion of the gradual elevation of the levees was heretical and unsafe. 

 In opposition to this, experience, now a century old or more, was 

 appealed to, which showed points of land near and above New 

 Orleans that were as high (or nearly) as the highest water marks 

 of recent times. 



The contest ran through a decade of years, and the triumph of 

 the new doctrine was finally due more to the desire to possess the 

 lands, than to any scientific conviction. In 1851, the great Delta 



(15) 



