THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER. 331 



ing facts obtained from the highest authority in this country, which show the 

 absurdity of all other plans and the feasibility of this one. General Humphreys, 

 the old chief engineer of the United States Army, who spent ten years examin- 

 ing the Mississippi River, making the most elaborate report ever made by any 

 one, says that the approximative fall from Cairo to Memphis is five inches to the 

 mile, for a distance of 200 miles, while we all know that the current is fully five 

 miles per hour. For the last 200 miles of the river (from the mouth up) the ap- 

 proximate fall does not exceed two inches to the mile and the current is only 

 about three miles an hour. This, of itself shows that the water runs in faster at 

 the upper end of the river than it runs out at the lower end, and the more levees 

 they build the less angular fall per mile, which in consequence makes the water 

 run slower and is the real cause of overflows. Upon the same principle, the 

 more levees the greater the overflows. 



By the plan of the Lake Borgne outlet the flood waters of the river reach 

 the Gulf in going five miles instead of 120 miles farther by the natural way of the 

 river, which will lower the flood line at New Orleans in the course of a couple of 

 years, or in other words will restore the same condition of water levels at that 

 point as when the mouth of the river was there, which was fully fourteen feet 

 below the present flood line. As a natural consequence this will restore the 

 flood lines of that period all the way up to Cairo, which were from twelve to 

 twenty feet below the present flood lines, doing entirely away with the necessity 

 for levees, and at the same time, confining within the natural banks of the river 

 the waters of the entire valley, which will in high as well as low water wash out 

 its bottom, confine the water and deepen its channels. The trouble is with all of 

 these educated scientists, they appear to never have understood in this great 

 problem that there was a Gulf of Mexico, the only place capable of emptying the 

 Mississippi River, or they certainly would have considered the necessity of get- 

 ting the flood waters of the Mississippi River and valley into the Gulf by shorter 

 and quicker routes than by the natural course of the river itself. 



By this plan the waters of the river are confined, while the River Commis- 

 sion maintain that they spread out and overflow the country. But they don't 

 understand the difference between an outlet and a crevasse, for if the Lake Borgne 

 outlet is made there will be no crevasses, and if there are no crevasses there will 

 be no overflows. For an outlet, such an one as Lake Borgne, takes the floods from 

 river direct to the Gulf and relieves the river of all its flood waters, while on the 

 other hand a crevasse is a place where the levees break, flooding the back coun- 

 try and returning to the river again at some point below, affording no general 

 relief. 



The closing of Bonnet Carre crevasse raised the water in the river higher 

 than ever before at New Orleans and in the lower section of the river, and the 

 relief was only found by the breaking of a levee on the west bank of the river 

 between New Orleans and Bonnet Carr-e which overflowed the parishes, causing 

 a loss of fully $10,000,000, ruining a great many people and rendering their land 

 incapable of producing a crop for another year. All this loss of property has 



