CHAP. XXX.] SNAG-BOATS. 133 



receive its vast burden of water and mud ; and if it went to Lake 

 Pontchartrain, it would have to excavate a new valley like a b c, 

 many times deeper than the bottom of that lagoon. 



The levee raised to protect the low grounds from inundation, 

 was at first, when we left New Orleans, only four feet high, so 

 as not to impede our view of the country from the deck ; but as 

 we ascended, both the natural bank and the levee became higher 

 and higher, and by the time we had sailed up sixty-five miles, I 

 could only just see the tops of tall trees in the swamps. Even 

 these were only discernible from the roof of the cabin, or what is 

 called the hurricane deck, when we had gone 100 miles from New 

 Orleans. 



The large waves raised by the rapid movement of several hun 

 dred steamers, causes the undermining and waste of the banks 

 to proceed at a more rapid rate than formerly. The roots also 

 of trees growing at the edge of the stream, were very effective 

 formerly in holding the soil together, before so much timber had 

 been cleared away. Now the banks offer less resistance to the 

 wasting action of the stream. 



The quantity of drift wood floated down the current has not 

 diminished sensibly within the last twenty years, but nearly all 

 of it is now intercepted in the last forty miles above New Orleans, 

 and split up into logs by the proprietors to supply the furnaces of 

 steamboats, which are thus freeing the river of the heavy masses 

 against which they used formerly to bump in the night, or round 

 which they were forced to steer in the day. There has also been 

 a marked decrease, of late years, in the number of snags. The 

 trunks of uprooted trees, so called, get fixed in the mud, having 

 sunk with their heavier end to the bottom, and remain slanting 

 down the stream, so as to pierce through the bows of vessels sail 

 ing up. A government report just published, shows that two 

 snag-boats, each having a crew of twenty men, one of them draw 

 ing four feet, and the other two feet water, have, extracted 700 

 snags in four weeks out of the Missouri, and others have been at 

 work on the Mississippi. When it is remembered that some of 

 the most dangerous of these snags have been known to continue 

 planted for twenty years in the same spot (so slowly does wood 



