THE MODERN MISSISSIPPI PROBLEM 25 



the current nearly as rapidly as with it. Thus began the palmy 

 period of the Mississippi as a line of commercial activity ; towns 

 were planted on the upper river and along the Ohio, and especially 

 below the confluence ; Columbus, Hickman, Vicksburg, Grand 

 Gulf, Natchez, Bayou Sara, Port Hudson, and a dozen other 

 towns whose names are half forgotten, sprang up along the river- 

 side and promised to become metropoles, while the passenger 

 packets became floating palaces, representing the acme of luxury 

 in American travel. Knowing nothing better, merchants and 

 shippers were content to endure the interruption of traffic by 

 floods, and were too dazzled by glowing anticipations to note the 

 building of bars between their warehouses and the main channel 

 or the undermining of their town-sites by the ever-shifting stream. 

 Then came the locomotive and railway, affording the means of 

 swifter and surer transportation, and the river commerce began 

 to wane, relative^ if not absolutely ; a third of the river towns 

 were deserted by the stream, a quarter were invaded by the cur- 

 rent, and only a third or a quarter were reached by the railways 

 and permitted to thrive under the new conditions. For a time 

 the river held the balance of power between rival lines and modes 

 of transportation, and thus controlled tariffs (indeed this is in 

 some measure true today), but successively larger and larger 

 shares of the traffic were diverted. Recent statistics show that 

 there is still a considerable transportation of coal, grain, and 

 other bulky and indestructible commodities by the river, though 

 the ratio of river carriage to rail carriage is steadily decreasing ; 

 today the flourishing river towns are also railway towns, and 

 depend primarily on land transportation for their commercial 

 supremacy ; today the old-time floating palace is but a memory, 

 and today only two, or five, or possibly ten packets pass the point 

 where twenty passed a quarter-century ago. 



Meantime the inquiries concerningthe great river have changed. 

 Today the practical importance of the lower Mississippi lies in 

 its fertile bottom-lands and in the agricultural and commercial 

 industries which they support; and since these are affected by 

 floods and other fluctuations of the river, the water stages have 

 become paramount as subjects of investigation. The researches 

 concerning the regimen of the river began while it yet retained 

 prime importance as a navigable waterway, and yielded one of 

 the earlier scientific classics of America in the monograph by 

 Humphreys and Abbot, issued in 1861. These f^drologists 

 were concerned chiefly with normal conditions rather than ab- 



