AND AMERICAN RURAL SPORTS. 
11 
vessel and perforate her bow, no further mischief accrues, 
than the mere filling of this snag-chamber with water. 
The prodigious quantity of wood annually drifted down 
by the Mississippi and its tributaries, is a subject of geo- 
logical interest, not merely as illustrating the manner in 
which abundance of vegetable matter becomes, in the 
ordinary course of Nature, imbedded in submarine and 
estuary deposits, but as attesting the constant destruction of 
soil and transportation of matter to lower levels by the 
tendency of rivers to shift their courses. Each of these 
trees must have required many years, some of them many 
centuries, to attain their full size; the soil, therefore, 
whereon they grew, after remaining undisturbed for long 
periods, is ultimately torn up and swept away. Yet not- 
withstanding this incessant destruction of land and up- 
rooting of trees, the region which yields this never-failing 
supply of drift wood is densely clothed with noble forests, 
and is almost unrivalled in its power of supporting animal 
and vegetable life. 
Innumerable herds of wild deer and bisons feed on the 
luxuriant pastures of the plains. The jaguar, the wolf, and 
the fox, are amongst the beasts of prey. The waters teem 
with alligators and tortoises, and their surface is covered 
with millions of migratory water-fowl, which perform their 
annual voyage between the Canadian lakes and the shores 
of the Mexican gulf. The power of man begins to be 
sensibly felt, and the wilderness to be replaced by towns, 
orchards, and gardens. The gilded steam-boat, like a 
moving city, now stems the current with a steady pace- 
now shoots rapidly down the descending stream through 
the solitudes of the forests and prairies. Already does the 
flourishing population of the great valley exceed that of the 
thirteen United States when first they declared their inde- 
pendence, and after a sanguinary struggle were severed 
from the parent country. * Such is the state of a continent 
where rocks and trees are hurried annually, by a thousand 
torrents, from the mountains to the plains, and where sand 
and finer matter are swept down by a vast current to the 
sea, together with the wreck of countless forests and the 
bones of animals which perish in the inundations. When 
these materials reach the Gulf, they do not render the 
waters unfit for aquatic animals; but, on the contrary, the 
ocean here swarms with life, as it generally does where 
the influx of a great river furnishes a copious supply of 
organic and mineral matter. Yet many geologists, when 
they behold the spoils of the land heaped in successive 
strata, and blended confusedly with the remains of fishes, 
or interspersed with broken shells and corals, imagine that 
they are viewing the signs of a turbulent, instead of a tran- 
* Flint’s Geography, vol. 1. 
quil and settled state of the planet. They read in such 
phenomena the proof of chaotic disorder, and reiterated 
catastrophes, instead of indications of a surface as habitable 
as the most delicious and fertile districts now tenanted by 
man. They are not content with disregarding the analogy 
of the present course of Nature, when they speculate on 
the revolutions of past times, but they often draw con- 
clusions concerning the former state of things directly the 
reverse of those to which a fair induction of facts would 
infallibly lead them. 
There is another striking feature in the basin of the Mis- 
sissippi, illustrative of the changes now in progress, which 
we must not omit to mention — the formation by natural 
causes of great lakes, and the drainage of others. These 
are especially frequent in the basin of the Red River in 
Louisiana, where the largest of them, called Bistineau, is 
more than thirty miles long, and has a medium depth of 
from fifteen to twenty feet. In the deepest parts are seen 
numerous cypress-trees, of all sizes, now dead, and most of 
them with their tops broken by the wind, yet standing 
erect under water. This tree resists the action of air 
and water longer than any other, and, if not submerged 
throughout the whole year, will retain life for an extraor- 
dinary period.* Lake Bistineau, as well as Black Lake, 
Cado Lake, Spanish Lake, Natchitoches Lake, and many 
others, have been formed, according to Darby, by the 
gradual elevation of the bed of Red River, in which the 
alluvial communications have been so great as to raise its 
channel, and cause its waters, during the flood season, to 
flow up the mouths of many tributaries, and to convert 
parts of their courses into lakes. In the autumn, when 
the level of Red River is again depressed, the waters rush 
back again, and some lakes become grassy meadows, with 
streams meandering through them.t Thus, there is a 
periodical flux and reflux between Red River and some 
of these basins, which are merely reservoirs, alternately 
emptied and filled like our tide estuaries — with this differ- 
ence, that in the one case the land is submerged for 
several months continuously, and, in the other, twice in 
every twenty-four hours. It has happened, in several cases, 
that a bar has been thrown by Red River across some 
of the openings of these channels, and then the lakes 
become, like Bistineau, constant repositories of water. 
But even in these cases, their level is liable to annual 
elevation and depression, because the flood, when at its 
height, passes over the bar ; just as, where sand-hills close 
* Captains Clarke and Lewis found a forest of pines standing erect under 
water in the body of the Columbia River in North America, which they sup- 
posed, from the appearance of the trees, to have been only submerged about 
twenty years. — Vol, ii. p. 241. 
f Darby’s Louisiana, p. 33. 
