Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, November 12, 1867

The Mississippi River.

THE “Father of Waters” is not only the greatest and grandest, but also the most peculiar of rivers; and his ways, though not past finding out, are certainly very queer and singular and mysterious. It was only the other day that either he or one of his tributaries, having no respect for State lines, suddenly indulged in an extensive crevasse, and transferred one of the most enterprising towns of Iowa to the State of Wisconsin. Along the upper Mississippi the soil consists of sand deposits, without cohesiveness, “and is cut,” says Richardson, in his admirable book Beyond the Mississippi, “by the water like sawdust. The shifting channel sometimes moves forty or fifty yards in a single week.” “Its water will deposit a sediment an eighth of an inch thick upon the bottom of a tumbler in five minutes.” “Navigating the Missouri, (or upper Mississippi) at low water, is like putting a steamer upon dry land and sending a boy ahead with a sprinkling pot.” This is on the upper Mississippi; more than thirty thousand miles of large rivers are collected to form the volume of the Mississippi; and this mighty current below the mouth of the Ohio is less in width, but increased in depth and volume, and rushes with a greater velocity than above that point, thus naturally producing another character of country. And in this is displayed one of its greatest peculiarities. One would imagine that it would require a mountainous country to confine this volume of water to proper limits, while the fact is that the Southern country through which it passes is almost entirely level. Sir Charles Lyell records that an old Mississippi pilot pointed out to him an island in the Delta of the Mississippi which he described as “very high land,” and explained, in answer to a second query, that by high land he meant “3 or 4 feet above the sea.” “In all Louisiana there is not,” says Parton, in his Life of Jackson, “a hill two hundred feet high.” The streets of New Orleans are only 9 feet above the level of the Gulf of Mexico, and are actually below that of the levees which confine the river to restricted limits. “The Mississippi,” says Parton in the work from which we have just quoted, “is apparently the most irresolute of rivers; the bed upon which it lies can not long hold it in its soft embrace. Wearing away the concave side of its numberless bends, rushing through new channels, slicing off acres in an hour, leaving lakes where it found forests, holding dissolved in its yellow tide land enough for a plantation, and carrying down in one season more trees than the Black Forest can boast, it reaches at last the Delta—that cess-pool and general emptying-place for half a continent. Arriving there with its deep, narrow volume of waters—two hundred rivers in one—it can no longer contain itself, but breaks into several channels, and passes its way through the black ooze of its own depositing, in a manner which looks helpless and sprawling, but which is in reality the shortest and directest way by which that prodigious torrent could find its way to the deep waters of the Gulf. There are so many streams, bayous, lagoons, and branches of the great river in the Delta, that it looks on the map like a damaged spider’s web, with New Orleans in the midst thereof representing the spider.”