University of Virginia Library

THE MISSISSIPPI.

The North American continent, in its impenetrable
forests, its fertile prairies, its magnificent
lakes, its veriety of rivers with their falls, is the
richest portion of our globe. Many of these wonderful
exhibitions of nature are already shrines where
pilgrims from every land assemble to admire and
marvel at the surpassing wonders of a new world.
So numerous indeed are the objects presented, so
novel and striking is their character, that the judgment
is confused in endeavouring to decide which
single one is worthy of the greatest admiration; and
the forests, the prairies, the lakes, the rivers, and
falls, each in turn dispute the supremacy. But to
us, the Mississippi ranks first in importance; and
thus we think must it strike all, when they consider
the luxurious fertility of the valley through which it
flows, its vast extent, and the charm of mystery that
rests upon its waters. The Niagara Falls, with its
fearful depths, its rocky heights, its thunder, and
“bows of promise,” addresses itself to the ear, and
the eye, and through these alone impresses the beholder

with the greatness of its character. The
Mississippi, on the contrary, although it may have
few or no tangible demonstrations of power, although
it has no language with which it can startle the
senses, yet in a “still small voice” it addresses
the mind, with its terrible lessons of strength and
sublimity, more forcibly than any other object in
nature.

The name Mississippi was derived from the
aborigines of the country, and has been poetically
rendered the “Father of Waters.” There is little
truth in this translation, and it gives no idea, or
scarcely none, of the river itself. The literal meaning
of the Indian compound Mississippi, as is the
case with all Indian names in this country, would
have been much better, and every way more characteristic.
From the most numerous Indian tribe
in the south-west we derive the name, and it would
seem that the same people who gave the name to
the Mississippi, at different times possessed nearly
half the continent; judging from the fact that the
Ohio in the north, and many of the most southern
points of the peninsula of Florida, are from the
Choctaw language. With that tribe the two simple
adjectives, Missah and Sippah, are used when describing
the most familiar things; but these two
words, though they are employed thus familiarly
when separated, when compounded, form the most
characteristic name we can get of this wonderful
river. Missah, literally Old big, Sippah, strong,
Old-big-strong; and this name is eminently appropriate
to the Mississippi.

The country through which this river flows is almost
entirely alluvial. Not a stone is to be seen,
save about its head-waters; but a dark rich earth
that “looks eager for the hand of cultivation;” for
vegetation lies piled upon its surface with a luxuriant
wastefulness that beggars all description, and
finds no comparison for its extent, except in the
mighty river from which it receives its support.
This alluvial soil forms frail banks to confine the
swift current of the Mississippi; and, as might be
imagined, they are continually altering their shape
and location. The channel is capricious and wayward
in its course. The needle of the compass
turns round and round upon its axis, as it marks the
bearings of your craft, and in a few hours will frequently
point due north, west, east, and south, delineating
those tremendous bends in the stream
which nature seems to have formed to check the
head-long current, and keep it from rushing too
madly to the ocean. But the stream does not always
tamely circumscribe these bends: gathering strength
from resistance, it will form new and more direct
channels; and thus it is that large tracts of country once
on the river, become inland, or are entirely swept away
by the current; and so frequently does this happen, that
“cut-offs” are almost as familiar to the eye on the
Mississippi as its muddy waters. When the Mississippi,
in making its “cut-offs,” is ploughing its
way through the virgin soil, there float upon the top
of this destroying tide thousands of trees, that covered
the land, and lined its carving banks. These
gigantic wrecks of the primitive forests are tossed

about by the invisible power of the current, as if
they were straws; and they find no rest, until with
associated thousands they are thrown upon some
projecting point of land, where they lie rotting for
miles, their dark forms frequently shooting into the
air like writhing serpents, presenting one of the
most desolate pictures the mind can conceive.

These masses of timber are called “rafts.” Other
trees become attached to the bottom of the river,
and yet by some elasticity of the roots they are
loose enough to be affected by the strange and
powerful current, which will bear them down under
the surface; and the tree, by its own strength, will
come gracefully up again, to be again engulfed;
and thus they wave upward and downward with a
gracefulness of motion which would not disgrace a
beau of the old school. Boats frequently pass over
these “sawyers,” as they go down stream, pressing
them under by their weight; but let some unfortunate
child of the genius of Robert Fulton, as it passes
up stream, be saluted by the visage of one of these
polite gentry, as it rises ten or more feet in the air,
and nothing short of irreparable damage, or swift
destruction ensues, while the cause of all this disaster,
after the concussion, will rise above the ruin as if
nothing had happened, shake the dripping water
from its forked limbs, and sink again, as if rejoicing
in its strength. Other trees will fasten themselves
firmly in the bottom of the river; and their long
trunks, shorn of their limbs, present the most formidable
objects to navigation. A rock itself, sharpened
and set by art, could be no more dangerous

than these dread “snags.” Let the bows of the
strongest vessel come in contact with them, and the
concussion will drive through its timbers as if they
were paper; and the noble craft will sometimes
tremble for a moment like a thing of life, when suddenly
struck to its vitals, and then sink into its
grave.

Such are the “cut-offs,” “rafts,” “sawyers,”
and “snags” of the Mississippi; terms significant to
the minds of the western boatman and hunter, of
qualities which they apply to themselves and their
heroes, whenever they wish to express themselves
strongly, and we presume the beau ideal of a political
character with them, would be one who would
come at the truth by a “cut-off,” separate and pile
up falsehood for decay, like the trees of a “raft,”
and do all this with the politeness of a “sawyer,”
and with principles unyielding as a “snag.”

The vast extent of the Mississippi is almost beyond
belief. The stream which may bear you
gently along in midwinter so far south that the
sun is oppressive, finds its beginnings in a country
of eternal snows. Follow it in your imagination
thousands of miles, as you pass on from its head
waters to its mouth, and you find it flowing through
almost every climate under heaven: nay more, the
comparatively small stream on which you look, receives
within itself the waters of four rivers alone;
Arkansas, Red, Ohio, and Missouri; whose united
lengths, without including their tributaries, is over
eight thousand miles: yet this mighty flood is
swallowed up by the Mississippi, as if it possessed

within itself the very capacity of the ocean, and disdained
in its narrow limits to acknowledge the accession
of strength.

The colour of this tremendous flood of water is
always turbid. There seems no rest for it that will
enable it to become quiet or clear. In all seasons,
the same muddy water meets the eye; and this
strange peculiarity, associated with the character
and form of the banks, strikes the mind at once as
the dark sediment which has for centuries settled
upon the river's edge, and thus formed the “ridges”
through which it runs; or in other words, it has confined
itself: and in this we behold one of its most
original features. On the Mississippi we have no
land sloping down in gentle declivities, to the
water's edge; but a bank just high enough, where
it is washed by the river, to protect the back country
from inundation, in the ordinary rises of the stream;
for whenever, from an extensive flood, it rises above
the top of this feeble barrier, the water runs down
into the country. This singular fact shows how all
the land on the Mississippi, south of the thirty-fourth
degree of latitude, is liable to inundation, since
nearly all the inhabitants on the shores of the river
find its level, in ordinarily high water, running above
the land on which they reside. To prevent this
easy and apparently natural inundation, there seems
to be a power constantly exerted to hold the flood
in check, and bid it “go so far and no farther;”
and but for this interposition of divine power, here
so signally displayed, the fair fields of the south
would become sandbars upon the shores of the

Atlantic, and the country which might now support
the world, would only bear the angry ocean wave.
Suppose, for an instant, that a universal spring
should beam upon our favoured continent, and that
the thousands of streams which are tributary to the
Mississippi were to become at once unloosed: the
mighty flood in its rushing course would destroy
the heart of the north-western continent. But mark
the goodness and wisdom of Providence. Early in
the spring, the waters of the Ohio rise with its
tributaries, and the Mississippi bears them off, without
injuriously overflowing its banks. When summer
sets in, its own head-waters about the lakes,
and the swift Missouri, with its melting ice from
the Rocky Mountains, come down, and thus each,
in order, makes the Mississippi its outlet to the Gulf
of Mexico. But were all these streams permitted
to come together in their strength, what, again we
ask, would save the Eden gardens of the south?

In contemplations like these, carried out to their
fullest extent, we may arrive at the character of this
mighty river. It is in the thoughts it suggests, and
not in the breadth or length, visible at any given
point to the eye. Depending on the senses alone,
we should never think of being astonished, or even
feeling the least degree of admiration. You may
float upon its bosom, and be lost amid its world of
waters, and yet you will see nothing of its vastness;
for the river has no striking beauty: its waves run
scarce as high as a child can reach: upon its banks
we find no towering precipices, no cloud-capped
mountains. All, all is dull—I might say tame. But

let us float day after day upon its apparently sluggish
surface, and, by contemplation and comparison, once
begin to comprehend its magnitude, and the mind is
overwhelmed with fearful admiration. There seems
to rise up from its muddy waters a spirit, robed in
mystery, that points back for its beginning to the
deluge, and whispers audibly: “I roll on, and on,
and on, altering, but not altered, while time exists!”
Here, too, we behold a power terrible in its loneliness;
for on the Mississippi a sameness meets your
eye everywhere, without a single change of scene.
A river incomprehensible, illimitable, and mysterious,
flows ever onward, tossing to and fro under its
depths, in its own channel, as if fretting in its
ordered limits; swallowing its banks here, and disgorging
them elsewhere so suddenly, that the attentive
pilot, as he repeats his frequent route, feels that
he knows not where he is, and often hesitates fearfully
along in the mighty flood by the certain lead;
and again and again is he startled by the ominous
cry, “Less fathom deep!” wher but yesterday the
lead would have in vain gone down for soundings.
Such is the great Aorta of the continent of North
America; alone and unequalled in its majesty;
proclaiming in its course the wisdom and power of
God, who only can measure its depths, and “turn
them about as a very little thing.”