University of Virginia Library

THE MISSISSIPPI.

The North American continent—in its impenetrable
forests—its fertile prairies—its magnificent lakes—its
variety 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 endeavoring 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” 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 In
dian tribe in the southwest 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 named 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—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; and the dark rich earth “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 but frail banks
wherewith to confine the swift current of the Mississippi;
and, as might be imagined, these 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
headlong 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 upon 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,
which but lately covered the land, and lined its caving
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 of which 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 are loose enough
to be affected by the strange and powerful current, which
will bear them down under the surface; and the trees,
by their own strength, will come gracefully up again to
be again ingulfed; and thus they continuously 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 and rise again, rejoicing in its
strength.

Other trees become firmly fastened in the bed of the
river; and their long trunks, shorn of their limbs, present
the most formidable objects of 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 crush its timbers as if they were paper; and
the noble craft will tremble for a moment like a thing
of life, when suddenly stricken 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 to their heroes,
whenever they wish to express themselves strongly; and
we presume that 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 forests that line the banks of the Mississippi,
and supply, without any apparent decrease, the vast
masses of timber that in such varied combinations
every where meet the eye, are themselves worthy of the
river which they adorn.

Go into the primitive forests at noonday, and however
fiercely the sun may shine, you will find yourself
enveloped in gloom. Gigantic trees obstruct your pathway,
and as you cast your eyes upward, your head grows
dizzy with their height. Here, too, are to be seen dead
trunks, shorn of their limbs, and whitening in the blasts,
that are as mighty in their size as the pillars of Hercules.
Grape-vines larger than your body will, for some
distance, creep along the ground, and then suddenly
spring a hundred feet into the air, grasp some patriarch
of the forest in its folds, crush, mutilate, and destroy it;
and then, as if to make amends for the injury, throw over
its deadening work the brightest green, the richest foliage,
filled with fragrance, and the clustering grape.
On the top of these aspiring trees, the squirrel is beyond
the gunshot reach of the hunter.

Upon the ground are long piles of crumbling mould,
distinguished from the earth around them by their numerous
and variegated flowers. These immense piles,
higher in places than your head, are but the remains of

single trees, that a century ago startled the silence now
so profound, and with their headlong crash sent through
the green arch above sounds that for a moment silenced
the echoing thunder that loaded the hurricane that pros
trated them.

Here were to be seen the ruins of a new continent—
here were mouldering the antiquities of America—how unlike
those of the Old World. Omnipotence, not man, had
created these wonderful monuments of greatness, with no
other tears than the silent rain, no other slavery than
the beautiful laws that govern nature in ordering tho
seasons—and yet these monuments, created in innocency,
and at the expense of so much time, were wasting
into nothingness. God above in his power could erect
them. They were breathed upon in anger and turned to
dust.

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 length, 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 comprehensive limits, to acknowledge the
accession of strength.

The color 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
suggests to the mind that the banks of the river
itself are composed of this dark sediment which has in
the course of centuries confined the onward flood within
its present channel, and in this order of nature we find
one of the most original features of the river; for on
the Mississippi we have no land sloping 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 mere sand-bars upon the shores of the
Atlantic, and the country which might now support the
world by its luxurious vegetation, would only bear the
angry ocean wave.

Suppose, for an instant, that a universal spring
should beam upon our favored 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
northwestern 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 be confounded by astonishment, or excited by admiration.
You may float upon its bosom, and be lost
amid its world of waters, and yet see nothing of its vastness;
for the river has no striking beauty; its waves
run scarce as high as a child can reach; uopn its banks
we find no towering precipices, no cloud-capped mountains—all,
all is dull,—a dreary waste.

Let us float however, day after day, upon its apparently
sluggish surface, and by comparison once begin
to comprehend its magnitude, and the mind becomes
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
every where, with scarce 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,
guided only by the certain lead; and again and again is
he startled by the ominous cry, “Less fathom deep!”

where 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, it proclaims
in its course the wisdom and power of God, who
only can measure its depths, and “turn them about as
a very little thing.”