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Show Improving fhe Mississippi. The Mississippi is a vagrant river. It has all the characteristics of the southwestern Missouri man; it is impatient of control; it does all kinds of lawless things. Conscious of its own power, it moves along in its own way as regardless of the statutes of the country as a Mormon bishop. It seems to reason to itself that for a great many millions of years it kept on its unchecked way to the sea; that it overflowed when it felt like it, and did all manner of lawless things, washing out a bank this year and making a new peninsula next year. It has had its effect on men. Our belief is that Mark Twain picked up a great many of his vagrant ways through watching the Mississippi Mis-sissippi when he was a pilot on its broad breast. But some forty years ago it grew to be very difficult dif-ficult to get even a fifteen hundred ton ship up to New Orleans. The river took on more mouths below New Orleans than a thorough politician has, but Captain Eads told the government that he could fix it so that there would be a straight channel for a ship of any size up to the city. The government engineers did not believe much in him, but he finally got an appropriation to begin his work. They gave him the south pass to work upon. Ho put in his jetties; he reduced tho width of the river materially, and it began to scour out for itself a deeper channel to the sea. This he supplemented with steam dredges, and now for about thirty years there has been an open channel thirty feet deep straight out from the river to the sea, but there is too much water in the river for that one channel, and so the government, gov-ernment, imitating Eads' work, has opened up another channel, and now there are two channels through which any ship can pass out of the gulf up to New Orleans. The work gives hint of the only way the Mississippi Mis-sissippi can ever be in a measure controlled; that is, to confine its waters within limits which will compel the current itself to scour out for itself a channel. It is a great undertaking, one of the problems of the age, a bigger work, per- haps, than the building of the Panama canal; but it must be done. It is possible that it will need a supplementary river to cut off the Missouri In the Dakotas and drive it down to the gulf in a new channel. Tho next generation, we take It, avIII be considering that possibility, but we sus- .pect that two hundred years hence the freshet ! will have lost its fear to tho men J of the Mississippi valley. There will he artificial lakes to receive it and deep channels chan-nels to carry it away, and the water will servo not only as a bearer of commerce, but vast amounts of it will fertilize the lands in western Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas until Its shores will be a garden as rich and as beautiful -as was the ancient Sldar, which was the valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and which wns sufficient in its day to support Nineveh and Bnby-ion Bnby-ion with their five millions of people. ! |