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Show I THE MISSISSIPPI RIVES. Qomi Freaks of the Current Which I Easily Deflected. "I have been much impressed with the importance of small thing3 in late years," said an old steamboat man to a New Orleans Times-Democrat reporter, re-porter, "and the Mississippi river has furnished me with rather good examples. exam-ples. I can understand now why Caesar Cae-sar looked out upon the Nile in suck curious amazement and offered all that he stood for to the Egyptian priest if he would show him the source of that wonderful river. But the antics of the Nile look like insignificant nothings noth-ings to me when compared with the strange conduct of the stream that oozes out of the earth at Itasca and hurries on its murky and devious way toward the Gulf of Mexico. Towns along the Mississippi that once stood right on the brink of the river have Deen isolated even in my uaj, there are, too, all along the course of the stream litt e empires in view where the river has encroached upon small centers of population, finally eating the earth away and forcing the inhabitants in-habitants to seek other quarters. There are hundreds of thcs3 places that are almost forgotten now, even by the men who are constantly on the river. "What brings about these violent vio-lent changes along the banks of the river? Not floods. It is jvnt the ordinary ordi-nary doings of the stream. In the first place the current of the Mississippi is wonderfully swift, and the sediment deposited at any point where resistance resist-ance to the flow is offered is very great. Tie a string to the neck of a bottle and sink it with the mouth of the bottle up and open. If held in one place where the flow is normal, in an extremely short period of time the bottle will fill with sediment. Stretch a net across the river, a net so finely woven that nothing but the pure water wa-ter of the river can pass through, and on account of the rapidity of the flow and the greatness of the deposit or. sediment, almost in a twinkling the river would be dammed at that point Experts have admitted this. This brings me to the point of my narrative. narra-tive. The flow of current is frequently Interfered with by sunken boats, perhaps per-haps by a jackstaff sticking up above the surface. The current is diverted by degrees, generally touching the far side of the stream, a mile from the point where it again meets resistance and immediately begins the building of a sandbar. I have seen a thousand examples of this sort during my career ca-reer on the river, and I have known of instances where the root of ? tree or the mere twig of a willow have brought about similar conditions. These things have tended to make a riddle out of the river, yet the stream, after awhile, will be handled so as to undo all that it has accomplished." |