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Show MAN AND THE MISSISSIPPI Great rivers, usually the indispen-1 indispen-1 sible servants of man, become terrify- ing monsters at times. Floods are j among the natural catastrophes that have wrought the greatest destruc-among destruc-among the lives and works of the human race. The Mississippi, lik.2 other great rivers, is subject to such floods; one of the most remarkable of the long succession of them has occured this year. It is the nature of the Mississippi which, through the lower part of its course flows through low-lying land, to overflow its banks in the spring and deposit the rich alluvial silt that its current carries on the surface of the ground. That is the orgino of the fertile cotton land that borders the river in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. But the yearly floods of the Mississippi in the past left great areas swampy, pestilential, unfit for human life; and ever since the settle-. ments reached the banks of the great river, men have dreamed of confin ing its waters uetween aruiiciai banks or levees and of reclaiming millions of acres of this water-logged land for their own use. j How much money and how much ' labor they have spent in this long battle with the river we do not know. Fifteen years ago one authority said ! that the national government had spent over two hundred millions of dollars on the Mississippi and its , chief tributaries; and another one; estimated that the government had : spent since the Civil war less than , half of what the states or local com-1 munities had spent Levee building was undertaken in an especially sys-' tematic way under the direction of able engineers after the great flood of 1882; and for many years the levee builders seeme to be keeping ; ahead of the river. But within the ; past fifteen years destructive floods have occured witn increasing ire- quency. The trouble s that levees I cause the river to deposit its silt in ; its own bed nstead of on the adjacent adjac-ent land, as it used to do. So the ; bed keeps rising, the levees must ! keep rising too, and at last the river flows along, elevated many feet higher than the land on either side, and confined only by artificial man-made man-made banks. These banks usually serve their purpose well, but under exceptional strains some of them do crumble and. j break, and then we have the kind of disaster that has lately shocked the country. There is reason to fear that ; the levee system may eventually j reach the limit of its effectiveness, if it has not already done so; that it , may end by raising the bed of the , Mississippi so far above its natural level that no banks, however solidly contsructed, can restrain it in time r.f flood. That would be a blow to the prosperity of the river country, for it would mean the return of great areas of highly cultivated land to unproductive un-productive swamp and jungle. Not every engineer believes that this is what is going to happen to the lower Mssissippi valley. Some of them are sure of the levees will cor,-tinueto cor,-tinueto combine the river for an indefinite in-definite if they are built with in-' in-' creasingly solidity and kept in per-! per-! feet repair. But it is bound to be. i a costly fight, and there will be occasions oc-casions at least when the river will prove too strong for all its carefully constructed bonds. One interesting suggestion, of which we shall hear more in the future, is for the use of artificial laMes or reservoirs along the course of the Mississippi and some of its great tributaries. Into these reservoirs it would be the plan to turn the flood waters in the spring &nd to impound them there until the riancrer is past. The strain on the levees farther south would thus be diminished. In order to save the city of New Orleans from inundation levees south of the city were dynamited, dyna-mited, and a thousand square miles of the low-lying delta lands were flooded. The Mississippi Flood As the days passed, the great floo 1 on the lower Mississippi and it , (Continued on page -1 J1AN AND THE MISSISSIPPI Continued from page 1) eouthem tributaries grew more in-etead in-etead of less serious. An area as great aa that of the state of Massa- chuaetts was under water by the last I f April, and on much of it the wa-tar wa-tar wan from ten to twenty feet deep. Thousands of men labored o keep the, levees hih enough to confine the flood waters within the channel, but frequent breaks occured in spite tif all that could be done to prevent them. The flood is said to be the greatest sirfce the famous one of 188 and prhaps even more disastrous. The situation alcing the Red and Arkansas Ar-kansas rivers was quite as alarming. 'She Red Cross organized a relief ser-Tice ser-Tice that did its best to succor the 250,000 refugees who had been driven from their homes, and President Coolidge appealed to the country for SI 0,000,000 to carry on the work of; erey. I |