Life on the Mississippi
Chapter 17: Cut-offs
[I now have] an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi's
oddest peculiarities--that of shortening its length from time to time.
If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will
pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River,
that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Ill.,
southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief
straight bit here and there at wide intervals. The two-hundred-mile stretch
from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so crooked, that being
a rocky country which the river cannot cut much.
The water cuts the alluvial banks of the "lower" river into deep
horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to
get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck,
half or three-quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple
of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow at a speed
of ten miles an hour to .take you on board again When the river is rising
fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country, and therefore
of inferior value, has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across
the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it, and in
a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened: to wit, the whole Mississippi
has taken possession of that little ditch, and placed the countryman's
plantation on its bank (quadrupling its value), and that other party's
formerly valuable plantation finds itself away out yonder on a big island;
the old watercourse around it will soon shoal up, boats cannot approach within
ten miles of it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former worth.
Watches are kept on those narrow necks at needful times, and if a man happens
to be caught cutting a ditch across them, the chances are all against his ever
having another opportunity to cut a ditch.
Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business. Once there was
a neck opposite Port Hudson, Louisiana, which was only half a mile across in
its narrowest place. You could walk across there in fifteen minutes; but if
you made the journey around the cape on a raft, you traveled thirty-five
miles to accomplish the same thing. In 1722 the river darted through that
neck, deserted its old bed, and thus shortened itself thirty-five miles.
In the same way it shortened itself twenty-five miles at Black Hawk Point
in 1699. Below Red River Landing, Raccourci cut-off was made forty or fifty
years ago (I think). This shortened the river twenty-eight miles. In our day,
if you travel by river from the southernmost of these three cut-offs to the
northernmost, you go only seventy miles. To do the same thing a hundred and
seventy-six years ago, one had to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles--a
shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance. At some forgotten
time in the past, cut-offs were made above Vidalia, Louisiana, at Island 92,
at Island 84, and at Hale's Point. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, seventy-seven miles.
Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at Hurricane
Island, at Island 100, at Napoleon, Arkansas, at Walnut Bend, and at Council
Bend, These shortened the river, in the aggregate, sixty-seven miles. In my
own time a cut-off was made at American Bend, which shortened the river ten
miles or more.
Therefore the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred
and fifteen miles long, one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven
hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one thousand and forty
after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven miles since.
Consequently, its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at
present. Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people,
and "let on" to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred
in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what
has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such
a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor "development of species,"
either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague-vague. Please observe:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi
has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of
a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who
is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Siluian Period, just
a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of
one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of
Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven
hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile
and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets
together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual
board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such
wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
First published in 1882 by Samuel Clemens.
Copyright in the public domain.