Chapter 17

Chapter 17
Cut-offs and Stephen

THESE dry details are of importance in one particular.
They give me 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, Illinois, 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 aboard 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