Chapter 27 - Page 2

I never beheld
a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi.
Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another Bolgia from
its horrors. One only object rears itself above the eddying waters;
this is the mast of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross
the bar, and it still stands, a dismal witness of the destruction
that has been, and a boding prophet of that which is to come.'

Emotions of Hon. Charles Augustus Murray (near St. Louis), seven years later--

'It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a
hundred miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that
of nature, that you begin to understand all his might and majesty.
You see him fertilizing a boundless valley, bearing along in his course
the trophies of his thousand victories over the shattered forest--
here carrying away large masses of soil with all their growth,
and there forming islands, destined at some future period to be
the residence of man; and while indulging in this prospect,
it is then time for reflection to suggest that the current
before you has flowed through two or three thousand miles, and has
yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before reaching
its ocean destination.'

Receive, now, the emotions of Captain Marryat, R.N. author of the sea tales,
writing in 1837, three years after Mr. Murray--

'Never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a
century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected
from the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi.
The stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have
been committed. It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight,
bestowing fertility in its course; not one that the eye loves
to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can you wander upon
its banks, or trust yourself without danger to its stream.
It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil;
and few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again,
in that day, that the Mississippi would neither buoy up a swimmer,
nor permit a drowned person's body to rise to the surface.]> or can
support themselves long upon its surface without assistance from
some friendly log. It contains the coarsest and most uneatable
of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and as you descend,
its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the panther
basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man.
Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered with
trees of little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole
forests in its course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion,
whirled away by the stream now loaded with the masses of soil