Chapter 39

Chapter 39
Manufactures and Miscreants

WHERE the river, in the Vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed,
it is now comparatively straight--made so by cut-off;
a former distance of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five. It
is a change which threw Vicksburg's neighbor, Delta, Louisiana,
out into the country and ended its career as a river town.
Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar,
thickly covered with young trees--a growth which will magnify
itself into a dense forest by-and-bye, and completely hide
the exiled town.

In due time we passed Grand Gulf and Rodney, of war fame, and reached Natchez,
the last of the beautiful hill-cities--for Baton Rouge, yet to come,
is not on a hill, but only on high ground. Famous Natchez-under-the-hill
has not changed notably in twenty years; in outward aspect--
judging by the descriptions of the ancient procession of foreign tourists--
it has not changed in sixty; for it is still small, straggling, and shabby.
It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and
early steamboating times--plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing,
and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days.
But Natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has always been attractive.
Even Mrs. Trollope (1827) had to confess its charms:

'At one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved
by bluffs, as they call the short intervals of high ground.
The town of Natchez is beautifully situated on one of those high spots.
The contrast that its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black
forest that stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the pawpaw,
palmetto and orange, the copious variety of sweet-scented flowers
that flourish there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert.
Natchez is the furthest point to the north at which oranges
ripen in the open air, or endure the winter without shelter.
With the exception of this sweet spot, I thought all the little towns
and villages we passed wretched-looking in the extreme.'

Natchez, like her near and far river neighbors, has railways now,
and is adding to them--pushing them hither and thither into all
rich outlying regions that are naturally tributary to her.
And like Vicksburg and New Orleans, she has her ice-factory:
she makes thirty tons of ice a day. In Vicksburg and Natchez,
in my time, ice was jewelry; none but the rich could wear it.
But anybody and everybody can have it now. I visited one of
the ice-factories in New Orleans, to see what the polar regions
might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics.
But there was nothing striking in the aspect of the place.
It was merely a spacious house, with some innocent steam machinery