One might as well try to describe womankind as to attempt
to describe the Mississippi
River. It is a creature of moods at any one point, and no
two places in its course to the
endless sea are similar. From the upper river to the lower
end of the Des Moines rapids, it
changes with every turn of its channel, every season of
the year, every variation of stage, every
hour of the day, and almost with every cloud that passes
over the sun and moves away again.
The beautiful, the sublime, the picturesque, are all
there. One picture is a good composition in
oilsl another is a brilliant symphony in water color or
pastel; a third is a striking plate in black
and white.
There is as much variety in the country along its banks as
there is in the river itself.
Great States lie there, each noted for some special
things. In the States are cities and communities,
each with its own dominant tone in the roar of the great
machinery of living.
La Crosse has its atmosphere of success and energy;
Prairie du Chien is as picturesque as its
name; Dubuque is as solidly strong as the torpedo boat it
made to win honors in the Spanish
war; Davenport has its sturdy honesty that is always found
with the German character; Rock
Island in its prettiness presents a great contrast to its
fame as the arsenal town; Moline is alliterative
with its manufacturing; so is Muscatine with its great
mussel-shell industry; Burlington is
known the world over on account of its railroads; and
Keokuk boasts of its scenery and
jobbing houses, colleges and canal, and of having given to
the nation almost as many famous
men as Ohio.
But these cities are but the larger gems set in the long
band laid north and south on the
globe. Between is a strip of golden grain, emerald fields
and vineyards, ruby forests of autumn
leaves, and steel filigree, dotted closely with smaller
diamonds where the towns are. These
lesser places are not a whit the less important because
they happen to have less population. At
Nauvoo was reared a great church which built a temple
ornamented with pure gold, and occupies
pages in the history of the United States; and many other
towns have left their mark on the
past. Songs have been sung, poems have been written,
libraries have been filled, and pictures
have been painted about this giant and his home.
This is the Mississippi River, cutting a broad line
through the nation, and having set on
its bluffs all the material to make a nation without
extraneous assistance.
One time when the world was younger, a force plowed down
its side midway between the
Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian hills and left a
furrow, long, wide and deep. That furrow
is there today, and its sides are the Mississippi bluffs,
high and steep, extending from one
end of the river to the other, sometimes miles away and
sometimes rising precipitously at the
very edge of the water. At one place there is a promontory
jutting out on the inside of a curve,
where an Indian maiden leaped to her death from love
before the white man came to put there
a square stone as a mark for his theodolite and
mathematics. At another place is a rounded
Shoulder sticking up above the landscape, its bone of
limestone covered over with thin flesh of
soil and a cuticle of low, green trees. Further along is a
flat, level plain, extending a dozen
miles back from the river, through which wends the way of
a tributary stream lying like a silver
cord upon a green-covered table, sometimes as broad as a
king’s embroidery and sometimes as
thin as a fine wire. But whatever lies just outside, the
river is always closely embraced by banks
that never change; banks here black with loam, there red
with iron or yellow with clay, but
always soft, yielding soil, constant only in its embrace
of the river, and as treacherous as Mephisto
to the land below the bluffs. Today the bank is solid as
the rock, tomorrow as soft as a
baby’s cheek, and the next day it has plunged into the
heart of its river lover, and the two are
one, and whole fields and even towns die as a sacrifice to
the ardor with which the river woos.
It is all these things which make the scenery of the
Mississippi River, and which give as
a result a life to the picturesque views there that is to
be found nowhere else in the world. The
Rhine is the same as when Charlemagne was crowned, and
speaks in an epitaph; the Hudson
was the same when Rip Van Winkle awoke as it was when he
became drowsy on its hills; but
the Mississippi River pulsates with a beauty like that of
a young girl full of life and
action and changing color and attractiveness, and seems a
sensate thing that is a part of the
character of a vigorous nation.
But in the grand chord, the river itself is always the
tonic note; the bluffs and the promontories,
the plains and the banks, the poetry and the history, all
furnish the thirds and the dominants
and octaves, sometimes in a common chord, sometimes
inverted or diminished; but the
river itself always keeps its power to determine the key
of the song that comes from one’s soul.
In the winter it sleeps like the mighty giant it is, tired
from its work from the spring, summer
and autumn which has carried a great commerce, smoothed
wrinkles from the face of Nature
and deposited a fertilizing silt upon an empire of
lowlands. First it composes itself in the north,
and gradually but quickly it grows white with a paleness
that sweeps down the river like a fog
before the wind, until all is quiet, and Minnehaha and
Keokuk have joined hands with half a
thousand miles of ice between them.
The Mississippi goes to sleep in November and remains
still and white until March. All
winter it is a great plain of ice, wide here and narrow
there, but long beyond the mind’s conception.
It is one great floe attached to the banks, with the
currents running below crisscross, but
always gradually southward. In some places it is as level
as a great threshing floor, and in others
it is as rugged as an arctic landscape. Where the sun
shines down on a bright, blue plain of
smooth ice miles in extent, it is beautiful; where the ice
cakes are piled in confusion over a territory
large enough for a township, it is picturesque in the
extreme. The whole surface is rough
with occasional even spots, and more often piles of ice
like cairns made of crystal standing here
and there, and telling something of the strength of the
giant moving in his sleep. These jutting,
irregular masses are dull and leaden in color and help to
make up the wintry, melancholy tone
of the scene in the days when Nature seems dead and these
might mark her grave.
Spring comes up from the south, and the giant stretched
out over the map of a great
nation is awakened by her soft voices and warm kisses. He
stretches himself, having long lain
motionless, and a great crackling is heard coming up the
river like the advance of a body of firing
artillery.
It is the breaking up of the ice, and is one of the
sublime aspects of nature, eagerly watched
for by the people, and worth going far to see. The thinner
ice farther south moves out in floes
miles in extent, and the first great spectacle is seen at
Keokuk. Day by day the process continues,
reaching farther and farther north, until finally St. Paul
reports the river open, ready for
the summer. At the Des Moines rapids at Keokuk is
exhibited the greatest power in the terrific
throes of the ice. First the ice begins to moan and crack
below the Gate City, the sun shines
down brightly, and its rays are the shafting which starts
the great movement. The moans turn
to groans, and people watch for the grand sight which is
at hand. Suddenly the mass of ice,
sometimes two miles long, sometimes five miles in length,
and about half a mile wide, starts,
hesitates, moves again, and objects on its surface are
seen to have new relations with trees on
the banks. Another more perceptible movement occurs.
Extending irregularly across the river
is seen a mauve line which widens as one looks, when the
ice moves still farther down the stream.
The groans become sharp explosions, and seams appear all
over the immense ice floe, each a
Down below, where a rock juts out from the bottom of the
river, the ice is caught. It
seems like an irresistible object striking an immovable
obstruction, that old problem of the
physics class. But the ice with its weight of millions of
tons moves on downward toward the
warm waters of the gulf, now a foot and now the length of
a surveyor’s chain. Where the rock
juts up, it strikes, and crashes, and roars, so that the
sound can be heard a mile away. There
the bottom of the moving glacier is caught fast, and the
ice plain behind comes on and pushes
with the power of a world in space. The ice is piled high,
the immense cakes, as big as a field
of corn, being forced on top of that below, breaking into
smaller fragments, each as large as a
city lot, and grinding the one on the other, veritable
millstones of the gods. Sometimes the
whole mass stops for awhile, but there is the sun pushing
it on, and the river forcing it even
downward; and in a few minutes more there comes a boom
louder than any before, and the cakes
of ice move into new positions like a kaleidoscope, the
sunlight being refracted from the irregular
mass in the colors of the rainbow, with dull, lead-colored
places between. Little by little, the
immense mass breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, with
as much noise as a battle, and finally
the river is running smoothly, its surface covered with
floating cakes of ice, each as large as the
floor of one’s sitting room, with channels like brooks
between, and people tell one another that
the river is open up to the bridge.
But it is above the bridge, where the rapids rush down,
that the great battle between winter
and spring occurs. Extending for fifteen miles to the
north is the Des Moines rapids, the
bottom full of projecting rocks and the current so swift
that man’s commerce goes around instead
of trying to face it. The solid piers of the bridge bar
the way at the foot of the rapids.
This ice, fifteen miles long and half a mile wide, must
get out to start on its journey south by
main force, and escapes its confines with an exercise of
power that is sublime. Here and there
it piles high, the ice above being forced upon the ice
below wedged between rocks, and other ice
from above tops all that has come before. Frequently the
irregular icebergs, built of superimposed
cakes, become so high that their feet rest upon the rock
bottom of the river, and then each
addition to their bulk only fixes their foundation the
firmer. But much of the ice ruches in the
swift current down against the bridge—lucky it is if the
most of it be piloted between the piers;
and dangerous it is if much catches upon the masonry
supporting the railroad and wagonway
and pedestrian walk. Sometimes the ice jams at the bridge,
and then there are thousands of
acres more forced down upon it by the current of the
rapids, and the mountain of ice there
grows higher every minute. Dynamite makes little
impression upon it, apparently, but with
patience the men blast out great blocks of crystal, and
finally the jam is broken, and the ice flows on to
overtake what has gone out below.
Next Burlington sees the ice go out, and although there
are not the obstructions there to
make so spectacular a sight to be seen from the banks and
the bluffs as is witnessed below, there
is always that sense of irresistible power when the river
awakens and the great fields move after
lying so quiet for months. Then Davenport, in a few days,
sends flashing over the telegraph
wires that the river is open. A little later, sometimes
much later, La Crosse sends the signal,
“The ice has gone out!” and finally St. Paul reports the
river open there; and all down the hundreds
of miles of river, men know that a new season has come and
many things are changed.
The going out of the ice starts many other things in
motion. At the bridge which spans
the river, the men who have been resting all winter
prepare for months of hard work again.
The spikes that held fast the draws are pulled; the
machinery that opens a wide gap in the
bridge is oiled and tested; semaphores of red and white
and green are seen to work smoothly;
warehouses by the bank are put in shipshape; boats are
being painted and minor parts put in
place on board; the government canal, which was built at
the cost of many millions of dollars, that
boats might pass the Des Moines rapids, moves its gates
and unlocks its doors; and by the time
that the ice is coming only in small cakes, like those the
iceman leaves for the large consumer,
the whistle of boats is heard in farm-houses miles inland,
and navigation is open.
Then the river rises. It comes up four or five feet at
first, in a week or two, and that rise
means a million tons of water added to its bulk every two
or three miles of its length. The river
But the rise continues as the snows in the north melt, the
spring rains come farther south
and every tributary, large and small, pours out an
increased volume of water into the great river
of the continent. Higher and higher the water rises, and
men begin to talk about the danger
line. Sometimes the rise stops before that interesting
point is reached, and sometimes it continues
past the mathematical line that marks the boundary between
control and damage from a
flood. The water creeps up hour by hour. First the lower
sandbars are covered, and then the
more prominent disappear, while the river becomes wider
where the banks are gradually sloping
and the shore line moves farther and farther out.
Tributary rivers rise from the water forced
up their beds, like the tide rising along the coast, and
some of these overflow a few miles up, and their flood
water runs over the fields through depressions to enter
the Mississippi below, destroying
crops and flooding villages on the way. The shore line
extends farther out, occasionally
making a quick advance as some ridge protecting a wide
plain is passed, and the water creeps
higher and higher on the railroad embankment that skirts
the river all the way, until it is lapping
the ties and in places covering the rails. Levees are
watched, for they protect whole townships
of farm land. Low places are raised and weak ones
strengthened, but it is now too late to do
much to advantage, for the river is bent on destruction.
In some places the water goes up a
tributary stream and around the long levee, taking the
fields on the flank and coming in from the
rear to make a junction with the main stream but a few
feet away, across the levee which stands
above the flood utterly useless because the defenses of
the farmers have been taken in reverse.
Telegrams come from above telling of a continuous rise,
and calculations are made with considerable
accuracy as to how high the water will reach below. Horses
and cattle have been caught by the flood and huddle on
little islands which were higher places in the fields;
farm animals
have been driven to the highest points, and the owners
pole flat-bottomed skiffs loaded with hay
and corn over the great inland lake to feed their stock.
The villages and towns built upon the
banks of the river where they are high, or where the
bluffs come near the water, see the
For after the water goes down, the whole submerged country
look like the bottom of a
drained lake, slimy and soft, and so useless for farming
that year, that the leases contain a clause
exempting the renter from paying the landlord if the river
overflows. But like the Nile, the
Mississippi has deposited on the fields new richness, and
for years to come the crops will be even
greater than before, and the production of grain enormous.
One day the report comes from up
the river that the gauge reading is less than the day
before; the next day the same report comes
from Davenport that La Crosse sent the previous day, and
the fall at La Crosse continues. Then
the people all along the river know that the worst is
past, and that the flood is subsiding. It may
have been with them for two months, but usually it lasts
for only a couple of weeks before the
waters begin to recede, having drained through the lower
river into the ocean; finally the banks
appear again and the farms reach the air except here and
there a lake in a depression, perhaps
a mile from the river. A little later the river is back in
its old bed, flowing along as innocently
as if nothing unusual has happened.
The time of commerce and excursions and tourists’ trips
has com; the boats are whistling
for landings, the draws in the bridges are swinging many
times a day, the smaller boats engaged
in the trade between contiguous cities are followed within
a day or two by the places of the big
packet line, and the flood is soon bearing on its bosom
the traffic that reaches large proportions
and has its greatest value in holding freight rates down
to the minimum all the year round
---for one thing that regulates railroad rates more than
any other is the commerce of the Mississippi
River. At once the excursions begin, and every one of the
smaller streamers has its barge
of equal capacity as herself, and generally even larger,
for the barge has two decks besides the
hurricane deck. The barge is lashed along side the
streamer, the portable gates are taken out of
the gunwales at the same point, leaving a passageway from
boat to barge, and the whistle blows
startling blasts calling the people to come to admire the
scenery of the Mississippi, talk politics,
arrange business affairs and make love in the dolce far
ninety of the hours on a Mississippi River
Steamboat. There is always an objective point for these
all-day excursions,--the arsenal at Rock
Island, the sights of La Crosse, the penitentiary at Fort
Madison, the coliseum at Burlington, the
parks and national cemetery at Keokuk, or the Soldiers’
Home at Quincy,--for it is by these excursions
that one community reaches out beyond its own confines,
and Iowa extends over into
Wisconsin and Illinois. But nobody cares for the
penitentiary, the parks, the Soldiers’ Home or
the arsenal very much on that day; the people who live
along the Mississippi can find more in
the restful floating on the river than they can in the
points of attraction in the cities. They go
on an excursion and do not read the part of the
advertisements that tell of its destination.
Then there are the evening excursions, then the boat
whistles urgently when twilight begins,
and it is chiefly young people who come to the gang-plank
to embark. The electric lights
are burning on boat and barge, and a famous band is
playing forward on the upper deck. Girls, in
costumes which strike a mean between ballroom and picnic
waltz with beaux who wear Prince
Albert coats, while staid doctors, dignified ministers,
taciturn lawyers and retired business men
talk to matrons with silver in their hair and watch the
whirling throng that fills both decks of the
barge. Up on the hurricane deck are little groups and
single poets, watching the play of the moonlight on water
and land and the lights kept burning at the edge of the
eater by the government,
to mark the crossing of the channel. All around the low
rail, up here, are couples separated
from the rest, tete-a-tete, and in the lee of the
pilot-house Love lingers and learns the
lesson never old. The pilot always has company; there is a
rule, lost somewhere long ago, prohibiting
passengers entering the pilot-house and talking to the
czar of the boat; but there is not
a pilot on the river who cannot take his boat through a
channel fifty feet wide and talk to a
pretty girl at the same time; and rules are made for the
pilots, not the pilots for the rules. The
more she admires real manhood, the more a girl likes to
talk to a Mississippi pilot—and she does
talk to him up there where a light is not permissible and
the bright moonlight glides everything
with a glory of its own. There is poetry in a pilot-house.
The summer tourist comes. The may be traveling from the
east or west to learn the face
of his country, or he may be the overworked,
nerve-strained city man of business and professional
life. Every summer St. Louis sends thousands of messengers
to St. Paul in the steamers
that are examples of concentrated luxury and types of
progress at the end of the century.
With decks as large as a lawn, electric lights everywhere,
a cuisine unsurpassed, service like that
one gets in the south, nooks for retirement and saloons
for parties and dancing, these river steamers
are almost as luxurious as an ocean liner and more
comfortable, for they glide through the
water with a smoothness that forecasts aerial navigation.
The tourist comes for rest, and he gets more rest in the
week spent on the Mississippi than
he can obtain in a month anywhere else. Scenery equal to
that of the Rhine, pictures equal to those
in the mountains, sunsets like those in the Alps, golden
glows approaching those of Egypt,
all these he passes through as he sits on the deck or
lounges in the pilot-house. The boat goes
fast enough to give a constant change of scene, and slow
enough to make one feel that the holiday
is not being shortened at the rate of eighty miles an
hour. The boats do more; they cross
and recross the river as the channel winds in and out, so
that without changing his position the
tourist sees both sides of the river and misses not a
single one of the scenic points. For while
there is first the trough, sometimes miles wide, in the
middle of which is the river, in the river
itself is another depression called the navigable channel
in the government reports. The channel
is another trough, in the bottom of the river, where the
water is deepest, and the boats of
heaviest draft must keep in this narrow roadway. The
special function of the pilot is to know
where the channel is hidden beneath the monotonous level
of the water and to keep his boat
there. How he does it, nobody but a pilot knows. He talks
of lights and crossings and buoys
and riffles and bars, but after hearing it all explained
time and again, one has a stronger feeling
than before that the pilot has a prescience and knowledge
that is beyond mortal ken and savors
of witchcraft. The channel will run along the middle of
the river for a mile and then in midstream
suddenly veer sharply to the right bank; after a hundred
yards or so it will turn again in a new vagary.
The surface of the water is as level as a plaza, but at
exactly the proper point on its surface the
pilot turns the wheel and the boat changes its course. His
system of triangulation deals with trees
on the bank, a farm house with a red roof, or a fence
dividing two cornfields. His rangefinder
is reversed and tells him the angles for a given distance,
instead of the distance for given
Angles, and it is composed of brain cells in his cranium.
At night there are lights on the shore,
standing ten feet above the ground, square lanterns set on
posts by the government, but some
stretches of river are without these lights for miles at a
time. New objects ashore are taken for
mathematical points by the pilot at night, and he steers
by these when the tourist by his side
cannot see the jackstaff at the bow of the boat. Worse
than all, the light are changed every
few months, and the channel changes location every few
days. A current is started across in a
new place by some trifling accident, and in three days a
deeper channel is cut through there
and the old one is filling up. The postal clerk who would
find the railroads of the country picked
up and laid down in a new arrangement in the night, and
Chicago moved out into Idaho at the
same time that Kankakee and Denver changed places and
Cincinnati became an Alleghany
mountain summer resort, would be in exactly the same
position as the pilot of a Mississippi boat
finds himself in almost every week. The more one knows
about that he does, and the longer
he explains how he does it, the more one feels that there
is something uncanny about it all.
It is not so hard when the water is high, and the boats
can go almost anywhere they please
in the river. But when the summer droughts lower the river
until there is only one little track,
sometimes only fifty feet wide for a long distance, along
which the boat can steam without
grounding, then the pilot must be not only omniscient, but
omnipotent as well. The readings on
the gauges grow less and less day by day, and finally only
two or three feet above low water
mark is given as the stage; still the figures decrease,
and one day the report published in every
newspaper in every river town drops the figure indicating
feet, and uses only that showing tenths
of a foot. The low water mark of 1864 is the datum, and
nearer and nearer to that line on every
bridge and government masonry creeps the top of the water
in the river. That low water mark
of 1864 was so phenomenal then, that it was taken as the
zero, just as Fahrenheit took 32 below
the freezing point as the absolute zero of temperature.
But now forests have been destroyed,
and the summers are dryer, and the river gets down until
its waves ripple across the line which
is seen for an instant and then disappears. The
stage-of-the-river reports that day read zero,
and the next morning minus signs appear in the reports and
the river is below low water mark.
That is really not so startling as it appears to the
stranger on its banks, for it happens nearly
There is still a navigable channel, however, which mush be
followed now with the most
minute exactness, for outside its confines the boat will
run aground, and that means hours and
days of delay. Riffles now mark where sandbars have their
noses just under the surface of the
water, and the river shows its teeth in the shape of snags
which are trees and logs with one end
anchored in the bottom and the other end sticking up
toward the surface at an angle. The river
commission of the government, which spends millions a year
on the river, has its snag boats in
constant use in low water, removing all snags found in its
search or noticed by pilots on their
regular trips. The river used to be full of them, but now
not nearly so many are here; and the
same may be said of the rocks which used to be found
impeding navigation in spots by either
sticking up from the bottom or shelving off gradually in a
way that made a landing place for a
steamboat exactly where the steamboat did not want to
stop.
The seasons each in its time change the picture made by
the banks of the great river.
The foundation of the picture is put on by the winter, and
it is strongly drawn with a pencil of
dark crayon on a background of white and gray. Under all
is the snow, dazzling in the sunlight
and cold in the gray shadow. The banks are in sepia,
standing out hard and clear cut, and just
above them is the black and white silhouette of the trees,
reaching up into the sky like black
rise into the air, hard, boldly drawn and solid as masonry
through the clear atmosphere, and the
forest on their slopes and summits make a rough, sketchy
sky-line, picturesque but never beautiful.
Spring comes and finishes her work on the picture almost
in a day. The black and white
and brown monotony has laid over it a thin wash of green
as the leaves unfold so rapidly that
each hour thee color is deeper than when one looked
before. Here and there a touch of contrasting
red or pink is dabbed on by the artist of the renaissance,
where shrubs and small trees flower
with a mass of blossoms. The white steppes are changed to
the work-rooms of nature, carpeted
Then comes summer with her palette set with strong
pigments, and what was in the spring
a suggestion becomes a reality which stands out far beyond
the outlines seen before, in impressionistic
effect. The symphony is one of green and brown. The rains
have freshened the color
of the soil of the banks and the steep hills too
precipitous for vegetation, and tdhe leaves of the
forest are great confused masses of dark green, obscuring
all the details of the original drawing
so carefully blocked out in the beginning with crayon,
there is an oil painting. Over the eastern
side in the morning are glowing sunrises; and over the
western side in the evening the sky is
painted with the most delicious tints of rose and purple
and blue and mother of pearl, after the
sun goes down. At noon there is the shimmer of undulating
air over the green fields of the
smaller grain and the darker green of the broad-leaved
corn. In the morning there is the deep
shadow under the eastern bank; and in the afternoon the
sun has lighted these dark places, and
the shadows are deep under the banks and bluffs of the
western side. As twilight falls the colors
dim, the tints in the sky-lines again, an the picture
gradually and slowly fades away into the night with
its twinkling stars in the sky and its steady stars where
cities have strung electric lights over
their hills.
Before one has grown tired of the picture-the same
picture, but with constantly changing
chiaraoscura-of the summer, autumn comes and the whole
color tone is changed. With the
wide brush of the frost, she begins at the north and
sweeps over the picture the pigments from
her own palette, rich in yellow, and reds, and browns. One
day there was a mass of dark
green just before, there is now a mass of glorious red and
gold. The brown banks and bare
bluffs no longer are in contrast with the forest, but the
whole picture for miles and miles that
one can see is a grand harmony of color on a scale that
reminds one of the Homeric hands of the
Then the picture begins to fade and scale. Everyday it
grows dimmer and more spotted.
That patch of red becomes a dull, dirty umber; that mass
of yellow becomes a drab; that stretch
of brown fades through sepia into mere nonentity; after
awhile the canvas is cleared again for
the bold, hard, cold strokes of the crayon of winter. And
so the picture is made and wiped out;
so it has been made over and over again since centuries
before Blackhawk fought and Tonty
made his crusade for the cross and for France. In those
earlier days, the Great River, the
Father of Waters, was a natural and insurmountable barrier
between the Indian nations as
effective as the wall built to separate the Chinese and
the Tartars. From the east the tribes
came to its shores, as men now go to the Pacific coast;
and from the west the nations came to its
bluffs and banks as people now visit the watering places
along the Atlantic. Some crossed over,
of course, and the smaller the river becomes towards the
north, the more transmigration there
was in earlier days. But always, the Mississippi has been
the Rubicon to the peoples of either
side, and however traveled one was and is, when one
crossed or crosses the Mississippi, one has
taken a distinct step forward. In historic times, the
Indian tribe which was sent west of the Mississippi
by the encroaching whites from the east, felt that it was
expatriated; when the Mormons
crossed the Mississippi at Montrose and moved across the
Iowa prairies, it was to them like the
passing of the Red Sea by Moses and the Israelites; today
in practical politics and governmental
affairs men speak of available candidates east of the
Mississippi and west of the Mississippi;
towns and communities separated by its half mile of water
down the river are as far removed
from each other in human interest as are Maine and
Georgia; the river does really cut a chasm
through the country as if the world had been divided by
the Creator and one part shoved over a
little way from the other.
The Mississippi is not so rich in Indian legends as the
St. Lawrence, because the romantic
French did not stay long by its shores. La Crosse, Dubuque
and other cities have French names,
but these are only the reminders accidentally carved in
the rocks by transient visitors of by
Frenchmen marooned by the inland, flowing sea. The Indians
of the Mississippi River received
the cavalry charge of civilization advancing from the
east, drunk with the glory of seaboard conquest,
and fresh from the victories of the middle country of the
Ohio, the Miami an the Illinois.
There were the shouts of the advance skirmishers, the
thunder of the advancing host, the roar of
the wave that swept everything before it an forced the
aborigines into the river, across the river,
through the river, to the west of the river, and a little
later on into the sunset of their race. But
the Mississippi checked even the wild charge of
civilization. Illinois was a State in 1818, and
Iowa with almost exactly identical characteristics did not
become a State until 1846; the thirty
hundred feet of water there stands for thirty years of
time in history. Up where its banks approach
and the river becomes a comparatively small stream, and,
moreover, where it parts the
States for only a short distance, the retarding of the
eastern movement is still seen, and Minnesota
was an obstruction as well as a powerful and beautiful
scenic part of the country.
To the Indian, its power was something that stood in this
way and was ungovernable. To
the white man its power has immense possibilities for
manufacture and commerce. On the upper
river the picturesque falls have been mad to turn the
wheels of the mills from which comes
man’s bread; farther down, but still far enough up that it
has hot yet attained the strength of
its manhood, the current turns turbines; but the great
power, which is to revolutionize the
economics of the west and move the center of manufacturing
from its present place, is now being
chained to the machinery of man. At Davenport there is a
water power that is capable of moving
millions of machines, which has gone on untrammeled
hitherto, because man had not yet learned
to build the dam that would check for an instant the
mighty Mississippi. Above Keokuk are the
Des Moines rapids, past which the river rushes for a dozen
miles, goaded on by the rocks pricking
its channel, with a force that is enough to turn all the
mills in New England, and hitherto
has been watched with awe because to stop its was like
stopping a planet in its revolution. But
the engineering skill that has led the power of Niagara
out into the State of New York is being
directed to theses great sources of power, and soon the
Mississippi River will be whirling the
shafting in factories humming twenty miles from its bank.
The beauty of the river can never be
Changed, for it is too large for any impression man may
make; but the use of the river is being
constantly extended and widened in scope. The
possibilities of the Mississippi, artistically,
politically, commercially and anthropologically, seem
boundless and inexhaustible. Truly it is
the greatest of all rivers! It held back civilization, and
then ground the flour for the bread of
the most highly civilized people; it retarded the spread
of knowledge, and then sends an electric
current to turn mills; it fought back the transcontinental
railroads, and now regulates their traffic
charges; it sucked down many men who ventured to the
outskirts of nature, and gives the artist
his finest themes from nature’s heart; looking down upon
it are the statues on the tombs of Indian
chieftains and modern generals; but through all the
mutations of time it is the same Mississippi
that Tonty saw with his romantic eye and Brigham Yong
crossed to found an ecclesiastical
empire.
The literature of the Mississippi is yet to come. The
river has been singing its songs all
these years, waiting for the poet to come to translate
them that all might hear. IT has been telling
its story for much of a century, waiting for the writer to
come to repeat it to the east and the
west and the reading world. It is a story of tragedy and a
tale of humane life. It is a story as
varied as the moods of the lover and as strong as the
passions of man. It is a drama with its
first act full of self-sacrificing French missionaries,
after a prologue of savage love and war; its
second act of conflict between the civilization of the
Anglo-Saxon and the other civilization of
the Indian; its third act one of pathos and machinery; its
fourth act of development along the
new lines; and its fifth act of the peace, beauty and
quietude of the aged century, with flitting
memories of other days and romances with which every mile
is dotted and of which every promontory
speaks. Only one or two writers have moved their pens in
sympathy with the moods of
the Mississippi, and some day there will come the man or
the woman who will grasp the tremendous
possibilities, the inherent human interest, in the Farther
of Waters, and make a new literature
in the world.
And its music? There is a little of that. The river moves
along with the power and the
Silence of a great boa, sometimes crushing the life out of
the farms near by and sometimes lying
Quiet as if gorged with the plenitude of the damage it has
done; but it is always still, and in the
night it can no more be heard than the passing of a planet
through space. It reaches the heart
of the musician, as it does the artist of any kind, and
there are fugues to be written on themes
suggested by the river; but these will be idealities, for
the Mississippi presents no realities to the
composer like those it is holding out all the time to the
painter and the writer.
As it was in the beginning, is now, it ever shall be-for
the Mississippi River is one of the
Controlling factors in nature, and not one of the
passivities which change as the years come and
go. It has the inherent power to enforce its own will, and
landscape, cities, commerce and civil
it has been for centuries, it will be for centuries to
come. The same procession of the painters
of the seasons, the same alterations of flood and drought,
the same changes of tint as the sun
goes down, the same deflection of currents and commerce,
the same tremendous energy when
the ice breaks up-all these will continue to be, because
the river will always be there and the
river is the dominant dynamic force of it all; withal, a
river that never presents the same face to
the looker-on.
There may be changes of its banks and the cities past
which it flows, as man changes his
civilization; rural glens may give way to factories, and
wastes may be redeemed for agriculture;
bluffs may be cut down and dykes may be erected; but the
mighty Mississippi will keep on its
slow and silent way to the sea, regardless of puny man,
and always the great dynamic, artistic,
dramatic, idealistic and realistic force that it now is.
