Thus the river life, out of which
Vicksburg was born, and without which the place would lose its
character, was retained, and the wicked old Mississippi, which has
played rough pranks on men and cities since men and cities first
appeared upon its banks, was for once circumvented. This is but one item
from the record of grotesque tricks wrought by changes in the river's
course: a record of farms located at night on one side of the stream,
and in the morning on the other; of large tracts of land transferred
from State to State by a sudden switch of this treacherous fluid line of
boundary; of river boats crashing by night into dry land where yesterday
a deep stream flowed; of towns built up on river trade, utterly
dependent upon the river, yet finding themselves suddenly deserted by
it, like wives whose husbands disappear, leaving them withering,
helpless, and in want.
Where the upper Mississippi, above St. Louis, flows between tall bluffs
it attains a grandeur which one expects in mighty streams, but that is
not the part of the river which gets itself talked about in the
newspapers and in Congress, nor is it the part of the river one
involuntarily thinks of when the name Mississippi is mentioned. The
drama, the wonder, the mystery of the Mississippi are in the lower
river: the river of countless wooded islands, now standing high and dry,
now buried to the tree tops in swirling torrents of muddy water; the
river of black gnarled snags carried downstream to the Gulf with the
speed of motor boats; the river whose craft sail on a level with the
roofs of houses; the river of broken levees, of savage inundations.
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