ST. LOUIS TO ALTON — 30 MILES
D. M. 1853 Altona made the run in 1 35 1876 Golden Eagle “ “ 1 37 1876 War Eagle “ “ 1 37
MISCELLANEOUS RUNS
In June, 1859, the St. Louis and Keokuk Packet, City of Louisiana, made the run from St. Louis to Keokuk (214 miles) in 16 hours and 20 minutes, the best time on record.
In 1868 the steamer Hawkeye State, of the Northern Packet Company, made the run from St. Louis to St. Paul (800 miles) in 2 days and 20 hours. Never was beaten.
In 1853 the steamer Polar Star made the run from St. Louis to St. Joseph, on the Missouri River, in 64 hours. In July, 1856, the steamer Jas. H. Lucas, Andy Wineland, Master, made the same run in 60 hours and 57 minutes. The distance between the ports is 600 miles, and when the difficulties of navigating the turbulent Missouri are taken into consideration, the performance of the Lucas deserves especial mention.
THE RUN OF THE ROBERT E. LEE
The time made by the R. E. Lee from New Orleans to St. Louis in 1870, in her famous race with the Natchez, is the best on record, and, inasmuch as the race created a national interest, we give below her time table from port to port.
Left New Orleans, Thursday, June 30th, 1870, at 4 o’clock and 55 minutes, p.m.; reached
D. H. M. Carrollton 27{half} Harry Hills 1 00{half} Red Church 1 39 Bonnet Carre 2 38 College Point 3 50{half} Donaldsonville 4 59 Plaquemine 7 05{half} Baton Rouge 8 25 Bayou Sara 10 26 Red River 12 56 Stamps 13 56 Bryaro 15 51{half} Hinderson’s 16 29 Natchez 17 11 Cole’s Creek 19 21 Waterproof 18 53 Rodney 20 45 St. Joseph 21 02 Grand Gulf 22 06 Hard Times 22 18 Half Mile below Warrenton 1 Vicksburg 1 38 Milliken’s Bend 1 2 37 Bailey’s 1 3 48 Lake Providence 1 5 47 Greenville 1 10 55 Napoleon 1 16 22 White River 1 16 56 Australia 1 19 Helena 1 23 25 Half Mile Below St. Francis 2 Memphis 2 6 9 Foot of Island 37 2 9 Foot of Island 26 2 13 30 Towhead, Island 14 2 17 23 New Madrid 2 19 50 Dry Bar No. 10 2 20 37 Foot of Island 8 2 21 25 Upper Towhead — Lucas Bend 3 Cairo 3 1 St. Louis 3 18 14
The Lee landed at St. Louis at 11.25 A.M., on July 4th, 1870 — 6 hours and 36 minutes ahead of the Natchez. The officers of the Natchez claimed 7 hours and 1 minute stoppage on account of fog and repairing machinery. The R. E. Lee was commanded by Captain John W. Cannon, and the Natchez was in charge of that veteran Southern boatman, Captain Thomas P. Leathers.
CHAPTER 14
Cutoffs 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 river from the southernmost of these three cutoffs to the northernmost, you go only seventy miles. To do the same thing a hundred and seventy-six years ago, one had to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles! — shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance. At some forgotten time in the past, cutoffs were made above Vidalia, Louisiana; at island 92; at island 84; and at Hale’s Point. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, seventy-seven miles.
Since my own day on the Mississippi, cutoffs have been made at Hurricane Island; at island 100; at Napoleon, Arkansas; at Walnut Bend; and at Council Bend. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, sixty-seven miles. In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend, which shortened the river ten miles or more.
Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and ‘let on’ to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor ‘development of species,’ either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague — vague. Please observe: —
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,’ just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I have been speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts to move. The water cleaves the banks away like a knife. By the time the ditch has become twelve or fifteen feet wide, the calamity is as good as accomplished, for no power on earth can stop it now. When the width has reached a hundred yards, the banks begin to peel off in slices half an acre wide.
