red heat
by threatening to become an empire by themselves if one course or the
other was not taken; but when the First Consul offered to sell all
Louisiana, our commissioners were quite robbed of breath. They had
approached to ask a hair from the elephant's tail, and were offered
the elephant.

For Orleans Island--island it certainly was until General Jackson closed
Bayou Manchac--is a narrow, irregular, flat tract of forest, swamp,
city, prairie and sea-marsh, lying east and west, with the Mississippi,
trending southeastward, for its southern boundary, and for its northern,
a parallel and contiguous chain of alternate lakes and bayous, opening
into the river through Bayou Manchac, and into the Gulf through the
passes of the Malheureuse Islands. On the narrowest part of it stands
New Orleans. Turning and looking back over the rear of the town, one may
easily see from her steeples Lake Pontchartrain glistening away to the
northern horizon, and in his fancy extend the picture to right and left
till Pontchartrain is linked in the west by Pass Manchac to Lake
Maurepas, and in the east by the Rigolets and Chef Menteur to
Lake Borgne.

An oddity of the Mississippi Delta is the habit the little streams have
of running away from the big ones. The river makes its own bed and its
own banks, and continuing season after season, through ages of
alternate overflow and subsidence, to elevate those banks, creates a
ridge which thus becomes a natural elevated aqueduct. Other slightly
elevated ridges mark the present or former courses of minor outlets, by
which the waters of the Mississippi have found the sea. Between these
ridges lie the cypress swamps, through whose profound shades the clear,
dark, deep bayous creep noiselessly away into the tall grasses of the
shaking prairies. The original New Orleans was built on the Mississippi
ridge, with one of these forest-and-water-covered basins stretching back
behind her to westward and northward, closed in by Metairie Ridge and
Lake Pontchartrain. Local engineers preserve the tradition that the
Bayou Sauvage once had its rise, so to speak, in Toulouse street. Though
depleted by the city's present drainage system and most likely poisoned
by it as well, its waters still move seaward in a course almost due
easterly, and empty into Chef Menteur, one of the watery threads
of a tangled skein of "passes" between the lakes and the open
Gulf. Three-quarters of a century ago this Bayou Sauvage (or