issippi, 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.

The upper river has a beauty which is like that of some lovely, stately,
placid, well-behaved blond wife. She is conventional and correct. You
always know where to find her. The lower river is a temperamental
mistress. At one moment she is all sweetness, smiles and playfulness; at
the next vivid and passionate. Even when she is at her loveliest there
is always the possibility of sudden fury: of her rising in a rage,
breaking the furniture, wrecking the house--yes, and perhaps winding her
wicked cold arms about you in a final destroying embrace.

Being the "Gibraltar of the river" (albeit a Gibraltar of clay and not
of rock), Vicksburg does not suffer when floods come. Turn your back
upon the river, as you stand on the platform of the Yazoo & Mississippi
railroad station, and you may gather at a glance an impression of the
town piling up the hillside to the eastward.

The first buildings, occupying the narrow shelf of land at the water's
edge, are small wa