the State of Louisiana to
clear away the whole raft, and open the navigation, which was effected,
not without great labor, in the space of four years.

The rafts on Red River are equally remarkable: in some parts of its
course, cedar-trees are heaped up by themselves, and in other places,
pines. On the rise of the waters in summer hundreds of these are seen,
some with their green leaves still upon them, just as they have fallen
from a neighboring bank, others leafless, broken and worn in their
passage from a far distant tributary: wherever they accumulate on the
edge of a sand-bar they arrest the current, and soon become covered with
sediment. On this mud the young willows and the poplars called
cotton-wood spring up, their boughs still farther retarding the stream,
and as the inundation rises, accelerating the deposition of new soil.
The bank continuing to enlarge, the channel at length becomes so narrow
that a single long tree may reach from side to side, and the remaining
space is then soon choked up by a quantity of other timber.

"Unfortunately for the navigation of the Mississippi," observes Captain
Hall, "some of the largest trunks, after being cast down from the
position on which they grew, get their roots entangled with the bottom
of the river, where they remain anchored, as it were, in the mud. The
force of the current naturally gives their tops a tendency downwards,
and, by its flowing past, soon strips them of their leaves and branches.
These fixtures, called snags, or planters, are extremely dangerous to
the steam-vessels proceeding up the stream, in which they lie like a
lance in rest, concealed beneath the water, with their sharp ends
pointed directly against the bows of the vessels coming up. For the most
part these formidable snags remain so still that they can be detected
only by a slight ripple above them, not perceptible to inexperienced
eyes. Sometimes, however, they vibrate up and down, alternately showing
their heads above the surface and bathing them beneath it."[360] So
imminent, until lately, was the danger caused by these obstructions,
that almost all the boats on the Mississippi were constructed on a
particular plan, to guard against fatal accidents; but in the last ten
years, by the aid of the power of steam and the machinery of a
snag-boat, as it is called, the greater number of these trunks of trees
have been drawn out of the mud.[361]

The prodigious quantity of wood annually drifted do