d 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 cut-offs 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, cut-offs 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, cut-offs 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