s and build new ones overnight with the nonchalance of a child
playing with clay. It could shorten itself thirty miles at a single
lunge. It could move inland towns to its banks and leave river towns far
inland. It transferred the town of Delta, for instance, from three miles
below Vicksburg to two miles above it. Men have gone to sleep in one
State and have wakened unharmed in another, because the river decided
in the night to alter the boundary line. In this way the village of
Hard Times, the original site of which was in Louisiana, found itself
eventually in Mississippi. Were La Salle to descend the river today by
the route he traversed two and a half centuries ago, he would follow dry
ground most of the way, for the river now lies practically everywhere
either to the right or left of its old course.

If the Mississippi could perform such miracles upon its whole course
without a show of effort, what could it not do with the little winding
canal through its center called by pilots the "channel"? The flatboatmen
had laboriously acquired the art of piloting the commerce of the West
through this mazy, shifting channel, but as steamboats developed in
size and power the man at the wheel had to become almost a superman. He
needed to be. He must know the stage of water anywhere by a glance at
the river banks. He must guess correctly the amount of "fill" at the
head of dangerous chutes, detect bars "working down," distinguish
between bars and "sand reefs" or "wind reefs" or "bluff reefs" by night
as well as by day, avoid the" breaks" in the "graveyard" behind Goose
Island, navigate the Hat Island chutes, or find the "middle crossing" at
Hole-in-the-Wall. He must navigate his craft in fogs, in storms, in the
face of treacherous winds, on black nights, with thousands of dollars'
worth of cargo and hundreds of lives at stake.

As the golfer knows each knoll and tuft of grass on his home links, so
the pilot learned his river by heart. Said one of these pilots to an
apprentice:

"You see this has got to be learned.... A clear starlight night
throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore
perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber because you
would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you
would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You
would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within
fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag i