Mississippi

“ The uprising of the people of Mississippi against Negro rule was a most magnificent example of that spirit of Southern patriotism that animated the hearts; first of such men as Walthall, Lamar, George, Featherston, Stone, Lowry and Harris, and then spread to the hearts of every true man in Mississippi. The young men of the State, the rising generation, have the greatest reverence and love for the brave men who fought such a gallant fight for the preservation of white supremacy in Mississippi. ”

“ One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. ”

“ There is the humming of bees, singing of birds and a fragrance indescribable. The Mississippi stretches away like a great silver serpent between golden meadows and headlands on either side, until it becomes a mere glint of light in the distance. ”

“ Not for blessing nor cursing, not for popularity nor for selfish ends, not for anything outside, but for the happiness that comes from within.
The Mississippi blesses the valley every day as he goes on south and overcomes. But the valley does not bless the river in return. The valley throws its junk back upon the river. The valley pours its foul, muddy, poisonous streams back upon the Mississippi to defile him. The Mississippi makes St. Paul and Minneapolis about all the prosperity they have, gives them power to turn their mills. ”

“ In this view, how noble an object is the Mississippi!
In extent, fertility, variety of scenery, and diversity of climate, its valley surpasses any other in the world. It is the great aorta of the continent, and receives a score of tributary rivers, the least of which is larger than the vaunted streams of mighty empires. It might furnish natural boundaries to all Europe, and yet leave, for every country, a river greater than the Seine. ”

“ The country was vast and fertile; the Mississippi, flowing by their homes, was sublimely grand, and seemed to inspire ideas and aspirations commensurate with its own majesty in the people upon its borders.
In no country are to be found women of more refined character, more beauty, or more elegance of manners, than among the planters' wives and daughters of the Mississippi coast. Reared in the country, and accustomed to exercise in the open air, in walking through the shady avenues of the extensive and beautifully ornamented grounds about the home or plantation-house ”

“ As if not content with the mischief, the Mississippi sometimes takes a fancy to make a cut off; instead of following the curve or bend which it has made into the country for perhaps twenty miles, it dashes with fury against the earth in front until it cuts its way through and reaches its former channel, tearing away with it houses, lands, and whatever had stood in its path. ”

“ To-day the timber of the hickories from its bottoms are the spokes of automobiles, and the handles of golf-clubs are sought among the dark corners of its brakes. Millions eat its fish, and the sheen of pearls from its tributaries delights countless women. There is scarcely a garment in the country that might not be improved by a button from a Mississippi clam-shell.
Whatever men may do to the Mississippi, the Father of Waters does not neglect their interests, nor does he fail to rebuke their impertinences and to stimulate their imagination. ”

“ A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating infliction to a fire.
We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday: two full hours' liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight. In the back streets but few white people were visible, but there were plenty of colored folk--mainly women and girls; and almost without exception upholstered in bright new clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut--a glaring and hilarious contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles. ”

“ May Mississippi see not another Scott but a literary man who under new conditions and with new material may create for Mississippi a new literature which may have like place in the world's literature with the immortal contributions of the great Scotchman. ”

“ A circular line drawn through the head waters of the Mississippi and its chief tributaries would not be less than six thousand miles in length. With all of its confluents the Mississippi forms a great moving sinuous highway fully twenty-five thousand miles long, and ploughed by many thousand steamboats. They stretch out as if to embrace the beauty, to grasp the wealth, and gather, as into a lap, the products of the vast region between the two mountain chains of the continent ”

“ The Mississippi, itself, has lost none of its taunts to daring spirits, as a river, and it has added countless varieties of venturesome amusement; even savage human nature does not change, but the resources of the mind give the Mississippi today what La Salle himself could never have found. ”

“ Here is the favored land—alas! it is a fever-land, too—of sugar-cane and Indian corn. To those who have very magnificent conceptions of the Mississippi, founded on mere arithmetical computations of leagues, or vague geographical data, it may be astonishing, but it is nevertheless true, the Mississippi is artificial for many hundreds of miles. Nature has, of course, poured out the waters, but man has made the banks. By a vast system of raised embankments, called levees, the river is constrained to abstain from overflowing the swamps, now drained, and green with wealth-producing crops. ”

“ A foreign power holding the mouth of the Mississippi! In the early stages of our history it was regarded as a self-evident truth that such power must be or become our natural enemy. But if at that time, when the great Mississippi Valley was a silently brooding wilderness, it was thought that we must have the mouth of the river, because the foreign hand that held it might choke our future development, what shall we say now when the Mississippi Valley has become the garden of America, the seat of empire? ”

“ The Mississippi, which below its junction with the Missouri, is a troubled stream, meandering through low grounds, and margined by muddy banks, is here a clear and rapid river, flowing over beds of rock and gravel, and bordered by the most lovely shores. Nothing of the kind can be more attractive, than the scenery at the upper rapids. ”

“ Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now--spending loads of money on her. When there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows, there wasn't a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags were thicker than bristles on a hog's back; and now when there's three dozen steamboats and nary barge or raft, Government has snatched out all the snags, and lit up the shores like Broadway, and a boat's as safe on the river as she'd be in heaven. ”

“ One hundred million people are annually regaled and exasperated by the irresistible powers that nature wields in this great central basin.
Men have dammed the little rivulets of a thousand gullies and valleys in the Appalachians to turn the wheels of grist-mills, so that corn can be ground for pone and sprouts ground for moonshine. They have stretched their masonry across the Great Falls of the Missouri to smelt copper and silver. Myriads of horse-power are beginning to serve the nation by hauling railroad-trains over the long divides. They have bridled the upper Mississippi at Keokuk. ”

“ The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi. In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. ”

“ The vast and almost wholly unknown territory west of the Mississippi, claimed by France, in virtue of her discoveries and settlements on the great river, until 1763, when it was ceded to Spain, was held by that country in 1800. This cession gave Spain complete control of the lower course of the Mississippi, since her province of Florida extended to the east bank of the stream. And she held it in a manner that proved deeply annoying to the American settlers in the west, to whom free navigation of the Mississippi was of great and growing importance. ”

“ What have you studied geography for if you don't know what river that is?"
"Oh, I know!" shouted Ruth, "I know, Father! It's the Mississippi! This is Illinois, that State over there is Iowa, and that is the Mississippi that flows between!"
"Ah, good girl!" applauded her father. "Of course! The Mississippi—the great Father of Waters. And the boundary line "—he continued thoughtfully, speaking more to himself than the children,—"between the old East and the new West."
"The Mississippi at last—hurray!" shouted Joe.
"Huh, I knew it all the time," grunted Sam. "Ruth needn't think she's so smart. ”

“ White people who go down the Mississippi in boats do see some fine scenery, but the real grandeur of Mississippi River scenery is revealed only from good vantage-points on the crest of the bluffs. For those sufficiently strong and Venturesome to climb to those points, nature spreads out her grandest panoramas found in the inhabited part of the globe. ”

“ Paul is not on the west side of the Mississippi, but on the east. Though it is rather too elevated and rough in its natural state to have been coveted for a farm, it is yet just such a spot as a pioneer would like to plant himself upon, that he might stand in his door and have a broad and beautiful view towards the south and west. And when the speculator came he saw that it was at the head of navigation of what be thought was the Upper Mississippi, but which in reality is only the Middle Mississippi. ”

“ But even after we have insisted on this wider definition of literature, Mississippi has few grounds for boasting. The list of Mississippi books is not long; the average quality is not high. Of pure literature, of the real literature of power, we have contributed scarcely fifty pages to the world's store. We may deceive ourselves and gratify our state pride by wild claims, but after the joy of self-glorification is over we shall be forced to the conclusion that our place in literary history is an humble one. ”

“ The Mississippi here traverses the immense plains which extend to the Missouri, and which present to the eye a spectacle at once interesting and fatiguing. Scarcely the slightest variation in the surface occurs, and they are entirely destitute of timber. In this debatable land, the game is very abundant; buffaloes, elks, and deer range unharmed, and unconscious of harm. The mutual hostilities of the Chippewas and Sioux render it dangerous for either, unless in strong parties, to visit this portion of the country. ”

“ The lower Mississippi itself from Cairo to the mouth is almost exactly as long as the Ohio. Then there are the upper Mississippi,—stretching clear up into Minnesota,—the Illinois, the Wisconsin, etc., the Missouri and its vast tributaries flowing from the Rocky Mountains, the Arkansas, the Red River, the Ouachita, the White, the St. Francis, the Yazoo, the Tallahatchie, the Sunflower, the Yalobusha—and a score of others, to say nothing of the vast bayous that connect with the wonderful river down South. Here they all are on the map. ”

“ Mississippi (1,290) , an American State on the E. bank of the Lower Mississippi, abutting on the Gulf of Mexico, between Louisiana and Alabama; has a hilly surface, traversed by numerous rivers, the Yazoo, a tributary of the Mississippi, forming a great fertile delta; the climate is free from extremes; the chief industry is agriculture; the best crops are grown in the N., and on the alluvial bottom lands; in the centre and NE. are good grazing farms; cotton, corn, oats, and fruits are the chief crops; virgin forests of hardwood cover much of the delta ”

“ Lawrence, and those rivers which take their course northward to Hudson's Bay; flowing the greater part of its way through the richest meadow-land, conveying on its bosom the productions of every climate, even ice from the frigid zone, which it transports to the great market of the sunny south! Hither are brought the products of the whole world. Such is the Mississippi! And who can calculate the total of its advantages, and the greatness of its future commercial engagements! ”

“ The contention of Mississippi is based upon an assumed inconsistency between the Louisiana and the Mississippi acts, but we think, upon a true interpretation, in the light of the facts, that no such inconsistency can be imputed. The maps show that there is a chain, not of alluvial, but of sea-sand islands, running from the west shore of Mobile bay, in the state of Alabama, westward to and inclusive of Cat island, in the state of Mississippi. ”

“ The whole of the Mississippi is ours, with far more than a thousand miles of its course from Columbus to its mouth, and even to a considerable extent up the Mississippi and Missouri, which had been once in the hands of the enemy. ”

“ In March, 1817, Congress passed an enabling act for the admission of Mississippi to the Union, and the State was formally admitted December 10, 1817. The most notable features of the first Constitution of Mississippi were the high property qualifications for holding office, the short tenures of offices, and the large appointing power of the Governor and Legislature. The first Governor was David Holmes, and during his administration the capital was permanently located at Jackson, near the headwaters of the Pearl River. ”