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Later in the slow years, while the largest coal basin in the world, and the prairies of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri were forming, the vast valley was again submerged. This time with fresh water. Where St. Louis now displays her linear miles of steamboats, and her square miles of brick blocks huge monsters, scaly and finny, disported in dark, profound depths. A hundred miles further south, the mighty torrent poured in a cataract, far exceeding Niagara. The width of the upper Mississippi covered several degrees of longitude, and its surface was two hundred feet above the present level.

Now the shrunken stream is but a mile wide. Along Missouri and Iowa its channel has greatly deepened. Beside Mississippi, and through Louisiana, mud-deposits have steadily raised its bed, until now, like the Nile, it is far higher than the adjacent land. But for artificial levees, all the river counties would be under water. Steamboat passengers look down into the chimneys of dwelling-houses, and into great fields of cotton, sugar, and rice.

The Iron Mountain country, one hundred miles south of St. Louis, was thrown up to its present height by an ancient earthquake. The same convulsion depressed a long strip of land from the mouth of the Ohio to the mouth of the White River, forming the endless swamps and submerged counties of Southeastern Missouri and Northeastern Arkansas.

That was in a dim, far-off past. But old settlers still remember the earthquakes of 1811-12, -the most violent on our continent within the historic period. Pioneers thought the end of the world had come. It was an era of wonders, natural and mechanical. The great comet had just disappeared. The first steamer of the West was on her way from Pittsburg to New Orleans. The heat was intense; the air close and stifling. Noonday was as twilight; and the lurid sun hung in the heavens like a globe of copper.

The country pitched and tossed like a raging sea. The pilot found the riv

er's bed strangely altered, and its shores, unrecognizable. Large islands in mid-channel had sunk out of sight. Acres of trees, with roots upward, were floating down the stream. No breeze stirred the air; but whole forests were waving and trembling like tall wheat in a strong wind. Great banks came tumbling into the river, overwhelming flat-boats and rafts, whose terrified crews had landed and escaped. The Mississippi gurgled and roared; and finally its torrent turned and flowed upstream for ten miles, swallowing keelboats and arks, ingulfing houses and farms, and drowning men, women, and children.

New Madrid was the centre of the convulsion. Some of the dismayed inhabitants fled back to the higher lands. Others stood palsied upon the shore, watching their tumbling houses, and praying to be taken on board the passing steamer. The earth opened in long fissures, from which jets of water and mud, and sheets of sand, streamed up into the air. Even the restingplace of the dead was invaded; the churchyard, with its grassy graves, parted from the shore, and went down into the turbid river. Bones of the gigantic mastodon and icthyosaurus, buried for ages, protruded from the banks of naked loam.

The whole face of the country was changed. Westward for miles the land sank many feet. Hills and plains of gigantic oaks, cypresses two hundred feet high, gum-trees, walnuts, hickories, and dense canes instantaneously dropped out of sight, as a magic forest goes down through the trap-door of a theatre. They have been submerged ever since, without branch or twig breaking the surface of the dull, stagnant waters.

Even when unconvulsed, our great rivers cut like knives through the soft alluvium of their banks. They roam their broad valleys almost as unrestrained as the sluggish catfish swim their muddy depths. They are here to-day, and there to-morrow, - always forming new channels, always filling up the old.

In 1853 a Missouri River steamer ran upon a sand-bar. The land was increasing so fast that she could not be got off. Night and day it grew apace, until the luckless vessel, a hundred yards from the water, perched high and dry, a modern ark upon a modern Ararat. In two or three years a thick forest of willows or cottonwoods would have hidden her. But suddenly the river changed its mind a second time, returned to its old channel, cutting away the new-formed soil, released the imprisoned steamer, and bore her safe to the St. Louis levee, after a delay of only a few weeks. The same stream has cut away half of St. Joseph, Mo., deposited a broad sand-bar in front of Weston, and, by finding a new channel, transformed a river town of Nebraska into an interior village of Iowa.

Hardly less erratic is the Mississippi. New Madrid seems to be the favorite neighborhood for the display of its eccentricities. One morning during the late war, the Rebels of that ancient illage were startled to find four of Geral Pope's steam-transports lying at heir landing. Beauregard's army blockaded the river above; but Pope's Illinois Yankees, by turning a portion of the water into a new channel, which they had cut for sixteen miles through bayous, swamps, and cornfields, floated their transports around, took the enemy in the rear, captured Island No. Ten, with its one hundred and twenty-five guns, half a dozen steamers, valuable supplies, and three thousand prisoners, and sent the Rebel lines "whirling" down to Fort Pillow.

That was the Mississippi plus man's ingenuity. But on the same spot the unaided stream has performed exploits almost as wonderful. New Madrid, founded by early Spanish settlers, and named in honor of their stately capital at home, was laid out for a magnificent city. A mile from the river its site embraced a pretty lake, which they designed enclosing to beautify the pleasure-grounds of their future metropolis. But the stream has encroached so ravenously upon its Missouri shore, that

the original seat of the town, lake and all, is not only removed into Kentucky, but is nearly two miles back from the Mississippi. At Randolph, Fort Pillow, and other points below, the river has swallowed extensive earthworks, and obliterated every trace of the great Rebellion.

Missouri has fewer antiquities than Ohio or Kentucky. On the Gasconade are caves of singularly pure saltpetre, which settlers have frequently used for the manufacture of gunpowder. But the caves had earlier workers. In their ancient rooms, with arched roofs and white limestone walls, have been found many rude axes and hammers. In the same vicinity are remains of stone towns, and of buildings which seem to have been religious temples.

There are other footprints of the Mound-Builders,-that mysterious race, just as distinct from the red men as the red men from the whites, — which swarmed in our great valley before the Indians, which worked oil-wells in Pennsylvania, and copper-mines on Lake Superior. They were unable to melt the copper, and therefore used it only for ornaments. One of their earth monuments, near New Madrid, was forty feet high, a quarter of a mile in circumference, perfectly level on the top, and surrounded by a deep ditch. St. Louis stands upon the former site of several; hence it is called the Mound City. Cincinnati, too, occupies the ancient seat of an interesting cluster of them.

Dr. Franklin, at eighty, talked of the Mound-Builders with great zest, and declared that if he were younger he would go and study their works for himself. Fascinating as the subject is, modern investigation has barely noticed it, and thrown little light upon it. These artificial mounds, often surrounded by curiously complicated earthworks, appear to have been used as fortifications, as temples for worship, and as the tombs of illustrious persons. Some bear the form of enormous serpents. Others, with their outworks, gateways, and covered pas

sages to the water, embrace many acres. Excavations have revealed in them gigantic human skeletons, battleaxes, bucklers of copper thickly overlaid with silver, polished bracelets and rings of silver and brass, many curious utensils of pottery, pipes and money of terra-cotta and slate, and rude sculptures in wood and stone.

Missouri boasts several of these mounds, but none so extensive and striking as those which have given name and interest to Circleville, Ohio. The Buckeye State is full of them; and Kentucky alone is said to have more than five hundred still unexplored. Originally they cost labor as vast and intelligent as the building of the pyramids. Yet the very name of the nation which reared them has passed from human knowledge as utterly as that of an unknown soldier dead on the field, or an unknown passenger swept from the deck of an emigrant ship.

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The bluff formations of Missouri contain fossil remains of the mastodon, the American elephant, and other primeval monsters. Even now, according to Draper, we might be enjoying their cheerful company but for the extreme rigor of modern winters. Let churls complain. I remember the fossil skeleton of an Alabama zeuglodon. reptile was ninety feet long, and in the largest place twice as thick as a sugarhogshead. He was as recklessly adapted to all circumstances as a Yankee invention. He was water proof, with a tail horridly useful for flapping or swimming. He had more legs, and uglier ones, than the most elaborate spider. Into his open jaws a small man might have walked, standing upright, and wearing a stove-pipe hat. Since that enlivening spectacle, I have regarded cold winters and the deprivation they bring with Christian resignation.

Song and story have done little justice to the patience, persistency, and daring of our early explorers. Their journeys were as romantic as that of Jason the Argonaut,—almost as incredible as those of Sinbad the Sailor. Three hundred and twenty-seven years

ago, near the present site of Helena, Arkansas, Hernando de Soto reached the Mississippi, the first white man who ever looked upon its waters. Powell's delineation of the discovery covers many square yards of canvas in the great Rotunda of the National Capitol. As a princess of shoddy once described a strong, dingy, hideous old battle-piece in her own parlor: "It is called the handsomest picture of the whole collection!" A copy of Powell's group adorns the backs of our ten-dollar National-Bank notes. It is a wonderful, but, alas! a fair, specimen of American historical painting. De Soto and his comrades are the prettiest of men. In personal comeliness they are only exceeded by the amiable savages standing about them. True to nature,—for everybody knows what a thing of beauty the American Indian is. The Portuguese and Spanish explorers appear in all the unsullied feathers and gold of a dess-parade. They seem to have been kept in bandboxes. They are gloved, rufi d, and laced, ready to caper nimbly a lady's chamber, to the lascivious pleasing of a lute. Of course, they looked exactly thus after wandering three years in the wilderness, having their camps and baggage burned months before, and losing half their numbers in the flames, in deadly Indian battle, and by low fevers caught in pestilential swamps.

De Soto and his men - the flower of the Peninsular chivalry-braved everything, suffered everything, in their search for El Dorado. The hot springs of Arkansas they thought the fabled fountain of perpetual youth. They penetrated Missouri from the south; twice crossed the Ozark Hills, and spent the winter of 1541-42 among them. They found the region swarming with fierce Indians. They fought the Pawnees, who still do a thriving business at scalping surveyors and throwing trains off the track along the Union Pacific Railway in Nebraska; and the Kaws, of whom a miserable remnant yet survive, to raise ponies, and beg tobacco and whiskey, on the

fertile bottoms of the Kansas River. They smelted ore, and were disgusted to find it lead instead of silver. Vernon County, Missouri, still contains ruins of old fortifications and furnaces, believed to mark the winter camp of those gallant, ill-starred soldiers of fortune.

Their fate served as a warning. For one hundred and thirty years the great river was left undisturbed, unseen, by civilized man.

Then Marquette the missionary, with Joliet the explorer, starting from Canada, floated down its silent current to the mouth of the Arkansas. Like later travellers, they were surprised to find the stream, so clear and blue above the mouth of the Missouri, so muddy and turbid below.

Before reaching the Gulf, they turned back from dread of the Spaniards. But after them, also from the north, came La Salle, the fearless. He rode the muddy current until he had planted the lilies of France at the mouth of the Mississippi. Louis XIV. was at the zenith of his glory. In the name of the Great King, the bold explorer took possession of the entire country, baptizing the river "St. Louis," and its valley, "Louisiana.”

Poor La Salle ! He hoped for wealth, fame, and honor from his discoveries. They brought hardship, heart-sickness, and death. For years he faced appalling disasters, with unshaken soul. At last, after long, fruitless endeavors to find again the banks of the Mississippi, a bewildered wanderer in Northern Texas, he fell, assassinated by one of his own soldiers. How great explorers, like great orators, have suffered the most cruel mockery of destiny! They form the saddest pictures in all history, -Columbus, of the broad brow and majestic frame, in an old age of poverty and chains; Ponce de Leon, feeble and gray-haired, shot to death by savages, even while seeking the immortal fountain; La Salle, the dauntless and tireless, with his thin arms folded, and his tattered cloak wrapped about him, cradled in an unknown grave, among the barren hills of Trinity River;

Raleigh, the early darling of fortune, his narrow bald head under the shining axe, his calm lips murmuring, "This is sharp medicine, but it cures the worst disease"; De Soto, lowered at midnight to the bottom of the Mississippi, with no audible prayer from his heartbroken comrades, lest the lurking red man learn that the bold leader was at rest after all his wanderings, in peace after all his troubles!

The Illini Indians greeted Father Marquette: "Fair is the sun, O Frenchman when thou comest among us." To Marquette's countrymen the Illinois prairie ever stretched under a fair sun. They held it a terrestrial paradise. The Missouri hills and valleys they believed uninhabitable, but filled with exhaustless mines of silver and gold. In 1700 there was not a white settlement west of the Mississippi. But Louis XIV. granted to Anthony Crozat, a wealthy French merchant, a monopoly of the trade of the entire valley for sixteen years. Crozat introduced the statutes and usages of France, copied chiefly from Roman civil law. These were the earliest canons of civilization between the Great Lakes and the Gulf.

The first royal governor was Crozat's business partner, La Motte. His first observations disgusted him with the province, and especially with the project for the establishment of trading posts. He wrote back to the Ministry:

"What! Is it expected that for any commercial or profitable purposes boats will ever be able to run up the Mississippi into the Wabash, the Missouri, or the Red River? One might as well try to bite a slice off the moon. Not only are these rivers as rapid as the Rhone, but in their crooked course they imitate to perfection a snake's undulations. Hence, for instance, on every turn of the Mississippi it would be necessary to wait for a change of wind, if wind could be had, because this river is so lined up with thick woods that very little wind has access to its bed."

Wise La Motte! Just as wise as Jefferson, who believed the Erie Canal

built fifty years too soon; as Franklin, who thought steamboats impracticable; as we, who a few months ago shook our sage heads pityingly at Cyrus Field!

Under La Motte no mines were found, no agriculture was begun; and in five years Crozat's monopoly had cost him so much more than it brought, that he returned to Paris, and gave up his charter as worthless.

The region was next granted to the Mississippi Company. "Corporations," says the proverb, "have no bodies to be kicked, and no souls to be damned." This famous company brilliantly exemplified the great truth. But at least it owned a head to lead, in the person of John Law,-gambler, rake, duellist, and speculator though he was. It is the fashion to decry him; but our own finances have sometimes been directed by quite as much charlatanry, and a great deal less brains.

His energy endeavored well for "Upper Louisiana.” He sent out two hundred miners to find gold or silver. The Mississippi Bubble swelled until shares rose to forty times their original value. Then it burst. Law, who had begun it with a fortune of five hundred thousand dollars, counted himself lucky to save his neck, and escape from Paris with eight hundred Louis d'or in his pocket. His miners in the New World found no precious metals. But, with a wisdom miraculous in gold-seekers, they worked the rich veins of lead still existing near Fredericksburg and Potosi, Missouri, and shipped large quantities of the product home to Europe.

For fifty years France had now held the valley. By the customs of that day, it was time for bloodshed about it, particularly as it was deemed almost worthless. So the Spaniards determined to capture and recolonize it.

The French settlers were few and weak; but the Missouri or Mud Indians, who have given name to the river and the State, were their stanch allies. Like all our aboriginals they took kindly to the easy, gay, music-lov

ing Frenchman, but not to the cruel Spaniard or the grasping Saxon.

The Osages, also a powerful nation, were traditional enemies of the Missouris. The Spaniards decided to join them in a war upon their ancient foes. The Missouris once destroyed, the conquest of the feeble white settlements would be sure and easy.

The expedition started from New Mexico in 1720. It was a strange caravan of Spaniards and natives, horses and mules, droves of cattle, sheep, and swine, with women and children, to form new colonies after the armed men should conquer the old.

The crusaders turned their backs upon Santa Fé, in its mountain aerie, — even yet the highest city of North America. They left behind snowy peak and delusive mirage, rolling wastes of sand and grazing herds of spotted antelopes. Down the shining Arkansas, to where its fair valley broadens into the magnificent prairies of Southern Kansas. Thence eastward through a swelling ocean of grass, its billowy green foamy with daisy and phlox, or gorgeous with goldenrod and sunflower. Then northward over rugged hills of gray rock, shaded with groves of chincapin and stunted oak, where, in the world's morning twilight, the Mound-Builders had toiled, where, two centuries before these soldiers, De Soto had marched and fought, where, on a summer day, a hundred and forty years later, Nathaniel Lyon and a thousand of his young comrades should fall for their country and for freedom.

After a weary march of a thousand miles, these pioneer filibusters approached the Great Yellow River. In its rich valley they found noble elms, black-walnuts, and sycamores, their trunks wreathed and their branches weighed down with luxuriant parasites. Bushes, vines, and trees bent under enormous clusters of black, shining elderberries, snow-white pigeon-berries, purpling grapes, and luscious, strawcolored plums.

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