America, Volume 6 (of 6)

Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

This book was printed in a 6-volume set and a 3-volume set. Although this e-book was from the 6-volume set, the title page refers to "Vol. III." The index references are to the 3-volume set.

From The Ohio To The Gulf.

Vol. III.

[Illustration: _Pack Train on the Skaguay Trail, Alaska_]

_Edition Artistique_

The World's Famous Places and Peoples

America

By Joel Cook

In Six Volumes

Volume VI.

MERRILL AND BAKER New York London

THIS EDITION ARTISTIQUE OF THE WORLD'S FAMOUS PLACES AND PEOPLES IS LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND NUMBERED AND REGISTERED COPIES, OF WHICH THIS COPY IS NO. ____

Copyright, Henry T. Coates & Co., 1900

List Of Illustrations

Volume VI

Page

PACK TRAIN ON THE SKAGUAY TRAIL, ALASKA _Frontispiece_

Tyler-Davidson Fountain, Cincinnati, Ohio 332

Bridge Crossing The Mississippi At St. Louis 396

Cloister Of Mission, San Juan Capistrano 442

Gateway, Garden Of The Gods, Colorado 466

Sitka, Alaska, From The Sea 500

XIX.

From The Ohio To The Gulf.

The Ohio River -- Economy -- The Harmonists -- Columbiana -- Wheeling -- Moundsville -- Marietta -- Parkersburg -- Blennerhassett's Island -- Point Pleasant -- Maysville -- Blue Grass -- Lexington -- Cincinnati -- Covington -- Newport -- Dayton -- North Bend -- Carrolton -- Frankfort -- Kentucky River -- Daniel Boone -- Louisville -- Jeffersonville -- Bowling Green -- Mammoth Cave -- Nashville -- Battle of Nashville -- Evansville -- Cairo -- Cumberland River -- Tennessee River -- Forts Henry and Donelson -- Battle of Shiloh -- Cumberland Mountains -- Cumberland Gap -- Mount Mitchell -- Chattanooga -- Missionary Ridge -- Lookout Mountain -- Chickamauga Park -- The Chickamauga Battles -- Rosecrans against Bragg -- Battle Above the Clouds -- Grant Defeats Bragg -- Knoxville -- Parson Brownlow -- Greenville -- Andrew Johnson -- Roan Mountain -- Land of the Sky -- Swannanoa River -- Buncombe -- Asheville -- Biltmore -- Hickory-Nut Gap -- French Broad River -- Hot Springs -- Spartansburg -- Cowpens -- King's Mountain -- Charlotte -- Mecklenburg -- Salisbury Prison -- Guilford Court House -- Chapel Hill -- Durham -- Raleigh -- Columbia -- Aiken -- Augusta -- Chattahoochee River -- Atlanta -- Its Siege and Capture -- Sherman's March to the Sea -- Rome -- Anniston -- Talladega -- Birmingham -- Tuscaloosa -- Macon -- Andersonville Prison -- Columbus -- West Point -- Tuskegee -- Alabama River -- Montgomery -- Cotton Plantations -- Selma -- Meridian -- Jackson -- Tombigbee River -- Mobile and Its Bay -- Admiral Farragut -- Capture of Mobile Forts -- The Pine and the Orange.

The Ohio River.

The Ohio--the Indian "stream white with froth," the French _La Belle Riviere_--is the greatest river draining the western slopes of the Alleghenies. Its basin embraces over two hundred thousand square miles, and it flows for a thousand miles from Pittsburg to the Mississippi at Cairo. In the upper reaches the Ohio is about twelve hundred feet wide, broadening below to twenty-four hundred feet, its depth varying fifty to sixty feet in the stages between low and high water, and it goes along with smooth and placid current at one to three miles an hour, having no fall excepting a rocky rapid of twenty-six feet descent in two miles at Louisville. From Pittsburg it flows northwest about twenty-six miles at the bottom of a deep canyon it has carved down in the table land, so that steep and lofty hills enclose it. Then the river turns west and finally south around the long and narrow "Panhandle" protruding northward from the State of West Virginia. It passes through a thriving agricultural region, with many prosperous cities on its banks, almost everyone having a great railway bridge carrying over the many lines seeking the west and south. In its whole course it descends some four hundred feet; its scenery is largely pastoral and gentle, without the grandeur given by bold cliffs, although much of the shores are beautiful, and its banks in various places disclose elevated terraces, indicating that it formerly flowed at much higher levels, whilst its winding route gives a constant succession of curves that add to the attractiveness.

Eighteen miles from Pittsburg is the town of Economy, where are the fine farms and oil-wells of the quaint community of "Harmonists." Georg Rapp, of Wurtumberg, believing he was divinely called to restore the Christian religion to its original purity, established a colony there on the model of the primitive church, with goods held in common, which in 1803 he transplanted to Pennsylvania, settling in Butler County. A few years later they removed to Indiana, but soon came back, and founded their settlement of Economy in Beaver County in 1824. Originally they numbered six hundred, and grew very rich, but being celibates, their community dwindled until there were only eighteen, who owned a tract of twenty-five hundred acres with valuable buildings and much personal property, so that if divided it was estimated each would have more than $100,000. The baby "Harmonist" then was over sixty years old, and to perpetuate the community, in 1888 they began accepting proselytes, who assumed all the obligations with vows of celibacy, and thus the number was increased to fifty. Economy is a sleepy village, its vine-covered houses built with gables towards the street and without front doors, all being entered from side-yards. They now labor but little themselves, their factories are silent, and their noted brand of Pennsylvania "Economy whiskey" is no longer distilled. Their church-bell rings them up at five o'clock in the morning, they breakfast at six, and at seven the bell again rings for the farmhands to go to work. At nine the bell summons them to lunch, at twelve to dinner, at three to lunch again, at six to supper, and at nine in the evening it finally warns the village to go to bed. They have a noted wine-cellar, and none drink water, but they give all the hands wine and cider, and present cake and wine to every visitor. At the church service, the men sit on one side and the women on the other, and when a "Harmonist" dies he is wrapped in a winding-sheet and buried in the "white graveyard," no tombstone marking the grave. They have recently suffered from litigation, others trying to get a share of their wealth, but they live quietly, awaiting the final summons, firm in their faith, and thoroughly believing its cardinal principle that their last survivor will see the end of the world.

Going Down The Ohio.

Having crossed the Pennsylvania western boundary, the Ohio River separates West Virginia from the State of Ohio, passing a region which seems mournful from the many abandoned oil-derricks displayed near the banks for a long distance. The Ohio shore is Columbiana County, a name fancifully compounded by an early State Legislature from "Columbus" and "Anna;" and it is recorded that when the subject was pending one member proposed to add "Maria," so that the euphonious whole would be "Columbianamaria." His effort failed, however. At the various towns, the railroads come out from the mountain regions of West Virginia, bringing the bituminous coal for shipment. Ninety-four miles below Pittsburg is Wheeling, the metropolis of West Virginia, a busy manufacturing city of forty thousand people. Farther down, in the midst of the flats adjoining the river, at Moundsville, is the great Indian Mound, a relic of the prehistoric inhabitants of this region standing up eighty feet high and being eight hundred and twenty feet in circumference at the base. In this mound were found two sepulchral chambers containing three skeletons. At Benwood, near by, one branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad crosses the river to Bellaire in Ohio. The Muskingum River, coming out of the heart of the State, flows in at Marietta, a stream thus named by the Delaware Indians when they first came to this region, from the abundance of elk and deer who could be approached near enough to see their eyes, Muskingum meaning "elk's eyes." Marietta is the oldest town in Ohio, settled in 1788 by a colony sent out by the "Ohio Company" of New England, which had been granted many square miles of land along the river. This colony of forty-seven Yankee pioneers marched over the Alleghenies, floated down the Ohio on a flatboat which they called the "Mayflower," and landing at the mouth of the Muskingum, their first act was writing a set of laws and nailing them to a tree, and in this code naming their settlement in honor of Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France. A company of troops in a little stockade fort protected them from the Indians. Here they found a curious mass of ancient fortifications, relics of the prehistoric mound-builders--a square enclosed by a wall of earth ten feet high, having twelve entrances, a covered way, bulwarks to defend the gateways, and other elaborate works, including a moat fifteen feet wide defended by a parapet. Thirteen miles below, the Little Kanawha River flows in at Parkersburg, and here the other branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad crosses on a massive bridge, a mile and a half long, over the river and lowlands. This is the entrepot of a great petroleum district which gives the town a large trade, and they are said to be still striking in the Ritchie County oilfield thousand-barrel wells. In the river two miles below is the noted Blennerhassett's Island, where that gentleman, an Irishman of distinction, built himself a splendid mansion and made a fine estate in 1798. When Aaron Burr afterwards concocted his notorious conspiracy, he induced Blennerhassett to invest his fortune in the scheme. Whilst not convicted of treason, Burr's dupe was irretrievably ruined and his house and estate fell into decay.

The Great Kanawha flows in, the chief river of West Virginia, at Point Pleasant, the Indian "rapid river," and it is now the outlet of one of the leading coal-fields, the New River district, in its upper waters, the navigation being maintained by an elaborate system of locks and movable dams. At the mouth was fought the severest battle with the Indians in the Ohio Valley, the tribes from beyond the river attacking the troops, but being beaten off after great bloodshed. Huntington is beyond, where the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway comes out to the Ohio, after having passed Charleston, the West Virginia State capital, fifty miles up the Kanawha. The Big Sandy River enters below, the boundary of Kentucky, and beyond is the mouth of the Scioto on the Ohio bank, where the terminus of the Lake Erie and Ohio Canal gave the start to the city of Portsmouth, having twenty thousand people. Maysville, to the westward on the Kentucky shore, is a leading hemp-market, and one of the towns supplying the famous "Blue Grass Region." The river banks here are very attractive and are backed by ranges of hills. Stretching southward from the shores are extensive green parks, with few fences and only occasional green fields, displaying majestic trees, one of the best grazing districts in America, the wealth of the inhabitants being in their flocks. Some distance back from the river the blue grass begins, so named from its blue tinge when in blossom, the district occupying ten thousand square miles in five Kentucky counties, the soil being very rich and the extensive pastures lined by hemp and tobacco fields. Stock farms abound, and Lexington is the metropolis of the district, a thriving town of twenty-five thousand people, about eighty miles south of the Ohio, an important horse and cattle market, and also famous for its distilleries of the native Bourbon whiskies. Here is the noted race-track of the "Kentucky Horse-Breeders' Association," and in this district are raised the greatest racing horses of America. Probably the leading stock farm is at Ashland, a short distance out of town, where Henry Clay long had his home. Lexington received its name from having been founded in 1775 about the time of the battle of Lexington. It has a fine monument to Henry Clay, who died in 1852, and it is also the seat of the University of Kentucky, with eight hundred students.

The City Of Cincinnati.

Sixty miles below Maysville the Licking River flows out of Kentucky, and on the opposite Ohio shore, built upon the magnificent amphitheatre of hills rising tier upon tier, and surrounded by villa-crowned heights elevated five hundred feet as a background, is Ohio's metropolis, Cincinnati, the Queen City. It spreads fourteen miles along the river, one of the most important manufacturing and commercial centres of the West, and is fronted by Covington and Newport on the Kentucky shore, the Licking River dividing them. John Cleves Symmes, a prominent American in the eighteenth century, bought from the Government after the Revolution a large tract of land in Ohio between the Great and Little Miami Rivers, known as "Symmes' Purchase." His nephew and namesake was the noted author of the "Theory of Concentric Spheres," which was called in derision "Symmes's Hole," and he afterwards died on this tract, being buried there with a monument surmounted, according to his pet theory, by a globe open at the poles. The people interested in the land purchase decided to establish a settlement opposite the mouth of the Licking, and they gave it the pedantic name of Losantiville, a word ingeniously contrived to describe its position by using the "L" signifying Licking River, "os" the mouth, "anti" opposite, and "ville" a city. General St. Clair, however, came along afterwards to establish a military post in his campaign against the Indians, and being prominently identified with the Society of the Cincinnati, he gave the place that name. It was for many years a small collection of log cabins, and had only slow growth until steamboating began on the Ohio, when it rapidly expanded, receiving an additional impetus from the opening of the Miami Canal connecting with Lake Erie in 1830 and from the great development of the western railway systems after 1840. Its earlier inhabitants came largely from the Atlantic States and Kentucky, but subsequently there was a great German influx, so that a considerable district north of the Miami Canal is their special home, and is familiarly known as "Over the Rhine." The Civil War gave the city a serious set-back by destroying its extensive Southern trade, but it has since greatly grown, and now has a population of four hundred thousand. The immediate advantage of location comes from having around it a district of a hundred miles radius which is one of the most fertile in America.

The Fountain Square at Fifth Street may be regarded as the business centre of Cincinnati, this being an expansion of the street, having upon a spacious esplanade the grand bronze Tyler-Davidson Fountain, the gift of a prominent townsman, which was cast at the Royal Bronze Foundry in Munich and is one of the noblest fountains existing. To the northward is the granite United States Government Building which cost $5,000,000, while farther inland is the red Romanesque City Hall, with a lofty tower, erected at an expense of $1,600,000. The high hills enclosing Cincinnati give grand outlooks, and upon them are the finest parts of the city. They are reached by inclined-plane railways from the lower grounds, as well as by winding roadways. Upon these hills to the eastward is Eden Park, a fine pleasure-ground of over two hundred acres containing the water reservoirs and an elaborate Art Museum, of handsome architecture, surmounted by a red-tiled roof. The famous Rookwood Pottery is also on these eastern hills. To the northward is Mount Auburn, and beyond, the Clifton Heights with the Burnet Woods Park, a fine natural forest. These high encircling hills, diversified by ravines, give to suburban Cincinnati a singularly picturesque and beautiful environment, being covered by attractive and costly villas surrounded by lawns and gardens, making throughout a most delicious park. The Spring Grove Cemetery, about five miles to the northwest, covers a square mile, and is an appropriate home of the dead, having elaborate monuments, of which the finest is the Dexter Mausoleum, a Gothic chapel of grand proportions and splendid decoration. Five great bridges span the Ohio in front of Cincinnati, crossing over to the Kentucky shore at Covington and Newport, where there are seventy thousand people, the United States military post of Fort Thomas being upon the hills behind Newport. Up the Great Miami, sixty miles to the northward, and at its confluence with Mad River, is Dayton, a busy manufacturing and railway centre, having seventy thousand people. It is the location of the Central National Soldiers' Home, where there are several thousand old soldiers, the spacious buildings, in an attractive park of seven hundred acres, standing prominently on the hills sloping up from the Miami River to the westward of the city.

[Illustration: Tyler-Davidson Fountain, Cincinnati, O.]

Cincinnati To Louisville.

North Bend on the Ohio River, fifteen miles from Cincinnati, was the home of General William Henry Harrison, and upon a commanding hill is his tomb, a modest structure of brick. The family mansion built in 1814, to which he brought his bride, is still preserved, and in it were born his son John Scott Harrison and his grandson, President Benjamin Harrison. To the westward the Great Miami River flows in at the boundary between Ohio and Indiana. Some distance farther down, at Carrolton, is the mouth of the Kentucky River, which named the "Blue Grass State," a beautiful stream, having upon its banks, sixty miles south of the Ohio, the Kentucky capital, Frankfort. The name of this river comes from the Iroquois word _Kentake_, meaning "among the meadows," in allusion to a large and almost treeless tract in the southern part of the State from which the river flows, called by the pioneers "the Barrens." To this region first came the famous hunter Daniel Boone, who had been born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1735, but went in early life to North Carolina. In 1769, being of a roving disposition, he crossed the mountains with five companions and penetrated the forests of Kentucky, the first white men who trod them. He was captured by the Indians, but escaped, returning to North Carolina after wandering and hunting through Kentucky over a year. He finally moved with some others, all taking their families, into Kentucky in 1773, settling on the upper Kentucky River, and building a defensive fort there at Boonesborough in 1775. The Indians repeatedly attacked the place and were repulsed, but finally, in 1778, they captured Boone, taking him northward to Detroit. Again he escaped, returning later in the year, having another combat with the Indians at his fort and defeating them. For seventeen years afterwards he hunted in Kentucky, and his name and exploits became a household word; but there was a large migration into the region from Virginia and elsewhere, and the increased population was crowding the old hunter too much, so he went west in 1795 to Missouri, settling beyond St. Louis. He had received large land grants in both States, and had various legal conflicts, losing much of his property, but he lived in Missouri the remainder of his life, dying there on his farm in 1820 at the age of eighty-five. Being the founder of Kentucky, that State in 1845, as the result of a popular movement, brought back the remains of the old hunter, and they were interred near Frankfort, alongside the river he loved so well.

The Ohio River flows westward past Madison, a thriving manufacturing town on the Indiana bank, and then sweeps around a grand curve to the south in its approach to the Kentucky metropolis, Louisville. The view of Louisville and Jeffersonville, opposite in Indiana, is very fine, as the visitor comes towards them down the river. The Ohio is a mile wide, and the Kentucky hills which lined it above, here recede from the bank, and do not come out to it again for twenty miles, leaving an almost level plain several miles in width, and elevated some distance above the water, upon which Louisville is built, spreading along the shore for eight miles in a graceful crescent. The rapids at the lower end of the city cover the whole width of the river, and go down twenty-six feet in two miles, making a series of foaming cascades in ordinary stages of water, but being almost entirely obliterated in times of freshet, when the steamboats can pass down them. A long canal cut through the rocks provides safe navigation around them. An expedition of thirteen families of Virginia, under Colonel George Rogers Clarke, floated down the Ohio on flatboats in 1778, and halting at the falls, settled there, at first on an island, but afterwards on the southern shore. This began the town which in 1780 was named by the Virginia Legislature in honor of the French King Louis XVI., who was then actively aiding the American Revolution. The Ohio River steamboating began the city's rapid growth, which was further swelled by the later development of railway traffic, and it now has two hundred and fifty thousand population. There is a large southern trade in provisions and supplies, and it is probably the greatest leaf-tobacco market in the world, being also the distributing depot for the Kentucky whiskies. There are, besides, other prominent branches of manufacture. Its foliage-lined and lawn-bordered streets in the residential section are very attractive and a notable feature. The chief public buildings are the Court House and the City Hall, the former adorned by a statue of the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay. Its great disaster was a frightful tornado, which swept a path of desolation through the heart of the city in March, 1900, killing seventy-six persons and destroying property estimated at $3,000,000. Its most famous citizen was George D. Prentice, poet, editor and politician, whose monument, a Grecian canopy of marble, is in Cave Hill Cemetery, prettily laid out on the hills to the eastward. The city has an environment of pleasant parks, and three fine bridges span the Ohio in front, crossing to the suburban towns of Jeffersonville and New Albany over on the Indiana shore. Five miles east of Louisville lived General Zachary Taylor, old "Rough and Ready," who commanded the army of the United States in the conquest of Mexico, and died while President in 1850. He is buried near his old home.

Louisville To Nashville.

Southward from Louisville runs the railroad to Nashville, and proceeding along it, Green River is reached, which, flowing northwest, falls into the Ohio near Evansville. At the Green River crossing were fought the initial skirmishes of the Civil War, in various conflicts between the western armies of Generals Buell and Bragg in 1862. Farther southwestward is Bowling Green, now a quiet agricultural town, but then a location at the crossing of Barren River of great strategic importance, it having been occupied and strongly fortified by the Confederates in 1861, to defend the approach to Nashville. But after the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in February, 1862, the Confederates being outflanked abandoned the town, retiring southward. Between these places, and adjoining Green River, about ninety miles south of Louisville, is the famous Mammoth Cave of Kentucky. This is the largest known cavern in the world, extending for a distance of nine or ten miles, the various avenues that have been explored having a total length approximating two hundred miles. The carboniferous limestones of Kentucky, in which the cave is located, occupy an area of eight thousand square miles, and the geologists estimate that there are probably a hundred thousand miles of open caverns beneath this surface. There is a hotel near the cave entrance, and it has several thousand visitors annually. Its mouth is reached by passing down a rocky ravine through the forest, and is a sort of funnel-shaped opening about a hundred feet in diameter at the top, with steep walls fifty feet high. A hunter accidentally discovered the cave in 1809, and for years afterwards it was entered chiefly to obtain nitre for the manufacture of gunpowder, especially during the War of 1812, the nitre being found in deposits on the cave floor, mainly near the entrance, and owing its origin to the accumulation of animal remains, mostly of bats, in which the cave abounds. It subsequently became a resort for sight-seers, and yields its owners a good revenue.

Upon entering the cave, the first impression is made by a chaos of limestone formations, moist with water oozing from above, and then is immediately felt what is known as "the breath" of the cave. It has pure air and an even temperature of 52° to 56°, and this is maintained all the year round. In summer the relatively cooler air flows out of the entrance, while in winter the colder air outside is drawn in, and this makes the movement of "the breath," at once apparent from the difference of temperature and currents of wind when passing the entrance. For nearly a half-mile within are seen the remains of the Government nitre-works, the vats being undecayed, while ruts of cart-wheels are traceable on the floor. The Rotunda is then entered, a hall seventy-five feet high and one hundred and sixty feet across, beginning the main cave, and out of which avenues lead in various directions. The vast interior beyond contains a succession of wonderful avenues, chambers, domes, abysses, grottoes, lakes, rivers, cataracts, stalactites, etc., remarkable for size and extraordinary appearance, though they are neither as brilliant nor as beautiful as similar things seen in some other caves. But their gigantic scale is elsewhere unsurpassed. There are eyeless fish and crawfish, and a prolific population of bats. In the subterranean explorations there are two routes usually followed, a short one of eight miles and another of twenty miles. Various appropriate names are given the different parts of the cave, and curious and interesting legends are told about them, one of the tales being of the "Bridal Chamber," which got its name because an ingenious maiden who had promised at the deathbed of her mother she would not marry any man on the face of the earth, came down here and was wedded. Bayard Taylor wrote of this Mammoth Cave, "No description can do justice to its sublimity, or present a fair picture of its manifold wonders; it is the greatest natural curiosity I have ever visited, Niagara not excepted."

Seventy miles south of Bowling Green, at the Cumberland River, and occupying the hills adjoining both banks, is Nashville, the capital and largest city of Tennessee, having eighty thousand population. It is in an admirable situation, and is known as the "Rock City," its most prominent building, the State Capitol, standing upon an abrupt yet symmetrical hill, rising like an Indian mound and overlooking the entire city, its high tower seen from afar. In the grounds are the tomb of President James K. Polk, who died in 1849 and whose home was in Nashville, and a fine bronze equestrian statue of General Andrew Jackson, the most famous Tennesseean, whose residence, the Hermitage, was eleven miles to the eastward. Nashville has considerable manufactures, but is chiefly known as the leading educational city of the South. The most prominent institution is the Vanderbilt University, attended by eight hundred students and endowed by Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt with $1,000,000, his colossal statue, unveiled in 1897, standing on the campus. The University of Nashville, originally begun by charter of the North Carolina Legislature as an Academy in 1785, has four hundred students in its Normal Department, which trains teachers for Southern schools, and as many more in its Medical Department. There are also the Fisk University, Roger Williams University, and Central Tennessee College, all endowments for colored students and having about thirteen hundred in attendance. The city has various other educational institutions and public buildings, and in the southwestern suburbs is the famous Belle Meade stock-farm, where was bred Iroquois, the only American horse that was a winner of the English Derby. Nashville was in the midst of the Civil War, and four miles to the northward is a National Cemetery with over sixteen thousand soldiers' graves. The great battle of Nashville was fought just south of the city December 15 and 16, 1864. In November of that year General Sherman had captured Atlanta, Georgia, to the southeast, and the Confederate General Hood, who had lost it, marched in Sherman's rear northward and began an invasion of Tennessee, advancing upon Nashville and forcing General George H. Thomas to fall back within its fortifications south of the Cumberland. For two weeks little was done, the weather preventing, but Thomas suddenly attacked, and in the two days' battle worsted Hood and put his army to flight, pursuing them over the boundary into Alabama, where the remnants escaped across the Tennessee River, a demoralized rabble. Hood's army being thus destroyed, Sherman, who had been waiting at Atlanta, began his famous march to the sea.

The Ohio River below Louisville passes Evansville, the chief town of southwestern Indiana, having sixty thousand people and a large trade. A short distance beyond, the Wabash River flows in, the boundary between Indiana and Illinois. Shawneetown in southern Illinois and Paducah in Kentucky are passed, and the Ohio River finally discharges its waters into the Mississippi at Cairo, the southern extremity of Illinois, the town being built upon a long, low peninsula protruding between the two great rivers, around which extensive levees have been constructed to prevent inundation. The place has about twelve thousand people and considerable manufacturing industry. All about is an extensive prairie land, which in times of great spring freshets is generally overflowed.

Cumberland And Tennessee Rivers.

A large portion of the waters brought down by the Ohio come from its two great affluents flowing in almost alongside each other on the southern bank, just above Paducah, the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. The Cumberland has its sources in the Cumberland Mountains, the eastern boundary of Kentucky, and flows for six hundred and fifty miles, the whole length of that State, making a wide, sweeping circuit down into Tennessee, where it passes Nashville, at the head of steamboat navigation, two hundred miles from its mouth. For twenty miles above their mouths, in their lower courses, these two great rivers are rarely more than three miles apart. The Tennessee is twelve hundred miles long from its head stream, the Holston River, rising in the mountains east of Kentucky and Tennessee. It comes through East Tennessee, makes a great bend down into Alabama, and then coming up northward flows through Tennessee and Kentucky to the Ohio. It is navigable for nearly three hundred miles to the Mussel Shoals at Florence, Alabama, where canals and locks have improved the navigation for twenty miles past the shoals, and it can also be navigated for eight hundred miles above, excepting at very low stages of water. Its name signifies "the river of the Great Bend," and it was also called in early times the "river of the Cherokees."

It was by the capture of Fort Donelson, near the mouth of the Cumberland River, that General Grant gained his early fame in the Civil War. The Confederates erected strong defensive works on the two rivers in order to prevent an invasion of Western Kentucky and Tennessee. The places selected were about forty miles south of the Ohio--Fort Henry being built on the eastern bank of the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the western bank of the Cumberland, twelve miles apart, and connected by a direct road. A combined land and naval attack was made on these forts in February, 1862, under command of General Grant and Commodore Foote. Fort Henry was easily captured by Foote's gunboats on February 6th after an hour's action, most of the garrison retreating across the neck of land to Fort Donelson. Grant then invested Fort Donelson, being reinforced until he had twenty-seven thousand men, and he attacked so vigorously that after a severe battle on the 15th he effected a lodgement in the Confederate lines and severely crippled them. Part of the garrison escaped southward during the night, and in the morning General Buckner, commanding, asked for an armistice and commissioners to arrange a capitulation. To this Grant made his noted reply, "No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted; I propose to move immediately upon your works." Having no alternative, Buckner surrendered. The Union army captured fourteen thousand prisoners, a vast amount of small arms and stores, and sixty-five cannon. Almost immediately afterwards the Confederates practically abandoned Western Kentucky and Tennessee, and Grant moved his army up the Tennessee River, and by the middle of March it was encamped to the westward and along the banks, near the southern Tennessee border, the lines extending several miles from Shiloh Church to Pittsburg Landing. The Confederates under A. S. Johnston and Beauregard were at Corinth, Mississippi, about twenty miles to the southwest. The Union plan was that General Buell, who was coming southwestward from Nashville, should join Grant, and then an advance southward be made. The Confederates, having learned of the plan, early in April decided to attack Grant before Buell could join him, and on the morning of the 6th the onslaught began, the Union army being surprised. This was the great battle of Shiloh, in which the Union forces were pushed back with heavy loss on the first day. Buell arrived, however, crossing the Tennessee that night and joining, so that next day, after a stubborn battle, Grant recovered his position, and the Confederates retreated to Corinth. In this battle the losses were about twenty-five thousand killed, wounded and missing, including three thousand Union prisoners taken.

The Cumberland Mountains, dividing Virginia from Kentucky, and extending farther southwest to separate East from Middle Tennessee, are the main watershed between the upper waters and sources of the two great rivers. This range is an elevated plateau rising about a thousand feet above the neighboring country and two thousand feet above the sea, the flat top being in some parts fifty miles across. On both sides the cliffs are precipitous, being much notched on the western declivities. Pioneer hunters coming out of Virginia discovered these mountains and the river in 1748, giving them the name of the Duke of Cumberland, the hero of Culloden, then the prominent military leader of England. These explorers came through the remarkable notch cut part way down in the range on the Kentucky-Tennessee boundary, just at the western extremity of Virginia,--the Cumberland Gap. This cleft, five hundred feet deep, is in some places only wide enough for a road, and extends for six miles through the ridge. It was for over a century the highway from southwestern Virginia into East Tennessee and southeastern Kentucky, being previously the trail followed by the Cherokees and other Indians in their movements east and west of the mountains. Through it came Daniel Boone and his companions from North Carolina into Kentucky, and the pass naturally became a great battleground of the Civil War. It is now utilized as the route for a branch of the Southern Railway from East Tennessee into Kentucky, traversing the Gap at about sixteen hundred feet elevation. In one place this road passes through a tunnel of over a half-mile, beginning in Tennessee, going under the corner of Virginia, and coming out in Kentucky. Iron is in abundance all about the Gap. During the war it was fortified by the Confederates, but in June, 1862, they were compelled to abandon it, and the Union troops took possession, being in turn forced out the following September. In September, 1863, the Union armies besieged and captured it, holding the Gap till the end of the war. The great curiosity of Cumberland Gap was the Pinnacle Rock, overhanging the narrow pass in a commanding position. This huge rock, weighing hundreds of tons, fell on Christmas night, 1899, awakening the village at the Gap as if by an earthquake, though no one was injured.

Chattanooga And Its Battles.

The great Allegheny ranges, stretching from northeast to southwest, attain their highest altitude in western North Carolina. They come down southwestward out of Virginia in the Blue Ridge and other ranges, forming a high plateau, having the Blue Ridge on the eastern side, and on the western, forming the boundary between North Carolina and Tennessee, the chain known in various parts as the Stony, Iron, Great Smoky and Unaka Mountains, while beyond, to the northwest, the Cumberland Mountains extend in a parallel range through East Tennessee. There are also various cross-chains, among them the Black Mountains. In these ranges are eighty-two peaks that rise above five thousand feet and forty-three exceeding six thousand feet. The highest mountains of the Blue Ridge in North Carolina are the Grandfather and the Pinnacle, rising nearly six thousand feet. In the Great Smoky Mountains, Clingman's Dome is sixty-six hundred and sixty feet high and Mount Guyot sixty-six hundred and thirty-six feet. The highest peak of all is in the Black Mountains, and it is the highest east of the Rockies, Mount Mitchell rising sixty-six hundred and eighty-eight feet. Between and among these ranges are the sources of Tennessee River, in the Clinch River, the Holston and its North Fork, and the French Broad, their head streams coming westward out of Virginia and North Carolina through the mountain passes. The extensive mountain region they drain in North Carolina and East Tennessee is a most attractive district, noted as a health resort, and famous for the sturdy independence of its people, while along the Tennessee and upon the mountains near it were fought some of the greatest battles of the Civil War.

Upon the Tennessee River, at the head of navigation, and near the junction-point of the three States, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, is Chattanooga, the Indian "crow's nest," now a busy manufacturing city and a great railroad centre, served by no less than nine different roads diverging in all directions, the iron, coal and timber of the neighboring country having given it an impetus that has brought a population of fifty thousand. This city has had all its development since the Civil War, and is the seat of Grant University of the Methodist Church, attended by six hundred students. It borders the river winding along the base of the Missionary Ridge and the famous Lookout Mountain. The battlefields upon them have been placed in control of a Government Commission, who have laid out the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Military Park, restoring all the roads used by troops during the battles, and marking the points of interest and the locations of regiments and batteries by tablets and monuments. There are sixty miles of driveways on the field, which embraces over five thousand acres of woodland cleared of underbrush and fifteen hundred acres of open ground. Here have been identified and accurately laid down the brigade lines of battle of seven distinct and successive engagements in the series of terrific contests that were fought, all of them being plainly marked. The fighting positions of batteries for both sides have been indicated by the location of guns of the same pattern as those used in the engagement. There are thus marked thirty-five battery positions on one side and thirty-three on the other, mounting over two hundred guns. The restoration to the conditions existing at the times of the battles is almost complete, both the Northern and Southern States that had troops engaged, actively aiding the historical labor. Lookout Mountain rises to the south of the city, its summit being over twenty-one hundred feet high, and it commands a superb view, extending over seven States. Inclined-plane railways ascend it, and there is a hotel at the top, and also another railway along the crest of the ridge. Upon the summit of this mountain, which is almost a plateau, the boundaries of the three States come together, and it overlooks to the northward the plain of Chattanooga and the windings of Tennessee River, traced far to the southwest along the base of the ridge into Alabama. The favorite post for the magnificent view from the mountain top is Point Rock, a jutting promontory of massive stone reared on high, and overhanging like a balcony the deep valley. Far beneath, the river in its grand and graceful sweeping curves forms the famous Moccasin Bend, which almost enfolds the city of Chattanooga, and then spreads beyond, fringed with forest and field, a waving silvery gleaming thread, until lost to view.

Beyond Missionary Ridge is the battlefield of Chickamauga, the "river of death," a stream flowing up from Georgia into the Tennessee, about twelve miles east of Chattanooga. General Rosecrans commanded the Union forces holding Chattanooga in 1863 and General Bragg the opposing Confederates. The conflict began September 19th by the Confederates attempting to turn Rosecrans' left wing and get possession of the roads leading into Chattanooga, and it continued fiercely for two days, when the Union forces withdrew, and the result was a nominal victory for the Confederates on the field, although Chattanooga and East Tennessee, the prize for which the battle was fought, remained in possession of the Union forces. This was one of the bloodiest battles of the war, thirty-four thousand being killed and wounded on both sides out of one hundred and twelve thousand engaged. Immediately after the battle, Rosecrans withdrew behind the fortifications of Chattanooga, while Bragg moved up and occupied positions upon Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, extending his flanks to the Tennessee River above and below the city. He cut the communications westward, and the Union army was practically blockaded and in danger of starvation. Rosecrans was relieved and Grant took command. He ordered Sherman to join him, coming up from the southwest, and by the close of October had opened communication along the Tennessee River and secured ample supplies. Bragg, who felt he was in strong position, detached Longstreet with a large force to go northeast in November and attack Burnside at Knoxville. Sherman's army joined Grant on the 23d, and next day the battle began on Lookout Mountain, continuing on the 25th on Missionary Ridge, and Bragg was driven out of his position and his army pursued in disorder through the mountains, over six thousand prisoners being taken. As the Union forces ascended Lookout Mountain in the mist, this has been called the "Battle above the Clouds." Burnside was afterwards relieved at Knoxville, and these decisive victories, which broke the Confederate power in Tennessee, resulted in Grant being made a Lieutenant General the next year and placed in command of all the armies of the United States.

At the head of navigation for steamboats on the Tennessee River is Knoxville, the chief city of East Tennessee, in a fine location among the foothills of the Clinch Mountains, which are a sort of offshoot of the Cumberland range. This was the spot where General Knox, then Secretary of War, in the latter part of the eighteenth century made a treaty with the Indians of the upper Tennessee, and the village which grew there was named after him. It is the centre of the Tennessee marble district, shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of this beautiful stone all over the country. It also has coal and iron and other industries, and a population of over forty thousand. Here are the buildings of the University of Tennessee, with five hundred students, and also an Agricultural College. Knoxville was the rallying point of Union sentiment in East Tennessee during the Civil War, and its most noted citizen was Parson William G. Brownlow, a Methodist clergyman and political editor, whose caustic articles earned for him the sobriquet of the "fighting Parson." He was Governor of Tennessee and Senator after the war, and died in Knoxville in 1877. The famous Davy Crockett was also a resident of that city. Twelve miles west of Knoxville, at Low's Ferry, Admiral Farragut was born, July 5, 1801, and a marble shaft marking the place was dedicated by Admiral Dewey in May, 1900. A short distance above Knoxville the Tennessee River is formed by the union of the Holston and French Broad Rivers. Following up the Holston, we come to Morristown, and beyond to Greenville, where, in sight of the railway, are the grave and monument of President Andrew Johnson, who lived there the greater part of his life, and died there in 1875. His residence and the little wooden tailor shop where he worked are still preserved. High mountains are all about, and to the eastward from Johnson City a narrow-gauge railway ascends through the romantic canyon of Doe River, in places fifteen hundred feet deep, up the Roan Mountain to Cranberry. This line is known in the neighborhood, on account of its crookedness, as the "Cranberry Stem-Winder." On the summit of Roan Mountain is the Cloudland Hotel, at an elevation of more than sixty-three hundred feet, the highest human habitation east of the Rockies, and having a magnificent view. It is a curious circumstance that the boundary line between Tennessee and North Carolina on the mountain top runs through the hotel, and is painted a broad white band along the dining-room floor, while out of the windows are views for a hundred miles in almost every direction.

The Land Of The Sky.

We have come to the famous region in Western North Carolina, the resort for health and pleasure, the "Land of the Sky," sought both in winter and summer on account of its pure, bracing atmosphere and equable climate, and where eighty thousand visitors go in a year. Between the Unaka and Great Smoky range of mountains which is the western North Carolina boundary, and the Blue Ridge to the eastward, there is a long and diversified plateau with an average elevation of two thousand feet, stretching two hundred and fifty miles from northeast to southwest, and having a width of about twenty-five miles. Various mountain spurs cross it between the ranges from one towards the other, and numerous rivers rising in the Blue Ridge flow westward over it and break through picturesque gorges in the Great Smoky Mountains to reach the Tennessee River, the most noted of these streams being the French Broad. From any commanding point along the Great Smoky range there may be seen stretching to the east and south a vast sea of ridges, peaks and domes. No single one dominates, but most all of them reach nearly the same altitude, appearing like the waves in a choppy sea, the ranges growing gradually less distinct as they are more distant. The whole region seems to be covered with a mantle of dark forest, excepting an occasional clearing or patch of lighter-colored grass. Very few rocky ledges appear, so that the slopes are smoothed and softened by the generous vegetation. The atmosphere also tends to the same result, the blue haze, so rarely absent, giving the names both to the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains. This haze softens everything and imparts the effect of great distance to peaks but a few miles away. Thus the remarkable atmospheric influence produces more impressive views than are got from greater peaks and longer distances in a clearer air elsewhere. The most elevated peak of the district, Mount Mitchell, rises four hundred and twenty-five feet higher than Mount Washington in the White Mountains. It was named for Professor Elisha Mitchell, who was an early explorer, a native of Connecticut, and Professor in the University of North Carolina, who lost his life during a storm on the mountain in 1857, and is buried at the summit. From its sides the beautiful Swannanoa River, the Indian "running water," flows eighteen miles westward to fall into the French Broad at Asheville, the centre and chief city of this charming region, whose fame has become world-wide.

"Land of forest-clad mountains, of fairy-like streams, Of low, pleasant valleys where the bright sunlight gleams Athwart fleecy clouds gliding over the hills, 'Midst the fragrance of pines and the murmur of rills.

"A land of bright sunsets, whose glories extend From horizon to zenith, there richly to blend The hues of the rainbow, with clouds passing by-- Right well art thou christened 'The Land of the Sky.'

"A land of pure water, as pure as the air; A home for the feeble, a home for the fair; Where the wild roses bloom, while their fragrance combines With health-giving odors from balsamic pines.

"The pure, healthful breezes, the life-giving air, The beauteous landscapes, oft new, ever fair, Are gifts that have come from the Father on high; To Him be all praise for 'The Land of the Sky.'"

In the early days of Congress, a North Carolina member, who was making a long speech for home consumption, observed that several of his colleagues, becoming tired, had gone out, whereupon he bluntly told those who remained that they might go out too, if so inclined, as he "was only talking for Buncombe." This member, whose remark has become immortal as the title of a certain type of Congressional oratory, represented the county of Buncombe, which embraces a large portion of the "The Land of the Sky," and Asheville is the county-seat. This town has a permanent population of twelve thousand, and is one of the most elevated towns east of Denver, being at a height of nearly twenty-three hundred feet above the sea. It is built in the attractive valley of the French Broad River, surrounded by an amphitheatre of magnificent hills, and commands one of the finest mountain views in this country. The Swannanoa unites with the French Broad just above the town in a charming locality; there are various pleasant parks; and the tree-shaded streets are adorned by many fine buildings. To Asheville come the Northerner for equable mildness in winter and the Southerner for coolness in summer, the climate being dry and bright, and most restorative in lung and other similar troubles, while the whole surrounding region has had its scenic attractions made available by improved roads and paths. About two miles to the southeast is George Vanderbilt's noted chateau of Biltmore, the finest private residence in the United States, built upon the verge of a princely estate covering a hundred thousand acres of these glens and mountains. The house, which commands magnificent views, stands upon a terrace seven hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide, and cost $4,000,000, while nearly as much more is said to have been expended in constructing many miles of drives over the estate and in landscape gardening and improvements, which in time will make this one of the world's greatest show places. The building is an extensive French baronial hall of the days of King Francis I., elaborated from the chateaux of the Loire, exceedingly rich in every detail, and having the general effect heightened by the free employment of decorative sculpture. From the grand esplanade the outlook is upon the "wild tumult of mountains stretching away in every direction." There are various other fine houses in the Asheville suburbs, and the locality is steadily improving through the attractions it has for men of wealth who love a home amid the grandest charms of Nature. Routes have been opened in various directions from Asheville to develop the mountain district. One railroad goes for a hundred miles through the gorges and valleys southwestward along the base of the Great Smoky range. Another route is southeast through the romantic pass of the Hickory-nut Gap, where the Rocky Broad River penetrates the Blue Ridge, a splendid canyon of nine miles, with cliffs rising fifteen hundred feet and having the remarkable Chimney Rock built on high alongside the gorge, where it stands up an isolated sentinel. Bald Mountain, rising opposite, is celebrated in Mrs. Burnett's _Esmeralda_. Cæsar's Head, to the southward, is an outlier of these mountain ranges, bordering the lowlands; and standing on top of its southern brow, upon a precipice rising almost sheer for fifteen hundred feet, one can overlook the lower regions of South Carolina and Georgia for more than a hundred miles away.

The French Broad River, the chief stream of this charming region, got its name from the early hunters who came up from the settled regions of Carolina nearer the coast, and penetrating the mountains explored it. The Cherokees called it Tselica, or "The Roarer," a not inappropriate name. The hunters who came through the Blue Ridge by the Hickory-nut Gap in colonial times followed down the Rocky Broad that flowed out of it into this river, which was much larger, and as the region beyond the mountains was then controlled by the French, they named it the French Broad. It rises in the Blue Ridge range almost on the South Carolina boundary, and nearly interlocks its headwaters with those of the Congaree flowing out to the Atlantic. Its upper waters wind for forty miles through a beautiful and fertile valley, but in approaching Asheville the scenery changes, the hills press more closely upon the stream, its course becomes more rapid, and after a swift turmoil it plunges down the cataract at Mountain Island. Here a knob-topped rock rises fifty to seventy feet high, the stream forcing its way on either hand by a channel cut through the enclosing ridge, and it descends a cataract of forty-five feet, running away through a deep abyss. The river passes Asheville and flows in a most picturesque gorge through the high mountains, everywhere disclosing new beauties, the water rushing and roaring over ledges and boulders, going around sharp bends, receiving gushing tributaries coming down the mountain side or trickling over the face of some broad high cliff. Massive rocks rise on high, and the road is often on a shelf cut into their face, the river boiling along far down below. Then the valley broadens, and here, in a lovely vale surrounded by the mountains, are the North Carolina Hot Springs, a popular resort, with a climate even milder in winter than at Asheville, as the Great Smoky range protects it from the northern blasts. The curative properties of these springs are efficacious in rheumatic and cutaneous diseases. Beyond, the bold precipices overhang the road and river that are known as the Paint Rocks, where the rushing torrent forces its way through a gorge between the Great Smoky and Bald Mountains and then emerges in Tennessee, to finally fall into the Tennessee River at the junction with the Holston just above Knoxville. These rocks received their name from Indian pictures and signs painted upon them. William Gillmore Simms, the Carolina author, tells in _Tselica_ the legend of this spot, founded on the tradition of the Cherokees that a siren lives on the French Broad who allures the hunter to the stream and strangles him in her embrace. Thus have the American aborigines reproduced in their way on this beautiful river the romantic legends of the Lorelie Rock on the Rhine, where, the ancient German legend tells us so interestingly, there dwelt another beautiful siren whose seductive music lured her lovers to the rock, when she drowned them in the waves washing its base.

Carolina And Georgia.

Eastward from the Blue Ridge the extended line of the Piedmont Branch of the Southern Railway parallels the base of the range on its route from Washington southwest to Atlanta. The railroad from Asheville southeast to Columbia and Charleston crosses it at Spartansburg in South Carolina. This is a prosperous little town in a region of iron and gold-mines, with also a development of mineral springs, attractive as a summer resort to the people of Charleston and residents of the South Carolina lowlands. Ten miles northeast of Spartansburg is the Revolutionary battlefield of the Cowpens, getting its name from the adjacent cow-pasture in the olden time. Here on a hill-range called the Thickety Mountain, January 17, 1781, the British under Tarleton were signally defeated. The railway passes through a rolling country, and thirty-three miles farther northeast is King's Mountain, where the previous battle was fought, October 7, 1780, in which the British under Colonel Ferguson were also defeated and a large part of their forces captured. Beyond, the boundary is crossed from South to North Carolina and Charlotte is reached, having cotton factories and gold mines and twelve thousand people, the county-seat of Mecklenburg, where the famous resolutions were passed, May 20, 1775, demanding independence. Farther northeast is Salisbury, where was located one of the chief Confederate prisons during the Civil War, and the National Cemetery now contains the graves of over twelve thousand soldiers who died there in captivity. Beyond this, the Yadkin River is crossed, and the route enters the tobacco district. Here is Greensboro', and near it the Revolutionary battle of Guilford Court House was fought March 15, 1781, when Lord Cornwallis defeated General Greene. To the eastward is Chapel Hill, the seat of the University of North Carolina, with three hundred students. Farther east is the great tobacco town of Durham, with large factories and six thousand people supported by this industry, whose education is cared for by Trinity College, which has been munificently endowed by the tobacco princes Colonels Duke and Carr. Twenty-five miles still farther east is Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants, built on high ground near the Neuse River. It has a central Union Square from which fine streets diverge, and here is located the impressive State House, modelled after the Parthenon. Raleigh has various public institutions, and large cemeteries where the dead of both armies who fell in the Civil War are buried.

The Congaree River, flowing southeast out of the Blue Ridge, intersects the extensive Pine Barrens of South Carolina, and here on the railway route from Asheville via Spartansburg to Charleston is the South Carolina State capital, Columbia. It is built on the bluffs along the river, a few miles below its falls, and in a charming location, the view of the valley from the grounds of the Executive Mansion and Arsenal Hill being very fine. The South Carolina State House is a magnificent building on which a large sum has been expended, and in the grounds is a monument to the Palmetto Regiment of South Carolinians who served with distinction in the war with Mexico. It was here that the Nullification Ordinance was passed in 1832, and the Secession Ordinance in December, 1860. General Sherman, on his march from Atlanta to the sea in February, 1865, occupied Columbia, when, unfortunately, the city was set fire and a large portion destroyed. The Pine Barrens and sand hills of South Carolina stretch southwestward from the Congaree to the Savannah River, and in this region is the popular winter resort of Aiken, surrounded by vast forests of fragrant pines growing in a soil of white sand, the town being a gem in the way of gardens and shrubbery which, with the balmy atmosphere, make it additionally attractive. While Aiken does not have a large population, yet it has very wide streets to accommodate them, the main avenue being two hundred and five feet and the cross streets one hundred and fifty feet wide. Its attractiveness of climate is condensed into the statement that the Aiken winter is "four months of June." A few miles westward is the Savannah River, and here at the head of navigation is Augusta, Georgia, on the western bank, a great cotton mart and seat of textile factories, which have attracted a population of thirty-five thousand, the city being known as the "Lowell of the South." The Sibley Cotton Mill is regarded as being architecturally the handsomest factory in the world. The whole surrounding district is an almost universal cotton-field, thus furnishing the raw materials for this industry. Near this mill stands the tall chimney of the Confederate Powder Works, left as a grim memorial of the Civil War. The various mills are served by canals bringing the water for power from the Savannah River at a higher level above the city, with an ample fall. Augusta is regarded as one of the most beautiful of the Southern cities, having wide tree-embowered streets and many ornate buildings, and it fortunately escaped injury during the Civil War. It was laid out by General Oglethorpe, the Georgia founder, on the same artistic plan as Savannah, and he named it after the English princess, Augusta. The Savannah River, the largest of Georgia, and forming the boundary with South Carolina, rises in the Blue Ridge in close proximity to the headwaters of the Tennessee and the Chattahoochee. Its initial streams, the Tugaloo and Kiowee, unite in the Piedmont district to form the Savannah, which then flows four hundred and fifty miles past Augusta and Savannah to the sea.

Atlanta And Its Neighborhood.

The Chattahoochee was the Indian "river of the pictured rocks." Its head-streams rise in the Blue Ridge in northeastern Georgia, and flowing southwest and afterwards south, it forms the western boundary of the State. Then uniting with the Flint River, the two make the Appalachicola, which, crossing Florida, empties into the Gulf. The Chattahoochee in its course passes, about seven miles from the Georgia capital, Atlanta, the "Gate City," the metropolis of the "Empire State of the South," and the chief Southern railway centre. Being largely a growth of the railway system of the "New South," the city is picturesquely situated on a hilly surface, elevated a thousand feet above the sea, and is laid out in the form of a circle of about four miles radius around the Union Passenger Depot, which is the central point. The first house was built at this place in 1836, on an Indian trail to the crossing of the Chattahoochee, whither a railroad was projected, and for several years it was called, for this reason, Terminus, being afterwards incorporated as the town of Marthasville, and named after the Georgia Governor Lumpkin's daughter. In 1845, the first railroads were constructed connecting it with the seaboard, and soon becoming a tobacco and cotton-mart, it grew rapidly, and in 1847 was incorporated as the city of Atlanta, having about twenty-five hundred people. During the Civil War it was a leading Confederate depot of supplies, but its great growth has come since, and largely through the development of the railway system and manufactures, so that now the city and suburbs, which are extensive, have a population approximating two hundred thousand. Its State Capitol is an impressive building, costing $1,000,000, and it has many imposing business and public structures and fine private residences. Joel Chandler Harris, _Uncle Remus_, is a resident of Atlanta. Its great historical event was the memorable siege during the Civil War. The geographical position of the city made it of vital importance to the Confederacy. General Sherman, in his advance southward from Chattanooga in the spring and early summer of 1864, steadily fought and outflanked the Confederates, until in July they fell back behind the Chattahoochee and took a line covering Atlanta, General Hood assuming command July 17th. Sherman crossed the Chattahoochee and then Hood retired to the intrenchments around the city. For several weeks there were manoeuvres and battles around Atlanta, until near the end of August, when Sherman had got behind the city, cutting the railways supplying it. On the night of September 1st, Hood evacuated Atlanta, and next day Sherman entered. In this great siege and in the previous contests from Chattanooga the losses of the two armies were sixty-six thousand men, each army having been repeatedly reinforced. This capture sealed the doom of the Confederacy, although there were subsequent battles and movements around Atlanta until November. Then Sherman, reinforcing General Thomas at Nashville, and leaving him to take care of Hood, ran back all the surplus property and supplies to Chattanooga, broke up the railway, cut the telegraph behind him, burnt Atlanta November 12th, and on the 15th started on his famous "March to the Sea," to cut the Confederacy in two, capturing Savannah in December. The destruction of Atlanta was almost complete, every building being burnt excepting a few in the centre, and a number of scattered dwellings elsewhere. After peace came, however, the restoration of Atlanta was rapid and thorough, and it is now one of the most progressive and wealthy Southern cities. It was Sherman's "March to the Sea" which furnished the theme for one of the most inspiriting songs of the Civil War, "Marching Through Georgia":

"Bring the good old bugle, boys! we'll sing another song-- Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along, Sing it as we used to sing it fifty thousand strong, While we were marching through Georgia.

_Chorus_--"'Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the Jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!' So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea, While we were marching through Georgia.

"How the darkies shouted when they heard the joyful sound! How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found! How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground, While we were marching through Georgia.--_Chorus_,

"So we made a thoroughfare for Freedom and her train, Sixty miles in latitude--three hundred to the main, Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain, While we were marching through Georgia."--_Chorus._

The railway leading north from Atlanta to Chattanooga exhibits, throughout the line, relics of Sherman's protracted struggle with the Confederates as he pressed southward, and they opposing him were repeatedly outflanked and retired to new defenses. Long ranges of hills cross the country from northeast to southwest, and on their crests are the remains of massive breastworks and battlements which time is gradually obliterating. Dalton, Resaca and Allatoona were all formidable defensive works, and each in turn was outflanked. Rome, the chief town on this route, now has seven thousand people and various factories. To the westward of Atlanta the railway leads a hundred miles to Anniston, Alabama, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge among the rich beds of Alabama iron-ores, and then to Talladega, the Indian "village on the border," where General Jackson fought one of his severest battles with the Creeks. It is now a busy manufacturing town. Beyond is the great industrial city of Birmingham with thirty-five thousand people, founded in 1871, a phenomenal development of the "New South," its industry being exhibited in enormous iron and steel mills, foundries, and similar establishments. Near the city is its El Dorado, the Red Mountain containing vast stores of hematite iron-ores, with abundant coal and limestone, minerals which have made Alabama the third iron-producing commonwealth in the United States, three-fourths of it being made in the Birmingham district. Nearby is another iron town of recent foundation, Bessemer, and a short distance to the southwest the old Alabama city of Tuscaloosa, the seat of the University of Alabama. This Indian word means the "Black Warrior," and thus was named the river, Tuscaloosa being at the head of steamboat navigation on the Black Warrior. The tradition is that before the white man knew this region it was held by a proud and powerful Indian tribe. When De Soto came along in 1540, searching for gold, he encountered these Indians, whose sachem was the fearless and haughty black giant Tuscaloosa. By stratagem De Soto captured the giant and carried him off a hostage down to Mobile, whence he afterwards escaped. This old city is shown on a French map of Louisiana published in 1720.

Southeast of Atlanta is Macon, at the head of navigation on Ocmulgee River, a prominent cotton-shipping city, with twenty-five thousand people. Here is the Wesleyan Female College with four hundred students, founded in 1836, and said to be the oldest female college in the world. To the southward, at Andersonville, was the great Stockade Prison of the Civil War, where large numbers of captured Union soldiers were confined, being so badly treated that thirteen thousand of them died. Henry Wirtz, a Swiss adventurer, was in charge, and the Confederate authorities in two official reports attributed the excessive mortality to the bad management of the prison. A military court after the close of the war convicted Wirtz of excessive cruelty, and he was executed in November, 1865. The prison-grounds are now a park, a memorial monument has been erected, and in an extensive National Cemetery the dead soldiers are buried. Southward of Atlanta is Columbus, with thirty-five thousand people and large cotton, woollen and flour-mills, one of the chief manufacturing cities of the Southern States. It stands on the Chattahoochee, which here rushes down rocky rapids, providing an admirable water-power improved by a massive dam. The river is navigable to the Gulf, and its steamboats have a large trade.

Atlanta To Mobile.

Proceeding southwest from Atlanta, the route crosses the Chattahoochee at West Point, another shipping port for the vast cotton plantations of this region, whence steamboats take the cotton-bales down to the Gulf. Beyond is Tuskegee in Alabama, where is located the famous Industrial and Normal Institute for colored youth, conducted by Booker T. Washington, the distinguished colored educationalist, who was born a slave in Virginia. It was founded in a small way by him in 1881 to meet the needs of education, and particularly to provide for the training of teachers for the colored race, and having greatly grown, has sent out nearly four hundred of its graduates throughout the South, where they are teaching others of their people. It has seventy instructors and over a thousand students; its lands cover nearly four square miles and there are forty-two buildings, many of them substantial brick structures erected by the students, the property being valued at $300,000. Great attention is given to manual training, and this institution, entirely supported by donations and requiring $75,000 annually for its expenses, is doing a great work in furthering the advancement of the colored race in the South.

A short distance westward, the Alabama River is formed by the union of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, and coming down a winding course a few miles from the junction, sweeps around a grand bend to then go away towards the setting sun, and ultimately seek the Gulf. The story is that a wearied Creek Indian, seeking quiet in the far-off land, wandered out of the mountains to the fertile plains of this attractive region. Charmed by the scenery and the beauties of the valley, when he reached the bank of the river he gazed about him, and then struck his spear into the earth, saying _Alabama_--"Here we Rest." At this grand bend of the river, upon a circle of hills surrounded by rich farming lands, is Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. There was an Indian village here in remote times, and traders came to the place, so that gradually a settlement grew, which in 1817 was made a town and named after the unfortunate General Montgomery who fell in storming Quebec. The bluffs rise to Capitol Hill, crowned with the State House, a small but imposing structure, having from its elevated dome an extensive view. Here was organized the Government of the Confederate States in February, 1861, continuing until the capital was removed to Richmond the following May. In the grounds there is a handsome Confederate Monument. There are thirty thousand people in Montgomery, and it has a large trade in cotton, gathered from the adjacent districts, shipped down the river to Mobile and also by railroad to Savannah for export. In the suburbs are many old-fashioned plantation residences, and the adjacent country is largely a cotton-field, the great Southern staple growing luxuriantly on the black soils of this region. The Alabama people devote themselves chiefly to cotton-growing, and this industry leads throughout the vast section of the South below the Tennessee boundary. This great product is the leading foreign export of the United States, and being indirectly the cause of the Civil War, it brought to the Confederacy the sympathy of the nations of Europe, which were the chief consumers. Cotton is said to have originated in India, and in America was first cultivated for its flowers in Maryland. It was not until about the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that the invention by Eli Whitney of the cotton-gin enabled the seeds to be easily removed from the lint, and thus enlarged the uses of cotton, so that a rapid increase was given its growth and also its manufacture throughout the civilized world. Both the seed and the lint are now used, the former producing valuable oil.

The Alabama River flows a winding course from Montgomery southwest to Mobile Bay, first going westward to Selma. It passes a region of the finest cotton lands, where originally the old southern plantation system reached its richest development, and where the modern plan of smaller farms has been making some headway since the Civil War. Selma is the _entrepôt_ of what is known as the Alabama "Black Belt," built on a high bluff along the river, and has cotton factories and other industries, including large mills for crushing the cotton-seed and producing the oil. To the westward, over the boundary of the State of Mississippi, is Meridian, a manufacturing town of fifteen thousand people, which has grown around a railway junction. This was the place which General Sherman, in one of his rapid marches, captured in February, 1864, and destroyed, the General reporting that his army made "the most complete destruction of railways ever beheld." Farther westward, on Pearl River, is Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, a small city with an elaborate State House. The Alabama River flows southwest from Selma and joins the Tombigbee River coming from the north, the stream thus formed being the Mobile River. A few miles below the junction it divides into two branches, of which the eastern is called the Tensas, both then dividing into several others and making a sort of delta, but meeting again in a common embouchure at the head of Mobile Bay, the Mobile River being about fifty miles long. The Tombigbee River is four hundred and fifty miles in length, and rises in the hills of Northeastern Mississippi. The name is Indian, and means the "coffin-makers," though why this name was given is unknown. The Tombigbee became celebrated in politics in the early nineteenth century, through a correspondence between the Treasury at Washington and a customs officer at Mobile, wherein the latter, being asked "How far does the Tombigbee River run up?" replied that "The Tombigbee River does not run up; it runs down." He was removed from office for his levity, and the controversy following, which became an acrimonious partisan dispute, gave the river its celebrity.

Mobile And Its Bay.

When De Soto journeyed through Florida and to the Mississippi River, he found in this region the powerful tribe of Mauvillians, and their village of Mavilla is mentioned in early histories of Florida. From this is derived the name of Mobile, on the western bank of the river near the head of Mobile Bay, the only seaport of the State of Alabama, about thirty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This was the original seat of French colonization in the southwest, and for a few years the capital of their colony of Louisiana. It was settled at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In 1710 the Sieur de Bienville transferred the earliest French colony from Biloxi to Mobile Bay, and many of the first settlers were French Canadians. In 1723, however, the seat of the colonial government was removed from Mobile to New Orleans. In 1763 this region was transferred to England; in 1780 England gave it to Spain; and in 1813 Spain made it over to the United States. The city is laid out upon a plain having a background of low hills; its broad and quiet streets are shaded with live oaks and magnolias; and everywhere are gardens, luxuriant with shrubbery and flowers. There is a population approximating thirty-five thousand, but the city does not make much progress, owing to the difficulties of maintaining a deep-water channel, though this has been better accomplished of late. Cotton export is the chief trade. There are attractive parks, a magnificent shell road along the shore of the bay for several miles, and fine estates with beautiful villas on the hills in the suburbs. The harbor entrance from the Gulf is protected on either hand by Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines, while the remains can be seen of several batteries on the shores of the bay, relics of the Civil War. Over on Tensas River is a ruin, Spanish Fort, one of the early colonial defenses, while in the city is the Guard House Tower, a quaint old structure built in Spanish style. Mobile was held by the Confederates throughout the war, not surrendering until after General Lee had done so in April, 1865, although the Union forces had previously captured the harbor entrance. This capture was one of Admiral Farragut's achievements. Having opened the Mississippi River in 1863, Farragut, in January, 1864, made a reconnoissance of the forts at the entrance to Mobile Bay, and expressed the opinion that with a single iron-clad and five thousand men he could take the city. Several months elapsed, however, before the attempt was made, but in August he got together a fleet of four iron-clads and fourteen wooden vessels, and on the 5th ran past the forts at the entrance, after a desperate engagement, in which one of his ships, the Tecumseh, was sunk by striking a torpedo, and he lost three hundred and thirty-five men. During the fight, Farragut watched it and gave his directions from a place high up in the main rigging of his flagship, the Hartford. Shoal water and channel obstructions prevented his ascending to the city, but in a few days the forts surrendered, the harbor was held, and blockade-running, which had been very profitable, ceased.

Mobile Bay is one of the finest harbors on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Its broad waters have low shores, backed by gentle slopes leading up to forest-clad plateaus behind, a large surface being wooded and displaying fine magnolias and yellow pines, while in the lowland swamps and along the water-courses are cypress, and interspersed the live oak, festooned with gray moss. But almost everywhere Southern Alabama, like Florida, displays splendid pine forests, reminding of Longfellow's invocation to _My Cathedral:_

"Like two cathedral towers these stately pines Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones; The arch beneath them is not built with stones, Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines, And carved this graceful arabesque of vines; No organ but the wind here sighs and moans, No sepulchre conceals a martyr's bones, No marble bishop on his tomb reclines. Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves, Gives back a softened echo to thy tread! Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds, In leafy galleries beneath the eaves, Are singing! Listen, ere the sound be fled, And learn there may be worship without words."

And in garden and grove, all about, there is a wealth of semi-tropical flowers and shrubbery, with their rich perfumes crowned by the delicious orange tree, whereof Hoyt thus pleasantly sings:

"Yes, sing the song of the orange tree, With its leaves of velvet green; With its luscious fruit of sunset hue, The finest that ever was seen; The grape may have its bacchanal verse, To praise the fig we are free; But homage I pay to the queen of all, The glorious orange tree."

The Valley Of The Mississippi.

XX.

The Valley Of The Mississippi.

The Father of Waters -- Its Drainage Area -- The Big Muddy -- Sources of the Missouri -- The Great Falls -- Fort Benton -- Sioux City -- Council Bluffs -- Omaha -- St. Joseph -- Atchison -- Leavenworth -- Lawrence -- Topeka -- Osowatomie -- John Brown -- Kansas Emigrants -- The Walls of Corn -- Kansas City -- Wyandotte -- Chillicothe -- Florida -- Mark Twain -- Muscatine -- Burlington -- Nauvoo -- Keokuk -- Des Moines -- St. Louis -- Jefferson Barracks -- Egypt -- Belmont -- Columbus -- Island No. 10 -- Fort Pillow -- The Chickasaws -- Memphis -- Mississippi River Peculiarities -- Its Deposits and Cut-Offs -- The Alluvial Bottom Lands -- St. Francis Basin -- Helena -- White River -- Arkansas River -- Fort Smith -- Little Rock -- Arkansas Hot Springs -- Washita River -- Napoleon -- Yazoo Basin -- Vicksburg -- Natchez Indians -- Natchez -- Red River -- Texarkana -- Shreveport -- Red River Rafts -- Atchafalaya River -- Baton Rouge -- Biloxi -- Beauvoir -- Pass Christian -- New Orleans -- Battle of New Orleans -- Lake Pontchartrain -- The Mississippi Levees -- Crevasses -- The Delta and Passes -- The Balize -- The Forts -- South Pass -- Eads Jetties -- Gulf of Mexico.

The Big Muddy.

The great "Father of Waters," with its many tributaries, drains a territory of a million and a half square miles, in which live almost one-half the population of the United States. The length of the Mississippi River from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico is about twenty-six hundred miles, the actual distance in a direct line being but sixteen hundred and sixty miles. Its name comes from the Ojibway words _Misi Sepe_, meaning the "great river, flowing everywhere," and the early explorers spelled it "Mesasippi." The Iroquois called it the Kahnahweyokah, having much the same meaning. The upper waters of the Mississippi have already been described in a preceding chapter, and taken in connection with its chief tributary, the Missouri, it is one of the longest rivers in the world, the distance from the source to the Gulf being almost forty-two hundred miles. The Dakotas called this stream _Minni-shosha_, or the "muddy water," and its popular name throughout the Northwest, from the turbid current it carries, has come to be the "Big Muddy." The head streams rise in Idaho, the _Eda Hoe_ of the Nez Perces, meaning the "Light on the Mountains," and in Wyoming. The name of the Indian nation through whose lands its upper waters flow--the Dakotahs--means the "Confederate People," indicating a league of various tribes. The Mississippi drains practically the whole country between the Appalachian Mountains on the east and the "Continental Divide" of the Rockies on the west.

The Missouri River is formed in southwestern Montana, by the union of the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin Rivers. Its length from the source of the Madison River in the Yellowstone National Park to its confluence with the Mississippi above St. Louis is about three thousand miles. The first exploration of the headwaters of the Missouri was by the famous expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark in 1805, who ascended to its sources, and crossing the Rockies descended the Snake and Columbia Rivers into Oregon. They found the confluence of the three rivers making the Missouri, in July, and called it "the Three Forks," at the same time naming the rivers after President Jefferson and his Secretaries of State and the Treasury. The Missouri, from the junction, first flows northward through the defiles of the Rockies, and breaks out of the mountain wall in Prickly Pear Canyon, at the Gate of the Mountains, where the rocky cliffs rise twelve hundred feet. Forty miles northeast it goes down its Great Falls to a lower plateau, having a total descent of nearly five hundred feet, the stream contracting in the gorge to a width of three hundred yards, and tumbling over repeated cascades, with intervening rapids. The Black Eagle descends fifty feet, Colter's Falls twelve feet, the Crooked Falls twenty feet, the Rainbow forty-eight feet, and the Great Falls ninety-two feet, this series of rapids and cascades covering a distance of sixteen miles. Lewis and Clark were the first white men who saw these magnificent cataracts of the Upper Missouri, and they named the different falls. The Black Eagle was named from the fact that on an island at its foot an eagle had fixed her nest on a cottonwood tree. It is recorded by a United States Engineer officer who was there in 1860, that the eagle's nest then still remained in the cottonwood tree on the island, being occupied by a bald eagle of large size. Again in 1872 the nest and the old eagle were still there, and from the longevity of these birds, it was then believed to be the same eagle seen in 1805. The old eagle nest and cottonwood tree are all gone now, and in their place are a big dam, power-house and huge ore-smelter, worked by the ample water-power of the fall. The flourishing town of Great Falls gets its prosperity from these cataracts and is a prominent locality for copper-smelting, having fifteen thousand people. At the head of river navigation, some distance farther down, is the military post of Fort Benton. The river then flows eastward through Montana, receives the Yellowstone at Fort Buford and turns southeast in North Dakota, passing Bismarck, the capital, and flowing south and southeast it becomes the boundary between Nebraska and Kansas on the west, and South Dakota, Iowa and Missouri on the northeast. Its course is through an alluvial valley of great fertility, from which it gathers the sediment with which its waters are so highly charged. Much of the adjacent territory in Dakota and Montana is covered by the extensive reservations of the Indian tribes of the Northwest, where the remnants now live a semi-nomadic life under military guardianship and government control. The river flows past Yankton, a supply post for these reservations, which being the settlement farthest up-stream, was thus named Yankton, meaning "the village at the end." Some distance below, the Big Sioux River flows in, forming the boundary between Dakota and Iowa, and here is Sioux City, where there are forty thousand people, much trade, and important manufactures.

Below here lived the Omahas, or "up-stream" Indians, and soon the Missouri in its onward course flows between Omaha and Council Bluffs. Here the bluffs bordering the river recede for some distance on the eastern bank, making a broad plain adjoining the shore, whither the Indians of all the region formerly came to hold their councils and make treaties. A settlement naturally grew at the Council Bluffs, which is now a city of twenty-five thousand people on the plain and adjacent hills, with fine residences in the numerous glens intersecting the bluffs in every direction. Three bridges cross the Missouri to Omaha, on the western shore, two for railways, one of them being the great steel bridge carrying over the Union Pacific, the pioneer railroad constructed to the Pacific Coast. Omaha is the chief city of Nebraska, the State receiving its name from the Nebraska river, meaning the "place of broad shallow waters." Omaha has over one hundred and fifty thousand people and is built on a wide plateau elevated about eighty feet above the river, from which it gradually slopes upward. It dates from 1854, but did not receive its impetus until the completion of the Pacific Railway converged to it various lines bringing an enormous trade. From its position at the initial point it is known as the "Gate City." There are large manufactures and its meat-packing industries are of the first importance, while its enterprise is giving it rapid growth. The Union Pacific Railroad pursues its route westward through Nebraska, up the valley of the Platte River for several hundred miles, and at Fort Omaha, just north of the city, is the military headquarters of the Department.

The State Of Kansas.

Various great railways bound to the West cross the Missouri in its lower course. The river flows between Kansas and Missouri, and here are St. Joseph with sixty thousand people, immense railway and stock-yards, and many factories; and Atchison with twenty thousand population and large flouring-mills, where the Atchison railway system formerly had its initial point, though now it traverses the country from Chicago southwest to Santa Fe and the Pacific Ocean. Leavenworth, a city of twenty-five thousand, has grown at the site of Fort Leavenworth, one of the important early posts on the Missouri. To the southward the Kaw or Kansas River flows in, the Indian "Smoky Water," coming from the west, draining the greater part of the State which it names. Upon this river is Lawrence, the seat of the Kansas State University, having a thousand students, and of Haskell Institute, a Government training-school for Indian boys and girls. Westward along the Kansas River broadly spread the vast and fertile prairies making the agricultural wealth of the State, and sixty-seven miles from the Missouri, built on both sides of the river, is Topeka, the capital, having thirty-five thousand people, large mills and an extensive trade with the surrounding farm district. In this eastern portion of Kansas, prior to the Civil War, was fought, often with bloodshed, the protracted border contest between the free-soil and pro-slavery parties for the possession of the State, that had so much to do with bringing on the greater conflict. When Congress passed the bill in 1854 organizing Nebraska and Kansas into territories, an effort began to establish slavery, and the Missourians coming over the border tried to control. They founded Atchison and other places and sent in settlers. At the same time Aid Societies for anti-slavery emigrants began colonizing from New England, large numbers thus coming to preëmpt lands. During four years the contests went on, Lawrence and other towns being besieged and burnt. The first Free-State Constitution was framed at Topeka in 1855, which Congress would not approve, and the following year the pro-slavery Constitution was enacted at Lecompton, which the people rejected. After the Civil War began, Kansas was admitted to the Union in 1861 with slavery prohibited. Among the free-soilers who went out to engage in these Kansas conflicts was old John Brown. Near the Missouri border, to the southward of Kansas River, is the little town of Osowatomie, in the early settlement of which Brown took part. Here he had his fights with the slavery invaders who came over from Missouri, finally burning the place and killing Brown's son, a tragedy said to have inspired his subsequent crusade against Harper's Ferry, which practically opened the Civil War. A monument is erected to John Brown's memory at Osawatomie. The New England emigration to Kansas in those momentous times inspired Whittier's poem, _The Kansas Emigrants_:

"We cross the prairie as of old The Pilgrims crossed the sea, To make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free!

"We go to rear a wall of men On Freedom's southern line, And plant beside the cotton-tree The rugged Northern pine!

"We're flowing from our native hills As our free rivers flow; The blessing of our Mother-land Is on us as we go.

"We go to plant her common schools On distant prairie swells, And give the Sabbaths of the wild The music of her bells.

"Upbearing, like the Ark of old, The Bible in our van, We go to test the truth of God Against the fraud of man.

"No pause nor rest, save where the streams That feed the Kansas run, Save where our Pilgrim gonfalon Shall flout the setting sun!

"We'll tread the prairie as of old Our fathers sailed the sea, And make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free!"

The Civil War ended all these conflicts, and since then Kansas has been eminently peaceful. It is now the leading State of the corn belt which broadly crosses the middle of the United States. Its vast corn crops make the wealth of the people, and as they may be good or poor, the Kansan is in joy or despair. One year the farmers will be overwhelmed with debt; the next brings an ample crop, and they pay their debts and are in affluence. Thus throbs the pulse as the sunshine and rains may make a corn crop in the State that sometimes exceeds three hundred millions of bushels; and then there are not enough railway cars available to carry away the product. In a good crop the cornstalks grow to enormous heights, sometimes reaching twenty feet to the surmounting tassel, and a tall man on tip-toe can about touch the ears, while a two-pound ear is a customary weight, with thirty-five ears to a bushel. These vast cornfields, watched year by year and crop after crop by the hard-working wife of a Kansas farmer, caused her to write the touching lyric which has become the Kansas national hymn, Mrs. Ellen P. Allerton's "Walls of Corn":

"Smiling and beautiful, heaven's dome Bends softly over our prairie home.

"But the wide, wide lands that stretched away Before my eyes in the days of May;

"The rolling prairie's billowy swell, Breezy upland and timbered dell;

"Stately mansion and hut forlorn-- All are hidden by walls of corn.

"All the wide world is narrowed down To walls of corn, now sere and brown.

"What do they hold--these walls of corn, Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn?

"He who questions may soon be told-- A great State's wealth these walls enfold.

"No sentinels guard these walls of corn, Never is sounded the warder's horn;

"Yet the pillars are hung with gleaming gold, Left all unbarred, though thieves are bold.

"Clothes and food for the toiling poor; Wealth to heap at the rich man's door;

"Meat for the healthy, and balm for him Who moans and tosses in chamber dim;

"Shoes for the barefoot; pearls to twine In the scented tresses of ladies fine;

"Things of use for the lowly cot Where (bless the corn!) want cometh not;

"Luxuries rare for the mansion grand, Booty for thieves that rob the land--

"All these things, and so many more It would fill a book but to name them o'er,

"Are hid and held in these walls of corn Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn.

"Where do they stand, these walls of corn, Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn?

"Open the atlas, conned by rule, In the olden days of the district school.

"Point to this rich and bounteous land That yields such fruits to the toiler's hand.

"'Treeless desert,' they called it then, Haunted by beasts and forsook by men.

"Little they knew what wealth untold Lay hid where the desolate prairies rolled.

"Who would have dared, with brush or pen, As this land is now, to paint it then?

"And how would the wise ones have laughed in scorn Had prophet foretold these walls of corn Whose banners toss in the breeze of morn."

The Kansas River flows into the Missouri at Kansas City, the chief settlement of the Missouri Valley, entirely the growth of the period since the Civil War, through the prodigious development of the railways. There are two cities where the Missouri is crossed by three fine bridges, and having two hundred thousand people, the larger being Kansas City in Missouri, on the southern river bank, and the other adjoining is Kansas City or Wyandotte, the largest city in Kansas, through which the Kansas River flows. The two cities are separated by the State boundary between Kansas and Missouri. Next to Chicago, this place has the largest stock-yards and packing-house plants, and does an enormous trade in cattle, meats and grain, many railroads radiating in all directions. The site was originally the home of the Wyandotte Indians who were removed here from Ohio in 1843. The town of Wyandotte had a small population prior to the Civil War, but the growth did not begin until after the close of that conflict had stimulated railway building and western colonization, and being on the trail from the Missouri River to the southwest, this gave the first impetus. These cities now have a rapid expansion, and are the greatest railway centres west of the Mississippi River, their lines going to the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific through sections of country which are rapidly populating and developing vast agricultural and mineral products.

The Missouri River traverses the entire State of Missouri in winding, turbid current from west to east. It passes Jefferson City, the State Capital, having about seven thousand people, and just below receives the Osage River coming up from the southwest. At Chillicothe to the northwest is buried Nelson Kneiss, who composed the music for Thomas Dunn English's popular ballad of _Ben Bolt_; and at Florida, to the northeast, was born in November, 1835, the humorist, Samuel L. Clemens, _Mark Twain_. Captain Sellers, who furnished river news to the New Orleans _Picayune_, had used this _nom-de-plume_, and dying in 1863, Clemens adopted it. Twenty miles above St. Louis the Missouri flows into the Mississippi, contributing the greater volume of water to the joint stream, the clear Mississippi waters, pushed over to the eastern bank, refusing for a long distance below to mingle with the turbid flood of the Missouri.

The City Of St. Louis.

The Mississippi River below the Moline Rapids at Rock Island passes various flourishing cities, including Muscatine and Burlington, the former having considerable trade in timber and food products, while Burlington, a much larger place, spreads back from the bluffs and is a busy railroad city, fronted by a beautiful reach of the river. About thirty miles below, on the Illinois shore, is Nauvoo, a small town chiefly raising grapes and wine, but formerly one of the leading settlements on the river. This town was originally built by the Mormons under the lead of their prophet, Joseph Smith, in 1838, after they had been driven from various places in New York, Ohio and Missouri. Nauvoo flourished greatly, reaching fifteen thousand population, but dissensions arose and the enmity of the growing population elsewhere caused riots, in one of which, in 1844, Smith, who had been arrested and taken to jail at Carthage, Illinois, was killed. Brigham Young then assumed leadership, and in 1845 removed the colony over to the Missouri River at Council Bluffs, finally migrating to the Great Salt Lake in Utah, two years later. Below Nauvoo are the Lower Rapids of the Mississippi, extending twelve miles to Keokuk, a beautiful city built partly along the river, but mostly on the summit of the bluffs, here rising one hundred and fifty feet. Keokuk was a noted Indian chief, his name meaning the "watchful fox." Des Moines River, forming the boundary between Iowa and Missouri, flows in at the lower edge of the city, having come down from the northwest and passing the Iowa State Capital, Des Moines, at the head of navigation, where there is a population of sixty thousand and extensive manufactures. This city has a magnificent Capitol, erected at a cost of $3,000,000, and its prosperity is largely due to the extensive coal measures of the neighborhood. It has grown around the site of the former frontier outpost of Fort Des Moines, built in the early days for protection against the Sioux. Below are Quincy, Hannibal and Alton, the latter being just above the confluence with the Missouri, and then the Mississippi River flows majestically past the levee at St. Louis, the chief city on its banks, having two great railway bridges crossing over to the Illinois shore.

When the French held Louisiana, a grant was made in 1762 to Pierre Ligueste Laclede and his partners to establish, as the "Louisiana Fur Company," trading-posts on the Mississippi. Laclede in that year came out from France to New Orleans, and in 1764, in order to open the fur trade with the Indians on the Missouri, he ascended the Mississippi, and on February 15th made the first settlement on the site of St. Louis, building a house and four stores and naming the place in honor of King Louis XV. of France. He had frequent journeys along the river, and died upon one of them near the mouth of the Arkansas in 1778. The post was made the capital of Upper Louisiana, but it grew very slowly, having only a thousand people when Louisiana was ceded to the United States in 1803. The development of steamboating and afterwards of the railway systems, all the great lines seeking St. Louis, gave it rapid growth subsequently, and its population now reaches seven hundred thousand. It spreads with its vast railway terminals for nearly twenty miles along the Mississippi, sweeping in a grand curve past the centre of the city, which rises in repeated terraces as it extends westward back from the river, the highest being two hundred feet above the water-level. It has an enormous trade and extensive manufactures, being the largest tobacco-making city in the world, and having one of the greatest American breweries, the Anheuser-Busch Company. Its Chamber of Commerce, of sandstone in Renaissance, is a noted building, and its grand Court House, erected as a Greek cross, is surmounted by a dome three hundred feet high. It also has a new and magnificent City Hall. St. Louis been singularly free from fires, but its great disaster was upon May 27, 1896, when a terrific tornado swept through the city, killing three hundred people and destroying property valued at $10,000,000.

The chief institution of learning is Washington University, which has fine new buildings in Forest Park on the western verge of the city, and cares for seventeen hundred students. The park system is very extensive, spreading partially around the built-up portions and embracing twenty-one hundred acres. The chief of these are the Forest Park, with fine trees and drives, the Tower Grove Park, Lafayette and Carondelet Parks, and in the northern suburbs O'Fallon Park, having adjacent the spacious Bellefontaine and Calvary Cemeteries. The gem of the system, however, is the Missouri Botanical Garden of seventy-five acres, the best of its kind in the country, which was bequeathed to the city by Henry Shaw, a native of Sheffield, England, who came to St. Louis, grew up with the city, and died there in 1889. The great attraction of St. Louis is its splendid bridge crossing the Mississippi, built by James B. Eads and completed in 1874 at a cost of $10,000,000, carrying a railway across, with a highway on the upper deck, being more than two thousand yards long, and resting on arches rising fifty-five feet above the water. The railway is tunnelled under the city for nearly a mile, and leads to the Union Station, which is one of the largest in the world. The Merchants' Bridge, which cost $3,000,000, brings another railway over, three miles above, and a third bridge is projected. The vast aggregation of railways centering at St. Louis also uses another bridge route north of the city, crossing the Missouri just above its mouth and then the Mississippi to Alton on the Illinois shore. The military post of St. Louis is Jefferson Barracks down the river, an important station of the United States army.

[Illustration: Bridge Crossing the Mississippi at St. Louis]

Descending The Mississippi.

The scenery of the Mississippi River changes below St. Louis, and it loses much of the picturesqueness displayed by the bluff shores above. The mass of the waters is larger, the shores lower, and the adjacent regions more subject to overflow. There are many bends and islands, and the Ohio River comes in at the end of the long low peninsula of Cairo, further adding to the enormous current. The Southern Illinois lowlands have long been known as Egypt, and upon these bottom lands are grown prolific crops of corn. In one field in the great crop of 1899, covering over six thousand acres south of Ava, was raised six hundred thousand bushels, the banner American cornfield of that year. Twenty miles below Cairo is Columbus, on a high bluff upon the Kentucky shore, having Belmont opposite in Missouri, this having been the scene of General Grant's first battle in the Civil War. The Confederates in 1861 had fortified Columbus and placed twenty thousand men there to hold the Mississippi. Grant, in November, made an attack upon Belmont, and broke up and destroyed their outpost camp in spite of a heavy fire from Columbus, afterwards cutting his way out and returning to Cairo. When in the next spring Forts Henry and Donelson were captured, the Confederates found Columbus untenable and abandoned it without a contest. Fifty miles below is Donaldson Point, and off it the noted Island No. 10, for all these islands below Cairo were numbered. The Union gunboats attacked Island No. 10 in March, 1862, and carried on a bombardment and siege for a month, when it was captured with New Madrid on the Missouri shore several miles farther down, they being mutually dependent. The remains of earthworks are still visible on the island, and also the canal cut to assist in the investment. The Mississippi beyond, skirts the various bluffs of the Chickasaw region on the eastern bank, while on the western shore are broad alluvial lowlands, as the great river passes between Tennessee and Arkansas. On the first Chickasaw bluff is Fort Pillow, another Confederate stronghold, which, however, they were compelled to abandon in June, 1862, as the Union army had got in their rear. Here afterwards occurred the "Fort Pillow Massacre," in April, 1864, when the Confederates under General Forrest attacked and captured it.

All the region hereabout was inhabited by the Chickasaw Indians, who were so called in their language because they were "swamp-dwellers" and "eaters of the bog-potato." This tribe long ago removed to the Indian territory, where they are now in a prosperous condition and successful agriculturists. On the southwestern border of Tennessee is what is known as the fourth Chickasaw bluff, and here is the city of Memphis, the leading town between St. Louis and New Orleans. The bluff shore rises about eighty feet above the river at the ordinary stage of water, and is fronted by a wide levee extending for two miles and a broad esplanade bordered by warehouses. It was here that De Soto in 1541, with his band of adventurous explorers searching for gold, came and first saw the great river, their chronicler writing home "the river was so broad that if a man stood still on the other side, it could not be told whether he was a man or no; the channel was very deep, the current strong, the water muddy and filled with floating trees." Memphis is a handsome city, attractively laid out, the residential section having spacious lawn-bordered avenues, and there being an attractive park in the centre, the Court Square inhabited by numerous squirrels and adorned by Andrew Jackson's bust. Memphis has seventy thousand people, and a large trade both by river and railroad, being a leading cotton-shipping port, whence steamboats take vast amounts down to New Orleans for foreign export. Among its attractions are the cotton compresses and cotton-seed oil mills. In the Civil War, Memphis was captured by the Union gunboats in June, 1862, and held afterwards. On the outskirts, a grim memorial of the great conflict, is the National Cemetery, with fourteen thousand Union soldiers' graves.

Peculiarities Of The Great River.

The Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio is an entirely changed river. Above that stream, it is similar to most other inland waterways, having tolerably stable banks and not much change in width. Below Cairo, however, the deposits forming the banks are composed of alternate layers of sand and mud or clay, the sand having been deposited by running water, and the mud in comparatively still water, so that the sand-layers are readily washed out, thus causing the banks to cave whenever the current sets against them. Below the influx of the Ohio, the river traverses alluvial bottom lands of inexhaustible fertility, and usually stretching to a width of forty miles or more. These alluvial lands have a general southern slope of about eight inches to the mile, and stretch five hundred miles to the southward, the river winding through them in a devious course for eleven hundred miles, occasionally on the eastern side washing bluffs of one to three hundred feet. The slope is sufficient to create high velocities in the current, making a very unstable channel, constantly shifting laterally and causing the river to develop into a serpentine form, one bend following another continuously. The immediate river, wherever it may be at the time, is confined by banks of its own creation, which, like all sediment-bearing rivers, are highest near the stream itself. Thus apparently following a low ridge through the bottom lands, the resistless mass of muddy water sweeps onward with swiftness, eroding its outer banks in the bends and rebuilding them on the opposite points, frequently forming islands by its deposits, and as frequently removing them, as the direction of flow may be modified by the unending changes in progress. Chief among these changes is the formation of "cut-offs." Two vast eroding bends covering several miles of distance gradually approach each other until the water forces a passage across the narrow neck. As the channel distance between these bends may have been many miles around, the sudden "cut-off" makes a cascade of several feet, through which the torrent rushes with a roar heard far away. The sandy banks dissolve like so much sugar, in a single day the course of the river is radically changed, and steamboats pass where a few hours before was cultivated land. The checking of the current at the upper and lower mouths of the abandoned channel soon obstructs them with the deposits, and in a few years forms a crescent-shaped lake, of which there are so many in the bottoms adjacent to the river. The convex bank in a bend is built up as rapidly by the deposits as the opposite concave bank washes off, so that the river does not usually become any wider in the bends on account of the process. The deepest water is always next to the concave or wasting bank, where the most current flows. It is not an unusual sight along this extraordinary river to see an ancient and well-constructed house hanging over the caving bank, destined ultimately to drop into the water. It may originally have been a mile from the river in the centre of an old plantation, but the mighty current sweeping around and into the bend has worn away the land, often dissolving it by acres, and as it dropped in, has piled the sediment on the opposite point, thus steadily moving the river over without materially changing the width, until it is ready to engulf the house.

While the great river above the Ohio is generally bordered by limestone bluffs, making stable conditions, yet below, the Mississippi flows through a region wholly formed by its own deposits. It is said the alluvial basin below Cairo was once an estuary of the Gulf of Mexico, and that it has been raised in level, along with the entire southern portion of the Continent, about a hundred feet, and then filled in with the sediment the river carries down. This alluvial region is sometimes as much as seventy miles wide; and when not confined to the channel by levees, the natural course of a great Mississippi flood is to spread entirely over the basin. These floods will rise fifty feet, and the basin then becomes a great reservoir and storage-ground for the surplus waters, though the levee system has much restricted this. It is estimated that the annual discharge of the Mississippi is twenty-one million millions of cubic feet of water, and that it carries in a year four hundred millions of tons of solid material down to the Gulf to be deposited; thus cutting away from its banks a space equalling ten square miles of territory eighty feet deep. It takes one-fourth the rainfall of its valley down to the Gulf, or water equalling a depth of seven or eight inches over its whole drainage area, and the solid matter annually carried along and deposited there is equal to a body a mile square and three hundred and sixty feet high. The flow of the river is from one to six miles an hour in different stages and sections. The flood periods are in April and June, the river being above the mid-stage usually from January to August; and the lowest stage comes generally in October.

Memphis To Vicksburg.

Following down the great river, its winding and varying channel south of Memphis becomes the boundary between the States of Mississippi and Arkansas. To the westward the Arkansas shore is a lowland and the interior largely swamps, with many bayous and lakes, the tributaries of St. Francis River, which, rising in the Iron Mountain district of Missouri, flows four hundred and fifty miles, generally southward, to fall into the Mississippi just above Helena. This river passes through a continuous swamp after entering Arkansas, spreads into numerous lakes, and its extensive basin is one of the great reservoirs of overflow relieving the Mississippi in time of flood. Its port of Helena has a trade in timber brought out of the neighboring swamps and forests. About one hundred miles below, the White River and the Arkansas River flow in upon the western shore. Very curiously, these rivers, having mouths about fifteen miles apart, join some distance above, their waters commingling in the alluvial bottom land. The White River is nine hundred miles long, rises in the Ozark Mountains of Northern Arkansas, makes a long circuit through Missouri and then comes southward, being navigable some four hundred miles to Batesville, the seat of Arkansas College. The Arkansas River, next to the Missouri, is the greatest Mississippi tributary, being nearly twenty-two hundred miles long and having its sources in the Rockies in Colorado, out of which it flows in a magnificent canyon. It comes for five hundred miles eastward through plains that are largely sterile, enters Kansas, turns southeast in the Indian Territory, and crosses the State of Arkansas to its mouth, being navigable for eight hundred miles. At the western border of the State the river is guarded by Fort Smith, where an active town has grown around the former frontier post on the verge of the Indian Territory, having large trade and a population of fifteen thousand.

In the centre of Arkansas, this great river, being about four hundred yards wide, passes the State capital Little Rock, having thirty thousand people, its largest city, with railways radiating in all directions, and conducting an extensive cotton trade. Its State House is attractive, and spreading magnolias pleasantly shade many of the streets. A spur of the Ozark Mountains comes down to the westward of Little Rock, and its foothills are thrust out towards the Arkansas River. In ascending it through the lowlands from the Mississippi, the original explorers met here the only elevations of land they had seen, the first being a rocky cliff rising about fifty feet above the water, which they called the "Little Rock," and on it the city has been built, while two miles above another cliff, rising five hundred feet, is called the "Big Rock." Southwest of Little Rock, in this spur of the Ozark Mountains, is the famous Arkansas town of Hot Springs, having ten thousand inhabitants and many visitors. It is located in a narrow gorge between the Hot Springs Mountain on the east and West Mountain, the wide Main Street being flanked on one side by bath-houses and on the other by hotels and shops. There are over seventy springs, rising on the western slope of the Hot Springs Mountain above the town, and discharging daily five hundred thousand gallons of clear, tasteless and odorless waters, of varying temperatures, the highest 158°. They contain a little silica and carbonate of lime, but their beneficial effects in rheumatism, gout, costiveness and other troubles are ascribed mainly to their heat and purity. There is a large Government Hospital here for the army and navy, the Springs being United States property. The waters flow into the Washita River, which passes through a pleasant valley to the southward and then goes off nearly six hundred miles down into Louisiana to the Red River. At the mouth of Arkansas River on the Mississippi is the town of Napoleon.

The vast current of the Mississippi River, constantly augmented by capacious tributaries, naturally finds outlets in times of flood through the banks, and thus overspreads the extensive adjacent lowlands. To the eastward, south of Memphis, and extending down almost to Vicksburg, is the enormous Yazoo Basin, a lowland of many bayous and lakes, making a region of excessive fertility, and its Choctaw name has thus been naturally acquired, meaning "leafy." The river originates in the bayous and sloughs springing from the eastern Mississippi bank, which form the Tallahatchie River, and that stream, uniting with the Yallabusha and the Sunflower, make the deep, winding and very sluggish Yazoo, flowing nearly three hundred miles down to the Mississippi, twelve miles above Vicksburg. The extensive bottom lands of this Yazoo Delta compose about one-sixth of the State of Mississippi, its entire northwestern portion, and being a rich agricultural region are traversed by railways and have many flourishing towns and villages. There is a perfect network of waterways throughout this fertile delta, over thirty of the streams being navigable for large steamboats, and it also has extensive forests of valuable timber. The entire region is alluvial, the soil having been deposited by the overflows of the Mississippi during past ages, and now that this extensive basin is protected by an elaborate system of levees from further overflows, almost the whole of it is available for cultivation. There are nearly five millions of acres of reclaimed lands here, and though less than one-fifth of this surface is devoted to cotton, it is said to grow more of that great staple than any other single district in the world. The malaria, often prevalent along the Yazoo, led the Choctaws to call it the "river of death."

Both banks of the Mississippi below the Arkansas River are lined with cotton plantations, giving a most interesting scene during the harvesting of the fleecy crop in the autumn. The broad plantations disclose the comfortable and often quaint planters' houses of the olden time embosomed in trees, and as one progresses southward the trees become more and more draped with the dark and sombre Spanish moss, giving a weird appearance to the shores. The Yazoo flows in, and the long and imposing range of the Walnut Hills rises on the eastern bank to five hundred feet elevation. Here a planter named Vick made the first settlement in 1836, and the city of Vicksburg has grown on the summit and slopes of the hills, the lucrative traffic of the Yazoo delta providing a chief source of its prosperity, making it the largest city in the state of Mississippi, there being fifteen thousand people. It presents a picturesque view from the river, but is chiefly known abroad from its famous siege and capture by General Grant in July, 1863. The Confederates, having lost Memphis and New Orleans, made their last desperate stand to hold the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, surrounding it with vast fortifications, crowning the hills with batteries, not only along the river front, but up the Yazoo River to Haines' Bluff. Several attempts were made to capture it in 1862, Farragut's fleet running past, and Grant began operations in the spring of 1863. After several battles, he appeared before the city in May, assaulting and being repulsed, and then began the siege which resulted in the surrender on July 4th. General Pemberton, commanding Vicksburg, surrendered thirty-one thousand men, his previous losses exceeding ten thousand. General Grant had similar losses, his forces engaged in the siege and preliminary battles approximating seventy thousand men. This siege greatly damaged the city, while in 1876 the Mississippi, in one of its peculiar freaks, cut through a neck of land opposite, took an entirely new channel, and left Vicksburg isolated on an inland lake. The Government has since, at heavy expense, diverted the Yazoo outflow past the city and restored the harbor. There are beautiful views and romantic glens in the Walnut Hills, with many traces of the old fortifications, while a favorite drive is to the extensive National Cemetery, where seventeen thousand soldiers' graves recall the terrific conflicts of the Civil War.

Natchez To New Orleans.

When the Sieur de la Salle made his voyage of exploration down the great Father of Waters from the Falls of St. Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico, he found in the spring of 1682 an interesting Indian settlement on the eastern bank a hundred miles below Vicksburg. This settlement was under a bluff rising a hundred and fifty feet above the river. Later, in 1699, Commander d'Iberville examined the Mississippi delta, and having founded Fort St. Louis at Biloxi, heard of these Indians, sought their friendship, and in 1700 came up and established a trading-post at their village under the bluff. He described them as numbering twelve hundred warriors, living in nine contiguous villages, ruled by a chief of the "family of the suns," their highest caste, and called the Natchez Indians, the word meaning "the hurrying men, running as in war." The French kept up communication with them, and regarded the tribe as the noblest of the many with whom they had been brought in contact in America. These Indians had a religious creed and ceremonies not unlike the "Fire Worshippers" of Persia. In their "Temple of the Sun," the priests kept the sacred fire constantly burning on the altar, their tradition being that the fire came originally from heaven and had always been maintained. In 1713 the Sieur de Bienville, who had succeeded his brother, d'Iberville, built Fort Rosalie alongside the landing, and around it grew a town which was the beginning of the city of Natchez. Unfortunately, just about this time the Indians' sacred fire accidentally went out, and attributing this to the coming of the white men, they became dissatisfied and conflicts arose. There were repeated fights, and in 1729 they swooped down upon the settlement and massacred the French. The following year troops came up from New Orleans, attacked and scattered them, burning their villages, and the tribe ultimately disappeared, the last small remnant of half-breed descendants remaining in Texas until recently, when they joined the Creeks and Cherokees. Now the city of Natchez has its business portion along the narrow stretch of river-bank in front of the bluff, where some traces yet remain of the earthworks of the old French fort. The greater part of the city, however, is on the bluff, where the brow of the hill is a wide-spreading park giving a splendid outlook. Also on the bluff is a National Cemetery filled with soldiers' graves, the sad memorial of the War. There is a large river-trade at Natchez, and twelve thousand population, and in the cotton-shipping season, business along the levee is very active.

About seventy miles below, the Red River flows in, the last of the great tributaries of the Mississippi. This stream is over fifteen hundred miles long, draining a region of a hundred thousand square miles, and gets its name from the red-colored sediment its waters bring down. It originates in the extensive "Staked Plain" of northern Texas, the "Lone Star State," its sources being at twenty-five hundred feet elevation. Its flow is eastward, forming the Texan northern boundary on the border of Oklahoma and the Indian Territory, and then it turns south near the twin city of Texarkana, which stands on both sides of the line between Texas and Arkansas. Coming into Louisiana it passes Shreveport, a city of fifteen thousand people, with a large trade in cotton and cattle, and then crosses the state to the Mississippi. The special and curious feature of the Red River is the formation of rafts. Its upper shores are heavily timbered, and vast numbers of trees are engulfed by the current washing out the banks in times of freshet, and they accumulate lower down, where the speed of the water slackens. These rafts are formed many miles long, growing by additions to the up-stream side, while the logs decay and are gradually floated off and broken up on the lower extremity. This makes the obstruction steadily move up-stream. In 1854, the great raft fifty miles above Shreveport extended thirteen miles up the river and was accumulating at the rate of nearly two miles annually. In colonial times this raft was said to have been two hundred miles lower down the river. Vegetation had taken root on the older portions, thus making a floating forest, and the retardation of the waters above made a lake over twenty miles long. In 1873, when the Government attacked it and opened a navigable channel, this raft had grown to thirty-two miles length, and the opening of the channel lowered the upper retarded waters fifteen feet. Snag-boats have since patrolled the Red River, pulling out thousands of trees every year, and breaking up the rafts, to maintain navigation. The lower course of Red River is very crooked and sluggish, through swamps and lowlands, and near its mouth part of the current, particularly in times of freshet, is diverted into Atchafalaya River, which flows for about two hundred miles southward directly to the Gulf of Mexico. This stream is said to have originally been the outlet of Red River to the Gulf, and such it seems again coming to be, the Government having a very serious problem in dealing with it. The Mississippi River in its earlier vagaries developed a bend towards the west, which struck Red River, thus making it a tributary, the former channel silting up. It was then named Atchafalaya, meaning the "lost river." To improve navigation, some time ago this old channel was opened, when to the general astonishment, the Atchafalaya began absorbing the Red River waters and developing a large river, which now carries a current more than one-third the volume of the Mississippi, and as they all run together at high-water stages, there is a fear that the whole Mississippi may at some time conclude to go into the Atchafalaya, thus leaving New Orleans on an arm of the sea. Extensive Government works are in progress to prevent this diversion and maintain the old conditions.

Below Red River, the Mississippi is all in Louisiana, its width barely a half-mile, and its depth very great, in many places one to two hundred feet, necessary to carry the vast flow of water. The banks are throughout protected by levees, and on the last bluff rising alongside the river, on the eastern bank, is the Louisiana state capital, Baton Rouge, a quaint old city with ancient French and Spanish houses, spreading over the bluff fifty feet above the water. There is a population of about ten thousand, and overlooking the river are the State House and the buildings of the Louisiana State University. Below Baton Rouge, both banks of the Mississippi are bordered by attractive gardens and extensive plantations, with sections of forest, sombre moss-draped trees and rich vegetation, the whole of the "coast," as the lower river banks are familiarly called, being lavish in the display of semi-tropical luxuriance. The voyage down, skirting the low shores and levees for a hundred and twenty miles, is most picturesque, as the windings of the river make pleasant views. Finally, a grand sweeping bend is rounded, where the city of New Orleans is spread out upon both banks, the streets and buildings stretching far inland upon the lowlands behind the great protective embankments.

The Crescent City.

The Spanish in the sixteenth century made various evanescent explorations of the Gulf coast and the entrances to the Mississippi, but never gained a permanent foothold. La Salle descended the great river to its mouth in 1682, took possession of the country for France and named it Louisiana, in honor of his King Louis XIV. The first colony planted in the Province by the French was at Biloxi Bay on the Gulf coast, about eighty miles northeast of New Orleans, in February, 1699, by Commander d'Iberville. Biloxi is now a quiet town of five thousand people, having a good trade and some manufactures. A short distance to the westward is Beauvoir, which was the home of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, where he died in 1889; and about ten miles farther westward is the extensive Bay St. Louis, where at Pass Christian is one of the most frequented pleasure-resorts on the Gulf coast. The French built a fort at Biloxi, and for years d'Iberville and his younger brother, the Sieur de Bienville, maintained their colony under serious difficulties, de Bienville finally deciding to change the location, and removing to Mobile bay. After considerable exploration, however, he determined upon a permanent location within the Mississippi River, and entering the passes in 1718 he ascended to where he found the most eligible fast land and founded the colony of New Orleans, naming it in honor of the then Regent of France, the Duke of Orleans. Thus began the city, which in 1721, being then described as "a village of trappers and gold hunters," was made the capital of the French royal Province of Louisiana. In 1732 it had about five thousand population, and after the transfer of sovereignty to the United States it was chartered a city in 1804, then having ten thousand. There are now two hundred and seventy-five thousand people in New Orleans.

This noted city is about one hundred and seven miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and the older portion was built around the outer curve of a grand crescent-shaped river bend, which gave it the popular designation of the "Crescent City." It afterwards grew far up stream, and stretched around another reverse bend, so that now the river passes through in form much like the letter S. The surface descends from the river by gentle slope towards a marshy region in the rear, and is several feet below the level of high water, the levee being a strong embankment about fourteen feet high and fifteen feet wide on the surface, effectually protecting from overflow. Its magnificent position near the mouth of the river, where an enormous interior commerce, coming by railroad and steamboat, has to be transhipped to ocean-going vessels, has made the prosperity of the city. Its event of chief memory is the battle of January 8, 1815, when General Andrew Jackson defeated the British under General Pakenham. The battlefield was at Chalmette in the southern suburbs, on ground stretching from the Mississippi River bank back about a mile to the cypress swamps. The war with England had already been ended by a peace concluded at Ghent December 24, 1814, but neither side then knew of it. The British advanced from the eastward to attack the city, and a hastily constructed line of breastworks formed of cotton bales was thrown up, behind which Jackson's men were stationed to receive the attack. The result was a most disastrous defeat, Pakenham, his second in command and twenty-six hundred men falling, while the American loss was only one hundred. A marble monument on the field commemorates the victory, and a National Cemetery, with many graves of soldiers fallen in the Civil War, now occupies a portion of the ground. In the Civil War, in April, 1862, Admiral Farragut ran his fleet past the forts commanding the river at the head of the Passes, and appearing before the city compelled its surrender, when it was occupied by the accompanying land forces under General Butler.

There is, in the older town, so much of characteristic French and Spanish survival, that New Orleans is a most interesting and picturesque city, though it has not very much to show in the way of elaborate architecture. The streets have generally French or Spanish names, and there is a distinctive French quarter inhabited by Creoles, where the buildings have walls of adobé and stucco, inner courts, tiled roofs, arcades and balconies, the whole region being lavishly supplied with semi-tropical plants. The chief business thoroughfare, Canal Street, is at right-angles to the river bank, and borders the French quarter. The levee for over six miles is devoted to the shipping, and in its gathering of ocean vessels and river steamboats, loading or unloading, is a most animated place, impressing the observer with the idea that tributary to this great mart of trade is the richest agricultural valley in the world. The hero of New Orleans, General Andrew Jackson, has his equestrian statue in Jackson Square, which was the old-time Place d'Armes, and adjoining is the French Cathedral of St. Louis, built in the eighteenth century, but since considerably altered. The chief institution of learning is Tulane University, having fine buildings and a thousand students, the benefaction of a prominent citizen. In Lafayette Square there is a statue of John McDonough, whose legacy for school-houses has built and equipped thirty spacious buildings, accommodating twenty thousand pupils. Around Lafayette Square are various public edifices and churches.

New Orleans has two fine parks, the City Park and Audubon Park, both displaying collections of live oaks and magnolias, which are picturesque. The city cemeteries also have many good trees and are attractive and peculiar. The soil being semi-fluid at a depth of two or three feet, nearly all the tombs are above ground, some being costly and beautiful structures. Most of them, however, are buildings composed of cells placed one above another to the height of seven or eight feet. The cell is only large enough to receive the coffin, and as soon as the funeral is over, it is hermetically bricked up at the narrow entrance. These cells are called "ovens," and bear tablets appropriately inscribed. The Cypress Grove Cemetery, near the City Park, is one of the most interesting. In Greenwood Cemetery, near by, is a monument to the Confederate dead, and General Albert Sidney Johnston is interred in Metairie Cemetery, which also has his equestrian statue. In some cases the graves are in earthen mounds, while occasionally, where the interment is in the ground, the grave-digging is so arranged as to be completed just as the funeral arrives, and the coffin thus gets placed and covered before there is time for much water to ooze into the grave. The most uniquely picturesque sight in the city is furnished by the old French Market, near the levee, in the early morning, when business is in full tide, and the mixed population in peculiar costume and language is seen to advantage. A favorite resort of the people is Lake Pontchartrain, five miles north, the spacious inland sea covering nearly a thousand square miles, to which fine shell roads lead.

The Levees And The Delta.

The whole country around New Orleans, and indeed the entire region adjacent to the Mississippi and its bayous, would be overflowed in times of freshet were it not for the elaborate systems of levees, which are a special feature of the whole lower Mississippi Valley. The work of constructing these extensive embankments began at the foundation of the infant city of New Orleans, when a dyke a mile long was projected to protect the settlement from overflow, and it was built soon afterwards. In 1770 the settlements extended thirty miles above and twenty miles below the city, the plantations being protected by levees. By 1828, the levees, though in many places insufficient, had become continuous nearly to the mouth of Red River. The methods of construction were various, and the authorities conflicting, but the Government took hold of the work in 1850, beginning by giving the States the swamplands to provide a fund for reclamation. When the Civil War began, the levees extended a thousand miles along the river, and as far north as the State of Missouri. During the war the system fell into decay, and afterwards much work of restoration was necessary. The Mississippi River Commission now has charge, under comprehensive methods, and large sums are devoted to the purpose, aggregating over $4,000,000 annually from the General Government and the States, there being continuous lines of levees from Memphis nearly to the delta below New Orleans. Were the river left to itself, in most of this region during the spring floods it would overflow the banks by several feet, this being, however, prevented by these massive earth entrenchments, through which there nevertheless often breaks a destructive crevasse. The sediment brought down by the river has been deposited most abundantly upon the banks, making their front the highest surface, so that there is a gradual descent inland and back from the river of about four feet to the mile. During the floods, an observer standing alongside the levee has the water in the river running high above him, and when the levee breaks the bottom-lands are soon extensively overflowed. The estimate is that these lands, reclaimed and protected by the levees, embrace thirty thousand square miles of the most fertile soil in the world, about one-sixth of it being under cultivation; and that there are altogether twenty-six hundred miles of levees along the great river, and the adjunct tributary bayous, lakes and other water-courses. For nine months the water stage is low, so that very little attention is given it, but when the spring comes, the melted snows of the Rockies and the torrential rains come down usually in conjunction, bringing an enormous flood, that rushes along, filling the river to the tops of the embankments. Processes of decay and weakening are always going on--rats and mice have their burrows, and millions of crawfish, with claws like chisels, riddle the levees with holes. Then in some unexpected place the dreaded alarm is sounded that the bank is giving way and a crevasse impends. The water-soaked bank shows fissures and help is implored--bells are rung, fleet horsemen arouse the neighborhood, the people assemble and try to stop the break. But the crumbling levee soon gives way, and the swollen and muddy current pours through with a roar like Niagara, the waters spreading afar over the lowlands, and thus by reducing the stream-level bringing relief to the river, but converting the adjacent region for many miles into a turbid lake and ruining the crops.

Below New Orleans, as the river is descended, the thick forest vegetation along the banks gradually disappears, giving place to vast expanses of marsh and isolated patches of fast land bearing stunted trees. The river banks grow less defined, and are finally lost in what appears to be an interminable marsh with many waterways. This leads to the delta, gradually built up from the sediment deposited by the river, and demonstrating the eternal conflict and gradual encroachment of the land upon the sea. Through the ages, this delta, steadily constructed by the river, has been protruded into the Gulf of Mexico, far beyond the general coast-line, and it is slowly advancing year after year from the accumulated deposits. The delta divides into the various channels or "passes" by which the waters seek the sea. These are at first bordered by shore-lines of mud, which lower down dissolve into consecutive lines of coarse grass growing from beneath the watery surface, and then they are discernible only to the practiced eye of the pilot by what appears to be a regular current flowing along in the universal waste. This delta covers an area of fourteen thousand square miles, and it divides into four separate passes, which are hardly much more than outlet currents through the expanse of waters and marsh, thus excavating deeper and navigable channels. There are lighthouses at the entrances, and just inside the Northeast Pass is a spacious mud-bank known as the Balize, where there once was a colony of wreckers, but now are pleasant residences. Above the head of the delta, and about seventy miles below New Orleans, located in eligible positions at a bend, are Forts St. Philip and Jackson, the defensive works of the river entrance, and below them the main ship channel goes out to the Gulf through the South Pass, where the bar has been deepened through the effective scouring produced by the famous Eads Jetties on either side--one over two miles long and the other a mile and a half. These jetties cost $5,000,000, and they maintain a channel thirty feet deep. The twin lights marking their extremities can be regarded as indicating as nearly as may be the mouth of the great river, and beyond is the broad expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. Vast as is the enormous outflow brought down by the Father of Waters, the drainage of the whole broad centre of the Continent thus poured into the Gulf, yet it has no appreciable effect upon the ocean into which it flows. The Gulf easily swallows up all the Mississippi waters in a way that reminds of Rossetti's dirge:

"Why does the sea moan evermore? Shut out from heaven it makes its moan, It frets against the boundary shore; All earth's full rivers cannot fill The sea, that drinking, thirsteth still"

The Rockies And Pacific Coast.

XXI.

The Rockies And Pacific Coast.

The Lone Star State -- The Sunset Route -- Port Arthur -- Galveston -- Houston -- Dallas -- Fort Worth -- Great Staked Plain -- Austin -- San Antonio -- The Alamo -- David Crockett -- James Bowie -- Sam Houston -- Cattle Ranches -- Rio Grande River -- El Paso -- Arizona -- Tucson -- Phoenix -- Prehistoric Cities -- Yuma -- Canyons of the Colorado -- Colorado Desert -- Southern California -- San Bernardino Valley -- San Diego -- Coronado Beach -- The Early Missions -- Climate and Scenery -- Los Angeles -- Santa Monica Bay -- San Gabriel Valley -- Santa Barbara -- Monterey Bay -- Del Monte -- Santa Cruz -- Santa Clara Valley -- San José -- Lick Observatory -- San Joaquin Valley -- Stockton -- Gold Mining -- The Big Trees -- Yosemite Valley -- Rocky Mountains -- The Atchison Route -- Indian Territory -- Oklahoma -- Raton Pass -- Las Vegas -- Santa Fé -- Albuquerque -- Mesa Encantada -- Flagstaff -- Mojave Desert -- The Union Pacific Route -- Cheyenne -- Colorado -- Denver -- Boulder Canyon -- Clear Creek Canyon -- Colorado Springs -- Pike's Peak -- Manitou -- Garden of the Gods -- Pueblo -- Veta Pass -- Cripple Creek -- Leadville -- Grand Canyon of the Arkansas -- Marshall Pass -- Black Canyon of the Gunnison -- Wyoming Fossils -- Utah -- Echo and Weber Canyons -- Ogden -- Great Salt Lake -- Salt Lake City -- The Mormons -- Promontory Point -- Nevada -- Virginia City -- Comstock Lode -- Lake Tahoe -- Donner Lake -- Sacramento -- The Northern Pacific Route -- Butte -- Anaconda Mine -- Helena -- Idaho -- Spokane -- Columbia River -- Oregon -- Snake River Canyon -- Shoshoné Falls -- The Dalles -- Cascade Locks -- The Great Northern Route -- The Canadian Pacific Route -- Regina -- Moose Jaw -- Medicine Hat -- Calgary -- Banff -- Mount Stephen -- Kicking Horse Pass -- Rogers Pass -- Mount Sir Donald -- Glacier House -- Eagle Pass -- Great Shuswap Lake -- Kamloops -- Thompson Canyon -- Fraser Canyon -- Vancouver -- Victoria -- Gulf of Georgia -- Alaska -- Fort Wrangell -- Sitka -- Juneau -- Treadwell Mine -- Muir Glacier -- Lynn Canal -- Chilkoot and Chilkat -- Skaguay and Dyea -- The Yukon River -- The Klondyke -- St. Michaels -- Cape Nome -- Puget Sound -- Port Townsend -- Everett -- Seattle -- Tacoma -- Mount Tacoma -- Mount St. Helens -- Portland -- Crater Lake -- Mount Shasta -- Benicia -- Mare Island -- Oakland -- University of California -- Menlo Park -- Leland Stanford, Jr., University -- San Francisco -- Point Lobos -- The Golden Gate.

The Lone Star State.

Westward from the Mississippi River the "Sunset Route" to the Pacific leads across the sugar plantations of Louisiana. This Southern Pacific railway passes many bayous having luxuriant growth of bordering live oaks, magnolias and cypress, hung with festoons of Spanish moss, crosses the Atchafalaya River at Morgan City, and beyond, skirts along the picturesque and winding Bayou Teche in a region originally peopled by colonies of French Acadian refugees from Nova Scotia. Ultimately the route crosses Calcasieu River at Lake Charles, and thirty-eight miles beyond, goes over the Sabine River into the "Lone Star State" of Texas, the largest in the Union. The name of Texas comes from a tribe of Indians found there when La Salle made the first European settlement on the coast at Fort St. Louis on Lavaca River in 1685, but after the Spanish occupation in the eighteenth century the country was long known as the New Philippines, that being the official designation in their records. At the mouth of Sabine River is Sabine Lake, where Port Arthur has been established as a prosperous railway terminal, having access to the Gulf by a ship canal with terminating jetties, deepening the channel outlet to the sea. Farther along the coast is Galveston, the chief Texan seaport, built on the northeastern extremity of Galveston Island, which spreads for thirty miles in front of the spacious Galveston Bay, covering nearly five hundred miles surface. The entrance from the sea is obstructed by a bar through which the Government excavated at great expense a channel, flanked by stone jetties five miles long. It is a low-lying city with wide, straight streets, embowered in luxuriant tropical vegetation, while the equable winter temperature makes it a charming health-resort. A magnificent sea-beach spreads along the Gulf front of the island for many miles. Galveston, in September, 1900, was swept by a most terrific cyclone and tidal wave, destroying thousands of lives and a vast number of buildings.

Texas was a Province of Mexico, under Spanish and afterwards Mexican rule, and its many attractions in the early nineteenth century brought a large accession of colonists to the eastern portions from the adjacent parts of the United States. The Americans became so numerous that in 1830 the Mexican Congress prohibited further immigration, and the result was a revolt in 1835, the organization of a Provisional Government, a war which ended in the defeat of the Mexicans in the battle of San Jacinto in 1836, and the final independence of Texas. The people then sought annexation to the United States, but the State was not admitted until 1845, the Mexican War following. Two men of that time were prominent in Texas, Stephen F. Austin, who brought the first large colony from the United States settling on the Colorado and Brazos Rivers, and Sam Houston, who, after being Governor of Tennessee, migrated to Texas, led the revolt, commanded their army, and was made the first President of the independent State. The latter has his name preserved in the active city of Houston on Buffalo Bayou, a tributary of Galveston Bay, and about fifty miles northwest of Galveston. Houston is a busy railway centre, handling large amounts of cotton, sugar and timber, and is rapidly expanding, having sixty thousand people.

The Trinity River is the chief affluent of Galveston Bay, flowing down from Northern Texas, and having upon its banks another busy railway centre, Dallas, with fifty thousand people and an extensive trade. About thirty miles above, on Trinity River, is the old Indian frontier post of Fort Worth, now a town of forty thousand population and the headquarters of the cattle-raisers of Northern Texas. For many miles in all directions are the extensive cattle ranges, and to the north and west spreads the "Great Staked Plain," a vast plateau elevated nearly five thousand feet above the sea, covering some fifty thousand square miles, and being surrounded by a bordering escarpment of erosion to the lower levels, much resembling palisades. The stakes driven by the early Spaniards to mark their way are said to have given this plain it