“You see, sir,” said my informant, “that this great river is an Abolitionist.”

The alluvial soil through which the Mississippi runs easily yields to the action of the fierce current.  The land worn away at one point is often deposited, in the form of a bar or tongue of land, in the concave of the next bend.  The area thus added becomes the property of whoever owns the river front.  Many a man has seen his plantation steadily falling into the Mississippi, year by year, while a plantation, a dozen miles below, would annually find its area increased.  Real estate on the banks of the Mississippi, unless upon the bluffs, has no absolute certainty of permanence.  In several places, the river now flows where there were fine plantations ten or twenty years ago.

Some of the towns along the Lower Mississippi are now, or soon will be, towns no more.  At Waterproof, Louisiana, nearly the entire town-site, as originally laid out, has been washed away.  In the four months I was in its vicinity, more than forty feet of its front disappeared.  Eighteen hundred and seventy will probably find Waterproof at the bottom of the Mississippi.  Napoleon, Arkansas, is following in the wake of Waterproof.  If the distance between them were not so great, their sands might mingle.  In view of the character Napoleon has long enjoyed, the friends of morality will hardly regret its loss.

The steamboat captains have a story that a quiet clergyman from New England landed at Napoleon, one morning, and made his way to the hotel.  He found the proprietor superintending the efforts of a negro, who was sweeping the bar-room floor.  Noticing several objects of a spherical form among the debris of the bar-room, the stranger asked their character.

“Them round things? them’s eyes.  The boys amused themselves a little last night.  Reckon there’s ‘bout a pint-cup full of eyes this mornin’.  Sometimes we gets a quart or so, when business is good.”

Curious people were those natives of Arkansas, ten or twenty years ago.  Schools were rare, and children grew up with little or no education.  If there was a “barbarous civilization” anywhere in the United States, it was in Arkansas.  In 1860, a man was hung at Napoleon for reading The Tribune.  It is an open question whether the character of the paper or the man’s ability to read was the reason for inflicting the death penalty.

The current of the Mississippi causes islands to be destroyed in some localities and formed in others.  A large object settling at the bottom of the stream creates an eddy, in which the floating sand is deposited.  Under favorable circumstances an island will form in such an eddy, sometimes of considerable extent.