up.  Twelve years or more afterward there was trouble; for the river, which had all this time so persistently ignored the canal, one stormy night, when its current was considerably swollen, took a notion to adopt the canal that it had so long refused.  Next morning the good people of Vicksburg woke to find their metropolis, not on the river channel, but practically an inland town overlooking a stagnant mud flat.  The town of Delta, which, the night before, was three miles below Vicksburg, was, in the morning, two miles above it.  Since that time, energy and intelligence have conspired in its behalf, and Vicksburg is still an important river port; but the channel of the river is persistent, and constant effort and watchfulness alone keep a depth of water sufficient for the needs of navigation before the wharves.

The average inhabitant of the flood plain of the Mississippi is not surprised at this capriciousness of the river, for long experience has taught him to look for it.  During seasons of mean or of low water, there is little or no trouble; but when floods begin to swell the current, then it is high time to be on the alert, for no one knows what a day or even an hour may bring forth.  Perhaps a snag, loosened from the bank above, may come floating down the stream.  It strikes a shallow place somewhere in the river, and thereupon anchors in mid-channel.  Directly it does, a small riffle or bar of silt will form around it, and this, in turn, sends an eddying current over against the bank.  By and by the latter begins to be chipped away, little by little.  Perhaps the corrosion of the bank might not be noticed except by a bottom land planter or a riverman.  But there is no time to be lost.  If some unfortunate individual happens to possess belongings in that vicinity, he simply lays aside his coat and works as if he were a whole legion doing Caesar’s bidding; he well knows that in a very few hours the river will be swallowing up his real estate at the rate of half an acre to the mouthful.  It is certainly hard to see one’s earthly possessions disappear before the angry flood of the river, but the bottom land planter does not complain, because the experience of generations has taught him that he must expect it.  A queer fortune befell Island No. 74.

Between the States of Arkansas and Mississippi there is a large island, which, for want of a name, is commonly known as Island No. 74.[6] This slip of insular land is probably the only territory within the United States and not of it, for this island is without the boundaries of either State, county or township.  It is not under control of the government, because it is in the possession of an owner whose claim is acknowledged by the government.  The anomalous position of the island as to political situation is due to the erosion of the river as an active and the defects of statutory law as a passive agent.  According to the enactment whereby the States of Arkansas and Mississippi were created, the river boundary of the