Mark Twain Models The Mississippi River

 

The dry details . . . give me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi’s oddest peculiarities---that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long, pliant apple paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River, that is the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Ill., southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals . . .

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At some forgotten time in the past cutoffs were made. . . These shortened the river, in the aggregate, seventy-seven miles.

Since my own day on the Mississippi, cutoffs have been made at Hurricane Island, at Island 100, at Napoleon, Ark., at Walnut Bend, and at Council Bend. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, sixty-seven miles. . .

Therefore the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cutoff of 1722. . . Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.

 

Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor “development of species” either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague—vague. Please observe:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain, Life On The Mississippi, 1883