Status Updates From Life on the Mississippi

The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. He says ‘honah,’ and ‘dinnah,’ and ‘Gove’nuh,’ and ‘befo’ the waw,’ and so on. The words may lack charm to the eye, in print, but they have it to the ear. When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England [continued below]

WHERE the river in the Vicksburg region used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight—made so by cut-off; a former distance of seventy miles reduced to thirty-five. It is a change which threw Vicksburg’s neighbor Delta out into the country. Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees—a growth which will [become] a forest and completely hide the exiled town.

The loneliness of this solemn stupendous flood is impressive—and depressing. League after league it pours its chocolate tide along between its forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the watery solitude; and so the day goes the night comes and again the day—and still the same majestic unchanging sameness of serenity

Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812 At the end of thirty years it had grown to mighty proportions and in less than thirty more it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. Of course it is not absolutely dead neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground but as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor Mississippi steamboating may be called dead

"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.…[continued below]

When De Soto took his first glimpse of the Mississippi [1542], Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo’s paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens…[continued below]