Accomplished in the
whole Mississippi Valley; town where we were handed the first printed
news of the 'Pennsylvania's' mournful disaster a quarter of a century
ago; a town no more - swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes;
nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney!
Chapter 33 Refreshments and Ethics
IN regard to Island 74, which is situated not far from the former
Napoleon, a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of men
and made them a vanity and a jest. When the State of Arkansas was
chartered, she controlled 'to the center of the river' - a most unstable
line. The State of Mississippi claimed 'to the channel' - another shifty
and unstable line. No. 74 belonged to Arkansas. By and by a cut-off
threw this big island out of Arkansas, and yet not within Mississippi.
'Middle of the river' on one side of it, 'channel' on the other. That
is as I understand the problem. Whether I have got the details right or
wrong, this FACT remains: that here is this big and exceedingly valuable
island of four thousand acres, thrust out in the cold, and belonging to
neither the one State nor the other; paying taxes to neither, owing
allegiance to neither. One man owns the whole island, and of right is
'the man without a country.'
Island 92 belongs to Arkansas. The river moved it over and joined it to
Mississippi. A chap established a whiskey shop there, without a
Mississippi license, and enriched himself upon Mississippi custom under
Arkansas protection (where no license was in those days required).
We glided steadily down the river in the usual privacy - steamboat or
other moving thing seldom seen. Scenery as always: stretch upon stretch
of almost unbroken forest, on both sides of the river; soundless
solitude. Here and there a cabin or two, standing in small openings on
the gray and grassless banks - cabins which had formerly stood a quarter
or half-mile farther to the front, and gradually been pulled farther and
farther back as the shores caved in. As at Pilcher's Point, for
instance, where the cabins had been moved back three hundred yards in
three months, so we were told; but the caving banks had already caught
up with them, and they were being conveyed rearward once more.
Napoleon had but small opinion of Greenville, Mississippi, in the old
times; but behold, Napoleon is gone to the cat-fishes, and here is
Greenville full of life and activity, and making a considerable flourish
in the Valley; having three thousand inhabitants, it is said, and doing
a gross trade of $2,500,000 annually. A growing town.
There was much talk on the boat about the Calhoun Land Company, an
enterprise which is expected to work wholesome results.
