Left New Orleans, Thursday, June 30th, 1870, At 4 O'clock
And 55 Minutes, P.M.; Reached
D. H. M.
Carrollton 27{half}
Harry Hills 1 00{half}
Red Church 1 39
Bonnet Carre 2 38
College Point 3 50{half}
Donaldsonville 4 59
Plaquemine 7 05{half}
Baton Rouge 8 25
Bayou Sara 10 26
Red River 12 56
Stamps 13 56
Bryaro 15 51{half}
Hinderson's 16 29
Natchez 17 11
Cole's Creek 19 21
Waterproof 18 53
Rodney 20 45
St. Joseph 21 02
Grand Gulf 22 06
Hard Times 22 18
Half Mile below Warrenton 1
Vicksburg 1 38
Milliken's Bend 1 2 37
Bailey's 1 3 48
Lake Providence 1 5 47
Greenville 1 10 55
Napoleon 1 16 22
White River 1 16 56
Australia 1 19
Helena 1 23 25
Half Mile Below St. Francis 2
Memphis 2 6 9
Foot of Island 37 2 9
Foot of Island 26 2 13 30
Tow-head, Island 14 2 17 23
New Madrid 2 19 50
Dry Bar No. 10 2 20 37
Foot of Island 8 2 21 25
Upper Tow-head - Lucas Bend 3
Cairo 3 1
St. Louis 3 18 14
The Lee landed at St. Louis at 11.25 A.M., on July 4th, 1870 - 6 hours
and 36 minutes ahead of the Natchez. The officers of the Natchez claimed
7 hours and 1 minute stoppage on account of fog and repairing machinery.
The R. E. Lee was commanded by Captain John W. Cannon, and the Natchez
was in charge of that veteran Southern boatman, Captain Thomas P.
Leathers.
Chapter 17 Cut-offs and Stephen
THESE dry details are of importance in one particular. They 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,
Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked,
with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals. The two
hundred-mile stretch from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so
crooked, that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much.
The water cuts the alluvial banks of the 'lower' river into deep
horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to
get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck,
half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple
of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow, at a speed
of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is rising
fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country, and
therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his chance, cut a little
gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the
water into it, and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened:
to wit, the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch,
and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its
value), and that other party's formerly valuable plantation finds itself
away out yonder on a big island; the old watercourse around it will soon
shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of it, and down goes
its value to a fourth of its former worth.
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