Southern Stories

by Various

  QUEER AMERICAN RIVERS

  BY F. H. SPEARMAN

  I wonder if my readers realize what a story of the vast extent of ourcountry is told by its rivers?

  Every variety of river in the world seems to have a cousin in ourcollection. What other country on the face of the globe affords such anassortment of streams for fishing and boating and swimming andskating--besides having any number of streams on which you can do noneof these things? One can hardly imagine rivers like that; but we havethem, plenty of them, as you shall see.

  As for fishing, the American boy may cast his flies for salmon in theArctic circle, or angle for sharks under a tropical sun in Florida,without leaving the domain of the American flag. But the fishing-riversare not the most curious, nor the most instructive as to diversity ofclimate, soil, and that sort of thing--physical geography, the teachercalls it.

  A LIVE-OAK WITH SPANISH MOSS.]

  For instance, if you want to get a good idea of what tropical heat andmoisture will do for a country, slip your canoe from a Florida steamerinto the Ocklawaha River. It is as odd as its name, and appears to behopelessly undecided as to whether it had better continue in the fishand alligator and drainage business, or devote itself to raisinglive-oak and cypress-trees, with Spanish moss for mattresses as a sideproduct.

  In this fickle-minded state it does a little of all these things, sothat when you are really on the river you think you are lost in thewoods; and when you actually get lost in the woods, you are quiteconfident your canoe is at last on the river. This confusion is due tothe low, flat country, and the luxuriance of a tropical vegetation.

  To say that such a river overflows its banks would hardly be correct;for that would imply that it was not behaving itself; besides, it hasn't any banks--or, at least, very few! The fact is, those peacefulFlorida rivers seem to wander pretty much where they like over thepretty peninsula without giving offense; but if Jack Frost takes such aliberty--presto! you should see how the people get after _him_ withweather-bulletins and danger-signals and formidable smudges. So theOcklawaha River and a score of its kind roam through the woods,--ormaybe it is the woods that roam through them,--and the moss sways fromthe live-oaks, and the cypress trees stick their knees up through thewater in the oddest way imaginable.

  In Florida one may have another odd experience: a river ride in anox-cart. Florida rivers are usually shallow, and when the water is highyou can travel for miles across country behind oxen, with more or lessriver under you all the way. There are ancient jokes about Floridasteamboats that travel on heavy dews, and use spades for paddle-wheels.

  But those of you who have been on its rivers know there is but oneFlorida, with its bearded oaks and fronded palms; its dusky woods,carpeted with glassy waters; its cypress bays, where lonely cranes pose,silently thoughtful (of stray polliwogs); and its birds of wondrousplumage that rise with startled splash when the noiseless canoe glidesdown upon their haunts.

  MOSS-DRAPED LIVE-OAKS.]

  Every strange fowl and every hideous reptile, every singular plant andevery tangled jungle, will tell the American boy how far he is to thesouth. Florida is, in fact, his corner of the tropics; and the clearwaters of its rivers, stained to brown and wine-color with the juicesof a tropical vegetation, will tell him, if he reads nature's book, howdifferent the sandy soil of the South is from the yellow mold of thegreat Western plains.

  Such a boy hardly need ask the conductor how far west he is if he cancatch a glimpse of one of the rivers. All the rivers of the plains arealike full of yellow mud, because the soil of the plains melts at thetouch of water. These are our spendthrift rivers, full to the banks attimes, but most of the year desperately in need of water. It is onlywith the greatest effort that they can keep their places in the summer:there is just a scanty thread of water strung along a great, ramblingbed of sand, to restrain Dame Nature from revoking their licenses to runand turning them into cattle-ranches.

  No wonder that fish refuse to have anything to do with such streams, andrefuse tempting offers of free worms, free transportation, andprotection from the fatal nets. Fancy trying to raise a family of littlefish, and not knowing one day where water is coming from the next!

  Not but what there is water enough at times; only, those rivers of thegreat plains, like the Platte and the Kansas and the Arkansas, are sowasteful of their supply in the spring that by July they are gasping fora shower. So, part of the year they revel in luxury, and during the restthey go shabby--like shiftless people.

  But the irrigation engineers have lately discovered something wonderfulabout even these despised rivers. During the very driest seasons, whenthe stream is apparently quite dry, there is still a great body of waterrunning in the sand. Like a vast sponge, the sand holds the water, yetit flows continually, just as if it were in plain sight, but more slowlyof course. The volume may be estimated by the depth and breadth of thesand. One pint of it will hold three quarters of a pint of water. Thisis called the underground flow, and is peculiar to this class of rivers.By means of ditches this water may be brought to the surface forirrigation.

  Scattered among the foot-hills of the Rockies are rivers still morewilful in their habits. Instead of keeping to their duties in amethodical way, they rush their annual work through in a month or two;then they take long vacations. For months together they carry no waterat all; and one may plant and build and live and sleep in their desertedbeds--but beware! Without warning, they resume active business. Maybeon a Sunday, or in the middle of the night, a storm-cloud visits themountains. There is a roar, a tearing, a crashing, and down comes aterrible wall of water, sweeping away houses and barns and people. Nofishing, no boating, no swimming, no skating on those treacherousrivers; only surprise and shock and disaster!

  So different that they seem to belong in a different world are the greatinter-mountain streams, like the Yellowstone and the Colorado.

  They flow through landscapes of desolate grandeur, vast expansescompassed by endless mountain-ranges that chill the bright skies withnever-melting snows. The countless peaks look down on the clouds, whilefar below the clouds wind valleys that the sunlight never reaches.Twisting in gloomy dusk through these valleys, a gaping canon yawns.Peering fearfully into its black, forbidding depths, an echo reaches theear. It is the fury of a mighty river, so far below that only a sullenroar rises to the light of day. With frightful velocity it rushesthrough a channel cut during centuries of patience deep into thestubborn rock. Now mad with whirlpools, now silently awful withstretches of green water, that wait to lure the boatman to death, themighty river rushes darkly through the Grand Colorado Canon.

  No sport, no fun, no frolic there. Here are only awe-inspiring gloom andgrandeur, and dangers so hideous that only a handful of men have everbraved them--fewer still survived.

  Grandest of American rivers though it is, you will be glad to get awayfrom it to a noble stream like the Columbia, to a headstrong flood likethe Missouri, or an inland sea like the Mississippi; on them at leastyou can draw a full breath and speak aloud without a feeling that thesilent mountains may fall on you or the raging river swallow you up.

  In the vast territory lying between the Missouri River and the PacificOcean the rivers are fast being harnessed for a work that will one daymake the most barren spots fertile. Irrigation is claiming every yearmore of the flow of Western rivers. Even the tricksy old Missouri iscontributing somewhat to irrigation, but in the queerest possible way.

  With all its other eccentricities, the Missouri River leaks badly; foryou know there are leaky rivers as well as leaky boats. The governmentengineers once measured the flow of the Missouri away up in Montana, andagain some hundred miles further down stream. To their surprise, theyfound that the Missouri, instead of growing bigger down stream, as everyrational river should, was actually 20,000 second-feet[1] smaller at thelower point.

  [Footnote 1: The volume of rivers is measured by the number of cubicfeet of water flowing past a given point every second. The breadth ofthe river is multiplied by
its average depth, and the ascertained speedof the current gives the number of cubic feet of water flowing by thepoint of measurement each second. This will explain the termsecond-feet.]

  Now, while 20,000 second-feet could be spared from such a tremendousriver, that amount of water makes a considerable stream of itself. Manyvery celebrated rivers never had so much water in their lives. Hencethere was great amazement when the discrepancy was discovered. But oflate years Dakota farmers away to the south and east of those points onthe Missouri, sinking artesian wells, found immense volumes of waterwhere the geologists said there would n't be any. So it is believed thatthe farmers have tapped the water leaking from that big hole in theMissouri River away up in Montana; and from these wells they irrigatelarge tracts of land, and, naturally, they don't want the river-bedmended. Fancy what a blessing it is, when the weather is dry, to have ariver boiling out of your well, ready to flow where you want it over thewheat-fields! For of all manner of work that a river can be put to,irrigation is, I think, the most useful. But isn't that a queer way forthe Missouri to wander about underneath the ground?