All  this  pother  about  maintaining  a  deep  channel  in
the  Mississippi  comes,  not  from  any  lack  of  water,  but
from  waste  of  water,  from  steep  slopes,  from  too  great
swiftness  of  current,  and  from  the  resulting  necessi-
ties of  domesticating  and  taming  the  wild,  wasteful,


Bringing  the  Sea  to  the  Farms  33

almost  incorrigible  stream,  keeping  it  within  its  banks,
confining  it  to  one  channel,  and  perhaps  raising  it  to
arbitrary  levels  and  taking  out  the  slope,  with  locks
and  dams.
At  times  and  in  places  the  upper  river,  from  St.
Paul  to  St.  Louis,  naturally  goes  almost  dry.  The
original  design  of  the  government  engineers  was  to  im-
prove it  so  as  to  afford  four  and  one-half  feet  at  low
water.  After  twenty-eight  years  the  maximum  draft
available  for  the  six  hundred  and  fifty-eight  miles  under
consideration  is  just  four  and  one-half  feet,  at  ordi-
nary low  water,  or  an  extreme  low  stage  of  three  feet.
The  people  of  the  Upper  Mississippi  Association  have
scarcely  dared  to  ask  for  more  than  six  feet  at  low
water;  and  the  canal  at  the  Des  Moines  Rapids,  near
Keokuk,  is  only  five  feet  deep — rather  meagre  figures
for  the  run-off  of  a  continent.
Below  the  mouth  of  the  Missouri  the  river  rushes
down  a  very  objectionable  slope,  and  originally  was
diffused  through  so  many  channels,  and  was  pulled  out
so  thin  by  its  rapidity,  that  even  after  the  accession  of
the  Big  Muddy  it  had  in  many  places  a  natural  depth
of  only  three  and  one-half  to  four  feet  at  low  water.
