The scenery of the Mississippi River changes below St. Louis, and it loses much of the picturesqueness displayed by the bluff shores above. The mass of the waters is larger, the shores lower, and the adjacent regions more subject to overflow. There are many bends and islands, and the Ohio River comes in at the end of the long low peninsula of Cairo, further adding to the enormous current. The Southern Illinois lowlands have long been known as Egypt, and upon these bottom lands are grown prolific crops of corn. In one field in the great crop of 1899, covering over six thousand acres south of Ava, was raised six hundred thousand bushels, the banner American cornfield of that year. Twenty miles below Cairo is Columbus, on a high bluff upon the Kentucky shore, having Belmont opposite in Missouri, this having been the scene of General Grant's first battle in the Civil War. The Confederates in 1861 had fortified Columbus and placed twenty thousand men there to hold the Mississippi. Grant, in November, made an attack upon Belmont, and broke up and destroyed their outpost camp in spite of a heavy fire from Columbus, afterwards cutting his way out and returning to Cairo. When in the next spring Forts Henry and Donelson were captured, the Confederates found Columbus untenable and abandoned it without a contest. Fifty miles below is Donaldson Point, and off it the noted Island No. 10, for all these islands below Cairo were numbered. The Union gunboats attacked Island No. 10 in March, 1862, and carried on a bombardment and siege for a month, when it was captured with New Madrid on the Missouri shore several miles farther down, they being mutually dependent. The remains of earthworks are still visible on the island, and also the canal cut to assist in the investment. The Mississippi beyond, skirts the various bluffs of the Chickasaw region on the eastern bank, while on the western shore are broad alluvial lowlands, as the great river passes between Tennessee and Arkansas. On the first Chickasaw bluff is Fort Pillow, another Confederate stronghold, which, however, they were compelled to abandon in June, 1862, as the Union army had got in their rear. Here afterwards occurred the "Fort Pillow Massacre," in April, 1864, when the Confederates under General Forrest attacked and captured it.