About seventy miles below, the Red River flows in, the last of the great tributaries of the Mississippi. This stream is over fifteen hundred miles long, draining a region of a hundred thousand square miles, and gets its name from the red-colored sediment its waters bring down. It originates in the extensive "Staked Plain" of northern Texas, the "Lone Star State," its sources being at twenty-five hundred feet elevation. Its flow is eastward, forming the Texan northern boundary on the border of Oklahoma and the Indian Territory, and then it turns south near the twin city of Texarkana, which stands on both sides of the line between Texas and Arkansas. Coming into Louisiana it passes Shreveport, a city of fifteen thousand people, with a large trade in cotton and cattle, and then crosses the state to the Mississippi. The special and curious feature of the Red River is the formation of rafts. Its upper shores are heavily timbered, and vast numbers of trees are engulfed by the current washing out the banks in times of freshet, and they accumulate lower down, where the speed of the water slackens. These rafts are formed many miles long, growing by additions to the up-stream side, while the logs decay and are gradually floated off and broken up on the lower extremity. This makes the obstruction steadily move up-stream. In 1854, the great raft fifty miles above Shreveport extended thirteen miles up the river and was accumulating at the rate of nearly two miles annually. In colonial times this raft was said to have been two hundred miles lower down the river. Vegetation had taken root on the older portions, thus making a floating forest, and the retardation of the waters above made a lake over twenty miles long. In 1873, when the Government attacked it and opened a navigable channel, this raft had grown to thirty-two miles length, and the opening of the channel lowered the upper retarded waters fifteen feet. Snag-boats have since patrolled the Red River, pulling out thousands of trees every year, and breaking up the rafts, to maintain navigation. The lower course of Red River is very crooked and sluggish, through swamps and lowlands, and near its mouth part of the current, particularly in times of freshet, is diverted into Atchafalaya River, which flows for about two hundred miles southward directly to the Gulf of Mexico. This stream is said to have originally been the outlet of Red River to the Gulf, and such it seems again coming to be, the Government having a very serious problem in dealing with it. The Mississippi River in its earlier vagaries developed a bend towards the west, which struck Red River, thus making it a tributary, the former channel silting up. It was then named Atchafalaya, meaning the "lost river." To improve navigation, some time ago this old channel was opened, when to the general astonishment, the Atchafalaya began absorbing the Red River waters and developing a large river, which now carries a current more than