In North America, that “father of waters,” the Mississippi, sometimes called the Missouri, runs through a glorious valley of unexhausted and inexhaustible wealth of 3,000 miles, and runs out into the sea at least fifty miles, while its currenmiles further. “Like all other great rivers, the Mississippi does not empty itself into the sea in one continuous channel, but in a great variety of arms or mouths, which intersect in sluggish streams the great alluvial delta, which is formed by the perpetual deposit of the immense volume of water which rolls into the ocean. Between these mouths of the river a vast surface, half land, half water, from 50 to 100 miles in width, and 300 in length, fringes the whole coast; and there the enormous mass of vegetable matter constantly brought down by the Mississippi is periodically deposited. A few feet are sufficient to bring it above the level of the water, except in great floods; and as soon as that is done, vegetation springs up with the utmost rapidity in that prolific slime. No spectacle can be conceived so dreary and yet so interesting, as the prospect of these immense alluvial swamps in the course of formation. As far as the eye can reach, over hundreds of square leagues, nothing is to be seen but marshes bristling with roots, trunks, and branches of trees. In winter and spring, when the floods come down, they bring with them an incalculable quantity of these broken fragments, technically called logs, which not only cover the whole of this immense semi-marine territory, but, floating over it, strew the sea for several miles off to such an extent, that ships have often no small difficulty in making their way through them. Thus the whole ground is formed of a vast network of masses of wood, closely packed and rammed together to the depth of several fathoms, which are gradually cemented by fresh deposits, till the whole acquires by degrees a firm consistency. Aquatic birds, innumerable cranes and storks, water serpents, and huge alligators, people this dreary solitude. In a short time a kind of rank cane or reed springs up, which, by retarding the flow of the river, collects the mud of the next season, and so lends its share in the formation of the delta. Fresh logs, fresh mud, and new crops of cane or reed, go on for a series of years, in the course of which the alligators, in enormous multitudes, fix in their new domain, and extensive animal remains come to mingle with the vegetable deposits. Gradually, as the soil accumulates and hardens, a dwarfish shrub begins to appear above the surface; larger and larger trees succeed with the decay of their more stunted predecessors; and at length, on the scene of former desolation, the magnificent riches of the Louisianian forest are reared.”[99]