Ten miles west of the great north and south embankment above described, on a north and south line which would pass close to the town of Melville in Louisiana and follow the west bank of the Atchafalaya River for some distance below Melville, another great embankment should be built, paralleling the one previously described. The material for the construction of this second embankment should be taken from its western side, thus forming a channel which should be used both as a drainage outlet and a navigable canal extending from the Bayou Teche to the Red River. At the point of its junction with the Red River, locks should be constructed which would prevent any of the floods of the Red River from ever entering or passing through this navigable drainage canal. From that point another great embankment should be extended by the most practicable route to the west or northwest, where a junction could be formed with the high land in such a way as to turn all the surplus flood drainage from the Red River and all other rivers to the north into the great ten-mile wide wasteway lying between the two embankments and running south from the mouth of the Red River or from Old River to Grand Lake. The volume of water that would make a flood twenty feet deep in a channel a mile wide could be carried through this wasteway with a flow of only about two feet in depth, and two great benefits thereby attained: First, the cutting power of the water could be controlled and its danger from that cause obviated. Second, the sediment carried by the water could be settled across a strip ten miles wide, which could be thereby brought to a level and its fertility enormously enriched by these sedimentary deposits which it would receive only in years of great floods. In the meantime and in other years the land could be used for meadow, or for the production of crops which could be grown after the danger of overflow in any season had passed. This ten-mile wide wasteway, supplemented by the auxiliary flood water channel paralleling its eastern embankment on the east, would completely control and carry to the Gulf all the excess flood water in years of extreme floods, and hold the high water level of the Mississippi River from Old River to the Gulf at an absolutely fixed level above which the river would never rise.