Red River 12 56 Stamps 13 56 Bryaro 15 51{half} Hinderson’s 16 29 Natchez 17 11 Cole’s Creek 19 21 Waterproof 18 53 Rodney 20 45 St. Joseph 21 02 Grand Gulf 22 06 Hard Times 22 18 Half Mile below Warrenton 1 Vicksburg 1 38 Milliken’s Bend 1 2 37 Bailey’s 1 3 48 Lake Providence 1 5 47 Greenville 1 10 55 Napoleon 1 16 22 White River 1 16 56 Australia 1 19 Helena 1 23 25 Half Mile Below St. Francis 2 Memphis 2 6 9 Foot of Island 37 2 9 Foot of Island 26 2 13 30 Tow-head, Island 14 2 17 23 New Madrid 2 19 50 Dry Bar No. 10 2 20 37 Foot of Island 8 2 21 25 Upper Tow-head—­Lucas Bend 3 Cairo 3 1 St. Louis 3 18 14

The Lee landed at St. Louis at 11.25 A.M., on July 4th, 1870—­6 hours and 36 minutes ahead of the Natchez.  The officers of the Natchez claimed 7 hours and 1 minute stoppage on account of fog and repairing machinery.  The R. E. Lee was commanded by Captain John W. Cannon, and the Natchez was in charge of that veteran Southern boatman, Captain Thomas P. Leathers.

Chapter 17 Cut-offs and Stephen

These dry details are of importance in one particular.  They give me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi’s oddest peculiarities,—­that of shortening its length from time to time.  If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals.  The two hundred-mile stretch from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so crooked, that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much.

The water cuts the alluvial banks of the ‘lower’ river into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again.  When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country, and therefore of inferior value,