The learned Professor A. Guyot, in a treatise on physical geography, written for “A.  J. Johnson’s New Illustrated Family Atlas of the World,” informs us that the Amazon River, the great drainer of the eastern Andes, is three thousand five hundred and fifty miles long, and is the longest river in the world.

According to the figures used by me in reference to the Missouri and Mississippi, and which are the results of actual observations made by competent engineers, the reader will find, notwithstanding the statements made by our best geographers in regard to the length of the Amazon, that there is one river within the confines of our country which is eight hundred and thirteen miles longer than the Amazon, and is the longest though not the widest river in the world.  The rivers of what is now called the Mississippi Basin drain one million two hundred and forty-four thousand square miles of territory, while the broader Amazon, with its many tributaries, drains the much larger area of two million two hundred and seventy-five thousand square miles.

A century after the Spaniard, De Soto, had discovered the lower Mississippi, and had been interred in its bed, a French interpreter, of “Three Rivers,” on the northern bank of the St. Lawrence River, named Jean Nicollet, explored one of the northern tributaries of the Mississippi.  This was about the year 1639.

It was reserved for La Salle to make the first thorough exploration of the Mississippi.  A few months after he had returned, alone, from his examination of the Ohio as far as the falls at Louisville, in 1669-70, this undaunted man followed the Great Lakes of the north to the western shore of Lake Michigan, and making a portage to a river, “evidently the Illinois,” traversed it to its intersection with another river, “flowing from the north-west to the south-east,” which river must have been the Mississippi, and which it is affirmed La Salle descended to the thirty-sixth degree of latitude, when he became convinced that this unexplored stream discharged itself, not into the Gulf of California, but into the Gulf of Mexico.  So La Salle was the discoverer of the Illinois as well as of the Ohio; and during his subsequent visits to the Mississippi gave that river a thorough exploration.

My entrance to the Mississippi River was marked by the advent of severe squalls of wind and rain, which drove me about noon to the shelter of Island No. 1, where I dined, and where in half an hour the sun came out in all its glory.  Many peculiar features of the Mississippi attracted my notice.  Sand bars appeared above the water, and large flocks of ducks and geese rested upon them.  Later, the high Chickasaw Bluff, the first and highest of a series which rise at intervals, like islands out of the low bottoms as far south as Natchez, came into view on the left side of the river.  The mound-builders of past ages used these natural fortresses to hold at bay the fierce tribes of the north, and long afterward this Chickasaw Bluff played a conspicuous part in the civil war between the states.  Columbus, a small village, and the terminus of a railroad, is at the foot of the heights.