hich are destined to contribute no little part
to the commerce, wealth, and power of the Union. It is idle to talk of
the well-cultivated and garden-like little rivers of Europe, of some two
or three hundred miles in length, compared to the Ohio. There is nothing
like it in all Europe for its great length, uninterrupted fertility, and
varied resources, and consequent power to support an immense population.
Yet its banks consist not of a dead level, like the lower Nile and
Volga, but of undulating plains and hills, which afford a lively flow to
its waters, and supply an amount of hydraulic power which is amazing.
The river itself is composed of some of the prime streams of the
country. The Alleghany, the Monongahela, the Muskingum, the Miami, the
Wabash, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, are rivers of the most noble
proportions, and the congregated mass of water rolls forward, increasing
in volume and magnificence, until the scene delights the eye by its
displays of quiet, lovely, rural magnitude and physical grandeur.

Yet all this is but an element in the vast system of western waters. It
reaches the Mississippi, but to be swallowed up and engulfed by that
turbid and rapid stream, which, like some gaping, gigantic monster,
running wild from the Rocky Mountains and the Itasca summit, stands
ready to gulp it down. The scene is truly magnificent, and the struggle
not slight. For more than twenty miles, the transparent blue waters of
the Ohio are crowded along the Tennessee coast; but the Mississippi,
swollen by its summer flood, as if disdainful of its rural and
peace-like properties, gains the mastery before reaching Memphis, and
carries its characteristic of turbid geologic power for a thousand miles
more, until its final exit into the Mexican Gulf.

I had never seen such a sight. I had lost all my standards of
comparison. Compared to it, my little home streams would not fill a pint
cup; and, like a man suddenly ushered into a new world, I was amazed at
the scene before me. Mere _amplitude_ of the most ordinary elements of
water and alluvial land has done this. The onward rush of eternal waters
was an idea vaguely floating in my mind. The Indians appeared to have
embodied this idea in the word Mississippi.

Ensminger was a stout manly fellow, of the characteristic traits of
Anglo-Saxon daring; but he thought it prudent not to plunge too hastily
into this mad current, and we slept at the precise point of embouchure,
w