The Sun.
London, England, 1860-10-18 00:00:00

a thin, irregular growth of dwarfish cotton-wool
completed the aspect which this bank work of
nature misused and falling to decay. Below a
level, greasy-looking shore spread out, half mud,

half sand, with ponderous white skeletons and
trees, earea,es which the stream had torn away from
distant banks to leave them stranded here half-
buried in the slime, with their gaunt bones striking
up in ragged points and splinters, and draped with
sticky, lank, offensive weeds, the garbage and off-

scourings of a mighty river. Carrion crows were
busy here, and men as muddy as the banks them-
._

selves were groping listlessly about, preparing
stacks of rough-hewn logs of timber for the steamers
which ply up and down and move the sluggish
water into muddy foam. The stream itself was not
very wide (about as wide as the Thames above Put-
ney-bridge), and on the opposite bank much like
the Middlesex shore of our own stream at the same
place. It was rich without being picturesque, rank
and overgrown with heavy timber and a thick un-
derwood of weeds, giving off a faint and not un-
pleasant odour of faded flowers, which spoke of
fever in every breath of the thick warm air. Above
the stream continued its straight course, hemmed
in with the same wild, dank ruins of vegetation,
and covered from point to point with smooth,
round, level bars of sand, with now and then bare,
scrubby, sickly little trees upon their edges, all
worn and faded in their foliage, less, as it seemed,
with coming winter than their own inherent slow
decay. Below the banks spread out in greater
width, dotted here and there between swampy aits
and spits of land, with sandbanks rising every-
where, forcing the muddy water aside in devious
channels, some so shallow as scarcely enough to
ripple over the oozy margin, some deep, where the
yellow current flowed swiftly and curled back with
a kind of stagnant velocity from sharp, black-look-
ing stumps and snags—the real monsters of the
deep of this great river, which, dark and silent,
seem always waiting for their prey, that surely
comes at last. On every side, seen in the cold, gray
morning, there was a dim forlornness in the stream,
a lonely, fast decaying savageness of nature, a faded
ragged, wild, unwholesome aspect, which was al-
most mournful, which spoke of the sickness and
long toil spent to bring even the half civilisation
around into the centre of this half-tamed wilderness.
Wan sluggishness was in the trees, filled the warm
air, and seemed to rest upon the crazy, wooden
houses, to spread abroad over the slimy shores, and
dwell upon the soft, flat banks of sand. The very
river in its yellow, dull ripple and smooth, deep
current seemed to speak of it, as crouched between
its narrow banks, it crept lazily along, shorn of its
energy and might, a mere river that had outlived
the character of force and bulk of which I had
heard so much, for this was the Mississippi. This
was that great father of waters that drains a quar-
ter of the world, creeping slowly along between
banks a world too wide—a dull, dilapidated, poor,
half-shrunken, muddy stream. A few lean cows
were wandering near its brink, as if they contem-
plated suicide ; there was a dead horse in the fore-
ground that had perhaps already committed it.
More cattle struggling and splashing in and out of
the rifts and weedy hollows of the banks, with here
and there in the green distance a patch of Indian
corn ; but beyond such traces all was wild, was de-
solate, unhealthy, and abandoned. Such was the
great Mississippi at Alton, such was the lonely as-
pect this mighty river bore when the Prince first
saw it. Such at all times is the Mississippi in its
wild state, where hardy, poor, unknowing settlers
first strive to battle with its rank vegetation, and
hand to hand not only fight the wilderness but the
deadly fevers which lurk around the banks at every
turn, which are borne in the warm thick air over
the marshy land, and nestle close, like serpents, in
little vales and nooks, that, clothed with a wild
luxuriance of prairie flowers, seem so charming to
the eye.

Still, wretched and pestilential as was its aspect
here, there was much that was suggestive in the
weedy desert banks, even in the yellow waters of
the stream itself, and a moment's thought enabled
me to feel that even theiMississippi at Alton was the
great Mississippi still. Alton is some 1,200 miles
from the mouth of this tremendous river, a river
which is navigable for great steamboats for 800
miles yet above Alton. What more need be said
of a stream than that great boats can traverse
its waters for a length of more than 2,000 miles,
that you pass in your steamer from the
liners of New Orleans through the great cities of
Western America up to the Falls of St. Anthony,
the wildest of all the American outposts of civilisa-
tion ? Let the eye in imagination follow the course
of this huge artery of commerce, passing through
such cities as St. Louis, Memphis, Natchez, Vicks-
burgh, and a host of smaller though great and
wealthy towns, bearing from each their harvest
wealth and manufacturing products, till the weary
length of stream expands atlast above New Orleans,
and from a group of wide and sedgy mouths pours
its vast tribute of waters to the sea. Some few
miles below Alton is the junction of the great
stream of the Missouri and Mississippi, where the
river widens out into a grand delta, and, forcing its
way through those ever-shifting banks of sand
which choke its mouth, the huge volume of the
Missouri comes tumbling down. So constantly
are these banks shifting, and so dangerous do they
render the navigation, that few pilots know them
well, and those who do are in such great request
that, I am told, they can earn from 8,000 dols to
10,000 dols per year. It is in consequence of these
sandbanks, too, that the Mississippi steamers are
built to float in such a trifling depth of water, that
it is said they can go anywhere where there is a
heavy dew. The railway from Alton to St. Louis
wound through -a wild and rather marshy, though
most fertile land, here and there overgrown with
weeds and massive forests, and now and then luxu-
riant patches of Indian corn bending under the
weight of their great golden ears. The train stops
on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, in a wild,
rough station, not good enough for a goods shed in
England, though doing duty here as an important
passenger depot. Like all else in America, espe-
cially in these western States, everything is con-
structed to meet an immediate pressing watit, and
this met in any way, however rough, there is no
attempt to go beyond it for the present. There is a
want of labour throughout the continent, and a want
of time to carry out its own gigantic business, and
thus everywhere you see a minimum of means ap-
plied to bring about a maximum of results, except
in the case of an election for President, when this
rule is exctly reversed. You see this paucity of
means—this sudden effort to stay absolute demands
in everything—in the single lines of rails, in the
poor wooden stations, where, instead of having 50
persons in charge, as in England, there are scarcely
lye ; you see it in the very want of omnibuses to
carry passengers' luggage, and in the consequent
delay of trains. In all you find these small means
expected to achieve great ends, excepting always in
the matter of hotels, 'which are as much the admi-
ration of travellers as ours are their terror.
St. Louis —at which the Prince arrived in the
evening—is a fine and, for this western world,
rather an old-looking city; that is to say, there
are houses, and even whole streets, which have evi-
dently been standing for the last 40 years. Viewed
from the eastern bank of the Mississippi, with its
long stone quay or houses, crowded at every part with
those quaint summer-house-looking, frail, danger-
ous, high-pressure river steamboats and its irregular
rows of lofty red warehouses, it bears a strong
lasting
though rather dirty likeness to Montreal from the
St. Lawrence. This impression, however, is not a
one, for the streets are very unclean, and the
inhabitants, though well-to-do enough, seem as a
body to delight in dressing themselves as shabbily
a s possible; and if it is true, as I certainly believeit, that the worst hats in the world are worn in
America, so is it equally beyond a doubt that the
worst hats in America are worn in St. Louis.
Dingy, wretched negroes, too, form a considerable
part of the population of the city, or, I had better
say, part of its live stock, for Missouri is a slave
State, and though now, I am glad to believe, fast
becomingt
Republican, yet the old leaven is still
g n
many places. Slaves, however, are fast
strong
i
decreasing there, for the climate is not favourable
to the cultivation of the black. Accordingly, they
are being traded off
.pretty fast, and hardly a
steamer leaves St. Loup for the South without con