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Updated: September 1, 2025
"It was a terrible trip, the river wet with overflows and the cut-offs drifted deep, so I drove back into Holy Cross a week late with bleedin' dogs and frozen Indians strainin' at the sled ropes. "I heard the wail of the old women before. I come to the cabin, and when Metla had sobbed the story out in her weakness, I went back into the dark and down to the Mission.
Passengers from Antwerp come by railroad to Moerdyk, and there take the steamer to Rotterdam. This country is very favorable to railroads in being level, but very unfavorable in the number of rivers and cut-offs to be crossed, which it is impossible to bridge."
Four hours later, as he passed the lower end, an immense torrent was rushing through the channel, and the tall trees were falling like stalks of grain before a sickle. Within a week the new channel became the regular route for steamboats. Similar "cut-offs" have been made at various points along the river, some of them by artificial aid, and others entirely by the action of the water.
More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and Delta is now TWO MILES ABOVE Vicksburg.
The old man had tried to make a fortune in many ways. There was no sort of useless invention that he had not attempted, and you will find in the Patent Office models without number of beehives and cannons, steam cut-offs and baby jumpers, lightning churns and flying machines on which he had taken out patents, assured of making a fortune from each one.
"And keep the left-hand channel till you're past the bend," Jacob Welse counselled him; "then take the cut-offs to the right and follow the swiftest water. Now off with you and into your blankets. It's seventy miles to Dawson, and you'll have to make it at one clip." Jacob Welse was given due respect when he arose at the convening of the miners' meeting and denounced the proceedings.
This shortened the river twenty-eight miles. In our day, if you travel by river from the southernmost of these three cut-offs to the northernmost, you go only seventy miles. To do the same thing a hundred and seventy-six years ago, one had to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles! shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance.
Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him. The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat BODILY is always moving bodily SIDEWISE. At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy.
It's a mean feelin', that. It keeps a man on edge every minute. So he naturally makes for the district he's at home in. It's a mistake, but they all make it. They figure they can dodge around where they know the trails and cut-offs. Consequently it's just a matter of time till they're caught. It's like an old buck that won't leave his range. Any man can git him that wants to spend a week at it."
Returning to camp, I wrote a letter to the commanding general, giving an account of the attack and its repulse, and despatched it by the Mexicans, who, taking cut-offs with which they were acquainted, and borrowing horses in relays at ranches on the way, delivered it next evening at Santa Fé.
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